The Wish Belly, Part V
Photo courtesy of Evonne/Creative Commons.
A fiction serial by Shane Kimberlin.
The scream was hers. Faint. I yelled out her name.
We ran to the car and hopped in.
“She’s at the cherry tree,” the cat said.
I drove fast. The engine bellowed. I could see the road now without headlights. The eerie dawn. As the car turned a corner we saw the hill, and on its bosom the silhouette of the cherry tree. I parked the car on the roadstop and ran up the trail with the cat following behind me.
Another scream echoed out, this time closer.
“C’mon,” I cried, “we gotta get there.”
We ran up. The hill began lowering, revealing the top of the branches, with its ever so green leaves, then the tree began to appear as a scroll unfastening itself until the entire scene was made clear..
There was nobody.
“What?”
The cat circled the tree.
“I see nothing.”
The tree stood with dogged bark.
“What were the words?” I said to myself, “‘Three feet down beneath the cherry tree.’”
“Yes,” said the cat, “have you a shovel?”
“No,” I said glumly.
“Okie dokie,” said the cat, “make a digging stick.”
“Digging stick?”
“It’s a stick that digs.”
“Oh. Does it work?”
The cat led me through the process of finding the right piece of wood. When I found one, he sharpened the end with his claws.
“Remember,” he said, “easy to make, easy to break.”
I began to dig. The earth, though touched with chill, was soft after the first few inches. Three feet was all, but there were rocks underneath the earth. I wondered if there was a shovel at the abandoned gas station nearby.
Digging sticks probably work as good as shovels, but not me. I sweat until it dripped into my eyes and stung, but still I dug. Finally, I hit something solid. A rock, maybe. I kept digging around. It was not a rock but a shape. I threw off the dirt. It was a grey metal wheel. I moved more earth until, as the object became clear, I realized and stopped. It was a hatch, like something from a submarine.
“It’s a hatch,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Why is there a hatch here?”
The cat was silent.
I didn’t expect him to answer. I was asking myself. I cleared off more dirt until the hatch was completely uncovered. It was in an oval shape, grey with only small flecks of rust. There was no window.
I began to turn the wheel. It didn’t budge. I breathed deep and grunted. The wheel began to turn very slowly. Finally, a click. I could turn no longer. I pushed open the door and saw what lay below.
It was a ladder descending into darkness without end.
“Huh,” I said.
Grabbing a rock, I dropped it down into the hole. Many seconds went and no sound ever came.
I stared down the hole and as it stared back into me, I felt a great fear. It was not the absence of light- the dark was the same everywhere, after all- but the possibilities that scared me so. Such an endless hole could contain every world, or none at all. Every world was a far more frightening proposition because I wanted this all to end.
I felt as a child does on the first day they could ever remember. This, a boy might tell himself, is the world, and there is so much of it.
She was down the hole and I knew this. There was nowhere else to turn but still I would not go down. Memories of her began to surface against my will. The fires of anxiety boiled over the past, bringing up old things.
The dark scared her. She always kept the lamp on when she slept. As a joke, I bought her a nightlight. She rolled her eyes and said it wasn’t funny. In less than three weeks she began to use the nightlight instead of the lamp. The nightlight had been molded and painted into the shape of a koala bear, her favorite animal. She had lived in Melbourne, Australia in middle school. Her parents were both biologists (They now lived in coastal Connecticut). She always wanted to go back. I said we would, one day. Maybe we could both use our vacation time.
The hospital she worked at as an RN was large and understaffed. She worked a lot. She didn’t mind. She found great comfort in the burden of caring, a brutal sacrifice of self that, in its great strength, spoke of a tough will, of an even stronger self. She would come home in scrubs smelling of bleach and ammonia and blood and all the mistakes and failures of the human body, its deterioration, its varying moving scenes towards the inevitable finale. I would sometimes hear her cry after work in the bathroom. It was a soft, long cry.
Often I would stand outside the door and silently mouth what I was going to say, but I never did. I would instead go into the kitchen and cook, because she would not hear that I had heard her, and therefore she could keep her dignity. She could tell me if she wanted to, but I wouldn’t force vulnerability.
