Underground, in a Cave, in a Shallow Bed of Freezing Water

This is where the salamander lives. It’s the kind of salamander with strange plumage-like gills hanging off of its neck. Or blossoming out of its neck. It has the little neck slits with the wavy, almost gelatinous coral fan structures somehow appended to them.

It’s enormous. This is a salamander that eats people. They say that it eats whole adult people. It is a salamander that you measure in yards.

We all know about the cave. The cave is right down the path from the big chain hardware store. We like to get drunk near the entrance. We like cheap liquor and campfires. We like talking to girls on the telephone and pretending that what they really mean is they’re in love with us. It’s not like our town’s so unusual. It’s not like we wear white robes and participate in ritualistic dances.

There’s just this giant man-eating salamander in the cave near the hardware store. We go into the cave and look at him. We’re pretty sure that he is a him. He could be a her. Or she could be a her. The grammar here is evasive. The salamander is not evasive. He moves slowly and waits patiently in the shallow bed of freezing water.

He doesn’t only eat people. If he only ate people, he would starve. He eats a lot of little blind underground fish and smaller amphibians and rats and mice. He eats a lot of insects too. He mostly eats not-people, but he eats more people than you would think.

We like to sometimes go into the cave and bring our flashlights and watch the salamander hunting in the dark. Nobody goes very close, but we can all tell he hates it when we come in with flashlights. His huge eyes can’t stand the light and he digs into the thin sandy layer beneath the water and buries his head as far as he can. The water loses its clarity and all we can see is his smooth pale back reflecting the glare of our lights. Somebody, usually Teddy, throws a few rocks and the salamander looks up at us and seems so sad that we all call Teddy an asshole and go back to our campfire at the front of the cave. We usually sit real quietly and a lot of us wait for long-distance phone calls that only come often enough to keep us hoping.

The water inside the cave takes a few minutes to settle. The salamander can’t hunt as well in the murky water, so he waits. When he’s waiting, he’s always totally still. Even his gills seem to flutter less.

Everyone in our town knows about the salamander. We all know how he looks and how he moves and that he lives on a diet of mostly not-people. You would think that he would live on a diet of totally not-people. Who would get caught by a giant salamander that lives deep inside of an underground cave and doesn’t ever leave?

It turns out that they don’t really get caught.

When people in our town want to die, they walk back into the cave until they reach the little trickle of the underground stream. They take a few steps further and the stream opens into the salamander’s wide shallow pool. The people who want to die reach forward and run their fingers through his gills. They kneel down into the water and stroke his totally smooth and almost rubbery face. Sometimes they pull back his big wet lips and trace along the line of his teeth.

One time I walked out alone behind the hardware store. It was something to do with phone calls. Or having to do without phone calls. The truth is, it didn’t seem so outlandish to crawl back behind his teeth and into the salamander’s mouth. But it takes a few minutes to walk back to his tiny shallow pond. It might be a sign of weak character, but I knew that the thick stone cave walls would block all satellite signals, and I didn’t want to spend my last minutes without reception.

I got as far as the cave’s entrance and gathered up some dry wood. I lit it in the little rock-lined fire pit that we’d built a few summers previously. I kept my telephone on my lap and watched its inactivity. The fire was small and warm. I wanted to call a girl, but I couldn’t figure out which answering machine message would be the most devastating.