by Gregory Hill
The little old lady bends forward, places her hand on my forearm. Her fingerprints calm the bile. My muscles relax, I breathe, I swallow my saliva. I offer the lady a grateful lift of my eyebrow.
She makes a slight nod, and points at the naked man. Then she points at her crotch. She makes the okay sign with her left hand and then pokes her right index finger thru the circle of okay sign. The old in-out-in-out, she’s saying. She’s saying she and the man on the pedestal boinked each other. She points at the floor of the sphere room and makes the in-out sign again. They boinked each other right there. This explains John’s smile.
Her old lady face goes wistful at the thought of all this inning- and-outing.
The lady uses both hands to mime the shape of a swollen abdomen. I nod. You got pregnant.
The lady points at her imaginary swollen belly and then points at me. Then she does the double thumbs-up sign from earlier.
Goddammit, fuckers, I was right. I am the boy from under the sagebrush; my father is John Riles, the dead cowboy brother of Kitch; and my mother is a withered old woman.
Okay, I didn’t foresee that last part.
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I scoot closer to the lady, my mother, and pat her hand to let her know I’m on board this train of implausibility. We’re inside a hole, my naked, dead father is on that tongue pedestal, and I was conceived on the floor right there.
Mother leans forward and puts a hand on my dad’s shoulder. She waves me closer, takes hold of my hand and places it next to hers on the man’s skin. There is no heat in him. His face is younger than mine. He has been here for a long time, long enough that he ought to be a pile of bones.
I take my hand away from his arm. There remains upon his skin a red handprint, as if I’d slapped him. I look at my palm; still the same old Narwhal swarthy-off-white. The woman, my mother, nods, as if all is as it should be. Then the woman points at the tunnel-tube that led us into the room. Carrying the candle, she scurries around the pedestal and leans her head into the tube. She beckons me to stand next to her. I maneuver my body and poise myself on my knees and look into the tube. She points to the ceiling of the tube, as lit by her candle. The tube is covered with little red handprints. She points at her crotch and makes a downward sweeping motion. Then she points at me. She takes my right hand in hers and rubs my palm with her thumb. Then she points at the handprints. Then she points at me. Then she points at the handprints again.
Translation: After you slid out of my womb, you walked out of here and slapped bloody handprints all over the place.
I nod, Sure, absolutely.
She gives a thumbs-up. I give a thumbs-up. Then, still holding the shortening candle, she plunges head first into the tube and I, not wishing to remain alone in this chamber of death and conceptualism, follow.
The return trip is not nearly as uncomfortable as the arrival. Either I’ve gotten skinnier or the tunnel has gotten larger. I am able to take full breaths, I can twist my hips as I shimmy.
We slide out the tunnel, once again in the cathedral room, where we stretch our legs, roll our shoulders. The conical candles continue to burn here. The room is. The room is. The room.
I’m beyond reaction. This roller coaster, rather than dropping into the big dive, as it should have done long ago, this confounded contraption just keeps dragging me up the hill.
Together, we make our way across the room’s vast floor. Halfway, we pause at the knife that’s planted in the chicken skeleton. Here, the woman, my mother, pauses. Her calm is replaced by sternness and the sternness is replaced by red-faced anger. The presence of the knife here is an obscenity. She squats and grabs the knife by its handle. Tugs until her knees start to shake, but she can’t extract it from the floor. I squat next to her and reach my hands around hers and squeeze gently. Together, we wiggle the knife and pull upward. It loosens from the hard stone floor and I let go of her hands.
Her face beams. She grasps the knife by its blade and presents it to me, handle first. I take it, uncertain of what I’m to do. There’s a folksy, handmade feel to it; it was clearly made for someone with smaller hands than mine. The knife is not mine and I do not intend to keep it.
Mother kneels next to the bones and leans forward and kisses the skull of the chicken. I cannot begin to guess what happened here.