She had work friends who understood her predicaments better than I, just as I had work friends who understood updating our company’s billing program’s code better than she. We didn’t bring work home because we knew our fields were on different continents, and our home was the safe zone away from their respective skirmishes in a forever war.
All this and more flashed through my mind and heart as I stared deep into the abyss. There was still so much for her to do. I had to save her, or at least fail trying.
And what of the cat? Would I trade him for her?
“Well, shall we go?” said the cat.
“What?” I said.
“Are you going to go?”
“Yes,” I said, “of course.”
I was afraid of the dark, afraid of heights, and afraid of enclosed spaces.
I could see the college, see the distant lights of the town. I felt like crying. The road winding and peculiar and on that road I could see headlights coming our way, coming the same way from the gas station. It was from a truck.
The truck stopped by my car. It was the truck I nearly hit with the three men, and out walked them. These were the men the cat attacked. The driver carried a gun.
“Oh no,” I said.
“Hurry,” said the cat.
“I ducked down behind the brush and watched.
“I locked my car,” I explained to the cat, “and I have the key.” I took my key out to show the cat that, indeed, I had my key.
The driver aimed his gun at the window and pulled the trigger. Glass exploded.
“Looks like he has a key,” said the cat.
He opened the door from the inside. They began going through the contents of the vehicle, of which there were little. The stout one took one of the cat’s half-eaten chicken nuggets and threw it in his mouth.
“You think they’ll hotwire the truck?” I whispered.
“They don’t seem like the mechanic types.”
I grabbed the cat and began to rub its belly.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m rubbing your belly. Making a wish. That they won’t see us.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“What?”
The cat jumped out from me.
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Well, how does it work?”
“No time, we need to get out of here.”
“We’re going down there.”
“They will be able to follow us.”
“I don’t have a better idea.”
I grabbed the cat and put my feet on the ladder. It held so I descended down lowly, placing fingers to the steps. The metal was very cold to touch. Step by step we descended.
We were a few hundred feet down when I saw something block the light. I stopped moving.
“We know you’re down there.”
I held my breath.
Off blasted a gunshot. It didn’t hit me. Both hands slipped but grabbed the rail at the final second. My heart beat as a drum rolling down a hill.
“We’re gonna wait here for ya here”
I paused. The figure didn’t move and the circle of faint light appeared permanently indented.
Waiting on a ladder is a very boring experience. It’s uncomfortable but not impossible. If you position yourself correctly, you can even mitigate leg cramping. As I hung on for a long time the intensity of the situation began to recede. I lulled myself into a self-mocking stance, the way characters do in movies. I did this because I was scared, because I wasn’t in a movie, and if I didn’t detach from the adrenaline I would somehow fall.
I played games with myself. I told myself jokes. How many programmers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None, it’s a hardware problem. An old staple around the office. Messy Mel, a far better programmer than I am with the worst hygiene ever encountered, used to carry a mug around the office with that very joke. I wondered what Mel was up to right now. He probably still smelled funny, and that thought was weirdly grounding at this moment.
The cat lay quiet on my shoulder. What was he thinking about? He was kind to not let claws push into me the way cats will do.
The dim light moved farther and farther into the color range of orange. A small glow above us would soon fade into the ceiling and there would be nothing to see. I began to move so slowly down. I came to the lower step with my right foot too soon, and a small clang rang out into everything.
“I hear it,” yelled the man.
A gunshot rang through the cave. Instantly I felt a pain somewhere, everywhere, in my body. A bullet drilled into my shoulder. I cried out. My fingers slipped into the air, each digit bowing up, away from the metal and grip holding me to the world and so I slipped, then fell, and fell, and fell into the great nothing.
How long I fell I didn’t know. Life, or an imagining of what my life was, didn’t go before my eyes. No thoughts occurred. All that filled me was panic. Just panic. Down down down we both fell down and the light above went small as I watched it become just a memory of the thing and I yelled, I screamed, but all I could hear was a futile breath.
The Wish Belly series by Shane Kimberlin: