by Brady Udall
He hung his head, indulging in a sweet moment of self-pity, and with some difficulty resisted the urge to cry.
Holding his pants up around his thighs so that he could walk without tripping, he shuffled out to his pickup, cast around behind the seat, and came up with the mason jar of moonshine Nestor had pressed on him before he’d driven away from Mexican Town a week and a half ago. “Take it!” Nestor had urged when Golden tried to decline. “You take it, Jefe, you will thank me. But only for emergencies! One sip for comfort, two for courage. Three and down the hole you go.”
Was this an emergency? Golden decided that it was: one in a string of so many that he was becoming accustomed to the alarm bell rattling relentlessly inside his chest. He took a sip, gasped, and then one more. Courage, that was what he needed. He assumed his position on the toilet and grimly went to work.
A quarter of an hour later he had an oval bald spot, glaring white and nicely symmetrical, that shone like a skating rink in a stand of dense undergrowth under the light of a full moon.
GOING UNDERGROUND
They met at the pond and headed west, hand in hand, flashlights swinging in the dark. She leaned against him when they walked a flat unbroken stretch, her black hair shimmering even in the faint starlight.
“Where are you taking me?” he said.
“A secret!” she said, and gave him a little poke in the belly. “A secret is secret.”
He had walked this way many times before, but in the dark it seemed mysterious and strange, and as they moved into margins of the lava field a three-quarters moon began to rise over the low southern peaks, casting every visible thing with the faint greenish hue of tarnished silver. They picked their way down into a sand wash, followed it north for maybe a quarter of a mile, and then tracked along an old leaning fence strung with ancient Crandall barbed wire. Before leaving the trailer, he had tried to dissolve the hard lump of anxiety in his throat with one more drink from Nestor’s mason jar and now he walked along behind Huila with a loose, almost careless gait, caught in the familiar state—something he felt whenever he was with her—between happiness and utter panic.
“You know where we’re going?” he asked.
“May-be ye-es!” she called in a singsong, her teeth a flash of white when she turned. “Maybe no-ot.”
A small breeze swept by, rustling the rabbit brush and swirling up the cuffs of his pants, and the sensation of cool air on his newly shorn privates put a bright look on his face, a hop in his step. Surreptitiously, he gave himself a couple of quick shots of nasal spray.
They came to a thready strip of white canvas tied to one of the fence wires and crawled through to the other side. Huila wandered around, shining her flashlight over a large expanse of ground jumbled with humps of black lava rock in every imaginable configuration until she found what she was looking for. She called to Golden and together they regarded what looked to be a dead clump of sagebrush lodged between two boulders.
“This is it?” he said.
“The secret place,” she said. “It’s wonderful, no?”
He cast his flashlight around to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. “Yeah,” he said. “This is…this is great.”
She laughed. She said, “It’s a joke!” and gave him a playful slap across the shoulder. He liked it when she hit him; unlike Nola, she didn’t seem to be trying to inflict pain. She cleared away the tangle of brush to reveal a kind of door set into the ground at an angle, constructed out of old mining timbers and rusty corrugated tin. She pulled it open, releasing a gentle breath of steam.
“The heck?” Golden said.
Huila pointed her flashlight into the hole, catching nothing in its beam but curling sheets of vapor. He thought of the bunker Ted Leo had shown him inside the Test Site, several miles to the north of here. He wondered if what Ted had told him was true, that underneath this barren desert landscape was a world of tunnels and shafts and man-made caverns and lairs of such a scale that a science fiction movie couldn’t do it justice. “Listo?” she said.
“Seriously?” Golden said. “We’re going in there?”
