Cavernous Gap

One

The band wraps up a chilling rendition of “Love as Blue as the Sky All Around Us.” The singer winks at me as he holds the last note, quavering. Beads of sweat escape from the brim of his hat—the dam that can only hold for seventeen songs, then begins to spill. 

Charlie’s winking eye sees into me then, or through the eye of my memory. A magic pulls Charlie through my eye and into what I had seen. He pulls his vision through me slowly, strong and slow, a bullhead catfish pulled by a nylon filament that eats up any inch its given and holds ground when you try to pull away. 

What Charlie sees through me is the baby blue Cadillac that the writer of “Love as Blue as the Sky All Around Us” died in the back of, now parked in a museum three states away. I was there by accident a week ago. Charlie himself drives a new Porsche and wears a bolo tie and holds his body like a salesman holds his body, at once disinterested and hooked firmly into present company. 

At this time, present company is the audience wrapping up their applause, slap slap slap, slap slap, the sound a diaspora of the music that preceded it, hoping to birth another tune from the fatigued musicians with their dark wooden tools for making magic out of sound. But the room births a different sound. It exits the mouth of Tyler. 

Tyler isn’t working the bar tonight and so he’s drunker than usual, which gives his shout the round edges that mark a man artificially at ease.

“Everybody out!”

And then Charlie: “You heard the man, let’s get!”

What happens next happens to the people that are there, which is, it happens at least a dozen different ways. The regulars file out the back door—Katie Joe in the lead, wearing a sort of tutu tonight, an homage to the dancing she did 30 years and 40 pounds ago—and the painter climbs into his truck and the Venezuelan throws some water on the woodfire and they are gone like that, practiced. 

The couple of bikers vanish fast, too, a vroom into the night. The students that come out—“Wow, this place is fun-ky!”—“I hear this band plays here every month”—then flee the way geese flee, flapping and running this way and that and tripping on their own shit as they get to the front door. And as I pull Charlie’s eye out of me and get out of the rickety building, I see that James stays behind the bar, that Rich never rises from his stool in the corner with the name Rich on the back of it. A tall woman and a round man with a lumpy waist, whose names don’t appear on any chairs reserved for regulars, slip in the side door behind the stage. 

I keep ahold of the strangers’ faces as I walk through the steam of the doused bonfire.

I climb in the car. I watch the faces distort as memory so quickly distorts, the car flying through the cool darkness with me in it. Satisfied with the tampered memory, I turn the radio to a preset channel. I catch the end of “Do the Things Between Us Separate or Connect?” 

In the next days, the information starts to trickle in. A smashed stand-up bass, according to one of Charlie’s boys. A cleaning van parked out front the next morning, according to Fermin when he comes out of the kitchen to chat over my lunch in town. I’m at the outside table. The wide sky hovers over us and the rumors. When I show up the next Friday for a beer and a round of pool, the pool table is gone—in its place, a long dent in the wood floor, where someone had flipped the table over to crouch behind.  

Two

John Elwood’s blacked shoes snap the blued corrugated stair as he descends into the mess. The steps land out of time with the sways of the boat and the third rhythm playing on someone’s radio—a hometown favorite, “I Might Have Died While You Weren’t Looking.” I look down into what remains of my soup. 

“Your turn,” says John and hands me the pair of goggles. 

John has a big head so I grab the adjuster and start to tug. John tugs back the chair with a dull rattle and squeak. Nobody knows the hour it’ll happen but we know what today is, so John looks relieved and a bit pale as he settles into his seat. 

Once I’m up on deck the music fades and the world is a sepiad blue, white stripes like a fuzzy TV on the bottom and white claw marks across the top. The prow of a larger vessel pokes into view. The doomed lump rises in the distance. I thumb her picture in my breast pocket and settle in for the hours. 

The gulls exist. I see them dart. The fish exist without my seeing them. 

I mime the casting of a pole and for a moment the smell of the sea gives way to the smell of the creek and I can hear my brother humming next to me the words to “My Heart Clamors and Fries.”

Still nobody but remembered ones, I play the usual game. What had I done with just the clothes on my back at seventeen? The recruiter, with his one way sign. Who did I leave back there? There exists a splashing sound and a gambling impulse, a humid and neon memory, a salty inhalation and a blue-jean song that they would never play at a football game called “Falling for Cheekbones.” The preacher’d disapprove. He had a blonde look about him and a strong grip but never seemed interested in anything. 

