A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (21 page)

He is well away. He made sure he would be, along with every other innocent. But Bryan knows he's done it. Gerald Fucking Flacker is dying. Bryan saw it happen, the man burned alive. He could practically feel the tight heat in Flacker's chest, the screwing worm. The flaring surge, that thick black rope, would have come out of nowhere, twining Flacker's breath, squeezing the life out of him, so that if he could curse, if he did curse, the howling words birthed in his gut would splutter and rocket alternately like fistfuls of gravel hurled blindly. Only the odd piece might hit and wound with a hot-red edge sharpened by that squeeze, his rib cage tightening.

Flacker moved at speed, but Bryan knew that wouldn't help him. Flacker simply had to run, despite the fact that he was nearly blind by then. He plain couldn't see for the furious flush, which narrowed his vision to one blistering beam. All the edges went gone up in smoke and that was all he was left with, that tunnel of blackening light. He had to smell burning rubber or hair or the hot sear of metal on flesh. From the feeling in his chest, the sheer weight slamming into his nostrils, the stink might have been coming from him. If a man could combust from his own rage, his overwrought spleen exploding and taking down each organ, each sense, one by one in a rapid-fire domino-like shots fired at cans, if a man could die from the vehement swell of his own interior violence, then that, that was what should kill, will kill,
did
kill, Gerald Fucking Flacker.

The first explosion took out the still and might have been survived and explained away. An accident, a nuisance, faulty connectors and imprecise measures, a dozen possible infractions for which Flacker would certainly have exacted retribution from damn near everyone for years; he would have made sure of that. But his private shed, shrine to guns and knives and obscene booty, to file cabinets, envelopes stuffed with cash held stiff with rubber bands like an old-time bank—oh, that was serious damage. Forfeiture of whatever spirit flared and spit within him. And yet even there, some valuables might have been saved, given the thin fortress of metal. He might have emerged piecemeal but mean as ever. Still, when the meth lab camper rumbled and clanked, mere seconds of warning, and the earth itself erupted, Flacker, fully insane now, was hurled upward off his back steps and propelled straight into the flames as if that claim could no longer be denied. He belonged to the devil now, fully and once and for all. All those curses still roiling inside him finally found purchase in that hellhole. Hurled outward in one fierce burst, Flacker's bellow rising and whipping at tornado force even as the furious earth opened in its own fiery rage and sucked him in. Not even ash and bone would be left.

He's dying. He's dying. He's dead.

The house went last behind Flacker like an exclamation point. He, of course, never noticed the sputtering fire under the front porch catching the gasoline spill from a discarded chainsaw, the two-sided leap toward a kerosene heater set against the post and pier foundation and, in a crooked dance, through the speargrass to the oil-soaked dust of what passed as Flacker's driveway.

Da Boom!

Da Boom!

Da Boom!

In one last gesture, Flacker's proud truck flew skyward and rained hard, the hammering pieces just missing the unchained dogs who fled like trained greyhounds up Charlotte Road, a bony flash of grayed flesh and hanging tongues.

In a steel railroad car beside the abandoned sawmill, the little Magnuson kids cowered at first at the thunder, anticipating what would follow, Flacker's sallow face whitening with rage, their punishment arriving. And when it didn't, they hoped. They unfurled from the tight burrow they'd made and turned up their faces like flowers to each sunny explosion. Surrounded by bags of snack foods—Sub-Rite's own store brands of popcorn, pretzels, potato chips, a treasure trove of cake biscuits and sweets, too—and an open, half-full case of tall-necked Diet Bubble-Ups, anyone watching might have thought they'd bought tickets to a show.

Their mother wasn't hungry. She never was. When the first explosion came, the blast had first rolled her down the hill before she'd landed on her feet already running, unwittingly following the same path her children had. She fled. Unusual for her, that flight. Her instincts were dulled, almost nonexistent. She didn't know it, of course, but this quality had attracted Flacker to her in the first place. How he loved a punching bag, and though she would bob and weave like a frantic pup, her timing was woeful and he always found her waiting in the corner, the truth of a situation only dawning when his fist grabbed her hair, knocking her head “to put some sense in it.”

Lord knows what pushed her away from the house in the first place that afternoon. The kick on the rear set her walking and she didn't stop until she was well down the hill. Even so, that last blast might have flattened her as it did her so-called boyfriend, if she hadn't reached the sawmill's tracks by then and flung herself, all the burning bits of her, into the open railcar. She hadn't required the coaxing enticements of Bryan's familiar bags visible at child height as if they'd entered a wild game, an Easter-egg hunt with a raw-boned teenager standing in for the bunny. The surprise of the open rusted boxcar was a gift those addled children didn't even question, and neither did their mother. One shoe was lost; her thin yellow hair singed on the top of her head. She hardly noticed her own two children and their booty as she crouched, hands crossed over her head, shivering uncontrollably, until one of them—it was the boy—scuttled to his feet and ran to hand her a long-necked bottle of lukewarm Diet Bubble-Up as if it were pure medicine, a magic elixir that might cure them all.

