by Brad Ashlock
“Let’s circle around,” Dwight said, motioning everyone to follow him. As they circled the mill, the ground solidified a little, as if there were stones not far under the mud. They made their way to the front of the building. There was an empty doorway. Dwight set the lantern on the ground, making all the shadows on the outside walls rise in unison. Dwight nodded to Shorty, and Shorty drew his pistol and aimed at the doorless entrance.
“If you’re in there,” Dwight shouted, cocking his rifle, “come on out. I’m not gonna tell you twice.”
They heard wood snapping from the other side of the mill.
“Circle round! They’re trying to bust out. Shorty, stay here and guard the door! Move!” Dwight shouted, plodding clockwise around the mill.
Naumkin motioned Cal to stay with Shorty, and then followed Dwight to the back of the shack. They were up to their knees in mud here. Dwight rotated at the waist, aiming the lantern at the back of the mill. He caught one of the slaves’ hands peeling back a rotting board until the plank snapped. Dwight dropped the lantern and shot at it; he missed and the hand retracted into the mill.
“Watch the door, Shorty!” Dwight barked at the sky. “Come on out the front door or we’ll fill you full of lead!”
“He’s coming out!” Shorty yelled from the other side of the structure.
Dwight cast a satisfied glance to Naumkin, and then they both went back around to the front of the mill. Naumkin and Dwight discovered Shorty with his pistol aimed at the old black man. The escaped slave was coated in mud from his bare feet to the bib of his overalls. His quivering hands were raised next to his ears.
“We got him!” Shorty trumpeted. “I’ll be dipped, Dwight! We got him!”
“There’s supposed to be two,” Dwight said. “Where’s your friend, nigger?”
“We split up,” the trembling man of mud said, looking down to the ground where he must have looked every time he spoke with a white man.
“Is that so?” Dwight asked. “You split up?”
“Yessir.”
Dwight ordered Shorty to go into the mill and have a look-see. Shorty, shaky pistol still pointed at the old man, refused and suggested Cal go.
“You chickenshit!” Dwight said. “I’ll go.”
Naumkin lightly grabbed Dwight by the shoulder and said, “Allow me. Least I can do.”
Dwight peered down at Naumkin’s hand, looking into the chess master’s eyes, and nodded reluctantly. Naumkin glanced back to Cal. Cal looked like he was about to burst out of his skin and demonstrate some serious chopsocky. Naumkin couldn’t blame the boy…or whatever Cal was now, boy in man, who knew maybe he was always a man. He was acting like one. These other so-called men, these fools who answered to Leonard Cabot and Sam Duncan, they weren’t men, they were more like rabid dogs, like those beasts that had chased him and Cal down the dark path in the woods. They walked on two legs instead of four, but there was a little of that beastly red in their eyes, those rouge embers like bloodlust, like bullet holes, like red suns burning across the South toward that pale Confederate gray. Naumkin didn’t like turning his back on those two beasts, Dwight Browne of the white and brown and the stupid Shorty with the itchy trigger finger and black smear across his hat. They were sadists.
Naumkin could remember his own slavery. His master was Stalin with the chomping hellmouth, devouring the world from the ninth circle that surrounded Moscow and radiated out, engulfing all that it could. Naumkin’s people farmed themselves to death for the chomping master Stalin mouth. This half-naked brown man staring down the white eyes that looked down the silver barrels knew something about terror. Could this old black man sense the scars Stalin had inflicted on Naumkin’s back with the communist whip? Scars that still burned. The old slave was probably too frightened to even see beyond the color of Naumkin’s skin. Couldn’t that little Katie Duncan see that Naumkin was in disguise; couldn’t this trembling old man see too?
