One Door Away From Heaven Page 4

  Not a brain-eating alien but feeling as though he himself is in the thrall of black-hole gravity, the intruder returns quietly to the open bedroom door, the dog remaining by his side.

  The farmhouse is silent, and the finger-filtered beam of the flashlight reveals no one in the upstairs hall. Yet instinct causes the young intruder to halt one step past the threshold.

  Something isn’t right, the silence too deep. Perhaps Curtis’s parents have awakened.

  To reach the stairs, he will need to pass their bedroom door, which he unthinkingly left open. If the farmer and his wife have been roused from sleep, they will probably remember that their door was closed when they retired for the night.

  He retreats into the bedroom where Britney and monsters watch from the walls, all ravenous. Switches off the flashlight. Holds his breath.

  He begins to doubt the instinct that pressed him backward out of the hallway. Then he realizes that the dog’s swishing tail, which had been softly lashing his legs, has suddenly gone still. The animal has also stopped panting.

  Dim gray rectangles float in the dark: curtained windows. He crosses the room toward them, struggling to recall the placement of furniture, hoping to avoid raising a clatter.

  After he puts down the extinguished flashlight, as he pulls the curtains aside, plastic rings scrape and click softly along a brass rod, as though the hanging skeleton, animated by sorcery, is flexing its bony fingers in the gloom.

  Curtis Hammond mutters, wrestles briefly with his sheets, but doesn’t wake.

  A thumb-turn lock frees the window. Gingerly, the intruder raises the lower sash. He slips out of the house, onto the front-porch roof, and glances back.

  The dog looms at the open window, forepaws on the sill, as if it will abandon its master in favor of this new friend and a night of adventure.

  “Stay,” whispers the motherless boy.

  In a crouch, he crosses the roof to the brink. When he looks back again, the mutt whines beseechingly but doesn’t follow.

  The boy is athletic, agile. The leap from the porch roof is a challenge easily met. He lands on the lawn with bent knees, drops, rolls through cold dew, through the sweet crisp scent of grass that bursts from the crushed blades under him, and scrambles at once to his feet.

  A dirt lane, flanked by fenced meadows and oiled to control dust, leads to a public road about two hundred yards to the west. Hurrying, he has covered less than half that distance when he hears the dog bark far behind him.

  Lights blaze, blink, and blaze again behind the windows of the Hammond place, a strobing chaos, as though the farmhouse has become a carnival funhouse awhirl with bright flickering spooks.

  With the lights come screams, soul-searing even at a distance, not just shouts of alarm, but shrieks of terror, wails of anguish. The most piercing squeals seem less like human sounds than like the panicked cries of pigs catching sight of the abattoir master’s gleaming blade, although these also are surely human, the wretched plaints of the tortured Hammonds in their last moments on this earth.

  The killers had been even closer on his trail than he’d feared. What he sensed, stepping into that upstairs hallway, hadn’t been the farmer and wife, awakened and suspicious. These are the same hunters who brutally murdered his family, come down through the mountains to the back door of the Hammond house.

  Racing away into the night, trying to outrun the screams and the guilt that they drill into him, the boy gasps for breath, and the cool air is rough in his raw throat. His heart like a horse’s hooves kicks, kicks against the stable of his ribs.

  The prisoner moon escapes the dungeon clouds, and the oiled lane under the boy’s swift feet glistens with the reflected glow.

  By the time he nears the public road, he can no longer hear the terrible cries, only his explosive breathing. Turning, he sees lights steady in every window of the house, and he knows that the killers are searching for him in attic, closets, cellar.

  More black than white, its coat a perfect camouflage against the moon-dappled oil, the dog sprints out of the night. It takes refuge at the boy’s side, pressing against his legs as it looks back toward the Hammond place.

  The dog’s flanks shudder, striking sympathetic shivers in the boy. Punctuating its panting are pitiful whimpers of fear, but the boy dares not surrender to his desire to sit in the lane beside the dog and cry in chorus with it.

  Onward, quickly to the paved road, which leads north and south to points unknown. Either direction will most likely bring him to the same hard death.

