Buried

Richard Crenna awoke with a thundering pain in his head. It was the kind of acute throbbing caused by only two things in his experience, a bottle of tequila and a baseball bat. The bottle of tequila had been a recurring cause of pain in his twenties, and the baseball bat a singular experience with his wife Marsha, but they were past that now.

Wondering what the hell was going on, he sat up and set off another round of sharp pain, as his forehead hit jagged stone. He touched his forehead gingerly to check for blood but it wasn't too bad. A scrape. He would recover.

Trying to retrace his steps he had to admit that he couldn't recall any alcohol in the last day or so, not that this was any indication that he hadn't gone out on a bender.

Where the hell did I crash out? he thought.

He was wearing a suit, his day clothes. Suddenly he remembered work at the plant, the grimy time-box still churning away after all these years, and he had waited for the last day crew man to punch out and headed home in his F-150 right after 5 o'clock like every day, and that was on...

Friday.

Richard had to roll around a little to get out from under the ledge or whatever it was. Not that it helped too much. Wherever he was it was dark and solid rock all around. He had to hit the green night light on his watch to shine around and see what was there.

It looked like a small cave, with a giant hole in the ceiling. Some kind of shaft or something, and he was at the bottom. All around him, maybe for ten feet in a circle it was rough stone, one spot with the overhang that gave him his head scar, and a lot of rubble where the rocks above had broken away and spilled down.

No way in hell I fell down here, he thought, that'd be nuts.

Except he had heard a story just like that out of the suburbs of Houston, a housewife had gone out in the back yard and fell into a tiny sinkhole, just barely big enough for her, dropped fifty feet (Some part of it she slid, which is why she wasn't quite dead at the bottom.). But she had shattered both her legs, and aside from the pain in the back of his head, no part of him was shattered. His suit wasn't even that ruffled.

On the other hand the fire patrol had dragged that huge woman up out of the sinkhole in a few hours when her boys noticed she was gone. Richard wasn't seeing any light above him, so he figured either it was night time, or he had played a game of chutes and ladders in his sleep and gone way down under the ground.

What he needed was a brighter light, and the first thing he thought of was his cell phone.

Digging around in his pocket he brought it out and opened it, shining the much larger light up towards the gaping hole above him. It looked pretty bleak. It wasn't a straight shot up and out, that was for sure. Fifteen feet up there was another ledge and another ceiling, and the cave snaked away horizontally after that.

Just like chutes and ladders, he thought. Still, it bugged the hell out of him that he didn't remember getting down in the cave to begin with. All of a sudden, shining the light around made him feel like an idiot.

“If it'd been a snake,” he said, turning the phone around and dialing it this time, which he figured was a better use of it's resources.

It died three times while he was calling 9-1-1 and he knew he was in trouble. His phone would work in a parking garage, even at the plant which was mostly concrete and steel (A lot of folks with the cheap phones couldn't get a signal, but Richard got a signal just fine.) so if it wasn't working there in the cave, it had to be more than a few twists and turns above him.

“Well, I'm not going to die here,” he said out loud. The noise was almost more frightening because it set off the quiet around him, making it feel that much more silent than it had been.

“HEY! Hey anyone hear me!? Help! HELP ME!”

Richard sat right down on the floor and waited a minute, his ears straining to hear anything or anyone that might be nearby. A few times he thought he heard footsteps, but when he strained his ears he could hear his own heart pounding so if someone was milling around above him they were sure quiet.

“Well, I'm not going to die here,” he said quietly.

His mind was on the verge of panic as he said that. Just the thought of maybe, maybe dying lost in a cave somewhere in south Texas was horrifying. He had to take deep breaths to keep himself calm, and he kept reassuring himself at the same time, using that slick drawl that everyone loved. His mother used to say it made him sound like “jus' folks.”. A man of principle, God-fearing and simple.

Which was all bullshit, but you couldn't tell it from his voice.

“You're not going to die down here,” he said, “You're sure as hell not. You just wait and see. No, no, listen to me, if you got down here in one piece, you can get back up in one piece.”

It wasn't quite an absolute fact, he could think of a few ways it definitely might turn out flat wrong, but it made him feel better, like there was a real chance he was going to get out.

