Billy Goat Hill

by Mark Stanleigh Morris

  We previously observed the flood control workers use a special tool to open the massive metal discharge cover. The cover is designed, I suppose, to make it next to impossible for tunnel rats like us to get in. It’s like the door to the nest of a giant trap-door spider, free swinging, suspended from a single monstrous hinge, and actuated by force applied from inside. A moderate amount of water opens it an inch or two, while a lot of water will push it open several feet. The first time I get a close-up look at the door, I conclude it is a hopeless idea. As it turns out, we are not to be defeated—the tire jack from Lucinda’s trunk works perfectly.

  Animals may not possess the logic-based reasoning ability that we humans supposedly have, but they often display remarkable instinctive judgment that some of us, namely me, could do well to observe. Mac quickly demonstrates that he’s no relation to Cerberus, the hound of the underworld, as he absolutely refuses to enter the storm drain. He takes one look at the precarious way we have propped open the huge discharge door and slams his rump down on the ground like a pack mule on strike. No amount of cajoling or ridicule will change his mind, and he insists on taking up a post just outside the tunnel opening. There he sits—humorless, stoic, and as rigid as a carved stone statue. Without question, he is the best looking mixed-breed sentinel in all of the Arroyo Seco.

  Admittedly, Lucinda’s car jack is strained to its limit and looks like the equivalent of a toothpick propping open the mouth of a great white shark. If the toothpick should snap during ingress or egress, there won’t be a second chance. No more hazardous than a late night showdown with the Crippler, I reason.

  We test our nerve to the limit on our first voyage into the tunnel. Apprehension marks each step as we edge our way into the darkened crypt. An ominous semblance hangs in the dank air, like a sign saying—Danger Go Back! But we proceed into the crypt anyway, plodding ever so slowly as we imagine we are knowingly going against the wishes of the dead.

  Behind us a circle of light gradually dims, giving inverse rise to our growing unease. My Flash Gordon flashlight, an unreliable gadget at best, isn’t powerful enough to make us feel secure.

  Luke hooks a finger through my rear belt loop and shuffles along behind me, his sneakers making sucking noises each time he lifts his feet. After we have penetrated the hole about the length of a football field, I stop and glance back toward the dwindling spot of light. I try to absorb a few additional rays of courage. Seeping blackness has nearly closed the void behind us, and we continue along the gradual incline at a slower pace than before.

  Soon my flashlight starts to flicker, and Luke begins to feel uneasy, judging by the increasing resistance pulling my pants back against my middle. Already leaning forward to keep my head from scraping the top of the tunnel, I shift my center of gravity a little farther forward, offering more tug and encouragement to help him along.

  Luke could stand face-to-face with those tow-truck drivers and bamboozle them without batting an eye, but delving into this kind of unknown is a different trick altogether. Suddenly he panics and puts the brakes on. My belt loop snaps, and Luke falls backward, landing on his backside with a sloppy splash. With all of my momentum, I sail headlong in the opposite direction. I try to catch my balance but end up executing a full-stretch landing that is almost graceful. My flashlight takes it much harder when it hits the deck like the lights-out-loser in a Sonny Liston fight. I slide on my belly for thirty yards, something akin to a wet seal sledding on oily ice—and thus we make another fantastic discovery.

  The magic of this place encompasses me with a strange new sense of security—back in the womb, blindman’s bluff without the blindfold. Exhilarated by the unexpected foray into the slithery wet blackness, I shout, “Wow! That was fun!”

  Wow! That was fun! A hollow but happy echo immediately agrees, launching me into a much needed giggle.

  I sit up soaking slimy-wet and squint back in Luke’s direction. Far away, a wanton circle glows, flirting with the darkness like an impassioned but very demure moon. At some inestimable distance in the foreground, a starkly contrasted silhouette of Luke shifts like a geometric shape imprisoned in the cylinder of an infinite kaleidoscope. Attempting to curb a new wave of anxiety, I laugh out loud and think to myself—there is light at the end of the tunnel!

  “I’m okay, Luke!”

