A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (8 page)

“Ah,” he whispered in his ravaged voice. “Ah, Leo. You saw her . . . didn't you? You saw Snow Woman.”

You know this, don't you?
he was almost begging.
You have this?

One of my father's more uncharitable relatives maintains that a great-uncle of my father's did a huge favor for a medicine man in one of the northern tribes and was paid back with a backhanded curse. Not so, Uncle Lud swears. He was
rewarded
—not with rich farmland or timber or a hefty bank account—but with an enduring connection to the band itself, one that led my father to fall in love with a Native woman and my father's younger brother to lose his heart—and soul—to storytelling. So my Uncle Lud, my white uncle, my uncle who should not have known all he did, stockpiled tales the way others amass tables and chairs and cars and suit jackets, all the props of life. This was his fortune, the legacy he was handing to me.

In Uncle Lud's vast story encyclopedia, one form of the devil is a gentle white lady who places a sliver of ice in your heart and makes you desperate to meet her in the underworld. It is an ancient story, dredged up each generation, whenever a spate of suicides occurred. Some bands call her Deer Woman. Others, Night Woman. When Snow Woman finds you, unless you are the strongest of souls, the most skeptical, or the most protected, the world no longer belongs to you. She has found a particularly easy berth in young Indian men, so eager it seems to flash out of this life into any other. Suicide sounds so desperate; it really does. But following Snow Woman can be damn near noble, irresistible. It is, the rumor goes, an act of pure magic: a disappearing act directed by the devil himself. I'd heard the story a half-dozen times from Uncle Lud. I knew it in my bones. But at that moment it seemed as if I'd forgotten every scrap, and as he watched, I reached for a notebook.

People go missing. That's not news, it turns out. It's how they get lost that's of interest. Vanishing, according to Uncle Lud, has never been an uncommon event. In the backcountry where he and my father grew up, people still disappear at regular intervals, many from choice, chasing a job or fleeing a failing farm or a hellish wife or a demented acquaintance with a grudge and a storehouse of weapons. Sometimes, the law swoops down when no one is looking, and only rumors are left behind.

Other times, plain old stupidity is the cause.

A perceived aura of invisibility, Uncle Lud says, is the third stage of drunkenness, followed swiftly by a more fatal stage: the belief in invincibility. So there you are, weaving home alone in the moon-starved night, shit-faced in the snow, no worries. Who can even see you? That realization sends you spinning from this world, the once well-known path squeezing down to nothing as if viewed through a closing periscope, the road lost for good, and your last brilliant assumption is that if you are only going to waste time turning in circles, why not rest awhile in that grave-shaped gulley, that pillowy hollow of a snowbank.

Gone, gone, gone.

Another kind of disappearance, less common, of course, is almost never talked about except by those who have nearly fallen victim, but even they quickly learn that their stories are best left unexplored. It was only by chance that Uncle Lud happened to be party to a firsthand report.

This happened in a mining town called Wilton's Cross, which used to occupy a narrow slit off the old highway—a dozen houses, a sand-brick church up on cinder blocks, and a company store with two back rooms (one for playing cards and one for visiting one of the three women unfortunate enough to have landed there without a man's protection). The enclave perched just beyond the spray of a waterfall that fell a quarter mile into the river that ran straight through the town under the half block of a boardwalked main street. Wilton's Cross has all but faded away—kind of ironical, when you think about it—but one of the old mining-company roads ends by the stone bridge that crossed into the old town, and though the boardwalk's long gone and most of the homes burned in a fire that swept through decades ago, you can still walk across that bridge, find bricks from the church, and hurl one or two toward the falls for luck, if you dare.

Uncle Lud, then a boy of twelve, was on his way back from a championship hockey game, a seven-hour drive from the farm where he lived with my father; their much-older sister, Joyce; Joyce's husband, Toby; and my grandparents. Toby was the assistant coach for the team that Uncle Lud had barely made, and he had volunteered to drive a few kids to the championship.

The team traveled in three vehicles—a van driven by the coach, a station wagon by a teacher at the school, and one old car by Uncle Lud's young brother-in-law. Uncle Lud, of course, rode in Toby's car. On the way home, he sat up front and listened while Toby painstakingly went over the games, the two they'd won and the one they'd lost. His teammates, two big boys from the reserve, unwelcome in the van and station wagon, were worn out and slept with their cheeks against the windows, and eventually Uncle Lud too dozed off, his head tipping forward as he nodded to Toby's passionate replay.

Some time later, it might have been a few minutes or full hours, he woke from a dream about butter tarts to a heavy bump and a whooshing rumble as if the car had fallen into a hole and Toby was gunning the engine. Behind him, the big boys stirred but snored on. Beside him, Toby was rubbing his tired eyes. He unrolled his window and craned his neck out, and only gradually was Uncle Lud aware that the noise he was hearing was not the car's engine racing—the car had, in fact, stopped—but the roar of a waterfall about forty feet away.

