I'll Be Here

his hands slide to my waist and I think that they linger for a beat longer than they should.  Or maybe that is my imagination. 
    Alex grabs a flashlight from a small cranny in the dirt wall and switches it on.  I hold my hand to my face to shield the glaring white-blue light. 
    “Sorry,” he says and shifts the beam downward.  The hard-packed dirt walls are about five feet high and I would guess that the space extends a good twelve feet behind us until it narrows into a tiny passageway that empties near the beach.  Alex has to bend his knees and head to fit.  “God, this place seems a lot smaller than it used to.”  He laughs.
    We are in a hole/cave hybrid.  This large parcel of land, situated between two houses at the back of my neighborhood was once owned by a builder who planned to construct a four story residential quadruplex but was stalled by a legal dispute between himself, his insurance company and the city government.  The end result was that the city ended up purchasing the land well-below market value and the spot was zoned “unbuildable” due to low elevation and flooding concerns. 
    Jake told me that in the late nineties there was talk of bringing in more dirt and transforming the space into a playground but an environmental group battled it because at one point there were some gopher tortoises that used it as their home base.  They asked Jake to assist the cause but he had to admit that he really didn’t know much about gopher tortoises.  No one wanted to deal with the controversy and the plans were scratched, the land forgotten, left to grow wild with sea grapes and palmettos.   
    Five summers ago, before we knew about the cave, Alex and I surmised that the vacant land would probably provide us with a shortcut to Shell Beach which isn’t much of a beach but when you’re under the driving age anything will do. 
    While Brooke and my mom played Scrabble on our porch and listened to Miles Davis, we pedaled down here—me on my lime green ten-speed and Alex on a blue monster of a thing borrowed from Jake. 
    Sam Allred was emerging from the tangled growth at the same time that we were dropping our bikes and entering it.  I knew Sam from school.  He was a year older than me and a well-known stoner. 
    Sam stopped and stared at us.  His brown eyes were rimmed with red.  “Want to see something?”  He asked finally.
    I actually didn’t want to see anything that Sam Allred had to show me but I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do and Alex and I followed Sam over the weeds and a rocky patch of ground that dipped into a shallow puddle.  I looked away when Sam’s shirt lifted and I could see the soft rolls of his back.  I wondered what someone so chubby and clearly more comfortable on the couch was doing out in nature.  I was about to ask when we came to this spot.
    “It was here before I moved into the neighborhood,” he said, gesturing to the warped wooden cover that didn’t cover the gaping hole all the way. 
    At first glance it didn’t seem like much—just a hole in the ground about four feet across.  But when the flimsy board was pushed aside I could see that the hole wound back under the ground.  It was lined with dirt and jagged rocks and in one corner stood a life-sized cardboard cutout of Tom Cruise in his Mission Impossible ensemble. 
    “We stole that from a store,” he responded to my unasked question about the Cruise cutout.  I didn’t ask how he’d managed to get such a huge piece out of the store without getting caught.  Some things are better left a mystery.
    “What is this place?”  I asked.
    Sam shrugged.  “I don’t really know.  Maybe they built it to put a septic tank in or construction posts or something.  Who knows.”
    “Hmmmm.”
    Sam looked us over—up and down like we were under inspection.  “There are only three rules.  One is that you always leave a flashlight on that ledge down there.  See it?” 
    He leaned forward pointing to a small space wedged between the dirt and rock.  “Two is that you tell someone else from the neighborhood if you’re leaving.” 
    He stood up and adjusted the waistband of his shorts.  I noticed the dark red marks the shorts left on the pale skin of his stomach.  “I’m leaving for a new school and that’s why I’m telling you guys.” 
    When he looked out over the green space to the edges of sky, I suppose that he looked as depressed as someone like him could get.  “My