The gulls and the sun above play their way nowhere but a little further. Drifters in their way, rolling off the tongue of light that the sun cast off. Defenseless but for the goggles and my starched uniform, I bop from Houston to home in my mind, remembering and forgetting just as quickly. When the two hours wind down I’m greeted by a short blast from a horn that feels slow and easy seeing how blue it is everywhere around. 

What little’s atop the ship bids me goodbye, all of a sudden as usual, and I’m startled as ever to find myself creeping back to the place where metal steps take me back to metal chairs wait that hold me for a while while we play cards. The half-eaten bowl of soup I had left behind is gone, but the smell is the same. Something of onion and a cow slaughtered under a conquered sun. I walk up with an empty bowl again.

Suddenly, I’m gripped by the thought that I might have left some rain gear waiting for me under that bridge outside of my hometown when it got sunny that Tuesday and we went after it quickly when a boar darted by. 

That infernal radio of Sam’s, which I sometimes love, sings “Door Swings Out and In” while two of the guys sing a bit under their breath, missing half the lines. We’re sitting there when the heaving of the boat leans into an unprecedented interlude.

It leans and leans as, for a long few moments, it leans long starboard and we hold our eardrums on instinct. 

We now know more about the atol, which we had never seen up close, as it most likely is gone. Both ears ring. As the world returns to the silence of waves I catch the remembered lilt of “Lost Column that Held Me Up” on the radio and a picture flashes in my mind of the red couch where I learned to read. 

Three

I do none of the hauling hammering-jamming of dynamite into crevices, none of the bargaining with procurement to take it away, the bargaining with God to leave me another day. That is loud work, impatient work. It belongs to men who measure time by blasts.

I do gentle work, quiet work. I say “hush hush” and “go on” and I pay the mules mind with neck pats, my thumb working the warm notch behind the jaw with the rope burns. Lumps of ore clink rhythmically into sacks that straddle him while I listen and pat and guide. They fill it up. The sound is everything: a careful rain of metal. When it changes, I stop.

The mine smells of wet pennies and old breath. I know where I am by the feel of the ceiling, by how the floor answers back. The men think I’m brave for it. I think I’m spared. There’s a someone singing somewhere down the drift today, tinny, skipping verses through the classic tune “Footfalls in the Maze.” I don’t need to see to know where not to stand.

I stay down here until I hear Hawks—who is from the Ukraine — say

“up”, and I say “hup”, and the beast backs out a ways, angling his backend against the cave wall for the turn. He trusts me with his eyes. I trust him with my knees.

“I stay down here until I see gurgles,” says Washington, who came up from Mississippi and still says “up” like it’s a river word. Jack, from just outside the opening, says he hears in Alaska it’s the same work except it’s night outside too or it’s day all day and the bad gold is just gold, really gold. He sings sometimes, half a thing about “Peaking from Out Front,” and loses the tune before it finds a chorus.

Today they send me out early. There’s a reason but it’s handed to me without words, like a hat placed on my head. The mule knows the daylight before I feel sun. Outside, the air opens. Pine and grease. The sweet smell of afternoon. A song floats through me and goes.

I tie him off and sit with my back to the timbers, counting breaths the way I count loads. Hawks has followed us up. “I May Have Lived While You Weren’t Looking,” he croons, and someone laughs. I run a hand along the mule’s flank. He shifts. A bucket slams to the ground. A boot scuffs gravel.

Then comes a sound not meant for ears. Not an explosion, but a settling that goes on too long, a thinking sound, wood remembering pressure. The mule lifts his head. The singing cuts. The mountain clears its throat.

I am outside when it happens. The ground shudders like a held note released. Dust moves before air. The men shout names that don’t answer. There’s a rush. I say “hush hush” aloud, like I can teach manners.

After, there are pieces of time everywhere. A lunch pail. Someone saying it was quick. The opening sounds shallow when you call into it. By evening there are lanterns and a prayer spoken twice. A boy hums “Slept Through My Own Death” and is told to stop.

I stand with the mule until they tell me I can go. Tomorrow, they say, there will be other work. Tomorrow, as if it’s a place with a door that swings out and in.

On the walk home I keep counting though there’s nothing left to tally. I listen for the clink that means full, for the scrape that means turn, for the footfalls that tell you where the walls are. The mountain keeps its counsel. Somewhere, far off, someone tries singing again, and for a moment I almost believe him.

