Salt Caves

Me and Dot had put together an LLC making Himalayan salt caves, and we’d cornered the market in central Nebraska. First one we planted was in North Platte, nearest sizable town to my hometown, London, so small, so methed out, you’d miss it save for a few sadsacks who’d wander all the way to I-80, including my pop, that’s where I last saw him, at the Kum & Go, hanging suspect-style under the skimpy eaves. Arrivederci to that asshole. 

All I have left of the man is his name: Herschel. What sort of a rural red-headed non-Jew is named Herschel? But here we are. I’m the third. Herschel, I say. I keep the handshake firm and coachlike. Pressed pants, shirt with a collar, they can bing me on my LinkedIn. Maybe a clap round the shoulder if we go way back, dated the same girl at Van Buren or whatever. I like to find an angle and work it. How you doing, Dave, Kenny, Etheline, Sue Ann, Mrs. Schmermling, Brent.

I get the salt, rough kind, big slabs, from a hog operation on the South Dakota border. Imagine a series of white rounded buildings, so long you can’t see the end of ’em, like maybe the government’s hiding whole colonies of extraterrestrials, and they smell like hell. I go there. I fill my brother’s semi (he’s laid up on worker’s comp two years now) with the salt slabs via forklift, the bigger the better, then drive south and east. Then me and Dot dye it pink, with the spray guns hooked up to a generator, this is kind of fun, getting in our undies in the trailer, her sweet bod bouncing like a pom-pom, and I don’t mind, shoo that’s a party. We know it’s good when it looks golden trout belly, kiss of pink. So sure, if pressed, “Himalayan” is branding, any good businessperson knows you need branding. It being from the Himalayas, well no. I don’t do Eurasia. Ditto the sea. Hence, in the contracts, my use of quotation marks. I was raised by tweakers, not wolves. Like I said: hog operation. They were slaughtering so many for their breakfasts that the salt part was easy.

We were aiming for franchisee status, with us being the franchisers. Say you got a former driving school on the corner of your underperforming strip mallette, the sort of place with Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets in a dusty turnstile, then we swoop in, we’re bringing sexy back. Or your main street, the three- or four-block long one that’s mostly given over to antiques, maybe a VA clinic that’s open two days a week, a Curves with the blinds drawn. Herschel and Dot ride up and you’re like: anchor tenant! Steak dinner! Our bread-and-butter is old, arthritic feet. Then there’s all the one-offs and series. We do bachelorettes, ladies’ spa nights, youthful rejuvenations, his-and-hers/reconnect with your other half, quests, cleanses, detox for farmers who got Monsanto skin, won’t break a teenager’s budget, yoga church, scared straight graduations, Habla Español, anti-acnes, grief release. Plus, perks. For example, if you’re on Meals on Wheels and you’ve got wheels, you get your first salt cave free.

When we’re keys in hand, we call Phil, Dot’s ex. Phil suffered a head injury in a tractor rollover which makes him meek in several departments. Workwise, he’s a beast. So fine, three’s company. First, we’re down to bolts. Bolts usually being, well, bolts, and vinyl tile, and spray-textured walls, and hollow doors. This country is a shittily built one, I hate to say. We yank it all out. I sell what can be sold, try to upcharge, the rest goes to the dump. Then it’s oasis time.

The salt cave is the tricky part, but I enjoy it, Dot does too. We combo anchor/glue it on the floor, the walls. We get it to curve, to protrude, it’s got to be a salt cave, not a salt room. Phil’s our go-to on ceilings. I’m our guy for lighting, which I run behind and under to make the salt glow. Lately, to be more above board, which is the direction I’ve been angling my whole life since Dot found me at a Taco John’s, we’ve been taking some real, I assume, Himalayan salt that we got bulk from the Omaha Natural Grocers, and we sprinkle that on top.

Dot does the gateways. At Chadron State she learned that the holy, in all religions, is set apart, by mountains, or temples, or rooms, or altars, or bells, or men in hats, or I don’t know bridge trolls with riddles, so you can’t just walk into our salt caves, you’ve got to transition via planes of meaning, and ours are little mazes with low lights and beaded curtains. Then she dolls it up at the end when you walk into the pink like you scooted back into your mama’s uterus or landed on Dolly Parton’s bosom, pick your comfort place.

