A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (3 page)

We waited for Jackie to say something. To crack a joke or push one of us around or even just grab the gun off Bryan and start pinging at the dump pile to see what might come out. But Jackie was shy and awkward, tripping on roots and making a lot more noise than she usually did. It was as if she'd just discovered her body was a few sizes too big and was stumbling around inside, trying to gain purchase.

A brilliant day. The cool morning air had slipped away. Our old flannel shirts and hoodies long since peeled off. The dump was already heating up, sunlight burning through the high clouds, crisscrossing the random piles and striking each of us in turn. Soon, we would be blistered by the stench, blind and sweating. Not yet though. In the woods beyond the rutted logging road, great swaths of God's rays formed halos here and there, illuminating the tunneling clouds of mosquitoes that were already claiming the day. Once, when I was in grade three, I'd been up on a trail with my mother and the dogs and a God's ray fell right over us. My mother, who'd been schooled by the nuns, started to kneel, but the dogs pulled her upright. Still, we all were held tight for a moment, even the dogs.

“No bears?”
That was the second thing she said. Nothing about the scavenger gulls squabbling over the remains of a moose butchering a few days ago. Nothing about the black flies that swarmed around our heads and made us all a little frantic. Nothing about the guns in our hands.

“N-n-not y-y-yet,” I stuttered. Everyone turned and stared at me. Even Jackie finally raised her bent neck and managed a weak smile.

“Leo Smooth Talker here,” Bryan jabbed.

“Bear got your tongue,” Tessa teased as we began to let our breath out. Annoyed as I was by my clumsiness, it felt good to have Tessa joking with me. I ducked my head with pleasure, but not before trying to catch her eye.

The old dump smelled like piss and sulfur and rot, but Hana Swann didn't seem to notice. She leaned against the big lava rock that we often used to balance our guns, and for the first time, with relief, we could see her weariness. Tessa offered her a stick of that clove gum she loved and hoarded from the rest of us, and we couldn't help noticing Hana Swann's hands as she unwrapped the gum, long and white and elegant and, just as everyone said, completely unblemished, as if she'd been soaking them in milk her entire life.

“Thanks,” she said, offering Tessa more of that pearl-toothed smile. I was surprised to see Tessa frown a little at that smile, as if she'd seen something in it she recognized and did not like one whit.

Hana Swann waved off Bryan's gun, even as she eyed him closely, reading, it seemed, his particular brand of longing.

“Who are you?” she said. “Ah, Bryan, sure, that's right.” As if she'd known about him for ages.

He handed the gun to Jackie instead, who took it in her own trance. Once she began to sight, her new awkwardness seeped away, and when she stepped up to take her shot, we relaxed a little more, forgetting for a moment to glance at Hana and see how she was taking it. Jackie nailed a young rat. The crap crows went ballistic, and we fell back a little to let 'em go, although Bryan managed to hit two who were reluctant to give up their positions in the moose offal.

Throughout all this, Hana watched with a kind of ease as if she'd been with us always. I could feel her eyes move from one to the other.

“Ursie isn't here,” she said out of the blue, and Bryan smirked at Jackie, imagining she'd been telling Hana all about us—a telling fact, since our Jackie didn't like to reveal anything personal to many. The thought that she'd described us to Hana kind of thrilled me, and Bryan pointedly wiggled his big eyebrows in Jackie's direction. She pretended not to notice. Instead she picked up one of the tin cans visited by bears and carried it to Hana. Big ol' Jackie looked like a little kid, shy with her treasures. We could see how much she wanted Hana to like this place, like us, like her, and when Hana said
You have a good eye, Tessa
or
Steady hand
there,
Leo,
we were all absurdly, uncharacteristically happy as if we'd been training for her approval all this time.

