A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (18 page)

He owns a slide rule, although he doesn't need it. He brandishes it the way comedians once flailed whoopee cushions and magicians will persist with top hats. Physics, he would like to tell you, is a fat, gaudy prop, a mass of mathematical indirections masquerading as True Fact, Goddamn Science. He loves his slide rule, loves, loves, loves the way he can prove anything with the right equation. It's a sleight-of-hand performance in which the laws of the universe become particular, in which anyone can play God or demon.

Go ahead, he says, set that pendulum swinging, such a lovely motion at first,
ding dong, ding dong
. Watch it lilt to the right, then,
whoosh,
it's back to the left with exactly the same force and lift. A mesmerizing dance of Displacement and Restoration. One could get hooked. He chortles at his pun. Oh, but not even Hooke himself would claim his “law” with all its pretty Latin (
Ut tensio, sic vis
) and that brief symbolic sigh (
F = -kx
) could prevail under all conditions with all materials.

So he fiddles, the slightest of gestures, and if you glance at the pendulum now, you'll see it has abandoned all grace, all sense of equality. It's fallen into a private dance, one riven solely with endless incalculable loss.

Story Problem:
A wandering soul acts as a spring with a spring constant of 132 N/m (or 112 N/m or 10 N/m or . . . well, does it really matter?). If the Devil equals an Unknown Force and applies an Unmeasurable Weight irrationally and erratically to the spring, calculate the Displacement as the spring bounces from soul to soul, from soul to spirit, from spirit to tortured body.

Ha, ha, ha. What fun. You want to play? You do? You really think you do? He pulls out his slide rule again, and a car slides
up
a smoke-filled mountain road.

It was almost noon when Tessa woke again to a series of butter-soft clicks, the interior locks being eased into place on the door, the chain sliding into place. Every bit of her heart began to loudly sing out, but her head felt too heavy to move and although she tried to open her eyes, the gauze underneath the bandage must have shifted, because now it lay too securely over her eyes and seemed to be crawling over her mouth as well.

She clutched at breath. That smell? What was that smell? Rotten eggs and wintergreen, bruised juniper berries and witch hazel, bleach? Each scent declared itself, then fractured and split apart. Her head fell back as if someone had pulled the bed away from her. But no, now she was being lifted and covered with jabs of ice and flickers of rain and a thin, sheeted shroud and . . . wait . . . wait . . . please, wait.

How much later was it when Ursie unlocked the door with Madeline beside her? The bolt jumped back, a released snap, and yet the door didn't budge.

“Fellow's got his own locks on,” Madeline said.

Ursie knocked, a gentle rapping she was sure would let Keven Seven know it was she, but Madeline snorted at her.

“Can't get in that way, girl,” her auntie said

“Housekeeping,” she sang out.

“Come to do a pickup,” Madeline added under her breath, giggling a little. “Pickup and delivery,” she sang softly.

Ursie couldn't get her auntie to understand how serious the situation was, how much was at stake. To Madeline, clearly this was just a case of one more fucked-up kid who needed to get home. But it was Tessa. It was Tessa.

When Keven Seven still didn't open, Madeline elbowed past Ursie and put a practiced shoulder to the door. For such a little woman, Ursie marveled, her auntie knew how to jolt a door. The second lock splintered the doorjamb. They could hear the crack and see now the second set of chains.

“Albie,” Ursie breathed, casting a worried glance over her shoulder.

“Will be, pissed, yeah,” Madeline agreed. But he wouldn't for the world suspect her or Ursie, she knew. She was about to stick her slender hand into the opening when the door slammed shut, the chains released, and the room suddenly opened to them.

“You okay, in here?” Madeline said. As she half fell inside, she was ready to explain how lots of people lock themselves in and get all hurt and need help, but Keven Seven wasn't paying any attention to her.

“I'm sorry,” Ursie began. “I left you a . . .”

“An unconscious girl in my bed,” he said as Madeline suppressed another snort.

“A note,” Ursie said. “I left you a note. I'm sorry. I had nowhere else to take her.”

