Through the Hidden Door (5 page)

“That an emerald?” I asked.

“Yup. But only on one side. The left side, where you can get at it with your finger easily. The other eye is green glass. Took me a while to figure it out. Then I realized that if you touch the emerald eye, it cocks the trigger mechanism. Guns like this were meant for a lady’s hand and a lady’s purse. But in case the gun was grabbed away, the assailant couldn’t use it against the lady unless he knew the trick mechanism.”

“You mean it works?”

“Better believe it works. Try it.”

“Is it loaded?”

“With little tiny slugs,” said Dad.

I aimed it at a carton full of Styrofoam packing chips in the corner of the room.
Kapow!
went the gun.
Kapow!
five more times. The bullets went right through the carton and deep into the wood of the wall beyond. “What are you gonna do with it, Dad?”

My father took the gun back. He loaded the chambers with six more slugs. Then he dropped it into a red, white, and blue U.S. Olympic team joggers’ pouch, the kind with a zipper and a Velcro belt that runners wear to keep their loose change in. “I’m going to give it to you, Barney,” he said.

S
UNDAY NIGHT AFTER THANKSGIVING
I searched all over the dorm for Snowy. Boys trudged by me, trailing puddles of slush water from their boots, crowing happy insults, and walloping their luggage against the walls of the dormitory. I snaked past them.

I waited in Snowy’s room until his roommate came shuffling in with two duffel bags slung over his shoulders. “You looking for Snowy?” asked the skinny sixth grader.

“Where is he?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, did he go home for Thanksgiving?”

“Snowy doesn’t go home much.” The sixth grader sighed. He was pale-faced with a shock of straight black hair that fell over his forehead. I’d seen him. I did not know his name. He dropped the duffels on the bed, unzipped them, and gazed mournfully at the hopeless jumble of clothes inside. “His mom and his dad are divorced or separated or something like that. His mom’s in France, I think, or one of those countries. His father’s in Canada or Mexico, I forget. Maybe California or Italy.” He sniffed. “Snowy never tells you much. You know? He’s living off campus now. Switched to being a day student. Trying to get anything out of Snowy’s like trying to ... His thought dribbled away.

I waited, sitting on the bed and pulling shirt after shirt out of one of his duffels for him. “Well,” he went on, “trying to get to know Snowy is the same as trying to get ice cubes out of one of those rubber ice trays that don’t work.”

I nodded, pulling out more shirts. The shirts had been crisply ironed. The trouble was they’d been packed in a giant ball.

“Still, it’s good for me, isn’t it? I mean, I get a single room now, just like a senior boy.”

I asked him if he knew where Snowy was living off campus.

“Nah. He never says. I’ll be glad to get rid of that skull collection, though.”

“What?”

The roommate pointed to an empty shelf. “He used to keep skulls on that. Squirrel skulls, raccoons, stuff he found in the woods. Even a snake skull and backbone. He was weird. I mean, I know his IQ was a hundred and eighty or something, but he gave me the creeps. Look at the stuff he reads!”

Here Snowy’s roommate handed me a pile of magazines. “You keep them,” he said. “I’m tired of seeing them around. It’ll be nice to have some room here for my stuff.” He cleaned a swath through the grime on his dresser top with the sleeve of a fresh shirt, sneezed at the dust he raised, and wiped his nose on the same sleeve.

I lugged the magazines back to my room. I let them drop in a heap at the back of my closet but at the last minute pulled off the top one. Kneeling there, I leafed through it. Weak, spindly, half-blind Snowy, I could see him poring over the anatomy books in the library. If he’d had a subscription to
National Geographic
or
Ranger Rick,
I wouldn’t have thought twice. But these had nothing to do with the Snowy I knew. These were something I’d never known existed.

They were back issues, forty or fifty of them, of
Soldier of Fortune.

Soldier of Fortune
was crammed full of stories about little wars that I had no idea were going on, all over the world. They certainly never came up in current events class. The men who fought these wars were not sent by the U.S. or any other Western government, they were on their own. Doing it for money and the fun of battling Commies.

