A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (9 page)

Turn around, turn around.

Hey, Leo. Leo Smartass,
Bryan was hissing through the screen window behind me,
turn around, you
.

“Here's the thing,” Bryan declared. “We make him disappear.”

I wasn't in the mood to conspire, but Bryan didn't seem to notice. He pulled a chair up beside the desk and began to hover in a way that reminded me of my mother, of an assignment on the way.

“If one girl after another can vanish off the highway without a trace, then why can't the same happen to that fucker?” Bryan said.

“No one knows what's going on with the girls,” I said.

Bryan scowled.
“We know,”
he said.

“Here's what I'm thinking,” Bryan said. “He has an accident. Let's say his truck skids off Ledge Road—who would find it?”

If Flacker's policeman cousin Mitchell went looking, even if he called out the entire force and sent out the kind of search parties they'd never mustered for the girls, by the time they hit Ledge Road, Bryan said, a “Good Samaritan” might have cleaned up the edge that Flacker's truck had vaulted so that no sign of its slide would be immediately visible.

“They'd need a helicopter. Even Mitchell Flacker doesn't have that.”

Days would pass before a more thorough examination would be launched. Meanwhile, Gerald Flacker would certainly have expired, if not from the impact, from the same dastardly care he gave to the Magnuson kids: he'd starve, pinned in the wreckage.

Bryan hadn't worked out all the details, but the gist of this first plan had been that he'd inspire Flacker to give chase on Ledge Road, barreling directly into a trap that they would set and that Bryan would know to avoid.

“How?” I asked.

“We'll steal from him. His drugs. His tools. Maybe even his dogs.”

“His dogs?”

In spite of myself, I began to imagine the problem in terms Leila Chen might applaud.
If a truck going 40 miles an hour on a narrow mountain road . . .
Almost immediately, however, I was overtaken with my usual issue regarding vector quantities. Direction I could maybe guess, but who could quantify Flacker's rage or Flacker's meanness or this new, near-suicidal determination of Bryan's? Pure magnitude I would call that, and so, I'd guess, a scalar quantity only. And if—as Bryan sketched out this plan—I was along for the ride, would my innate reluctance, my tendency toward inertia and backward movements, deter Bryan's Acceleration? And what about the Force of Desire? Whose would be greater—Bryan's? Flacker's? Or my own hopeless will to stay alive long enough to woo Tessa?

While Bryan yammered on, I made up equations, all variants of
F = ma,
a fundamental that tumbled around in my head continually and never quite made sense.

“Your truck won't make the curve,” I finally declared with no real evidence at all.

“Well,” Bryan said as he watched my pencil dart around aimlessly on the notebook page, “all right, it might not be the best plan . . .”

“Yes,” I agreed. “You're crazy. It's suicide.”

Another thought came to me. “Who gave you this idea?”

“It may not be exactly right, but it's something, isn't it?” Bryan continued, his eyes sparking. “It's beautiful, you know. Turnabout is fair play. We finally
do something,
you know?”

“Leo,” Bryan went on, “how much can Flacker destroy before someone strikes back?”

Turnabout. Something about the phrase and Bryan's jumpiness, like a spring under pressure, jolted me. My progress through Leila Chen's assignments might have been stuck, but in those early weeks of summer, I'd wandered through the physics course from back to front, reading pieces and scoffing at story problems I'd never halfway decipher, let alone master, and stopping whenever a real story seemed to appear. Now I found myself remembering a lesson—or at least my interpretation of a lesson—about something called Hooke's law, about Stress and Strain and proportional elasticity.

Tit for tat, I thought. Turnabout.

A look of semi-understanding must have crossed my face, because Bryan glowed as surely as if I'd jumped up and agreed to shoot Flacker myself.

“You see?” he almost shouted. “You see?”

“You can't knock him off a cliff,” I said. “Or poison him. He's too damn mean. And whatever you did, you'd have to arrange it so you'd be far away at the time. Plan it to the second, so that no one could connect you.”

“Okay.” Bryan leaned forward, listening.

Displacement, as far as I understood, describes the length of an imaginary path—a description that still strikes me as funny and apt and also completely nonsensical, because how can you measure a route that doesn't yet exist, and wouldn't you have to know for sure where it was you started from? Displacement wasn't only the measurement of that imagined journey, I'd read, it also was a relative point in space. That didn't help me much. One thing I did understand, or thought I did, was this part of Hooke's law: If you placed Weight on a spring, the measurement and relative position of that imagined path would be proportional to the Stress and Strain of that Weight. It occurred to me that if the pressure building in Bryan finally landed on Flacker, just like that Weight on a spring, Flacker might be blasted to the other side of the moon.

