CAVE

Louis Gallo

The gauzy tint of a low hanging sun has oppressed the few of us on this mountain for over a month. Ice laminates our lawns, much of the streets, sidewalks and trails, tree limbs and bushes. It will not melt. There’s never enough light or warmth. We bundle up, pace the floors, huddle beside ovens, but nothing defeats the lingering chill in our bones. There are reports of suicide, sightings of luminous phantoms. The younger people have packed up in trucks and escaped to the valley, where commerce, opportunity and glittery night life abound. Up here we dream of tropical islands, sweat, sinewy green vines; we snap at each other as if trying to incarnate our misery into some tangible form to assail and curse. We know that the Arctic siege will end in a few months but cannot believe it. It’s impossible to believe. The ice seems impervious, eternal, the resinous, skeletal remains of a dying world.

I’m sitting at a chipped porcelain table left over from the thirties, sipping my hot brew of the

morning. They’ve shoved it against the wall again so it seats only three. No matter how often I drag it to the center of the room, they always push it back. The wall is a dull, flat beige, adorned only by an industrial clock that runs slow and my glossy magazine print of a Caribbean beach. An old aluminum percolator on the counter gurgles and spits. Ribbons of hardened, amber-like coffee streak down its sides. No one cleans it, though they do flush its insides with ammonia. You can taste the bitter residue. We never see the cleaning people. They are invisibles who work at night. One of the flourescent tubes on the ceiling hums and flickers. The room is a kind of low-grade memory of itself from another era.

I clutch the hot mug with both palms and inhale the steam rising from its surface. A small but precious treat. James Bradley shuffles in, sighing as usual, but he has at least changed his flannel shirt. James wears the same shirt every day or maybe he owns dozens of identical shirts. Muted gray and red checks. Always pressed with light starch. James, pushing forty, is lanky and sullen, and I am trying to convince him that, despite the cold, it’s not so bad here. He wants to descend into the valley and

seek a belated fortune. Alas, James doesn’t stand a chance next to the packs of multi-tasking, high-yield, aggressive, ferociously competitive, ruthless, dynamic young hustlers armed with bakery fresh MBA’s and swanky credentials. I wouldn’t have much of a chance either but I like to think by choice. I’d much rather just piddle around and read women’s magazines than negotiate multi-million global deals. The very thought of global deals paralyzes me. As for multi-tasking, I would rather be chained to a boulder watching vultures loop and descend.

James is a different story. Ambition drives him, but sometimes he can barely complete a single sentence; his mind drifts off into realms of mist uncharted by science or medicine. He lapses into waking comas and stares at the beige wall for half-hour spells. An avid believer in what he picks up from Nostradamus and the Bible, James believes the final days are at hand and that Anti-Christ has deputized millions of demon scouts to prepare for Armageddon. He claims he can slay these demons, boasts that he has killed two or three in this very building, one down in the furnace room, another here in the kitchen area.

“Demons are everywhere,” he says. “They disguise themselves sometimes and you’ve got to sniff them out. I don’t bother with the minor fiends. Just big ones.”

He’s shown me crude pictures he has drawn of these cartoonish monsters and I only nod and tell him how ugly and evil they look and it’s a good thing he’s around to handle the problem. The absurdity of seeking one’s fortune as one prepares for the apocalypse never seems to dawn on him. I no longer try to convince James to explore women’s magazines. He fails to appreciate the solace of mini-articles on How to Keep Floors Gleaming All Winter or SuperFoods That Help You Master the Blues. Nor can he feel the delight of chancing upon an ad for Palmer’s Cocoa Butter Formula with Vitamin E.

Cheap women’s magazines - (forget the glitzy Vogues, Cosomoplitans and that ilk), the kind you spot in check-out aisles at Food Town and Bi-Low -- have made my life bearable. They calm me down and rev me up at the same time, make me feel moral and compassionate, convince me that you don’t need to consult the Dalai Lama for directives on

happiness. I discovered the secret while down in the valley once having an ominous looking mole removed from my chest. I felt so anxious in the waiting room that I glanced around for something, anything, to read, and the only item not already snatched up by other patients was a battered copy of Home, a magazine I have subscribed to ever since. The mole turned out benign. I came out a transfixed and changed man. Testosterone had met Estrogen in an implosion of serenity.

