“Is this what you wanted, to get another dose for the day?”
“I love us in here, is all.” Isabel knocked on the wall. “All this rock. It feels safe.”
I wanted to argue radon gas and show her the spreadsheet in the brochure that clearly stated we were now in the red section, the part with the cartoon skull and crossbones, but the sound of the cave wall cracking open behind Isabel stopped me. I pulled her from the wheelchair as a section of rock calved off and came down right where she had been sitting, taking her place in the chair. With the penlight, it was hard to tell if the wheelchair was completely crushed or just pushed into the muddy ground. The sound inside the cave was deafening. With only one exit, it echoed off every angle of the cave wall before finally releasing to the outside. We were covered in mud. I made a quick assessment of Isabel, bending all her parts. I knew every curve of every bone known to man. I knew exactly how each bent, how each broke, and the amount of time it took for each to heal, so it didn’t take me long to know that she was physically okay. “You all right?”
Isabel wiped mud from her face and nodded as the overhead lights clacked on. The last three bulbs on the strand above our head were burned out. Mr. Gannon knocked over two tables to get to the back of the cave. He looked at the amount of water now pooling on the cave floor in large circles. He lifted his boots and watched his footprints fill with water and disappear into larger connecting puddles. He grabbed towels from a plastic bin next to where the cowboys had spent their day. I could still see them shaking their heads. I puffed out my chest.
“Dry off,” said Mr. Gannon. “What are you doing in here?”
“I wanted to come back,” said Isabel. “It’s my fault.”
Mr. Gannon looked down at the wheelchair. He got down on his knee to inspect the damage up close. He broke off a piece of rock sitting in the chair and rubbed it between his good fingers like he was reading braille. “Could’ve killed you, Isabel.”
Isabel looked overhead before stepping closer to the fencing.
“That’s far enough,” said Mr. Gannon. “It’s not safe in here, c’mon.”
“Listen,” said Isabel. “That sounds like water.”
I pointed to the ground and to the water dripping off the ceiling.
“No,” she said. “In the black hole. It sounds like a river flowing.” Isabel leaned into the chicken wire that now looked like cheap twine netting struggling with her weight. The cemented Yuban cans lifted on one side. I grabbed her waistband and twisted her sweat pants in my fist to cinch her close to me. She reached out her hand. “Give me the penlight.”
“This is ridiculous, Isabel. Let’s go, now.”
She turned to me and held her hand out higher. “I know you won’t let go,” she said. “I just want to see something.”
I handed her the light. She bent the chicken wire fence down from the top without much effort. I grabbed hold of her with two hands as she stretched out over the hole. She shined the light down as far as she could reach. I could hear the faint sound of turbulent water. “Can you see anything?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Hold tight.”
Isabel turned the penlight around. It lit up her face. And between the streaks of mud, I could still see a hint of blush in her cheeks. “Yes,” I said. “I still think you’re pretty.” I wasn’t even sure Isabel heard me, but Mr. Gannon took hold of my waistband like all this might actually be worth a damn. Isabel hovered out over the fence. She held the penlight out between two fingers. Her lips moved, but there was no sound. I assumed she made a wish because then she dropped her guardian angel straight down into the black hole and watched it fall away, child-eyed.
“Could you see anything down there?” asked Mr. Gannon.
“Just the light. It fell straight down and then disappeared.”
“Lava tubes,” Mr. Gannon said. “Sounds like the only explanation.”
“Maybe fifty feet or so,” said Isabel.
I pulled Isabel up and gave her my towel to cover her head. I had to muscle my own release from Mr. Gannon’s grip. He stepped around Isabel to get a look into the black hole. “The water table is slowly rising under here, and it’s beginning to cut away at all this dirt and rock. All this seeping.”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“It means this place is gonna be full again,” he said. “And real soon.”
It was difficult to see anything now at the back of the cave. Isabel crouched down, obviously fascinated by the possibility of the water returning.
“What’s that smell?”
Mr. Gannon pulled down the strand of lights from the middle of the cave and held the bulbs over his head to see where the wall had broken away. “That’s the smell of the ice age,” he said. “Take a look.”
