A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (2 page)

Uncle Lud says she's been around a very long time. You might say she owns these hills as much as anyone. Legends have been written and children warned about how she burrows under the skin, crawls into your heart, lounges behind your eyes so that all you can see is the broken end ahead and . . . it looks . . . so
pleasant
at first. So you take a step forward. One little step, that's all. And for the first time, you see a clear path. It's all lit up like fireworks, like a heaven's gate, and you can't stop thinking about it. The earth seems to pulse beneath your feet. A wind wraps around you, tugging and pushing. You can't pull away. First, you imagine it's her you want. Her image seeps inside so that you can barely breathe. Oh, but take another step . . . and another and soon you'll see it's all you. It's all about you! And, bless her, she's shown you the way to your heart's true desire.

And you hear,
How brave I am, how strong I'll be
, as your feet stumble toward the cliff ahead.

That summer, Jackie was working in the logging camp's dining hall, a bunch of killer shifts. Her only break was right after breakfast was cleaned up and almost the whole crew went out on the crummies until supper. She would catch a ride to the turn-off, where we'd be waiting with Bryan's truck.

A big, tough-looking girl, taller than any of us, even Bryan, whose shoulders were as broad as some of the loggers, Jackie was also surprisingly nimble, although after she started working at the camp and she'd hike the short trail from the turn-off to meet us, you could tell that, big and strong as she was, she was beat when she arrived, rubbing her lower back and cracking her neck. By the time Jackie arrived on those mornings, she was already sweaty, stinking of sour milk and old gravy, even her big arms shaking a little from fatigue.

Sweet, though—the sweetest girl ever. She was always squirreling away food at the camp for Bryan and Ursie, who'd been on their own since their father went up north to the pipeline, and for kids like the Magnusons. The Magnusons' crazy mum had taken those tiny babies to live with Gerald Flacker, who seemed hell-bent on starving the bunch to death. Talk about the devil. He'd already slipped Gerald Flacker into his pocket.

Those mornings, Jackie wrapped cold fried potatoes or bits of greasy meat in paper toweling and if anyone was looking, she'd make out like she was throwing out the garbage, but she'd slip the towels into the plastic bags that lined her deep pockets instead. There wasn't an outright rule about stealing food, but the thing was, the fallers ate everything you put out—a startling quantity, outright tonnage—so anything you held back . . . well, let's just say that nothing was about to go to waste, not even the crusts tucked into her pockets. Jackie would pass her bags on to Bryan at the refuse station, and he'd drive them back into town in time for the Magnuson kids' lunch that day, he and Ursie snacking a little if it had been a while.

Bryan must have appeared like something out of a fairy tale to those kids, a gawky giant in threadbare clothes of his own, his big boots split from wear, a queer hitch in his step. They must have glimpsed him from time to time, hovering on the other side of Flacker's metal hell pile, the flash off the plastic bags he carried in his deep coverall pockets giving him away. If Gerald Flacker wasn't around, Bryan would leave a bag under a rusted fender and hope the kids got to it before Flacker's dogs, who didn't have it so good themselves. My mother, who worked up at the animal shelter, was always after snatching those thin-flanked dogs (so skinny they walked sideways as if tiptoeing toward you) the way Jackie and Bryan wanted to rescue the Magnuson kids. Flacker took delight in keeping his hounds pretty hungry too. A mean-boned man. All of us had a few of those in mind when we took aim those mornings at the dump. Revenge, resentment—a kind of low-level heat that burned constantly within us, tamped down by the silence we knew would be our only protection until we couldn't stand it anymore and the flames burst through. We had seen that happen to others and wondered when it would happen to us, break us wide open so that we would be set free or singed beyond repair.

Jackie would be the first, the rest of us were sure. She was tough and stoic, but beneath it, her sense of fairness was acute, and her pain at every injustice became harder and harder to hide. We could see it in her rising color, her even more pronounced silence when men unrolled their car windows to spit out a few words about what “a big fucking squaw” could do for them. She'd beat up more than a few who had naïvely thought they could slap around her sisters or hurl insults toward her mother and aunts as they walked to the market. The law knew Jackie's address by heart. Warnings had been issued with at least one officer leaning in too closely to make his own declaration, his own deal, a few moments on her knees to buy her way out of trouble. Lucky man, that fellow. Jackie's BaBa arrived in time, his sorrowful, proud eyes holding Jackie tight enough so that she could breathe again.

