A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (11 page)

Then there was the meth, of course, but Bryan had only glimpsed that operation. Flacker's meth had different routes to buyers. Bryan knew the Nagles and their cohort, that nasty Brit, were into all sorts of bad deals with Flacker these days. Bryan got the idea too that they were now entrepreneurs of a different sort, peddling drugs they devised and concocted and barely tried themselves before hawking them without a second thought. A gang in Winnipeg was involved, a planning of a complex route of transportation under way, the famous highway an overland express.

He waited a while before he left the truck to stalk a single kid, too high or foolhardy to know he shouldn't visit Flacker's alone. Bryan whistled quick and low, and the boy turned, his hands already flying up to protect himself from Bryan, who, with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up, was near-invisible in the gloom. What wasn't invisible was the bright white folded square he forced into the boy's hand.

“Make sure Flacker gets this,” he said. “And don't say a word about where you got it.”

Twice more in the space of an hour, Bryan passed notes to spaced-out kids. Two of the kids ran headlong to Flacker as if their lives depended upon it, as if he'd set up a test for them. One simply wedged the note as a tiny scrap within the bills he gave Flacker and fled as Flacker began his count, leaving half his purchase unclaimed. Luckily for Bryan, the kid had no sense of direction or maybe he didn't want to encounter Bryan again. He fled on a trail a distance away from where Bryan crouched. Not two minutes later, a volley of shotgun blasts rang out over that far hill, right on that poor kid's tail, and Bryan didn't move an inch, thinking of the messages he'd sent, written in black block print:

THEY'RE CHEATING YOU, ASSHOLE ASK NAGLE ABOUT WINNIPEG IT AIN'T JUST YOUR MONEY HEADING NORTH

Bryan might have been risking his own life out there that night as much from the weather as from Flacker. Long black clouds streamed overhead as if the heavens were racing above him, and between them, at steady intervals, lightning cascaded, randomly, it seemed, the way he himself struck out, again, again, until with a kind of luck, contact was made. He stayed for far too long that night without knowing why he couldn't leave until finally the lightning made purchase on a far-off hillside with an orange flare that seemed to spring from his own heart. It was as if someone had screamed, a single, sudden renting in the black night that clamored painfully, then disappeared, only to reappear in sharp orange bursts so abrupt and disconnected he wondered if he was imagining them. Each time another appeared, he seemed to come more awake, as if the fire were burning away his own confusion, until finally he was standing straight, upright on Flacker's land, the full plan gloriously illuminated before him. Fear left him then, but not discretion. He waited, past the hours of Flacker's visitors, past the swollen early morning dark when even on that ridge you couldn't see a hand in front of your face. He waited out the deep silence until the night perched on the cusp of dawn and other creatures began a rustling in the false dark. Then Bryan began. He'd walked those trails a hundred times on his way to feed the little Magnusons. He knew, too, the route the Nagles took when Flacker had commanded they arrive without even his cousin Mitchell knowing. And he knew Flacker, too. He did. The Big Man had his own divining spots, places he'd claim to survey his property and listen for any insubordination. Bryan crept from one to another, crisscrossing Flacker land, almost as if he were impregnable to Flacker evil, setting up markers that only a man who felt vulnerable might seek out. It was almost light by the time he crawled, his back stiff from crouching, into his cold truck, putting it into neutral and pushing, until he could hop up into the cab and coast down the narrow lane below Flacker's now-doomed land, starting the engine only once he reached the end of Charlotte Road. The engine surged as if it, too, were experiencing a new sort of elation.

He could have sworn he heard Hana Swann's laugh right beside him.

“Ah, yes, Bryan,”
she was saying in that bell-like voice,
“You finally do something. Be better than your father. Be like the real man.”

