The White Gates

by Bonnie Ramthun

  “My great-great-great-grandmother was named Leaping Water. Do you know anything about the Ute?”

  “Ute?” Tor said in confusion. For a moment he thought she’d said “youth,” which was a very old-fashioned word for a kid to be using. “What is a Ute?”

  “Indians,” Drake said, and made a quiet yelling noise while patting his hand against his mouth. “Native Americans. You heard about those?”

  “Well, sure, of course. I just never heard about Utes before. You’re a Ute?” Tor asked Raine.

  “Couldn’t you tell?” she said, pointing the waxing stick at her face.

  “I thought…I dunno, I didn’t notice,” Tor confessed, and Drake gave a yelp of laughter.

  “You serious?” he asked.

  “So what if he didn’t notice, Drake,” Raine said with a sniff. “You really didn’t notice?”

  “We’ve got all sorts of colors in San Diego,” Tor tried to explain. He felt bad. “Mexican Americans, lots of African Americans, Asian Americans, and don’t forget all the people coming out to Hollywood to be actors, marrying each other and making all sorts of new blends. I mean, skin color in California isn’t exactly, er, black and white.”

  “Well, I guess so,” Drake said, grinning.

  “I forgive you for not noticing my Native heritage,” Raine said, and bent back to Tor’s snowboard with her waxing stick. “You make me laugh, Tor, you really do. You truly never noticed?”

  “You were nice. I never noticed anything else,” Tor said, and then he had to look awkwardly into his teacup because he didn’t want to see Drake laughing at him.

  There was a silence, and nobody laughed. Raine stroked the snowboard with long, smooth gestures, and Tor felt oddly like she was soothing the spirit of the snowboard instead of simply repairing it. Or maybe that was because he suddenly knew she was a Ute, and now she had spiritual qualities that all Indians were supposed to have. He felt embarrassed at the thought.

  “Leaping Water,” Drake prompted.

  “First, the Ute,” Raine said. “We were people of this land before the white settlers got here, but we weren’t natives here either. Our tribe’s history begins through other tribes—their histories talk about driving away Utes from their lands. From the Apache to the Navajo, the Ute were constantly seeking a home and always being driven away.”

  “But where did they come from originally?”

  “I think they came from Atlantis,” Drake said, and Raine shot him a very dirty look.

  “No one knows. Maybe my people were from Mexico, or Central America, or even some place back East. Perhaps a plague or another, stronger tribe drove them from their lands. You think of America before the Europeans as a settled place, maybe even all peaceful and stuff, but it really wasn’t. There were lots of wars, and sometimes things happened that nobody can explain at all.”

  “The Anasazi,” Drake said. “My favorite mystery story.”

  “You’d learn about them if you’d gone to elementary school in Colorado, Tor,” Raine explained. “You would know about Utes, too, and Shoshone and Cheyenne and Arapahoe. The Anasazi were a cliff-dwelling tribe of Indians who disappeared entirely, leaving their intact villages behind. My people arrived a lot later. My people, the Utes, settled in the Colorado mountains.”

  “Perfect mountain people,” Drake said, lazily flipping through his math book. “Always want to play, ride horses, hang out, party.”

  “Not exactly farming types,” Raine agreed. “We were the last tribe to be located on a reservation. The Meeker Massacre took place in 1879, a long time after the Trail of Tears. Even the tribes like the Apache, and they were awesome warriors, even those tribes had surrendered before the Utes were finally moved to a reservation.”

  “To where?” Tor asked.

  “Utah,” Drake said. “That’s why the state is named Utah.”

  Tor smacked his forehead with his hand. He hadn’t made the connection, and now it was so obvious he felt like a fool.

  “Why aren’t you there, then?” he asked. “In Utah? How come your great-great-great-grandmother escaped the Meeker Massacre?”

  “Oh, the Meeker Massacre wasn’t a massacre of Utes,” Raine said with a rather pointed smile. “It was a massacre by the Utes. Nathan Meeker was a white man assigned to teach our people how to be farmers.”

  “Get off those horses, stop fooling around, and bust that sod,” Drake said.

  “That wouldn’t fly,” Tor said thoughtfully. Already he thought of the Utes as his kind of people, even though he wasn’t remotely Indian.