I have learned along the way how to ease airport stress (though I never set foot in airports) and relieve hangovers with a piece of toast soaked in honey; that Jergen’s Ultra Healing Extra Dry Skin Moisturizer cures gray-looking legs; to cut down on mood-swings by consuming fish oil and tell if my basal ganglia (whatever that is) may be overtaxed; to avoid restless legs syndrome through creative visualization; that a compound in olive oil cures headaches; that inhaling the scent of grapefruit eases tension . . . I could go on, of course, on and on and on.

But what soothes me most are the homey, cozy pictures of holiday wreaths, glowing fireplaces,

festive platters of cranberry sauce or salmon cakes garnished with paprika, gourmet chocolate desserts (that you can prepare almost instantly!), economic designer touches added to any room to lift it from drab to glad, the always smiling, perfectly clad young women standing beside some sparkling appliance. These impeccable women must be dreams. So clean, sculptured, modestly sexy, svelte, genteel. Surely they smell fresh as lemon and sunshine in clothes dried outside on the line. If perfection can be thought of as distance, this is surely the case with such women. How taxing it must be to smile all the time.

When my wife Annie died in that freak accident (she so young and throbbing with life), I gave up on the future, on starting over, on women, family, civilization. I took the job up here and have spent each day striving not to regret a thing. I have not set foot in our cabin for over three years and prefer to live in a few back rooms of the station. It’s so much easier. So the women of Home amount to no more than a kind of pleasant, low-key distraction as I focus almost solely on my duties here, my prescribed functions. We’re a kind of state-funded rescue operation, though maybe “rescue” is too

grand a word. This isn’t the movies. James and I are not heroes. Every half hour we check the dispatch for news of missing hikers or campers, though mostly what we do is give directions to those who show up every fifth day or so. Usually from the valley. Escaping for a while to fish or trek through the woods, camp, explore the caves. Not many during these brutal months, so life is easy and slow, too slow for James and Mason, the part-time guy we need for real emergencies, but just right for me.

Mason is young, muscular and can lift boulders over his head. I’ve seen him dangle from ropes off the sides of cliffs in order to rescue some lost puppy or kitten. He arrives in the afternoons or whenever we radio him during off hours. He’s energetic, still hopeful, idealistic and fit and prefers the rugged outdoor life to any paper sinecure in the valley. James and I are shadows next to Mason. Mason should be in charge, but he doesn’t have the patience for details and paperwork. And the pay is so low that the state will probably keep the three of us on forever. There is something to be said for minimum wage. I am no fisheries and wildlife type by temperament, but I’ve studied the maps and can

get around in the heavy-duty SUV’s that come with the territory. The people I find are easy to find, they take few risks, they don’t venture too far out. It’s like driving around the corner to spot some disoriented relative shuddering in a phone booth. They’re always enormously thankful and sometimes they tip grandly, and you can tell they won’t be back. To be honest, the mountain is simple and it’s almost impossible to get lost; if you find a path, just move with it and you’ll wind up back where you came from. Everything is circular, connected, designed for maximum security and ease. But that’s my little secret -- James hasn’t caught on.

Even the caves lead nowhere, the deepest tunneling in maybe half a mile toward a dead end of pure stone. It’s panic does them in. The cell phone calls begin. You tell them to calm down and describe the nearest landmark, boulder, tree, whatever. I always find them. James is not so accurate; half the time I’ve got to follow up on his attempts. But James knows engines and motors, machinery, how to sharpen an ax, so he earns his keep. Machinery unnerves me. I don’t understand it. Like the women in those supermarket magazines,

I assume. Want to find women? Don’t hang around oily service garages or construction sites –- check out the boutiques and coffee houses and Christmas stores. We men are so incredibly stupid.

* * *

I’m still trying to lift James’ spirits and lighten the mood by sharing a tip I picked up from Home a few issues back. “Did you know, James,” I say, “that raisin skins can poison a pet? You should not leave raisins hanging around the house. The skin is toxic to small animals.” James has about twelve cats and five or so dogs, so I figure the news might interest him. But he’s staring at the wall again, slurping his now tepid coffee.

