by Gregory Hill
“But you didn’t die.”
“I didn’t.”
“How’s that?”
“I thought the tunnels were angry because I’d brought strangers. I was trapped in that hole with your father’s body and his brother’s body. It was dark and the poodle was out there barking on the other side of Kitch. I couldn’t sleep. I told the tunnels I was sorry. Eventually, the poodle stopped barking.”
Her face is pained and then calm again. She says, “Johnny Riles never went ripe, never got stiff. He stayed soft and pretty. Kitch, he stunk. Every time I awoke I’d grab his arm and try to pull him out of the tunnel. One day, his arm came off in my hands. I stopped tugging on him after that. Meanwhile, you were growing inside me.
“And then you came out. You were a tiny baby. I held you to my bosom, but I had no milk. I could not let an infant child suffer in that hole. So I put my hand on your mouth and held it there for a long, long time. And I took it off and you were still breathing. You didn’t cry. I put my fingers around your throat and I squeezed and I started crying and then there was a slurping, birthing sound and Kitch’s body slipped out from where he’d been stuck in the tunnel and landed in the room. I took my hands away from your throat and you were still breathing. I carried you in one arm. We crawled over Kitch’s body. He had gone soft, like grey mud. We crawled over him and thru the tunnels and rooms and up to the outside world, right here, in fact. I left you on the ground here and I went back into the caves, to my shelves. I used to have shelves with food and drink, and a table and a bed and a stove. But they were all gone. Disappeared. So I came back to you, but you were gone so I climbed back into the hole. That’s the end of my story.”
I say, “It’s an unlikely story.”
She says, “You don’t believe it.”
I say, “I do. Every word. Except.”
She sighs. “Except what.”
“What happened to the poodle?”
“The poodle ceased its barking while you were still a bump on my belly. I concluded that he was dead. But he wasn’t. You want to know how I know this. I know this because, ever since, the coyotes in this land are small. Because they’re part poodle.”
Mother chuckles.
I say, “That strains plausibility.”
She says, “Son, everything’s a strain.”
Pause.
I say, “Just one more thing.”
“You want to know how I came into possession of a carbide lamp.”
I say, “Well, that, I guess, and how you found me and how you were able to move fast enough so I could see you and why any of this is going on and if I’ll ever get to talk to Veronica again.”
She says, “Those are some good things to wonder about.”
Mother touches my temple with her ugly fingernails. She says, “You might use a nap.”
I close my eyes and listen to the moving world and smell the wandering air.
85
The sun has migrated across the sky. The world is still moving. Sounds are still sounding. How ‘bout that, Toto? It wasn’t a dream after all.
I sit up. Mother is nearby, sleeping on her back, her hands crossed over her belly. On the horizon, an elk grazes in the grass. I remark at the size of his antlers, which are big. Moose-like, actually. I didn’t know there were moose in these parts.
There’s a sound from the ground beneath me. I roll onto my belly and snake myself to the rim of the hole. From behind me, Mom says, “Wait, boy. She’ll come to you.”
I do as she tells me. A moment later, my sweet, darling, funny, patient Veronica pokes her head out of the earth.
Her beehive is squished flat and goofy, her eyes are cloudy from waking up. She exhales and her breath is onions and ground beef. After so long, so long with nothing, this is. It’s like. Maybe Adam felt this way after God turned a lump of garden soil into Eve.
My first word to Vero is, “Hey.”
Vero’s first words to me are, “Nice shirt.”
I tug the hem of my zebra skin so I can look at the dirty stripes running down the front. I say, “Ever the professional.”
She reaches a hand up and I reach down and help her out of the hole. Her fingers are warm and wet and full of motion. She moves like an oil spill, smooth and fluid and full of rainbows. We watch each other like a couple who’ve recently endured mutually bizarre but entirely different experiences.
I say, “How’s your tailbone?”
“It hurts.”