The animal shelter where my mother worked had its own crematorium and its own executioner, a fellow my mother and her staff had nicknamed “Hannibal,” who volunteered for the duty with a suspicious cheeriness. But my mother was a fan neither of the crematorium nor Hannibal. Bones were important to her. If a body, even that of a stray, went straight to ash, she reckoned, it disappeared, and almost immediately, my mother would begin to question whether the animal was really dead or if, perhaps, it had gone missing in another way. It became an extended loss, one that never quite ended. So, whenever she was personally involved in retrieving a dead animal, my mother insisted upon wrapping the body in an old blanket from the Tried and True Shop's donation box and bringing it home. She kept stacks of those blankets in her closet office, which consequently smelled like old people, as if she'd been harboring geriatric refugees. The blankets' colors had long faded into withered grays and dusty browns, into pale pinks and yellowed parchment—flesh tones—and they'd been worn so soft and thin, it's doubtful they'd ever again provide much warmth. They were mere gestures of blankets, but that was all my mother and her lost creatures needed. She'd arrive home with oozing bundles in the trunk of her car and I'd have to help her slide them onto an old blue tarp, which I'd drag past the back deck and our own dogs' camp, well beyond the vegetable plot, to a scrap of land beside my father's tool shed, where my mother had once let a cousin park a tractor he'd hoped to restore until my father had the rusted pieces hauled away. My mother would follow with a shovel, and I would dig another grave while she chose a long flat piece of amber-striped mountain shale as a marker.

The evening of Hana Swann and Keven Seven, my mother arrived with a full stinking trunk, the heat acting as an accelerant on the stench so that I had to wear one of my dad's old red handkerchiefs tied over my nose and mouth while my mother perched a respectable distance away with her latest piece of mountain shale, calling out instructions until I lifted the shovel and paused, and she quieted.

“We'll have supper soon,” she said, as if the activity she'd instigated was whetting my appetite.

“Don't go looking at him either,” she called back. “He's one of the ones that got torn apart.”

Any groans I attempted were masked by the sound of the phone ringing in the house, and my mother took off running. My father's calls almost always arrived at suppertime, a time I was sure he'd chosen to keep the conversations short, and although my mother pretended she rushed to keep the phone from disturbing Uncle Lud, she wasn't fooling anyone. The phone traveled with her all the way to the basement, where she'd tuck herself into a corner or the tumbledown davenport like a schoolgirl before returning, sighing, upstairs.

“Your father sends his love,” she said when, chore finished, I came inside.

Of course, he hadn't.

For years, my father, like Trevor Nowicki, had gone up north for work. Early on, he still had his first good job with Suncor as well as sharing with Uncle Lud the task of caring for their widowed, demented mother. Their sister, Joyce, divorced Toby (infertility, drunkenness, affairs, temper tantrums on both sides), and Joyce and her second husband, an actuary, moved to Edmonton for a finer life. But Uncle Lud had stayed on, scraping out a living on what was left of the farm after they'd sold most of their mother's legacy. He possessed, as my mother frequently mentioned, two graduate degrees. My father, who'd gone up to the mining college, couldn't see that they'd done him much good. He tried to get Lud on at the mining offices, but Uncle Lud wasn't interested. Lud had toiled for the government as a social worker and taught grade seven once, as well, and he said that was about enough bureaucratic oversight for one lifetime. Until he got sick, you'd never know what job he'd have the next time you saw him—machinery repairman, drywaller/electrician, mail carrier, bookstore clerk—but through everything he still maintained the tiny herd of dairy cows he'd inherited, and persisted upon producing a pungent white cheese (much prized by his neighbors) that he simply gave away.