As Mother stands herself up, I place the knife on the ground next to the chicken bones, and now both it and the chicken are content, the obscenity forgotten. Mother is beaming. For the first time in our lives, she hugs me and I hug her back. In our embrace, the accumulation of trauma, dread, and darkness that lurked down here are mutated into glittering fondness.
This roller coaster is never going to stop climbing.
I follow Mom as she, with a straight back and a skip in her step, crosses to the far side of the room. We crawl thru the next tunnel-tube into the Russian ice-cream cone room, then we crawl thru the final tunnel-tube and emerge back in the foyer where my fiancée, Veronica Juanita Embajadores Vasquez, remains prone, hovering above the blanket on the floor.
Mom strokes Vero’s cheek with the arthritic knuckles of her right hand. She raises Vero’s left hand and points at the place where a wedding ring would be.
Good lord. I’ve known the woman for less than an hour and she’s already bugging me to tie the knot. I put my hands on my heart and nod vigorously in the hope that Mom’ll understand that I’ve proposed to Vero and we intend to get married as soon as we can get to California and find Lauren Bacall’s house.
Mom gives me a wary look and then gently presses upon Vero until she’s resting flat upon the blanket. Mom admires her future daughter-in-law, lingering over the beehive hair, and then points at me and to herself and to the exit. We are to leave now.
I point to my fiancée and rise my eyebrows, We’re bringing her, too, right?
Mom flattens her palm toward Vero, She’ll be fine here, kiddo.
We’ve got this sign language stuff down.
She hands me a candle and I follow her to the stone-carved steps and we crawl upward. She’s limber, this old lady, and she scuttles far ahead of me. My knees are grinding, my wrists are grinding, my teeth are grinding.
I stop feeling sorry for myself when I realize three things:
My urge to vomit has passed.
My stomach is no longer tied up in knots.
My eardrums are vibrating.
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I scuffle forward, led by the candle in my hand, chasing these vibrations on my eardrums. It’s ticklish, as if people are blowing in my ears, and they make me giggle. When I giggle, the vibrations grow more powerful. And then, the vibrations become intensely uncomfortable. They metamorph into a platoon of tiny militiaman lunatics who invade my brain cavity and begin firing tiny machine guns at my ear nerves.
I lose my grip on the candle and I curl into a ball. I gasp shallow breaths. The air slides in and out of my throat, as if it, the air, were losing its viscosity. I concentrate on my respiration. Don’t hyperventilate.
The machine guns in my ears become less insistent. The militiamen’s ammo is running out. And then the final militiaman fires his final bullet into his own forehead, and the pain ends.
In the absence of pain, there’s a thrumming. A thrumming noise. I’m still lying on my side. I open my eyes. A thin rivulet of water is approaching me along the bottom of the tunnel. It moves at lightning speed, probably an inch per second.
I come to all-fours, spreading my arms and legs into a bridge so the water will pass underneath without touching me. There’s something wrong. Water can’t move like this on its own. Nothing can move this quickly on its own. I do the moving.
And there, look at the candle, floating where I released it a moment ago. Not floating. It’s slipping earthward even more quickly than the water is coming at me. It lands on the floor of the cave and bounces a little and then settles sideways in the water. The flame flicks and dies.
I’m staring between my crawling hands at this candle that’s expired in this demonic trickle
of water. There’s a flash at the end of the tunnel. I look upward, and I’m clobbered by a sound so violent that I think I will disintegrate. It’s like being awoken from a coma courtesy of an atomic bomb.
The sound continues, rumbling, shaking my guts, wiggling the hairs on the back of my thighs. I want to crabwalk backwards, return to the cavern, grab Vero, and dive deep into my daddy’s death chamber. But the rumbles cease and soon it’s just me in this quivering tunnel with an extinguished candle floating between my limbs.
And now I hear—this is what is happening, I’m hearing—a voice. It’s the voice of a cassette player with a dying battery. Slow, low, indecipherable.
“Kooooooooooooommmmaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwn.”
I say, “Pardon?”
