A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (15 page)

“Hey,” he bellowed. “Hey, you there. Hey, Nurse!”

In his experience, nonstop caterwauling always got attention, and he wasn't wrong here. When the clinic nurse finally rushed to shush him, her breath caught at the newly dimmed room and even in those shadows, she recognized Markus.

“You,”
she said, shaking her head, but he would not shut up.

“We need help here,” he hollered, resisting an impulse to punch the chair the nurse stood beside.

Across the room, a woman began to wail and another bar-fight survivor held his head in his hands and cursed them all.
Shut, shut, shut the hell up.

The nurse could see the direction in which Markus was propelling the room, and she knew the two big aides she could count on to break up any brawls were out in the aid car, so she sighed and went to help Markus to his feet. To her shock, he pushed her away, pointing instead to little Tessa, now curled into the well of her chair, her hair wet and matted on one side from the melting ice that had been slipped into the gel pack. One foot, the unlaced sneaker half off, hung over the chair's edge, and Markus saw now that someone had written all over her sneakers with a broad black pen. Somehow, this made him even more insistent, even though Tessa hadn't even raised her head to acknowledge this latest brouhaha.

“Her,”
Markus commanded.
“Now.”

“But your arm,” the nurse began, gesturing toward the visible bone, which she hadn't given a rat's ass about before.

“Her,”
Markus repeated.

The clinic nurse could barely get Tessa to her feet. Together, they staggered toward an examination room. Her stunt on the chair had fully depleted Tessa, and she struggled to stay upright. Her head drooped as she was maneuvered from the room, so that she never noticed Markus's satisfied grin. He might have been a little disappointed at her lack of reaction, but he didn't show it. Instead, he crowed to the rest of the waiting room—all those busted, stoned, dead faces—crowed in the last full glory of his ebbing drunkenness. And later, as he crawled into his own examination room, right before the doctor pressed on the bone and he passed out, he caught a glimpse of Tessa, her face a bruised mash, and heard the aide beside her, say, “That one. That was the fellow.” And later yet, when Markus, with his arm set in its new cast and a decent handful of painkillers in his pocket, pushed himself back down the corridor and into the cool relief of dawn, he thought he might be dreaming when she slipped off the concrete wall where she must have been waiting for him.

“You need a ride?” his muddled tongue managed.

“My sister's coming,” she said, taking a few steps away from him.

“I don't see her,” he said.

The van he'd found had gone away. He remembered vaguely handing over the keys. Not to his brother. Another fellow. A friend, he guessed. His brother wasn't waiting, of course, but that was no problem.

“Car's right here,” he said to Tessa.

In fact, the lot was half-full. In the old days, they would have had their pick. He succeeded in nodding once toward the backlit parking lot before something broke adrift inside his head.

“How can you drive with a broken arm?” she asked.

Practice, he thought, a whole lot of practice. The words chugged, but never emerged. His eyes would barely open, and his left hand scrambled weakly in his pocket. His fingers briefly met and caressed a wad of bills (money he'd sworn to his brother he had hidden away) before they found the slim metal rod, his near-favorite and most handy tool.

From her perch by the hospital entrance, Tessa swiveled in place to follow his struggle as he crossed the lot and paused finally beside what must have been the oldest car there, an ancient Toyota parked directly under the sole light.

A slow wave was surging through him. No, one wave after another. Not pain, not the pleasant discomfort of drunkenness either. Some other unknown elemental disturbance that had been dispensed with the pain med. As a very young boy, Markus had spent a summer's week on a fishing boat and he'd never forgotten the glimpse he'd had of a sailing yacht, cruising at high speed past the battered and stalled gillnetter his father pretended was their vacation. Now, a couple of quick moves, the ignition bypassed, and the car was running. Markus felt elated, redeemed, as if a separate being, one as beautiful as that glorious sloop, was sailing through his veins, ghosting on an orphaned wind all of his making. A disconnection. He felt himself slipping and soaring.

“You can't drive.”

The girl's words tippled beside him. How had they got to the ground? Bits of gravel clung to his palms.