What looked like the base of a log jutted out a foot from the cave wall. Isabel shook her head. “Is that moss?”
“That’s a ten-thousand-year-old hairdo,” said Mr. Gannon. “It had to be a hard, cold pack to be preserved this well.”
“Old slaughterhouse bones?” I asked.
“A mammoth tusk.”
“How did that get here?” asked Isabel.
“It walked here,” said Mr. Gannon. He laughed and pulled Isabel in for a closer look. “To find something like this so far south is nothing to sneeze at.”
“Kids found pig bones down here all the time,” I said. I prompted Isabel to agree with me from her days spent swimming here. I wasn’t even sure if that was true or not, but it was my only response to such a find, to explain it away with something useful to me.
“I’ve never found anything down here until now,” she said.
“I’m a rancher before anything else. I know pig bones. And unless pigs in the 1920s were ten feet tall, I’d say this here’s a prehistoric find.”
In the dimmed cave light, the tusk had a smattering of sepia. It was charred black at its opening, and packed with a red clay. It disappeared into the cave wall and reappeared eight feet away, its once sharp end now dulled and pointing out and upward three feet to the cave ceiling. Threadlike cracks gave the tusk a scrimshaw appearance, a snapshot of a million yesterdays. The space between the two points seemed like impossible earth to cut through. Mr. Gannon kicked the wall with his black boot, leaving a streak of polish on the granite.
“A cave drawing,” I said.
“She’s in there pretty deep,” he said. “That curve could go as far as two or three feet.
“Tell me where to dig,” said Isabel.
Mr. Gannon walked Isabel to a plastic lawn chair. “I think you should sit this one out. No telling what will happen.”
Mr. Gannon handed me a rock that looked especially shaped for carving away the earth around the tusk. It was the perfect primal tool for the task. I stabbed at hard-packed dirt. I pictured early man in the first Home Depot, staring down the long aisles filled with a variety of sharpened rocks. It took over an hour to expose a two-foot section. None of us could say as to how long we had been in the caves. The smell was overwhelming, a rotten-meat mold. Ancient flesh. I had never smelled anything like it. Isabel breathed in deeply. I expected her to throw up again, but she didn’t. Instead she pushed away from the chair and began to dig with me, her hand over of mine as we pressed and cut our way through.
I wanted to share this moment with all the cave dwellers. I wanted to give back the gift of work to their useful and pain-free hands. One hundred abuelitas with molcajete stones, grinding away at the cave wall in prayer, telling their stories as though they were preparing a great meal for the dead. I wanted them to know that their river was coming back to them. That it was bringing everything since the beginning of time with it.
Most of the dirt had been cleared when Mr. Gannon anchored in his foot the best he could in the mud. He slipped the narrow end of the mammoth tusk between the empty spaces in his hand and pulled against the ten-thousand-year-old decay, roots that resembled an old woman’s crooked bent-bow knuckles. I squatted underneath t
he tusk and reached up to hold it in place. The cave-wall water ran the length of my arm and down my sleeves into my pants. It didn’t seem like it would ever give way until its own weight began to rip it out from the wall. The large end hit the ground first. I lowered down its dull tip. The three of us stood over the tusk, not sure how to welcome it into this world. Isabel cleared the clay from inside. “I can fit my entire arm in.” We raised the mammoth tusk up on its end. Even with such an exaggerated curve, it was taller than us by two feet and scratched the cave roof. Isabel positioned it between her legs and teased the loosening tufts of rancid hairs. “I can’t wait to see how these grow back,” she said. She took off her hibiscus clip and attached it to the base. She tipped the tusk toward me. “This is yours,” she said, “to replace what you’ve lost.”
I leaned the tusk into my body and squatted it up onto my shoulder to carry it out to the cave entrance. I felt strong.
Isabel pulled the plastic sheeting out from underneath the mattress. She met me outside, and we wrapped the tusk together. It glowed orange in the early morning light that sifted down through the eucalyptus branches. I sat outside on a flat rock ledge and looked out over the riverbed. I imagined the ghosts of saber-toothed cats gathered in the sage and buckwheat and tall grasses, their barrel chests heaving out long, patient breaths like they’ve witnessed this before.
