A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (4 page)

“Luck gets spent,”
I burst out, quoting Uncle Lud to Tessa's amusement.
“And an empty pocket won't hold tears.”

With that, Hana returned to us. Her laugh was a lucent bell, a golden peal I swore I saw arc and ripple in the shimmering air before its chime faded away. Even the trash-talking raven was momentarily nonplussed and fell silent.

“Native wisdom?” Hana smiled.

“German bullshit,” Jackie spat. “Leo only looks like an Indian. He's got the heart of a Kraut.”

“And the soul of an Irishman,” came Tessa's whisper, echoing a phrase my mother once uttered after I recited a poem in a school play.

I opened my mouth to argue, but it didn't matter. Hana sent Tessa an amused glance as she swung up easily in the back of Bryan's truck, nestling beside the old narrow duffle bag I used to carry the guns. Jackie, looking as if she were shaking off her own trance, managed to lumber in beside her, offering us only a faint semblance of her usual grunt. Any possible talk ended then, Bryan driving as gently as he could in that old truck with its worn shocks. We stayed quiet, grave even, in the bouncing cab until Bryan pulled up by the camp turnoff.

Jackie usually swore as her feet touched the ground, offering a “Fuck us all,” before she hit the trail, but that day we could see that it wouldn't matter if the cook pitched his usual fit, pissed at the weight of chores ahead, all those potatoes to be peeled; it wouldn't matter how heavy the mop buckets were as she scrubbed away the filth of one more meal or whether a dry gust through a propped-open door ushered in black flies. If bears trampled laundry and upended trash, who would care? Not Jackie. As the girls eased down from the back of Bryan's truck, Hana slid beside my open window and we all jumped. Already we had been starting to doubt her existence, all that perfection, and there it was again.

“Good luck,” Hana said, a general wish, it seemed, although Bryan's mouth twisted a little as if he were holding back a response. “Wish Ursie good luck too.”

She said the latter in a way that made us all think for a moment that she knew Ursie, knew her secrets, and really had missed her good, sweet company, her crazily accurate shooting. I glanced over at Bryan in time to see a frown break apart whatever was weighing him down, his expression settling into the shell-shocked self-consciousness that Jackie had arrived with that day.

Then Hana was gone, with Jackie and her backhand wave, disappearing up the gravel trail. Hana Swann, easy and bright, her own bruising white ray swelling outward to include Jackie with that new ganglyness. Jackie dazed and in love.

We didn't say a word most of the way down the hill until I finally managed to say what I thought then we must all be thinking: “Gonna be some hurt in that one.” Tessa and I sighed as if we had been holding our collected breath for hours, because we already felt the first uneasy pangs heavy in our own hearts. To our surprise, Bryan, usually ready with his own wisecrack, stayed silent. What's more, he turned his face away from us, his eyes scanning the side of the highway as if he spotted something moving along beside us. Tessa and I watched him as whatever he glimpsed took on shape and he struggled to keep the truck in a straight line. Just as fast, whatever Bryan glimpsed apparently shot ahead. His chin went up. He squinted toward the distance.

“Bryan,” I began. “Yo, Bry, you playing a game?”

I reached around Tessa and nudged his elbow and only gradually did he seem to come back to us, tossing his head and purposefully downshifting as the truck grabbed another curve.

Tessa and I glanced at each other, and for the first time in a long time, the awkwardness between us was gone. We'd cast it away in our concern. I guess we both must have known then that trouble was not on its way; it was already here. Although how could we have known how many forms that trouble would take? Neither of us was like Uncle Lud, who with his catalog of stories would have warned us all on the spot, would have wrestled the wheel from Bryan, driven straight to collect Ursie and Jackie, and taken a sure road to safety. Was there such a thing? Even in retrospect, I can't imagine where we could have fled.

