The main street, Fuller, is a flat concourse that runs parallel to the train tracks and the lumber mill and the yard. Every other street goes uphill. Just outside of town, even Fuller climbs up and joins the famous highway featured in that newspaper article. We have no less than seven traffic fatalities a year on that highway. Some years a lot more. The highway’s trajectory, its every curve, is a nightmare, but that can’t be helped. The landscape, the one we claim to prize, forced its shape and won’t allow the highway one inch more so it pinches us continually.
In the distance, great snowy mountains ring us; closer in, green glacial rivers swell around and through us, some with islands big enough for an ornery homesteader. In places, the rivers and the forest are like what you’d imagine heaven might be like: quiet and powerful and personal. They course right through your veins and, despite that intimacy, don’t give a damn about you either. In other areas, the rivers are ravaging highways, littered with hurling logs or choked by their jams, and the forests beside them are the stuff of dire fairy tales, dense and black and thick with bears. These are better than the alternative, the bleached graveyards of forests that appear without warning, clear-cuts like old battlefields, still bloody, still carelessly showcasing open wounds. Don’t think about complaining, though. (You live in a wood house, don’t you? Write on paper? Read books, eh?)
We’ve got weather, the kind that looms like pagan gods, poking and prodding and playing their secretive, torturous games as if suffering could be a prize in itself. Think snow and ice and hammering rain, think fog so thick you lose sight of your own fingers as you’re chopping wood, think lightning strikes that set one hill after another into a booming whoosh of flames, and a choking summer smoke that squeezes your chest so that it hurts to curse.
Despite that, the long-standing rumor is that we’ve got a resort coming in, back of beyond. They say it will have wooden boardwalks snaking through the second growth straight to the river, to cabins and fishing boats and a lodge with a fire-resistant metal roof. That rumor’s been alive for years.
On the eastern side of town, a homesick Scottish man is building a private golf course, open and green, his heaven on earth.
We’ve got a five-page weekly paper, a radio station, middling television reception, political representatives, and taxes. We don’t have a jail, but we have a holding station with real metal bars and chicken wire you could suicide on if you felt so inclined. If you’ve got a cell phone, you can wiggle it from here to there and good luck to you. Satellites don’t seem to take us much into account. We’ve got white people and reddish-brown people and a few shades in-between, foreigners, settlers, tourists, mixed bloods, and Natives. We’ve got alcohol—store-bought and grain—warm racks of gas-station beer, bargain whiskey sold by the gallon. We’ve got Oxycontin and crack and meth and coke with needles and lots of weed and homemade pharmaceuticals, guns and knives and fists and boots, fights and accidents, arsons and homemade explosives, amateur sex rings, love triangles, and charging romances, weddings and funerals—we’ve got a whole lot of funerals.
See, you know us. Or think you do.
THE DEVIL’S POCKET
Bryan still wasn’t himself by the time we reached Fuller again. It was a little past noon, a haze coming off the hot pavement. I hopped out with Tessa, desperate as always for a few minutes more, another chance, even though it would mean a longer walk home alone. For once, Bryan didn’t glance into his rearview mirror to shake his head at my inability to make a move on Tessa. I could tell he was stuck on Flacker and the way Hana Swann had dismissed the solution he’d come to with Jackie. A dare? A taunt? Whatever it was, Hana Swann was in him now, a fishhook of longing, a branding iron still smoking.
Follow him, I could imagine Uncle Lud saying, pushing me to hold the story tight. You know where he’s going. And, yes, even then I must have known where the story was heading.
Bryan had hours before he had to pick up Ursie. His sister would be waiting in the motel office for the ride home, sipping one of the ancient, high-necked Diet Bubble-Ups from Albie’s relic of a soda machine. Albie had invested in cases of the stuff years ago, convinced the town would soon be rushed by hoity-toity, ever-dieting skiers. The brands—Bubble-Up, Tab, and Fresca—had sounded exotic and ritzy to him. But a ski resort had yet to materialize, and he couldn’t give his stock away. Guests remained suspicious of those old brands, believing a local rumor about a government scheme to slim down the populace by slipping health foods into their favorites, and locals berated Albie for even suggesting such bizarre beverages. Besides, most everyone up here has a raging sweet tooth—calories be damned. Diet drinks aren’t a big sell. So Albie allowed Ursie and her auntie to help themselves each afternoon when the rooms were finished, and they were usually so parched they did just that. Ursie admired the long-necked bottles and the frostiness Albie’s old soda machine achieved, and despite the odd aftertastes, despite her inevitable preference for Diet Bubble-Up, she savored every brand and would spend several considerate minutes before the soda machine each afternoon. Sometimes she was still gazing at the machine when Bryan’s old truck with its often-loose fan belt screeched into the lot.