  “I’m not!” Luke’s silhouette rapidly retreats toward the safety of the loving moon.

  During expedition number two, we perfect the concept of placing candles in the tunnel. Luke comes up with the best method, and his freckles seem to glow in the dark when I compliment him for thinking of something good.

  Every fifty feet or so, we locate little imperfections in the otherwise smooth wall of the tube and use them as sconces to hold the candles. We find a notch above the midpoint of the tunnel wall, melt some wax on it for stickum, and post a candle. Pinpoints of flame lick at the concrete leaving odd tear-shaped soot marks, while swaying flares embrace shadowy partners that silently dance on the curvilinear walls. The captivating ambiance fits my imagination like a glove, and soon we become masters of our endless medieval dungeon.

  We are fully adapted by the end of our third trek into the cavern. We move about with surefooted confidence, firmly in command of our strange new environment. I have found the perfect escape from the surface world, a world that has revoked my right to happiness and become darker than the light I have found in the darkness below ground. Down here I feel privileged and free from the haunting images that reside in the scenery above—the gruesome images of the dead man that show themselves only to me. There is no scenery in Cavendish Caverns.

  Luke seems happy enough just to be wherever I am. However, Mac, stubborn beyond all belief, has not altered his position on tunnel frolicking one iota. We have taken to calling him Mr. Party Pooper, but he is immune to childish insults. Wise beyond his years, he continues to guard the storm drain opening with suppressed trepidation, while Luke and I have become mercurial in our actions, buzzing in and out of our honeycombed hive like bees jazzed with the feverish pace of spring.

  As the surface dwellers suffer through the blast furnace of summer, we enjoy the cool, damp darkness of our secret hideaway. We have become moles shunning the light of day and the attendant clatter of the normal world to enjoy the serene isolation of our exclusive subterranean kingdom. For me, the tons of compacted earth overhead serve as perfect shielding from everything that is bad. And Luke, well, he is just glad there aren’t any mockingbirds in the storm drains.

  By the time the dreary, overcast mid-June skies over Los Angeles have once again tarnished the myth of sunny California, Alan B. Shepard, Jr. has restored Carl the baker’s pride, Sam Yorty is preparing to move into City Hall, Chavez Ravine has become synonymous with Dodger Stadium, and Luke and I are spending more time in our cave than hibernating bears in the dead of winter. Overriding Mac’s obvious displeasure, a great period of emotional prosperity ensues. I hope it lasts.

  Lucinda left for work very early this morning, which affords Luke and me a quick start on the day; a lucky break because of the rain showers forecast to hit in the late afternoon or early evening. Thanks to stories told about rescues from storm drains, I have enough sense to know we do not want to be down in the storm drain during a flash flood. I advise Luke that we’ll have to call it quits at the first sign of rising water. He assures me that that’s fine with him.

  We wolf down some Wheaties, the breakfast of champion cardboard sliders and tunnel riders, and hastily pack some munchies in a knapsack. Grabbing a fresh can of motor oil and Lucinda’s tire jack from the garage, we head off for another thrilling day in the wet and wild blackness below.

  We keep the rest of our tunnel riding gear squirreled just inside the tunnel opening. In our full riding attire we look like a couple of drillers after a good day in the oil field. We wear old sweatshirts and dungarees soaked with motor oil, a kind of slick friction-free husk worn between skin and concrete. Luke calls our slimy getups greased pigskin. It
does occur to me that oil-soaked clothes, candles, and matches might be a dangerous combination. But we never seem to have any flammability issues. Human Molotov cocktails we are not.

  “I’m tired,” Luke announces after a couple of hours of vigorous sliding.

  “Me, too.”

  “Can we stop for a few minutes and eat some of our goodies?”

  “Okay.” I am out of breath and also a little hungry. “But let’s walk back up to the starting gate first so we’ll be ready to make another run after we rest.”

  The “starting gate” is the name we have applied to a particular inclined section of pipe. I did a little homework on storm drains and found out the system is designed to utilize the force of gravity rather than electric pumps to move the water. The entire network is laid out with a gradual downhill gradient that routs the water toward outlets that discharge it directly into the Arroyo Seco.

