One Door Away From Heaven (24 page)

Now, in the most unforgiving hours of the night, speeding along the streets of south Orange County, Noah was scared as he had never been before, scared worse than when he’d taken Lilly’s two bullets and rolled down the front porch steps with the expectation of taking a third in the back of the head. The prospect of redemption receded from him the faster he drove, and receding with it was all hope.

When he jammed the brakes and slid the Chevy sideways into the driveway at Cielo Vista Care Home, despair overcame him at the sight of all the police units parked around the front entrance. The phone call that rousted him from bed, the call that might have been a hoax or a mistake, was proved true and accurate by every pulse of red light and by every chasing shadow that leaped across the face of the building and through the bougainvillea twining the trellises.

Laura.

Chapter 30

DOG DRIPPING, boy dripping, dog grinning, boy
not
grinning, and therefore dog ceasing to grin, but both still dripping, they stand in the sudden light, Old Yeller trying to control her doggy exuberance, Curtis reminding himself to react now as a boy would react, not as a dog would react, trying to work his foot fully back into the shoe that Old Yeller pulled half off him.

The pump creaks and groans as declining pressure allows the untended handle to settle into the full at-rest position. The flow from the iron spout quickly diminishes from a gush to a stream, to a trickle, to a dribble, to a drip.

“What the jumpin’ blue blazes you doin’ out here, boy?” asks the man who holds the flashlight.

Not much can be seen of this person. Largely hidden behind the glare, he shines the light in Curtis’s face.

“You leave your ears in your other pants, boy?”

Curtis has just figured out that he should disregard “the jumpin’ blue blazes” from the first question in order to discover the essence of it, and now this second question baffles him.

“They full of horseshit, boy?”

“Who’s ‘they,’ sir?” Curtis asks.

“Your ears,” the stranger says impatiently.

“Good Lord, no, sir.”

“That there your dog?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He be vicious?”

“She be not, sir.”

“Say what?”

“Say
she,
sir.”

“You stupid or somethin’?”

“Somethin’, I guess.”

“I ain’t afeared of dogs.”

“She ain’t afeared of you neither, sir.”

“Don’t you go tryin’ to bullyrag me, boy.”

“I wouldn’t even if I knew how, sir.”

“You some sassy-assed, spit-in-the-eye malefactor?”

“As far as I can understand what you might mean, sir, I don’t think I am.”

Curtis is comfortable with a lot of languages, and he believes that he could conduct conversation easily in most regional dialects of English, but this one is challenging enough to rattle his self-confidence.

The stranger lowers the flashlight, focusing it on Old Yeller. “I seen dogs sweet like this here, then you dares turn your back an’ they bite off your co-jones.”

“Jones?” Curtis replies, thinking maybe they’re talking about a person named Ko Jones.

With the bright beam out of his eyes, Curtis sees that this man is none other than Gabby Hayes, the greatest sidekick in the history of Western movies, and for a moment he’s as delighted as he’s ever been. Then he realizes this can’t be Gabby, because Gabby must have died decades ago.

Frizzles of white hair, a beard like Santa’s with mange, a face seamed and saddle-stitched by a lifetime of desert sun and prairie wind, a body that appears to be composed more of leathery tendons and knobby bones than of anything else: He is your typical weathered and buzzard-tough prospector, your weathered and cranky but lovable ranch hand, your weathered and comical but dependable deputy, irascible but well-meaning and weathered saloonkeeper, crotchety but tender-hearted and banjo-playing and weathered wagon-train cook. With the exception of a pair of orange-and-white Nikes that look as big as clown shoes, his outfit is totally Gabby: rumpled baggy khakis, red suspenders, a cotton shirt striped like mattress ticking; his squashed, dusty, sweat-stained cowboy hat is slightly too small for his head and is parked on his grizzled skull with such desert-rat insouciance that it looks like a growth that has been with him since birth.

“She goes after my co-jones, I’ll plug her, so help me Jesus.”

Just as you would expect of any cranky citizen of the Old West, regardless of his profession, this man has a gun. It’s not a revolver of the proper period, but a 9-mm pistol.

“Maybe I ain’t so well-appearanced, but I sure ain’t no useless codgerdick, like you might think. I’m the night caretaker for this here resurrected hellhole, and I can more than do the job.”

Although he’s old, this man isn’t old enough to be Gabby Hayes even if Gabby Hayes somehow could still be alive, and he isn’t dead, either, so he can’t be Gabby Hayes brought back to life as a flesh-eating zombie in another kind of movie altogether. Nevertheless the resemblance is so strong that he must be a descendant of Gabby’s, perhaps his grandson, Gabby Hayes III. Flushed with excitement and awe, Curtis feels as humbled as he might feel in the presence of royalty.