“I need to walk around,” Toby declared, and so, Uncle Lud decided, did he.

They left the sleeping boys behind and wandered up the empty road to the stone bridge that led into Wilton's Cross. The settlement was quiet, even then in its last days of pretending to be a town, and no one appeared on the gravel street or peered out a window at them. At the far end of the road, they could see a truck and a derelict school bus framing a turnaround.

“I'm hungry,” Toby said, his stomach growling from the cold air's bite.

They'd left home with wax-paper-wrapped packets of Kraft cheese sandwiches, with thermos containers of beef stew and chicken, with great boxes of sugar-raisin cookies and a couple of sacks of old apples from the root cellar. Nearly every bite of it had been eaten before they even arrived at the championships, and then they'd gone on to gorge themselves on the city motel's free breakfasts, slipping stale doughnuts and hard-boiled eggs into their hockey bags as they left. But now Uncle Lud, too, still craving the butter tarts of his dream, was starved and fingering the two dollars he had kept all along in his coat pocket.

“You think there's a store here?” he asked Toby.

Without answering, Toby began to stroll forward, and Uncle Lud followed.

The remnants of a dirty snow covered the wooden steps up to the company store, and though they creaked and buckled, the stairs held and the door opened on the first try, its wavy glass panes shuddering. Not much on the shelves—dusty tins and cardboard boxes with their sides sunken in—but the clerk, a long-faced, unshaven man in spattered coveralls, wearing a wool hat and work gloves in the unheated store, pulled a dusty bag of potato chips from under the counter and sold that and a large bottle of seltzer to Uncle Lud for the money in his pocket. Toby bought the store's entire supply of spicy jerky, all eight of them in homemade wrapping, and was tearing at one with his teeth before they left the store. As they meandered back over the bridge, a breeze off the falls misting their hair, Uncle Lud privately hoped the big boys were still asleep and would stay that way until he'd finished off the chips.

But the boys weren't asleep. And they weren't in the car, either.

“Taking a piss, I guess,” said Toby, squinting off into the woods on the other side of the falls. Footprints in the snow seemed to lead that way.

Early afternoon and already dusky and growing colder by the second.

“We'd better rouse them,” Toby said after a few minutes had passed. “We don't have time for sightseeing. Damn kids.”

He guessed they'd gone on to get a better look at the falls. Even half-frozen, the falls were a sight. He hoped those boys weren't foolish enough to go exploring. All of a sudden, an urgency came over them there in the fading light, and both Toby and Uncle Lud bolted for the dimming trail, calling out the boys' names.

They followed footprints to a deer trail and were soon trotting along in the gloaming light, twisting with the trail until the footprints disappeared. For a moment, Toby and Uncle Lud paused, their frozen breath aching in their lungs as they cast around for any clue. Uncle Lud saw the broken branches, and they didn't hesitate. They couldn't hesitate. It was that swift decision to beat through the broken branches, sliding and falling, that ultimately saved the two reserve boys, who they finally saw ahead of them, coatless, both still in their red hockey jerseys, perched above them, mere feet from the falls. If it had been summertime, the boys never would have heard them. As it was, the waterfall's muted winter roar kept them from noticing the newcomers at first.

“Hey!” Toby shouted, but the boys didn't turn, and Uncle Lud noticed how brilliant the light was beyond them. Away from the trees, daylight still held sway. He and Toby climbed closer, their every step now more treacherous. As they climbed, Uncle Lud found himself whispering,
Turn around, turn back. Turn around, turn back.
A mantra in his mind, but Toby soon was stock-still, staring at him, because Uncle Lud was singing the words aloud now:
“Turn around, turn back, turn around, turn back,”
and the boys were slowly changing course, twisting away from the falls, back toward Toby and Uncle Lud. As they did, both seemed to come awake, and one almost fell backward in his horror at seeing the falls so close to him.

Uncle Lud continued his singsong, and Toby reached forward to snag first one boy, then the other, pulling them as gently as he could back down the hill into the warren of broken branches they had all ascended. It took them forever to regain the trail, which tried to disappear beneath them, and it was fully dusk when they reached the car, the two big boys shivering and blubbering now in the backseat. Toby pulled blankets from the trunk and covered them. He found an old tarp beside the spare wheel well and pressed that around them too. Then, he and Uncle Lud got back into the car and hightailed it out of Wilton's Cross. They drove a full hour more on the highway before Toby stopped for coffee, and the boys managed to speak.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Toby began.

Tears leapt to one boy's eyes. The other coughed. Toby waited.

“We woke up,” the coughing boy said, “because of the light. We thought we were home and you were shining a flashlight to get us out of the car.”