Taking his coat off and tying it around his waist, then rolling up his sleeves, Richard got ready to start climbing. While everything was a little damp and a little slippery, he was able to find some big chunks to grab hold of, and it seemed like he just might make his way up to the next landing.

Richard was starting to sweat bad, and his fingertips were raw from the grips he was taking. He hadn't climbed anything more strenuous than a step-ladder in ten years. The next rise was only a few feet away, but it might as well be a mile. Both his biceps were pulled taught, and felt like they'd snap any minute, and his feet weren't much help in his ultra-durable boots. What he needed was a decent pair of sneakers.

It just didn't make any sense. He had left the plant, that much he remembered for sure, but then he had gone home, hadn't he?

Not if it's Friday, he thought. Tuesdays and Fridays Richard made a special trip 'for work' he told Marsha. In reality there was a very pretty little thing named Thelma that lived in a run down little trailer park on Silver Street. Richard had been going there most weeks steady for about a year.

Getting a little pep in his step was what he called it, borrowing beauty so to speak. He was almost fifty years old, forty-eight in September, and he needed to have a good time with someone who still remembered how. Just for a while.

Once he got good and properly old he'd break it off and that'd be that.

If you get out of here, that is, he thought, otherwise the only thing waxing your carrot will be the wild mushrooms.

The thought hit him really fast, almost hard enough for him to slip, but he caught hold of the rock again and charged up, throwing both arms up over the top of the rise and pulling himself up like a snake, since there wasn't much up there to really grab hold of.

Had he ever left Thelma's?

He could remember stopping by, his cologne that reeking stuff they sold at boot leather shops, he called it 'Saddle Sores' because that's about what it smelled like. That was just how she liked it, that and a big ol' cowboy hat in his hand like a gentleman caller.

“Come on in, Richie,” she said, letting her red silk night gown drop down on one shoulder.

She was a fine woman, Thelma Rollins, with light brown skin, and she said she was a quarter Chicano. She had sweet red lips that were thick and soft as anything. They felt like pillows on his neck as soon as he got in the door.

The best part was he could spend a few hours there, doing whatever he could talk Thelma into, which was a lot, and not worry one bit about her husband coming in the door, since he knew exactly where Jake Rollins was.

Now, Jake, he didn't seem at all like that would cold cock a man and toss him in a cave to die, even if he was caught nailing his wife. Moreover, Richard thought with a smile, he was one hundred percent sure Jake didn't know.

About a year before, when Richard and Thelma first met, Richard set up a policy at the plant, where Jake worked as a floor manager, that his day teams had to work two nights a week to get used to the way things were. His explanation had been a little turnover and the trouble training night supervisors.

Tuesdays and Fridays were Jake's nights.

It wasn't like Richard meant any harm anyways. He was getting older, and wouldn't be hanging around too much longer, and Jake should have known better than to hook up with a woman like Thelma in the first place. Richard was coming by twice a week and you'd think she was starving the way she tore into him.

“I'm not buying it,” he whispered once his breath stopped coming in fits, “He's not the type.”

The second level of the cave was at the top of a very steep slope that ran downwards, and wasn't much of a level at all, just a ledge with a huge overhang above it and a crevice in the wall.

The crevice was like a tunnel heading upwards, and the sides of it were almost smooth in places. Richard couldn't tell if it was natural or something dug out of a hillside with a big drill.

Shining his cell phone around, he figured out that he had come in through the crevice, slid down the slope headfirst and pile-drived into the rocks below with the back of his head. It was a miracle his brains weren't scrambled eggs.

He could tell he came from the crevice and not somewhere up in the shadows because the slimy junk growing around the outside was torn loose.

Somewhere in his head where he was still concerned about clothes, Richard realized the back of his suit must have been painted up pretty good by the crap he saw scraped away. He tried not to shiver too much with disgust.

That wasn't the only thing, either. He was starting to notice a real issue with the temperature in general and his suit coat wouldn't help, since it was soaked with the rock condensation by now, along with his pants and shirt. It wasn't freezing cold yet, and it wouldn't get too bad in March, but down in the cave, where it wasn't that hot to start with, it'd get about like an ice cooler, he figured.