I know that such staring signifies deep depression and should be monitored, but who am I to monitor levels of despair in my fellow man, my own having once plummeted to depths so immeasurable I had no choice but to ignore it altogether and resurface by default? I should call Dr. Phil and Oprah and pass along a word to the wise. Ruined? Night sweats? Can’t breathe? Suicidal? Ignore it all. As if there are two yous, one contorted

in dark agony in a desolate crypt, the other observing from afar and tsk-tsking your seditious lack of faith and resolve.

We have just returned from rescuing decrepit Mr. Pinaster again. His family never learns. They venture into one of the park areas, get involved with throwing snowballs at each other or horsing around with sleds, and senile Mr. Pinaster takes his cue to disappear. He wanders through a thicket of scrub pine and the now black stalks of poke, spots the cave entrance and burrows inside until the family calls and we hustle out to find him. It has crossed my mind that he wants to wander off and die, but that’s no option in a country obsessed with the value of life, however diminished. He looks sadly bewildered each time we step into the cave and cry out his name, lead him by the crook to the SUV and return him to party time. I once whispered into his ear, “Don’t worry, one day they’ll forget to call.” His lips quivered, twisted into a faint smile, and he stared at me as if I were an angel bearing good tidings. How has it come about that death often seems our greatest hope?

But something bothers me about our latest

mission. I’m back at the kitchen table writing up the report, drinking more coffee, glancing at a recipe for Oreo smoothies in Home, longing for a short, easy nap. James shuffles in with a filthy exhaust fan motor in his hands. He drops it on a workbench near the window. “Bearings are shot,” he mumbles.

“Where’s that go?” I ask, not caring one way or another.

“Bathroom. I turned it on and it froze up and made a squawking sound. We’ve probably got the parts around here, matter of finding them.”

“Say, James, to change the subject . . . did anything seem odd about the cave today?”

“Cave?”

“Abbot’s Cave. Where we found Mr. Pinaster.”

James spits some char into an old Yuban tin on the workbench, downs a swig of Seven-Up, then raises his finger-locked arms above his head in a grand stretch.

“Odd,” he finally repeats my word as if trying to remember what it means. Or is he deliberately

irritating me?

“Yeah, I’ve got this feeling, I dunno, thought maybe I heard something.”

“You mean like another person?” I’m a bit stunned for that’s exactly what I meant.

“I didn’t want to say anything since you think I’m crazy anyway –-“

“James, I do not think you’re crazy, so stop. We’ve been through this. Depression is not crazy.”

“Oh, it’s normal?”

“Hell, maybe it is crazy. What do I know? But right now the point is the cave. What did you hear? You heard another person? Was it a kind of whisper, like a low moan, a female moan? Did you hear it?”

“Yeah, I guess. But it could have been the wind. You know how it sometimes snakes in and does that. Probably the wind or maybe a critter.”

“But it could have been human?”

“Could have.”

“Shit, we’ve got to get back there. That was what, about two hours ago? We’ve got to go, James.”

“All right, no big deal. I don’t feel like fooling with this crappy motor anyhow. Better find a new man, too. Next week I’m splitting for the valley. For good.”

I’ve heard it before and usually humor him, but at the moment I’m feeling a bit frantic. “You get those chains on the tires? Blizzard moving in.”

James refuses to regard me as his superior, though technically I am, and he expresses his disdain by saluting.

“Yes, mas’a, I put on dem chains.”

“Ok, let’s hit the road.”

* * *

Black whorls churn angrily in the otherwise pewter muck that is the sky. They’re calling for up to four feet of sleet, freezing rain, snow, wintry mix and whatever else can happen. I say two feet at best; I know these parts. It’s the ice I can’t stand. James thumps the dashboard to the beat of

Shakira’s “Timor.” He loves Shakira, believes she is his soul-mate. I read about her in an upbeat article in Home the other day. Home thrives on the exhaustively upbeat. When James isn’t around I play Ben E. King, early Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson.

“You know, she’s not even five feet tall,” I tell James, “and has an IQ of 180.”

“Yeah, yeah,” James grunts, wanting me to shut up. The IQ business disturbs him.

Eighty-year-old Tahitian women who rub themselves with avocado oil have skin smooth as children. The phytoestrogens in certain foods sock it to tumors. Sock it to the blues by blowing on your thumb twenty times three times a day.