My voice emerges from my mouth and I swear I can see the sound ripple thru the air and bounce off the cave walls and fly back into my ears: “Paaaaaarrrrdddddoooooooonnnn?”
The cassette player voice repeats, “Kooooommmaaaaaaawwwwwnnnn.”
Diffused light pours in from the tunnel’s entrance. It spills along the floor and walls, devouring the shadows.
I am irrepressible, goddammit. I crawl forward and forward and now I’m squatting at the entrance, looking upward at a daylit, clouded sky. Raindrops are diving right at me. They land in my eyes and my hair and each one makes me flinch as if I’d been stung by a wasp. I hug myself, let the water flow into my skin and my shirt.
A withered, big knuckled hand drops out of the sky and dangles in front of my nose. “Koooooom. Oooooon.”
I grasp the hand and I’m pulled out of the hole and up to solid ground where I’m embraced by my elderly mother.
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It happened, you see? I slowed down.
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I raise my arms and, lo and unfold, my hands fly upward without resistance. My clothes slide against my skin. I hear wind and splatting raindrops and the sound of my own voice shouting wordless nonsense. The arthritis flees my joints. I am strong and lithe. I leap up and down and up and down and up, huge leaps. I’m an astronaut on the fucking moon.
With her arms crossed and a bemused look on her face, my mom watches me bounce and shout until I collapse on the ground on my back to let the rain fall all over me. Each drop becomes a gentle surprise: the motion of the water as it runs down my cheeks, the splashes on my teeth, the dirt sliding away from my zebra shirt.
Walking softly on the grass, Mother squats and then lies down next to me, not touching, just near. I think, This is marvelous, absolutely marvelous.
We remain still even after the last of the raindrops has fallen.
The sun appears and shines as if a god had done something worth remembering. Blue sky, distant birds flying. Wind gliding over the gentle hilltops. Wet blades of grass shifting underneath my back. It’s humid here, in this post-rain. Let the water evaporate from my clothes. Smell the shift of air, the dank of the earth and the musk of life. The buzz of flies all around.
Mom speaks. Her voice is magic. I say nothing because I can’t understand, because I’ve forgotten how to hear. She speaks again, more slowly. I dig the sound, can’t hear the words. I watch a V of birds cross the sky. They look like seagulls.
Some time later, and this time I understand, my mother says, “What is your name, boy?” Her voice is soft, with a twisted Okie accent. The accent is a surprise. I would have figured her to talk more like Mary Poppins.
I say, “Narwhal.” My voice comes out too loud and the word is lumpy. It’s the voice of a deaf person. I try again, concentrating on my consonants, and Mom understands.
She says, “Narwhal is an odd sort of name.”
“I agree.”
We’re side by side, staring up at the sky. The pauses between our sentences are very long. I have to interpret what she’s saying and then I have to practice what I’m going to say before I say it.
She says, “When’s your birthday?”
“September first, thereabouts.” I’m mimicking her accent.
“What year?”
“1976.”
“Who raised you?”
“The Slotterfields,” I say. “They’re professors.” Then I say, “You’re my mother.”
She reaches and touches the tip of my nose.
I say, “My father is John Riles.”
“Johnny Riles. A fine boy.”
Mother calls him Johnny, same as Charlene from the Keaton Cooperative Grocery. I like that. I say, “And that was him down there.”
“Yes,” she says. “That’s where he died.”
“He’s a young man.”
“The cavern doesn’t let go of the dead.”
“It’s an odd spot, that cavern.”
She waits a moment, two. She says, “I’m not accustomed to talking.”
I say, “That puts us in the same boat, I guess.”
“Well.”
I say, “Down there, where my dad is. That’s where I came from?”
“You came from fucking.”
This mother of mine is no lilyflower. I say, “Mom—can I call you ‘Mom?’”
“You may.”
“Mom, Vero’s still in that hole. And I—”
“Vero is your friend?”
“Wife, eventually. Short for Veronica. You’ll like her.”
“I hope that is the case.”
“I want to see her.”
“Wait here with me for a while.”
