by Jim Craig
“Damn it. The power’s down again.” Charlie cursed and lurched toward me.
I grabbed for the robe beside the tub and crawled out trying to cover myself. I almost tripped over the food tray in the process.
He looked at me, his eyes wild. They were rattling back and forth behind the coke bottle lenses like ping pong balls in a bingo machine. He paced back and forth looking down at his hands. He clenched and re-clenched his fists over and over, not looking at me.
I watched him and waited, making a clumsy effort to dry my hair with the oversized arms of the robe. The only light in the room came from the windows in the door on the opposite side of the room from us.
“Your clothes are dry,” he muttered finally. Then he turned and started to walk away into the dark interior of the laundry room. Was I being dismissed?
“The power went out?” I asked, trying to understand.
“It’s the goddamn generator. It crapped out again. This whole damn place is falling apart. I’ve about had it.” He spat the words out and fumbled in one of his pockets. Finding a box of wooden matches he broke two before giving up. Then he slapped the box down on the granite counter top and pointed to a can with a candle inside it.
“You do it,” he snapped and turned away.
“Let me get dressed, and maybe I can help you with the generator,” I offered, but the door on the other side of the room slammed shut leaving me alone in the dark.
I found the matches and struck one. The flame sputtered and flared sending a tiny plume of acrid sulfur up my nose. I found a short piece of candle, lit it and tried to stand it back up in the can. The old container was dirty, rusted and partially filled with wax, cigarette ashes and burned out matches. I shook my head at the contrast between the soaring wooden beams, the marble floors, the porcelain fixtures and gold picture frames and the crumpled wreck of the tin can in my hand. The place must have been brilliant with wealth and success over many years. Now the dirty candle stub in my hand was the only light left in the darkness inside a massive luxury lodge in wilderness Alaska, its glory days far behind it.
I pulled open the door of the dryer and began to put on my clothes in the candlelight. Their warmth reminded me of my sleeping bag in the camper back in Seward. A sick hollow feeling washed over me then, and I thought about how far I was from home. I pictured Mount Alice staring down at me in the morning light as I sipped coffee and listened to Willie bitch. I was surprised to realize that I missed hearing him rant about the city’s taxes or the price of fuel or whatever else had him riled up at the moment.
I had to get the hell out of there. The place was making me nuts. I jerked on my shoes and hopped up and down on one foot trying to tie the laces in the flickering light. I finally sat down on a bench against the wall, took a deep breath and stretched. My muscles felt relaxed and warm after the long soak. At least I had that going for me.
Then one of the laces snapped in my hands. My breath rushed out with a sigh. I held up the broken lace and stared at it, shaking my head and muttering. Ain’t that the shits? Jesus Christ, what else? What the hell else could go wrong out here? Where’s the glory, bush pilot? Where’s the freaking glory?
As I fumbled to tie a knot I could hear Willie saying, “Quit your whining. You sound like an old woman.”
He was always saying stuff like that. Real sympathetic, the damn guy. But, of course, he expected me to listen forever when he wanted to complain. But he was right, damn it. That’s what really bugged me. I finished tying my shoes, wiped my nose and stood up.
I picked up the candle and made my way into the men’s room. I walked carefully so the flame wouldn’t go out. It was surreal moving past the gleaming white sinks and mirrors, the tiny light flickering all around me as I passed. Huge angular shadows danced in the corners like war painted savages around a bonfire.
I made my way through the dimly lit game room and started up the stairs. I could hear Charlie and Greta’s voices up above me. It sounded like they were arguing about something in the kitchen. The foggy gray light filtering through the large windows made the candle unnecessary, so I blew it out and left it at the bottom of the stairs. I paused for a minute on the stairs to listen, but the voices had stopped.
As I came up to the main floor I heard an outside door open and then slam shut. The voices continued to argue outside, but they faded, and I sensed that I was alone in the huge lodge. The lobby with the double portraits loomed around me and the staircase to the second level seemed to beckon. I looked up and saw more animal heads mounted around a landing near the guest rooms.