“Just wait, okay? My sister . . .”

“Your sister's not coming, baby. My brother's not coming. Nobody comes for us, do they, baby?”

Did he say all that? He didn't know. He didn't know.

He danced with her, through air, through a tepid surge of water, through the open passenger door of his newly purloined Toyota. She eased his legs inside, set him right or nearly so. She tucked the wad of bills he hadn't known he'd dropped back into his pocket. He leaned his head back against the car seat and began to cry. A slurping, huffing bout that, even drunk, should have humiliated Markus, but instead comforted him. What a weeper he was, what a grand and wonderful weeper. A tentative hand reached around his shoulder, and he leaned into Tessa, feeling the rough edge of her own bandage press against his tears. He was shivering, too, in a bad way, coming down from the drink and the pain meds beginning to show their own evil edges.

“Where,” Tessa said, “where do you want to go?”

Markus suddenly remembered a white strip of sidewalk, another night with another companion, and before he quite realized it, he'd become a ventriloquist.

“The Peak and Pine,” he said, his stolen voice tinny and assured, “sounds just fine.”

Somehow Markus managed to crack the window, and air whistled beside his raised, pursed lips as if the night itself was astonished to see the pair of them traveling together, that soul-damaged man and the battered girl who could not leave even a hoodlum in distress.

Tessa did not own a car and drove her sister's wreck only when she had to on those nights she was able to spirit away the keys to avert sure disaster. At her best, she was uncertain behind the wheel, endlessly second-guessing distance and speed. And should she ever have to drive, she knew enough to equip herself with a pocketful of good-luck charms: an old (heads-up) penny she'd found unscathed on the railroad tracks, a sprig of dried forget-me-not, a silver fish Leo had won in a grade-six bazaar and tucked into her hand before running away as if he were being chased by the staggering frenzy of his own pent-up, pigeon-toed desires. She had none of those talismans with her in the clinic parking lot, but she had no choice. The car's engine was running. Markus was moaning. And although Tessa had hardened her heart in a way Ursie, for instance, would never achieve, she knew she couldn't leave Markus like that. The nurse had dressed the burn on her hand as well as tending to her face, gliding a numbing gel over the growing blisters before taping a fresh piece of gauze over her palm. She could barely bend her hand around the steering wheel. Her legs trembled, and her foot jumped on the pedals so that the car's progress was jerky and belabored. As lightning sliced across the hills above town and the brief shock of illumination seemed to crumple and compress the landscape, poor Tessa's heart leapt as painfully as if she'd achieved the crash she feared. She drove even more slowly then, as slowly as she dared, the lightning punctuating every turn, bursts of blue light that engulfed the wretched car as if determined to expose—and demolish as well. When they reached the P&P, she braked right in front of the office door, leaving Markus snoring openmouthed while she went inside alone.

Albie Porchier's night clerk, Vincent, was also asleep, and Tessa had to go around the empty front desk into the back room where Vincent dozed on a cot, his hands folded across his chest like a corpse. His habit was to stay up a full hour past the last bar's closing time, waiting for potential stragglers before setting his alarm to allow him a few hours' rest. He'd been awakened in the past by such niceties as a beer poured on his face, a jab in the gut, even the blunt side of a knife once edging across his temple. (That last was Albie himself proving some damn point.) Most of the night's receipts were stuffed in a locked drawer under the front desk. He had another thin envelope of actual cash wedged under his ass. He liked to think he'd trained himself to jump to his feet at the slightest tickle in the air. But Tessa shook him again and again, recoiling each time to wipe her good palm on her still shaky legs, and when she finally did rouse him, he gasped and cowered against the back wall. Tessa did look a mess, her little face half-engulfed in bandaging, her wrapped hand raised like a spectral mallet, but she ignored him. She wanted to finish up here.

“Fellow outside,” she told Vincent in the tough-girl voice she'd learned from Jackie, “needs a room and some help in. I've got to go.”

Vincent was suspicious. “What fellow?” he said.

Tessa backed out of the door, and Vincent tentatively followed her into the tiny reception area.