  “Nope. So they finally got tired of Meeker, and they killed him. Then they killed a bunch of U.S. Cavalry, and then finally they agreed to relocate to Utah before the entire U.S. Cavalry came back in force and wiped them all out. They knew they were beat, but they surrendered on their terms. We Utes, we were one of the few Native tribes to successfully make peace with the white man,” Raine said. There was a distinct note of pride in her voice.

  “But Leaping Water didn’t go to Utah,” Tor said. “Right?”

  “She was already married to Frederick Borsh,” Raine said.

  “That doesn’t sound very Utish,” Tor said. Drake snorted and Raine grinned.

  “Nope. Fred was pure German, lederhosen and pointy Tyrolean hat and all. What a couple they must have made, eh?”

  Tor blinked at the image: a Native American princess in a doeskin dress and beads, with long black braids, holding hands with a plump German man in a white shirt with suspenders, leather shorts, and big boots. It just didn’t seem possible.

  “Weird. So she stayed. Was the town doctor involved in this? Did she curse the town doctor because of her people being driven away?” Tor asked.

  “No,” Raine said. “That came much later. Now you know the background—my people were here, then they were gone, and only Leaping Water stayed behind. Here in Snow Park, which was called, I think, Cooperstown?”

  “Coopersville,” Drake supplied.

  “Coopersville. Frederick Borsh made a mining claim here and worked a mine in the mountain next to the town. He never found gold, as far as we know, but he never gave up. Legends say he tunneled all over that mountain.”

  “Which mountain?” Tor asked.

  “The one without any chairlifts or ski slopes, of course,” said Drake, and lifted a hand as Tor started to ask another question. “Listen.”

  “He and Leaping Water also ran Borsh’s General Store. There was a lot of racism in those days, of course, but she was such a gentle and kind little creature that few people minded buying groceries from Mr. Borsh’s Ute wife. Their store is still in operation. But it sells ski and boarding equipment now.”

  “Here in Snow Park?” Tor asked.

  “Right here,” Raine said with a smile, and she pointed her stick straight down at the floor. Tor felt a chill run right up his spine.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  “After Frederick died in the 1918 flu epidemic, Leaping Water spent a lot of time on the mountain he’d worked. Some said she was looking for his ghost. She let the store pass to her daughter and her son-in-law, and she got battier and battier.”

  “Battier?” Tor asked.

  “It was about 1950 that everything was really set in motion. Dr. Robert Malone moved here. He’d been a mountaineer in World War II, a combat skier, and a doctor, and he’d spent a lot of time skiing in the European mountains after the war. He realized we had the same snow and the same gorgeous mountains here, and he started buying up property in dying little Coopersville. He petitioned the town and the name was changed to Snow Park.”

  “And a winter resort was born,” Drake said.

  “Your great-great-great-grandmother was alive in 1950?” Tor asked in astonishment. “How old was she?”

  “She was born in 1858,” Raine said proudly. “So she was ninety-two in 1950. She died in 1952. I think.”

  “You think? You don’t know?”

  “Let her finish the story,” Drake said. “Then y
ou’ll understand.”

  “Dr. Malone was the town mayor and the town doctor, and he offered riches and a future to the newly named Snow Park. There was only one problem with his grand plan.”

  “The mountain that belonged to Leaping Water,” Tor said. “Ahh.”

  “It was perfect for the new ski development. But he couldn’t get Leaping Water to sell,” Raine said sadly. “She was all the way around the bend by then, a crazy old Ute talking about how ‘her people’ lived on that mountain and she had to protect them.”

  “Her people?”

  “She would never explain what that meant,” Raine said. She bent her head down so all Tor could see was the part in her glossy black hair. She was pretending to concentrate on the nick in his snowboard. “Of course she couldn’t mean her people, the Utes. Our people are mostly on a reservation in Utah. There weren’t any Utes living in the mountains around here except for Leaping Water. So people thought she must mean something crazy. How’d you like to have kids in the third grade chase you around claiming your grandmother had a thing going for Bigfoot?”

  “Life can always get worse,” Drake said, as though it were his own personal motto. Tor looked at him and Drake looked down at his math book again, idly stirring the pages and refusing to look at Tor.

