“Thanks,” she said, offering Tessa more of that pearl-toothed smile. I was surprised to see Tessa frown a little at that smile, as if she’d seen something in it she recognized and did not like one whit.
Hana Swann waved off Bryan’s gun, even as she eyed him closely, reading, it seemed, his particular brand of longing.
“Who are you?” she said. “Ah, Bryan, sure, that’s right.” As if she’d known about him for ages.
He handed the gun to Jackie instead, who took it in her own trance. Once she began to sight, her new awkwardness seeped away, and when she stepped up to take her shot, we relaxed a little more, forgetting for a moment to glance at Hana and see how she was taking it. Jackie nailed a young rat. The crap crows went ballistic, and we fell back a little to let ’em go, although Bryan managed to hit two who were reluctant to give up their positions in the moose offal.
Throughout all this, Hana watched with a kind of ease as if she’d been with us always. I could feel her eyes move from one to the other.
“Ursie isn’t here,” she said out of the blue, and Bryan smirked at Jackie, imagining she’d been telling Hana all about us—a telling fact, since our Jackie didn’t like to reveal anything personal to many. The thought that she’d described us to Hana kind of thrilled me, and Bryan pointedly wiggled his big eyebrows in Jackie’s direction. She pretended not to notice. Instead she picked up one of the tin cans visited by bears and carried it to Hana. Big ol’ Jackie looked like a little kid, shy with her treasures. We could see how much she wanted Hana to like this place, like us, like her, and when Hana said You have a good eye, Tessa or Steady hand there, Leo, we were all absurdly, uncharacteristically happy as if we’d been training for her approval all this time.
Before long, we were almost bullshitting as usual as we traded off taking shots, although even our simplest jeers felt like lines given out onstage. We could feel Hana. She damn near glowed behind us, so that by the time the heat had fully risen, our T-shirts were soaked through, and our hearts were about to burst with the need to stop and stare. Jackie had already quit and was hunched on an old stump beside a patch of late-blooming foxgloves, her eyes pinned on Hana, who it seemed had gone to sleep while we were aching with her presence. She was still leaning against the big black rock, that bone-white girl, asleep there in the middle of the swill and the stench and the noise of the guns. Yet when it was time to go, and Bryan and Jackie went to the far side of his truck, Hana rose fully awake and followed them, head tilted to one side, watching as Jackie pulled plastic bags from her pockets: biscuits and back bacon wrapped in paper toweling. Without a fuss, the food parcels were placed on the cracked dashboard of Bryan’s truck.
“So what’s this?” Hana asked.
Bryan shrugged. Gerald Flacker didn’t seem worth his breath, and it hurt him to conjure up the Magnuson kids, but Jackie managed an explanation laced with “dickhead” and “fucker” and just about every other adjective we’d ever hurled toward Flacker. And then, all warmed up, she told a story about a back room Flacker had kept for truckers, about girls drugged and branded and raped; about his drugs, his guns, visits in the night; about his private posse of goons, the Nagle brothers and the bald, dead-eyed Brit who accompanied them as they trolled town; and lastly about those two little kids trapped by their meth-head mother in Flacker’s kingdom.
“And this is how you deal with him?” Hana said, nodding toward the truck’s dashboard. “You sneak around behind his back?”
She didn’t say it meanly, but her question cut Bryan to the core, I could see. She had offered a tease, but clearly she had no idea of what Flacker really was, although for one terrifying second, I thought we’d conjured him, a black-bearded monster, tattoos riding up his neck and across his iron knuckles, a twisted livid face striding straight out of a stunted jack pine. He’d set men on fire more than once, it was said, and stuck around to watch them burn. A swelling heat enveloped me as the vision faded, and I hurried to cut off any suggestions Hana Swann might be about to make.
“Would be suicide to do more,” I began. “Anyone who crosses Flacker . . .”
“You got a better plan?” Bryan interrupted, closing the truck’s passenger door.
“The best plans are the simplest ones,” Hana said.
“This is pretty damn simple,” Bryan said. “We bring food.”
“How pure you all are,” she said, confusing the hell out of us again and embarrassing us too, especially me. I could not help cutting my eyes toward Tessa. Out of all the kids we knew, we were probably the only ones not screwing around. At least, not much.
The morning was spent. We began pocketing the pellets and gathering the guns, none noticing for the moment that Hana had picked up the .22 and was scoping out a shot, but she wasn’t aiming toward the tipped piles that had occupied us. No, she was turned in the opposite direction, her eyes scanning the woods behind us. She got off several shots in rapid succession, causing Tessa to fall against me in surprise, an event too unexpected to relish. Before our shouts had fully erupted, Tessa had regained her balance and Hana had aimed the gun twice more, and our thin shouts arced high to pursue her shots into the trees. Even Jackie looked vexed. We had rules. In weather like this, so hot a spark might ignite the woods, we only shot toward the garbage pile, a containment, we hoped. And we had a rule too about shooting behind our backs. We’d even mentioned those earlier when we thought Hana might shoot with us. Hana didn’t seem to care. She’d already flown away into the woods. It seemed she’d barely wandered into the jack pine, scrub alder, and black spruce before she returned cradling something in her arms. The disconnection was too great—the shot, Hana returning as if she’d skunked out an infant. The scene barely made more sense when the infant slid along her arm so that she was holding it by the tail.