Naumkin wanted them to know now that he was not a slaver, not a racist, not a hater. He walked up the steps of the mill and looked into the darkness. This was Stalin’s mouth now, waiting in 1857 in an Arkansas swamp to grow big and wide and gaping, to slurp the stagnant waters using the femur bones of slaves for straws, and plugging his nose from the swampy stench with picked cotton. Maybe the Stalin mouth just devoured the cotton along with the humanity and the brackish water. Naumkin stepped up to the giant Stalin head, the ramshackle mill, the chocolate factory, in the pines where the river dies and past the oaks where the Rouge chokes, the mill, like that bizarre Nazi chocolate grinder on the manufacturing floor in a different time and world, seemed to turn into some kind of old technology of mixed steamboat parts, bomb shelter bulkheads, all of it resembling a skull, Stalin’s head, chomping up and down, the black mouth sucking up the lantern light just to show how it could devour anything or anyone.
Naumkin stepped over the threshold and saw, huddling in a corner, a little boy with brown skin and eyes wide like the horses’ eyes had been. The child was frozen in the dark, lodged deep in Stalin’s gullet. However, the slave wasn’t looking at Naumkin at all. The boy was staring into the far corner. Naumkin looked to it. Spinning in the wall was a glass revolving door, like from a hotel, mall, or airport. Every time one of the openings of the door passed, a little flash of blue light pulsed and filled the room with a weak strobe. The revolving door should have been visible half the time on the outside of the mill, but half of it wasn’t in this world, it was somewhere else, anywhere else because it was an Everywhere Door.
Right now Naumkin wanted Cal and the old man in the room so they could all escape, but he didn’t know how to make that happen. He let his mind tick possibilities as if pruning the tree of variations in a chess game. Grand Master Kotov had advised that you didn’t skip around, you investigate each branch of possible chess moves fully, and then you move to the next, but this wasn’t how the mind worked. The human mind wasn’t a machine, wasn’t a cold meat-computer spitting out data. Sometimes the hibernating bear must simply awaken. Without thinking, Naumkin, the Medvedkin, Master of Defense, spun around in a whirl of joyously suicidal ambivalence and shot off half of Dwight Browne’s right hand. Safety first. The rifle fell to the ground. Like a released spring, Cal swung his nunchaku sticks and smashed Shorty across the bridge of his nose. The cowhand reeled to his back and spasmodically fired a couple rounds into the sky before falling unconscious. Dwight looked up to Naumkin in disbelief, then down to the rifle that was becoming enveloped in mud.
“I’m gonna kill you,” Dwight said, his eyes almost glowing red in the dying lantern light.
“Cal, come on! There’s a door here! Bring the old man!”
As Cal passed Dwight, he shot an elbow out along with a catlike howl, and knocked him out. Dwight fell atop his rifle, his face upturned out of the mud.
“Bitched out!”
“Are you boys in the Underground Railroad?” the old man asked.
“Something like that,” Cal said. “Come on.”
The old man followed Cal up into the mill.
“It came just before y’all arrived,” the old slave said, the light from the spinning revolving door dancing across his face. “We didn’t know if it come from the Devil or from Heaven. I think the Devil.”
“We have to go now, Mr. Naumkin! We don’t know how long this door will stay open.”
Naumkin nodded, went to the boy in the corner, and rested his hand on his shoulder. “My name’s Tigran. What’s yours?”
The boy looked to the floor.
“His name’s Jacob. I’m Solomon.”
“Do you want to come with us, Jacob?” Naumkin asked the boy gently. “There are other men out there looking for you and your friend. They might hurt you, especially after what we did to the men out there. I don’t know what’s behind that door, but me and my friend, Cal, have to go through. Do you understand?”
“We’ve got to go now!” Cal said.
Naumkin kept his hand on Jacob’s shoulder.
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br /> “I’ll go,” Jacob said.
Solomon said, “Me too. It it’s all the same, sirs…”
They went to the spinning door and, one by one, went through.
