One Door Away From Heaven (11 page)

After he relieves himself, as he’s washing his hands with enough liquid soap to fill the sink with glittering foamy masses of suds, he looks in the streaked mirror and sees a boy who will be all right, given enough time, a boy who will find his way and come to terms with his losses, a boy who will not only live but also flourish.

He decides to continue being Curtis Hammond. Thus far no one has connected the name to the murdered family in Colorado. And since he’s grown comfortable with this identity, why change?

He dries his hands thoroughly on paper towels, but then holds them under one of the hot-air blowers, just for the kick of tricking the machine.

Refreshed, hurrying along the corridor between the restrooms and the restaurant, Curtis comes to a sudden halt when he spots two men standing out there at the lunch counter, talking to Burt Hooper. They are tall, made taller by their Stetsons. Both wear their blue jeans tucked into their cowboy boots.

Donella appears to be arguing with Mr. Hooper, probably trying to get him to shut his trap, but poor Mr. Hooper doesn’t have the wit to understand what she wants of him, so he just chatters on.

When the trucker points toward the restrooms, the cowboys look up and see Curtis a little past the midpoint of the hall. They stare at him, and he returns their stares.

Maybe they aren’t sure if he’s his mother’s son or some other woman’s child. Maybe he could fake them out, pass for an ordinary baseball-loving, school-hating ten-year-old boy whose interests are limited entirely to down-to-earth stuff like TV wrestling, video games, dinosaurs, and serial-flushing public toilets.

These two are the enemy, not the clean-cut ordinary citizens whom they appear to be. No doubt about it. They radiate the telltale intensity: in their stance, in their demeanor. In their eyes.

They will see through him, perhaps not immediately, but soon, and if they get their hands on him, he will be dead for sure.

As one, the two cowboys start toward Curtis.

Chapter 13

“INTERGALACTIC SPACECRAFT, alien abductions, an extraterrestrial base hidden on the dark side of the moon, supersecret human and alien crossbreeding programs, saucer-eyed gray aliens who can walk through walls and levitate and play concert-quality clarinet with their butts—Preston Maddoc believes in all of it, and more,” Leilani reported.

The power failed. They were conversing by candlelight, but the clock on the oven blinked off, and at the far end of the adjacent living room, a ginger-jar lamp with a rose damask shade went dark with a pink wink. The aged refrigerator choked like a terminal patient on life-support machinery, denied a desperately needed mechanical respirator; the compressor motor rattled and expired.

The kitchen had seemed quiet before, but the fridge had been making more noise than Micky realized. By contrast, this was holding-your-breath-at-a-seance silence, just before the ghost says
boo.

Micky found herself staring up expectantly at the ceiling, and she realized that the timing of the power outage, just as Leilani was talking about UFOs, had given her the crazy notion that they had suffered a blackout not because of California’s ongoing crisis, but because a pulsing, whirling disc craft from a far nebula was hovering over Geneva’s motor home, casting a power pall just like alien ships always did in the movies. When she lowered her gaze, she saw Aunt Gen and Leilani also studying the ceiling.

In this deep quiet, Micky gradually became aware of the whispery sputter-sizzle of burning candle wicks, a sound as faint as the memory of a long-ago serpent’s hiss.

Gen sighed. “Rolling blackout. Third World inconvenience with the warm regards of the governor. Not supposed to have them at night, only in high-demand hours. Maybe it’s just an
ordinary
screw-up.”

“I can live without power as long as I’ve got pie,” Leilani said, but she still hadn’t forked up a mouthful of her second piece.

“So Dr. Doom is a UFO nut,” Micky pressed.

“He’s a broad-spectrum, three-hundred-sixty-degree, inside-out, all-the-way-around, perfect, true, and
complete
nut. UFOs are only one of his interests. But since marrying old Sinsemilla, he’s pretty much dedicated his life to the saucer circuit. He has this honking big motor home, and we travel all around the country, to the sites of famous close encounters, from Roswell, New Mexico, to Phlegm Falls, Iowa, wherever the aliens are supposed to have been in the past, we go hoping they’ll show up again. And when there’s a new sighting or a new abduction story, we haul ass for the place, wherever it is, so maybe we’ll get there while the action is still hot. The only reason we’re renting next door for a week is because the motor home is in the shop for an overhaul, and Dr. Doom won’t stay in a hotel or motel because he thinks they’re all just breeding grounds for legionnaires’ disease and that gross flesh-eating bacteria, whatever it’s called.”