My father was just the opposite. He'd found his way early in a molybdenum mine, seeing, as he liked to say, the future there, although he'd easily made the shift over to oil and gas. You couldn't even breathe the words “oil sands” around our house for fear he'd hear a smidge of criticism in an exhale. A long-standing black mark against him as far as my mother's relatives were concerned. All of them possessed epic and mostly cogent rants against the latest enterprises up north, not a one of them seeing that bitumen-rich sludge my father's way—a glorious national resource: “Only Saudi Arabia has more!” My father wore his love for his work in his wide-legged stance and raised chin, his steady prideful gaze. My parents had met in a library, tussling over a math book both of them wanted, and although my father had lost the book, he eventually convinced my mother first to date, then to abandon her own studies and marry him. Unlike Trevor and Junie Nowicki, they had realized what kind of reception my mother, half-Kitselas herself, would meet back in his small town, and the two of them acknowledged early on that theirs would be an unconventional marriage in this one regard: they'd live apart. He bought the nicest house he could afford and, for at least the first years, drove endless hours to spend every break he had with her.

Whatever hopes my father nourished for me had thinned long ago. Always he seemed surprised by the look of me, a throwback to my mother's BaBa, not a sign of her own father, another part-white fellow, not a sign either of my father's kin save my height and my nearsighted eyes, which like his and Uncle Lud's were neither blue nor green nor brown but shifted between the three, depending on the light. He was hard with me, my mother maintained, because he worried I'd never find a real place in life, that like Lud, I'd be swept away by stories that weren't even those of my kin. Yet, unlike Lud, I wouldn't have an all-white skin to shield me. My father never seemed to understand his world was not the only one, and my mother had long since stopped trying to inform him. Instead, she pushed me toward the Mining College and dreamed along the way that my father and I would recognize each other, that we might one day work side by side the way he'd once hoped he and Lud would.

I once thought Uncle Lud had no taste for company work, but the truth is he and my father had had a disagreement, an irreconcilable breach. It happened about the time the late, infamous Wiebo Ludwig was first put in jail for bombing company equipment. Uncle Lud didn't know Ludwig, didn't know if he was guilty or not, but he'd had the same problems with his few dairy cows that Wiebo Ludwig had had—miscarriages, misshapen calves, unexplained illnesses—and he sympathized with the man's frustration. My father fully believed Wiebo Ludwig a madman, and had Uncle Lud not been his most dearly beloved brother, they might even have come to blows. As is was, he bore the hurt while making his disappointment clear. But when Uncle Lud's illness became clear, my father began to sit with him again, sweet black coffee in hand, to talk about the missing world they both still knew well, a childhood world they tended, a place where neither of them could be proved wrong at this late date, where they could simply be brothers. It wasn't until Lud's illness took this last sweep downward that whatever pieces had fallen together, whatever grief and guilt my father harbored ballooned unbearably, and his visits home were canceled, one after the other.

“He'll be later than he thought,” my mother said as she began chopping an onion in a neat flutter that she soon swept up with the flat edge of her knife and deposited into a spitting frying pan.

“Too much work, the crew too thin. Week after next, he promises.

“It's just hard for him is all,” she said as she whirlwinded through dinner preparations. “Hard to get away, that is. And he knows we're doing all we can here.”

Which, to be honest, was almost nothing at all. Uncle Lud had been clear in the beginning. He had only months and would not be a pretty sight. Bone and mash and yellow wasting, the skeleton claiming its place. Babble and drool, fetid breath—who knows, he told us, but that he might fill our house with moans and curses.

“No cures exist for this, Leo,” he told me. “Don't even imagine that story.”

We all thought we knew what he was asking. Never mind that my father had already fought with him about doctors and hospitals and ever-new procedures. Never mind that in the end my father simply would not allow Lud to remain alone in the farmhouse but must bring him home to us. Uncle Lud begged our pardon for such an inelegant ending. My father, it seemed, could not abide the decision. He left Lud to us.

My mother, who daily shepherded the abandoned and the doomed, the never-found missing, didn't pause. She squared her shoulders and drew up daily schedules, as if preparation would make our loss easier, a finish line we would all cross together.