“I didn’t mean for that to happen. I thought time had stopped. I read your diary, ‘cause I figured we’d never talk again. I was upset. I pulled your chair out from underneath—”
“Nar, I don’t care about the chair. I don’t care about my diary. I don’t know where we are. I don’t know what you’ve been doing since you went into that bathroom. All I know is that the last ten minutes of my life have been absolutely bonkers. You go into that bathroom and it’s like, what the fuck? Then I’m on the floor and that waitress is pointing a gun at me. And those two assholes, the guy with the coffee and the cook, they were psycho. And those messages that appeared out of nowhere. I said to myself, ‘Ride this sucker out, Veronica. You’re in the middle of some truly bizarre shit. Treasure it.’”
She says, “Those people were dicks, except the waitress, who turned out to be nice. Thanks for getting me out of there. I liked that pretty yard you brought me to. Sometimes I’d see this blurry moving thing.”
I say, “That was me, I bet.”
“My own private poltergeist.”
“I thought of myself as a superhero.”
She says, “Thanks for proposing to me, by the way. What’d you think of my response?”
“It took me a while.”
“Yeah. I’m clever. And then you said we could get married in California, which made sense since the sun had gone down.”
I say, “You put all that together? You are clever.”
“So I closed my eyes and I knew that pretty soon I’d open them and we’d be in California.” She looks about. “This doesn’t look like California.”
My mother says, “We are a damned good distance from California, young lady.”
Vero tilts her head toward the strange woman. “Where’d you get her?”
Mom says, “I’m the boy’s mother.”
I lean toward Vero and whisper, “She’s my mother.”
Vero, oh, unflappable Vero, says, “Cool beans.” Her eyes move, her nostrils flare with each inhalation. In her flip flops, her big toes start to snap idly against her long toes. Vero is right in front of me. I stare and listen and love her.
Considering that this is the first meeting between my fiancée and my mom, things are proceeding nicely.
Vero’s eye catches a movement on the far side of the valley. She says, “Where’d you get the moose?”
Mom stands and turns her head toward where the big-antlered elk-moose is grazing out yonder. The beast lifts its head. It makes a bugle sound and starts galloping toward us. Although the animal’s hauling ass, we’re at least a quarter mile away; there’s still plenty of time to dive into the hole if things get hairy.
Which is precisely what happens when a saber-toothed tiger crests the hill behind the elk. With feline leaps, the cat catches up to the elk and launches itself at its neck. Cat and elk go down in an explosion of dew. The cat writhes over the writhing elk until it stops moving. The tiger opens its jaws wide and then plunges its monstrous canines into the belly of the elk. At less than two hundred yards away, we hear the entrails slip out. Apparently, so do the tiger’s offspring, because once the elk’s guts are spilled, three saber-toothed kittens bound over the rim of the hill to join their mother in slurping up organs and flesh.
Vero says, “Holy shit.”
I agree.
Mom says, “Don’t bring attention.”
The tiger and her babies stop gorging long enough to regard the three of us and then they get right back to it. When they finish, they cuddle near the corpse and fall
into fat-bellied slumber.
I suspect that I’ve not yet seen the end to crazy-ass crazy shit. This suspicion is compounded when a camel crests the hill, takes a look at the sleeping tigers, and turns back.
I say to my mom, “I think perhaps this is a different hole from the one we came in thru.” After receiving no response, I add, “Like, this landscape bears very little resemblance to the one we exited. Take the prehistoric animals, for instance.”
Mom, ignoring me, reaches a hand to Vero. “My name is Jabez Millstone.”
Vero takes Jabez’s hand. “Veronica Vasquez. I intend to marry your son.”
I rest my hand on Vero’s shoulder, with its soft flesh and living bones.
Because it’s been a good two minutes since anything nutty has happened, a wooly mammoth crests the hill and marches past the elk corpse and the sleeping tigers, who barely crack an eye, and approaches us. The thing is magnificent, with its swaying fur, preposterously curved tusks, and generally cuddly appearance.
My mother, Jabez Millstone, claps her hands and shouts, “Go on! Git!”
The mammoth watches us, idly waving its tusks.
