A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (7 page)

While she parked and went through the ritual of greeting the dogs and fussing over their water bowls, I had time to wrap a kitchen towel around my wound—turned out it was only my middle finger that had grazed the blade—glance at Uncle Lud (sleeping, it seemed, in the lounge chair), slip into my room and spread my books over the desk, and turn on the antiquated computer my mother had purchased from the shelter when the town upgraded. By the time I found the Band-Aids and covered my scratch, I could hear her kitchen clatter, followed soon by her always-comical idea of a whisper, a hiss so loud the dogs began to whimper again outside the back door, sure she was summoning them for a treat.

“Leo . . .
hss 
. . . lunch.”

In the kitchen, tomato soup was warming in the pan, despite the heat. A tuna sandwich already cut in half and waiting on a plate for me. The fan in the corner was flinging air around in a tight circle, but my mother's forehead glistened.

“What page are you on?” she asked as she reached across the counter to pour a long, gliding arc of milk into my glass. The pure swell of it conjured up Hana Swann, and for a moment, I was speechless as if I had no clue what my mother was talking about.

In the fall, I would return to Secondary for my last year. My father planned for me to continue on to the Mining College, where he had once taken courses, while my mother reminded me daily that I was not responsible for fulfilling my father's dreams. Apparently, however, I
was
on the hook for her
dreams. Ever since I had won a rash of school awards in grade six—big success story, me—my mother had been mapping out my future university career, making lists of prerequisites for a dozen professional endeavors, then laying each before me the way I imagined tasks were presented to those godforsaken heroes in Uncle Lud's fairy tales:
climb a mountain; kill a golden phoenix; outwit a sorcerer
. I would call that unnecessary busywork. My mother calls it preparation for salvation. Really. Salvation. Her greatest fear is that I'll graduate from childhood an addled drifter, still roaming around town like the Nagle brothers. If I do, I say it will be entirely her fault.

“I could have a breakdown,” I've told her. “That happens when a mind is overtaxed.”

Whenever I say this, my mother laughs, and if her cousin, the fire dispatcher, is nearby, Trudy actually snorts and whacks me hard on the shoulder.

“That's a good one, Leo,” she says.

“You can't say you haven't had advantages, Leo,” my mother liked to tell me, acting like she had no clue of the reality of my life away from home, the steady dance I did in the schoolyard between “dirty Indian” and “the Kraut Brain,” always on alert for the way the bully wind might blow.

Since my mother was working every day at the animal shelter office that summer, and my father remained up north, I should have been left alone to ramble through my summer, doing chores and keeping Uncle Lud company. Instead, I was also charged with a physics correspondence course my mother had ordered, another in that series of enrichments she'd sought out. Most days, instead of even glancing through the course, I closed the door to my room, flicked on the computer, and went to lie on my bed, where, in between thinking about Tessa, I filled notebook pages with the steady stream of stories my mother could never quite follow, stories Uncle Lud was determined to bestow on me before he left us. I kept those notebooks secret from my mother, who was already convinced that my slowness in the physics course must be due to the hours I spent listening, a fact she couldn't quite complain about given the situation. Yet what she didn't realize was that Uncle Lud wasn't the only impediment; I couldn't seem to get past the first section of my physics course. The notion of velocity flat-out stymied me.

“It's sections, not pages,” I finally managed to tell her, as I did every day. “Units. Self-contained units. They take a while.”

“Hmm,” she said, raising an eyebrow. She watched me bite into my sandwich before she picked up her own and said, “There's another dog dead this morning at the shelter. This heat gets to them, even with all the fans going. And an old tom torn to pieces by the school.”

“That could be coyotes,” I said. “Or a cougar. A bear.”

“Yeah, you think so?” she said. “Coyotes and cougars and bears don't break necks, cut off heads and tails, and make an eviscerating art project out of them, do they?”

“At least they're old ones, gonna die anyway.”

“Going to die, not gonna,” she corrected, then added, “I really hope you aren't the one taking care of me in my old age, Leo.

“I can't get them to listen downtown,” she went on. “You'd think it was a regular sport like hockey or basketball.”