Before long, we were almost bullshitting as usual as we traded off taking shots, although even our simplest jeers felt like lines given out onstage. We could feel Hana. She damn near glowed behind us, so that by the time the heat had fully risen, our T-shirts were soaked through, and our hearts were about to burst with the need to stop and stare. Jackie had already quit and was hunched on an old stump beside a patch of late-blooming foxgloves, her eyes pinned on Hana, who it seemed had gone to sleep while we were aching with her presence. She was still leaning against the big black rock, that bone-white girl, asleep there in the middle of the swill and the stench and the noise of the guns. Yet when it was time to go, and Bryan and Jackie went to the far side of his truck, Hana rose fully awake and followed them, head tilted to one side, watching as Jackie pulled plastic bags from her pockets: biscuits and back bacon wrapped in paper toweling. Without a fuss, the food parcels were placed on the cracked dashboard of Bryan's truck.

“So what's this?” Hana asked.

Bryan shrugged. Gerald Flacker didn't seem worth his breath, and it hurt him to conjure up the Magnuson kids, but Jackie managed an explanation laced with “dickhead” and “fucker” and just about every other adjective we'd ever hurled toward Flacker. And then, all warmed up, she told a story about a back room Flacker had kept for truckers, about girls drugged and branded and raped; about his drugs, his guns, visits in the night; about his private posse of goons, the Nagle brothers and the bald, dead-eyed Brit who accompanied them as they trolled town; and lastly about those two little kids trapped by their meth-head mother in Flacker's kingdom.

“And this is how you deal with him?” Hana said, nodding toward the truck's dashboard. “You sneak around behind his back?”

She didn't say it meanly, but her question cut Bryan to the core, I could see. She had offered a tease, but clearly she had no idea of what Flacker really was, although for one terrifying second, I thought we'd conjured him, a black-bearded monster, tattoos riding up his neck and across his iron knuckles, a twisted livid face striding straight out of a stunted jack pine. He'd set men on fire more than once, it was said, and stuck around to watch them burn. A swelling heat enveloped me as the vision faded, and I hurried to cut off any suggestions Hana Swann might be about to make.

“Would be suicide to do more,” I began. “Anyone who crosses Flacker . . .”

“You got a better plan?” Bryan interrupted, closing the truck's passenger door.

“The best plans are the simplest ones,” Hana said.

“This is pretty damn simple,” Bryan said. “We bring food.”

“How pure you all are,” she said, confusing the hell out of us again and embarrassing us too, especially me. I could not help cutting my eyes toward Tessa. Out of all the kids we knew, we were probably the only ones not screwing around. At least, not much.

The morning was spent. We began pocketing the pellets and gathering the guns, none noticing for the moment that Hana had picked up the .22 and was scoping out a shot, but she wasn't aiming toward the tipped piles that had occupied us. No, she was turned in the opposite direction, her eyes scanning the woods behind us. She got off several shots in rapid succession, causing Tessa to fall against me in surprise, an event too unexpected to relish. Before our shouts had fully erupted, Tessa had regained her balance and Hana had aimed the gun twice more, and our thin shouts arced high to pursue her shots into the trees. Even Jackie looked vexed. We had rules. In weather like this, so hot a spark might ignite the woods, we only shot toward the garbage pile, a containment, we hoped. And we had a rule too about shooting behind our backs. We'd even mentioned those earlier when we thought Hana might shoot with us. Hana didn't seem to care. She'd already flown away into the woods. It seemed she'd barely wandered into the jack pine, scrub alder, and black spruce before she returned cradling something in her arms. The disconnection was too great—the shot, Hana returning as if she'd skunked out an infant. The scene barely made more sense when the infant slid along her arm so that she was holding it by the tail.

“What is that?” Tessa said. “A marmot?”

“Too little,” Jackie said.

“It's a marten,” I said. “A young one.”

“Another A for Leo,” Hana said.

“We're not high enough. They live above the tree line, don't they?” Bryan said. “Shouldn't be here at all.”

“Would you call this his bad luck?” Hana said.

Tessa took a few steps backward and thrust her hands into her pockets, assuming what a stranger might suppose was a nonchalant pose. The truth is that Tessa is the most superstitious girl alive, placing trust in a collection of talismans she rotates among her pockets, and I, at least, knew Hana had set off one of her alarms, and inside her pocket Tessa's fingers were busy rubbing a white-striped rock or a knot of red ribbon or the silver fish charm I once found behind the Shelter.

“They're protected,” I said. “You can get fined for shooting them.”

