A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (10 page)

A man appeared in Uncle Lud's town the year he started Secondary. A man who went door-to-door with a suitcase. He wore a skinny tie and a shiny suit. What he was selling was hidden, locked within the case.

“I'd love to show you, if you have a minute,” he told the woman of the house, children clustered around her. “First, might I have a glass of water? The road up to the house was dusty,” he added, “so very dry.”

While one of the kids went to fetch the water, the rest noticed how the man's shoes sparkled, and they nudged one another. The fellow's hands were smooth and unmarked. They couldn't tear their eyes away as he unbuckled straps, unsnapped locks, and opened his world for them.

Sweets, that's what he was selling. Only one flavor. An astonishment. His suitcase crammed full of gold-wrapped candies that, unwrapped, made them all take a step backward. On the corner of the porch, a hound on a chain growled, not so much in response to the visitor but to the reactions of his family.

“Madam,” the salesman said. “Might I offer you a complimentary sample of my wares?”

How could she say no? The sweet was blood-red, varnished, and salty on the surface. The housewife half choked when it hit her tongue.

“My fault, Mister,” she apologized. “I was expecting something else—cinnamon, a spice of some kind.” Her tongue dried from the salt, even as the sweet beneath it beckoned. Her hand reached involuntarily for another. The salesman held back, eyeing the children, who'd inched behind their mother, clutching her skirts, hiding their faces from his temptation.

Did you dream this? I wanted to know.

A story is not a dream, Uncle Lud told me.

He went on to describe how a dream is a fractured shadow, a cardboard village.

A story, though, Uncle Lud said, now, a story has solid form. You can hang your hat on a story.

The devil doesn't care about character development—that hidden code for moral expansion. The buds and branches of careworn emotional depth are anathema to him. He favors regression, backsliding, the wave-on-wave corruption, the dissolution, if you will, of character. Don't ask for character here.

Eventually, if not that very day, the candy salesman would find the children at the doorway receptive. And they would be struck by how, once on the tongue, the sweet seemed to ripple as if riding an unseen current before dissolving with an audible
whoosh,
a tiny explosion on the tongue that nothing could replicate, although quite a few children would discover as they grew older how closely the physical effect of that tiny sugar rock resembled a popular homemade drug, the only difference being the candy's effect ended with that marvelous eruption, while the drug's explosion dug craters within them that could never be healed. And they would do anything to get more.

“It's only candy,” the salesman said smoothly. “Surely, you've tasted it before.”

That day, the day of Hana Swann and Keven Seven, seemed unwilling to give way to night. It stretched on for hours, coming as it did at the height of summer, the burnt halo of sunset finally seeping away around ten thirty. At the Nowickis', Bryan huddled at the kitchen table drawing diagrams in the notebook I'd given him while Ursie sat cross-legged at the table's far side and fiddled with a new pack of cards she'd brought home from the Peak and Pine.

“They'll bring you luck,” Keven Seven had told her. “A certain kind of luck, a type I'd bet you've never experienced before.”

And his words had been made true already. That afternoon, as she'd gone to haul her cart and vacuum back into the supply closet, she'd spotted a twenty-dollar bill on the floor. She'd had an uncharacteristic moment of doubt and greed, half-shoving the bill into the pocket of her jeans, where it bunched uncomfortably, but she'd turned it over to Albie once she got to the office. It wasn't hers. She could hear her mother's voice saying as much. But then, out of the blue, the usually tight-fisted Albie turned around and handed back a ten, a tip that afternoon. One of the truckers had left something—for the mess in the parking lot, he said.

“And I notice you've got a taste for that,” he said, nodding toward the cases of diet pop. “Go ahead and take a case of it home with you. Good to get rid of the stuff.”

Albie looked up to see Ursie's eyebrows narrow, and he caught himself.

“Don't get used to it,” he said.