Can't see my breath yet, he thought. Still, it likely wasn't daytime anymore.

Of course that might also be good news. For all he knew the outside might be just in the crevice and upwards a little bit. Or it might be a quarter mile of slime covered nastiness.

“Well, I ain't waiting here,” he told himself, and tore his suit coat in half to wrap his hands up with.

He got ready and then went into the crevice, forging ahead as fast as he could go to keep warm. The only thing he had to do was take out his phone every fifteen feet or so and flash the light ahead so he could see where he was going.

It was maybe forty feet of steady incline when the tunnel started to get thinner. Pretty soon there wasn't enough space for his hands to get any leverage and he had to lay on his back and squirm, letting his boots scrape like Fred Flintstone behind him, and with his arms stretched upwards.

Even then he reached a bad stretch where he was just a bit too fat in the middle to squeeze through.

All he could think was on the way down he must have had some momentum, enough to hit the tight spots and slip on past.

“With the grime and slime,” he said, then he panted a little from lack of air. It was tough for him to breath, with the rock keeping his chest from moving out as far as it needed to.

On the way down this was probably just a speed bump, he thought, sucking in another breath. It wasn't a spot he could stay stuck very long and keep breathing, that was for sure.

When his feet scraping along the tunnel didn't pop him back out again, he panicked for the first time.

Oh, Jesus Christ I'm swole' up in the middle, he thought, kicking and screaming his lungs out, and he could feel it was true. His chest and gut and back were throbbing with scrapes and bumps and bruises, not to mention the muscles that had gone past their endurance point, all swollen with blood.

He screamed until his voice became nothing but hissing and whistling, and cried until his eyes felt as swollen as the rest of him. With all the shuddering and screaming his rib cage felt like it had cracked in two.

A few times he slipped in and out of consciousness for a second, and woke up with a hot sweat all over him, feeling like he was going to throw up. He ralphed three times straight into the rock before he finally got control of himself. The taste of stale beer and corn chips and vomit was in his nose and running back down his gorge, threatening to send him into another fit.

Coughing and spitting, he kept the rest of his stomach down at all costs. That last time he had almost choked to death because he was crying and spitting straight up like a baby.

Oh, God, he thought. For the first time he wished he had stayed below and froze or starved to death in relative comfort. Now he was hot like mowing the lawn in August and stuck in a dark hole with nothing but his thoughts.

He had never cared what his life added up to, Richard was a get in and get what you want kind of guy. The sort his father would call young, dumb and full of rum (Lionel Crenna never said a curse word in his life, not even when he half took his thumb off with a wood saw.) except Richard never got old, bold, limp and cold, he just kept on going after what he wanted, and usually got it.

The crying came in little fits as his breath came back to him. He just couldn't stop it.

I'm going to die like this, he kept thinking and he was afraid, not of God or the Devil or any of that nonsense, but afraid of nothing. Richard was terrified he would become nothing.

Every time that thought repeated he would hit the walls like a three year old.

It took some time, maybe an hour, maybe longer, but he felt like the pressure had eased a bit on his midsection, oh he was still caught but maybe, just maybe a little less. That was when he tried to pull it together. You could only panic for so long before your brain released the magic stuff that made everything okay. Richard didn't know what he'd call it, but he sure felt it. It was like the best cocaine you could get in Cancun.

“You got to keep crawling, cupcake,” he said to himself. His legs were half dead below him, and his guts and everything else was stuck right to the rocks. There was no shirt around his waist anymore, just white doughy flesh that felt every bite and sting of the rocks.

Just like that guy in New Mexico, or Colorado or wherever he was, he thought. The one that Richard saw on Discovery Channel, who got stuck under a rock in a river while he was kayaking. The guy cut part of his leg loose to get free, using his pocket knife which was probably as blunt as the old ax head in Richard's garage.

“Hell, you buying that?” he'd said to Marsha.

“Fella's on Teevee, ain't he? Can't beat that.”

Wouldn't that be a sight? Richard almost laughed until the rocks bit into him again. Him, on television, standing there with one of those blankets the fire patrol always has with them, shivering and telling the world how he was just thankful to be home?

“Praise Jesus,” he whispered, as if in practice he smiled, “I put my faith in the good Lord, and he seen me through.”

