A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (17 page)

“You know I have to,” he told me once I caught up to him.

And even though I'd disagreed mightily, I couldn't say a word. She was standing there again in front of us, holding out that white forearm with its trace of stolen blood that was, in actuality, a coursing river of a dare, and there was no turning away for Bryan. I could see that. Self-destructive though the path might be, it was the only one that made sense to him.

And it made no fucking sense at all.

What Bryan hadn't figured on in his initial plan, what he realized last night once he'd gone back, he said, was that getting rid of Flacker had to involve getting rid of the Flacker operation, not just the man himself.

“You're crazy,” I said.

“Be crazy not to,” he said.

A great wail of sirens began outside the Sub-Rite, even as overhead a bird-dog plane led what might already be a low-flying air tanker over the hills. Could the fire really be that close? If so, Bryan wasn't kidding; this fire was swift and serious. Perversely, I was pleased. No way he would try a stunt in the middle of a town emergency. A police cruiser inched past the lot. Bryan looked right past it. Even when the sirens began again, rippling across downtown, he didn't flinch. No one did but me, because clear as could be, I had heard another call.

“I need to go home,” I said. “Right away.”

Albie Porchier couldn't believe it. Broad daylight and they were brawling. Thanks to Christ the head logging boys had left at dawn to assess the eastern-ridge fire. But there were others to think of, weren't there? He cursed as he noticed the entertainer's van was no longer in the back lot. Had they already chased his newest regular away? Ursie had run to tell him. She had rolled her cart to the upper rooms and was cranking through each task at an even higher speed than usual, anticipating an early finish and the progress she'd exhibit for Keven Seven, when the first crash pierced her and she flew down to the office, leaving the door to Room 18 wide open, her vacuum cleaner fallen to one side.

“It's Room 11,” she said, rushing into the narrow lobby where Albie was training a new clerk, a thin-lipped white girl named Tracy.

Albie managed a quick glance at the computer over Tracy's shoulder. Even so, he couldn't quite believe his eyes. Vincent was a moron, but even he should have known better than to check in a Nagle brother. You had to steer that shit back out to the highway, out of town even a breath, toward the half-ruined chain motel that had obliviously sprung up in this wasteland of a town and immediately gone to seed with bedbugs and fleas, fire and water damage. A Nagle brother stood more chance of harming himself there than doing much more damage to the place. For all the Peak and Pine's failings, Albie
maintained
. He had a contract with the two lumber companies and an understanding with a few oil outfits as well. Bad enough the occasional drunken parking-lot brawl. He did not need the likes of a Nagle brother, the real promise of murder and mayhem and, hell, full-bore destruction.

“You two stay right here,” he told Ursie. “If I'm not back in four minutes, call the police, Tracy. And get in the back room there, and shut that door tight. Don't want them taking anything out on you if they see you in here on the phone.”

Tracy bolted straightaway, forgetting the phone and locking the door behind her.

“I'll be fine,” Ursie called after Tracy, who did not answer. Ursie grabbed the phone and crept to the front windows. And she would be fine too. She was as tall as a man, and although gangly with thin, broad shoulders, she could lift astonishing weights. Her endurance was mighty. Should a crazed Nagle brother burst through the office door, she decided, she'd nail him with the fire extinguisher.

Still, she intended to do as she was told in this much-needed job and would have if she hadn't stuck her head out the door and glimpsed a single red sneaker in the corridor not far from Room 11's door. It looked familiar. Along the sneaker's side were loopy black marks that looked a lot like the autographs she and Jackie had provided one bored evening at Tessa's request. That girl believed in the strangest things, like that if she had Ursie's and Jackie's handwriting on her shoes, their very names, she'd hold them close to her and keep them both safe. She would always be able to sense where they were, no matter what, and they'd always know how to find her, too. She'd made them spit onto their hands before they signed as if they were eight-year-olds making a pact to never kiss a boy.