Veronica says, “It’s like it wants those tigers to eat it.”
I say, “Since when did mammoths become suicidal?”
In another of her incongruent utterances, Mom points to the mammoth and says, “Do you think you could draw one of those things?”
I say, “It’s funny you ask. I’ve been doing some sketching lately. There’s a notebook in my—”
Out of the cloudless blue, a single small piece of hail falls and bounces off the bridge of my nose.
“Well, shit,” I say.
Then more hail and more, little harmless spitballs of ice, showering from the heavens, covering our hair and shoulders, clattering the teeth in our wide-open mouths.
The hail grows larger, mouse-sized, and pummels the earth. We cover our heads with our arms and huddle together. Vero tries to cover my head and I try to cover hers and Jabez presses the two of us into a squatting position and leans over the both of us and lets the hail bounce off her bony back.
This all happens extraordinarily quickly. Perhaps I giggle. Vero may giggle as well. Jabez, with her hands on her knees and her back bent, snorts and spits a glob of phlegm onto the grass, which is quickly disappearing under the assault of hail. The cooling air puckers goose-bumps on my arms. It’s delightful, feeling things, suffering alongside other, breathing humans.
The hailstones grow even larger, bouncing like lumpen rats upon Jabez and, where she can’t protect us, Vero and I. The sound is a rockslide, our bruises are already beginning to turn purple.
Jabez, sensibly, shouts, “Hole!”
In a more or less orderly fashion, we dive into the hole and scoop away ice and we are out of the storm.
86
Hush now.
The three of us will sit at the mouth of the tunnel as the hail pours in from above. We will rub our sore arms and backs and attempt uncomfortable laughter. We will watch as the entrance to the tunnel slowly fills with clattering stones. Light will grow dim, but continue to glow thru the barrier of ice.
Amid the racket, Mother will tilt her head and say, “Listen.”
We will hear a mammoth trumpeting in the distance.
Time will pass and the hail will slow until there are only occasional plops, like the last kernels in a bag of microwave popcorn. We will remain inside the tunnel, unwilling to retreat further into the caverns. We will not speak during this interval. We will merely look at each other, eyes roving from one person’s to the other’s, each of us gauging the degree to which we fear for our lives. Jabez will not fear for anything. Vero will shiver in her tank top, the top of her left ear swelling from a hail strike. As for me, I have been living on a planet of nonsense for so long, all I can do is wait for the next pile of crap to land.
When it is calm, when we are calm, Jabez will begin pulling handfuls of hail from the accumulation that blocks our exit. She will pass hail to Vero, who will pass hail to me, who will wing it further on down the tunnel. It will be a pleasant exercise, throwing chunks of ice and watching them bounce and skitter on the hard floor.
Once the exit is cleared, we will, the three of us, climb forth into a new world, twelve inches deep in hail. In our own ways will each of us say to ourselves, What the fuck.
The dead, gutted elk-moose will be completely buried. A white mound on the distant hill will shake itself free of the ice that has accumulated upon its shoulders and reveal a mammoth underneath. The skies will be clear and blue and the sun will glare brightly off the polar landscape. No sign of the saber-tooth tigers.
Vero will hug me and I will hold her, both of us cringing from where the hail has struck us. Jabez will beam happily at this embrace. Then she, Jabez, will tilt her head back and say, “Yonder comes something.”
87
Up we’ll gaze to a glow in the sky, not unlike that of Jabez’s Tinker Bell gas lamp, except this will more closely resemble a comet plunging out of the heavens, white with blurred edges. At first, it will be the size of a pinhead held at arm’s length. As it descends, it will grow to the size of a thumbnail, a golf ball, a bowling ball, a Volkswagen Bug, a comet.
We will stand directly in its path. The falling, glowing comet will be making a great deal of racket at this point. I will lean against Vero and the two of us, still staring upward, will engage in a sideways kiss, the kind where you have to drag your mouth to the side of your face while you continue to gaze forward at the comet that’s flying toward you. We have never kissed in this manner before.
