After she’d cleaned up the parking lot, Ursie retrieved her cart and vacuum and began on the first floor. She skimmed dirty sheets off the beds and covered their sloping mattresses with rough, clean ones, shaking out each worn, yellowed pillowcase so that it almost snapped in midair before the pillow fell seamlessly into its open pocket. She picked up shredded paper wrappers and the jaundiced ends of cigarettes and empty bottles and sticky glasses and wads of tissues. She averted her eyes from the plastic garbage cans she emptied into her big black plastic bag. She ran the toilet brush around the stained toilet bowls, cleaning as best she could the grime between the cracked linoleum, the thin brown paneled walls. You couldn’t get the smell out. Too many men had moved through here and their sweat and farts and piss and cigarette smoke and everything else she didn’t want to think about permeated the rooms from the stained blue carpets to the broken acoustic ceilings. Not to mention the creeping stench of damp mold. She sprayed window cleaner, poured bleach, and plowed the vacuum from one edge to another, and at best the stench was furrowed beneath the chemicals, making Ursie a little bit sick all day. She wanted to open windows and call up a storm that would cleanse and sweeten, but the truth was, the men would be back at sundown, ready to go again, and Albie had forbidden her.
“Too many goddamn thieves around here,” he told her when he noticed her struggling with a window in Room 6. “You give them the tiniest crack, and they’ll take everything.”
Ursie couldn’t imagine what they’d take from the motel. The televisions were bolted down; the phones didn’t work; not even the toilets flushed with regularity. But she had nodded, wrestled the window closed, and wondered privately if she could bring a box of baking soda and sprinkle some on the carpets without him complaining.
Although she’d only been working at the Peak and Pine Motel a few weeks, she’d already developed a feeling around several of the rooms. Room 11 was pure trouble. Two minutes inside, and you could feel a creeping despair press in off those scarred walls until you were choking with it and pissed off, too. Did you deserve this? Was this really your intended life? Those unfortunate to land in Room 11 ground their cigarettes out on the dresser or right into the paneled wall; they slashed at the carpet with pocket knives and bottle openers and smashed the overhead lightbulb and cracked the television once they realized the bedside lamps were permanently affixed to the tables and couldn’t be hurled. They left cracked and putrid vials by the washroom sink and empty syringes on the carpet beside the bed. Ursie would like to burn sage and sweetgrass in there and purge it of all its sour rage.
Rooms 25 to 32, the logging company specials, were full of lies and deceptions and clouded thinking. When Madeline had given her the quick tour, an abiding denseness in those rooms made the air heavy and dulled even Ursie’s quickness. Room 2, beside the ice machine, felt the happiest of the bunch, as if its proximity to party ice, the office, and the edge of the parking lot allowed it one foot out of the despair that haunted so many of the other rooms. Albie liked to put the occasional tourist family there, the ones who’d been camping for weeks before the mosquitoes wore them down or the kids came down with a mountain flu. The dad would go down to the café and return with grease-streaked paper bags full of hamburgers or soup and crackers while the mom would cajole Albie, who despised the role of obliging manager, into changing all her dollars into quarters so that she could race to the Laundromat down the road. Bucket after bucket of ice went by until eventually the family was gone, leaving a fragment of their own healing behind in the room among the sweat-stained towels, the empty pop bottles, and the inevitable socks half-shoved between mattress and box spring.
Who stayed at the Peak and Pine? Not many tourists, really, despite the new push by Albie and the Community News. Instead, the P&P saw a steady stream of truckers, and the lower-level logging company officials, of course, the ones punished by overseeing the camps. Social workers come to conference with other social workers, deliver new pamphlets the government had printed up after the latest five-year study, to hold PowerPoint presentations not even the elders could follow. And now, more recently, the pipeline scouts, slick talkers who met with the local council and promised not safety or wealth or even good jobs, but instead “a tangible role in addressing the nation’s needs” and “compliance with the current laws.”