These were stories on killing leftover Vietnamese, patrolling the borders of Nicaragua, driving off Cuban battalions in tiny African countries the names of which I couldn’t start to place on a map, and hand-to-hand combat in the Libyan desert. Was this real? It seemed to be: I read three stories. In them one man was squeezed to death by an Amazon River boa constrictor, two others fell over a waterfall in Tanzania, and five more were blown up in a land mine set by Manchurian insurgents. Just what the Manchurians themselves were insurging about was not clear.

Snowy had gone over the texts with a yellow highlighter pen and marked everything of interest with exclamation points. Gentle, quiet Snowy. The magazines were loaded with ads for everything from Uzi hand-held machine guns to blow darts. You could buy a half-wolf German shepherd puppy or a complete medicine-growing farm to prepare for the day when all the pharmacies closed down. In among the back pages were printed order forms that he had ripped out. What had he ordered? Tarantula repellent? A bulletproof vest? A tiny microphone that let you listen to conversations a quarter mile away? Yes, yes, I decided suddenly. Something had rung untrue in Snowy’s story about listening to the trustees’ meeting where Mr. Finney had stomped out. The boys’ lavatory did not back up against the common room. There was a broom closet in between. The only way he could have overheard the meeting was in the bushes outside with a seventy-five-dollar listening microphone in the palm of his hand.

The
Soldier of Fortunes
had not been mailed to Snowy at school. The address printed on the backs was care of the local post office, general delivery, in the name of Mr. Robert Cobb. I pushed them deep into my closet and piled a bunch of last year’s math workbooks on top of them. I had stumbled on to a secret of Snowy’s. I intended to keep it to myself.

During the night I woke once, recalling several photographs in the pages of the magazines. They were of groups of men, standing or sitting with weapons in hand, all blurry. All black and white. I couldn’t see their faces well, or even tell what kinds of uniforms they wore. From time to time Snowy had circled one or another with a ballpoint pen, adding a little question mark each time.

I didn’t find Snowy until Tuesday afternoon, when he’d passed me a note in my mailbox saying to meet him in the old school stables at two thirty after classes.

There hasn’t been a horse on campus, the gym teacher once told me, since the Second World War. The rose brick stable at the edge of the woods has been a storehouse for the school grounds keepers in the meantime. It is covered with creeper vines, untrimmed, and I could see at least ten birds’ nests hanging empty in the fall sun. Inside, there are twenty lonely stalls. Still, the horseless air smelled of rotting hay, and in one stall a yellow-toothed rat peered out at me from among the cobwebs.

“Snowy!” I called. No Snowy.

I began poking around. Opening cupboards. Finding bits of moldy riding gear not quite interesting enough to touch.
Am I afraid?
I wondered for a second.
No. I have my pistol.
That morning I had strapped it tight around my upper right thigh and torn out the right-hand pants pocket so I could reach it. I did not like wearing a gun. “A complete easterner is what you’ve become!” my western dad would have said.

It was true. Dad had taught me to shoot when I was eight. Guns were as common as pencils in the West, and I had grown up with them, but the eastern view of guns had seeped into me. I thought of them now as the toys of macho slow-brains and redneck wimps.

I unstrapped the pistol in its red, white, and blue pouch and buried it in a deep mass of black humus that had gathered on a windowsill in the first of the empty stalls.

“I thought you wouldn’t come,” said Snowy, suddenly coming up behind me after I’d looked in every stall and called out his name five times.

“Where were you hiding, Snowy?” I had a feeling he’d been there all along, watching me.

“I wasn’t hiding.”

“Then what’s happening? And where are you living off campus?” Snowy was maddeningly secretive.

“I found out where the bone came from,” he said.

“Where? How?”

“Over Thanksgiving I spent the four days with the Finneys.”

“Snowy, are you living with Mr. Finney and his wife?”

Snowy gazed out the doorway and kicked some straw, both his hands deep in his front pockets. “I took the collie out. I took her for runs day and night. One afternoon she led me to where she found the bone.”

“Where, Snowy? Where?”

“I won’t tell.”

“Come on, Snowy. You dragged me into this. That’s not fair!”

“I’ll take you there. But I’ll only take you because I need help.”

“Help?”

“I will need help soon, anyway. I need an intelligent aide who can keep his mouth shut. I picked you because you’re smart and you want a place to hide away from Sader and Damascus and their friends,” Snowy said.
Intelligent aide,
I thought. Snowy’s vocabulary comes right out of hand-to-hand combat in the Libyan desert.