To her surprise, Keven Seven said, “Oh, I understand.”

“We'll take her now. Madeline's going to drive her home.”

“Why not leave her with me?” he said.

“No, no,” she was shaking her head even as she tried to get Tessa to sit up. Tessa looked even worse, Ursie thought, as if she'd been crumpled up and tossed around again. She must have rolled into the thin sheet Ursie had folded away from her and messed with her bandages, too. She smelled odd, like medicine. Ursie hadn't noticed that before.

“She's clearly not able to move.” The deep curls of his voice, that sonorous tone that Ursie had carried home with her and twined within her own thoughts all through the last night, tightened and grew brittle. Even Madeline's clowning around disappeared.

“I'll carry her,” Ursie said.

She could imagine Albie's reaction when he noticed the broken lock, and she didn't want Tessa anywhere around that, either.

“Aren't you supposed to be working?” Keven Seven asked in this new, too-tight voice. “I could take her away for you.”

What a strange offer, Ursie thought. As if Tessa were . . .

“Auntie gets a break now,” she rushed to explain, a lie.

He smiled. He knew lies. They were sweets to him.

“And what about your
break
?” he asked Ursie, causing Madeline to click her tongue.

Ursie paused, but she managed to keep her head down as she answered. “I'll be finished by two, maybe three, I think. I'll come back up and fix that lock.”

“Oh, will you?” Madeline said, recovering. “You know how to do that? Ho, ho, don't be telling Albie that, eh?”

“Auntie?” Ursie was pleading. She'd gathered the insensible Tessa into her arms and had reached the threshold, but she couldn't keep the door open wide enough for them to pass through.

“Don't worry,” Ursie whispered back at Keven Seven. “I'll fix it this afternoon.”

“Sure you will,” her auntie said. She recognized Keven Seven; she was sure of it. She knew that glance, casual but proprietary. A boyfriend she'd once had used it just before he punched her in the face.

“There you go,
sweetheart,
” he'd said.

Okay, then. Madeline pushed past Keven Seven to hold the door for Ursie, who she nudged forward. She slammed it three times behind her before she was satisfied the latch caught.

Ursie was heartened to see that Madeline had sobered considerably. She darted in front and led the way to her old car, even pushing off food wrappers and soda cans, dirty shirts and towels, before helping Ursie lay Tessa on the backseat.

“My boyfriend's dog weighs more,” Madeline said. “And smells . . . better, too. What is that? Phew! Hope my car don't . . . smell so bad after. Hey, is this gal . . . breathing?”

She leaned her head to Tessa's chest and came up grimacing. A skint of breath, that's all she got, but the girl was still ticking.

“Bastards,” Madeline added, to no one in particular.

“Can you do this, Auntie?” Ursie said, catching her breath to lay out a string of instructions. It must have been the preoccupation with cards, because that's how she was beginning to see her day, Tessa's options, as one configuration after another, each one leading to another possible outcome.

“You can get her to the couch? If Bryan's there, he can put her in my bed. You lock the door behind you when you leave. Bryan's got a key with his truck keys. Lock up tight. Maybe pull the curtains closed too? You okay, Auntie?”

“Oh, sure, honey,” her auntie said, suppressing another old image in her mind. “You worry too much, you know? I've done this a lot, a real lot.”

Madeline reached through the open driver's window to pat Ursie's cheek, but her eyes were uncharacteristically grim. For the briefest moment, Ursie saw her own mother in Madeline, Junie's steadiness and generosity, her unwavering sorrow at the end.

“Hey, kiddo, that fellow back there . . . he a firefighter or something?”

“I don't think so,” Ursie said. “Why?”

Her auntie shrugged, returning to herself. “Smells like . . . smoke, is all. Like one of those jumper boys. Makes my throat all dry and cracked thinking about them.”

“You'll come right back, okay?” Ursie said.

“You sound just like
him
.” Madeline said, tilting her head toward Albie's office.

And she tooted her horn as she started the car and rumbled through the parking lot's back exit, just as Albie, toolbox in hand, left that front office for Room 11.