At the camp, no one was going to discipline Jackie if she whaled on a fellow who tried to touch her or anyone else, and not one of those tough guys wanted to be laid out cold by Jackie, so they let her be. The work wilted everyone, anyway. Half of 'em were always sleeping on their feet the first few weeks, their necks burned by the hot fuel dripping off the chainsaws they carried against their shoulders. They didn't come fully awake even during their time off, when they'd head down the mountainside to get drunk and try to remember how they'd ended up here. A few flat-out disappeared and were replaced almost overnight by one of the continuous train of strangers coming through, every now and then bearing a surprise so startling it seemed lives would change forever. A surprise like Hana Swann.

They were barely into the first week of July when the French camp cook got into a screaming match with the longhaired kid who was Jackie's co-worker, a hitchhiker one of the fallers had brought up to the camp. Almost from the first, the cook had refused to even use the kid's name—he despised him on sight, apparently—pummeling him instead with every insulting term he could. The screaming match that day, a particularly virulent one, disintegrated into a shoving contest (which was no contest at all, the camp cook being two hundred pounds of crazed Québécois fury), and the kid, whom the cook called the
niaiseux
or
plotte—
obscene terms that meant something akin to “nanny-goat pussy”—ended up with a broken wrist and spent half a morning weeping in pain before someone could spare the time to drive him down to the clinic.

Crisse de cave
, the cook spat in the kid's direction when the longhaired boy finally wobbled out the door, his thin arms slung around a faller's scarred shoulder.

Great move, Jackie told us, via Glenn Closby, who drove one of the supply trucks.

They're in for it now, Glenn said, until they get another pair of hands.

And the cook and Jackie did struggle mightily through two rough days before they shanghaied a bush bunny from a sunken trailer down the hill to wash dishes. He was nearly as crazy as the cook, though, and it was another full week before real help was found.

Like Jackie and the kid, that newcomer, a young woman named Hana Swann, was hired to do the grunt work, to peel endless piles of potatoes, chop mountains of onions, and blister in front of those massive stainless-steel stoves. Jackie was ready for anything that resembled relief by then. Even so, her first reaction when she glimpsed Hana Swann was to snort. Little girl like that at the camp. Give me a fucking break! Minutes later, she watched Hana Swann beating batter in a bowl with a clean impressive fury and decided maybe Hana would last the morning after all. A few hours later, that “little girl” was still easily hoisting heavy pots of oatmeal and urns of coffee, weights that had made the longhaired kid grunt, and Jackie began to feel the shifting. Hana was a worker, all right, despite the looks.

When the men came in early that morning, the dark just lifting, a hush descended, but not the usual thunderous vacuum of men intent upon their food. Jackie was too distracted at first to register the change until the quiet was broken with self-conscious chatter that was equally strange, like a foreign music she didn't recognize, and she and the cook glanced at each other. He shrugged, but like the fallers, Jackie was now openmouthed, marveling at the grace of the new girl, who stopped them all cold. Then Jackie couldn't peel her eyes away. The coffee ran low, a criminal act and all Jackie's doing. With that, one faller reclaimed his bellow and complained. Eventually, the cook woke her, threatening more than a swat of a spoon:
Lâche pas la patate!

But the cook, too, could not imagine who had hired this fragile-looking girl. He intensified his hollering, embellishing his usual insults and orders, only to discover that the new girl was always a step ahead of him and not at all perturbed by his bad humor.

All that first morning, as Hana peeled and chopped and stirred and scrubbed, Jackie longed to pinch her, to see whether that white, white skin would pinken or, as Jackie suspected, remain unscathed. Her desire was so great that by the time they themselves sat down to eat, Jackie had been stricken dumb.

Kitchen work is back-wrenching labor. Too hard for most. Jackie began to wonder if Hana was for real, if they were dreaming her into being. When the breakfast was over, Jackie was relieved to see Hana pull off the blue kerchief she'd wound around her hair and wipe invisible lines of perspiration off her forehead and the back of her neck.

It fell to Jackie to show Hana where she'd sleep, in a metal shack like those for fallers but considerably more cramped, (“the tin bin,” Jackie called it), an arm's length away from Jackie. Hana stowed her gear, a single filthy yellow duffle, leaving it without a second glance as if its loss would mean nothing to her. Jackie wanted to ask so much that she couldn't ask anything, could only wait hopelessly for Hana to tell her tale.