We drive about three miles from the station and park alongside the road; from there it’s a ten-minute hike to the entrance to Abbot’s, a four-foot high slit in the limestone. The ice crackles, splits and turns to slush that fouls our boots and cuffs as we trudge. I whip out the heavy-duty LED flashlight. James has a first aid kit slung across his back. I don’t know why he’s brought flares and a Mossberg 12-gauge. Does he expect to run into

some wild turkeys? I stoop and squeeze into the cave and wave the light around. “Anybody home?” I bellow, the echo resonating in every direction. “They would hear that,” I mumble. No response except the fluttering of some dusty, sluggish bats.

“Looks like we’re going in all the way.”

“Ain’t nobody here,” James says nervously.

We trek in about a hundred yards, stop and listen. . . yes, a faint, definitely female murmur, almost a kind of desolate, ghostly singing.

“Shakira!” James laughs.

“This can’t be good,” I say. “How long has she been here? No calls either. Really lost.”

We hustle along and shout out every few seconds. “Rescue team coming in! Are you hurt or in danger?” Our standard calling card.

“Sounds like she’s laughing,” James says.

I would not describe it as laughing.

We’re about half way to the wall of rock when the vapors begin to whirl at our feet. This cave is famous for its vapors. They issue from a deep

fissure (we’ve never bothered to look for it) and sometimes the whole enclosure fills with a thick miasma and you can’t see two feet in front of you. But that’s rare. Usually it amounts to a fine wet mist that saturates clothing and clings to the skin. The gas is not toxic, though it can irritate the eyes and throat. It smells like slightly stagnant water spiked with dill.

I’m aiming the light at every crevice and ledge.

“Wait!” James shouts. “Bring it down. I see something.”

I lower the beam and behold a human form sprawled against the stone. She stares at us, terrified yet half smiling, a young woman wearing only a light silky shift. Drenched, she shivers with violent body spasms. “Jesus,” I cry, “you’re freezing to death.” I whip off my jacket and drape it across her chest and lap. She burrows in, sniffing it like an animal, cooing, smiling, moaning with relief. “I’ve got some Snicker bars in the pockets, Miss. Eat them if you’re hungry. Sugar energy.” She claws at one of the pockets, tears off the wrapper and devours the candy.

“We’ve got to get you out. What are you doing in here anyway? Who are you? How’d you find this place?”

“I’d say about eighteen,” James grunts. “Seems a little demented.”

I shine the light directly into her face and she covers her eyes with her fingers as if trying to claw it away. Long bluish-black hair, disheveled, mottled, a nose ring, fair, fine features, though some dirt streaked across her forehead and cheeks. My jacket has bunched into her lap and it’s clear the shift is really a kind of bedroom slip. Breasts heaving right out of the thing.

“Not Shakira,” James says, “but pretty, very pretty.”

“What are you doing here, Miss?” I ask.

She lifts her eyes toward the ceiling, which is about eighty yards up, sighs heavily, her lower lip falling; she rolls her head from one side to another.

“Miss?”

“Water,” she says tentatively, innocently, almost as if astonished that she can speak at all. “I

drowned. My whole family drowned. The Evil took everything. They’re all dead. Far, far from here. Am I dead too?”

James and I glance at each other. “Fruitcake,” he mutters nervously.

“Miss,” I ask, “are you a patient at the psychiatric institute down in the valley?”

“No no no no no no,” she insists. “The Evil shifted space and time. I am Sibyl and this is the cave of Delphi. I am your oracle.”

“What’s she talking about?” James asks. He is attracted to the girl but quite agitated and fidgety.

“In ancient Greece,” I say, “they had these caves with witches who went into trances and had visions. I studied it in college. They called them sibyls.”

“I guess she wants to tell our fortune. I got a Chinese cookie for that. She’s creeping me out. You say she’s a witch?”

I realize “witch” was a poor choice of words when in the presence of a self-proclaimed demon slayer, but I don’t have time for quibbling at the

moment.

“Maybe something’s broken, a bone, maybe she’s hurt. Miss, is Sibyl your real name? This is not a cave in ancient Greece. You’re not dead or two thousand years old. You got lost and wound up here. Do you understand?”

“Naomi. Name. I am not Sibyl. Naomi Labyzon.”

“Lazy bone?”