Crazy, yeah, but who knew? Tessa was as serious about her beliefs as some of the elders were about the old stories they told. Ursie squinted and could just make out a splotch of yellow paint just like the one Tessa's nightmare nephew had splattered on her shoes the day proud Tessa first wore them home.

Ignoring Albie's scowl, she ran lightly behind him to snatch up the little red shoe he hadn't noticed.

“Ursula,” he growled, and she flew back to the office with the shoe, which she knew for sure now was Tessa's. There were her own initials
UMN
—Ursula Marie Nowicki—right next to Jackie's tortured scrawl—
Jackie Lisa-Ann Morey—Queen of the Forest.

A man's voice boomed. Albie's voice slapped back, a little bee. Another man let out a high-pitched howl, and Ursie picked up the fire extinguisher, readying herself. But now the men were leaving with more shouting and fists banging. Someone kicked a metal wastebasket down the corridor. Rolling along the concrete walk, the bin ratcheted like rounds from a rifle. Another shoe—not Tessa's—flew by the window of the office. Car doors slammed, an engine screeched, and Albie, white-faced and sweating, returned to the office.

“Did you call?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Well, they're gone, but they did their damage. Broken glass all over the carpet. Mattress slit open with a knife. You ever wonder why God made guns, Ursula, you have your answer right there. One of 'em had his arm in a cast and he was still whaling at the other. No point in calling the police now. I'd just have them back later tonight taking revenge.”

He noticed the shoe in Ursie's hand and couldn't help chastising her.

“You've got to be careful around here, girl. I know you thought you were helping by grabbing that, but you should have waited until they left to tidy up. There's tons to do, no worries there. Once Madeline gets here, let her take over the laundry cart. And you vacuum up the glass in there. That's about all you can do right now. I won't have a chance to get more spackle until the idiot Vincent comes in this afternoon. I'm pretty sure I've got another door lock in the supply closet. At least the hinges are still intact.”

“I'll go right away,” Ursie said.

She had to control herself to keep from running. Her hand shook as she entered Room 11, and she had hardly absorbed the breadth of damage—the broken metal chair leg on the shredded mattress decorated with shattered glass and fresh bloodstains—when she became aware of a slight huffing noise and turned to see the edge of another red sneaker protruding from beneath the bed.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” she whispered as she shut the door to the room and lifted the bedspread to see Tessa, eyes wide, half-trapped beneath the broken bedsprings and a slat of wood that had been sheared in two by the weight of GF Nagle.

“Hold on, just hold on,” Ursie crooned. As slowly as she could, she raised the corners of the bedclothes and swept the broken glass toward its center, then swept it away in one contained bundle before swooping down with one massive surge and lifting first the mattress, then the broken box spring up on end, and shoving both against the washroom door, exposing finally her poor shattered friend.

Ursie's heart was lurching with all kinds of pain, but it wasn't until she saw Tessa's damaged cheek, the bloom of bruises, the dangling bandages, that Ursie too began to cry.

“Tessa,” she wept. “Oh, Tessa, what have they done to you?”

The broken slat had left a long scrape across Tessa's forearm, but it wasn't bleeding. One hand was bent into a fist. The other was bandaged and cocked at an odd angle.

There was no way to reach Bryan, who, Ursie knew, was already out on his scavenging run. She knew that if she called the Kreutzer house, Leo would race to the P&P barefoot over glass, but without a car and a way to get Tessa out, he was of little use to her. And she didn't want to call Tessa's home, not until she knew what had happened, how Tessa had come to be here at the P&P, under the bed in a room rented by one Nagle brother and assailed by another. For all Ursie knew, Tessa's sister could have engineered the encounter, set her up as surely as she kept Tessa captive through her worry for those kids, her fear her sister would leave them and they'd be sent away to foster care just as Tessa had been. Tessa would kill herself first, and her sister knew it. No, Ursie didn't trust that sister. But if she could just get Tessa home to her house—hers and Bryan's—she could clean her up and let her rest and wait to hear the truth.