We set up a camera, not to be creepers, just for oversight. I have seen some stuff, I tell you! Sex and/or hanky panky (not surprising), sleeping (ditto), but here’s a weird one: licking? A lot of people, I mean farmers, grandmas, teenage girls, couples, recovery groups, but especially if it’s one person alone, they’re gonna take a finger first, from the mouth to the wall and back again, then a bunch of them are gonna take their tongues, straight-up bold, and lick the walls like they are giraffes at the zoo. The more normie they look the sooner they’ll do it. Another observation? Customers like to fiddle with things. They turn the steam up, and they turn it down, they mess with the tubes on the Hobby Lobby fountain. They’ll do pretty much anything to not transcend to a higher plane. They huff and cough. Finally, they settle down on the pink ground and maybe cry. There is some sadness out there.

Kearney was our biggest operation, both for square footage and traffic. We got a hold of a beaut, once an opera house from the WPA, that had been mothballed for decades in the historic bank block. Pause to imagine a world where central Nebraska had opera houses? Now it’s next to a bong-and-chainsawed-bears store. But this place is still something special, thirty-foot ceilings on the ground floor, marble columns. Quality is what I’m saying we’re saying with the flagship.

The idea with the pools is you experience deep space and the womb in them, an intergalactic trip. Extremely nice for hurting bodies, obese bodies, just plain old vanilla tight or sore. Customers emerge with realigned priorities, a sense of renewal. We started with three pools, ordered from spawarehouse.com. Honestly, they’re just black plastic pools, small (made for Chinese nationals, not Nebraskans), and kind of flimsy, with lids. My first impression was: they look like saucers. Portentous. The online promo made installation look easy, like setting up a washer/dryer. Not so. Phil and I had to rent some earth movers to lay the appropriate pipe. We got past every level of apparent human intervention, down to where there was a trickle from a long-covered ancient spring. Maybe Ogalala, maybe not. But I tasted that water, and it was sweet.

When everything was good to go, I sent Phil home to his Saint Bernard and Big Green Egg and fired up the tubs.

Dot went first, came out fast. She said, Hersch: It’s not that different from a bath? We messed with the salt solution, the magnesium, the water temperature and then she tried again. I lowered the lid on my girl. Inside, it gets completely black. She calls out for the Enya. I pipe in “Caribbean Blue.” Dot takes her twelve-minute intergalactic trip. I’m checking my notifications and having a snack when Dot opens the hatch. Definitely felt like driftwood in there, baby driftwood that doesn’t have any joints, she says. Oh! She puts her cute little surprisingly fat foot on the refurbished tile floor. Hersch, I feel like a feather floating down from a swanboat for children in the sky. Um-hmm, I say. Swanboats, by which I mean cash.

Phil goes for a float the next day, says even his asshole feels refreshed. I prefer him as a man of fewer words. I realized I’m part flower, he says. Maybe majority flower? A gardenia, he goes on. Why the specificity, Phil? I say. I’m not putting assholes or gardenias in the brochure. I am not majority flower, I know that about myself. Plus, I have claustrophobia for real, due to my mother doing “time-outs” via a closet that locked starting when I was a barely a toddler. A teenaged cousin, when I told her what was up, she gave me a care package for the closet, so starting around six I had a flashlight in there, her teacher’s giveaway National Geographics, and an everlasting bag of Dum-Dums. Still, one winter, when I was four, mom forgot to open it up, so a black lid clamping closed on me gets a hard pass.

We rebrand and reopen with the zero-gravity pools as a prime feature, at a slightly higher price point. In the reception area, there’s stuff in our water: cucumbers, mint, lavender. The towels are thicker. The lotion’s on point. Our playlist will make you feel like a perfectly cooked noodle. But not two days into the reopening things get weird.

I pull up in my Ford F-150, having made the five-minute drive I could just as easily walk, and there’s a sandhill crane like a greeter at the door. Mind you Kearney, Nebraska, is known for these living dinosaurs. These birds are ancient, like men’s nipples ancient. Dot! I say, walking in the door. There’s a crane out front? But there’s no Dot in the reception area, there’s my dad, Herschel Junior, standing near the herby candle display. Even weirder, he’s put on twenty healthful pounds, and his skin looks, like, moisturized? He appears to have scrubbed. For some reason he is wearing a soccer jersey from a country I don’t know, though he’s only left this one to go to war.