  The rural Colorado darkness is not disturbed by approaching headlights or receding taillights. When he holds his breath, he hears only stillness and the panting dog, not the growl of an approaching engine.

  He tries to shoo away the dog, but it will not be shooed. It has cast its fortune with his.

  Reluctant to be responsible even for this animal, but resigned to—and even somewhat grateful for—its companionship, he turns left, south, because a hill lies to the north. He doesn’t think he has the stamina to take that long incline at a run.

  On his right, a meadow bank grows, then looms, as the two-lane blacktop descends, while on his left, tall sentinel pines rise at the verge of the road, saluting the moon with their higher branches. The slap-slap-slap of his sneakers echoes between the bank and the trees, slap-slap-slap, a spoor of sound that sooner or later will draw his pursuers.

  Once more he glances back, but only once, because he sees the pulse of flames in the east, throbbing in the dark, and he knows that the Hammond place has been set ablaze. Reduced to blackened bones and ashes, the bodies of the dead will offer fewer clues to the true identity of the killers.

  A curve in the road and more trees screen him from sight of the fire, and when he entirely rounds the bend, he sees a truck stopped on the shoulder of the highway. Headlights doused in favor of the parking lights, this vehicle stands with engine idling, grumbling softly like some hulking beast that has been ridden hard and is half asleep on its feet.

  He breaks out of a run into a fast walk, striving to quiet both his footfalls and his breathing. Taking its cue from him, the dog slows to a trot, then lowers its head and slinks forward at his side, more like a cat than like a canine.

  The cargo bed of the truck has a canvas roof and walls. It’s open at the back except for a low tailgate.

  As he reaches the rear bumper, feeling dangerously exposed in the ruddy glow of the parking lights, the boy hears voices. Men in easy conversation.

  Cautiously he looks forward along the driver’s side of the truck, sees no one, and moves to the passenger’s side. Two men stand toward the front of the vehicle, their backs to the highway, facing the woods. Lambent moonlight spangles an arc of urine.

  He doesn’t want to endanger these people. If he stays here, they might be dead even before they empty their bladders: a longer rest stop than they had planned. Yet he’ll never elude his pursuers if he remains on foot.

  The tailgate is hinged at the bottom. Two latch bolts fix it at the top.

  He quietly slips the bolt on the right, holds the gate with one hand as he moves to the left, slips that bolt, too, and lowers the barrier, which is well oiled and rattle-free. He could have stepped onto the bumper and swung over the gate, but his four-legged friend wouldn’t have been able to climb after him.

  Understanding its new master’s intent, the dog springs into the cargo bed of the truck, landing so lightly among its contents that even the low rhythmic wheeze of the idling engine provides sufficient screening sound.

  The boy follows his spry companion into this tented blackness. Pulling the tailgate up from the inside is an awkward job, but with determination, he succeeds. He slides one bolt into its hasp, then engages the other, as outside the two men break into laughter.

  Behind the truck, the highway remains deserted. The parallel median lines, yellow in daylight, appear white under the influence of the frost-pale moon, and the boy can’t help but think of them as twin fuses along which ter
ror will come, hissing and smoking, to a sudden detonation.

  Hurry, he urges the men, as if by willpower alone he can move them. Hurry.

  Groping blindly, he discovers that the truck is loaded in part with a great many blankets, some rolled and strapped singly, others bundled in bales and tied with sisal twine. His right hand finds smooth leather, the distinctive curve of a cantle, the slope of a seat, pommel, fork, and horn: a saddle.

  The driver and his partner return to the cab of the truck. One door slams, then the other.

  More saddles are braced among the blankets, some as smooth as the first, but others enhanced with ornate hand-tooled designs that, to the boy’s questioning fingertips, speak of parades, horse shows, and rodeos. Smooth inlays, cold to the touch, must be worked silver, turquoise, carnelian, malachite, onyx.

  The driver pops the hand brake. As the vehicle angles off the shoulder and onto the pavement, the tires cast loose stones that rattle like dice into the darkness.