“Maybe it is,” I said, thinking of the refuse station and the guns sweating in our hands.

“Oh, boy,” my mother said, “I sure hope not, kiddo. Don't folks cause enough trouble with the usual games? Trudy told me some fellow and his girl cleaned out a whole crew last week in a card game. The crew was lucky that couple caught them before payday. I guess that pair was lucky too. The crew would have ripped them apart later, laid the both of them out right beside that old tomcat.

“Strangers,” she said, almost spitting the word.

My mother saw the world from the underside up. Trouble everywhere. Lately, she'd been musing aloud about all the trouble that could befall a single soul alone in the world, which led her into thinking about how the world had contracted, what with the computers and all, so that all of them were now within shouting distance.

“Look at you,” she'd say to me, “taking courses from all over.”

We could hear Uncle Lud stirring, the wracking cough that greeted his waking beginning like the strangled barks the dogs let loose with when we chased them outside. All that scraping and baying for breath as they moved from the enclosed world into the next.

Without another word, my mother rose and took a glass from the cupboard, a bottle from the refrigerator. She was not one to put sugar on sorrow. No, the doctors had done their piece, now she'd decided she could only fix the pains that arose, nothing more.

“Here,” she said, pouring chilled vanilla Boost into a jelly jar, sticking in a straw.

I carried the glass to Uncle Lud and knelt beside him until the first bout of coughing subsided and he could hold on to the glass and take a sip or two on his own. Thirty-seven years old, and he might as well have been a hundred, the way he looked. His fever was back, and he was shuddering. A line of sweat creasing along his brow and his thin hands with their broken nails shaking so that when I took the glass back from him, I couldn't tell what burned more—my uncle's touch or the shock of ice. Both caused a shiver to run up my arm and neck, and noticing, Uncle Lud reached out a single heated finger and touched the side of my throat to ground me again. To ground us both.

Before he got sick, Uncle Lud had towered over me. Each of his visits would begin by hoisting me high in a bear hug. Even a year or so ago, he could lift me straight off my feet. Imagine that: me, the big-boned nerd, swirling through the air in Uncle Lud's arms, my long black hair swinging, my new glasses bumping up and down on my face, and a huffing sound, an adolescent version of a laugh, chafing the air with each turn, like I was an engine desperately trying to start. There wasn't much better, not even when my father, shaking his head, disappeared into the house as if unable to bear the foolish sight of the two of us, already no doubt anticipating the moment Uncle Lud would release me and I would roil in circles, damn near giggling.

Now my young uncle crumpled in my arms—even his bones had shrunk—and as Uncle Lud revived that afternoon, light pouring in around the bedroom shades my mother religiously lowered, I slung my uncle's arm around my neck and helped him into the washroom. Afterward, I maneuvered Uncle Lud into the living room, settling him gingerly in the recliner with that fresh glass of Boost, a new unbent straw beside him. Then I sprawled on the couch in a show of comradely weariness. With both of us stretched out facing the big back windows and the mountains beyond, I thought it felt a little as if we were embarking upon the road trip Uncle Lud had once promised we'd take together, traveling along in the same direction.

Sometimes when we sat like this, we managed to get the BBC on the radio, a transmission that tickled Uncle Lud. He once told me he imagined the BBC announcers as pompous Claymation figures, entertainingly oblivious of their lack of real substance. One quick-tongued, long-winded, double-talking interviewer, Alexander McAfee, Uncle Lud confided, appeared in his imagination as an animated fox.

“Now, tell me,” asked McAfee the fox as he interviewed a famous rugby hero sidelined by family tragedy, “would ye say ye've fully recovered or should I say, can one ever
fully
recover, or rather, might one imagine that an accident like this one would instead alter one irreparably? I'd say, it quite must, mustn't it? I guess what I mean is I imagine ye've become a different sort of player, not a regular fellow, but a man now, wouldn't ye say? Perhaps ye are less inclined to be the demon of a bad boy on the field, then, but a true team player, what one might label ‘an honest instigator' instead of a rabble-rouser?”