Ursie and Bryan had taken the money right to the Hot Spot and bought a big greasy bag of Spot Burgers and fries. Ursie set the kitchen table, the same way they always had—two plates on the daisy placemats, two paper towels folded into fat triangles—and they'd eaten their supper almost wordlessly. Bryan didn't mention Hana Swann, and Ursie had no words to introduce Keven Seven, whose face, despite an afternoon of close scrutiny, was becoming more indistinct by the second. Like smoke, she thought, imagining a puff rising from her rapidly expert shuffling. She marveled at the energy captured in tiny bits of paper. Paper and ink, that's all the cards were really, and yet look what they could do.

A new letter from their father lay on the counter. Bryan had decided it could wait. They'd given up the phone; they'd had no choice. The only routes their father had to reach them were to write to them (rough slashes on his new girlfriend's pink paper), leave a message with a neighbor, or show up in person. He hadn't done the latter two in a good long time, and his letters were few and far between and rarely, these days, full of more than barely suppressed rants as if with a little help from the new girlfriend, he'd made strangers of his children, only to have conjured an argument with them, and he couldn't let it go.

“He has nothing good to tell us,” Bryan told Ursie.

“Maybe he sent something,” she said.

It had been weeks and weeks. He'd been clear in his last letter, Bryan knew. He wouldn't be doing that again.

“Or maybe he's coming home.” A weird sense of dismay settled on her heart, surprising her.

“You want to open it?” Bryan asked.

“After supper, I guess,” she'd said. “I'm starving.”

But they'd eaten hours ago, and the letter remained unopened.

On any normal night, brother and sister might have noticed the oddness of the other's behavior, but not that night. Bryan drew and drew, ripped one crumpled sheet of paper after another. Ursie fingered playing cards. Heat pressed in upon them in the narrow kitchen, the bent screen on the back door wheezing, but no real breeze arriving.

Ursie had never held a deck of cards until that afternoon. Her father once pronounced that a girl playing cards was trashy. But she wasn't playing cards, and she certainly wasn't gambling, and he wasn't there, was he? She fanned the deck out in one long line the way she'd been taught that afternoon and swept the line into a pile again to practice her new shuffle.

“Do we have bleach?” Bryan asked suddenly.

“Under the sink,” Ursie said.

The cards had a tendency, she was noticing, to tangle as if they were gripped by a peculiar urgency and must rush into place. Her task—she could see that now—was to provide calm, to stroke them so that they flanked one another in an orderly, well-reasoned line that would unfurl with her tender touch.

“Good,” Bryan said, keeping his eyes on the charts and diagrams filling his notebook page.

His reply came after a long beat of silence during which Ursie exchanged a series of winks with the Jack of Clubs. She'd completely forgotten Bryan's earlier question, but she agreed with him; it was good. Containment and control: her index finger stopping each card as it streamed from hand to hand. Elegance: the neat, quick rhythm of a riffle shuffle.
All cards have two faces,
Keven Seven had proclaimed. One is public and conceals all true identity under a cover of uniformity. The other is the secret and true card, a revelation that can alter destinies.

Games depend upon this secrecy, Keven Seven had told her. In this way, they resemble life and death, because, after all, what meaning would life hold if it weren't for its flip side? Like the “imperfect information” upon which a player must stake his fortune, glimpses of death, dealt, could pry open a life and allow the real betting to begin.

Ursie's wrist burned. She could see two even lines of reddened skin on its smooth underside and nearly felt his grip again, saw the white knobs of his knuckles. How hard had he held her?

She set up the cards again for a shuffle.

Again, please, again,
Keven Seven had said, one lean hand pressing on her shoulder.

She would like to have conjured his face right that moment, but he turned away from her. For the life of her, Ursie couldn't recall his features. And yet he occupied her fully. Her chest rose and fell with a churning that for lack of a better alternative, she accounted to him. She would undress later that night to find the bruising blooms of his touch along her shoulders and collarbone, along her upper arms, and most alarmingly, within the velvet undersides of her thighs. And she would, against her better nature, preen a bit, feeling he was with her. His grip was that tight.