Albie Porchier was in a bad state that morning. Two big fights the night before. Car windows smashed in the parking lot, a few more holes punched in the walls. One fuckhead had ripped out the sink plumbing in Room 11. What the hell was the point of that? He could have used both the new gal and Madeline, but Madeline had gone up to the hospital to get her blood checked again. Or so the niece, that Ursie, said. More likely, Madeline was having one of those days; she had an ailment, unspecified but prone to flare up during work hours. It happened. He hated to admit it, but after a decade or more of owning the Peak and Pine Motel, Albie expected continual failures from his staff. So he was working Ursie hard while he could.

She had surprised him. Seventeen, just out of school, she was Indian all right, a Haisla like Madeline, but also half-Ukrainian, he'd guess, or German. She had that big-boned, Slavic look to her mixed in with everything else. A good gal, he'd decided, maybe too nice and quiet to see what had been left behind in some of his rooms, but a dedicated worker. He didn't need to direct her and stay on her the way he usually did with his maids. Even before he'd come back from the Sub-Rite with the new PVC pipes and fresh spackle, she had swept up the glass in the parking lot and started on the empty rooms, and the curses he'd been about to bark dissolved into a nasty taste he spit into the weeds.

Not a sign of last night's fight remained. The tortured cars had screeched away, and the lumber company's big diesels had followed. In fact, other than Albie's own black Chevy, only a single vehicle, the Econoline van that arrived a few days ago, remained, still parked almost out of sight behind the Dumpsters. Mild fellow, some kind of entertainer, it seemed. A musician maybe. Or a magician. With a silly rhyming misspelling of a name: Keven Seven. Funny, Albie couldn't quite remember when he'd come in, a few nights ago at least. And for some reason, Albie could have sworn the musician had wandered down from the highway bus stop alone, until he noticed the van and felt the vague prick of a recollection: a half-heard conversation, a woman's voice engaged in a bargain of sorts, a duffle tossed onto the curb, a whispered curse thrown after it. Well, how many of those exchanges had he overheard? As he picked up a shard of glass Ursie's broom had missed, Albie no longer wondered at the fellow's need to isolate his vehicle. God knows how he'd slept through last night's ruckus.

After she'd cleaned up the parking lot, Ursie retrieved her cart and vacuum and began on the first floor. She skimmed dirty sheets off the beds and covered their sloping mattresses with rough, clean ones, shaking out each worn, yellowed pillowcase so that it almost snapped in midair before the pillow fell seamlessly into its open pocket. She picked up shredded paper wrappers and the jaundiced ends of cigarettes and empty bottles and sticky glasses and wads of tissues. She averted her eyes from the plastic garbage cans she emptied into her big black plastic bag. She ran the toilet brush around the stained toilet bowls, cleaning as best she could the grime between the cracked linoleum, the thin brown paneled walls. You couldn't get the smell out. Too many men had moved through here and their sweat and farts and piss and cigarette smoke and everything else she didn't want to think about permeated the rooms from the stained blue carpets to the broken acoustic ceilings. Not to mention the creeping stench of damp mold. She sprayed window cleaner, poured bleach, and plowed the vacuum from one edge to another, and at best the stench was furrowed beneath the chemicals, making Ursie a little bit sick all day. She wanted to open windows and call up a storm that would cleanse and sweeten, but the truth was, the men would be back at sundown, ready to go again, and Albie had forbidden her.

“Too many goddamn thieves around here,” he told her when he noticed her struggling with a window in Room 6. “You give them the tiniest crack, and they'll take everything.”

Ursie couldn't imagine what they'd take from the motel. The televisions were bolted down; the phones didn't work; not even the toilets flushed with regularity. But she had nodded, wrestled the window closed, and wondered privately if she could bring a box of baking soda and sprinkle some on the carpets without him complaining.

Although she'd only been working at the Peak and Pine Motel a few weeks, she'd already developed a feeling around several of the rooms. Room 11 was pure trouble. Two minutes inside, and you could feel a creeping despair press in off those scarred walls until you were choking with it and pissed off, too. Did you deserve this? Was this really your intended life? Those unfortunate to land in Room 11 ground their cigarettes out on the dresser or right into the paneled wall; they slashed at the carpet with pocket knives and bottle openers and smashed the overhead lightbulb and cracked the television once they realized the bedside lamps were permanently affixed to the tables and couldn't be hurled. They left cracked and putrid vials by the washroom sink and empty syringes on the carpet beside the bed. Ursie would like to burn sage and sweetgrass in there and purge it of all its sour rage.

