The Five Gates of Hell

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Go back,’ Nathan shouted, ‘go back,’ and he pointed behind him. But Lumberjack just leapt at his outstretched hand. It was part of the game.

  After three miles Nathan had to turn round and ride all the way home again. India-May locked Lumberjack inside the house. As Nathan pulled away for the second time he could hear Lumberjack in the kitchen, frantically sawing the legs off tables and chairs. Somehow that was worse than anything.

  But he rode hard to the end of the track and when he reached Baby Boy’s white cross he hesitated, then he turned right, into the mountains, something that he’d never done before.

  Four

  The First Drop Of Rain

  Jed drove north to begin with, his wrist a rectangle of heat and all that numbness just behind his eyes, but after two days the roads drew him inland, over high mountains, and soon he was heading due west. The mountains lay down, sprawled on the land like tired dogs. Then there were no mountains at all. Sometimes he saw a row of trees on the horizon. In the heat-haze they were saints walking on water, they didn’t seem to touch the ground at all. Towards nightfall the sun balanced on the end of the road and then not even his special lenses helped. He’d be half blind by the time he stopped for sleep, his vision clunking with green and purple balls. In the mornings, standing in some motel parking-lot, the air scorched his lungs, it was like breathing the air above a fire. He drove with the windows shut. It was cooler. Skulls and dust outside. Tornadoes that spun across the blue sky like vases thrown on some mad potter’s wheel. The weather was like a scourge, the land could kill you. Out here, on the desert’s edge, penance could be done. Out here he could spend his years of exile.

  The first time he drove into Adam’s Creek he saw a picture of Creed in a store window and he stabbed the brake. The car slewed. A truck filled his mirror and overflowed. A sneezing of brakes, a clash of gears, and it lumbered past, the driver glaring down, fingers twitching and a black hole for a mouth. It wasn’t Creed in the window, after all, it was just some advert for brilliantine, but his heart didn’t know the difference and he sat there until it slowed.

  Two miles out of town he pulled into a shallow ditch and switched the engine off. Looking around, he saw that he’d parked outside a graveyard. There was no church. Only a tin shelter with three walls and a bench. A few gaunt trees. Some rocks. It was the kind of place where you waited for a bus that never came.

  He left his car and moved through the yellow grass, his arms clutched across his chest. He felt the inch of bare skin above his socks as two cold metal bands. He’d never thought that you could shiver in a desert, but it was late afternoon and the sun had fallen behind the hills and a chill wind cut across the graves. The wind dropped once, and he watched in astonishment as flies landed on his face and hands in clots. Then the wind rose again and plucked his top hat off his head and sent it bowling among the stones. He’d been sitting in the car so long, it was hard for him to run. His ankles clicked, his knees snapped, but he was after it, past crosses, round tombs, over mounds. Families passed beneath his feet, and he caught glimpses of their tragedies: TREASURED DAUGHTER. OUR DEAR BABIES. BELOVED WIFE. Only two days before he’d called his mother from a pay-phone on the highway. When she answered, he just listened.

  ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Who’s this?’

  He waited.

  ‘That you, Henry?’ she said.

  So. It was Henry now.

  ‘Henry?’ she said, raising her voice now. ‘Is that you?’

  He put the phone down. He didn’t exist for her. Henry existed (whoever Henry was). But he didn’t. That was the truth.

  His BELOVED MOTHER.

  ‘Stop,’ he shouted at his hat. ‘Stop,’ he shouted. ‘Wait for me.’

  All the biggest words rose off the stones towards him: mother, love, father, memory, son, heaven. He felt nothing. He was nobody his mother knew, and there were no beloveds. He caught his hat and put it on.

  He was so cold when he climbed back into the car, his lips mauve in the mirror, his teeth drumming in his head. All week he’d been trying not to think. He’d wanted to drive until anything he remembered would seem as if it had happened to someone else. A movie, another person’s memory, the words of a song. And finally, that afternoon in the graveyard, he knew the door had slammed on his life and the door was one of those big silver refrigerator doors and he saw his life hanging behind that door like meat. It no longer felt like a life. His or anyone else’s.