  After much exploration, the starting gate proves to be the optimal point from which to start a run. It works like a Pinewood Derby ramp or a ski jump ramp, and we use it as such with a good running start to boot. We probably achieve speeds on the order of twenty-five miles per hour at the bottom of the ramp and then slide down the pipe for nearly a quarter of a mile. It is pure fun and an exhilarating sense of freedom blasting like a projectile down the longest cannon barrel in the world. Depending on how fast our start is, we finally come to a stop anywhere from three to four hundred feet from the tunnel outlet, feeling charged up and raring to hustle back to the starting gate and do it all again.

  We try different styles—feet first, head first, belly down, belly up, sitting up frontward, and, weirdest of all, sitting up backward. Sometimes we even hook together in tandem like a two-man toboggan, although this style is much slower than making the run individually. There are occasional collisions, too. They happen when the one walking back up the tunnel fails to spread his legs in time for the one coming down.

  Boy do we have fun—marvelous, carefree, timeless fun.

  ’Twas a life not for the fainthearted.

  But such innocent foolishness, when

  compounded, leaves young rascals

  well confounded, or… maybe even

  with the dear departed!

  We sit at the top of the starting gate leaning against the wall of the tunnel with our legs arching over the silent trickle that flows continuously—the perpetual lifeblood of our eventide sanctuary. Resting, munching, talking, and at times just sitting quietly, we listen for the caverns voices and manfully nod or smile when we hear something we haven’t heard before.

  The caverns speak frequently in mysterious, invisible rumbles and soft, aimless echoes that float on gentle tunnel breezes. Different sounds come and go that after a while all sound the same. I am intrigued how the tunnel voices travel like messages sent across time from unknown universes, communications never answered but heard and appreciated nonetheless. Sometimes the voices seem to speak directly to me—distant manhole covers groaning under the weight of the world, or the resonant vibrations of misplaced baseballs yearning for the game, or the chime-like knells of silver dollars calling heads-or-tails like lonely loons lost in the dark.

  I, the boy manslayer banished from above, have found residence deep in the soul of the City of Angels. And it is wonderful to share this refuge with my brother. Me and Luke, the greased-up little moles that we are, nestle together in our burrow of safety, comforted by the soothing beat of our underground mother’s gentle heart. Yes, life is good down below.

  I sit here looking at Luke as he casually reposes opposite me. My younger brother, my only remaining brother, looks so innocent. He realizes I am looking at him and he grins at me, his freckles shimmering in the quivering candlelight.

  Does Luke ever have such convoluted thoughts as I? He has problems—sure he does, some of the same ones that I have, in fact. Yet, he seems so able to take things in stride. Talk about convoluted… Maybe if I had an older brother, if I weren’t the oldest and therefore not the responsible one, I would be able to take things in stride, too?

  Luke is human—of course he is. He reacts at the time that something happens; but on the whole he is far more lenient with the world, with life’s imperfections than I am. I sit here resting, looking at him and admiring him and wishing I could figure out how he does it.

  He stares back at me with no specific focus, apparently deep into his own confidential accounting. After a while, he says, “I think I should get a new cap.”

  We never retrieved his Dodgers cap from Three Ponds, and he has been hatless since. Still, his pronouncement, coming on the heels of my own long rumination, seems ridiculously profound. While my searching mind is lost in a kind of metaphor-seasoned philosophical soup, Luke deftly whips up a tasty baseball cap broth. How convoluted can I get?

  “A new cap? Why?”

  “Because, you big dumb donkey, I can’t stay down in these tunnels forever.”

  I think about that for a moment. “True enough.” I assume he must be leading up to something. “Are you still worried about the mockingbirds?”

  “I figure I need to be more practical about the mockingbird problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He smiles judiciously, making me feel as though I have asked him to reveal the secret of life. “Well, I’ve been doing some research.” The careful smile remains. “Did you know that mockingbirds are also sometimes called catbirds?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.” Maybe he is as strange as me.