He was rarely late. Bryan didn’t like to think about the men returning to the motel and seeing his sister—no beauty, he’d admit, but young and female and unfailingly kind—alone in the narrow lobby. Another nightmare had him arriving late with Ursie nowhere in sight, Albie simply pointing down the road as if a girl taking a long walk home wasn’t beyond foolhardy. Bryan glanced at the old watch hanging from the knob on his truck’s broken radio. He had time. He should use it for his own scavenging. He’d heard about an untended scrap pile that might have a few hot-water tanks and a bunch of insulated copper wire he could strip and sell. And he had a little Nagle pot he should peddle at the community center before they swung around looking for him again. But first his truck must buck and bounce past Gerald Flacker’s place on Charlotte Road.
Charlotte Road was narrow and rangy, but Bryan didn’t slow down by Flacker’s, and he barely moved his head, even though he noted that Gerald Flacker’s flaking brown Chevy two-ton was not in the driveway. He circled around the dirt road that buddied up against the railroad tracks and parked behind the vacant sawmill Flacker’s father had run years ago. On foot, he shouldered through the heat-burned speargrass, tinder his boots almost sparked, until he caught sight of Gerald Flacker’s own ever-expanding piles of scrap. Supposedly, Flacker made a living off the bent trailers and broken appliances that littered that old clear-cut, but it was obvious to Bryan, expert grubber himself, that only a desperate soul could imagine anything useful in Flacker’s yard, a five-acre parcel where even the dwellings lay like litter. At first glance, you couldn’t even see the moldy mobile home or the sinking cabin made from discarded planks ripped from the now-defunct sawmill.
Bryan waited on the edge of the property to hear if the death dogs had begun howling at his approach. Despite Flacker’s mistreatment, they weren’t bad creatures, but they were unpredictable since they had no memories, their years of living alongside meth heaven having burned out what natural sense they might have had. Sometimes, they greeted Bryan with wagging tails, a heartbreaking need to be petted. Other times, they would approach him almost at a crawl, their bellies dragging, deep growls building into the rush and snap he had to forestall by flinging bits from Jackie’s bag at them.
He didn’t hear them today. Most likely, Flacker had gone off to make his deliveries and collections and had taken his tormented pets along as goons. The Magnuson kids were scrabbling in the dirt behind the trailer, playing their feeble games like a couple of refugees with pieces of sticks and torn shoelaces, pebbles hammered on rocks. Bryan didn’t want them to see him either. Or maybe he just didn’t want to see them. They were thin, shell-shocked kids whose mother forgot them for days at a time, so that their tiny pants and T-shirts were always filthy, smelling of pee and baby sweat, and they’d almost lost whatever
route to human speech they’d undertaken before their mama became enslaved to meth and Gerald Flacker. Twins, a boy and a girl. Jackie said they were six, but Bryan guessed three. Little animals. You could call Child Services about the kids—a foster home couldn’t be much worse—but Flacker’s cousin Mitchell was on the force, and anyone who interfered with Flacker usually found himself in trouble on the road, no matter how anonymous he or she had tried to be. And the roads could be awfully dark and boneyard lonely around here.
Another kind of silence crawled around Flacker’s yard. Bryan thought it bordered on hysteria, as if these broken, busted metal and plastic carcasses composed a kind of receptacle for damned souls, and their anguished cries lay a finger’s length beneath the surface, just barely tamped down. That perception was enhanced by the Flacker air, which shimmered in the heat as if fanned by a constant and unforgiving fire.