Who else came to the P&P? Men suddenly without homes. Men with “dates.” Drunk men. High men. Frantic, desperate men. Furious men. Men whose lives were pallid shreds that nonetheless throbbed like raw nerves. She kept her distance. Her auntie had warned her; Albie had warned her. If her fingers itched when she touched a door handle, if a flicker of tiny shivers coursed down her right side, she moved on, even if she’d knocked and knocked and no one had answered. Someone was waiting. She could tell.
Room 14 had one of the few unblemished doors. If she had a favorite room at the P&P, this was it, because whether it was by design or chance, the occupants of Room 14 were nearly always tidy and contained, arriving and departing with unusual reticence, as if they hoped to erase their passage. Her auntie said that girl Hana Swann had slept here, but Ursie had never seen her.
Ursie had every other room done that morning when she knocked on Room 14’s door, knocked again and called “Housekeeping.” And the knob cool and still in her hand, she unlocked the door, called again. The cart outside the open door, Albie below in the parking lot, she pushed in the doorstop wedge Bryan had made for her, the one that would keep a hand from easily slamming the door behind her, and began her quick survey: unmade bed, pizza box, beer bottles on the nightstand and floor, but also clean brown shoes lined up neatly by the nightstand, a stack of folded clothes—jeans, a red shirt—on the torn chair. An odd scent, like a pot left too long to boil. A strange, not unpleasant hum in the air and then there between the bed and the washroom door, a man in green plaid undershorts sitting cross-legged on the sour carpet in front of a spread of playing cards.
“I’ve lost the Queen of Hearts,” he said before she could retreat. His hands still moving through the cards, he hadn’t even glanced at her.
“All my fault. I was warned, of course. A warning I flagrantly ignored—for good reason.” He raised his head then and grinned at her. “Silly ass,” he said.
Ursie’s heart lurched, but she knew enough not to grin back at him despite the infectiousness of that sudden surprising smile. That was the first trick Keven Seven showed her—the way a real smile could transform a thin boy with an old man’s face, a boy sitting in his undershorts on a filthy motel carpet, into an irresistible show.
Both her auntie and her brother, Bryan, had warned her against talking to the men at the P&P. Women—Native women like Ursie—had been disappearing (only the “remains” of a few had been found). All anyone could remember later was that they’d last seen the gal talking to a fellow up by the motel, down by the bar, outside a party. Nothing good came from cavorting with strange men. Or even familiar men. Get near that Gerald Flacker or his buddy GF Nagle and a girl could be nicked bad enough to carry damage through all her short days.
“I’ll come back,” Ursie said, but she didn’t move, and the fellow didn’t seem to hear her in any case. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. His looks made no sense to her at all.
He was as slim as a boy with a head full of tousled brown hair tipped with gold. She might even have believed he was a boy but for the long lines etched down his cheeks, the crinkles by his eyes as he grinned. His eyes were clear though, blue and bright. And his hands, those white, white hands, narrow and long-fingered, those clever hands began to make the cards twirl before him. His fingers barely grazed their edges, and the cards all stood up, revolving ever so slightly before fanning back and forth. She swore they danced for him as he bent his head and scanned them once more. She leapt a little with them.
“It will ruin everything, you know,” he said, his eyes back on the cards.
“It’s that important?” Ur
sie asked. She hated to see anyone in trouble.
“Life or death, I was told,” he answered.
“A card?”
“Not just any card. The Queen . . .”
“. . . of Hearts,” she finished.
She looked then for herself, lost for a moment in the fluid music of his hands, each card turning and preening like a mask in a ceremonial dance. She thought of the river where she and her brother Bryan and their father fished, the way her eyes learned to scan the ripples and eddies and separate out the proud, fast shot that would be her fish. If Ursie harbored a secret vanity, it had to do with her quick eyes and even swifter reactions, that unnatural surety. Whenever boys praised her for her skills, their awe and envy made her flush as sure as if they’d openly admired her breasts or slipped a hand on her bum—events that had never happened despite a ferocious amount of quiet dreaming on her part. Though she let no one see, she preened at such compliments and grew almost pretty under them. Her mother always said no fellow would romance their Ursie without first taking her fishing or shooting. That was the way to true love with their girl. They’d have to see her, her words suggested, not as a mere big-boned girl, a quick shot, but instead as the marvel she was, with her uncanny ability to ignore the rules of this world and transpierce its narrow limits.