  He fumbled the key into the ignition with numb fingers. Once the engine caught, he turned the car round and drove back into Adam’s Creek, population 2,200, elevation 21 metres.

  When he arrived he found that he’d already become something of a legend. The landlord of the Commercial Hotel gave him a nod as he walked through the door. ‘How are you doing?’

  Jed nodded. ‘Not bad. You?’

  The landlord nodded. ‘Saw you earlier.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. You were the one who braked on Main Street. Denny Buder nearly crushed you flat.’ The landlord was smiling, his face broad and red and open.

  Strange to be seeing still things, Jed thought. He was used to white lines, asphalt, trees. All moving. Towards and past. Faces didn’t do that. They just hung in front of you, like lamps.

  He blinked. ‘You got a room?’

  ‘We got single rooms. Seven dollars a night.’ The landlord licked his thumb and flicked the register open. ‘You going to be staying long?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. A couple of nights, maybe.’

  ‘Names’s Wayne,’ the landlord said. Jed stuck a hand out.

  ‘Jed,’ he said. ‘Jed Morgan.’

  He paid cash for the room.

  ‘Yeah,’ Wayne said, ‘just about everyone must’ve saw you this morning. Not often you get someone braking like that on Main Street. And wearing a hat like that and all. Thought you were selling bibles, some of them did.’

  When Jed said nothing, Wayne said, ‘You don’t sell bibles, do you?’

  Jed shook his head slowly. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘So what do you do then?’

  Jed couldn’t figure out why, but he didn’t mind the landlord’s curiosity. In other towns he’d left way before the question mark, his Coke still fizzing at the top of the glass. Now it seemed like a relief to be talking, a novelty, a test of wit.

  ‘I used to work back east,’ he said. ‘Got laid off. Thought I’d take a trip.’

  ‘You got here a week ago, you’d’ve cooked.’

  ‘Still pretty hot.’

  ‘You did right coming through Adam’s Creek,’ Wayne said. ‘It gets a bit rough round here from time to time, there’s a power station out past the ridge and the boys do their drinking here, but mosdy we’re pretty friendly.’

  Rough. Jed smiled. They didn’t know what rough was.

  Wayne showed him to a room on the first floor, at the front of the building. A cracked sink, an iron bed. When Jed opened the wardrobe, the empty hangers jangled like wind-chimes. It was a nice illusion. Not even the faintest of breezes here. The window looked out on to a wide wooden verandah with a few deadbeat chairs and a metal table that took one leg off the ground when you leaned on it.

  ‘Bibles,’ he muttered.

  From the verandah you looked down on Main Street, with its asphalt all cracked and splintered by the heat. A high wire-mesh fence divided the street from the railway tracks beyond. The line wasn’t used much any more, Wayne had told him. Only for taking coal from the hills in the south to the power station just over the ridge. The yard was a desert of flint chips and rolling stock that was almost extinct. The signal box had shed its paint. Weeds grew, mauve and yellow, between the rails.

  He lay down on his bed that first night, his hands folded on his chest, his boots still on. He’d been driving for days, he’d forgotten how many, and he was tired of the white lines painted down the middle of the highway, he was tired to the centre of his bones. The trouble was, once you’d been driving for th
at long, you drove right through your tiredness and out into a dreamland where only the road was moving. He’d driven into Adam’s Creek the same way he’d driven into a hundred other small towns. But he’d braked suddenly, and broken the momentum. He’d looked round and it had seemed like just about the first place he’d seen, and some part of him deep down had said: It’s got to be somewhere, why not here? After all, he couldn’t go on driving for ever, he’d just drive straight into another ocean, and that was what he was trying to get away from, wasn’t it, the ocean?

  At nine o’clock he left his room and went down to the bar. Wayne drew him a beer. ‘Welcome to Adam’s Creek.’ Wayne turned to the two men at the bar. ‘One creek that never runs dry, eh, boys?’ The laughter that followed was routine. The echo of a million other nights.

  Jed hadn’t drunk beer since the night he met Sharon, but he didn’t flinch. He raised his glass. ‘It’s good to be here, Wayne,’ he said, and swallowed half of it before he put it down. He made that noise that men who drink beer make, and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist.