“She gone?” he said, shaking his head. “Not to the hospital again, I hope. No daylong doctor's appointments?”

“She went to pick up her medicine. She'll be back in ten minutes. Ten minutes, tops,” Ursie said, marveling inwardly at how easy the lies were coming.

“Medicine.” Albie grimaced. “Well, she'd better be right back. We've got a crowd coming in. They're closing the camps and evacuating. That fire's moving fast. Just hope they stop the damn thing before the whole town's got to head out to a reception center.”

For the first time that day, Ursie noticed the extra weight in the air. She'd assumed the trouble she'd had breathing all morning stemmed from her anxiety and the physical pressure of carrying Tessa upstairs. Now she could see the haziness on the horizon, the heavy tin sky with flint-colored clouds bearing down. She smelled the dry smoke in the air and recognized the strain in her lungs. Jackie must be back in town. Ursie smiled a little to herself, imagining how Jackie would go after—or try to go after—whoever had damaged Tessa. They'd have to hold the girl back, and they would. No one wanted more trouble for Jackie. If the fire was that close, Bryan sure wasn't up at the refuse station this morning. He might even be back at home, scribbling in that new notebook, and ready to leap up and help Madeline with Tessa. For the first time that morning, she almost relaxed. Bryan and Jackie would see to Tessa.

“It could be a bad one,” Albie said.

He sighed. A full house brought gains—a fat till, for sure—but also the inevitable pains—the bitter card games, the losses, the fights.

Hell, he thought. I almost shouldn't bother fixing up. They'll just break it all up again tonight. He'd have to be here; he knew that now. If that idiot Vincent hadn't let him down so badly, Albie might have convinced himself Vincent could monitor a simple run of card games but, really, who was he kidding?

He glanced up to see that Ursie, his stalwart helper, had already skipped right back to work. He could hear her keys rattling and soon after, the broken purr of her vacuum promising to set his world back to rights. Thank God there was something—someone—he could count on.

When my mother called out to me for the second time that day, I was asleep, my right cheek resting on an open notebook covered with numbers scribbled sideways and equations squeezed into margins. I had no memory of writing any of them down, and in fact, when I first opened my eyes and glanced down, they resembled the muddy tracks of tiny, fleeing animals. Beside the notebook was a full sheaf of handwritten pages. Those I remembered well. I heard my mother whisper my name from the kitchen, and I knew it was her, knew it was my name, and yet for the slightest second it seemed as if those numbers were calling out, and not necessarily to me.

And too, before my mother's voice registered, it seemed I'd been lingering in the dream middle of a wide-open logging road. Up ahead, Bryan and Ursie trudged as if following a sibilant command I could barely make out. And even farther ahead, far in the distance, I could see Jackie, just the back of her, disappearing. But where, I wondered, was Tessa? And where was I meant to go? Whatever directions the others had been given were overpowered by other voices—Uncle Lud's, my mother's, even an unintelligible taunt from Trudy—and soon I'd eased away from the middle of the path, hesitating, as usual.

By the time I came fully awake and made it to the hallway, baby monitor in hand, my mother was there to meet me. The phone was pressed against her shoulder.

“For you,” she whispered, handing me the phone I had not heard ring. “Your lunch is on the table,” she added.

Noontime, at least. I'd slept away half the morning since I'd come home. I had no idea how long my mother had been home or if she was staying. Faintly, even as I pressed the phone to my ear and willed myself to speak, I could hear my mother in Uncle Lud's room, the steady murmur of a single voice.

“Does Bryan not have another friend?” my mother sighed when I told her.

“I'll stay if you need me here.”

“No, no.” My mother frowned.

“What?” I said.

“I meant to tell you Jackie's mother called this morning before I left. She wondered if you were out somewhere with her and Bryan and Ursie. You haven't seen her today, have you?”

“Bryan said a fellow from the camp told him Jackie was on her way home.”