  “So she didn’t sell. Obviously, she won. There’s nothing on that mountain, right?” Tor said. “Do you own it? Your family?”

  “We own it.”

  “Why don’t you live there? I mean, build a house or something?”

  “Too dangerous,” Drake and Raine said at the same time.

  “Nobody goes on the mountain, not even my family,” Raine said. “It’s dense. Lots of trees. And mine shafts that my great-great-great-grandfather dug.”

  “So why would anyone want it?” Tor asked.

  “With enough money they can bulldoze down the trees and plug up the mine shafts,” Drake said.

  “Now you know almost the whole story, Tor,” Raine said. “Dr. Malone put all sorts of pressure on the Douglas family. That’d be my great-grandpa, James. But the mining claim belonged to Leaping Water and my family stuck with her decision, even if she was batty and all. Then one day she came down Main Street, dressed in her Ute best—I mean beaded doeskin dress, boots, her hair braided with shells and beads, her face like a crazy woman, and she cursed the mayor in front of his doctor’s office. Right in front of ten witnesses. Not me, I wasn’t born yet.”

  “Within a few years everyone in town claimed to have been there,” Drake said drily.

  “Doctor’s office?” Tor said with a sinking feeling. “The same?”

  “The same place,” Drake said, “where your mom works now.”

  Tor remembered the pipes and lines and tunnels that he’d seen in that open manhole cover that day in San Diego, the pipes that must also run under every place in Snow Park. He gripped his empty cup in his hands and licked at his sore lip.

  “Leaping Water told him she would never sell her husband’s mining claim. She said that Dr. Malone was cursed; that every doctor forevermore that came to Snow Park would be cursed, that no healer could stay in Snow Park until they talked to her people and agreed to protect them. Then she turned and walked into the mountain and no one ever saw her again.”

  “She ‘walked into the mountain’?” Tor asked. He didn’t think he’d heard Raine properly.

  “She was last seen walking on the road that leads to Borsh Mountain,” Raine said, rubbing Tor’s snowboard with an absentminded hand. The scratch that had marred it was gone. It looked as good as new. “That’s the last anyone ever saw of her.”

  “Dr. Malone never lived to see the first chairlift take skiers up the hill,” Drake said with relish. “Served him right, trying to bully an old woman like that. Besides, the town did okay without that mountain anyway, right?”

  “He died?”

  “He was walking out of the Denver County Courthouse two weeks later, when construction workers across the street dropped a load of stone from a scaffold. Two pieces of marble exploded like a grenade going off. A piece struck the doctor, killing him instantly. He was at the courthouse trying to get the mining claim revoked so he could take over the mountain.”

  “The curse had struck,” Raine said. “Nobody in Snow Park could talk about anything but the curse from then on. The next doctor, Dr. Alan Victor, got a horrid cancer and died less than a year after he came here.”

  “Then there was that one doc—what was his name? Didn’t he go to jail? He was, like, a heroin addict or something?” Drake said.

  “Dr. Reginald Maclean,” Raine said, as though she knew all of the names and had them written down somewhere. As though saying them hurt her. “He blew out a knee skiing and got hooked on painkillers. Then he moved on to heroin. He got caught and lost his license, and he had to go to rehab. He never came back.”

  “Who took over the lodge and development and stuff?” Tor asked. He turned his empty mug over and over in his hands, fiddling with it the way that Raine was fiddling with Tor’s snowboard and Drake was fiddling with his math book.

  “The doctor’s daughter,” Drake said. “Rebecca Malone Lowen. Smart woman, and she was married to a Denver attorney who liked to ski. Snow Park continued on schedule with a single break—for Dr. Malone’s funeral. And no doctor has lasted in this town for more than a year ever since. Not all of them die. Some just move away. Most years we haven’t had a doctor at all. The ones who come here, they don’t stay.”

  “The curse,” Tor said.

  “The curse,” Drake and Raine said as one, and Raine looked at him with sad eyes in the face that used to be ordinary but was forevermore exotic to Tor—a Ute face.

  “You don’t really believe in it, do you?” Tor asked. “The curse?” He was thinking of his mother and what she’d said about truth and perception.