Albie had gone into the office, but it wouldn't be long before he'd return with his toolbox, ready to piece the room back together. Ursie didn't have a lot of options. He'd blame Tessa as much as the Nagles. Gently, she gathered Tessa into her arms, feeling her friend's brittleness, that unfamiliar surrender. The girl couldn't even talk.

“C'mon, Tessa,” she whispered. “I'll get you steady.”

Down the hall, Ursie knocked lightly on Room 14's door, Tessa leaning hard against her. When he didn't answer, she unlocked the door and eased Tessa inside. She would put Tessa back into the bed still likely warm from Keven Seven, who as usual had left the room as neat as could be. The bed bore only a suggestion of a human shape outlined on the cheap bedspread. Tessa struggled to keep her eyes open, but Ursie shushed her.

“It's okay,” she said. “I'll be right back.”

Upstairs, she reclaimed the vacuum, packed up her cart, and trundled the whole shebang downstairs again. Never mind that she had twelve rooms yet to do and most of them beyond wrecks. In Room 14, Ursie wrote a note to Keven Seven, the briefest of explanations. He might not, she realized, even return until after lunch. That was when she'd promised to meet him, in that hour before Bryan was due. And her auntie, Madeline, was scheduled to work this morning. She was late, and Ursie had already been covering for her. Once her auntie showed up, Ursie could make a deal: she'd finish the rooms if Madeline would drive Tessa to Ursie and Bryan's. Ursie relaxed as she unfolded a plan. Poor Tessa. Curled into herself, she'd plunged into something resembling sleep. Ursie finished her note and crept from the room, closing the door as carefully, satisfied that, for the moment at least, Tessa was completely safe.

The highway: pretty and peaceful and lonely as hell in the crackled light before dawn. Two girls on the shoulder, the tall one propelled forward as if she can by her own considerable force cover the long miles to the next town. The other girl—her white, white skin glowing—strolls. She could be anywhere. See how she dawdles, stopping to tie and retie her shoes, to gaze toward the heavy, hidden horizon or into the endless black woods beside them. The shadowed shapes of black bears might lumber across the highway ahead of them, behind them. They don't worry the girls. Bears won't linger. The bears dislike the highway almost as much as the big girl does. A raven wakes as they pass and, pissed at the smoky air, blames them. The second girl, the meanderer, taunts back. Wait here, she tells her friend, and chases the raven into the blind woods. When she doesn't return, the first girl goes looking. She calls and calls. She beats past brush and bushes and spindly trees until only the sound of a truck rushing the highway lets her know she hasn't fallen off the face of the earth. She finds her way back to the shoulder, where she is sure her friend must be waiting for her. Finally, alone, she presses forward. She'll walk all day if she must—and
she must, she must—
under that soiled sheet of a sky that refuses to pull away, refuses to give her a chance to take one good sweet, lasting breath.

• • •

Need a lift?

He drives a big red truck, a silver step-van with blacked-out windows, a foreign shit-can, mustard-colored, with a banged-up right rear fender and no backseat or inner door handles. Who but the driver needs one anyway? A practiced motorist, he carries chains and sand and meters of rope and duct tape and quick-ties and syringes and rags soaked in ether and, well, God knows what are in the plastic containers behind his seat. The weather can change at any moment, can't it? The fellow's generosity has no bounds. He brakes for every hitchhiker and stranded motorist. Hell, he even picks up those who are merely shouldering their way home, head down, purposefully oblivious to the slowing, ticking engine behind them. Persuasion is both a subtle art and a clear show of advantages, isn't it? No one is faster or stronger or more strung out, and who else can lift a full-grown woman by the back of her neck as if she were just one of a dozen spitting kittens ready for drowning?

For the first time in my memory, my mother's cousin looked genuinely glad to see me. My mother had left an hour earlier and, given Uncle Lud's condition, Trudy had stayed on, waiting for me.