“Then we were outside,” the other boy continued, “and the light was . . . pulling us.”

“I saw it moving into the wood, and I knew we were supposed to follow it.”

“She was ahead of us the whole way.”

“She?” Toby asked. “Who?

The boys looked shocked and miserable. They were certain—they were . . . sure, yeah, sure—they'd seen the retreating figure of a woman with long black hair.

“Yeah,” Toby kept prodding, “a woman? Not an animal?”

“I don't know,” the tear-streaked one said. “I don't know. She kept calling me, and I don't remember nothing else until I turned around and my legs began to shake.”

“Dumb-ass kids,” Toby swore. “You could have been killed.”

But he knew and Uncle Lud knew they weren't at fault. They'd felt it too, that yarning tug through the dusky light.

Later, after they'd delivered the boys back to the reserve, Toby asked Uncle Lud, “How did you know to do that, boy? Who taught you that song?”

But Uncle Lud couldn't say, any more than the reserve boys could explain Snow Woman, the will-o'-the-wisp who tried to woo them from this life. They'd have chills for months afterward, even into the summer. A misery set into their bones that even drink couldn't ease. Uncle Lud played a lot of basketball then, and he remembers getting into a pickup game with one of the reserve boys from that afternoon in Wilton's Cross. He remembers how the boy wore two shirts even in the heat, how his hands shivered on the ball, and how when their shoulders touched in a crashing jump, a cold, clean shock ran though him.

When the girls began to go missing off the highway outside town, this is what I thought of: snow and ice, a half-frozen waterfall, a flickering light, a bone-sick desire to destroy. I knew, of course, that Uncle Lud's story had nothing to do with the vanishing girls, that it would be bullshit romanticizing to imagine they'd simply wandered away following a will-o'-the-wisp, the worst kind of rationalizing, and that it was no Snow Woman but a real monster out there. Still, for weeks, even as wailing began and fights broke out and grief saturated another family, I had gone to sleep thinking, not about that lonely road but a beckoning light that could slash across time and snatch away. And I hoped. I hoped.

“You met Snow Woman,” Uncle Lud had said.

“Nah,” I told him, feeling a cold sweat behind my neck, “that wasn't her. That wasn't the girl we met.”

“Are you sure?” Uncle Lud managed, looking even more tired and concerned.

“I'm still here, aren't I?” I said, immediately hearing the echo of Hana Swann in the woods, declaring her own invincibility.

“She's just a friend of Jackie's,” I was insisting when I noticed Uncle Lud was drifting off again.

And then remembered Hana Swann's white arm, that laugh, and I thought: Jackie.

The image of her trudging away from the truck beside Hana Swann twined with a fear I hadn't felt before. It was a different kind of heartache from what came over me when my mother first told me about Uncle Lud's illness. It was different from my constant anxiety about being near Tessa. This was raw and consuming. I could feel it roiling in my gut and rushing up my spine. What was I worried about? Jackie was the toughest girl I knew—Hana Swann sure as hell couldn't hurt her—but still here it was: a big, heartless fear that swamped me and yet wouldn't show its face.

As Uncle Lud's breathing eased, I fixed his covers, adjusted the pillow behind his head, and left him sleeping in his chair. My mother had gone back to work long ago, but not before shooting both Uncle Lud and me a glance that said her heart was hollowed out and it might just be our fault. That look pushed me to my bedroom and the old computer, to my undone physics assignments, where I stared and thought of Uncle Lud, of Jackie's sideways glances at Hana Swann, of Tessa. I thought of Trevor Nowicki, of my own father and his increasingly perfunctory visits, of my mother's chronicle of butchered animals, of Tessa's foster families. Gerald Fucking Flacker. I scrolled through screens, flipped pages, lost again and again, until I began to wonder if Disappointment was a scalar or a vector quantity; if Direction could make a human heart go bad; if the Acceleration Equation could illuminate all the ways to avoid disappearing. And in the notebook (mostly blank) that my mother liked to shuffle through, I sketched my first full equation, the first that made fractional sense to me at least:

Average acceleration =
velocity + desire
=
v
f
- v
i
+ d

time
*
wasted dreams t /wd
1

The equation looked so right, like the first true thought I'd ever had, that I entered it into the daily log of section problems I was supposed to solve and keep, and I sent it off to the course instructor, a woman named Leila Chen who lived, I imagined, in that distant university city where this course, like the many others my mother had ordered over the years, originated. While Leila Chen frequently sent me e-mails, reminding me of deadlines I hadn't made and offering oblique help in her stilted prose, this was my first missive to her, and I was still in the grip of a kind of euphoric stupor when I heard Bryan's truck grabbing the gravel off Lamplight Road, and I kind of woke up, the way I imagined those two reserve boys did the afternoon they perched on a precipice, a cold ache half-formed around their eager hearts.