“And you'd have to annihilate him,” I found myself saying, “otherwise he'd be coming after you. And then there's the Nagles and that Brit. They'll come after you for sure.”

Because that was the other part of Hooke's law: Restoration. All that Stress and Strain would be matched and returned, flinging itself right back at Bryan, a hard kind of justice.

Imagine a pendulum in the bottom of a clock, swinging from side to side, every bit of Displacement ultimately Restored. Hooke's law didn't apply to every material or situation, but it seemed to me now to perfectly describe Tessa and me, that constant movement between us, away and back, away and back. I fucking hated Hooke's law, I realized, and the way it was ruling my life.

“Sure,” Bryan was agreeing. “It would have to be all of them.” He was grinning now.

So, imagine, I thought, Bryan sending Flacker and the Nagles into a nether region and then, whoops, the whole bunch slamming back to Earth, meaner than ever.

Figure that one out, genius.

“No, no, no. Not happening, Bry,” I concluded, coming back to myself. “It'll be the end of the world before those fellows go down. Fire and brimstone and all that shit. No one can calculate past that.”

But Bryan was still nodding as if we were both signing on to a plan.

“You're right,” he said. “It would have to be complete destruction.”

He was in his own hot daze, staring out the open window he'd crawled through as if the world had suddenly become brilliant with possibility. I glanced out with him, but all I saw was the old shed where my father kept his tools and unused fertilizer, his miner's paraphernalia, all the trappings of a man who once imagined he had a life here. The Old Miner's Shed, my mother and I called it, as if it were an actual historical relic. I sometimes dreamed I could spirit Tessa there, that we could hide away in that shack for hours at a time, where no one—not my mother nor that raucous, needy crowd at Tessa's house—would find us. For a long moment, the shed and its possibilities mesmerized me again. By the time I turned back to Bryan, his excitement had hardened into purpose.

“You got another one of those?” he asked, motioning toward the notebook.

In the living room, Uncle Lud began coughing.

“Hey, hey, it's story time again,” Bryan said as I got to my feet. “See if your uncle's got a good one about how to get a girl, huh?”

“You still picking up Ursie?” I said, glancing at the clock by my bed.

“Ah, shit,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “Is that clock right?”

“Hey, listen,” I said. I wanted to talk him out of whatever new scheme he was hatching, but even as I began, whatever argument I'd had in mind fell away, a peculiar lassitude sliding over me.

Let him go,
a voice inside me said.
Look how happy he is.
It was true. I hadn't seen Bryan so directed since before his mother got sick, so instead of arguing with him about Flacker or Tessa or even Uncle Lud, I only shook my head and handed him a fresh notebook from the pile of new notebooks my mother added to continually.

“Is that blood?” Bryan said, pausing to swipe at a mark I'd left on the new notebook. He didn't wait around for an answer. He was already levitating back out the window, plunging into the afternoon glare with a new dark radiance, clutching the notebook in hand as if he intended to fill it with his own peculiar equations, ones that would incinerate all notions of relative elasticity and relegate Flacker and the Nagles to an underworld all their own.

The stories of the dying have nothing to do with dying. They are all about past adventure. An inexpert listener might think the dying man is holding on to the hem of life, desperate to feel its weight and value, to make a kind of peace before moving onward. But the truth is, the dying man is opening a door for the living. You have to find out
how
to live; that's his parting advice.

See, he says. Look. Can You Hear Me? Hey, I'm dying over here.

A few years back, my dad was inspecting a tailings pond and a load of debris fell off a partially raised backhoe, knocking him about and half crushing a vital organ or two, and in the hospital, after one complication after another and the infection to boot, the staff made ready to summon a white-collared professional to prepare him for the worst and in sober almost meaningful tones, they asked us: “What is his religion? What does he believe in?”

I had felt a moment of panic, sure my dad was about to fail a crucial test, one that would make his survival impossible, but neither my mother nor Uncle Lud hesitated.

“Science,” they both said, almost at once. “He believes in science.”

Well, that pissed them all off, didn't it? The hospital social worker with her glossy brochures and clipboard and dozen clergymen on call, that brisk nurse with her not-too-subtle silver cross stud earrings—the pair of them disgusted with this family. Only the doctor managed a twitch of satisfaction, and his smug smile soon tinged with anxiety because now, for certain, he was on the hook, no higher power hovering in the wings to assume the blame my father—and presumably our family, as well—would certainly ascribe to the only scientist at hand.