Almost everybody who shows up here has a story, usually embellished and smoothed out. That's one big difference right off between those who arrive and those who live here. Our own stories were unedited—sprawling and unpretty—and nothing could clip and shape and redefine them as long as we stayed here. As long as we were alive. In fact, our stories started out messy, our families telling tales on us as mere infants, cataloging all our peculiarities in the womb and pinning them on us as soon as we arrived so that even our good points became barbs, jabbed back at us whenever we got in the way. In a place like this, the stories circulate over and over and grow flatter with each pass, and it's no wonder townies got hungry for new ones, ones with more drama, which more or less explains our behavior. No one wants bad news, but it's something to tell.

The stories were about all we did like about new people, who were either awestruck or blind or rude or plain damaged, hell-bent on trashing whatever they could get their hands on all the while pretending they were here to help. And, sadly, the most interesting-looking newcomers weren't much inclined to share their stories—not the real ones, at least. All Hana Swann would say is that she'd heard of the job in town, after breaking up with the boyfriend with whom she'd been traveling. Before long, we wanted to see that asshole boyfriend, who was probably just sobering up to what he'd lost. I wondered if he'd become one of those men Uncle Lud claimed to know, who having experienced a vision, haunts the highway hour after hour, hopelessly longing for its return.

We hadn't heard about Hana Swann from Jackie, but from Ursie, whose auntie could not stop talking about the girl she'd seen leaning beside Peak and Pine Motel's coffee machine talking to the camp manager. You'd think Rose Prince, saint of the Carrier Nation, had returned to Earth, Ursie said, the way everyone at the motel had gone on about her. One fellow crashed his car into a brick wall on Seventh Street after a brief encounter with her, they said. He was so overcome. Even Albie Porchier, the motel owner, had reportedly gone into cheerful spasms of terrible courtliness at the sight of her, opening doors and whipping off his cap. And, too, we soon heard how when the French cook sliced his hand in the middle of one of his rants, Hana had not only swooped in with the first-aid kit, she'd conjured up a foul-smelling poultice and bound the wound with poplar bark so the wound had closed tight by midday. The cook's heart had raced so fast, he said, he felt he'd have to stab himself to slow it down. He'd nearly done that, would have, but Jackie grabbed the knife off him. Might have been the result of the herbs, sure, or might have just been the sight of his rough, blood-soaked hand in her unmarked palm that set his heart to racing. Still, the poultice had done its job.

“She knows the plants, then, eh?” we said. “She must be from around here.”

But clearly she wasn't. She would have been a legend if she had been. Or, at the very least, we thought, we would have known her weak spot. That's how dumb we were.

Once Jackie made it back up to the refuse station, she was quiet while we conjectured, as if for once she didn't want to share. We asked her if she thought Hana Swann was a saint like Rose Prince, and she only made a guffawing sound. Bryan asked her if she thought the French cook was fucking Hana Swann yet, and Jackie didn't say a word, just frowned, and shot two rats in rapid succession. Bryan wanted a real description. How tall? he asked, how big? His hands curled in front of his own chest. I said maybe it would be better to drive up there in Bryan's truck and wait until the crummies left, then go see for ourselves.

Jackie said, “I'll bring her.”

So we waited.

A week later, and there was Jackie, coming down the old road with Hana Swann.

You hear about celebrities, how they have this kind of glow, this presence that makes everyone hush or grin, pawing the ground in front of them. Hana Swann was maybe twenty-four, tall and lean, with a fall of black hair we all recognized and eyes a shade of turquoise we'd only seen up in the high mountain lakes. We did not truly believe people came in her variety. Pretty? Was she pretty? Who knew? Her skin, that particular shade of white, was unknown to us and maybe even a little strange. She was an unblemished person, and while we all had wanted to believe such people existed in far-off cities where people can live in pristine white rooms, cushioned by fluffed-up carpets and overstuffed silky furniture, up here such a person was a fantastic notion. It was hard to imagine not being riddled by bite marks from mosquitoes, swollen eyes from black flies, bruises from a sudden fall or the back of metal spoon, or burns, gashes, old scars, hickeys, peeling skin, sprawling rashes, the raw, burning edges of a nose that wouldn't stop running.

Hana Swann had none of these. Not even a freckle. I finally saw why the cook had taken one look and dubbed her “Snow White.”

“Hey.” She smiled, with tiny pearl teeth that transfixed us.