He had hopes for her, he said. Better than hopes. A wonderful plan. She was extremely talented, he said, and it wouldn't be long before she could prove it. Did she like games? Of course she did. Who didn't? Who didn't like winning? He'd only seen one other like her, and unfortunately that girl squandered her talent. Ursie wouldn't. Her gift was too great. His eyes followed her imitation of each of his lessons. Her own learning astounded her. She mastered technique, sure—but she possessed that other intangible: she could lead the eye and capture the beholder. Why even he, Keven Seven, said he was entranced.

That evening, Ursie's hair flew back in her cards' own dashing breeze. Bring it on home with a strip shuffle—Running Cuts, it was called—and she loved this best of all. It reminded her of a long time ago when they were a family and out camping and her father wouldn't even start the truck but simply shift it into neutral so that the old truck came alive as if it had a life of its own, meandering down whatever back road they'd camped beside. And she and Bryan and their mother would lope behind it until, picking up speed, one by one, they hoisted themselves into the truck bed—slip, slip, slip—like cards falling back into the deck.

Ursie was sipping a Diet Bubble-Up from the case Albie had given her along with that astonishing tip. Now she wondered if he'd noticed her delay that afternoon and if he'd wondered what she had been doing in Room 14. She felt her lips and cheeks redden. Even her hair had a new swing to it, one that seemed to mimic the back-and-forth of the cards passing between her hands.

“You be good to yourself tonight,” Albie had said, a funny hitch in his voice.

“Yes, I will,” Ursie said.

“And get yourself in here tomorrow. Don't be like your auntie. Don't let me down, you hear?”

No, neither Ursie nor Bryan had any intention of letting anyone down.

As the night descended in wave after wave of softened, retreating light, Ursie kept shuffling, murmuring as she did, and Bryan, head still down, nodded in agreement to her whispered commands. He had decided he needed to take a drive back out to Ledge Road and Flacker's place that evening, to catalogue the way the light fell as true night approached. He'd take the notebook, sketch a map of angles and instigations. Forget his original scheme. It was a fool's game. He could see that now. Flacker wouldn't chase him. But no mind, that afternoon, Bryan conceived of another, better plan as he realized a potential goldmine of explosives was right under his nose in the miner's shed. It was simply a matter of choosing his time and finding a way to distract Flacker. That would be the crucial move. He'd need to set more than one fire under the fellow, something Flacker couldn't ignore. He would need to distract Flacker into his undoing. And then there were the little Magnuson kids to consider.

The sound of Ursie's shuffling called up an image for Bryan: Flacker, the Nagle brothers, and a couple of fallers squabbling over a card game at The Landing, a fellow rushing out after the Nagles as they careened toward the car owned by that other fellow, the one with the accent. The faller who'd lost the most dared to follow the Nagles, bellowing complaints behind them that went unanswered (unless you could call hawking gobs of spit an answer) while Flacker sat there with his mean grin.

Don't look at
me,
he all but said. I ain't got your money.

He made a snarling point of pulling out his empty pockets for the others, upending a slim wallet, as if he'd just fallen to Earth, not a penny to his name. If a thread of friendship between Flacker and the Nagles had been evident to these new-to-town fallers, they might have stripped him, but Flacker had mightily pissed off GF in only the third hand, so that a well-used buck knife appeared beside him on the table and had gone on to threaten the foul-tempered Brit more than once. Why would anyone believe they were in cahoots?

But Bryan knew the Nagles and their nasty friend acted as Flacker's temporary bank. The thought descended upon him that intercepting Flacker's potential withdrawals, or more accurately, the Nagles' deliveries back to Flacker, might jumpstart some seriously good trouble, at the least create a little distracting traffic long enough for Bryan to do his own damage. Money knocked everyone off course.