“You mean you’ll be gone in a week?” Aunt Gen asked. A web of worry strung spokes and spirals at the corners of her eyes.

“More like a few days,” Leilani said. “We just spent July in Roswell, actually, because it was July 1947 when an alien starship pilot, evidently drunk or asleep at the joystick, crashed his saucer into the desert. Dr. Doom thinks ETs are more likely to visit a site at the same time of year they visited it before, I guess sort of the way college students go to Fort Lauderdale every spring break. And isn’t it amazing, really, how often these weird little gray guys are supposed to have totaled one of their gazillion-dollar, galaxy-crossing SUVs? If they ever decide to conquer Earth, I don’t think we’ve got much to worry about. What we’re dealing with here is Darth Vader with lots of Larry, Curly, and Moe blood in his veins.”

Micky had figured to let the girl wind down, but the longer that Leilani circled the subject of her brother’s fate, the more tightly wound she seemed to become. “Okay, what’s the point? What’s all this UFO stuff have to do with Lukipela?”

After a hesitation, Leilani said, “Dr. Doom says he’s had this vision that we’ll both be healed by extraterrestrials.”

“Healed?” Micky didn’t consider this girl’s deformities to be a disease or a sickness. In fact, Leilani’s self-assurance, her wit, and her indomitable spirit made it hard to think of her as disabled, even now when her left hand rested on the table, obviously misshapen in the otherwise forgiving glow of the three candles.

“Luki was born with a wickedly malformed pelvis, Tinkertoy hip joints built with monkey logic, a right femur shorter than the left, and some bone fusion in his right foot. Sinsemilla has this theory that hallucinogens during pregnancy give the baby psychic powers.”

The night heat couldn’t bake the chill from Micky’s bones. In memory she saw the fury-tightened face of the woman in the frilly slip, and moonlight painting points on the teeth in her snarl.

“What do you think of that theory, Mrs. D?” Leilani asked with little of her usual humor, but with a quiet note of long-throttled anger in her voice.

“Sucky,” Aunt Gen said.

Leilani smiled wanly. “Sucky. We’re still waiting for the day when I’m able to foretell next week’s winning lottery numbers, start fires with the power of my mind, and teleport to Paris for lunch.”

Micky said, “Some of your brother’s problems…It sounds like surgery could have helped at least a little.”

“Oh, Mother’s far too terribly smart to put any faith in Western medicine. She relied on crystal harmonics, chanting, herbal remedies, and a lot of poultices that would give any urine-soaked, puke-covered wino competition for the worst smell outside of a Calcutta sewer.”

Micky had finished her second cup of coffee. She couldn’t recall drinking it. She got up to pour a refill. She felt helpless, and she needed to keep her hands busy, because if her hands weren’t occupied, her anger might overwhelm her. She wanted to lash out at someone on Leilani’s behalf, take a hard satisfying swing, but there was no one here to punch. Yet if she went next door to knock some sense into Sinsemilla, and even if the psychotic moon dancer didn’t kill her, she wouldn’t improve the girl’s situation, only make it worse.

Standing at the counter in the near dark, pouring coffee with the care of a blind woman, Micky said, “So this nutball is driving you and Luki around looking for aliens with healing hands.”

“Healing technology,” Leilani corrected. “An alien species, having mastered interstellar travel and the problem of toileting neatly at faster-than-light speeds, is sure to be able to take the wrinkles out of this body or pop me into a brand-new body identical to this one but with no imperfections. Anyway, that’s the plan we’ve been operating on for about four years now.”

“Leilani, honey, you’re not going back there,” Geneva declared. “We’re not going to let you go back to them. Are we, Micky?”