  The truck rolls southwest into the night, with the twin fuses on the blacktop raveling longer in its wake, and utility poles, carrying electric and telephone wires, seem to march like soldiers toward a battleground beyond the horizon.

  Among mounds of blankets and saddlery, swathed in the cozy odors of felt and sheepskin and fine leather and saddle soap—and not least of all in the curiously comforting, secondhand scent of horses—the motherless boy and the ragtag dog huddle together. They are bonded by grievous loss and by a sharp instinct for survival, traveling into an unknown land, toward an unknowable future.

  Chapter 5

  WEDNESDAY, after a fruitless day of job-seeking, Micky Bellsong returned to the trailer park, where much of the meager landscaping drooped wearily under the scorching sun and the rest appeared to be withered beyond recovery. The raging tornadoes that routinely sought vulnerable trailer parks across the plains states were unknown here in southern California, but summer heat made these blighted streets miserable enough until the next earthquake could do a tornado’s work.

  Aunt Geneva’s aged house trailer looked like a giant oven built for the roasting of whole cows, in multiples. Perhaps a malevolent sun god lived in the metal walls, for the air immediately around the place shimmered as if with the spirits of attending demons.

  Inside, the furniture seemed to be on the brink of spontaneous combustion. The sliding windows were open to admit a draft, but the August day declined the invitation to provide a breeze.

  In her tiny bedroom, Micky kicked off her toe-pinching high heels. She stripped out of her cheap cotton suit and pantyhose.

  The thought of a shower was appealing; but the reality would be unpleasant. The cramped bathroom had only a small window, and in this heat, the roiling steam wouldn’t properly vent.

  She slipped into white shorts and a sleeveless Chinese-red blouse. In the mirror on the back of the bedroom door, she looked better than she felt.

  At one time, she’d been proud of her beauty. Now she wondered why she had taken so much pride in something that required no effort, no slightest sacrifice.

  Over the past year, with as much mulish resistance as the most obstinate creature ever to pull a plow, Micky had drawn herself to the unpleasant conclusion that her life to date had been wasted and that she was solely to blame for what she had become. The anger that she’d once directed at others had been turned upon herself.

  Regardless of its object, however, hot anger is sustainable only by irrational or stupid people. Micky was neither. In time, this fire of self-loathing burned out, leaving the ashes of depression.

  Depression passed, too. Lately she had made her way from day to day in a curious and fragile state of expectancy.

  After giving her good looks, fate had never again been generous. Consequently, Micky wasn’t able to identify a reason for this almost sweet anticipation. Defensively, she tempered it with wariness.

  Nevertheless, during the week that she’d been staying with Aunt Gen, she awakened each morning with the conviction that change was coming and that it would be a change for the better.

  Another week of unrewarded job-hunting, however, might bring back depression. Also, more than once during the day, she’d been troubled by a new version of her former rage; this sullen resentment wasn’t as hot as her anger had been in the past, but it had the potential to quicken. The long day of rejection left her weary in body, mind, and spirit. And her emotional unsteadiness scared her.

  Barefoot, she went into the kitchen, where Geneva was preparing dinner. A small electric fan, set on the kitchen floor, churned the hot air with less cooling effect than might be produced by a wooden spoon stirring the contents of a bubbling soup pot.

  Because of the criminal stupidity and stupid criminality of California’s elected officials, the state had suffered electricity shortages early in the summer, and in an overreaction to the crisis had piled up surpluses of power at grossly high prices. Utility rates had soared. Geneva couldn’t afford to use the air conditioning.

  As Aunt Gen sprinkled Parmesan cheese over a bowl of cold pasta salad, she served up a smile that could have charmed the snake of Eden into a mood of benign companionship. Gen’s once golden hair was pale blond now, streaked with gray. Yet because she’d grown plump with age, her face was smooth; coppery freckles and lively green eyes testified to the abiding presence of the young girl thriving in the sixty-year-old woman. “Micky, sweetie, did you have a good day?”

  “Sucky day, Aunt Gen.”

  “That’s a word I never know whether to be embarrassed about.”