“You may stay here,” she said, “or you can be a brave boy and come with me.” With that she squatted, braced her hands on the rough stone, inserted one leg, then the other, wiggled charmingly to get her hips through, and disappeared into the ground. Golden waited, heard the sounds of rocks shifting somewhere underneath him. He shimmied into the hole, the steam filling his nose with a slight whiff of sulfur, and scraped the dickens out of both his elbows on the way down. He gave in to a rising claustrophobic fit when he became stuck for a few seconds, his shoulders clamped from either side and the hot, wet air like a damp pillow pressed into his face. But he saw Huila’s light playing over flashes of water and stone, which gave him a sense of the vaulted space below him, and he calmed enough to pull himself through and clamber down a series of natural steps until he felt mud under his feet and nothing but air within arm’s reach.
“Now turn off your light for one momentito,” she said, cutting hers. In the thick darkness he felt his heart rate begin to rise, and then Huila struck a match, the sudden small flame such a shock that he stepped backward, spangles of color floating across his vision.
She lit a series of five kerosene lamps, section by section revealing a cavern the size of a small house whose ceiling was hung with formations of thin white stalactites glittering like crystal chandeliers suspended over a small black pool steaming like a cauldron. At the far end of the room long draperies of reddish flowstone seemed to move and furl in the glow of the lamps. The surface of everything was slick with a moisture that already clung to his skin and hair, and the sound of dripping water echoed with such insistence it was impossible to tell if there was only one drip or ten thousand.
Huila explained that Ted Leo had paid very dearly for the land surrounding the cave—the old sheep rancher who owned the place had kept it secret, believing that if its whereabouts became public the hippies and Californians and sodomites of the world would come in droves to smoke their dope and perform their perverted sex rituals and generally ruin his peaceful Christian existence. But when Ted Leo bought the adjoining land for development, the rancher realized he might have a valuable commodity. Despite paying twice the land’s estimated value, Ted Leo believed he had made a steal; he could charge his brothel clients steep sums for the chance to spend an hour with a hooker in an otherworldly lava tube with a natural jacuzzi fed by mineral hot springs, or he could take a different route and fleece health nuts and religious zealots for the opportunity to stew their pasty selves in its mysterious healing waters. Or both, he was still deciding.
Huila dimmed the two closest lamps to give full effect to the alien shapes, the glistening skin of formations like great rising columns of hardened glue. She kicked off her sandals and dipped a toe into the small pool. “Ay!” she cried. “Hot, hot!” She showed him the channel that had been chiseled out of the rock, allowing cool water from an overhead spring to flow into the pool so as to regulate the temperature. She removed several round stones from the mouth of the channel and the trickle of water expanded into a steady flow that purled over the smooth rock and into the pool without a sound.
She grabbed the hem of her shirt as if to pull it over her head. She nodded at the pool. “We go in?”
He stayed where he was, backed up against a stalagmite that looked like a massive yellow dog’s tooth. “I don’t…” he said. “I didn’t bring my swimming trunks.”
She gave him a look and he averted his eyes—I didn’t bring my swimming trunks. Was he serious? Could he be any more ridiculous? What could someone like Huila see in an ass like him?
“No swimming,” she said, now straining just a little to maintain her good mood. “No swimming. Only sitting. It’s nice. Are you…”—she searched for the word—“bashful? It’s okay. I’m bashful too. You cover your eyes for me, and I cover my eyes for you.”
Like the monkey who sees no evil, he covered his eyes with
both hands and took those few moments in his own little dark world to figure out what to do. He couldn’t refuse Huila—this was a special occasion, one she’d put some thought into, and he simply could not disappoint her. He considered stripping down to his underwear, but underwear was only one small step from naked, and naked was what he would give anything right now to avoid; he was certain that if she got a load of his weird little shaved zone she’d want nothing to do with him ever again.
In what seemed like no more than five seconds she called, “Ready!” and he looked through his fingers to find her up to her chin in the steaming water, her hair spread out over the water, a sheet of black satin. Through the clear water her naked body appeared two-dimensional, furling and unfurling like a flag.
“Okeydokey!” he said. “Here I come!”