She looks at me with slow-blinking eyes. I’m dying to see Vero, to see if she can see me, to hear if she can hear me. But I will obey my mother.
My mouth is coming back. I hazard an extended phrase. “Can you maybe give me some context with respect to, you know, my existence? Just a quick summary. Eight sentences.”
She exhales for a good long time.
“What do you know, son, about yourself?”
I say, “I know that on January first, 1976, a basketball player named Kitch Riles, who may or may not have been dealing cocaine to half of the players in the ABA, drove to eastern Colorado to the ranch where his brother, John, lived. After that, neither one of the Riles boys was ever seen again. And then, eight months later, a woman named Charlene Morning found a baby somewhere in the vicinity of this valley here. Charlene wanted to keep the baby, but she couldn’t, so she left it on the courthouse steps with my name—Narwhal—pinned to its blanket. Eventually, the baby was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Slotterfield of Denver, Colorado.”
My voice has returned.
I say, “Many years later, Veronica and I were eating hamburgers in a town called Holliday and I went to the bathroom and when I came out, time had stopped. But it didn’t actually stop. I was just moving really fast, turns out. And now, due to various other circumstances, I am here. That sums it. Your turn.”
Mom reaches forward and pinches my sleeve. “Your shirt.”
“I’m a referee. I referee basketball games.”
She likes this. “That makes sense.”
“In so many ways. Tell me about me, please.”
Mom says, “Johnny Riles ranched and he worked hard and he loved whiskey and horses. He had a poodle and he gave me a chicken.”
This woman is not terribly concerned with conversational continuity. I rotate my neck so I’m facing her. She’s blinking nostalgia out of her eyes.
She says, “Your father collected arrowheads. He smoked cigarettes and he loved a girl named Charlie. She’s who found you.”
I say, “Charlene.”
Mom looks at me askew and says, “Charlie’s a good one. I wish your father could have seen her tits.” I keep my trap shut. This conversation is difficult enough already. No use sending the lady down any additional detours, especially when she’s doing such fine job of it on her own.
Mom says, “I like your girlfriend.”
“Fiancée.”
“She part Mexican?”
“She’s got four names, and her last one’s Vasquez.”
Mom is silent for a good long while.
We ro
ll our faces back to the sky. I say, “Were you there when my dad died?”
“I was.”
“What did he say, in the end, about all this?”
“He didn’t say anything. We were both holding our breaths at the time.” She continues. “You’ll want to know how we met. First, there was a blizzard. I killed his horse and I ate it, but that was because I had bowel problems and there wasn’t any food and it was blizzarding. He was pretty upset about losing his horse. After the blizzard, he hunted for me for a long time. When he found me, he waved a pistol so I threatened to cut off his testicles. But he started bringing me food so we became friends. He gave me one of his chickens. We spent Christmas together in those tunnels, me and your dad and my chicken and his poodle. It was a happy time.”
Story-wise, Mom’s not one to linger on details. And now she’s stopped talking altogether. I wait a bit, figuring she’s arranging her next batch of thoughts. Soon, she’s snoring.
I roll over and poke her shoulder. She says, “But then, a week later, that loathsome Kitch showed up and he dragged us and the poodle into the tunnels and everything went bad. Kitch was filled with madness. He murdered my chicken with Johnny’s knife. And then he made us all crawl into the deep room. Johnny and I made it thru without any problem, but Kitch became trapped. He was fat and the tunnel squeezed on him. So he died there. But his body plugged up the tunnel. We were corked in. At the time, the air in that room was bad. Just me and Johnny and that dead brother, sticking halfway out of the tunnel. We couldn’t pull him in and we couldn’t push him out and we couldn’t breathe.”
She stops again, swallows hard. As scenarios go, this one qualifies as overtly horrifying.
I say, “What did you do then?”
“I gave Johnny a gift.”
In lieu of speaking, I tilt my head.
Mom says, “It was the thing that led to you.”
“In the cave down there.”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“And then he died from the bad air.”
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