“La-bee-zon . . . French, not lazy bone . . . Creole. The Evil killed them all. My brother floated in the putrid water, his face a swollen white balloon. We were displaced.”

“The hurricane down south!” I yelp. “She’s one of the refugees you hear about on the news. How in the hell did she wind up here?”

“Hitched?” James laughs. “Look, pal, I’m plenty worried. No way for her to find this cave. A thousand miles from the coast. Maybe she’s not human.”

“James, take one look at her. You’re saying this girl isn’t human? Come on, we’ve got to get her back to the station.”

“Oh no,” James rears back, tapping the barrel of the Mossberg. “They disguise themselves. We ain’t bringing back no witch so she can cast spells on us, no way.”

The girl shrieks wildly at just the wrong moment. Her head oscillates like a speed bag; wild, wet strands of hair slap across her face. She ululates in piercing, shrill dissonance. “The Evil,” she wails, “the Evil!” She begins to rise to her feet, smoothly, gracefully, like a plant suddenly sprouting into place. The dainty, clean, smiling women of Home magazine flash into my mind. It’s spooky and too much for James, who staggers backwards in terror. “Demon!” he cries.

Time slows down, solidifies like the stone surrounding us. I watch James bring up the shotgun as if in slow motion and know he will fire. “Lie flat!” I command the girl and at the same time hurl the flashlight, my only weapon, at James. I hear a blast in the abrupt, ensuing darkness, and for an eternal moment no one stirs, nothing moves. I find myself sitting cross-legged on smooth, slimy rock and have no desire to investigate or think. Six servings of mini-eggnog Bundts. Keep your green beans crisp

with lemon oil. Lull the heebie-jeebies with artichoke hearts.

“Blood” I finally hear the girl - Naomi - whimper.

“Are you hit?” I ask, hoping our voices will not stir James, wherever he is.

“Smell blood. I am intact. Watch out for the jackal dogs that devour bodies.”

“James?” I say calmly.

No response.

“James? Are you ok, James?”

Either he has fled the cave or lies in wait, so I crouch on all fours and crawl toward where I’d last seen him standing, prodding the darkness with my fingertips. “James?” I collide with an inert human body, a heavy, motionless, wet mound of flesh. He’s flat on his back. When I feel for his heart, my fingers sink into a viscous pool that I know is blood. I taste to make sure. Like copper. “James?” I shake him a bit. “James! Can you hear me?”

“She reaches with her long talons and takes him

too,” Naomi whispers.

I’m thinking that either James panicked and turned the shotgun on himself or my flashlight jarred the barrel, knocked the gun out of his hands and mis-fired. It crosses my mind too that Naomi may have lurched at him in self-defense. But what matters is getting us out of this cave before we’re iced or snowed in, and by us I mean Naomi and me. James will have to stay. No lugging him out in this thickening darkness.

“Naomi,” I cry hoarsely, “crawl toward my voice. I’m holding out my hand.”

Her cool, moist fingers soon entwine with mine. The first woman I’ve touched in over three years. My heart flutters chaotically. Where have I been?

“Good, now we’ll stand up and grope our way out of here. It’ll be slow going. Hold your other hand out in front of you, touch my back as I lead. Don’t want to smash into the rock. Stay with me.”

And thus we proceed, cautiously and, of all things, tenderly, through viscous, almost creamy darkness that seems to be ossifying.

* * *

Snow tumbles down in soft, deadly fists as we drive back to the station, Naomi slouched over in the seat, her head resting on the dashboard. She has passed out. When I carried her out of the cave I could not help feeling her bulging ribs. The girl is probably starving, dehydrated and hypothermic. She needs a doctor, but no time, no time. I’ve got to get her into a warm bath, fix her some chicken broth (“Grandma was right!”), force her to drink, find warmer clothes, tuck her into bed and cover her with quilts. Cool the onion before cutting to avoid weeping. See breathtaking Bora Bora. Relax with a crossword puzzle. Roasted red bliss tomatoes.

Poor James. I hope he’s ok but I suspect the worst. I radio Mason and tell him to get to the cave pronto and call the police and an ambulance. I don’t mention Naomi Labyzon.

