Caves

by Eliot Treichel

The summer I was fifteen, a tire blowout sent the dump truck my brother was driving into the hillside along Highway 31. It was the sidewall of the driver’s side tire that exploded, loud as a bomb he later said. Colt was hauling gravel for the Nortons, and the heavy load pushed him across the center line into the opposite lane, tires screeching and smoking as he stood on the brakes. Luckily, no other vehicles were coming, though I don’t know if that was luck, so much as it was there never being other cars out here. The truck jumped the ditch and then came to a violent stop, the front end plowing into the embankment, dirt and gravel blasting skyward and then sprinkling down, like rain.

After the accident, my brother developed tinnitus—a buzzy, high pitch ringing in his ears that was always there, an inescapable noise. The only thing that helped relieve it was other noise, so for a while my brother would disappear on these long drives and let the pounding air of the open windows cover things up. He’d come back with his hair all swirled like he’d just gotten out of bed, and he’d kind of stumble from his truck, not drunk, but more like he’d stepped off a ship and was trying to find his land legs. Years later, I’d develop tinnitus too, a side-effect of the antidepressants I’d been put on. It was only then that I finally began to understand my brother, or at least understand him differently, why it all might have happened like it did. It was so weird how the tinnitus worked, how silence would only make the ringing louder and more electric. How it pushed toward madness. It seemed so cruel since quiet was about all this valley had.

I was asleep when my brother’s accident happened. My dad was already on the road and went straight to the site. Sent Uncle George to fetch me. My room upstairs got hot and kept hot long into the night, even with our big box fan going. I was staying up late those nights, going to bed when my dad and brother were just getting up for work. My brother had taken on with the Nortons a few summers by then, though he sometimes also helped Dad and knew enough about towing that he could go out on his own. Dad had made him learn all that stuff, how to jimmy a lock and help someone get their keys, how to check the hydraulics on the boom lift, how to bill insurance. Colt had a natural talent for it, though he’d also had Dad as his mentor, which explained why he finally ended up being better at breaking things than making them run again. When it came my turn, Dad started schooling me, but he gave up pretty quick, not for any single reason as far as I could tell, except that it was easier for him—for both of us.

Uncle George woke me by flicking the end of my nose. He laughed when I jerked up and swatted the air. “Morning sunshine,” he said. “We got somewhere to get.”

My uncle went to the window and pulled open the blinds, leaving them hanging unevenly. I sat up and leaned on my elbow, squinting against the light. “Where?”

Uncle George came back and stood over me, still pleased with himself. He smelled of motor-oil and sour milk. The middle of his shirt was buttoned, the bottom parted by his hairy gut. He had a blunt forehead and flat nose, and sometimes I imagined that he’d been stored face-down for too long as a baby. He was my dad’s younger brother, but only by a year or so, unlike Colt and me, who were seven years different. And if some brothers are different, then my dad and Uncle George were exactly the same, at least in how they both seemed to think other people were things you could hammer on.

“Your brother found some trouble.” Uncle George reached out like he was going to flick me again, and he chuckled when I flinched. “We’re supposed to help.”

I asked what Colt had done, if he was okay, but instead of answering, Uncle George snatched my wrist. He gripped harder when I tried to pull free. “You gotta be faster than that, buddy.”

He let go when I stopped fighting back. I sat all the way up, bunched the sheet over my lap. A corner of my pillow was as wet as a dish rag from sleep drool.

“What did he do?” I asked again.

Uncle George looked down at my bare legs, legs skinny as my forearms. “Your father told me to come wake your butt up, so here I am.” My uncle stepped to the side, and the sun hit sharp in my eyes again. “That’s about the sum of what I know.”

“I was already up,” I said, blinking.

“Okay,” my uncle said, almost impressed. “Sure.”

He told me to meet him outside and started for my door. A dark sweat-line ran down his back, a bullseye for my middle finger.

“Didn’t you ask though? Did you ask what it is, with Colt?”

Uncle George stopped but took a slow moment to turn around. He started scratching the top of his hand on his chin stubble, distracted as a dog with an itch. When he finally was done scratching, he asked me if that’s what he said, if those were his words—that he didn’t ask what had happened. I told him I couldn’t remember, though I could, and that’s when he told me that I should know what I’m talking about before I say things.

He’d pulled a red handkerchief from his front pocket. My room was already stuffy, and he wiped the sweat from his face. The skin under his eyes was always bruised-looking, and if I didn’t know the truth, it would’ve been easy to mistake his expression as a kind of lassitude, or even a patience with me.