So fast that she couldn’t question or stop him, he advanced toward her over the slick cavern floor with the seesawing carriage of a bear on roller skates, tossing aside his wallet and keys, kicking off his boots and peeling away his socks as he went. At the last moment, in a gesture of wild abandon, he yanked off his shirt, popping a few buttons, and slid into the pool still wearing his pants, as if in his rush to join her he had forgotten this minor detail. His mouth opened involuntarily in a childlike expression of rarefied pain when his brain registered the extreme heat of the water.
“Oh-ah-ah-ha,” he gasped. “It’s hot!”
“Hot!” she agreed, her eyes wide.
Once he was satisfied that the water would not boil the skin off his flesh, he slid the rest of the way in, and they regarded each other from across the small pool, their chins just touching the trembling surface of the water. The heat had made her lips flush pink, her skin glow, and he couldn’t imagine her being any more beautiful than she was at that moment.
“It’s nice,” he said. “This is nice.”
“Mmm,” she said.
She watched him with a rapt scrutiny and he knew she was wondering what kind of oddball she had taken up with. She has no idea, Golden thought, with a trace of bitterness. As far as she was concerned, he was a regular American guy with one wife and five kids and a full complement of pubic hair. If only she knew. He almost laughed. If she had even the smallest inkling of what she was dealing with, she would climb out of this cave, run for home and never look back.
Her face softened just a little and she held her hand out to him. He took it, and she pulled herself over to him, put her hand on his chest and her head against his shoulder.
“Are you afraid?” she said.
“Afraid?” he said.
A long silence. She said, “Afraid of me?”
“What? No. I’m not—I would never be afraid. Of you.” To show her just how unafraid he was, he slid down against her and kissed her on the mouth, put his palm against her wet neck. She grabbed hold of him and suddenly they were unmoored, rolling and tumbling like otters, nothing to hold on to but each other, the water sloshing over the lip of rock. He’d never felt anything like it: the buoyant heat, the absence of friction and gravity, the steam that left a salty condensation on her upper lip. He didn’t know what would ever become of him, but he wanted this moment to last.
Her skin was as slick as if it had been covered in oil and he struggled to hold on to her, gripping her thigh on one side, locking his leg around hers on the other. He felt the bones of her hips pressing against him, like a pair of small fists, and he was seized with the kind of mindless desire he hadn’t experienced in years, an arousal so strong his body shivered trying to contain it. He did a splashing scissor kick, trying to press himself closer, his face getting tangled in her hair, a shuddering thrill in his stomach as he realized that this was the end and the beginning of everything he knew.
She found some leverage and pressed him up against the other side of the pool, and as they kissed he could feel her hand make its way down his belly. Her fingers found one of his belt loops, then the buttons of his pants, but as she began to work at them, jerking a little at the wet denim, something happened to him: he went cold. Some presence, forgotten in the dark back rooms of his mind, had come forward to wake him from this feverish delirium into the reality of what he was about to do. At the time he couldn’t have said what it was, but something made him put his hand on hers and say in quavering apology, “I don’t think I can.”
She made a little groan, let her mouth slip away from his. He tried to pull back from her but she held tight to him.
“It’s okay,” she said. She was still gasping a little, her eyes bright, her hair twisted over her shoulder in thick wet ropes. He looked away but she put her face in front of his. “I understand. Don’t worry. Ted Leo has the same problem. Many times.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He had no idea what she was talking about.
“We can still have a nice time, don’t worry, please don’t worry. It’s no problem with me.”
He plunged his head into the water in an attempt to hide his face from her, to escape the sting of embarrassment for denying all that she had so willingly offered, the disgust at himself for turning something beautiful and rare—the kind of moment men would trade their lives for—into something awkward and strained. He wondered if the day would ever come when he would be able to make a simple decision, take a single step without this sad, mealymouthed second-guessing, this self-doubt. She held tightly to his hand and he was shamed by her kindness. Only when his head began to throb from the heat of the water did he let himself surface. He stood, thinking he might grab his clothes and make some sort of dramatic, self-flagellating gesture, such as stalking off into one of the cavern’s dark grottos to sulk, but he felt a light-headed fizziness as the blood drained all at once from the heat-dilated capillaries in his brain and he began, slowly, to tilt backward. His vision went dim and he was falling, he knew, but there was precious little he could do to stop it. Huila tried to hold him up; he could feel both her hands tightly gripping his wrist, but he swung sideways like a big wooden doll and went down.