* * *
Meeko Russell awoke from her second Indian dream and looked into the billowy dark, unsure where she was. There was a cloud of shadow in the middle of the room, hovering, blotting out the far wall; it blurred everything that touched its foggy edges. She sat bolt upright and gasped for breath. The cloud instantly dissipated, revealing the posters of pre-teen idols. She ground her head back into her pillow and then the Indian’s face—he had called himself a medicine man—flashed again through her mind. He had kept telling her to remember the night she had gone with Daddy: she didn’t know what he was talking about. Which time?
There was something even stranger about the dream other than her disorientation upon waking: the Indian had seemed more real than the room, more actual than the actual. She didn’t want to know about it, all Meeko wanted to do was enjoy the bliss of here reunited parents. It had been like a dream come true. But there was something… missing. She felt the way she did when she’d drink cough syrup and then try to enjoy her lunch, all the taste was washed out. Yes, she was satiated on the love and the security of her recently reunited family, but something was amiss. Also, there was that persistent creeping feeling she sometimes got, right out of nowhere, like she was being watched. Alone in her room listening to CDs, the feeling would creep like cold fingers through her flesh. Meeko turned her back to the shadowy room and faced the wall. She was acting like a big baby. Andy why? Everything was perfect. She wouldn’t allow her dreams to ruin that, not now, not when everything had just seemed to click back into place.
“Remember…” The medicine man had said. And remember she did: her mother and father laughing again, dinners together at the table again, Daddy tossing her into the air again, plans being made for Europe again; she didn’t mind remembering that. Remember the night you went with your Daddy. Yes, he had given her a locket for Christmas, an early gift because she had been such a princess. There was a tiny key in the locket, and a new door, one with a lock, and sometimes she could swear the keyhole was an eye, and the faces in the wood grain would wink. Maybe the key in the locket and the locked door were strange, but Daddy only wanted her to be safe. Wasn’t there something else? A question she had asked?
She closed her eyes tightly and shook her head back and forth on the soft pillow. There was no question, there is only perfection, there was no question, there is only perfection, in the pines where the river dies and the snow and dirt as white and brown flies to polish the bones that sink like hard stones and open the doors to the everywhere shores. In the pines? The memory stunned her: Daddy carrying her across the snow on her grandfather’s estate, up and over the fence, and into the woods…into the pine forest. Grandpa had gotten his Christmas tree from there; it must have been twenty feet tall.
The sky was dark and the wind howled but she wasn’t scared as long as her father sang that old Beatles song. But they didn’t go to the road to a waiting car with its engine idling and the interior toasty from the heat defrost, no, they went farther into the blackness between the tree trunks, up a hill then down into a valley. There had been a building there. God, it was a dream, wasn’t it? It was confusing and she was tired, but the words stabbed through her head again: in the pines where the river dies and the snow and dirt as white and brown flies to polish the bones that sink like hard stones and open the doors to the everywhere shores.
The pines. She could now recall the scent, almost unnatural that strong pungent smell, like cheap perfume. There had been a rusty fence and they had traveled through it. Surely, that did not happen! It was a dream, or not even that, it was a half remembered dream with the details refurbished with other memories and fancy, of afterthoughts blended with those mistaken pseudo-recollections that are nothing more than imaginings from stories overheard. Memory and fiction were incestuous siblings. She wanted to go back asleep so she could find that crazy Indian and tell him to shut up, to keep his stupid poems, to leave her alone because there was no question, there is only perfection.
But it wasn’t perfect. There was that space, that lingering cloud of darkness like the one that had hung in her room moments before; this other shadow hung between that place in the pines and her room. She heard them now, a billion cicadas singing in unison. The drone had been bleached out by a white blue light, like the glow around the moon but a thousand times stronger. The two of them had stepped through that din, Daddy had held her hand, and then they were here. No, that wasn’t right. She must have forgotten leaving the place, getting into the car, and heading back home. She had probably fallen asleep. Yes, that is most certainly what had occurred.