  One of the two men leaned over. ‘So where’s all the bibles then?’

  ‘Bibles?’ Jed said. ‘What bibles?’

  ‘Ain’t you selling bibles?’ The man had slack cheeks that shook like jelly when he spoke.

  Jed smiled and took a risk. ‘I’d sell my sister first.’

  Wayne spluttered. He turned and yelled to the woman who was polishing a glass at the other end of the bar. ‘Did you hear that, Linda? He’d sell his sister first.’

  Linda took one look at Jed and went on polishing the glass. ‘Wouldn’t fetch much by the look of it.’

  Jed raised a grin. ‘What are you drinking, Linda?’

  ‘I’ll have a beer,’ she said.

  He got drunk that night, though not as drunk as he pretended to be. He was a man drowning his sorrows, he’d decided. He was a man drinking to forget. And slowly he let his sorrows spill. He’d seen a hundred funerals. He knew how it was done. Six or seven drinks inside him, he leaned on the bar. ‘I just want to forget her, Wayne.’

  ‘Who’s that, Jed?’

  ‘My wife.’

  You couldn’t show up in a place like Adam’s Creek without a few questions being asked, Jed knew that, so he’d dreamed up a story. He’d got the idea from a song he’d heard on the radio while he was driving. It was about a wife who’d cheated on her husband, she’d left him for his best friend, and now the man was on the road trying to mend his broken heart. To him it sounded ridiculous, but he thought it was the kind of lie that people might believe. People like feeling pity for people, it makes them feel lucky. Well, he was going to give them the chance, wasn’t he? After being the man who’d sell his sister, he was about to become the man who’d lost his wife.

  ‘She made a fool of me, Wayne,’ he said. ‘I just want to forget the whole damn thing.’

  ‘You go ahead,’ Wayne said. ‘She wasn’t worth it. You just go right ahead and forget her.’

  And because Jed couldn’t picture the wife who was supposed to have left him, because he had no idea what she looked like, he found himself believing that he was doing a pretty good job.

  When, just before closing, Wayne said, ‘So what’s with the top hat, Jed?’ Jed knew what the answer was, and he was drunk enough to carry it off.

  Slowly he removed the hat and slowly he looked down at it, his vision blurred by alcohol, but for all anyone knew it could have been tears. ‘This hat?’ he said. ‘This is the hat I wore to my wedding.’

  He looked up. There was a big rear-view mirror over the bar so he could see the glances being exchanged behind his back. He could see the pity surfacing.

  ‘You know, it’s strange, Wayne, but I’ve completely forgotten what she looks like.’ He smiled bravely. ‘It’s almost like she never existed.’ And, looking down again, he felt the weight of Wayne’s hand on his shoulder.

  *

  A couple of days, he’d said, but he ended up staying in the Commercial Hotel for almost a year. During the first few months he worked with a gang of local road-menders, filling pot-holes on the highway, smoothing cambers, paving the dirt tracks that led to ranches. He spent most of his daylight hours outside. His lean pocked body tightened, turned brown, found a different shape. In that clear air he felt himself settling into his new skin. Some days he didn’t say a word. He just didn’t have any. Words would take longer. Not that anyone noticed. The road-menders were a sullen bunch. Then, towards Christmas, the work dwindled and he was laid off. He took the first job he could find, washing dishes at the Wang Garden, a Chinese restaurant two blocks down the street from the hotel. Lunchtimes and evenings, $4.50 an hour. Shortly after he started at the restaurant he told Wayne that he was moving to Mrs O’Neill’s boarding house on the corner of Main Street and Railway Avenue.

  ‘How long are you going to stay there?’ Wayne said. ‘A couple of days?’ He laughed so hard, he almost pulled a muscle.