“You tell me this,” he said, blowing and then wiping his nose, almost as if he was giving me more time to prepare. “You the type of guy that likes asking your father a whole lot of questions? Because I’m not that type of guy. But if you are—” he said. He stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket, then crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe, watching me chew my lip, as if I was really thinking about my answer. But Uncle George didn’t need an answer. It wasn’t that kind of question. “Then get moving,” he said. “I’ll be in the car.”

It’s true that I looked up to Colt, and as a kid, I would have even called him my hero, but I no longer believe in heroes, nor do I believe that any man has to earn his name. After graduating high school, Colt went down to Klamath Falls, was going to give Tech a try, but he came back right before Christmas break, didn’t even stick it out to the end of the term. The house was quieter without him, by which I mean Dad was quieter. Even if I couldn’t have expressed this back then, I had worried that Dad would turn everything on me when Colt left, that I would be the target by default. Instead, our father seemed subdued by the whole thing, or what you might call “taken down a peg,” as he liked to say himself, about others. There were nights and nights of TV where he didn’t even talk.

But then Colt came back, and soon enough it was like he had never left in the first place. He started floating around with his old friends, who were not doing much except not having to go to school anymore, which seemed like a grand accomplishment to them. He still had his room upstairs, and he wouldn’t so much as come hang out as he would stand in my doorway, not all that different than Uncle George sometimes did. Colt would tell me stories about the dumb professors he’d had or about the girls he’d met, or had at least talked to, and how he could’ve gone to a Taco Bell or a McDonalds whenever he’d wanted, without even having to go all the way across town, because “they were everywhere.” He said it all like he was some kind of explorer, and his tales were not only to dazzle me but to let me know how innocent I was, how I had no clue. And not only innocent, but also maybe chicken.

“You couldn’t even,” he’d say, like he was someone else entirely.

I’d listen, sometimes trying to picture it all, but other times I’d find myself tuning him out, wondering why he was even home in the first place. After bragging about how great it was down there, he would then start to dump on it all, would call the girls hot, but bitches, everyone trying to talk smart in class but being clueless about real shit. Anyone with half a brain could see how excited he was, though, how much he wanted to go back.

Dad told Colt that he didn’t care much one way or another if Colt took up school again, but I knew that wasn’t true, and it wasn’t long before Dad started riding Colt about earning some money and paying for his own groceries. After a while, when Colt still didn’t have any work, our dad started doing this thing where he’d would cook us dinner, enough for all three of us, but then tell Colt that he couldn’t have any—or that there wasn’t any left, even though you could see the spaghetti sitting right there on the stove.

“You’re telling me I can’t have any of this?” Colt would ask.

“Any of what?” Dad would say.

Uncle George was waiting in his ancient Accord. It had mismatched panels and a roof painted over with white Flex Seal. Just as I was walking around to the passenger side, Uncle George hit the horn, cracking up when I jumped. Like it was the funniest thing.

“Come on now,” he said, after I got in and wouldn’t look at him. He turned awkwardly, too big for his seat, and squeezed the back of my neck. “You don’t always gotta be like that, do you?”

I squirmed and shrunk myself to the side. “I’m not,” I insisted, a warble in my voice. But I was. I’d been like that for a long time already.

Instead of backing and turning around, Uncle George pulled the Honda forward and circled under the shade oak and through the front yard, dusting the brown and tindered grass. He bumped over the railroad ties that bordered the lawn and onto the gravel driveway, driving at an idle to keep the dirt down, as if that was actually possible anymore.

He took us north on 31, putting the lakebed on my side of the car. The lakebed’s cracked skin stretched all the way to the far hills. Heat rippled across the horizon, and only way out there was there any remaining shimmer of water, though that could’ve just been the sun playing tricks. My uncle accelerated, and the Accord’s A.C. whined like a hair dryer and only slightly cooler, but he wouldn’t let me roll my window down even a crack. “Either the hot air is in, or the hot air is out,” he explained, not considering that it could also be both. Okay, I thought. Sure.

During the winter and early spring, the lake would come back and fill in, though never quite all the way, and never as much as the year before. Even when the lake was full, it averaged only a foot or so in depth, and because it was so shallow there was a mirroring effect, the water casting back a sharp reflection of sky, even on the most overcast days. Unless a person stood right on the shore, there was no way to tell it was an illusion. It would look like so much water, like the kind of lake that should have had boats and water-skiers and swim docks and anglers.