The falling object will be trailing steam or smoke or something. Parts of it will flake off like the ice chunks that fall off the space shuttle thruster tank when it launches. The chunks will drift away from the rest of the mass and evaporate into the glowing tail.
In a very short while, the three of us will be extinct.
88
Just as I and Vero and Jabez brace for death, the falling space rock will come to a grinding, midair halt, and then it will ease itself before us, gentle and steaming onto the hail-strewn landscape. The rock’s final descent will bear more than a passing resemblance to that of a giant, frozen teardrop lowered from the heavens like a flying Sandy Duncan being wired back down to the stage in the production of Peter Pan, which I still will not have seen. Or, in less confusing terms, it will ease to Earth like the first snowflake of winter.
The mammoth and any other nearby prehistoric varmints will have made themselves scarce by this time, the only suggestion that they ever existed being the lump of hail that covers the elk’s remains.
The teardrop-shaped space rock will loom before us, dripping water, hissing steam, sinking and melting into the hail below. As space rocks go, this one will seem to be on the large end of the spectrum, roughly the size of a condominium. It appears to be composed entirely of ice.
We will wait silently, observing the clunk of hydraulics and the seep of gas as the airlock is unsealed and the gangway slides out of the mouth of the vessel.
A creature, probably four feet tall, shaped like a grey Q-tip, no eyes, no limbs, no problem, will glide down the gangway and come to a halt in an ankle-deep pool of melting water with hailstones floating atop. The critter will shift in color like a cuttlefish, patterns appearing on its surface, mostly of the plaid and paisley variety. The coloration will settle into a series of black stripes on a white background, as if thon has deemed this interstellar denouement an occasion worthy of a tacky zebra-print outfit of the variety that one would encounter at a cocktail party on the Nassau end of Long Island. Or it just likes my shirt and wants to mimic me.
Here, now, the Q-tip will cease all motion—freeze, as it were, like a statue. Many minutes will pass without any further development, except for the fact that the mammoth will now be showing its head over the lip of the hill. And the camel’s hump will be visible now and again.
Let me digress briefly. The audio will be incredible.
I will have only been hearing things for a few hours at this juncture and the sounds will include the melting of thousands of hailstones, which shift and tumble upon themselves in the warm, sunlit afternoon. The breath of Vero and the breath of Jabez will mingle in a low harmony. I will sense a nearly invisible respiration in the upper and lower bouts of the Q-tip’s body.
Here, Jabez, who is to my left, will reach across my torso to Vero, who is on my right. Vero will take Jabez’s hand and Jabez will lead her a few steps toward the Q-tip. The Q-tip will be float-standing twenty yards away from us.
Vero will release Jabez’s hand and she, Veronica Vasquez, my fiancée, will walk in her typical slouchy unconcerned manner directly up to the Q-tip and engage it in a conversation that I can’t hear.
89
While Vero speaks to the Q-tip, Mother Jabez will stand in front of me, hands clasped in front of her belly. I will assume they are clasped. I won’t be able to see them, as I will be behind her.
Jabez, at least from my perspective, will be in a state of contentment, yogic breaths, sloppy hair glowing in the light of the late afternoon sun.
I will not be in a state of contentment. I will be terrified that the Q-tip will begin probing, mutilating, vaporizing, or otherwise compromising the structural integrity of my fiancée. I know I shouldn’t be anxious. Vero knows how to handle herself. This is the woman who didn’t bat an eye while my hypertemporal self was dragging her all over the countryside and writing notes, and issuing marriage proposals. She can handle a space Q-tip.
Vero will appear to be calmly explaining something to the Q-tip. Her calmness calms me.
I will whisper ahead to Mother Jabez, “What are they saying?”
Mother Jabez will turn her head slightly and speak aloud, “Talking about the weather, probably.” She will then say, “Shut up.”
I will say, still in a whisper, “Is it just me, or does that thing resemble a Q-tip?”
Mother Jabez will say, “I’m uncertain as to what a Q-tip is.”