With a glance toward the outside I turned and started up the stairs. Something drew me to explore. I needed a better feel for this place. And besides, I could always say I was just checking out the facilities, like any curious visitor would do in such a magnificent place.
Thick red carpet flowed up the stairs and across the landing in both directions. My footsteps were silent as I moved along. The heavy wooden beams below my feet were solid. No creaks. To the right I spotted the door that I had seen night before. It must have been Greta shouting down to me, but I couldn’t believe it was the same person from the hot tub room.
The door was partly open, and looking inside I saw an empty dark corridor with more closed doors on either side. A pile of laundry lay on the carpet next to an overflowing black plastic garbage bag. On the other side of the landing behind me there was a matching double door, but it was closed tight.
Something about those closed doors intrigued me. They pulled at me with a magnetic attraction. I sensed something behind them. Something important. I knew I should go back downstairs before they came back, but the magnet wouldn’t leave me alone.
I walked carefully across the landing and tried the brass handle on the double wooden doors, but it was locked. I tried to peek through the crack between the doors, but I couldn’t see a thing. I cocked my head and listened for any sounds or movement on the other side of the doors. Nothing. No smell either. Just the faint aroma of rich wood, brass and money.
I started to examine the door frame and the lock, looking for any weaknesses. It was an old habit. Locks hid secrets. Closed doors were a challenge. From the first time I had figured out how to use a knife blade to get into mom’s locked pantry, I had been obsessed with locks. Then the prize had been bubble gum and candy. Later I found all kinds of goodies and a sense of power and pride being able to bypass locks without a trace.
The bolt between the two doors didn’t look like much of a problem. I pushed on one door enough to see that it moved, and that a simple piece of plastic would be able to push the bolt out of the way. Even the most expensive buildings often skimped on their interior locks. I was reaching for my wallet and a credit card when I heard something.
I wasn’t alone. I heard a low growl. An animal growl. It was behind me and close. My skin felt like it was going to jump off my body. I turned my head to the right and froze.
A mean looking black dog was crouched only six feet away. It wasn’t that big, but its teeth were bared and it was snarling, its lips quivering and drooling. Its ears were flat against its head, and it looked like it was ready to leap for my throat at any second. I hadn’t heard it sneak up behind me on the thick carpet. It had me trapped against the locked door with nothing to defend myself.
I kept silent, stared at the beast and tried to breathe. My muscles had turned to stone. The animal was poised on the carpet, ready to spring. The hair stood up on its back, and its eyes were locked on me. Its breath rasped in and out with a low growl as it watched me. Every time I moved, its eyes twitched and followed. Slowly I tried to move my feet into position so I could land a kick when it went for me, but it didn’t like that. The growling continued and grew louder. When I moved, it tensed even more and crept closer, so I stopped.
It wasn’t a big animal, but that didn’t give me any relief. About half the size of a German shepherd it was some kind of mutt. The square pit bull look of its head sent my heart into my t
hroat. I saw teeth, yellow, ragged and glistening, moving back and forth under lips that stretched and strained as they anticipated sinking themselves into the warm bloody softness of my neck. Its whole body quivered with each guttural rumble.
I wondered why it hadn’t barked, why it hadn’t rushed me. I vaguely remembered something about certain guard dogs that were trained not to bark. They held their captives in place quietly and didn’t attack unless they had to to prevent an escape. Then they clamped onto an arm or a leg and wouldn’t let go for hours if necessary. It was working, I wasn’t going anywhere.
Suddenly I heard the sharp sound of small hands clapping. I looked up to see a small figure of a child halfway down the hall. The dog stopped growling but held its ground eyeing me hungrily. Then a golf ball came flying and thumped its way toward on the carpet. It bounced crazily around the wooden doors and corners beside me. The noise distracted the dog, and it turned and chased the golf ball to the edge of the landing catching it in its teeth just before it bounced through the railing. Then it turned and ran toward the kid in the distance. I started to run toward the stairs, but the dog and child disappeared into a side room and slammed the door behind them.
I was alone again on the landing, but I’d had enough. I headed down the stairs and into the kitchen trying to catch my breath along the way. I settled myself onto a stool at a counter and watched as Charlie and Greta came in the door. Charlie was pissed.