Like a paradise, almost.

Late spring, the water would already be receding. The lake would be water and then it’d be mud and then the mud would begin to harden and split apart, patterned like alligator skin. Thin layers of dirt would peel off, page-like, crumbling into a fine powder with the slightest of breezes. Hot afternoon winds then scoured the lakebed, swirling all that silt skyward into colossal dust devils that would spin from one side of the valley to the other, burying us. End of summer, near everyone had a cough.

My uncle’s cell began vibrating on the dashboard, and he leaned forward to grab it. He held it at arm’s length to see who was calling. “Yep,” he answered.

I understood my dad was on the other end. My uncle didn’t use my name, but he mentioned having to wake me, that I still seemed half asleep. “Yeah yeah,” he said, “I’ll see who else we can get.”

After he hung up, I could feel Uncle George looking at me. He kept spinning his phone in his hand, until finally he let out a loud sigh and tossed it back on the dash without dialing anyone else. “You want to know or not?” he finally asked. I straightened, which was its own kind of answer, but didn’t say anything. I stamped my shoe print across an old oil-filter box, then toed it out of the way. The truth was I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know or not, and I kept feeling that I both wanted to get to wherever we were going and never get there at all, these two opposite urges panicking through me, filling and then emptying. I asked Uncle George if he wasn’t sure he was supposed to call someone, and he shook his head.

We rode in silence like that for a while before he spoke again. “I’m sure he’s fine. If you were wondering that.”

The way he’d brought it up made me fear something must be wrong, and I think Uncle George could sense that. He started talking about how my brother was one of the luckiest people he’d met, how Colt had been that way ever since he was a kid. “Watched him fall out of a tree once when he was your age. Gets up, starts laughing about the whole thing.”

“What other times?” I asked, not remembering the fall he was talking about.

“Hell, I don’t know, whenever. All the time, really. Only person I know that’s luckier than your brother is my brother.” He smiled and winked and then I wasn’t sure if he’d meant what he’d said, or if he was only joking. It would say a lot about a person if they thought my dad was lucky.

Uncle George swore and hit the brakes, his car veering hard toward the shoulder, seatbelt locking against my chest. I’d seen a flash of something out of the corner of my eye, and my instinct was that it must’ve been an animal, but when I looked, there was my dad. He was standing in the middle of the highway, right on the centerline, phone to his ear. His back was to us, and he turned around slowly, his expression flat yet indignant, like he didn’t care that we’d almost hit him, only that we’d made him turn around. His tow truck was parked diagonally across the other lane, blocking off the accident, hazard and emergency lights flashing. Just past him was the wreck.

“Here is an example,” Uncle George said, a little breathless. “If you’re an unlucky person, you might choose to stand someplace else.”

Uncle George eased his car all the way onto the shoulder, then pulled up next to my dad, and parked. My dad kept talking on the phone, staying right there in the middle of the road. I asked Uncle George why Colt wasn’t there, but he didn’t know, and when I couldn’t spot him, I became convinced that he was still in the dump truck, dead. My uncle tapped his window then, pointing high up on the hillside. “There.”

Colt was directly above the wreck, a good forty yards from the road. He was squatting on his heels and smoking a cigarette, our dog, Mandy, sitting next to him. Colt was looking in our direction, so I leaned forward and waved, but he gave no acknowledgement. His hair was a tumbleweed of curls, sun-bleached almost to gold by that point in the summer, arms and face and neck as dark as his boots. He took another drag, then roughed the top of Mandy’s head and gave her a pat-pat. She was a terrier mix, the kind of dog my dad always said he hated but one my mom supposedly would’ve loved. Once I’d spotted him on the hill, it was impossible not to notice my brother’s white T-shirt, the way he stuck out so much after being invisible.

Not there. There. The reverse of how things would end up.

My dad’s tow truck wasn’t powerful enough to transport the dump truck or even free it from the ditch. While we waited for a rig with a rotator arm to come down from La Pine, my dad had me sweep up the gravel that had spilled onto the highway. He wanted me to sweep it into a pile on the shoulder.

“We’ll come back later for it,” he said. “Haul it home.”

My therapist, the same one who suggested antidepressants, once asked if I thought my dad’s collecting of junk was his attempt to compensate for what he’d lost in his past—my mother, his own mother, maybe something beyond that.