* * *

Five weeks later I’m standing at the work bench fiddling with the exhaust fan James left behind. I hear Naomi humming in the bathroom as she

showers. She has put on some weight and there’s color in her face. I can’t say we’re madly in love (are we both too wounded?), but we like each other well enough in an easy, shy manner. We cast embarrassed, surreptitious glances at each other. When not out trying to find someone, we josh around and read women’s magazines together. Naomi has decided to learn how to cook. She wants to transform our otherwise sorry diets into well-balanced meals that guarantee maximum vitality, provide lots of fiber and anti-oxidants, and flush toxins out the systems. She’s no smiling model from Home -– her hair is too disheveled, she wears baggy blue jeans and sweat shirts and little make-up, she lapses into icy silences and suffers frightful nightmares and flashbacks. She spends much of her time drowning again and again and again, sees bloated, blue, water-logged relatives flitting across the edges of her eyes. And she rarely smiles.

But then I’m no cheerful paragon myself. Perhaps smiling is the first step toward recovery. If you want to be cheerful, act cheerfully.

Naomi did indeed lose most of her family to the hurricanes down south. FEMA brands her as

officially “displaced.” She refuses to return to the coast because, a la James, she believes evil spirits now possess the place. The winds and water washed her family home into the street, where it promptly collapsed. She has lost not only family but everything. She tries to locate a few friends and relatives scattered throughout the country, but it’s slow going. The big mystery still is how she wound up here, eight hundred miles (not a thousand, James) northeast. She can’t remember. She likes to joke about it, “I rode in on the wings of the mama siren.”

I am content not knowing.

And, damn, now I believe in demons as well. It’s as good a way as any to explain whatever goes catastrophically wrong. So I take her down to the chapel of St. Jude’s Catholic church in the valley and we attend mass, pray together, repeat the Hail Mary, and ingest the body and blood of Christ. It can’t hurt. Then we return to the mountain on those intense Sunday afternoons, drink a few beers and wind up in bed, hoping no one will get lost or call. We remain tentative, innocent excavators of each other’s souls and bodies.

Naomi’s mental state is so fragile that I often hear her muttering pure gibberish when she thinks I’m not around. Sometimes the gibberish sounds inspired, revelatory. Maybe she is indeed a demon, but I’ll take my chances. And I have no idea whether she will some day just pick up and leave on a mission to find what’s left of her heritage. Of course I would go with her if she asks. She begs me never to abandon her. When I swear I won’t, she wraps her arms around me and cinches me with all her might, and I feel her being melt into mine, and I stroke her hair, gaze into her mysterious eyes and kiss her lips. The editors of Home could not possibly suspect that their two most avid readers are a potentially suicidal male who lost his wife in a bizarre auto accident and a mentally unstable young woman wiped out by hurricane and flood. We both live at the station now, but I’m toying with the idea of returning to the cabin, cleaning it up, repairing whatever no longer works. Naomi thinks it’s romantic.

And it turns out James was wrong. Naomi is not eighteen; she’s twenty-three. I’m thirty-five in two more months. Twelve years. In some ways a lifetime, in others, a cosmic speck.

The police ruled that James’ death was either accidental or self-inflicted. Suspicion abounded when they learned about Naomi, and they grilled us both, but the case closed without further incident. Mason resigned after being offered a ranger position in the real mountains of Wyoming. I can picture him leaping from peak to peak like some crazed Paul Bunyan. So now it’s just Naomi and me, and she still off record, who cruise the roads, poke about caves and locate the missing, the displaced, the runaways.

What we need around here is a good mechanic. I’ve made my pitch with the state, but you know how that goes. Meanwhile, we’ll just try to get by - nothing new since it’s what we all wind up doing anyway. One thing’s for sure, the weather is a lot better lately. The first crocus has poked its little sombrero out of soil garnished with ice crystals. And I spotted this great little blurb in Home about the winter blues (they now call it seasonal affective disorder): sleep with a sixty-watt bulb shining in your face. Ok, what the hell, I’ll give it a shot. And our invisibles have finally scraped the flaky resin off the percolator! Home, it seems, always turns out to be someplace else. I should write a letter to the

editor. For a new lease on life, try angst. On the other hand, they’d never publish it. Nor the accompanying photo of wide-eyed, frazzled, haunted Naomi, or me, punch-drunk with wonder and desperate thanksgiving.

Copyright© Louis Gallo. White Whale Review, issue 1.2