No shit
,
Sherlock,
he heard his old friend Dean say as if he were crouched beside Bryan and Ursie in that hot kitchen.

His pen itched in his hand.

Just do it,
Hana Swann whispered, clear as could be from beside the screen door, causing Bryan's head to snap up. His eyes scanned the kitchen for her, catching only one out-of-place object, his father's letter.

Bryan had almost forgotten that letter, which remained unopened on the kitchen counter. Ursie, riveted by her cards, certainly had. But as he considered that square white envelope, his father's familiar hand, Bryan realized he didn't need to prize letter from envelope and decipher that scrawl to hear the hiss and spittle of that new, foreign greed of their father's. He could feel a corresponding heat rise within him, a heat not unlike the one Hana Swann engendered, and catching himself, suddenly felt like rejoicing. If a few unread lines on paper could steam him, here in the simple kitchen beside his sweet and steady sister, what might a single anonymous, incendiary note do to the bomb that was Flacker? A concerned observer, who had information—cheap information—that would reveal Flacker's enemies, reveal an angle that had eclipsed Flacker's notice. That alone, that lapse, might be enough to cause the violent row Bryan needed as distraction. He had a notebook. He had a pen. The sketches of a plan taking shape in neat lists. So simple. Even she'd have to admit that. He'd sell Flacker his own destruction.

Flacker, Bryan had discovered during his pot pickup and deliveries with the Nagles, ran a full-scale illegal substance enterprise. Not only did he make meth, he'd jerry-built a still from a couple of dirty pots and vile car radiator condensers to produce a searing moonshine he sold in cloudy milk jugs to kids from the reserve. The reserve had an alcohol ban in place, but no one really enforced it. Even so, the kids didn't have to go near town where they might be seen. Instead they'd carry their milk jugs into the woods or down by the old school or behind the defunct lumber train depot and drink until they were flat-out numb, even at times paralyzed. “Razed,” they said, as in,
“Oh, fawk me, I'm razed.”
Moonjuice, Wildwood Mash—these were refined compared with Flacker's home-burnt brew, which was just two steps away from antifreeze. It addled those kids, took away their sight and gave them endless gut pains that if they were lucky they could relieve by massive bouts of vomiting as they began to sober up. Give 'em a week (or even a couple of nights) to recover and back they'd go.

It's not that we're stupid, we all could tell you that. Screw that.

No, take any one of the kids from around here and set him down in a leafy city neighborhood with all the advantages and see what he can do. Guarantee you, you'd see right away the difference between your average coddled suburban kid and one with innate smarts. No, ignorance is not a choice here. But what else do they have? Most of the kids aren't getting away, and those who head up to Flacker's know the world conspired against their kind so long ago it's like they're at the bottom of a murky, shit-filled trench, and they might as well splash about until they drown as wait around for someone to outright crush them.

As soon as Ursie went to bed, Bryan put the truck in neutral, coasted out to the paved road, and drove back out to Flacker's place. It was not quite midnight and sitting in his truck below the old sawmill, he catalogued the stealthy parade of loping kids, customers all, heading up from Ledge Road. He could hear the dogs begin even before the kids started to navigate the speargrass up into Flacker's tin yard. Flacker would likely have a jug in hand by then. Maybe he'd even be sneaking up on the kids, ready to give them a little thrill with their razing, the sight of him with all the knives hanging off his belt, his scarred belligerent face suddenly visible in the eerie blink of dry lightning that could not land and scorch him. Oh, no. You want to talk crazy. Let's talk crazy. Or worse, maybe he'd send that Cassie Magnuson out, half-dressed in a T-shirt and thin panties, a jerry-built woman to match the still, shaking so much that bills would be fluttering from her stained hands and she'd have to search for them on the ground. They'd have to leave her like that, crawling and whimpering. They couldn't risk getting caught up in sympathy for her. No one knew what Flacker might do if he caught you down on the bare earth with his half-naked property.