Isabel was on her stomach just inside the cave entrance, her ear pressed to the dirt floor. She hummed with the rush of water coursing underground. “Lie down next to me,” she said. I was eager to tell her the entire of story of us, as if she hadn’t been living it right alongside me this whole time, lighted like a magnificent torch. I kissed her head, ran my hands through her hair. “The floor is ice cold,” she said. “I bet if we stay here long enough, we’ll freeze in place.”
FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE
Daniel had only reached the edge of the sidewalk when Superman pulled up in his ’57 Chevy and kicked the passenger-side door wide open. Superman drove thirty-five miles per hour the entire way home. He was as safe as they come, Daniel thought. Superman held his bulking left arm out the driver-side window until he hit the dirt road that zigzagged into La Loma. Dust kicked up into the car window before Daniel could roll his side up. Superman ran his strong finger along the cherry-red dash, leaving a clean line behind it. With his seat belt pulled tightly across his lap, Daniel never took his black-and-blue eye off the Man of Steel, not since the moment they left the parking lot at Solano Elementary, and not when they passed the Elysian Park baseball fields, where all the kids ran to the fence to see if it was really true—Daniel Castillo getting a ride home to Chavez Ravine from Superman himself. And as that brand-new-showroom-floor-candy-cane ’57 Chevy they rode in passed the fields, Daniel only stretched out his arms to acknowledge the other children, the tips of his fingers barely brushing the windshield in an overture of flight.
“That teacher of yours, Miss Lorraine,” said George, “she’s something special for a bunch of second graders.”
“She seems nice enough,” Daniel said.
Superman smiled at Daniel and adjusted the radio. His teeth, so big and white, could easily bite through a metal girder. Superman tapped the dial gingerly so as not to push his entire hand through the radio and into the engine compartment. Daniel stared out the window as they passed his old school, Palo Verde Elementary. The basketball hoops had already been taken down and Dumpstered. The playground had been broken into large asphalt chunks as though Mole Man had recently smashed out from underneath to pull all the hopscotch and foursquare courts underground. All the sand in the sandboxes sieved out to fill the empty spaces in the underworld below. City workers stood on the school roof in their hard hats. They used long sickle-bladed tools to scrape off the terracotta shingles that shattered on the sidewalk below. Daniel and his friends had broken out the windows to his old classroom at Palo Verde only the week before. They had emptied a bucketful of old baseballs to cutter-perfect circles through the glass panes from sixty feet away. Daniel felt guilty over the whole thing now, with Superman like a stone pillar next to him, sitting behind the wheel in a three-piece suit.
A bulldozer pushed dirt into the abandoned far end of school where the roof had already been removed. “They aren’t even gonna tear the school down,” Daniel said. “My dad says they’ll fill it like a poor man’s grave.” Superman dipped his head down to see out the driver-side window. He waved to the bulldozer operator who spit on the ground and gave back a distrustful look. The look said, Beat it, Big Blue. It’s too late for you to save anything here. Daniel took note and growled.
“How does your father know that?” asked George.
“They filled up plenty of houses up here.”
Superman sat back into the Chevy’s fine white leather bench seat and surveyed the hillside. A small herd of goats tempered the tall overgrowth that had begun to take over the road. This wasn’t Benedict Canyon with all its beautiful Hollywood palaces. These were simple, sturdy homes with brightly colored beams that held them in place. Many had arched entries and latticed porches with flowering hibiscus and mums, ivy that pulled the houses down to the ground and held them in place. Homes in the distance sat in rubble piles like children’s blocks waiting to be played with again. Some sat on stilts that watched over the hillside. One had a red door. Skill and practicality transitioned across the roofline horizon, from clean woodwork to corrugated and rusted-out sheet metal. These were working-class family homes.