Dad, I say. What do you want. I make my chest broad, try to look like that punk-ass rabies dog in Cujo, his favorite movie, he watched that on repeat. I’m figuring: money. A job, a hit. His expression is softer than I’ve seen it before, something loose in his meanset pisser mouth. I’m dead, he says. Just came to say I love you son and I’m sorry. You’re dead, Dad? I say. I have the weird idea to check his pulse, and I reach out for his wrist, but then there’s Dot, where did she come from? Just dusting she says. Dad’s gone.

Dot, I say. My dad was just right here. I saw his hammy forearms with the mess of strawberry-blonde hair, a replica of my own. Honeybaby, have some coffee, Dot says. She goes to the pot. Did you sleep? Did you eat? We have been wondering what breathing glue would do. I resolve to say nothing more, but the crane is still loitering outside my business door by the new brochures in the Plexiglas box. I see him, baby. A bird, Dot says. It is early in the season, she notes. Though really the seasons have been all effed up. Okay fine, a bird, I orient myself via more coffee. A bird and a hallucination. I decide we can up our bolts, lessen our glue. I try to go about my day. Around two or so I must be looking less than amazing, because Dot says take off early. I drive out to the reservoir but I don’t feel like fishing. I have a weird not unpleasant feeling of being accompanied.

It’s a portal, Dot said the next morning. You better go look for yourself, she says. So, unclear, if it was the cave, or the crane, or Phil’s refreshed asshole, or the pools, or the unearthed ancient spring, or forgiveness which felt like a door opening somewhat painfully in my sternum, but indeed, we had opened a portal. 

This is how Dot found out. There was an entire scared straight group there. In my experience, they all get nicknames, like trail names, and this crew was called Brothers By Another Mother (illogical, as there were like sixteen of them). Anyway. These boys had detoxed in the Sand Hills, gone backpacking all the way over in Rocky Mountain National Park, done some art therapy in Fort Collins, then they hauled back to central Nebraska. This was their graduation weekend. Come in, float, salt, go out for a nice dinner, next day you walk the Holiday Inn stage. These nice, effed-up kids, they even had matching T-shirts made.

The opera house was rounded like a bandshell, so it made the very best cave. Dot was able to use the historic red curtain in her gateways. There is an animal in there. Think of the biggest RV you’ve ever seen, but it’s meaty, covered in fur, alive. It gives out heat. A musky smell. The animal is just like, sleeping, thank God, all along a wall of the cave, and the boys thought they’d maybe gotten some kind of special deal. Dot asks if she can snap a group picture (the presence of mind to think of that), the Brothers from Another say sure. She uploads the photo on her flora and fauna app. This bub, he’s extinct.

He’s a ground sloth, we think, a baby one. Possibly a Shasta ground sloth. Hersch, we seem to have some sort of Pleiostene/Holocene situation, she asserts. Going on about the megaherbivores, the Clovis People.

I see the camel first. I have never seen a camel in my actual life, and still I would say, it is not like any camel I have ever seen. It is scraping the thirty-foot ceiling. I am six-foot-three, and I wouldn’t even clear its knee.

Yesterday’s camel, Dot says. He’s gonna need some prickly pear cactus, some narrowleaf yucca, some Mormon Tea.

Dot! Put down your damn phone, I say. Do we call the cops on a camel?

She looks up. Two more camels have entered the no-longer enormous historic opera house/salt cave. The first one sits down like he’s in a giant nativity scene. The tallest one keeps having to duck. Then he/she starts in on the walls. Licking them too. Big hunks start to fall down, our enterprise, revealing the poorly taped drywall, each regrettable shortcut.

Is it that it’s easier for a camel to get through a needle than for a what? Dot is being weird.

Her eyes have become her child eyes. Not cops, Dot says. We need to call the birders.

I make the sound of a northern loon, that sound of a glass lake at dusk, high and lonesome. I feel a prickle of electricity, is it being or is it time? Dot snaps her fingers in my face. They have little flamingos on them, she’s gotten pretty into nail art. Sorry, I say. We go get some white paint, like the kind car dealerships use, and quick paint the front windows with CLOSED FOR RENOVATION. More animals, all the while, are entering that space, but docile. Dot keeps trying to find them on her app: a giant elk, a woodland muskox, and they keep showing up with the red triangle that means extinct.

What if their predators come too? She shows me a North American sabretooth cat. That would be extra bad, I say.