“I can shoot me a man around the corner, by calculated ricochet, if I got to, so you keep that flea hotel in check, and don’t you try to run nowheres.”

“No, sir.”

“Where is your folks, boy?”

“They is dead, sir.”

Bushy white eyebrows jump toward his hat brim. “
Dead?
You say
dead,
boy?”

“I say dead, yessir.”

“Here?” The caretaker worriedly surveys the street, as though hired guns have ridden into town to shoot down all the sheep ranchers or the homesteading farmers, or whoever the evil land barons or the greedy railroad barons currently want to have shot down. The pistol wobbles in his hand, as if it is suddenly too heavy to hold. “Dead here on my watch? Well, ain’t this just an antigodlin mess? Where is these folks of yours?”

“Colorado, sir.”

“Colorado? I thought you said they was dead here.”

“I meant they was dead in Colorado.”

The caretaker looks relieved, and the gun doesn’t shake as much as it shook before. “Then how’d you and this biscuit-eater come to be here after closin’ time?”

“Runnin’ for our lives, sir,” Curtis explains, because he feels that he can tell at least a portion of the truth to any descendant of Mr. Hayes.

The caretaker’s wrinkle-garden face sprouts a new crop where you would have thought he had no room to plant the seeds for any more. “You ain’t tellin’ me you run all the way here from Colorado?”

“Run at the start of it, sir, then hitched most of the time, and run this last piece.”

Old Yeller pants as if in confirmation.

“Who’s the damn scalawags you been runnin’ from?”

“Lots of scalawags, sir. Some nicer than others. I guess the nicest would be the government.”

“The gov’ment!” declares the caretaker, and his wrinkles rise like hackles, pulling his face into a surprisingly taut bristle of pure disgust. “Tax collectors, land grabbers, nosey do-gooders more self-righteous than any Bible-poundin’ preacher ever born!”

Curtis says, “I’ve seen the FBI, whole SWAT teams of them, and I suspect the National Security Agency’s in on this, plus one special-forces branch of the military or another, and probably more.”

“Gov’ment!”
The caretaker is so beside himself with outrage that if
beside himself
could be taken literally, there would be two of him standing before Curtis. “Rule-makin’, power-crazy, know-nothin’ bunch of lily-livered skunks in bald-faced shirts! A man an’ his wife pays social-security tax out the ass all their life, an’ she dies just two checks into retirement, an’ the gov’ment keeps all she paid, greedy bastards, she ain’t really got her no
account
with ’em like they tell you. So here’s me gettin’ one monthly check no bigger than a brush-rabbit turd, hardly enough to buy me the makin’s of a good long beer piss, while Barney Colter’s worthless lazy donkey-wit son, who never worked a day in his useless life, he collects
twice
what I get ’cause the gov’ment says his drug addiction’s left him
emotionally disabled.
So the doped-up little slug sits on his saggy ass, scarfin’ Cheez Doodles, while to make ends meet, I haul myself out here to this historical hellhole five nights a week an’ listen to blowsnakes blow, waitin’ to be turned into buzzard brunch when my ticker pops, an’ now facin’ down dangerous wild dogs what wants to chew off my cojones. You see the idea I’m gettin’ at, boy?”

“Not entirely, sir,” Curtis replies.

Because of all the excitement of trying to get Curtis’s shoe and the fun of splashing in the outfall of well water, and also because Gabby’s angry rant has frightened her, Old Yeller whines, squats, and pees on the pump platform.

Curtis perfectly understands her feelings about the caretaker. They have heard a lot of crankiness but not much lovableness, have been doused with buckets of crotchety talk but not with one teaspoon of tender-hearted sympathy; plus as yet there’s no sign whatsoever of a banjo.

“What’s wrong with your dog, boy?”

“Nothing, sir. She’s just been through a lot lately.”

And here comes more trouble for dog and boy: the giant-dragonfly thrum of the huge helicopter throbbing across the desert.

The caretaker cocks his head, and Curtis half expects the man’s unusually large ears to turn toward the sound like the data-gathering dishes of radio telescopes. “Holy howlin’ saints alive, that thing sounds big as Judgment Day. You mean them egg-suckin’ bastards is chasin’ you in
that
?”

“That and more,” Curtis confirms.

“Gov’ment must want you bad as a damn gopher snake wants to get its snout in warm gopher guts.”

“I’m not so happy to hear it put that way, sir.”

Pointing the flashlight at the ground between them, Gabby asks, “What they want you for, boy?”