Makeshift shrines to Our Lady of Guadalupe took up all the space on the sidewalks. There were signs on every corner that begged for fair market deals for land, signs that asked for prayers and that Walter O’Malley and Dodgers, just leave us alone!, and signs for all the glorious veteranos. One woman sat outside her home under a pomegranate tree. A picture of two young men leaning on baseball bats, their arms around one another in an embrace, sat pinned down under her bosom. It didn’t take a superman to realize the men were brothers, and the woman’s sons. War medals hung on particleboard nailed up with two two-by-fours over her head like a lemonade stand. Her sign read: They Fought for Freedom—Is This the America They Gave Their Lives For? Superman nodded to the woman as they drove by. She gave a polite wave back. Daniel handed Superman his handkerchief when he noticed the superhero wiping his sweaty palms on his Italian dress pants.
The red Chevy stood out like the scorching sun. It was longer than any car Daniel had ever seen, let alone taken a ride in. If Superman brought the Chevy to top speed, its shark-fin-silver-chrome-tipped rear fenders would keep the car true. A car like this one had been to space and back. Everyone stopped to look as it blazed a trail through town.
“They’ll be happy you’re here,” Daniel said.
“I can’t stay too long,” said George.
“My father will want to meet you.”
“I would hope so,” George said. “Can’t just have a stranger bring home your son and not shake his hand.”
A stranger? How ridiculous, Daniel thought. He hadn’t understood most of the day’s events: Superman coming to his classroom on the first day of school to sing songs in Spanish during lunch. He spoke better Spanish than any of them. Lorraine had introduced him to the class as Superman, then giggled and called him the actor George Reeves the rest of the day. She explained that he had come to welcome all the new Chavez Ravine students to Solano Elementary. Superman sang and danced and laughed. He carried more books than humanly possible when the new encyclopedia collection he had bought for the library arrived. During kickball, he launched the ball over the cafeteria roof. It had missiled over Daniel’s head with a high-pitched whine, and when it finally landed a city block away, Daniel could hear the exploding concrete. It was obvious what was happening, and Daniel had picked up on it right away. What are you supposed to think when a superhero gets dropped into your lap? Daniel didn’t speak to Superman the entire day. He wasn’t nervous as much as he was curious as to how Superman might go about hiding his identity. And he did it
spot on! All the kids called him Mr. Reeves as they lined up for his autograph at the end of the day in Miss Lorraine’s classroom. But Daniel knew the Last Son of Krypton when he saw him. When Daniel finally spoke up and asked Superman for the ride home to La Loma, telling him that only he possessed the special powers that could really be put to some good use in Chavez Ravine, Miss Lorraine scolded Daniel and told him not to look a gift horse in the mouth—a phrase completely lost on Daniel not for its meaning but more for its second-grade timing. Daniel was clearly surprised then when Superman pulled to the curb in his red Chevy to give him a ride up, up, and away.
Superman pointed at the graffiti on a water tank as they cruised into La Loma—¡Vive Carlos Castillo! “Isn’t that your last name?” George asked.
“That’s my father, Carlos Mena Castillo.” Daniel looked at Superman as if to time his response. “The welterweight champion of La Loma.”
“Champion. That’s a pretty big title.”
“Well, he used to be. It’s been a while now.”
“I see,” George said. “Must have something to do with that shiner you’re sporting.”
“Kids want to know if I can box.”
“Can you?” George asked.
“I never wanted to learn.”
Superman shadowboxed inside the Chevy, giving small jabs to Daniel’s left side. “I bet you could go twelve rounds in a pinch.” Daniel pointed out to Superman his purple and now yellowing eye. He pressed on it until his eyes began to water. Superman put both hands back on the steering wheel. He explained to Daniel how you’ve got to start somewhere in this life, young man. “I’ve had my share of lickings, if you can imagine that,” said George.
Daniel could not.
Bishop’s Road and Effie Street intersected at a single streetlight at the top of a hill where three shirtless boys shot marbles in the hard dirt. A young man smoked and listened to a transistor radio outside his car. Superman waved, and the young man cocked his head back. The road forked to the right and down into La Loma toward Daniel’s house. He pointed the way by swaying his outstretched arms in one direction or another, flying shotgun with his eyes closed. Superman made the turns through the neighborhood as though he, too, had flown over Chavez Ravine once or twice before. Daniel sensed this, as one does, one superhero to another. “I know these streets like an old crow,” said Daniel. “Stop. Right here.”
Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul Page 15