Behind the house, rows and rows of junked cars and scrap stood stacked a story high, organized by a system only my dad knew. To him, the stuff was a discarded fortune, a currency waiting for its right time. He thought people were fools for how they gave things away, for what they threw out. “Who throws away money?” he’d ask us, as if that’s really what was happening. In truth, the most my father’s junk was good for was how it served as a windbreak to the dirt blowing off the lakebed, waist-high drifts of brown piling up on the leeside of each row.

“Maybe,” I recall telling my therapist, before channeling my dad in a way that caught me off guard. “Could also be the kind of thing that sounds right but isn’t.”

Colt still hadn’t descended from the hillside, nor had he returned one of my increasingly exaggerated waves. Originally, I’d thought he must have climbed all the way up there from the road, that he’d scrambled down the ditch and then up the embankment, but as I swept, I noticed how deeply the front of the dump truck had buried itself into the hillside, and I wondered if rather than climbing out the passenger door, my brother hadn’t crawled right out his window, right onto the slope, not stopping until he thought he was clear.

Dad finally ordered me to get him. He stood next to me, looking up the hill at Colt, and took the broom. The smell of burnt rubber remained surprisingly strong. “Tell him the sheriff came across on the scanner. He’s on his way.”

I slipped during the steep spots, ripped out branches of sage as I grabbed for something to pull on, stopped once to catch my breath. Every time I looked up, Colt was already staring at me, his expression strangely frozen, almost vacant. As I got close, Mandy scampered down toward me, skittering loose rocks and soil, barking at me when I told her to stay. Colt whistled her back and she went right to him, sat without having to be told.

My brother dropped back off his heels and planted his ass in the dirt. His crumpled cigarette pack hung like a lone ornament in one of the shrubs.

“What happened?” I asked. It wasn’t until I got next to him that I could see the size of the lump on his forehead.

Colt looked at me for a second, his eyes red and fidgety, but then went back to the view in front of us.

Below, Dad and Uncle George were directing a minivan around the accident. The skid marks behind the dump truck seemed like they went back a hundred yards. Everything else seemed like it went back forever.

“He really made you climb all the way up here to get me?” Colt finally asked.

I shrugged my shoulders. There was a real possibility that Dad would’ve preferred Colt to never come down, except for the sheriff. “I don’t know,” I said.

Colt asked why I hadn’t waved or shouted first. “I have my phone.”

“I did wave,” I said.

It was my brother’s turn to shrug. “But still.”

Mandy lifted her nose to the wind. I reached over and roughed her neck, feeling that her fur was all wet. When I smelled my hand, it smelled like coffee.

“I’m supposed to tell you the sheriff is on the way.”

Colt nodded, then leaned over and kissed Mandy on the head. I asked him if he was in trouble, but he only answered by spitting off to the side and then standing up and shaking the kinks out of his legs. He held out his hand and pulled me to my feet.

“My ears,” he said. “They won’t stop ringing. Like when I’m talking now, it sounds all funny and shit, and then when I stop—” Here he stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it. “—all I hear is ringing.”

“The bump on your head is huge.”

He said he hadn’t experienced anything like it before, that when the tire blew, he thought he’d hit a bomb, which was pretty ridiculous, but that’s what he thought. And then when the truck hit, everything finally still, his chest contused from the seatbelt, dirt and brake-smoke choking the cabin, his head pounding, he thought it again: “A fucking bomb.”

I asked Colt if he’d been scared, somehow embarrassed by the question, since it so clearly revealed that I would’ve been.

My brother waved it off. He said it was more adrenaline than anything. “I was only reacting,” he said.

The sheriff had come into sight. Miles to the south, past Sulphur Spring, a blue speck of lights made its way toward us. His cruiser was still so far away that you almost couldn’t tell it was moving.

I asked my brother about afterward—about when it was over. “Were you scared then?”

Colt scooped Mandy and cradled her like a baby, even though she didn’t really like being picked up. He squeezed her tight when she tried to wiggle free.

“She was sitting right next to me,” he said. “I look over, and she’s nowhere. Not on the floor, not between the door and seat, not under the seat.”

I didn’t understand at first. “Mandy?”

“That’s why I’m up here,” he said. “I was so confused, but then I thought I heard this voice that told me to start moving. Not even really a voice, but like something took over me. I guess this is as far as I got.”

“And then you found Mandy up here?”