Bryan didn’t have to step too far onto Flacker’s property to lift the fender on a mold-covered Ford. He put the tied bag partway beneath to hold it steady before taking off down the trail, spinning a handful of gravel against the far trailer to alert the twins, who did not waste time but scuttled barefoot across that treacherous yard with its spiked pieces of metal and broken glass. Their tiny hands edged into the hole beneath the fender, and they wrestled the bag free and stuffed their faces right there, sinking to their haunches, little paws pushing cold potatoes into their mouths so that even as he walked back to his truck, Bryan could hear their infantile huffing and grunting. Smart kids, they’d hide the empty bag—after they’d licked it clean. The rest of the day, they’d chew or pretend to chew on the pieces of paper toweling stuck like leaves to the insides of their cheeks.
Usually, Bryan would drive back along the railway road until he reached the single-lane of Ledge Road with its deep open drop, where he’d crawl along, half-hoping he’d run into Gerald Flacker or even the Nagles. If he did, he hoped he could gun his old truck and plow forward, no regrets. Since his mother died, Bryan had discovered his only real fear was that something would happen to his dad or Ursie or that Ursie would be left alone with no way to take care of herself, but now that his dad had gone up north and Ursie was working at the motel, that last weight had lightened some, and Bryan found himself in new territory, not exactly brave, but missing any true spark for life. He had so little to lose and so many waiting on the other side: his mother and grandmother; his cousin Brent; a little yellow-haired girl named Sharon who’d held his hand all through grade four; Joby from the basketball team; Russell, whom he and Leo had known since they were babies; the Courchats who’d wrecked the family car only last winter. His old friend Dean. Yeah, hell, he thought, Dean.
With school over for good and no steady job in place, Bryan wasn’t seeing many new friends on the horizon, and with Ursie working and me on my way to getting jammed up at the mining college if my father had his way, his closest circle of friends must not have looked too promising either. He couldn’t count on Tessa or Jackie—he just couldn’t. Tessa’s family continually sucked her under, and Jackie, loyal and dear as she was, could also turn on him if she decided she’d been wronged in any way, and that was a line they all knew was far too easy to cross on Jackie’s bad days. And then there was his father, who had let him down in more ways than he could count. Just last week, for instance, that letter had come about the house. You and your sister are guests in my house, his stranger of a father had written. My house, remember that. Bryan wondered if the letter had been dictated; it read so cold.
Bryan’s father, Trevor Nowicki, had grown up on a farm up north. He’d spent his youth working on the sour gas wells, but on a hunting trip down here, Trevor met Bryan’s mother, Junie, and though they’d tried to make a home together up north, people didn’t make it easy for a white man with a Kitselas wife, a “squaw”—not Trevor’s family or his old buddies or the people in the town. Junie never spoke about it, but the truth was, she couldn’t even get a cup of coffee up there. If Trevor and Junie went out, the waitress would only bring the one cup and, if challenged, spit right back at Trevor: “You should know better than to bring her in here.” He had gone back to working on the sour gas wells, and more than a few times those wells had flared close to the farmhouse they were renting, sickening their goat and cow and making them all dizzy and nauseous. By then, Junie had lost one baby and the headaches had begun to get really bad right about the time they learned about the second pregnancy, and while Trevor refused to connect the dots publicly—God knows, you don’t bite the hand that’s feeding your community—he himself kept having nosebleeds that privately terrified him, so he caved in and moved back here, where my dad, his good friend, had arrived and met my own mum, who never pretended she would go anywhere else with him, where Bryan, then Ursie, were born intact and healthy, and Junie’s sisters spooling around to help and cheer until one by one, they began to slide—and Junie with them, but for different reasons. In those last days, Trevor was still down at the mill yard, and Bryan, who was fourteen and without a license, would drive Junie home from the clinic to find one of her sisters picking through Junie’s clothes.
“Whoa,” the sister might say, “you look bad! Don’t they have a medicine for that?”
Junie would barely manage a weak smile as Bryan eased her back into bed. And when her sister would lurch close to Junie to “smooch” her cheek, Bryan would flinch and bite his tongue, noticing how Junie held her wriggling sister tight and whispered, You be good, before the sister pulled free and, giggling, left in Junie’s last best blouse.