“What is that?” Tessa said. “A marmot?”
“Too little,” Jackie said.
“It’s a marten,” I said. “A young one.”
“Another A for Leo,” Hana said.
“We’re not high enough. They live above the tree line, don’t they?” Bryan said. “Shouldn’t be here at all.”
“Would you call this his bad luck?” Hana said.
Tessa took a few steps backward and thrust her hands into her pockets, assuming what a stranger might suppose was a nonchalant pose. The truth is that Tessa is the most superstitious girl alive, placing trust in a collection of talismans she rotates among her pockets, and I, at least, knew Hana had set off one of her alarms, and inside her pocket Tessa’s fingers were busy rubbing a white-striped rock or a knot of red ribbon or the silver fish charm I once found behind the Shelter.
“They’re protected,” I said. “You can get fined for shooting them.”
“They’re just as bad as rats, really, Leo,” Hana countered. She turned toward Bryan: “Do you know they feed on the young of other animals? It’s not dead, either. Only stunned. Go ahead, Leo, feel it.”
And I did, just for a second, the tiny heart beating a mile a minute. Truthfully, I was more transfixed by the line of red coursing down that white arm, spotting her open palm. I suddenly wanted to catch it in my own hand. I wanted, oh so strangely, to feel the heat of the gun, the stink of blood, on me. If I’d been alone with Hana, I might have even said to her: Me next. Shoot me next. Even as I heard the words bounce in my head, I was paralyzed by a desire to find more hurt. It came from her. Like a gift, I thought irrationally. Out of the blue, I heard another murmur that reminded me of Uncle Lud’s voice. Uncle Lud, telling a story. I went to take a step backward, away, away from Hana Swann, but I was crazy dizzy, and stopped short. I might have stood there even longer, openmouthed above the marten’s wounded side, but Tessa murmured beside me, and in response, Hana pulled the creature away and tossed it, a trapper’s nightmare, onto the refuse pile with a nonchalant coldness that finally made me want to run from her.
Jackie and Tessa went over to hav
e their own look at the marten. Hana handed the gun back to Bryan. I turned in time to see her lean in closely, touching his arm with her stained white hand. Bryan, like any sensible person, went stock-still at her proximity—my own heart lurched again—but the crap crows, lulled by the temporary quiet, had returned along with a pair of inquisitive ravens, and whatever Hana said to Bryan was muffled by the birds’ raucous reclamation of the moose entrails, their excitement at the new addition of the not-quite-dead marten.
It all happened quickly, and then we were done, more than ready to go, to get away from this spot. As we were climbing into the truck Jackie told us they’d be hitchhiking the highway route back to camp: Hana’s plan. A quicker solution, she said.
“Nah, you can’t do that,” Tessa said. “You know better than that.”
“There’s two of us,” Jackie tried. “It’s daylight.”
“Hasn’t she heard?” Tessa asked, her eyes skittering past Hana.
No one wanted to go over the details: the names of the girls, the tiny children left behind, the rumors of truckers on the highway, chains hanging in the cabs, a silver van with blacked-out windows. Native girls were prey, as thoughtlessly disposable as that moose carcass or the unlucky marten, and we all knew it, regardless of how many times some uniformed dope with his tortured hat got on the television and explained how hard they were trying, how impossible the landscape, how thin the clues and evidence gleaned from family reports they never seemed bothered to fully consider. What we heard was a kind of irritated grumbling: C’mon, you can’t find anyone out there, especially with skin like that.
“She’s been traveling all around,” Jackie said, unable to fully keep the doubt out of her voice. “She says she never has a problem.”
Bullshit, we thought. A girl like that had to have encountered a few issues on the road. But then the image of Hana striding back toward us—that thin line of marten blood running down her white forearm—returned all at once, and we weren’t sure any longer. Bryan and I hardly dared look at her. Her head tipped backward, hair swinging behind her, that long, breathtaking white neck exposed, she was scanning the high hills as if looking for someone else.
“Those hills are full of girls,” I thought I heard her say. Although she might have said “gulls.”
The comment pierced us. Not one of us moved. Hana seemed impervious to whatever stories she’d heard, whatever truths we knew.
“This is God’s country, isn’t it?” she said, with an odd, faraway gaze that implied God hadn’t visited in a while. “And I’m still here, aren’t I?”
A marvel indeed, we might have privately agreed.
And for one slender moment, we believed her, and like Jackie, we might have fallen into her cool sureness ourselves, but then a raven called out from the refuse pile, mocking our reverential stillness, our continual stupidity. The light shifted, and we woke up, feeling again the sweat running down the back of our necks, the sun scalding the tops of our heads.
“Lucky,” Bryan said, “that’s all.”
Hana stared past us as if she were already traveling on and we had been left far behind.
From the corner of my eye, I noticed Tessa crossing herself. The concept of luck made her almost as uneasy as the pictures we all just conjured of Hana and Jackie wandering up the highway together. More than anything, I wanted to enclose Tessa in my arms then, to offer her safety. Instead, I settled for interrupting her unease.
“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.
KEVEN SEVEN
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, M
adeline 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.
A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain Page 3