  Mrs O’Neill had startled red hair and a face that was like a dried-up river bed. She sat in her front room with the curtains drawn and the TV on and the door ajar. All you could see through the gap was a strip of wall and half a fridge. There were two pictures taped to the side of the fridge: Jesus and Donald Duck. Mrs O’Neill had the sweetest tooth in Adam’s Creek, and Jed won a place in her affections on his very first day by buying her a Rocky Road on his way back from work. He’d just discovered Rocky Roads. Made from peanuts, nougat, and chunks of glacé cherry, and covered in a thick coating of milk chocolate, it was the best candy bar that he’d ever come across. Whenever he passed Mrs O’Neill’s room after that, it was always, ‘Bring me a Rocky Road, would you, Matt, there’s a dear.’ That was the other thing about Mrs O’Neill. She thought his name was Matt. ‘My name’s Jed,’ he’d told her, more times than he could remember, but every time he passed her door she called out,’ Matt, honey, is that you?’ Maybe it was her way of telling him that she knew he was lying. Not about his name, but about everything else. But then, how could she know that? he thought. How the fuck could she know anything with Jesus and Donald Duck taped to the side of her fridge and her brain blended to mush by all that TV? She didn’t know. Nobody knew.

  He had a large room on the second floor, with bright-green walls and a tangerine bedspread. The curtains looked like spring, but a spring that had happened somewhere else: all green shoots and rainfall and blossom. There was a plug-in kettle, an electric ring for cooking on, and a Gideon’s bible, for solace. It was from this room that he wrote his first and only communications with the outside world. One weekend he bought two postcards of the Adam’s Creek power station at night (they were the only postcards there were) and sat down at his rickety table by the window with a pen. He wrote the first card to Mitch. He thanked Mitch again for the tattoo and said it was lasting pretty well, considering. He told Mitch to say hello to his old lady. He said the clock in the local post office was busted and maybe Mitch would drop by and fix it sometime. Then he put, ‘But your bike probably wouldn’t make it, would it? Yours, Jed.’ Grinning, he turned to the second card. This would be for Sharon. There were times when he missed her; hers was the only woman’s body that he’d ever known. He remembered surprising her once at work. She’d just got a job at Simon Peter’s, a twenty-four-hour supermarket chain that catered for all funeral needs. Their logo was a yawning grave (a black triangle with the top cut off). Their slogan? OUR PRICES ARE SIX FEET UNDER EVERYBODY ELSE’S. His eyes lifted to the window, but they didn’t see the telegraph wires or the railway tracks or the range of dusty yellow hills beyond. They saw Sharon standing in the plastic-flowers aisle. She was wearing a black nylon coat and a badge that said SHARON LACEY. SECTION MANAGER. Her eyes widened at the sight of him. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Make like I’m a customer,’ he whispered. ‘Show me where something is.’

  She took him to the far aisle and showed him the salt tablets. They were called Weepies. You took them to replace the salt your tea
rs had bereaved you of. Or so the packet said.

  He noticed a door that said STAFF ONLY. ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just stock.’

  He led her through the door. She was right. Boxes stacked in piles, nobody around. He sat her down and began to unfasten her coat. She smelt of ammonia, violets, sweat. ‘It must be hot wearing all this nylon,’ he said. In the distance he could hear the requiem mass that was being piped at a discreet volume throughout the store.

  ‘You can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve got my period.’

  ‘I don’t mind about that.’

  ‘It’s not safe.’

  ‘Of course it’s safe. You just said. You’ve got your period.’

  ‘It’s not safe here,’ Sharon hissed. ‘My job. They’ll kill –’

  He was inside her before she could finish the sentence.

  ‘They won’t kill you,’ he said after a while. ‘You’re too important.’ He tapped her badge. ‘You’re Section Manager.’

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ she said, but she was laughing by then. ‘I’m supposed to set an example.’

  Afterwards Jed tore open the cardboard box they’d done it on. Inside, conveniently, were hundreds of packets of black-edged tissues. As he crouched behind her, mopping the blood off the back of her thighs, he could feel his erection returning. It was the first time he’d realised that a woman’s blood had the power to excite him.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Sharon said, ‘you know that?’

  But he’d stopped now, he was staring at the tissue.

  ‘I know who invented these.’ He smiled up at her. ‘I lived in the same house as him once. He thought walking was old-fashioned, so he used to go round in a wheelchair.’

  Sharon was shaking her head. ‘Crazy.’

  Smiling, he lowered his pen to the paper. He told her he was very far away. He was working in a Chinese restaurant, he said. He hoped she was all right. He hesitated, then he wrote, ‘Remember that time in the storeroom?’