Rooms 25 to 32, the logging company specials, were full of lies and deceptions and clouded thinking. When Madeline had given her the quick tour, an abiding denseness in those rooms made the air heavy and dulled even Ursie's quickness. Room 2, beside the ice machine, felt the happiest of the bunch, as if its proximity to party ice, the office, and the edge of the parking lot allowed it one foot out of the despair that haunted so many of the other rooms. Albie liked to put the occasional tourist family there, the ones who'd been camping for weeks before the mosquitoes wore them down or the kids came down with a mountain flu. The dad would go down to the café and return with grease-streaked paper bags full of hamburgers or soup and crackers while the mom would cajole Albie, who despised the role of obliging manager, into changing all her dollars into quarters so that she could race to the Laundromat down the road. Bucket after bucket of ice went by until eventually the family was gone, leaving a fragment of their own healing behind in the room among the sweat-stained towels, the empty pop bottles, and the inevitable socks half-shoved between mattress and box spring.

Who stayed at the Peak and Pine? Not many tourists, really, despite the new push by Albie and the
Community News.
Instead, the P&P saw a steady stream of truckers, and the lower-level logging company officials, of course, the ones punished by overseeing the camps. Social workers come to conference with other social workers, deliver new pamphlets the government had printed up after the latest five-year study, to hold PowerPoint presentations not even the elders could follow. And now, more recently, the pipeline scouts, slick talkers who met with the local council and promised not safety or wealth or even good jobs, but instead “a tangible role in addressing the nation's needs” and “compliance with the current laws.”

Who else came to the P&P? Men suddenly without homes. Men with “dates.” Drunk men. High men. Frantic, desperate men. Furious men. Men whose lives were pallid shreds that nonetheless throbbed like raw nerves. She kept her distance. Her auntie had warned her; Albie had warned her. If her fingers itched when she touched a door handle, if a flicker of tiny shivers coursed down her right side, she moved on, even if she'd knocked and knocked and no one had answered. Someone was waiting. She could tell.

Room 14 had one of the few unblemished doors. If she had a favorite room at the P&P, this was it, because whether it was by design or chance, the occupants of Room 14 were nearly always tidy and contained, arriving and departing with unusual reticence, as if they hoped to erase their passage. Her auntie said that girl Hana Swann had slept here, but Ursie had never seen her.

Ursie had every other room done that morning when she knocked on Room 14's door, knocked again and called “Housekeeping.” And the knob cool and still in her hand, she unlocked the door, called again. The cart outside the open door, Albie below in the parking lot, she pushed in the doorstop wedge Bryan had made for her, the one that would keep a hand from easily slamming the door behind her, and began her quick survey: unmade bed, pizza box, beer bottles on the nightstand and floor, but also clean brown shoes lined up neatly by the nightstand, a stack of folded clothes—jeans, a red shirt—on the torn chair. An odd scent, like a pot left too long to boil. A strange, not unpleasant hum in the air and then there between the bed and the washroom door, a man in green plaid undershorts sitting cross-legged on the sour carpet in front of a spread of playing cards.

“I've lost the Queen of Hearts,” he said before she could retreat. His hands still moving through the cards, he hadn't even glanced at her.

“All my fault. I was warned, of course. A warning I flagrantly ignored—
for good reason
.” He raised his head then and grinned at her. “Silly ass,” he said.

Ursie's heart lurched, but she knew enough not to grin back at him despite the infectiousness of that sudden surprising smile. That was the first trick Keven Seven showed her—the way a real smile could transform a thin boy with an old man's face, a boy sitting in his undershorts on a filthy motel carpet, into an irresistible show.