But of course, my mother didn't share my father's true confidence in science, save as a means to my personal achievement. Instead, she believed in grand myths of the kind governed by multiple sets of arbitrary and often unsaid rules. Her Earth erupted from a fiery birth, and both life and death must involve a long passage, through mountain trails and wild river rapids. The elders around here loved her.

My mother parceled out her faith, also giving another portion to the Church, but not explicitly to Church doctrine. A fierce attendant of Mass, a devotee of Our Blessed Lady, she would bang her fist against your jaw for bad-mouthing a pope, but was more than happy to ignore what she called the lesser details and what His Holiness might call Church law. No, it's the Battle Between Good and Evil my mother believed in: the Big Show. She collected candles and incense and rosary beads as if they were ammunition she's stockpiling away for the day the Dark One comes sniffing around her door. The old tribal stories don't get in the way here. My mother has widened the interpretation so that when the Devil comes to call, he might take the form of a lonesome wolf with black cloven hooves instead of paws and long, yellowed incisors. She'll know when he's close by, she says. She heard him once, years ago, pacing around an old shed where a weak-minded uncle raged with drink. The uncle grew calm; they all remembered that—my mother, especially—the high-pitched caterwauling winding down into a quiet that made them all uneasy. And yet they let him be until morning when they found he'd hanged himself in that shed, his hands laced with marks the doctor said were self-inflicted burns. She'd seen the holes in the yard, indentations that no dog, no cat, not even a moose would make. And though they'd raked the yard smooth a dozen times, those marks never failed to return, almost as if they were a bad memory continually surfacing.

Oh, yeah, my mother's faith took the devil into account.
Another reason
she liked to keep watch over Uncle Lud. If he was going, she wasn't letting him go with That One.
Another reason
she liked to keep me busy. If the devil wanted an entryway into our household, who would he choose? My engineer father? Her holy self? My good uncle? Or a weak-willed, socially ignorant pudding like me, a big, gangly, half-sighted, half-breed boy loping up the middle of the road right into danger, his nose in a fifty-cent notebook filled with scribbles? I'd be safe—we'd be safe—she reasoned, as long as I didn't glance up from that notebook or dawdle around, waiting for trouble to snap me up. If she'd known for certain how I used those notebooks, recording all I could manage, she would have realized what I hadn't yet: that I'd already been converted and was calling up trouble with each turn of the page.

As for Uncle Lud, he claimed his faith in listening.

“That's no kind of believing,” I countered.

“Listening to who? Listening to what?” I asked.

“But you're the one we listen to,” I added, stating the obvious.

Still, there was no arguing with him. No real answers would be forthcoming. Nothing, that is, you could relay to the hospital staff should they be asking about Uncle Lud one day.

“Stories,” I would have to tell them. “He believes in stories.”

And from the room beyond, no matter how deeply into a coma he might have fallen, Uncle Lud would likely snort. But I would be telling the truth. I was sure of that.

Whenever I talk with Uncle Lud, I am in a huge field. Uncle Lud's talk is a huge field, sky flung 'round us like a fresh cloth sprung from the laundry line, all sweetness and embrace. I lie back and listen, and fanciful though it might seem, we slip away.

We might be on a fragrant knoll, barely above waving flanks of what must be wheat—although I've never seen the stuff growing—the sun skipping between the rasping rows so that some are tawny and brindled, others pure raving gold. And though the vista narrows and widens with each tale Lud tells, the landscape never fails to unfurl itself, so that soon, too, I can see what my uncle sees and I know (I
know
) that there's another route that leads in and out of town, a secret one that's been here all along and is well traveled by other sorts of visitors, less strangers than well-forgotten kin. That road has none of the stark beauty of our highway. Uncle Lud's secret route is meandering and narrow. In places, it tunnels through forests and giant mica-dazzled rocks that from a distance appear impenetrable. But the route is open and once the traveler reaches what he might suppose should be a wall, there it is: a twining ribbon coursing forward, the fields, the lake. Imagine maps laid upon maps, all translucent, all imperative, soul trails enveloping real space, real people.

Light folds and wind buckles in the field that is Uncle Lud's talk.

Look here, Leo, he says, bending down to caress an insect with mottled wings, a crenulated leaf, a tiny sentient stippled rock whose tin and copper colors deepen with pleasure at his touch.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I can't believe he'll leave us. I can't believe I won't find my way to Uncle Lud. Because even now, I know where Lud will be.

In a deep, wide field in a town overlaid on this one. As long as I remember every story, I'll know just where to find him, and maybe there, too, I'll find what I believe in.