Underground Bliss
by Greg Gerke

I once had a girlfriend who drove me to the hot springs and quicksands in the grasslands of the basin and range around Bishop, California. Isabella, ten years older, armed with a tuft of sage and a lighter. A crystal in the shape of an icicle around her neck and almond eyes perpetually green and closing to massage her eyeballs. She said she had one more thing to prove before she went to Guatemala for the winter. I would be enduring months of loneliness and sniffled. She patted my thigh as we drove down a rutted road. “When we met two years ago, St. Gabriel told me it would be 700 days of bliss but no more than that.”

I clapped my hands and asked for more pot.

“St. Gabriel never lies Jesse. He’s been through a lot of shit. His third eye is a honking laser beam.”

It was late afternoon. A low set of eastern hills went honey with the autumn sundown. I heard a raven cawing in a nearby tree. We didn’t have any food or water or towels for soaking. This should have concerned me but I was twenty and we just had raucous sex that morning.

Besides I was in a peculiar mood. I’d been digging ditches for a month through this public works program. For the first time in my life I had real muscle definition. I looked at those fat veins for fifteen minutes a day. Then me and a few guys from the work detail started pumping iron in their friend’s basement after work. Alex had this idea that we could be a trio of traveling musclemen or Chippendale’s—whatever was needed. Alex had a brother in Sante Fe and thought we could start the tour in the southwest. There was one problem, we were all pretty ugly. Missing teeth, hooked noses, crosseyed. When I told Isabella she suggested that I get high thrice as much as I did. “Hey,” I pleaded, “You’re like my girlfriend. Aren’t you supposed to be supportive?”

When I came home the next day my mother had left six messages for me. “Mom, what happened?”

“If you gon’t get rid of that crazy girlfriend I won’t ever let you come home again. No forget that. I won’t ever give you money again.”
Apparently Isabella had called her and asked if God told her to sacrifice me would she follow suit as Abraham had done before her. Also how many sexually transmitted diseases had I ever confessed to her since I was about to hit the road as a striptease act.

“I can’t mother Jesse, Mrs. Collins,” she told her. “St. Gabriel has made it clear I can only be with men sexually but I can never have their child or support them as type of mother figure. I know my limitations. Do you know your son’s, Mrs. Collins?”

I told mother Isabella’s father just had a stroke and he had had one before in 1981. Isabella was my first brush with desire. My heart sang when I could smell her. In love, you do anything. You try to catch the wind. I knew Isabella wasn’t perfect, but at night I went down on my knees to pray for her never to leave my life.
When we drove onto a grizzled plain I could smell the sulfur from the hot springs over the next verge. “Why aren’t I going to Guatemala again?” I asked.

Isabella tapped at the wheel like a piano and stopped the car by a small rust colored butte. “Because time is a reality. Come here baby doll,” and I laid my head in her lap. Her large, tanned face softened and she kissed my eyes. “You’ll do fine without me,” she said.

Another car drove up behind us. As we walked up the butte I felt like a prisoner being lead to either more work or execution. A small part of me, maybe fifteen pounds or so, held out hope Isabella was kidding. I wanted to breathe, travel, skydive—everything with her. At one point I put my hand on her shoulder, “You know the whole Chippendale thing was a joke.”

“I know Jesse. I know so well.”

I kept track of the young, miniature trees we passed. I wanted to have seven of them make all the names of the dwarfs. When we came to a small cave I was at five.

Daylight pushed away like a man that wanted to be left alone. The cool air blew my bangs from my vision. It didn’t smell just like one mineral in there, it smelled like every one of them. On the way in a candy bar wrapper trundled past us. “Have you been here before Isabella?” She was silent, intent—her hair scattered but her soul pressed on.

A hundred yards in we were near total darkness. She stopped and I saw the shape of something long in front of her. She bent and picked it up. A shovel. “Baby doll, could you get down there please?”

“Where?”

“Into the hole down there.”

“Isabella, I don’t know if I’d feel right doing that.”

She fingered the handle and brought the crystal from around her neck to her lips. “Jesse I love you more than fire or water. Now get in there.”

It was a few feet deep, maybe a little more. To lay I had to bend my knees. The dirt shoveled on top of me wasn’t as ice cold as that below. I was goose-pimpled and breathing fast.

Right before she covered my face she said, “Just don’t try to hold your breath.” As I called Isabella’s name the last syllable was snuffed out when dirt filled my mouth. It was like how the color black would taste. With the clop packed in I followed her advice and sucked in and out of my nose. I was surprised that most of me wasn’t worried. I believed Isabella—everything was okay. Why would she lead me astray?

I heard her muffled voice and then I didn’t hear anything. I felt the ground pull my body down, absorbing me into its dark properties.

Worms slithered in between my toes and I had a laughing fit. Everything was still, no sound, no energy. I dreamt a bear shuffled into the cave and started digging me out. It seemed he returned to me like he’d saved up all day for my delicious flesh.

Then my nose stopped working. I couldn’t suck air anymore. I tried to pull my arms up but they were pinned. There wasn’t space enough where I was buried to measure Isabella’s love and I fell asleep.

The first thing I saw were arch lights. Huge, saucer-like contraptions pointed at me. Men in uniforms were everywhere. One with a goatee threw off the deliberator paddles and screamed that it had worked. There was a chorus of cheering in the distance and I was given water.

The man with the goatee smiled and shook his head. “Don’t even ask me man. Don’t even ask.”

“Are you talking to me?” I said weakly.

“I’m talking to everyone in this cave. What’s the story Nick?”

Nick was a cop and he had a look of relief on his face. He dug into his pocket and pulled out Isabella’s driver’s license. The picture with the right eye wide and zany, the other normal. “You know her?”

“Yes.”

“Well I’m sorry. She’s dead. But she saved your life.”

The feeling I was getting back in my limbs ceased and I went jittery.

“She was in an accident on the highway. The person who she hit survived and when she ran up to her this Isabella told her you’d been buried alive and wasn’t sure she could get you out of it.” Nick stood up and yanked his tie loose. He slipped it in his pocket and laughed steadily, “I can’t stand that son of a bitch.”

Isabella knew a family in Guatemala and always stayed with them when she went there. The children played drums together and she told me how she had taught them English. She even taught them my name and how to say it in a sentence. Jesse will do anything for you. Jesse will do anything for you.

Nick said, “Do you know how many turns we missed getting here? It’s a fucking miracle.”

“It’s a fucking miracle,” I repeated.

The goateed man started rummaging around in a container and said, “Do you like chicken?”

“Does the chicken like me?”

 

GREG GERKE lives in Buffalo. His work is published or forthcoming in Gargoyle, Rosebud, and Fourteen Hills. He rock-climbed at Joshua Tree with high hopes but froze midway up and had to be rescued by helicopter. There’s Something Wrong With Sven, a book of short fiction, has been published by BlazeVOX Books. His website is www.greggerke.com.

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