“Right there.” She pointed. “In the car there, right in front of the door.”

“You paying?”

“He is. He'll pay you. I saw his money.”

“Not you.”

“And you'll have to help him too. He just got back from the doctor. He's got a broken arm, I guess.”

Vincent was coming round now. He recognized Tessa from the high school. “You could have at least parked the car.”

“There's no key,” she said. “He didn't have a key. I can't turn it off.”

Then Vincent understood.

“Shit,” he said, peering out the glass door toward the slumped figure. “That's Markus Nagle, isn't it?”

“Wait,” Tessa said, seeing his face closing. She ran back to the car and slipped her good hand in Markus's pocket, removing the bills wrapped in a rubber band. She clumsily peeled off three and tried to stick the rest of the money back in his pocket, but Markus rolled and moaned and the bundle would not stick to him, so for the moment, she shoved the roll of bills into the front pocket of her own jeans.

“Here,” she said, thrusting the three loose bills toward Vincent, who was watching her every move as if reluctant to believe in the money. It was more than the nightly rate. He knew that. She must know too. But Tessa didn't say a word when Vincent simply took the cash and put two bills into the locked drawer and the last into his own private envelope.

He grabbed a door card from a boxed stack and swiped it through a machine two or three times, swearing until a beep sounded, then he swept out the door in front of Tessa, slid into the driver's seat, and drove the car to the lot's back edge.

Once Tessa heard the engine stall and die, she began walking. The P&P was on the far edge of Fuller Street. Not too long a walk home. Fifteen minutes, if she walked fast. And she would. The dry lightning that had chased her from the Health Centre had moved onward far back into the hills, and the street ahead was glazed with darkness that seemed almost fluid. Security lights offered shafts of illumination she'd sooner avoid as she navigated the blocks home. Any other time, she would have run the whole distance, lithe, unstoppable, but whatever they'd given her at the Health Centre had numbed her limbs and left her with a racing heart, and she wasn't sure how far she'd get. One side of her face throbbed uncontrollably. If she could just lie down. She wiggled her hand into her pockets, disconcerted by a wad of paper. The center receptionist had thrust a handful of tissues at her as if she'd been suffering from a runny nose. If she had the fish, she thought. Just Leo's silver fish. She wouldn't, couldn't, think about it; she'd just go. She squared her shoulders, shivering a little now in the near-dawn air, and had nearly made it past the P&P's parking lot, that line of stunted pines, when she realized both her shoes were untied.

She shouldn't be cold—at home, they'd all be flinging the sheets off them and peeling off their thin nightclothes to find relief from the heat—but she could not stop shivering. The laces would not come together in her hands and she'd just managed to grasp them for a third failed try when she glimpsed a movement ahead of her and to the right.

For one absurd moment she thought it might be the help she'd been hoping for.

“Leo?” she whispered, straightening and peering into the dark.

She saw him then. A figure only a few feet away, standing clear of the parking-lot lights within scrawny pine seedlings Albie Porchier called landscaping. A slim form with a tiny coal in his hand, a cigarette, she guessed, that he was pointing in her direction. Her vision was messed up—the sidewalk ahead had a wave to it—and her heart continued to bump and grind as if out of control.

“How tired you look,” a man's voice said, clear as could be. His lips might have been right beside her ear. Leaves rustled. A shoe tapped.

Tessa caught a glimpse of a shiny swath of hair—metal-colored in the black-and-white coloring of night—a granite face of lines and angles that she believed she recognized but could not place. It might have been a trick combination of his cigarette and the motel sign's light, which could only reach so far and began petering out here in streaky lines, but she could have sworn a halo of smoke surrounded and obscured the figure. She
smelled
smoke. Beyond the outline of his form, town faded away into pitch. This had the unsettling effect of seeming as if nothing existed beyond him. The wound on her cheek began again to tremble as if calling out. She pressed a palm against her bandage to shush it and sang out with the sudden pain. The face before her reacted as if he too had been stuck with that quick stab, that electric jolt, but then he smiled as if that pang translated as pleasure.