“Mostly the worse scalawags wanted my mother, and they got her, and now I’m just sort of a loose end they have to tie up.”

“What they want your mother for? Was it…a land thing?”

Curtis has no idea what the caretaker means by
land thing,
but the opportunity exists to make an ally of this man. So he takes a chance and replies, “Yes, sir, it was a land thing.”

Spluttering with anger, Gabby says, “Call me a hog an’ butcher me for bacon, but don’t you
ever
tell me the gov’ment ain’t a land-crazy, dirt-grabbin’ tyrant!”

The very thought of butchering anyone repulses Curtis; in fact, the suggestion entirely bewilders him. And he’s too polite to call the caretaker a hog, even if the peculiar request was as sincere as it sounded.

Fortunately, Curtis isn’t required to formulate an inoffensive response, because at once the fuming caretaker inhales a great chest-expanding breath and blows out a storm of words: “Me and the missus, we bought us this sweet piece of land, not a nicer plot of dirt up in Paradise itself, got its own water source, got this grove of big old cottonwoods been there so long they probably has dinosaur bones a-tangled in the roots, got some good pasture with it, taken us the better part of fifteen years to pay off the blood-suckin’ bank, then more years savin’ to carpenter-up a little place, an’ when we finally gets ready to dig us a foundation, the
gov’ment
says we can’t. The
gov’ment
says this here butt-ugly, bandy-shanked stink bug what lives on the property might be
disturbed
by us movin’ in, which would be what the
gov’ment
calls an ecological tragedy, because this sticky-footed, no-necked, crap-eatin’ stink bug maybe exists on only a hundred twenty-two tracts of land in five Western states. So me and the missus have ourselves this sweet property we can’t build on, an’ no jackass ever born ain’t crazy enough to buy it from us if they can’t never build it, neither. But, oh, it sure do give me a special fine fuzzy-good feelin’ in my heart to know
the dung-eatin’, flame-fartin’ stink bug is all snug and cozy and AIN’T NEVER GOIN’TO BE DISTURBED!
”

By now Old Yeller is hiding behind Curtis.

In the east, the
chop-chop-chop
of the helicopter grows louder, and this ceaseless cutting sound echoes off the hard land, back into the wounded air. Steadily, rapidly closer.

“Iffen they catch you, what they plannin’ to do, boy?”

“The worse ones,” says Curtis, “will kill me. But the government…most likely they’ll first try to hide me someplace they think is safe, where they can interrogate me. And if the worse scalawags don’t find me where the FBI’s hidden me…well, then sooner or later the government will probably do experiments on me.”

Although his claim sounds outrageous, Curtis is describing what he genuinely believes will happen to him.

Either the caretaker hears truth resonating in the boy’s voice or he is prepared to believe
any
horror story about a government that values him less than it does a stink bug. “Experiment! On a child!”

“Yes, sir.”

Gabby doesn’t need to know what type of experiments Curtis would be subjected to or what purpose they would serve. Evidently he’s able to stir up endless hideous possibilities in the pot of paranoia that is ever boiling on his mental stove. “Sure, why the blazes not, what better them dirty bastards got to do with my taxes but go torture a child? Hell’s bells, them is the type what would hack you up, cook you in some rice, serve you with salsa to the damn stink bugs if they thought that might make the damn stink bugs happy.”

Beyond the eastern crest of the valley, a pale radiance blooms in the night: the reflected beams of headlamps or searchlights from the two SUVs and the helicopter. Flowering brighter by the second.

“Better move,” Curtis says, more to himself and to the dog than to the caretaker.

Gabby glares at the rising light in the east, the frizzles of his beard seeming to bristle as if enlivened by an electric current. Then he squints so intently at Curtis that his suntoughened face crinkles and twills and crimps and puckers like the features of an Egyptian mummy engaged in a long but losing battle with eternity. “You ain’t been shovelin’ horseshit, have you, boy?”

“No, sir, and my ears aren’t full of it, either.”

“Then, by all that’s holy and some that’s not, we’re gonna feed these skunks our dust. Now you stay on me like grease on Spam, you understand?”

“No, sir, I don’t,” Curtis admits.

“Like green on grass, boy, like wet on water,” the caretaker explains impatiently.
“Come on!”
In that quick but hitching gait familiar from his grandfather’s many movies, Gabby runs past the front of Smithy’s Livery toward the hotel next door.

Curtis hesitates, puzzling over how to be grease, green, and wet. He’s still a little
damp
from playing at the pump, though the desert air has already more than half dried him out.

In spite of her previous reservations about the caretaker, Old Yeller trots after him. Apparently instinct tells her that her faith is well placed.