Uncle Lud would cackle with each of the fox's assumptions and self-clarifications.

A fox, he maintained, was in love with the sound of his own voice.

At least a Claymation fox—dressed, as Uncle Lud and I imagined, in a scarlet riding outfit—was.

But that afternoon, the high comedy of the BBC was illusive, a narrow drawer of static that wouldn't come clear. I flicked the radio's knob to a local station, but even the endless stream of Traveling Top 40 proved unobtainable. In its place, a news report about fears of a potentially dangerous fire bleated.

Dry lightning and willfully stupid campers were in season along with the unusual heat and the tindered grass, but I wasn't sure that things would have been different if the heat had held off. Then we might have had landslides or tremors or a spate of death-by-bear. You couldn't live here all these years and not feel as if the mountainside itself had a soul that flared and suffered and must find its own way of exploding.

“You went up to the refuse station,” Uncle Lud whispered, more statement than question. His throat, I knew, was always raw these days. I knew too that Uncle Lud wanted to say more. He would say more, I was sure, as soon as he could dampen the dry edge of his throat. I sat up to bend his straw and hand him his glass, waiting until he sipped before I answered.

“All of you?” Uncle Lud asked.

“Not Ursie,” I said.

“She'll be okay,” Uncle Lud said, startling me. My uncle rarely misread a conversation. “And?”

“And what?” I said.

“Who else?”

How did he know? I wondered. How did he always know?

I almost laughed aloud and Uncle Lud finally smiled, a tiny anxious twist to his old grin.

“A girl who works up at the camp with Jackie,” I said. “Hana Swann's her name.”

“For now,” Uncle Lud said.

I shrugged, and Uncle Lud read the shape of my morning in that gesture.

“Trouble?” he said as if he already knew she was.

I found myself oddly reluctant to share the truth of Hana Swann.

“Ah, no. She had advice for Bryan, that's all. Pissed him off, I think, this girl trying to tell him how to deal with Flacker.”

“Did she shoot?” Uncle Lud persisted.

“Oh, yeah, a little,” I said. “You should see her with a .22.”

I could feel a pressure building inside, a push against the truth. Uncle Lud read it in my face.

“She killed something, didn't she?” he said. “Something besides a rat.”

“A young marten,” I admitted.

“Did you help?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did . . . you . . . help her . . . kill it?” Uncle Lud managed.

Did I? For a moment, I flat couldn't remember. A part of me imagined I had stepped beside her to steady the gun or that I had been the one to stroll into the broken forest and lift the bloodied creature against me. I glanced down at myself, almost sure I'd see my shirtfront drenched in blood and was both confused and relieved to see only a speck of blood, my own blood, I remembered now, my own tiny accident.

Something spilled inside me, and in a rapid voice that shamed me, a voice that reminded me of my own childish fears, I babbled out how Hana Swann had shocked us all, how she disappeared into the trees, how blood ran down her white arm.

“She's not afraid of anything,” I concluded. “She was even ready to walk clean back to camp. Claims she'd never had a problem, hitchhiking on the highway or any road.”

“Jackie stopped her?” Uncle Lud said, leaning forward a little.

“Nah, weird thing is, Jackie knows better. Her sister's friend Minette, you know. They haven't found
her
. Jackie feels safe with this girl, I guess.”

I saw again the helpless longing on Jackie's face, and the rush of desire that had lofted me over Fuller Street to chase Tessa returned. I found myself rising to my feet, as if ready to run after her again, this time with Hana Swann looking on, grinning even as the Nagle brothers' car came tearing toward me and GF threw open his door.

It came fully into the room with us, a vision of blood, a burst of gunfire, a lonely figure eyeing a stretch of the highway.

In the kitchen, my mother rattled plates and pots to remind us what life entailed. Water ran, cupboard doors slammed. We could hear the pill drawer open and lids pop as my mother began to sort Uncle Lud's next doses. Uncle Lud's chest calmed, and he inclined his flushed head toward mine, taking stock of me, including the unnamed absence I felt and the bandaged finger even my mother had missed. A new hurt crossed Uncle Lud's face.