The moment Cassie Magnuson appeared at the top of the hill, Bryan knew the Nagles had arrived and that Flacker would be occupied. He'd got what he'd planned, a full-bore distraction, which was the only way he'd managed to get the dynamite in place. He hoped that, like in that old singsong poem his mother used to tell them about a gingham dog and a calico cat, they'd just eat each other up. But justice was slim around here. That's why he was here, wasn't it? He'd done the deed, and afterward, a fine char coating his face, his eyes stung by smoke, he searched, screaming, “Leo! Leo!” until he could wait no longer. Hoarse and blackened, he must have been a horrible sight when he returned to the open freight car. The little Magnuson kids were seemingly impervious to terror, but not to the effects of junk food. One might have thrown up. The boxcar stank of puke. But both were still methodically stuffing their mouths and right next to them was their horrible mother, rocking back and forth with a half-empty bottle of Diet Bubble-Up.

Bryan checked the truck, began calling out again. “Leo, damn it!”

“They took 'im,” Cassie Magnuson told him when he returned to the boxcar. “They put that kid away in the orange car.”

Bryan felt an unbearable urge to slap her. Slap her or run like crazy. Leo had been right all along; the Nagles had come after them. Instead he roughly hustled Cassie Magnuson and her two kids and their found booty into a van he'd found parked between two firs beyond the rusted millworks, the keys dangling in the ignition. It started up right away, just as it had the first time Bryan had tried it, hours before. Such a soft purr for an old battered van. He all but pushed Cassie into the driver's seat, pretending he didn't smell a thing, and still she stared at him wild-eyed until he did what he imagined every man did to get her attention. He screamed at her.

“Get out of here, you bitch!” he yelled.

His voice was muffled by the roar behind them, but Cassie got it. As if sparked, her bony hands jammed the shifter into drive, and the van all but galloped away, sliding sideways only once before it landed on the loop road. Running, Bryan reached his truck, which mercifully started, and he followed the old van right up to the highway, watched as it merged and began its journey away from town. Bryan followed in the truck as far as the first cut-off dirt road, then looped back toward town to search for the Nagles' orange Matador and the dumbest smart kid ever.

All morning, they had plagued him. His brother slamming the back of his head each time Markus began to drift. Even when they were in the car and Markus wanted to howl from the pain in his arm, even when the pain flat made him pass out, his brother didn't let up.

“Where's the fucking money? Where's the fucking money?”

They had to go see Flacker. They had to stay the hell away from Flacker. They had to tell Flacker that Markus was a fucking idiot. That Markus had been rolled. That Markus was a stupid thief. They'd feed Markus to Flacker. Or not. Because who had passed that wad of bills to Markus in the first place? Somehow they decided it would look better if he disappeared along with the money. If he just got the fuck out of town and didn't show his face again. They'd put him in the jeep they kept at the house as a spare. Send him north. Or south. Do mischief on his own. Keep his mouth zipped. Leave them here to take the brunt of Flacker's anger, which would be the equivalent of a hot iron set in his own wounds. Maybe they should give him a taste before they set him free? But hell, they might need that jeep. Why let Markus take it? They didn't need him. Asswipe. They'd find that money. They would. Unless he was screwing with them. He'd better not be screwing with them.

His brother's fists spared nothing, but the last beating was calculated, leaving him energy enough to stagger eventually to his feet. They didn't want him found. They wanted him gone. As if he could go. A pitiful specimen quaking on the roadside, one thumb cocked among that sea of fire refugees, not one of them with a spare inch of room for a broken loon like Markus—unless it was another broken loon, enough of those about.

He wasn't going anywhere anyway.

Markus had to walk the whole way back, skunking through ditches until he regained the outskirts of town, shadowing yards and back alleys, kicking off dogs, and even hunkering down awhile in the baseball dugout to catch his breath and swallow a couple of pain pills GF miraculously hadn't taken from him. He couldn't shake the sound of sirens in his head. They'd begun hours ago after GF had booted him out of the Matador. He'd lain in the ditch, howling, but GF hadn't come back. And just as well. After the pills kicked in, he was able to stumble to the house where they'd crashed the last time and, with his one good hand, make a pile of crappy scrambled eggs, slamming them down right out of the hot pan so fast he raised a blister on his lip. Afterward, almost without thinking, he fled again. Both the jeep he'd hope to use and the Matador were gone now, but GF would be back; he'd find Markus and be more pissed off than ever, sure Markus had lost the money on purpose. But he hadn't lost the money really. It was safe as could be. In an angel's hands.