“They're just as bad as rats, really, Leo,” Hana countered. She turned toward Bryan: “Do you know they feed on the young of other animals? It's not dead, either. Only stunned. Go ahead, Leo, feel it.”

And I did, just for a second, the tiny heart beating a mile a minute. Truthfully, I was more transfixed by the line of red coursing down that white arm, spotting her open palm. I suddenly wanted to catch it in my own hand. I wanted, oh so strangely, to feel the heat of the gun, the stink of blood, on me. If I'd been alone with Hana, I might have even said to her:
Me next. Shoot me next.
Even as I heard the words bounce in my head, I was paralyzed by a desire to find more hurt. It came from her. Like a gift, I thought irrationally. Out of the blue, I heard another murmur that reminded me of Uncle Lud's voice. Uncle Lud, telling a story. I went to take a step backward, away, away from Hana Swann, but I was crazy dizzy, and stopped short. I might have stood there even longer, openmouthed above the marten's wounded side, but Tessa murmured beside me, and in response, Hana pulled the creature away and tossed it, a trapper's nightmare, onto the refuse pile with a nonchalant coldness that finally made me want to run from her.

Jackie and Tessa went over to have their own look at the marten. Hana handed the gun back to Bryan. I turned in time to see her lean in closely, touching his arm with her stained white hand. Bryan, like any sensible person, went stock-still at her proximity—my own heart lurched again—but the crap crows, lulled by the temporary quiet, had returned along with a pair of inquisitive ravens, and whatever Hana said to Bryan was muffled by the birds' raucous reclamation of the moose entrails, their excitement at the new addition of the not-quite-dead marten.

It all happened quickly, and then we were done, more than ready to go, to get away from this spot. As we were climbing into the truck Jackie told us they'd be hitchhiking the highway route back to camp: Hana's plan. A quicker solution, she said.

“Nah, you can't do that,” Tessa said. “You know better than that.”

“There's two of us,” Jackie tried. “It's daylight.”

“Hasn't she heard?” Tessa asked, her eyes skittering past Hana.

No one wanted to go over the details: the names of the girls, the tiny children left behind, the rumors of truckers on the highway, chains hanging in the cabs, a silver van with blacked-out windows. Native girls were prey, as thoughtlessly disposable as that moose carcass or the unlucky marten, and we all knew it, regardless of how many times some uniformed dope with his tortured hat got on the television and explained how hard they were trying, how impossible the landscape, how thin the clues and evidence gleaned from family reports they never seemed bothered to fully consider. What we heard was a kind of irritated grumbling:
C'mon, you can't find anyone out there, especially with skin like that.

“She's been traveling all around,” Jackie said, unable to fully keep the doubt out of her voice. “She says she never has a problem.”

Bullshit, we thought. A girl like that had to have encountered a few issues on the road. But then the image of Hana striding back toward us—that thin line of marten blood running down her white forearm—returned all at once, and we weren't sure any longer. Bryan and I hardly dared look at her. Her head tipped backward, hair swinging behind her, that long, breathtaking white neck exposed, she was scanning the high hills as if looking for someone else.

“Those hills are full of girls,” I thought I heard her say. Although she might have said “gulls.”

The comment pierced us. Not one of us moved. Hana seemed impervious to whatever stories she'd heard, whatever truths we knew.

“This is
God's
country, isn't it?” she said, with an odd, faraway gaze that implied God hadn't visited in a while. “And I'm still here, aren't I?”

A marvel indeed, we might have privately agreed.

And for one slender moment, we believed her, and like Jackie, we might have fallen into her cool sureness ourselves, but then a raven called out from the refuse pile, mocking our reverential stillness, our continual stupidity. The light shifted, and we woke up, feeling again the sweat running down the back of our necks, the sun scalding the tops of our heads.

“Lucky,” Bryan said, “that's all.”

Hana stared past us as if she were already traveling on and we had been left far behind.

From the corner of my eye, I noticed Tessa crossing herself. The concept of luck made her almost as uneasy as the pictures we all just conjured of Hana and Jackie wandering up the highway together. More than anything, I wanted to enclose Tessa in my arms then, to offer her safety. Instead, I settled for interrupting her unease.