“No,” Colt said. “I crawled out of the cab, and she was sitting right there, wagging her tail, ready to go. Happy, like the whole thing hadn’t even happened.”

I thought my brother was going to cry then. I wanted to tell him I was glad he was okay, but I didn’t know how. Colt set Mandy down and shooed her away with his foot, but she stuck close. He nudged her away again, and she returned, this time pawing at his boot, like it was a toy, which made him laugh.

“You’re so stupid,” he said to her. He said it just like he was saying I love you.

The sheriff walked Colt over to the front of his cruiser, siren lights still whirling, wanting to speak with him alone. Our sheriff was not the rugged Western sheriff of TV but someone softer, a man whose remembrances might include the use of words like “jolly.” Dad knew the sheriff by first name from his years of towing, among other things, but that familiarity didn’t translate into any kind of affinity on my father’s part, a sentiment that Colt and I understood we were supposed to share.

My brother was smarter than that, though. He knew this was a moment to put on the charm. Used all no sirs and yes sirs and other such pleasantries, and it wasn’t long before he and the sheriff were laughing about something.

While Colt and the sheriff talked, Dad sent me off to get gloves and a shovel. Loaded with all that rock, the dump truck was too heavy to be towed, even for the boom rig that was coming. My dad had tried, but he couldn’t get the dump truck to start, and without the engine running, the PTO couldn’t transfer power to the hydraulics and tilt the bed, so the only other way to get some weight out was by shoveling it out.

My dad had already climbed into the box. I had trouble scaling the ladder and hanging on to the shovel at the same time, so I left the shovel with Uncle George. Halfway up, he started prodding me in the butt with the handle. He didn’t stop when I kicked at him, or when I kept kicking, but only when my dad yelled for both of us to knock it off.

The bin felt like a broiler. Sunlight bounced back and forth off the metal walls, and the gravel sucked in the heat. My hands were swimming in the gloves I’d found. I pushed them on tighter and took a stab at the rock, which pinged hard against the blade and vibrated right into my bones. When I went to throw my tiny scoop over the edge, I banged my shovel into the side of the box, all the rock spilling right back in.

“How much do we need to get rid of?” I asked.

My dad said he wanted a ton at least, but probably a little more. “More than a ton?” It seemed an impossible amount.

“You’re too far down,” he said. He had me climb higher up the pile, where there was less wall to clear. He showed me how to choke up on the shovel handle, watching me until I sort of had it figured out.

“Make sense?” he asked.

I tossed another scoop to show him. My dad didn’t nod in approval, but some of the contempt left his face, which counted, and there was something about the easing that reminded me of when Colt had gone off to Tech, and it was only Dad and me, when everything was somehow better—a thought I feel guilty admitting now. “I’ve got it,” I said.

Colt joined us after he was finished with the sheriff. He took off his T-shirt, then twisted it tight before tying it around his head as a sweatband. He didn’t have any gloves and didn’t want mine when I offered. When Dad told him a ton, Colt said, “A ton is nothing.”

My brother shoveled like a machine, lean, muscles rippling. It took only a moment before I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up, not then, not ever. The sheriff had given him a ticket for expired tags even though the truck was registered to the Nortons. Colt had laughed it off when he told us—Figures!—but Dad took it pretty cross, and he kept asking Colt what kind of bullshit was that and why was he fine with the sheriff jerking him off.

Instead of offering Dad an answer, Colt shoveled. Faster, more focused, an almost unbroken stream of gravel flying over the bin wall. And while in many ways our father was unpredictable and chaotic, he was also entirely predictable in others, such as the way he always met stubbornness with stubbornness. Dad stopped peppering Colt with questions and began shoveling, swinging his shovel in sync with Colt’s. Anytime I tried to get in there, I would only screw up their rhythm. Neither seemed to mind when I stopped trying to help at all.

A breeze moved in, finally pulling off some sweat. Out on the lakebed, a half-dozen dust devils were rising and collapsing, climbing high and then dissipating as if they were smoke. Dad’s pace was already fading, getting out of time with Colt’s, making Colt slow down. My heat-cooked mind wandered back to this time when I was eight, after this monster spring storm had blown through and Colt convinced me to take the Grumman our dad had just salvaged out on the lake.

After days of rain, Colt and I still had to walk the canoe a few hundred yards from shore before the water would float the both of us. Even then, after we were that far out, we got stuck a bunch more times and had to push, mud smearing across everything, one of my shoes sucked from my foot and forever gone.