In the past week or so, a change had occurred, Uncle Lud's waking moments diminishing, and the weird thing was that even as he gave way more and more to the dream world that pursued him, his voice claimed more space in my head. I could feel Uncle Lud's stories taking up residence within me, like an audience of fervent actors, ears cocked, eyes wide, chests puffed up with deep cleansing breaths, all those eager heartbeats, ready to pull in and adapt to whatever show would come next. And between them murmured Uncle Lud's unasked request:
Believe
.

That evening, after I changed my burying clothes, I leaned against the half-open doorway of the bedroom where he slept. Under the steady whir of the fan, I could hear my uncle's breath, not labored at all but low and whistling as if he were only lost in a daydream. In my head, I heard Lud's good long, deep laugh, and not for the first time I was mad at him for leaving me behind with only a pile of stories dashed into notebooks meant for scientific equations or even childish poetry.

“You think this is funny?” I whispered.

I was shocked when, without opening his eyes, Uncle Lud replied.

“Not hardly,” he said.

“Bryan was here,” he went on, his eyes opening. “He has a plan now?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Well, he's working on one at least.” Unease shot through me. I didn't know, I realized, what Bryan was planning now.

“A good one?”

“He
had
a terrible one,” I said.

“You can stop him, Leo,” Uncle Lud said. “If he needs the interference.”

“Nothing will happen,” I said. “Flacker is pure evil, but Bryan doesn't have a mean bone in him.”

“Oh, everybody's got . . . a mean bone . . . or two, Leo. It's a fact of life.”

The name of the latest girl gone missing suddenly came to mind as if Uncle Lud had placed it there: Carla. Her name was Carla, and her photo was on a slew of new billboards. It was as if she'd vanished and reappeared in black-and-white stills. Unlike a few of the others, no body had been recovered. She'd been hitchhiking from the tiny settlement where she'd ended up, a place with not a single grocery store. No car, not much money. Even if the Greyhound stopped at her door, a forty-dollar fare to buy milk and bread? Did she have a choice? She left a three-year-old son, who, according to his grandparents, kept digging up the yard, first to look for signs of his mother, then once a kind of understanding took hold, to bury her things—a shoe here, her hairbrush there, her favorite sparkly T-shirt in the ground outside his bedroom window, where he sung his good-nights to it each evening in toddler singsong.

“You don't . . . believe . . . me yet, do you?”

I tipped my head to stare at Uncle Lud, but he kept his straight-ahead gaze, drooping eyes struggling to stay focused on the window. He was pushing back in the only way he knew how.

“Yes,” he said, as if I were no longer there. “Everybody's got a mean bone. Some have a full set. Just needs someone to come along . . . and twang . . . remind 'em . . . it's there, the same way folks work . . . so hard . . . to keep the good ones in motion.”

“You mean like with the Church?” I asked, thinking ruefully of my mother's Quest for Good, her contorted Catholicism.

“Sometimes, the only way . . . to beat the . . . devil is to become one . . . yourself.”

“But . . . ,” I began.

“Look at that light, will you, Leo?” Uncle Lud motioned toward a proud pinch of yellow glossing up a nearby ridge. “Don't you wonder . . . what it feels like up there . . . right now?”

This was the way it was with Uncle Lud since he got sick. He had always been the most considerate of companions, asking me what I thought, worrying about interrupting me, a kid. But whether as a result of his medications or a sea change burrowing within him, Uncle Lud now drifted from one conversational thread to another as if his illness had unmoored him. I was about to sneak away, let my young uncle return to dozing, when he reached out to hold me back.

“Wait a minute, Leo,” he rasped, and I knew he was readying to offer the next story no matter what it cost him.

“Do you remember,” he said, “do you remember . . . the door . . . in the mountain?”

Sure I did. Uncle Lud's version of a Pied Piper, the devil arriving in town in one of his many guises. Uncle Lud had personalized this tale—he'd made it true, I thought—aimed the devil right at one of our own, GF Nagle's milder younger brother, Markus.

Uncle Lud waited. Of course, of course, I leaned back with him—and began.