  He nods. “Haven’t you ever noticed how their call kind of sounds like the meow of a cat? Meow, meow,” he croons, attempting to sound like a mockingbird mimicking a full-grown cat, but sounding more like a half-dead mockingbird mimicking the mew, mew of a malnourished kitten. Nevertheless, it does vaguely resemble the annoying squawk of a mockingbird.

  I bury a laugh. He is being far too serious to appreciate the humor I see in this. “Yes, I see what you mean, Luke. Would you like to stop off at Kory’s on the way home? They might have some Dodgers caps.”

  “Well, the thing is—I don’t want another Dodgers cap.”

  “Hey, wait just a darn minute! If you think you’re going to wear a Giants cap, you can forget about being my brother!”

  He laughs hard at that one. “No way, you big dumb donkey. I want a cap from that university down in Georgia, the kind that has a bulldog on it.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Why?”

  “The way I figure it, no catbird is going to mess with me with a big, mean, ugly looking bulldog on my head.”

  He is deadly serious.

  I laugh so hard I nearly wet my pants. Geez, what a comedian. He has absolutely no idea how funny he is, naturally funny, without even trying to be funny, funny. At first he is offended by my irreverent reaction, but the virus of laughter is very contagious and soon he’s laughing along with me. It takes a while for us to calm down.

  “Are you ready to do another slide, Luke?”

  “Yep. Can I go first?”

  “Sure.”

  As we start to get up we are startled by a tremendous BANG!

  The rumble comes as a shock wave from the direction of the tunnel opening, a wicked metal-against-metal scream that reverberates up the tube at the speed of sound. The candles near us flicker and sway as a shift of air brushes by my face. I am badly shaken by a surge of adrenaline.

  Luke gives my arm a desperate shake. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Denial throttles my mind, and I can almost feel my brain hardening like some yet-to-be discovered organism whose only defense against the perils of the wild is to turn to stone to keep from being eaten. Here I go again. Why can’t I just react? Why does my mind launch itself into some kind of out-of-control hyper-thought that pulls a total vacuum on my very being and sucks the marrow right out of my bones? Get a grip, Parker!

  I can smell my own dread oozing from me like blood from a bullet-
ridden body. An aching urge to repent enshrouds me in a chrysalis-like crust, closing me in, locking my petrified mind in a prison that might not open for a thousand years. Get a grip, Parker!

  We have trespassed in the medieval mines of Mephistopheles, the worst of the seven devil chiefs, and now he hath come to exact a toll! Death to all transgressors! Get a grip, Parker!

  I become conscious of my own labored breathing. I focus on it, slow it down, and forcefully steady myself against the tremors of fear tempering my hapless thinking.

  “You big dumb donkey don’t you think we should go see what made that noise?”

  I swallow a gulp of air as deep as I can. “Yes.”

  Loosening my arm from Luke’s grip, not wanting him to feel my trembling, I consciously conjure up my real imaginary friend, Duke Snider. I need your help, Duke. I can’t bear to lose this game!

  Power of the mind gives me a quick burst of resolve upon which I brace myself and bravely stand up. A big mistake. I am so rattled I’ve forgotten the first rule of Cavendish Caverns. I bump my noggin hard on the ceiling overhead and sit back down faster than an obsessed competitor in a game of musical chairs. I see twinkling silver ball bearings, not stars.

  Luke cringes. “Geez, are you all right?”

  “Ugh!”

  “Your head sounded like Lucinda testing muskmelons at Kory’s, except at least ten times louder.”

  Watery eyes squinting with pain, bile bubbling in my throat, my mouth wide open as if to scream, I reach up and delicately feel for an egg—an ostrich egg. “Oh man, I darn near busted my head wide open. Ouch! Ooo-ah! Hold on a second, I need to sit still for a bit.”

  “Sure, geez man, take your time.” He sits next to me.

  After a few deep breaths I decide my head is okay, but a fierce soreness rising from my shoulders tells me I’ve jammed my neck. Way to get a grip, Parker!