My mother nodded. “That's all right then, I guess.” She glanced back out the window. “The wind's low at the moment. They might stop this fire straightaway. Hannibal's got the shelter covered. We're ready to go tonight if we need to. But he'll have to manage that, I told him. They all will. Still, if we get an evacuation alert, I've got you lot to take care of—isn't that enough? Trudy made a pack up for Lud, but . . . well . . .”

“What?” I said. I was awake now, but still cotton-mouthed and cranky. The enthusiasm I'd carried back from Leila Chen had twisted and split into threads of panic.

“I called Dr. Miller,” my mother said. “It's the pain he was most worried about, but I said I didn't think Lud was in pain. You don't think so, do you? No, no, that's what I told him. I won't wake him for his medicine. Did he have a sip this morning? When did Trudy leave? Did he wake for her?”

In the minutes before Bryan's truck bellied up the driveway, I held my uncle's limp hand. Could I go with Bryan? Should I? Uncle Lud had grown much younger since the morning, his face softening, a boyish curve to his cheek. I could imagine him up on the farm, racing around the pond on his hockey skates. He might have been twelve. At the same time, he'd also aged greatly in the past weeks. His thatch of blond hair had thinned and darkened to a few brown strands; his ears, exposed, seemed twice as large around that delicate face. The veins in the thin hand I held were gnarled and swollen. I could imagine him ancient, too, prodding me into telling my own kids numerous and twisted tales, a luminous shadow in the room's corner that somehow managed to hold every scrap of light.

Please don't leave,
I whispered.
Please, please, wait for me.

I could hear my mother shuffling around in the kitchen, impatient with both of us, I suspected. In the early springtime, the last time my father had come home, he brought Uncle Lud to us, a half-familiar scarecrow in his passenger seat. They were coming then from another hospital visit, the last one, but I didn't know that then. I'd rushed the door, tripping over Norbee and slamming a hip into the mudroom cupboard, sending a basket of trowels and garden snips flying, an exuberance I always shared with my mother and even Trudy when Lud arrived. That time, though, no one was scrambling at my side, tossing the tools away, as we battled to be the first to reach the car. Instead, I could see my mother gazing out the kitchen window, one hand shielding her eyes as if she didn't dare to look. She was crying. Yet somehow she'd managed to shake away her tears so that by the time Uncle Lud and my father and I reached the kitchen door, she was able to shoo Norbee in a voice that did not quake and reach her arms around Uncle Lud and hold him tight. And he let her. He didn't wiggle once. He knew eventually everyone would have to let him go.

I could feel myself rummaging for some kind of hope, nowhere a suggestion of true escape, only a familiar cycle of promise and disappointment. I had been in a minor season of the former, I realized, and now I feared even that forlorn wave was cresting. At least Bryan had direction and purpose. I was an equation with no answer, just a series of muddied conjectures that would not come into focus.

If you took a good look at me, you'd see. How I favored black T-shirts, which faded straightaway, and plaid shirts whose cuffs were never long enough. Seams frayed on my jeans; sweatshirts lost their shape. And directly after a haircut, my old cowlick reappeared so within hours I was shaggy again. I'd shot up so quickly in grade nine that my orientation was still skewed and, off-balance, I continually knocked into doorjambs and lockers and the fluttery little French teacher well known for darting through the school hallways. Like a five-year-old, I could stumble and fall while standing still in one place. A half-bottle of beer put me to sleep. Despite my horrible vision, my height had interested the basketball coach briefly, just as my big square head and hands had once piqued the attention of a grade-school hockey coach, but any moments of coordination I attained were purely accidental, and both soon decided I would be more liability than asset, although they both talked me into sitting on their respective benches for a season or more to offer some misplaced anxiety to opposing teams who had not an inkling of my shortcomings and might only wonder how the game would change against them should the coach finally send me forward—which, of course, he never did.

Yeah, it seemed to me that I was all bleak suggestion, that I would never be enough to take over for Uncle Lud. Which may be why I decided to go along that late afternoon.

“An hour, Bryan,” I had told him. “That's all I've got.”

“An hour should do it,” Bryan said.

“Don't worry, wussy,” he added. “Not a chance you'll get into any trouble.”