Now Ursie let her breath wind among the cards, mimicking their silver-quick turns before, with one quick motion, she braved the swell of cards and plucked one free.
“Here you go,” she pronounced. “The Queen of Hearts, okay?”
She expected relief, but the look on his face was so troubled, so profoundly clouded, she felt pained as if she’d ruined the game. The magic had disappeared. The beautiful boy was now again a half-naked, ordinary man in Room 14, far older than he’d first appeared. The cards tumbled into disarray, stilled and lifeless, nothing more than flattened paper. She dropped the queen back into their midst and began to back away, but Keven Seven was too quick for her. He snagged her wrist with his long fingers.
“That was beautiful,” he said. “A . . . a . . . a life-saving move. Do you realize that?”
His face was rapidly regaining its glory. For the first time since her mother died, Ursie felt the wonder she might engender, and she paused in her flight. Her wrist sagged, and her hand slid right into Keven Seven’s waiting palm as if choreographed, so that for a few glorious moments, the two of them were kneeling there, holding hands among the scattered cards.
“Curious,” he said finally. “Your hand is warmer than mine.”
Ursie knew he was right. She had felt the heat grow in her fingertips as the cards had danced below them. Already her hands were cooling.
“But not for long,” she said.
“No,” he said. “Not for long.”
He had the oddest smile—a quick flash, intimate and knowing—as if he were colluding with her. And yet his seeming appreciation for her talents—for her—made Ursie less wary than she usually was. After all, she had found the Queen of Hearts, just like that, and he’d seen right away how talented she was in this arena. Most people didn’t. Most people simply saw her—if they noticed her at all—as a capable bear of a girl, a potential workhorse who wouldn’t flinch at a dirty job, a worker’s kid. Most people never perceived the graceful ease of her movements, the unusual sureness. But he did. He got it right away, and look how delighted he was, as if he’d been waiting for her.
So when Keven Seven drew her other hand in and exposed her palms, she didn’t shrink away from his slow scrutiny. When he held both her hands, perhaps a bit too tightly to his chest, as if bringing her into him, her heart began a strange skipping that she mistook at first for fear. But when she raised her head and considered again that smile, she knew she wasn’t afraid of him. She was curious. Who was this fellow who recognized her so quickly, who knew what she might be capable of?
“Yes,” he finally said, “you have talents. I can see that.” He released her hands momentarily, just long enough for the cards to somehow arrange themselves in a neat stack between his own fingers, then he reclaimed her, depositing the deck into the open palm of her right hand.
“You’d like this, wouldn’t you?” he began.
She had no idea what “this” was, but almost before she’d realized it, she was nodding and the cards had begun a subtle whirling, as if impatient for shuffling.
“You were made for this,” Keven Seven told her as he nudged the door wedge Bryan had constructed for her protection to one side. And Ursie, her attention wholly owned by the possibilities within her hands, didn’t even seem to notice as the door began to squeeze closed behind her.
HIS PLAYGROUND
Where are we? A simple finger poking around on a map won’t do. Neither will an article ripped from a city newspaper a full day’s drive away, an article that details another disappearance, another girl, vanished off the notorious highway that borders town. My mother has that article pinned to a corkboard behind the kitchen door as if it’s a reminder, an invitation, an appointment. Or some kind of prayer. Yeah, some people might call this God’s Country, but others swear it’s been colonized by the other team.
You see, here’s a place where a singular story won’t suffice, if one ever could.
One of the teachers up at the school, Mrs. Brenda Vanderleux, oblivious to my grade-five successes, once told me my school themes lacked “specificity.”
“You need to commit, Leo,” she told me. She demanded details—dates, names, and places—articles of confirmation, she called them, but the only evidence I had been willing to release were the bones of facts, the “what happened”—a man goes off on a ship to catch a whale, one fellow kills another, a dog freezes to death. That’s enough, eh?