“Yeah,” she said. That was all. And it wasn't until after Bryan's truck rattled off with Trudy tailgating down Lamplight Hill, that I realized we'd talked the way Uncle Lud and I often did, a whole conversation played out before we'd opened our mouths.

I heard the sirens. I know you have to go. I'll be here with him.

“Yeah,” she'd said, but what I heard was:

I know
.
I'll be back soon, soon. Don't you let him go without us.

Given the circumstances, there was no telling when my mother would return. All the shelter animals would have to be crated and trucked away if the fire moved west. Hannibal would be all for dispatching them instead, but my mother wouldn't listen to that kind of talk, I felt sure. Yet, though she would make Hannibal wait until the last possible moment until they put the shelter on the move, much had to be made ready. If it hadn't been for Uncle Lud, my mother would have expected me there as well, chipping in where I could.

And then there was Bryan. He needed me too, if only to steer him clear of whatever trouble he was thundering toward with his Sub-Rite sacks and his splintered rage at Flacker.

Meanwhile, Uncle Lud, ash-colored, slept on, and I kept an aimless kind of watch. He'd been sleeping, Trudy said, since she'd arrived early that morning. There'd been no drinking of the magic milkshake she'd prepared, not much bathing, either, although I imagined my mother hadn't skipped the whispered prayers. Was it only yesterday Uncle Lud and I had sat and talked together? My mother had told Trudy that her priest said Uncle Lud was traveling in a dark wood, and I knew she was thinking of a wood far different from the ones that ringed us, those hills lashed this moment with the flames that heralded their own demise. Neither was she imagining her priest's version: Uncle Lud eventually lifted free of that gloomy forest into the brilliant light of the Lord's embrace. No, my mother's wood, the one in which Uncle Lud had gone missing, was an impenetrable forest of thorny thickets, a maze of paths he might wander in until at last the right one appeared, the one that would lead him straight back to us.

He did not wake either when I went in to see him. I put my ear beside his narrow chest and heard only the lightest wheeze in and out, not much more. I sniffed around and was relieved at first to smell nothing more than the lanolin cream my mother liked to rub across Uncle Lud's dry knuckles. Then I caught another slight but familiar odor.

A few weeks ago, a fetid smell, an itchy stink, had seeped into our house, landing specifically in Uncle Lud's room. It was not unlike the stench in the back shed when the spring rats overtook it and made nests in the walls. My mother marched around the house, poking a stick at the foundation, looking for weak spots. She'd prodded me into crawling into the basement corners while she held a flashlight and her stick. She ignored her long-standing worries about the dogs and laid down poison and sprayed Sub-Rite's version of Febreze willy-nilly—at the floors, the ceiling, the windows, the back of my head. It seemed as if the smell shifted from spot to spot, as though it hoped to hover out of our reach until we lost interest.

We attributed it next to the dogs, my mother sweeping poor Norbee out of the kitchen and into the yard as if he were dirt in a dustpan. But the smell didn't go away. She scoured the washrooms, scalded the linens. She steeped sweet-smelling herbs in a washbasin and sponged Uncle Lud from head to toe. For a while, she blamed his pain medication, which had been increased, but the truth was, the stench wasn't rising off Uncle Lud, who through everything had retained a familiar warm, earthy scent that I fancied was the smell of the farm where he and my father had grown up. Finally, one day not long ago, as she sniffed painfully around his room, my mother bent to the windowsill, where a thin line of soot was clearly visible.

She turned grim. She swept the sill. Cleaned it with bleach. Then she burnt sage and sweetgrass until she'd got her message across. Only then did the smell retreat. It had all but vanished for days, but now, apparently, that demon scent was back again, waiting in the folds of particle-laden air drifting townward from the forest fires.

Uncle Lud didn't stir at all, not even when I transferred the baby monitor Trudy used during the morning to his silent pillow and switched it on, adjusting its static-laded volume before moving on to my own electronic monitor: Leila Chen.