Perhaps the only good thing about the unextinguishable anger that had charred Micky’s life was that it also burned from her all illusions. She didn’t entertain fantasies derived from the movies or from any other source. Aunt Gen might for a moment see herself as Ingrid Bergman or Doris Day, capable of rescuing an imperiled waif with just a dazzling smile and a righteous speech—and stirring music in the background—but Micky saw clearly the hopelessness of this situation. On the other hand, if only hopelessness was the result, perhaps the burning away of illusions wasn’t so desirable, after all.

Micky sat at the table again. “Where did Lukipela disappear?”

Leilani looked toward the kitchen window but seemed to be gazing at something far away in time and at a considerable distance beyond the California darkness. “Montana. This place in the mountains.”

“How long ago?”

“Nine months. The nineteenth of November. Luki’s birthday was the twentieth. He would have been ten years old. In the vision that the old doom doctor had, the one where he claimed he saw us being healed by ETs—it was supposed to happen before we were ten. Each of us would be made whole, he promised Sinsemilla, before we were ten.”

“‘Strange lights in the sky,’” Micky quoted, “‘pale green levitation beams that suck you right out of your shoes and up into the mother ship.’”

“I didn’t see any of that myself. It’s what I was told happened to Luki.”

“Told?” Aunt Gen asked. “Who told you, dear?”

“My pseudofather. Late that afternoon, he parked the motor home in a roadside lay-by. Not a campground. Not even a real rest stop with bathrooms or a picnic table, or anything. Just this lonely wide area along the shoulder of the road. Forest all around. He said we’d go on to a motor-home park later. First, he wanted to visit this special site, a couple miles away, where some guy named Carver or Carter claimed to’ve been abducted by purple squids from Jupiter or something, three years before. I figured he’d drag us all along, as usual, but once he unhitched the SUV that we tow behind the motor home, he only wanted to take Luki.”

The girl grew silent.

Micky didn’t press for further details. She needed to know what came next, but she didn’t entirely want to hear it.

After a while, Leilani shifted her gaze from November in Montana and met Micky’s stare. “I knew then what was happening. I tried to go along with them, but he…Preston wouldn’t let me. And Sinsemilla…she held me back.” A ghost drifted along the corridors of the girl’s memory, a small spirit with Tinkertoy hips and one leg shorter than the other, and Micky could almost see the shape of this apparition haunting those blue eyes. “I remember Lukipela walking to the SUV, clomping along with his one built-up shoe, his leg stiff, rolling his hips in that funny way he did. And then…as they drove away…Luki looked back at me. His face was blurred a little because the window was dirty. I think he waved.”

Chapter 14

PERCHED HAPPILY ON HIS STOOL at the lunch counter, poor dumb Burt Hooper knows that he himself is a truck driver and knows that he himself is eating chicken and waffles, but he doesn’t know that he himself is a total Forrest Gump, good-hearted but a Gump nonetheless. Well-meaning, Mr. Hooper points toward the hallway that leads to the restrooms.

As one, the two cowboys start toward Curtis.

Donella calls to them, but even she, in her majestic immensity, can’t restrain them by word alone.

To Curtis’s right lies a pivot-hinged door with an inset oval of glass. The porthole is too high to provide a view to him, so he pushes through the door without knowing what lies beyond.

He’s in a large commercial kitchen with a white-ceramic-tile floor. Banks of large ovens, cooktops, refrigerators, sinks, and preparation tables, all stainless steel, gleaming and lustrous, provide him with a maze of work aisles along which a stooping-crouching-scuttling boy might be able to escape.

Not every delicacy is prepared by the two short-order cooks out front. The kitchen staff is large and busy. No one appears interested in Curtis when he enters.

Oven to oven, past a ten-foot-long cooktop, past an array of deep fryers full of roiling hot oil, around the end of a long prep table, Curtis hurries into a narrow work aisle with loosely thatched rubber mats on the floor. He stays low, hoping to get out of sight before the two cowboys arrive. He avoids collisions with the staff, squeezing around them, dodging left, right, but they’re no longer disinterested in him.

“Hey, kid.”

“What’re you doin’ here, boy?”

“¡Tener cuidado, muchacho!”

“Watch it, watch it!”

“¡Loco mocoso!”

He’s just entering the next aisle, one layer deeper into the huge kitchen, when he hears the two cowboys arrive. There’s no mistaking their entrance for anything else. With the arrogance and the blood hunger of Gestapos, they
slam
through the swinging door, their boot heels clopping hard against the tile floor.