You know where we are. You do. Even Uncle Lud, who loves the briery strands of a complicated story—Uncle Lud, whose own stories reverberate with pinched-dog howls and red neckerchiefs tied against whiskers, with crunching footsteps in the snow and taps on the window that wake us from one vigil and plunge us into another—declares there’s no need to tell you where we are. You’ve heard of this place. The news was all over it for a while. And they’ll be back, Uncle Lud guesses. That’s the thing about places like this. People come here to get lost, but all that means is that they want to do whatever they’d like without anyone interfering, and eventually, someone else is going to get in the way. Conflict, Uncle Lud would assure Mrs. Vanderleux, addressing her other foremost concern, will most certainly ensue.
If we give the name, if we say, here we are in Canada, in Terrace or Kaslo or Avola, or we tell you that here we are hidden away like a bunch of bush bunnies in Alberta, you’ll say, nah, I passed through there on my holidays or my aunt lived near Smithers or my entire band’s been here for more generations than your family has years, and that’s not the Terrace or Kaslo or the Peace I know. And you’d be right. It’s none of these, nor is it Victory, Idaho, or Ruston, Colorado, or, heck, Australia for that matter. It has not one thing to do with Omak, Washington, where we’ve heard they’ve started up the gold mining again.
The way we see this place is different from how you would if, say, you were a vanload of senior climbers come for a camping trip from the city or the exiled Bavarian wife of the lumber executive constantly comparing our forests with those of your youth or a Kitselas woman working your first job at the Centre after pushing through the community college and nearly collapsing under a daily weight of disregard so that you vibrate with the dual desire to both shake and embrace everyone you meet. Or different, say, than if you are one of those kids common here who begin drinking in the womb and keep it up, starting early in the day, driving trucks as old as Bryan’s straight off the graveled, icy logging roads. You only know boredom and splintered light and the constant nagging in your heart to get out, get out, get out.
No, this place is none of those places, but Lud says he’d lay down ready money that you know where we are.
You do.
The town has a mill yard and a railroad, two motels (three, if you count the half-built one on the highway a few miles down), a Greyhound station, a community center with a card room, an animal shelter, a bunch of little sawmills outside town limits. We’ve got the school and one little museum stuffed with pioneer paraphernalia—the usual rusted traplines, cross-saws, and gold pans—and another new museum, just a couple of rooms behind the shopping plaza, one of those rooms self-consciously marketing genuine First Nation art no one really wants you to buy and take to your suburban house, while the other room boasts a few pieces of real art from real aboriginal artists that no one ever will buy because it’s not your traditional black-and-white-and-red-hang-on-the-sitting-room-wall-paint-by-numbers Native art.
We’ve got Anglicans and Baptists, Uniteds, Catholics, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Indians and more than a few of the reformed varieties of each, all of whom will be happy to save your everlasting soul and give you a T-shirt to boot. (Well, except for the Anglicans. You have to fill out applications to join them.)
We’ve got a coffee shop and a bakery, two banks, a garage, a nearly bankrupt car dealer, a thriving Canadian Tire, a 7-Eleven, a narrow-aisled supermarket with peeling linoleum, and a shopping plaza with a Sub-Rite, which is kind of like a Sub-Walmart, if such a thing can exist. You can buy anything from fifty-cent snack biscuits to hip waders to shotguns there. And four taverns, one of them the size of a small bowling alley that pretends to be a “club.” We haven’t got a bowling alley, of course, but we’ve got a scabby ball field and a well-worn hockey rink just beyond the community center, which has a four-lane swimming pool so chlorine-rich it can turn blue eyes to green.
We have a health center with an operating room, and we have three dentists (one good, two terrible). An office “park” with six separate offices for mining agents, insurance agents, and agents of the peace—police, that is—and on the other side of town, a couple of liquor stores (shoplifting havens that are robbed at least a dozen times a year, despite the aforementioned presence of peace officers).
A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain Page 4