When he opened his eyes Huila’s face was so close to his he felt her breath on his skin.
“You okay?” she said.
“Just fine, yes,” he said.
“You hit your head.”
He placed his hand on the back of his skull, where a small goose egg was already forming.
“I can’t feel a thing,” he said, which was true. “I got light-headed because I stayed under the water too long, that’s all.”
She sighed, and the worry line between her eyebrows eased away. Suspended in the water he felt weightless, warm and secure, and he realized she was cradling him in her arms, all of him, like a baby. This he liked. This he liked very much.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?” she said with a little laugh. “You didn’t try to fall.”
“No, I mean about before. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
She put three wet fingers across his lips. “Stop. There’s nothing wrong. It’s common, yes? For a man your age.”
“It is?” he said.
“Many men have this problem, men everywhere, it’s nothing to think about.”
Finally, it hit him. Even though he didn’t know what his problem was and never really had, she did: he was impotent. Of course that’s what she thought. He felt an immediate rush of relief, which, he realized, was probably not the most common of reactions under such circumstances. He decided, right there, that he liked the idea of being impotent. Somehow it was less shameful and complicated than all of the possible versions of the truth—it was nothing more than a physical malady, something he couldn’t be blamed for or required to explain. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
“It’s really kind of hit and miss—” he started to say, but she shushed him again.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We do not need to give it a thought.”
“Ted Leo has the same problem?” he said. This was an idea that pleased him deeply.
“Oh yes,” she sa
id. “Very bad. You don’t know.”
“That’s a real shame,” he said.
“No more talk of this.” She bent down to give him a full, deep kiss that rendered him as pliant and insubstantial as the water he floated in.
“But let’s remove your pants, yes?” she said, as if to a toddler in need of a diaper change. “So we can enjoy ourselves, with no worries. We can make out, okay? It will be nice.”
“Okay,” he said in a meek child’s voice. He had no strength or inclination to protest anything she wanted of him. He could reveal himself completely to her, he believed, all his quirks and secrets, and she would still love him.
He smiled dreamily, all of him except his face submerged, while she unbuttoned his pants and began to tug them down around his hips.
There was a noise—he heard it inside the water first—a vibration somewhere above them. The report of a car door slamming shut, stamping footsteps and then the echoing screak of rusty hinges.
Huila’s weight came suddenly forward and he went under for a moment, inhaling water through his nose. He came up coughing, snorting, and she put a hand over his mouth to muffle the noise.
“Huila!” came a voice. “You down there?”
“Dios, dios,” she whispered, frantically pulling him out of the water and pushing him toward the edge of the pool. “Go hide, now. Please, go.”
He lurched out of the pool and hit the floor with a wet slap. He struggled the rest of the way out of his wet pants, which were tripping him up, yanking out one leg and shaking them off with the other as if they were a small, snarling dog that had attached itself to his ankle. He took a moment to look around and skidded and slid toward a rockfall at the back of the cavern.
“Yes!” Huila called, “I’m down here, please come down!” doing her best to cover up the sounds as she splashed out of the pool to retrieve his pants, shirt and shoes and toss them into the shadows. The sound of Ted Leo grunting and scraping his way down the narrow passageway reverberated through the chamber with a sound like thunder from on high, making Golden flinch. He hunkered down, pink and steaming as a boiled shrimp, behind the pile of rocks and tucked his head between his knees. He clamped his nostrils tightly between his thumb and forefinger to prevent a catastrophic sneeze.