Both her auntie and her brother, Bryan, had warned her against talking to the men at the P&P. Women—
Native
women like Ursie—had been disappearing (only the “remains” of a few had been found). All anyone could remember later was that they'd last seen the gal talking to a fellow up by the motel, down by the bar, outside a party. Nothing good came from cavorting with strange men. Or even familiar men. Get near that Gerald Flacker or his buddy GF Nagle and a girl could be nicked bad enough to carry damage through all her short days.

“I'll come back,” Ursie said, but she didn't move, and the fellow didn't seem to hear her in any case. She couldn't take her eyes off him. His looks made no sense to her at all.

He was as slim as a boy with a head full of tousled brown hair tipped with gold. She might even have believed he was a boy but for the long lines etched down his cheeks, the crinkles by his eyes as he grinned. His eyes were clear though, blue and bright. And his hands, those white, white hands, narrow and long-fingered, those clever hands began to make the cards twirl before him. His fingers barely grazed their edges, and the cards all stood up, revolving ever so slightly before fanning back and forth. She swore they danced for him as he bent his head and scanned them once more. She leapt a little with them.

“It will ruin everything, you know,” he said, his eyes back on the cards.

“It's that important?” Ursie asked. She hated to see anyone in trouble.

“Life or death, I was told,” he answered.

“A card?”

“Not just any card. The Queen . . .”

“. . . of Hearts,” she finished.

She looked then for herself, lost for a moment in the fluid music of his hands, each card turning and preening like a mask in a ceremonial dance. She thought of the river where she and her brother Bryan and their father fished, the way her eyes learned to scan the ripples and eddies and separate out the proud, fast shot that would be her fish. If Ursie harbored a secret vanity, it had to do with her quick eyes and even swifter reactions, that unnatural surety. Whenever boys praised her for her skills, their awe and envy made her flush as sure as if they'd openly admired her breasts or slipped a hand on her bum—events that had never happened despite a ferocious amount of quiet dreaming on her part. Though she let no one see, she preened at such compliments and grew almost pretty under them. Her mother always said no fellow would romance their Ursie without first taking her fishing or shooting. That was the way to true love with their girl. They'd have to see her, her words suggested, not as a mere big-boned girl, a quick shot, but instead as the marvel she was, with her uncanny ability to ignore the rules of this world and transpierce its narrow limits.

Now Ursie let her breath wind among the cards, mimicking their silver-quick turns before, with one quick motion, she braved the swell of cards and plucked one free.

“Here you go,” she pronounced. “The Queen of Hearts, okay?”

She expected relief, but the look on his face was so troubled, so profoundly clouded, she felt pained as if she'd ruined the game. The magic had disappeared. The beautiful boy was now again a half-naked, ordinary man in Room 14, far older than he'd first appeared. The cards tumbled into disarray, stilled and lifeless, nothing more than flattened paper. She dropped the queen back into their midst and began to back away, but Keven Seven was too quick for her. He snagged her wrist with his long fingers.

“That was beautiful,” he said. “A . . . a . . . a life-saving move. Do you realize that?”

His face was rapidly regaining its glory. For the first time since her mother died, Ursie felt the wonder she might engender, and she paused in her flight. Her wrist sagged, and her hand slid right into Keven Seven's waiting palm as if choreographed, so that for a few glorious moments, the two of them were kneeling there, holding hands among the scattered cards.

“Curious,” he said finally. “Your hand is warmer than mine.”

Ursie knew he was right. She had felt the heat grow in her fingertips as the cards had danced below them. Already her hands were cooling.

“But not for long,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Not for long.”

He had the oddest smile—a quick flash, intimate and knowing—as if he were colluding with her. And yet his seeming appreciation for her talents—
for her
—made Ursie less wary than she usually was. After all, she had found the Queen of Hearts, just like that, and he'd seen right away how talented she was in this arena. Most people didn't. Most people simply saw her—if they noticed her at all—as a capable bear of a girl, a potential workhorse who wouldn't flinch at a dirty job, a worker's kid. Most people never perceived the graceful ease of her movements, the unusual sureness. But he did. He got it right away, and look how delighted he was, as if he'd been waiting for her.