lost; they were human, after all. But Bing was different. Bingo was pure magic. I stood there shivering, threw up, pissed myself; it may have been days I stood there waiting for him, for all I remember.
I waited until my flashlight went out and I was alone in the dark with the only sound the carbonated surge of the water and the ghastly shrieks of night birds swooping round the cave, circling overhead. I couldn’t hold my head up. I sank to my knees, wet and mossy, cold as river rock, a creature of hollow edges, and the sole light was the light from the moon wavering on top of the black water, blackbirds going round and round above me.
When the light went out I knew he was gone, buried at the bottom of the pool. Head tilted back. Face turned up to the light on the water’s surface. Skin turning blue, lips blue, fingernail beds blue. Breathing stopped. Circulation stopped. Heart. Stop. Brain cells dying one after another.
I had to get help. Somehow I climbed back up onto the limestone ledge and worked my way toward the opening, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave them there alone in the cave. The next morning, another group of day trippers found me and called for help.
They found Erica and Rosie downstream right away. Bingo took longer. I was there when the police divers spotted him and pulled him out. He was clutching the chain I wore around my neck, my holy medal in his hand, St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals. He’d torn it from my neck when he fell. He must have grabbed for me as I grabbed for him. All he got for his efforts was a fistful of someone’s goodness and courage, somebody else’s bravery and martyrdom.
Nothing, there was nothing to do. Bingo was dead. It was plain enough. He was white, so white that he was translucent, a tinge of blue under his eyes, pure Irish blue, in the hollow of his cheeks. His hair was filled with sand and was swept back off his forehead, sleek and wet and shiny.
I’d never seen such stillness.
I’d thought dying was the same as sleeping. But nothing about Bingo suggested that he was asleep. Silent and empty, he seemed to have gone far away, leaving a massive vacancy behind. Water trickled from the side of his mouth. He soaked the ground where he lay; water drained from every part of him onto the sand.
“He’s melting,” I said, and the thought terrified me.
He had a deep, narrow cut over his eye. It was shaped like a crescent moon and ran from the outer edge of his eye to the tip of his cheekbone, immaculately executed as if by skilled practitioner with precision blade. Water seeped from his wound. There was no blood. I wondered if his blood had turned to water.
I’d still be there. I swear to God, I would be, I would have waited for him forever, I never would have left him, but someone came along and found me and took me away.
He was scared, just something I knew about him. When he was small, he was scared of so many things, used to shake when he saw a bee, would tremble with fear when he had to go to the doctor or get his hair cut.
Uncle Tom taught him this limerick about a little mouse that lived in a bar and sneaked out at night to drink beer spilled on the floor.
“Then back on his haunches he sat. And all night long, you could hear the mouse roar, ‘Bring on the goddamn cat!’”
After that, whenever Bingo got scared he used to say, “Bring on the goddamn cat!”
It worked. Everyone thought he was fearless, everyone but Uncle Tom and me.
I told myself he was all right. He wasn’t alone. He had that goddamn cat at his side.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE COPS DROVE ME HOME; AT LEAST I THOUGHT THEY WERE cops, though they were in plain clothes, both had the traditional signifiers—the strangulated formal speech, standard-issue mustaches, and humorless demeanor, although I wasn’t exactly a bundle of laughs.
Pop was waiting on the front porch.
He held me tight to his chest, and then he started to cry. In the dark, helpless and uncomfortable in his clutch, I could see Sykes in ghostly silhouette. He wagged his tail faintly in greeting, and then he jumped up and tried to comfort Pop, but there was no solace to be found anywhere