  “I believe it,” Raine said, and shrugged. “And I don’t care if you think I’m crazy. I’m the Bigfoot-loving great-great-great-granddaughter, you know.”

  “Crazy is in her job description,” Drake said.

  “You believe?” Tor asked him.

  “Yes,” Drake said calmly. “Yes, I do.”

  “I don’t know if I do,” Tor said, but he was lying.

  “You will,” Raine said.

  Tor clenched his hands around his cup. “Then we’ll have to fix it,” he said.

  “Time to get on home now, kids,” Mr. Douglas said, appearing in the doorway and startling them all so they jumped. “I’m closing up and we need to get to supper before Elinor gets furious at the both of us and burns the stew. Here are your things, Tor.”

  Tor took the package that Mr. Douglas was holding out to him. He gave them all a grin that didn’t feel straight on his face, and he showed the package to Drake and Raine. They looked at what he’d asked Mr. Douglas to get for him: a set of thermals, sized for a small woman. Sized for Dr. Sinclair.

  “We’re going to be here a long time,” Tor said firmly. “So I thought my mom should have some of these, too.”

  Drake and Raine looked at him and Tor felt something very warm inside him. Mr. Douglas sighed and turned away, but his friends did not. They glanced at each other and then turned back to him.

  “Here’s your snowboard, Tor,” Raine said.

  “See you tomorrow,” Drake said.

  “TOR, WAKE UP!” His mother was speaking to him.

  Tor tried to sit up and then flopped back on the bed, groaning. His body was one big bruise and his mouth felt swollen to twice its normal size. His head throbbed in time to his heartbeat.

  “School?” he mumbled. The hall light shone dimly into the room. Tor glanced at the clock. Three o’clock in the morning. His aches were forgotten as he sat upright. “Problem?”

  “Don’t get up,” Tor’s mom said. She sat on the bed, dressed warmly in her red snowsuit. Her new thermal shirt showed under the V of her scrubs. Tor tried to blink himself awake.

  “I’m up,” he said.

 
; “I need to go to the clinic,” Dr. Sinclair said calmly. “I don’t want you to go with me this time. I was silly to make you come with me before. You’re only a few blocks from me, so just stay in bed, sleep, and I’ll be back before you know it. I just wanted you to know if you wake up, that’s where I am.”

  “But I can come—”

  “No,” Dr. Sinclair said firmly. “I’ve thought about this. You’re old enough to be by yourself. Go to sleep.”

  She pressed her hand against his chest and he lay back down reluctantly. The odd thing was, as soon as his body was back in the bed and she’d tucked his covers up to his chin, he was already half-asleep again.

  “Okay,” he said. “Be careful.”

  “I’m always careful,” Dr. Sinclair said. “Thanks again for the thermals, Tor. I’m warm as toast now.” She smoothed his hair, kissed his forehead, and in a moment the darkness was complete. Tor didn’t even hear the front door close.

  Dr. Sinclair walked down the snow-covered street toward the clinic, her big snow boots clumping along, her breath floating back from her head like a white balloon. She was carrying her black doctor’s bag in one mittened hand. The lights of the clinic were on and there were people inside. They were nothing but shadows moving against the light.

  The snow had been falling for several hours and there hadn’t been a breath of wind. The soft, light powder was as fluffy as goose down. Puffs of snow flew up with every step she took. The few streetlights lit the underside of more snow clouds, thick and heavy, pressing down on the town and catching on the tops of the buildings.

  Dr. Sinclair stopped for a moment and changed her bag from hand to hand. There was a person on the porch of the clinic, like Coach Rollins had been waiting when Brian Slader had taken sick. But this man wasn’t the snowboarding coach. He was much taller, too tall to be human. Whatever it was loomed like a stick insect under the clinic porch, wrapped in darkness.

  Abruptly, the thing left the porch and started loping toward her, faster than a person should have been able to run. It left no footprints in the snow and it left no cloud-breath of air behind it. Dr. Sinclair dropped her medical bag in the snow and stepped back. The creature was right in front of her. The face was pale and remote as snow crystals, and the blood that rimmed its mouth was as red and damp as a fresh rose petal. As it reached for her, Dr. Sinclair began to scream.