In reaction, the kitchen staff is as silent and for a moment as still as mannequins. No one demands to know who these brash intruders are, or makes a clatter of pots that might draw attention, probably because everyone fears that these two are federal immigration agents, rousting illegal aliens—of which there’s no doubt one present—and that they will hassle even properly documented workers if they’re in a belligerent mood.

By their very presence, however, the cowboys have won allies for Curtis. As the crouching boy progresses by hitch and twitch through the kitchen, cooks and bakers and salad-makers and dishwashers ease out of his way, facilitate his passage, use their bodies to further block the cowboys’ view of him, and direct him with subtle gestures toward what he assumes will be a rear exit.

He’s scared, mouth suddenly bitter with the taste of what might be his mortality, lungs cinched tight enough to make each breath a labor, heart rapping with woodpecker frenzy—and yet he is acutely aware of the delicious aromas of roasting chicken, baking ham, frying potatoes. Fear doesn’t entirely trump hunger, and though the flood of saliva is bitter, it fails to diminish his appetite.

Noises in his wake suggest that the killers are trying to track him. Contentious voices quickly arise as the kitchen staff, realizing that these two cowboys have no law-enforcement credentials, object to their intrusion.

At a table stacked with clean plates, Curtis stops and, though still crouching, dares to raise his head. He peers between two towers of dishes, and sees one of his pursuers about fifteen feet away.

The hunter has a handsome, potentially genial face. If he were to smile instead of glower, put on a mask of kindness, the kitchen staff might warm at once to him and point him toward his quarry.

But although Curtis is sometimes fooled by appearances, he’s perceptive enough to see that this is a man whose face gives out at every pore the homicidal toxins in which his brain now marinates. Pressing sweet peach juice from a handful of dried pits would be easier than squeezing one drop of pity from this hunter’s heart, and mercy would more likely be wrung from any stone.

As he moves along the salad-prep aisle, the grim cowboy looks left and right, shoving aside the men and women in his way as if they are mere furniture. His partner isn’t immediately behind him, and might be approaching by a different route.

The restaurant employees are protesting less, maybe because the hunters’ steely indifference to every objection and their cold-eyed persistence is too intimidating to resist. You see guys like this on the TV news, shooting up shopping centers or office buildings because of a wife’s decision to file for divorce, because they’ve lost a job, or just because. Yet with discreet nods and gestures, the workers continue to shepherd Curtis toward escape.

In a half squat, shambling side to side and using his swinging arms for counterbalance, just as a frightened monkey might scamper, the boy turns a corner at a long butcher block and encounters a cook who’s gazing out across the enormous kitchen, wide-eyed, watching the hunters. The white-uniformed cook might be an angel, considering that he holds a plastic-wrapped bundle of hot dogs, which he has just taken from the open cooler behind him.

A crash rocks the room, rattles cookware. Someone slamming through the swinging door from the restroom hallway. Following the cowboys. More hard and hurried footfalls on the tile floor. Voices. Then shouting. “FBI! FBI! Freeze, freeze, freeze!”

Curtis clutches at the hot dogs. Startled, the man lets go of the bundle. Having claimed the meaty treasure, Curtis scuttles past the cook, bound for freedom and a makeshift dinner, surprised by the arrival of the FBI, but not in the least heartened by this unexpected development.

When it rains, it pours,
his mother had said. She never claimed that the thought was original with her. Universal truths often find expression in universal cliches.
When it rains, it pours, and when it pours, the river runs wild, and suddenly we’re caught up in a flood. But when we’re in a flood, we don’t panic, do we, baby boy?
And he always knew the answer to that one:
No, we never panic.
And she would say,
Why don’t we panic in the flood?
And he would say,
Because we’re too busy swimming!

Behind him, elsewhere in the kitchen, dishes clatter-shatter on the floor, and a soup pot or somesuch bounces
bong-bong-bong
across the tiles. Spoons or forks, or butter knives, spill in quantity, ringing off stainless-steel and ceramic surfaces with a sound like the bells that might announce a demonic holiday.

Then gunfire.