If I could have asked Uncle Lud, he might have counseled that I start anew with Leila Chen, but I would bet that, more likely, Uncle Lud would fall himself into a correspondence with her, one that sidestepped calculus and hurtled right into atomic radiance. The file was open on my desktop, but even as I stared at the screen, I balked and resolved again to tell my mother the truth that day. Yet along with the arrival of a creeping sense of relief came that familiar ding—another e-mail from Leila Chen—and dread returned.

Dear
Leo Kreutzer, Student ID# 889355,

Professor Blankenship suggests I check in with you to ascertain your receipt of my previous email, which I apparently failed to cc him upon and will not do so now, since it is a “private communication” between teacher and student. Is it not? Dr. Blankenship trusts me implicitly, understand, yet certain “procedural assurances” must be produced, such as copies and replies and academic follow-throughouts.

You may note I have not cc'd Professor Blankenship on this email either. This is because upon re-reading my previous missive, I see I was perhaps too harsh to you. Physics is a difficult science and not for everyone, despite the preponderance of links to spiritual endeavors and the like that promise a connection between a zen-like peace, abundance, and the “Theory of Relativity in Everyday Activities.” Objects do not have souls, I assure you,
Leo Kreutzer.
Nor do particles have a symbiotic electrical relationship with brain waves or aliens or spirit guides. Time travel is not optional at the moment. These are popular myths that might have seduced someone like you,
Leo Kreutzer,
into pursuing the science. As per our last exchange, I can assure you other fields will lead you to romance and myth far more expeditiously should that be your final goal. As mentioned, I myself have endeavoured forms of poetry and find they satisfy that requirement, albeit imperfectly. You, too, I did conclude, might pursue a more direct course if such is your goal.

On secondary thought, what has become clear to me re your efforts is that you do understand one fundamental:
interweaving patterns of energy,
for true connections really, as the renowned Leonard Cohen may once have written. In second sight, I applaud you for this realizing, which many students never achieve, despite the obvious rote-work of problem-solving. You are coming in a back door, I now perceive. You may be familiar with the legendary Leonard Cohen's Stranger—you certainly now seem to me to at least know he exists. (Do I see a
pattern
here?) Yet curiously you did not mention Leonard Cohen's masterful lyric or the Stranger when you started this course. Still I sense the Stranger's impending escape attempt upon your part. The insightful Leonard Cohen might say you are waiting for the High Card, and
Leo Kreutzer,
with the most esteemed Mr. Cohen in mind, I find respect there. And although Professor Blankenship worries for my dwindling enrollment numbers and your reluctance, I am growing converted to your beliefs,
Leo Kreutzer,
and can only encourage you once more to begin again in your own Stranger ways and learn from top to bottom, from inside to out—with mathematics (of course).

Imperatively and simplistically, I commend the basic tenets to you (taken from
Section 1A
) for your immediate review:

Newton's Three Laws of Motion

1. Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

2. The acceleration produced by a particular force acting on a body is directly proportional to the magnitude of the force and inversely proportional to the mass of the body.

3. To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal and directed in contrary parts.

Begin and end with these,
Leo Kreutzer
. Perhaps you will find more of the patterns here and your path inward even as you problem-solve
Sections 1–4
. Perhaps not.

With sincerity,
Leila Chen

For the first time in weeks, I laughed aloud, long and hard, forgetting about Uncle Lud's rest, my mother's looming disappointment. So that was what I believed in: patterns of energy—
patterns
. One line intersecting and influencing another. My laughter was joined by the sudden crackling of the baby monitor, a rise in static that came and went so swiftly I might have imagined it. And despite my best intentions, even as my hand began scribbling down that primer of Energy and Mass, I paused, wondering what Uncle Lud would make of that first section's heading:

Lesson One: The Measurement of Space.

Measuring space, I decided, would be like beating Flacker, an incomprehensible task that not even math could truly solve. Physics, I decided, was fantasy, pure and simple.