The Kearney Audubon Center is in the opposite direction of town, south of the highway, where some farmers have been paid to let their fields go fallow, so they aren’t fields at all now, they’re ponds and streams and rivulets and rivers and cattails and toads and frogs. It’s nice there. Birdsong. The building is like a hobbit building, made from rammed-earth tires, which create these thick, cool walls, that are covered over in mud. We get there around three.

There aren’t any tours happening, big phew. Just one mom and son messing around with some owl scat and tweezers. The woman working the counter is a grey-haired reedy gal from Red Cloud with thyroid eyes.

Are you a naturalist? Dot lowers her voice, like we’re getting a dime bag.

I’m an interpreter. Her name tag says Kathleen. And a retired veterinarian.

Oh a vet! Dot sounds way too excited. What kind?

Large animal. Kathleen the retired vet is one of those people that only picks up on the text, not the subtext, and that is good news for us because Dot is acting odd.

What is a good place for large animals to, she pauses, roam free, around here?

Well, there’s Niobrara, that’s at least fifty thousand acres. I did a black-footed ferret release there.

Something’s clicked for Dot. I pee, read the sign about not disturbing prairie dog towns, but isn’t everything we do disturbing prairie dog towns? Get back in the truck.

Where’d you say you saw your dad?

At our shop.

We need him.

Why?

We need to buy some tranq.

Dot, when I saw him, he said he was dead?

Baby, dead people don’t show up and talk to their sons. Dead people can’t buy Nivea cream.

We both know how hard it is to get animal tranquilizers for animals, what with the fentanyl situation. So to use it semi-legally, we need to get it illegally.

Do you want me to try to call him?

Got a better idea?

I ask the lady who picks up for Herschel. She says he’s ded. That’s how she says it, “ded.”

When did he die?

About a year ago, found him on Christmas, went to bring him some brittle bark with pecans, found him face down, there was a smell, some time had passed.

Do you have any tranq? I ask.

Who is this. She’s got that can’t-quit-smoking voice.

This is Herschel, his son. I swear to God I need it for an animal.

We make a plan. Dot will get the animal tranquilizer. I will break the news to Phil. My brother the bad cop will loan us a semi. We will leverage darkness, and a crane, a cable, a forklift, a lorry. We opened the portal, and now we have to close it. The tranq is going to cost a buttload, so first we stop by an ATM, and there goes my future, little numbers on somebody else’s screen. The plan from there is: she’ll drop me off. I’ll call Phil and faux repair the front door to watch for watchers; she’ll go get the drugs. But we are too late. There’s Phil, at our flagship, not a scratch on his body, which is dead. Freshly I’d say. Can you die from shock? I guess Phil did. He looks shocked! But peaceful. Dot gets down by him and kisses him lustily on the damn m­outh.

What the eff, Dot? I say.

I loved him, she says. I love him. That tractor did him wrong.

Aren’t hearts complicated. Night, Phil. We arrange him so his leg’s not all weird.

I feel this rumbling like an earthquake. It’s in my cells, it’s in my teeth. Is that what happens when you forgive someone? The earth gives up its ancient dead? The bank block is shivering, spasming, like mom in withdrawal, there goes that cornice I always liked. Impressive, as it was made of stone. The asphalt heaves up, cracks in two.

It must have been the mastodons. I can see their golden tusks against a slate and darkening sky. My God, they are huge. The other animals shine, tall as the tallest skyline. Their names come to me, from the National Geographics I read with a flashlight, rescuing some part of myself in the closet all that time. That’s a woolly mammoth, I say to Dot. And Herschel, her phone is down, her phone’s away, that is a Harlan sloth.

I can feel the thunder gathering. We are in a stern-to-stem situation. Thunderstorms in Nebraska are like nothing else. The sky, it buckles, it breaks. There is nothing to do but ride it out, surrender. Think of sailors, so long ago, in boats of timber, on ancient seas, that whipped and lashed and how did they ever survive.

Wanna take them to the Niobrara? Dot says.

She’s about as big as that giant’s dark foot. She’s got her crossbody bag unleashed and thrown up to a tusk. Thank God it’s high-end, Lululemon, a dumb splurge. For you I will, I say.

We climb up the leg, which smells like when a calf is born, like a wheatfield before rain, like the blackest soil where a tomato can be happy. I hear the car crashes. I hear the horns honking and the alarms. Then I hear the thunder, oh my God, it’s so good, from the ground, from the sky. So long to a man I used to know. She pulls me up, the last bit. And we ride.