  “I didn’t realize anyone got embarrassed about anything anymore. In this case, it just means ‘as bad as a sucking chest wound.’”

  “Ah. Then I’m not embarrassed, just slightly sickened. Why don’t you get a glass of cold lemonade, honey? I made fresh.”

  “What I really need is a beer.”

  “There’s also beer. Your uncle Vernon liked two icy beers more evenings than not.”

  Aunt Gen didn’t drink beer. Vernon had been dead for eighteen years. Still, Geneva kept his favorite brand in the refrigerator, and if no one drank it, she periodically replaced it with new stock when its freshness date had passed.

  Although conceding the game to Death, she remained determined not to let Death also take sweet memories and long-kept traditions in addition to his prize of flesh.

  Micky popped open a can of Budweiser. “They think the economy’s going down the drain.”

  “Who does, dear?”

  “Everyone I talked to about a job.”

  Having set the pasta salad on the dinette table, Geneva began slicing roasted chicken breasts for sandwiches. “Those people are just pessimists. The economy’s always going down the drain for some folks, but it’s a warm bath for others. You’ll find work, sweetie.”

  The beer provided icy solace. “How do you stay so upbeat?”

  Focused on the chicken, Geneva said, “Easy. I just look around.”

  Micky looked around. “Sorry, Aunt Gen, but all I see is a poky little trailer kitchen so old the gloss is worn off the Formica.”

  “Then you don’t know how to look yet, honey. There’s a dish of pickles, some olives, a bowl of potato salad, a tray of cheese, and other stuff in the fridge. Would you put everything on the table?”

  Extracting the cheese tray from the refrigerator, Micky said, “Are you cooking for a cellblock full of condemned men or something?”

  Geneva set a platter of sliced chicken on the table. “Didn’t you notice—we have three place settings this evening?”

  “A dinner guest?”

  A knock answered the question. The back door stood open to facilitate air circulation, so Leilani Klonk rapped on the jamb.

  “Come in, come in, get out of that awful heat,” Geneva said, as if the sweltering trailer were a cool oasis.

  Backlit by the westering sun, wearing khaki shorts and a white T-shirt with a small green heart embroidered on the left breast, Leilani entered in a rattle and clatter
of steely leg brace, though she had climbed the three back steps with no noise.

  This had been worse than a sucky day. The language necessary to describe Micky’s job search in its full dreadfulness would not merely have embarrassed Aunt Geneva; it would have shocked and appalled her. Therefore, at the arrival of the disabled girl, Micky was surprised to feel the same buoying expectation that had kept her from drowning in self-pity since she’d moved in here.

  “Mrs. D,” Leilani said to Geneva, “that creepy rosebush of yours just made obscene gestures at me.”

  Geneva smiled. “If there was an altercation, dear, I’m sure you started it.”

  With the thumb on her deformed hand, Leilani gestured toward Geneva, and said to Micky, “She’s an original. Where’d you find her?”

  “She’s my father’s sister, so she was part of the deal.”

  “Bonus points,” said Leilani. “Your dad must be great.”

  “Why would you think so?”

  “His sister’s cool.”

  Micky said, “He abandoned my mother and me when I was three.”

  “That’s tough. But my useless dad skipped the day I was born.”

  “I didn’t know we were in a rotten-dad contest.”

  “At least my real dad isn’t a murderer like my current pseudofather—or as far as I know, he isn’t. Is your dad a murderer?”

  “I lose again. He’s just a selfish pig.”

  “Mrs. D, you don’t mind she calls your brother a selfish pig?”

  “Sadly, dear, it’s true.”

  “So you aren’t just bonus points, Mrs. D. You’re like this terrific prize that turned up in a box of rancid old Cracker Jack.”

  Geneva beamed. “That’s so sweet, Leilani. Would you like some fresh lemonade?”

  Indicating the can of Budweiser on the table, the girl said, “If beer’s good enough for Micky, it’s good enough for me.”

  Geneva poured lemonade. “Pretend it’s Budweiser.”

  To Micky, Leilani said, “She thinks I’m a child.”

  “You are a child.”

  “Depends on your definition of child.”