Colt finally ordered me to go home. “It won’t work if it’s both of us.”

“I’ll walk alongside,” I tried, terrified by the thought of having to make it back alone. “I can push you when you get stuck.”

“I won’t,” is all he said, drifting away.

Both my shoes were gone when I finally made it back. I’d fallen once, my arm stuck up to my elbow, my cheeks as wet from the lake as my panicked crying. My brother later said that when he paddled out that day, he could see our house the whole time. That whenever he looked back, there it was, and no matter how far he went, it didn’t seem like he’d gotten anywhere at all. Eventually he felt bored, and instead of paddling back, he headed toward the shoreline that the highway ran alongside, and he abandoned the canoe there, walking back home the long way.

That same summer, when it was dry, I tried walking all the way across the lake by myself. I made it so far out that our house did disappear. I felt more panicked and scared than I had when I was sure I’d gotten permanently stuck in the mud, not because I was lost or that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back, but because of something else. Something about how our brains can’t process that much absence, that much nothing, so they have to fill things in, which is what happens with tinnitus, and even now, if I think too much about it, the buzzing in my ears only gets worse.

Uncle George whistled sharply, breaking the race. The heavy-duty tow was coming down the road, mirage-like. Uncle George wanted to know if he should move Dad’s rig out of the way, but Dad said he’d come down and do it himself. Dad seemed to have forgot that I was there, and when he saw me leaning on my shovel, he told me to quit sucking my thumb.

“Be useful for once,” he said, his contempt already back—a contempt that I’ve now started to understand wasn’t only for me, but the whole goddamn world.

After Dad left to move his truck, Colt told me to forget what he’d said. “Just tune him out.” He told me to chill, that he didn’t need my help with the gravel. “I mean, make it look like you’re doing something, but I got this.”

I asked if he really meant it. I told him that I could do it, that I’d been doing it before.

My brother stopped for a second and arched his shoulders to stretch, his T-shirt headband sopping. Dust from each shovelful of gravel had stuck to the sweat on his chest and arms, caking into something thicker, almost like clay. He assured me that he’d meant it, that he wanted the workout. “You can keep me company,” he said. “How about that?” It was one of the last kind things he’d do for me.

Colt worked, and I pretended. Shadows lengthened off the ridgeline. The emergency flares set out by the sheriff sputtered, almost burned through. The heavy-duty wrecker was placing its stabilizers, prepping the boom to deploy. Across the lake, the mountains were scalloped in blues and purples and had foothills pocked with caves. The caves were from millions of years ago when the shoreline of the lake used to be that high, and day after day after day, the waves carved them out. The lake was hundreds of feet deep back then, filled this whole valley and the next. Everything green and lush and jungle.

I started telling Colt about it. People used to live in those caves—beachfront. Scientists have been out there and found bones from camels. They found fossilized human poop and tested it and figured out that it’s the oldest poop they’ve ever found in all of North America. At least 14,000 years old.

Over time, the geography changed, and the lake began receding. The people in the caves left. Later, much later, other people came. They left and then other people returned. The land was mostly all dry by then, at least comparatively, but it’s gotten even drier still. Drier every year. I asked Colt if he could imagine it, how it used to be back then.

“There weren’t palm trees,” he said, like he’d figured out a prank before I could pull it on him. “That’s bullshit.”

“There were,” I said, almost demanding. “It’s true.”

Colt laughed, still thinking it was a joke. “Okay, professor. There were palm trees.”

I’m not sure why I thought he’d believe me. And even then, after he dismissed me, I remember knowing that it didn’t really matter if he believed me or not. He was my brother. But I remember wishing.

By the time we finally headed home, it was twilight, the heat of the day no longer baking, the first few stars blossoming above. We had the windows down, the air cool and almost moist. Dad drove, following Uncle George, whose left taillight was out. I sat in the middle, my legs angled uncomfortably to avoid the gearshift, while Mandy rode in Colt’s lap, his arms seat belted around her so she couldn’t put her paws on the windowsill.

That accident changed my brother. It didn’t come on all at once but started instead with little things. He became nicer for a while, more caring, not unlike the way he guarded Mandy from riding half-out the window. He even climbed up to my room a few nights to see what I was doing, invited me to the basement to watch TV with him. Later, when things in his head got worse, he started stuffing cotton balls in his ears, sometimes hitting the side of his skull like he was trying to get ketchup from a bottle. He started going on those long drives, disappearing for hours and sometimes days, pushing how fast he could go, how deafening yet quiet he could make the turbulence. The sheriff nabbed him with a few more tickets, something Colt kept from Dad, though Dad found out later. Colt had never paid them, and after his suicide, they were dismissed by the court.