He hadn't breathed a word of her to GF, not even when the two of them were working him over, GF's boot pressed hard on his chest, its dog-shit stained tip under Markus's split chin. He hadn't mentioned her at all. But he could see her clearly, curled into the chair like a velvety cat, the long sweep of her hair blanketing her shoulder and broken cheek. Tucked up so neat with a red shoe on her as if she were something special. She was, he knew, she was.

Even GF had missed her. That's how crazy-smart that girl was.

He remembers vaguely a wad of bills, her bandaged hand unfurling paper and trying . . . and failing . . . to reacquaint the rolled wad to his pocket, which refused to hold the bills and rolled them outward, a continual expulsion, so that he laughed and tipped his head away. It was such a silly joke: a Nagle who could not snatch money. Still he could not, would not, describe for his furious brother the thin-boned grace of that girl who saved him, who did not desert him, but flew back to his side and saw him safely to bed, poor wracked souls, the pair of them. She had a sister somewhere waiting. A running car. An impatient clerk with a hand out. And she satisfied them all and tucked the sheet around him so that he slept, finally slept, like he hadn't for all his life; he was sure of that. And if GF hadn't interrupted and slammed away every last good dream Markus had, he might have awakened with her hand in his good one, a better, gentler man. A man with hope and promise. No. No. No. He would not give her up.

He must have slept or passed out or maybe someone else had knocked him over. He woke again in the dusky light of that late summer night, coughing from the weight of the air. He could hear cars still moving on the highway, the steadiness like a surf, and they made him unaccountably happy. The town was still here. And so must she be as well. He half ran the blocks past downtown, past the still-humming Sub-Rite, the vibrating strip that led to the neon pine tree pulling him close. The Peak and Pine—what a place that was. The lot was crammed full of trucks, even campers. It occurred to him there must be at least one poker game in progress, but how quiet the place was. Although he knew better, he imagined Tessa sleeping behind one of those thin green doors, the entire motel shushed for her benefit. Which one? Which one? He was wavering in front of a wall of doors, reading their numbers, trying to jog his memory when a familiar voice greeted him and he turned to see his old friend, leaning against a back corner as if he had been waiting for Markus.

You're still here.

I'm always here,
you know,
Clark said.

Card game, eh? Room for one . . .

It's over.

So early.

For now.

S'okay. I was looking for someone.

The girl with the red shoes.

Yeah. Yeah
.
Unease tickled Markus. The faint memory of nausea. His arm jolted with pain as if he was truly waking now.

And the roll of cash.

Yeah? How did Clark know? Had she told him? She must know Clark.

Oh, yes. You'll want to see her.

Markus beamed. He wanted to describe her to his old friend, but details eluded him. Her calmness. Capability. Acceptance. How could you put that into words? Better to say “great ass,” but Markus felt a deeper, stranger pull toward Tessa. An old-timey phrase came to mind. Heavenly. She was heavenly. She would elevate him, he felt sure.

Heaven is a fortress, you know. Icy, snowbound,
Clark said as if in response.
No way in, no way out.

Markus frowned, sure he hadn't said a word aloud. Had he? And now Clark, like GF when he got a snootful, was off on a rant.

Pearly gates held tight by thunderbolts, pompous know-it-all guards, scads of rules. Hierarchy you would not believe. Crowds and crowds of the most boring souls you can imagine. Only one thought vibrating through those orthodox vestiges: obedience, obedience, obedience.

Markus cracked an uneasy grin, and a seepage began, as if he were losing a vital fluid. His arm ached.

Hell, on the other hand, has no borders. You can find it anywhere. Do what you like, where you like, to whom you like.

Hurts, does it?
Clark said, reaching toward him with one thin white hand.

And oh, how it did then. A hot pain shot right to his heart. His legs shook. The parking lot waved and began to disintegrate, and just as quickly, it was over.

A little trick I learned,
Clark said as Markus tentatively moved his arm. The sore bone vibration, that endless dull ache within his cast, was gone. He swung his bad arm from side to side. Nothing. He could run with her now; they could leave together.

Guess they took the car away. Markus said. Place is swarming with people.

She's not far, you know,
Clark said.

A faint memory of a van stirred in Markus.

His old friend shook his head.
Oh, no. But not far.
I'll draw you a map. You'd be surprised at how easy it can be to lose your way on that beautiful highway.