“Goddamn generator. It ain’t coming back this time.” He threw a dirty crescent wrench on the counter. “Bearings are wore out.”
Greta was dressed. She looked different in clothes but still spectacular. I realized my mouth had fallen open, and I quickly snapped it shut. She’d changed into faded blue jeans and a black leather jacket. Stylish high heeled white boots came to her knees. Her vivid blond hair stuck out around the edges of a baseball cap that matched her jeans. Her makeup and bright red lips were still perfect.
She didn’t look at me. Almost as if she didn’t even notice I was there. Like I was invisible.
“We have to get out of here, Charlie,” she said quietly.
“And go where?” he snapped.
“It doesn’t matter. Anywhere. I’m not living here like this anymore.”
“Why? Cuz your hair dryer won’t work now?”
I glanced at her. She didn’t say a word, but she didn’t need to. She stood stiffly with her hands in the pockets of the jacket facing Charlie. He seemed to wilt in the icy heat of her glare.
“I’m sorry, babe. I didn’t mean that. I’m just …” He didn’t have a chance to finish. Greta turned and left the room. We listened to the sound of her heels hammering their way across the lobby floor before she started up the stairs.
Charlie looked like he was going to cry. An odd reaction for a big man, I thought. But maybe not. Who was it that said ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall?’ He paced like he might follow her upstairs, but his feet couldn’t make up their mind.
I felt like an intruder on a bad soap opera. Drama lay thick in the air like a burnt turkey on Thanksgiving.
I waited and pretended not to watch the big man struggle. I halfway expected him to turn on me if I played my hand wrong. Soup ladles and pans hanging from their hooks watched us with metallic indifference.
Charlie ran his hands through his hair, pulled off his thick glasses and laid them on the counter next to the wrench. With a sigh he finally sat down on a stool across from me and rubbed his eyes with his palms.
“Why, man?” he stared across the counter at me just like it was completely normal to visit with a stranger about a family conflict. Like I’d been there forever.
Without the glasses he had a handsome face, but his eyes were bloodshot and sunken into dark hollows. He looked like he’d aged twenty years in the last hour.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just shrugged, looked away and shook my head slightly.
“Why does she have to be like that?” he persisted.
“What do you mean?” I asked carefully, staying neutral and hiding my relief that his frustration was with her rather than me.
“Ah, hell. We’ve been together for more than a year now, and she just can’t settle into this place.”
“Yeah, that can be rough. I guess a lot of women never get used to the way it is up here.”
He looked at me with those sad blood hound eyes and took a deep breath. His shoulders shook slightly as he exhaled. “I thought it was going to work. I really did. She’s everything to me, man. I mean, Christ, just look at her.”
I dropped my eyes and tried to hide what I was thinking. Remembering the way she’d looked downstairs. Beauty like that can make a man weird. Talk about selling your soul.
I glanced at Charlie but looked away when he turned his head toward me. We were dangerously close to having a male bonding kind of touchy feely thing. Either that or he was going to beat me within an inch of my life.
In the nick of time we heard footsteps. A clatter in the lobby nearby interrupted the moment. The dog skittered sideways on the wooden floor and came bounding into the kitchen wagging its almost hairless tail and grinning a demented grin as it headed for Charlie. It seemed to notice me for a moment, but continued to scramble across the floor pawing at Charlie’s legs.
“Oh, for crap sake,” he grumbled. “Tambourine, get in here and take Tank outside before he pisses all over the floor.”
A head of kinky red hair peered around the edge of the doorway but didn’t enter. It was the kid I’d seen earlier upstairs in the hallway. He kept his head down and hovered near the doorway glancing toward me but never making eye contact.
“I mean it,” Charlie bellowed holding off the quivering dog as it tried to climb up his leg. It was licking at his hands and slobbering with a slurpy snorting sound like a pig in a trough. “Get in here now, Tamby!”
The kid came in, grabbed the dog by the collar and dragged it away through the lobby and outside. The door slammed behind them. I looked at Charlie, but he was busy brushing at his pant legs.