The last night I was down in the basement with him, Colt had worked most of his way through a twelve-pack of Coors. We sat in the blue-dark, me on the floor, watching the random stuff that came on after the late-night shows, the volume movie-theater loud. He’d signed on with the Nortons for another summer and would need to get ready for work in a few hours. He’d told me to help myself to a beer, but I didn’t much care for the taste, still don’t, and my half-full can sat unattended and warming.

I don’t remember much of what we talked about that night. We laughed at the dumb stuff, video clips of wipe-outs or getting kicked in the nuts. Switched to wrestling for a while, cheering on our guys, talking smack, but not acting out any of the moves like we used to. Almost in a whisper, he said, “I wish Mom were here.” His eyes didn’t budge from the screen.

I told him I did too, though I think that was mostly reflex.

I fell asleep that night before Colt did, if he even slept at all. When I woke on his floor the next morning, the sunlight squaring in through the window well, he was gone, the television off. The covers had been pulled back over his bed, but it hadn’t been made. Most of the empties had been picked up and put back in the box, the others stacked alongside it. My beer was still sitting next to me, miraculously un-spilled. I dumped it out in the utility sink and added it to the pile, then trudged upstairs to my too-hot room and fell back asleep.

We were nearing the turn to Uncle George’s place. He slid over into the on-coming lane so we wouldn’t have to slow down for him. The road was wide open there, and instead of flying past, Dad let off the gas so that we stayed even. He kept looking over at Uncle George, trying but failing to get his attention, and part of me wondered if Uncle George saw but was pretending not to. Uncle George began braking and dropped behind us, Dad double-tapping the horn at him.

We were alone on the highway. A last remaining band of color lined the horizon. In the low light, the lake almost looked like it had water in it again.

Colt lifted Mandy off his lap and turned so he was facing us. His hair was wild from the window, and he had to shout over the road. “Whaddaya think, Dad? You think there used to be palm trees out here?”

Colt looked at me and grinned, but not in the mocking way I’d expected, as if he’d only asked Dad so that he could make fun of me again. Instead, it seemed a smile of contentment, like my brother was happy, though now I sometimes wonder if that wasn’t only exhaustion.

Dad didn’t follow what Colt was saying. “It ain’t gonna make it through winter you try planting one.”

“No,” Colt corrected. “In the past. What did you say, Trav? Fourteen-thousand years ago? The giant lake and camels and all of that?”

I glanced over at Dad, trying to measure him, but it was too dark to read his expression.

He stuck his arm out the window and looked over at the lakebed.

“Used to fill a lot more,” he said, wagging a finger at it. “You remember that?”

Neither Colt nor I answered. Maybe Colt could, like he remembered Mom, but I could only remember it the one way. Colt asked about the palm trees again, wanted me to explain it.

Dad supposed that it only made sense there was a bigger lake before, but he didn’t believe me when I said it had been hundreds of feet deep. And no palm trees, no jungle. No common sense in any of that.

“Yeah, I can’t imagine it either,” Colt said, leaning over Mandy and making a goofy face at her, giggling when she licked his chin.

Dad brought his attention back into the cab, his two sons right there next to him. “No,” he said, “I can’t imagine it being anything but this.”

Could any of us?

~

Eliot Treichel is the author of A Series of Small Maneuvers and Close Is Fine. Originally from Wisconsin, he now lives in La Grande, Oregon, where he is an Assistant Professor of English/Writing at Eastern Oregon University.

Featured image: Photograph by Eliot Treichel, 2024.

Artist note: This story originated when a dump truck hauling gravel crashed directly across from an artist residency I had been staying at in the Oregon Outback. As in the story, most of the gravel had to be shoveled out of the dump truck so it could be towed away, a task that took most of the day, and the image of one of the young men resting on his shovel in the twilight caught me. That image rattled in my head for several years before I took a stab at a first draft, and then it was many more before I figured out who the narrator was and what the story was trying to be. While it’s a story about change (both sudden and geologic), “Caves” ultimately is a story about our capacities to imagine one another, to imagine a restoration of ourselves and our families and our environment—to imagine the opposite of that and everything we have to lose.