The Boys of Bald Cave

Everyone in town knew about the cave. Some called it Bald Cave, maybe because the mouth of it sat on top of a rocky hill where grass or weeds wouldn't grow. Our parents said it was dangerous and to stay away. But none of that stopped me and my best friend, Mark Russell, from going there the summer we were twelve.

Mark and I lived in houses that sat side by side on an old gravel road, and the cave rose up just beyond the imaginary border between our fathers' farms. We were playing hide-and-seek in the fields one morning in early June when Mark pointed up to it.

"We should go up there," he said.

That was Mark. Unafraid of trouble, the type of kid who knew how to steal dirty magazines from the drugstore without getting caught. He wasn't bad, just brave, and it made him popular with the other kids in our small town of Panassus, Missouri.

I was different, mostly quiet and well behaved, prone to being picked on for both. Our appearances reflected the contrast. I had blond hair and burned quickly in summer, while Mark, with his dark curls, browned as easily as toast. I guess I looked up to him, even though I was a few months older, and that made it easy to say yes.

A wooden gate shuttered the cave's mouth, with widely spaced slats that allowed some light to shine through. The bottom hinge was loose and the gate was so old and wobbly to begin with that Mark and I could crawl under it just by lifting one of the lower corners.

Inside, it smelled like a deep basement, dark and wet. Just past the entrance was a space ten feet wide or so, and twice as deep. Past that the cave narrowed to the size of a hallway, and at its center was the feature that gave the cave its dangerous reputation: a hole in the floor. Ragged and rocky, it was less than three feet across, three or four feet long, and who knows how deep. Somebody had laid a piece of plywood over it--probably when the gate went up--that was now warped and half-rotted. Beyond the passage was more cave, but mostly darkness.

Mark walked up to the hole and shoved the plywood aside with his foot, then kicked a rock into it. I held my breath, imagining what it would be like to tumble down through all that blackness. When it finally hit bottom the clatter sounded like it could have come from the passage in front of us rather than the hole below. I suppose the two could have been connected, so that the sound echoed through both openings instead of just the one.

"Cool," Mark said. "Did you hear that?" He got down on his hands and knees in front of the hole. "Fuuuuuuck youuuuuu!" he shouted, then laughed and did it again. The voices that returned to us sounded older and deeper, as though adult Marks were somewhere inside the cave, mocking him.

Despite its forbidden status (or more likely, because of it) we decided that the cave would be our secret hideout for the summer. Mark said he had a battery-operated cassette player and some tapes we could listen to. He could also bring some dirty magazines, to look at without worrying about being caught. If I wanted.

Then he said, "Hey, I got a question for you. What's worse than a tornado?"

I knew the joke and flinched, but not quickly enough to avoid the punchline. "A TITTY TWISTER!" He cackled and delivered a painful pinch directly to one of my nipples. I stepped back to get away from him and tripped, pulling us both to the floor with Mark on top of me. We wrestled, but Mark had me at a disadvantage and I laughed, even though his weight made it hard to breathe. I was about to say "give"when Mark straightened up and snapped back his hands.

"Now you gotta tell me: What's worse than a titty twister?"

I'd never heard this one before. My hands hovered as I tried to anticipate what was coming next and where it would land. "I don't know..."