Four

We cross another line of dry-stacked stone wall that some poor farmer hauled together before the trees began their tall and spindly competition. I imagine a potato seed still waits here and there in the understory: burgeoning, ready, patient.

This part of a long trip leaves us not saying so much. I assume my brother hears me but I’ve only made a thought, not a sound. I realize several minutes after we pass the wall why he hasn’t responded. I repeat myself, this time out loud.

“You miss all the shots you don’t make.”

“Right,” he says, and that’s all for a while. Just a fox running by. Something unseen in the leaf litter. He sings the chorus of “One Less Step Than I Expected” in his higher octave but the forest swallows up sounds so it’s just another squirrel chittering to a mate or to God about the acorns.

We come across a few piles of trash—broken bottles, all bright blue in a heap, a few plastic bags and an empty box. Little shards of mulch remind me of shattered pool cues. We’re a long way from Boston, the long-haired supervision of the old Irishman with his predictions for next season’s standings while you’re stretched out across the table for a long shot at the maroon seven ball.

Laughter rips through the branches all of a sudden, rousing the squirrels to chatter and the ravens to call out. It’s a sycophantic, high squeal that makes us both recoil. I’m cowering, too, looking for the source, even after I realize it’s my own mouth trapped open and my tongue stuck to my throat and my diaphragm shaking the trees.

He’s staring at me but I can’t stop laughing. Syncopated, ridiculous, as his blue irises shine at me with mingled terror and concern. I just keep laughing. I’m crying. There’s a blueberry at our feet and moss hangs down while everything shimmers for me, howling louder and louder, the trees swimming and bouncing and him just staring. 

Eventually it spends itself. The laugh leaves the way weather does—without apology. He hands me water. I drink it wrong. We don’t talk about it. He hums “The Sweet Smell of Home”, not the words, just the rise and fall, like he’s checking the trail with his voice. My breathing finds his tempo. We start walking again. 

The path narrows and then opens. Another wall waits somewhere ahead or doesn’t. We step where the ground holds. The woods let us pass.

Five

Lovely Los Angeles, the traffic of it, the sickly anonymity, the trains pulling in behind concrete screens, brakes screaming, the mountains looking at the city and nothing in the rocked river, a thousand lips mouthing their entrées, ads for cigarettes and pantyhose, you smiling jauntily at me like you hadn’t read my diary while I was in the kitchen back in college.

Your place smells like old citrus and something chemical. The curtains are half-drawn in a way that feels practiced. You tell me about a project that’s just about to break open, you tell me about a woman whose name I instantly forget, you tell me you’re finally done with that stuff. I nod. I’ve learned the rhythm. There’s a radio on the floor between two chairs, the old hit “Newspapers on the Stoop,” the singer promising tomorrow like a favor.

We drink something brown and sweet. You laugh at the wrong times. You say “Remember when…” and then correct yourself, the past like a house you might still sell. I watch your hands. They’re steady enough. Outside, the light goes orange and then thinner, the city settling into evening bargains. Somewhere a train relaxes, then tenses and moves on again.

You walk me to my car. You clap the roof twice like it’s a horse you trust until the gate opens. “Don’t be a stranger,” you say, which is something you’ve always said. I back out slow, leaving you still smiling when the street bends and then I suspect you aren’t.

The drive is all headlights and radio dust. I catch the end of a song—“Carried It ’til I Dropped It”—and don’t know why the titular line stays with me. The freeway signs stack up, one behind the next. The mountains recede. I stop to buy a soda then get back in the two-door. I think of something I meant to ask you and decide it can wait.

A few hours later the phone rings at the motel where I’m staying. I say hello over the sounds issuing from the door that connects to the next room. Your sister’s words on the other end keep their distance, like she meant to call the other room, but she said my name when the front desk rang her through. Her voice is a sheet of paper.

I picture you back in that quirky Hollywood house with the careful curtains, the radio still on, the collected oddities in their places, the metropolis continuing without instruction. You’ve got your body but it’s not working and they are coming to pick it up. Your sister is pacing, maybe drinking for once. I imagine the papers arriving in the morning, folded and precise, waiting for hands that won’t come.

By then I’m already gone, the car cooling in the dark, Los Angeles holding its breath and then letting it out again, traffic doing what it always does. I tell myself I didn’t miss anything, I can turn around and we could do it again. I carry that as far as I can and then I keep driving.