They'd be selling ten times the Crenna Valve Stems after that. There'd be Crenna Valve Stems all over the Bible Belt, after everyone saw his miracle survival and heard his story. Maybe he'd even cut himself or something for television. That'd be a story, right there.

“Take down some of the swelling too,” he said, looking down at his forty-seven year old man tits, all covered with gray hairs and sagging. It was a wonder any woman would touch him at all.

“The blood would make it slick,” he said, “Slide me through.”

Except his pocket knife was on his key chain in his pocket, which was on the other side of the man-breast divide. He had his cell phone down there too. The only thing he had on the skinny side was two parts of his suit coat, a ragged shirt, and the plastic buttons that came with them.

Yeah, if it gets bad, I'll cut my wrists with those, he thought, and half laughed until his ribs popped again.

“I'll just have to tug. It'll come loose, the fat and the skin will come off, just like if this was a cheese grater,” he said, reaching out to the sides of him and taking hold of the rock with his fingernails.

He had soft hands, but he was able to pull himself further with the help of adrenaline, and the blood was making it easier. Each time he heard a fingernail pop, split down the middle like firewood, that finger went numb and didn't trouble him anymore. It made his hands a lot more like claws.

The worst of it was almost over, almost to where he could get to his cell which he was sure would get him a signal this time, and then by God straight to freedom and selling valve stems to everybody and their brother and being a rich miracle man.

That's when the flashlight shone in his eyes.

“Hey! Hey up there! You gotta help me, praise Jesus, you got to help me friend! Throw me a rope!”

It was so bright it burned his eyes after spending so many hours in near pitch blackness, like having the sun rise right in his face, and it was impossible to shield out with his hands much, as night sensitive as he was.

He closed his eyes and heard something coming down the tunnel, but it didn't sound like rope. When it got to him it was wet and gave off fumes that made him jump into action.

It was gasoline.

Richard started kicking his feet and clawing upwards with his hands like he was already on fire, because there was no telling how long he had until he was.

If there was a smell to crackling flesh, fat popping on the griddle, or meat searing on the stove, Richard smelled it then, over the scent of the gas. It was his imagination, or perhaps his head going funny from the fumes (Richard briefly flashed on the memory of a kid in his grade school that got retarded in a few seconds of huffing gasoline.) but he smelled it, and his fingers left red trails on the tunnel from scraping across the muddy gasoline river he crawled in.

My phone, Jesus where's my phone?

He had a signal, just two bars but it was there, and he dialed.

“I'm on the phone with the police! Do you hear me? The police are coming! They can trace this call! They're going to be all over you!”

He looked up at the opening, now dark again without the flashlight, and continued to crawl upwards on his elbow. Just ten more feet and he would be there, but what then?

A flash, a very familiar flash, went off, illuminating the opening of the hole again, and this time Richard felt a panic like nothing he had ever felt before. It was a road flare.

“Sir, can you hear me, sir?” came a voice from the phone.

“Hello? Sweet Jesus, you have to help me, do you understand? I need help now,” then Richard added screaming, “You hear that, the police are coming!”

“Sir, we need to know where you are.”

“Trace it, you daffy bastard! Trace the goddamned call, I don't know where I am!”

How did they stay so calm on the other end? How the hell do you listen to someone dying, Richard wondered, someone about to die, and not react?

The road flare illuminated the person above him, and for a moment Richard couldn't believe it. She didn't seem the type to do it. Sure, she said she would, but they all said that.

“Marsha, baby don't do this,” he said, trying to sound as pathetic as possible. Given the amount of blood, the fumes and his useless fingers it wasn't hard. When he saw her eyes didn't change he tried another tack, “You listen, all right? You just listen to me right now. The police are coming baby, they are friggin' on the way, you understand? You put that torch out now, or you're going to the gas chamber. Is that what you want? Death row?”

His hands were curled up to his chest, and he was crying, he hated it but he was, he couldn't help it.

“Sir?” the dispatch officer said, “We have units on the way, sir. Stay calm.”

“She doesn't care,” he whispered back.

There was a brief moment as he watched the flare glide down towards him when he really thought the gas wouldn't go off.