It had been an eventful night; she had simply dozed off somewhere. She imagined how her father must have plucked her out of a chair or even from the floor and had taken her out of that dark building, through the woods, and finally back home. That weird displacement had happened to her before. Like trips back from the airport, or even grandpa’s house after Christmas: she’d remember groggily getting into the backseat, pulling her coat over herself, and then awakening the next morning snug in bed. That’s all that had happened. Yes, there was no question because there is only perfection. She chuckled lightly to herself and then to the shadows, and to that dark cloud that had returned but which she was too tired even to notice now, and drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep.
In the morning, the room was cold. She pulled the sheet up to her chin and looked at the frost that had glazed over the windowpane. The whirls and whorls of the thin ice coating reminded her of fingerprints. The sunlight poked through the frost and brought muted purples and yellows along with it to paint across the carpet. Meeko tried to remember what day it was. Saturday? She had better keep track because soon Christmas vacation would be over and it would be time to go back to school. Usually this wouldn’t dampen her spirits, but now, with everything so perfect, so just right, she didn’t want it to end; she wanted to let one day blur into the next forever. It would be a beautiful monotony, the same winter day over and over, her father and mother together, her snug in a warm bed in a cold room.
It almost was the same day over and over, repeating like a skip in a CD, bouncing back and forth, the nights uncomfortable, the days long and uneventful, just that constant feeling of everything being in place. Meeko crawled out of bed and went to the window. She could just make out the outlines of the neighboring houses through the frost. She sniffled and tiptoed across the room to her front door, grabbed the knob and turned it. Locked. Of course. The locket. She was still getting used to this ritual. She shot a glance back to her dresser and caught the twinkle of the necklace, popped open the locket, and retrieved the little key. It looked like something gnomes might use to get into their toadstool houses. She inserted the key into the tiny lock on the bedroom door, and opened it.
Her mother and father were at the table in their robes and pajamas, Father with the paper and a mug of coffee, and mother at the stove making omelets and sausages. Fresh orange juice awaited in tall sparkling glasses. The television played a morning cartoon, Kim Possible, a Saturday program. How much vacation did she have left? About a week, she figured. She scuttled to the table, the soles of her feet sticking to the kitchen tiles, and sat before one of the glasses of orange juice.
Daddy turned a page and said good morning to her. She took a sip of juice and her mother asked her if she wanted an omelet. Of course Meeko did. They had breakfast together and then her father went to take a shower. Her mother scraped the finished plates into the garbage disposal and put them in the dishwasher; Meeko wiped down the table. She got herself some more juice and settled down in front of the television on the couch. Her father returned, hair still wet, but his pajamas had been replaced with his familiar worn blue jeans and Michigan State sweatshirt of white and green. He sat on the couch next to his daughter and watched the cartoon with her
.
“Daddy?”
“He continued staring at the TV. “Yes?”
“Do you remember the night you came and got me from grandpa’s? The night you gave me my locket?”
“Yes.”
“Did I fall asleep?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just I don’t remember how I got home. We were in the old chocolate factory, and then we were here. Isn’t that what happened?”
“How could it happen that way, Pumpkin?” He kissed the top of her head.
“I don’t know. I guess it couldn’t.”
“Don’t you like your locket?”
“I love it.”
“I think it’s best if all of us just forget that night, sweetie. It was a difficult time. That’s probably why it’s hard for you to remember everything right.”
“I guess you’re right, Dad.”
“That’s my girl.”
“Can Miranda come over?”
“Sure. Does she need to be picked up?”
“I’ll call her and see.”
“OK.”
Meeko waited for the commercial break and then got up from the couch and went to the telephone. She brought the kitchen phone into her room and closed the door—a habit with her. She dialed Miranda’s phone number. Rats, the same stupid phone message. It seemed that every time she ever tried to call any of her friends, they weren’t home or were busy, even her second-string girlfriends. Well, it was the holidays after all. A lot of kids were busy on vacation. She went to her door, again forgot it needed to be unlocked, and turned the resistant handle. It was sweet that her father wanted to keep her safe, but come on! She fished into her picket, withdrew the key, and opened the door.