“You’re right there,” I answered. “I can’t stay in the library after school forever. Sader and the guys are staring right past me these days, but I know they’re just waiting for a chance to get me alone. I guess I’m smart enough—I have a three-point-nine average. And I won’t say a word to anyone.”

Snowy went on as if I’d said nothing and he was recruiting the head of a brigade. “You must swear on your honor as a man and an American never to tell a living soul what we find, never to remove anything, and I’ll only lead you there blindfolded.”

“Blindfolded!”

Snowy opened his hand. In it was a black disk the size of an Oreo. “I carry a listening device to make sure we aren’t followed,” he said. “Take it or leave it, Barney.”

I took it. He wound the back of an old black soccer shirt over my eyes, tied it in back, and secured it above and below with masking tape. Then he walked me around the woods for three quarters of an hour, never more than five minutes in any direction and with several complete three-hundred-sixty-degree turns. “This is ridiculous!” I yelled at him several times.

“You want to come or not, Barney?” Snowy answered each time. Finally he got me on my hands and knees, gave me a string end that led to his belt, and then told me to fall on my belly and crawl through an opening. “You can take the blindfold off now,” he said after a minute’s crawling. “Don’t lose it. Put it in your pocket.”

I ripped off part of my eyebrows with the tape.

We were in a kind of basic darkness. Blinded, I thought I would suffocate too. “Where in hell are we?” I screamed. “Get me out of here!”

“Don’t be afraid,” said Snowy. His feet shuffled on just ahead of my face. “We’re in a cave. Or we will be soon. Follow me.”

“A cave! I hate caves! Do you have a flashlight?”

“Of course. A little one. And Sunday afternoon I brought down a kerosene lamp. I left it here.”

I struggled along through the clammy mud tunnel after him. Panicky not to get stuck in the darkness, I yelled, “Turn the stupid flashlight
on,
Snowy!”

“Not yet.”

“Tell me why not!”

“Because this is only the entrance, Barney. There are other ways to go after this tunnel. I don’t want anyone to know which way it is. If you take the other ways, you can get lost in here forever. I found the cave and I want it to stay secret. Don’t worry. I know just where we are. I can hear where we are by the sound of the water.”

“God save me.” I choked on my words and a clayey mouthful of soil. I heard water too, but what it meant or where it was gushing and dripping from I couldn’t begin to imagine. The tug of the string in my hand told me Snowy was moving. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Turn the
light
on, for God’s sake!” I begged him.

“Wait. Follow me.”

Snowy turned me twice around and then led me down a walkway. It turned out to be a ledge. I felt outward with my left foot. There was no ground, only air beneath it. “Snowy!” I pleaded, clinging with my fingernails to the wall beside me and balancing on my right foot. “In the name of God will you put the bleeping light on!”

“I was just going to,” said Snowy. He flashed it on the ceiling of the tunnel.

Above us twinkled a thousand iron-colored icicles of rock, dripping water like faulty shower heads. Twenty yards or so beneath my dangling left leg identical red-brown icicles grew pointing up.

I had come within a hair of tumbling sixty feet down, smack onto a grove of sparkling limestone bayonets. When this registered in my brain, I peed straight down my leg.

Think of springtime, Barney,
I told myself. The ledge we crept along was as narrow as my shoulders. I needled myself with singsong advice.
Which are the stalactites and which are the mites? Don’t look down
—
you’ll fall off. Don’t shake
—
you’ll fall off. And remember to breathe or you might as well fall off right this minute.

Drip drop, drip drop
went the ceiling. The slithery rock wall beside us was as comforting as a dead man’s arm. Suddenly the path ahead ended in a hole.

“Slide!” Snowy shouted. I did, with my stomach just behind my teeth. I counted the seconds that my backside bumped down the chute. Seventy-five seconds. “Snowy! Snowy!” I cried. “How will we ever get out of here? We can’t climb back up this. It’s too steep and slippery!”

“Another way!” echoed Snowy’s voice.

We bumped to a stop on a patch of soft sand. It felt like a beach at the North Pole.

“Stay there,” Snowy said. He untied the string from around his waist and let it fall. Then his flashlight dipped and weaved farther and farther away from me as he moved deeper into the cave.