They tried to swarm after Junie died, but Trevor held them off. All three of them—Trevor, Bryan, and Ursie—would come to the door as the sisters began to rattle the knob and thrash their way back into Junie’s house. All three wearing the same fierce expression with which Trevor’s implacable Polish father had faced every homesteading challenge. Even Ursie, Junie’s spitting image, summoned up her father’s kin so that her soft brow grew stern and her usual easy laugh could not be enticed by her once-giggling aunts, begging on the threshold to visit and hold them tight, to be to Bryan and Ursie what Junie had been to them. Trevor chased them off, but it was the kids standing beside him without an ounce of their mother’s grace showing that made them stay away. Junie’s sisters came to believe the Polack, as they called Trevor, had kidnapped first their sister’s treasured soul and now those of their sister’s children. Only Madeline, the youngest, dared eventually to come back, sneaking through an open bedroom window one afternoon to pilfer Junie’s old red high heels and a bottle of cologne Trevor had bought his wife while she was in the hospital that last time. She tried again after Trevor left, but Bryan set her straight.
“We have nothing,” he told her. “You want some of that?”
Still it was Madeline who set Ursie up at the P&P. Madeline who Bryan would come to blame for Keven Seven.
His shirt was sticking to his back, and the truck seat was burning beneath him. Bryan felt on fire as he drove up the dirt road that paralleled the train tracks. The coil of desire that had begun at the refuse station that morning twisted in his gut and made him want to cry the way he hadn’t managed after his mother died, after his father left. He had nailed Jackie’s longing, but hardly knew it was his own, too. That bone-white girl with the Indian hair. Who are you, Bryan? Just once that morning, her eyes had met his. She’d touched his arm with the marten blood, and she’d poured right into him as if passing along a set of instructions, but all she had said was, Just do it, Bryan. And the weird thing was that he knew exactly was she was proposing. He’d driven away feeling as if he had made a promise, as if he were a heroic soul, not just another lusting asshole, nearly as half-starved and lonely and trapped as the Magnuson kids. And the thought pierced him, pierced and burrowed until he could think of nothing else: why shouldn’t he be brave and bold and do the world this favor?
He was nearing the highway intersection about then, and with his usual stellar timing, he arrived as
Mitchell Flacker’s patrol car was taking the last curve. Gerald’s cousin, his “protection,” usually took account of the slightest peripheral movement, trained eyes spotting a truck even when it was slowly emerging from a byroad, half-covered in dust. Mitchell Flacker would raise two fingers off his steering wheel, a country wave that let them know they were under observation. Today, Bryan managed a quick swerve into brush, and Gerald’s cousin didn’t seem to see the truck at all. He had someone in his backseat—a girl, Bryan thought. On any other day, he would have begun fretting, wondering what was up with Mitchell Flacker ferrying around a girl. Creepy bastard. Gerald probably had that strung-out tweaker Cassie Magnuson out on loan with Mitchell doing the dirty work, which would have meant the Magnuson kids had been left out there alone. Upon reflection, that did not seem like such a bad thing. A blessing, wouldn’t it be for those Magnuson kids, if Flacker and their mother just outright disappeared, like the girls up off the highway? Hana Swann claimed his thoughts again, and Bryan imagined a wide pit opening, a whoosh like the gas flares his father had once described, Flacker’s world engulfed, and Bryan and that bone-white girl strolling majestically alongside the tainted highway. She would be a cool comfort beside him as each of them chaperoned a Magnuson kid to safety.
As he put the truck into gear and began easing out of the brush, the back tires slipped, and Bryan realized he’d put the truck inches away from a precipice. Sweat crept along his scalp and down his neck, and his hands could barely hold on to the shuddering steering wheel until, with gentle lurches, he regained the gravel road. Full minutes passed before he hauled the truck back onto the dirt track, then the highway, headed back into town, the usual sights yet everything seeming altered. The truck’s shocks were shot, its suspension barely holding together, and somewhere in the fire and rumble and sweat, in the pure pressure of bouncing along in that hot truck cab with stinging desire filling his hollow gut, the idea finally jarred loose in Bryan, the beginnings of a plan to rid the world of Gerald Flacker. He would kill Flacker. A simple accident. Hell, why hadn’t he thought of that before? He’d need some help, sure, but he knew just where to go for that. Didn’t he have the brainiest kid he knew as his best friend? As he came into town, he leaned forward and wrestled the wheel onto Fuller, not right toward the P&P, but left, up Lamplight Hill.
A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain Page 5