“Damn mutt. Worthless as a cross eyed bull frog.”
“Your boy?” I asked.
“Yeah, more or less,” he muttered as he picked up the wrench and shoved it in the back pocket of his jeans. He must have noticed my puzzled expression.
“It’s a long story.”
“What was that you called him?”
“Oh, Tambourine? Yeah, that’s his name. Like I said, it’s a long story. A real long story. Dog’s name’s Tank.”
I walked to a nearby window and looked outside. The boy and the dog were walking across the driveway toward the barn. The dog scampered from point to point lifting its leg and squirting in random directions. His tongue hung out one side of his grinning jaws, and it flapped up and down as he worked his way down the line of weeds and rocks lining the drive. A long string of spittle and drool trailed from his mouth and swung back and forth as he jumped from place to place.
The kid wandered along with his head down and his hands in the pockets of a worn gray down jacket. He stopped once in a while to wait for the dog who looked up and then dashed to catch up. The boy looked to be around ten years old and kind of scrawny. His hair was a blazing red afro, kinky and wild, bouncing and oddly shaped.
I cringed at the sight of him. He might as well have walked into any public school with a sign on his back, “Beat me up, PLEASE! “
When he looked back toward the lodge his face held a permanent frown. His eyebrows scrunched together, and his lips pressed together in a tight grimace. His eyes were tiny black slits squinted as if it was painful to stare out at the dim gray world around him. Like the groundhog that gets dragged out of his hole every spring to look for the sun. He turned and walked out of sight, slipping in the mud and trying to avoid the slobber that Tank deposited on the back of his pants.
The fog looked the same. Thick as coagulated potato soup. I could see a few feet up the trunks of the trees nearby but nothing more.
<
br /> A familiar sound came to me then. More of a vibration than a sound. Very faint but definitely there. I cocked my head to listen at the window trying to figure it out. It could have been a piece of machinery somewhere in the lodge. Had the generator come back to life?
No, no way. The power was still out. Charlie was still sitting on the stool drumming his fingers on the counter. Then he noticed the sound too, and his eyes went wide for a second and he stood up.
“What’s that?” His voice quavered slightly. I had to look at him twice. He seemed alarmed.
“Sounds like a chopper,” I said and headed for the front door. He followed me, and we stepped out from under the porch roof to stare up into the fog. The sound grew louder and louder, and the vibrations swelled until we could feel them throbbing straight above us.
“That’s a big chopper, like a Coast Guard Blackhawk. They must be trying to find the ground,” I said straining to see any sign of the aircraft. It sounded like it was only a hundred feet above us. I thought about the layer of fog it must be hovering on top of. I thought about firing up the airplane and taking off in a steep climb. I could climb up through the crap until I broke out into the clear blue sky above. Unless I ran into something first, of course. Bad idea.
The sound moved away gradually then, maneuvering toward the airstrip down the road. I wondered if they could see any gaps in the fog bank. Charlie was pacing in a tight circle staring up just like me. His mouth was hanging open as he squinted skyward. His large boots made a frantic pattern in the muddy driveway. I could see panic in the wild way his magnified eyeballs flicked back and forth behind the thick lens of his glasses.
“What’s wrong, Charlie?”
He seemed startled at the sound of my voice. “N-nothing,” he stammered.
“I wonder what’s going on,” I said. “Don’t you have any way of calling out of here?”
“Not without power,” he shrugged.
"Don't you have batteries that charge from the generator?" I asked.
"Nah, they died a while back. Can't afford to replace 'em."
“I’ve got to get back to the airplane. The fog may be lifting.” I pointed upward. “And that chopper might have something to do with me being missing.”
Charlie turned without a word and headed back to the lodge. I was left listening to the fading sound of the chopper blades in the distance. I needed to think. I was worried about Phil and Willie wondering where the hell I was. And I needed some distance from the odd crew of inhabitants on this island that I’d just met.
I started walking down the road to the airstrip as fast as I could. I needed to make contact with the real world again. Most of all I wanted to get the hell out of there. If there was even fifty feet of ceiling I was going to launch.
CHAPTER ELEVEN