One Door Away From Heaven (30 page)

Chapter 36

ACROSS THE BADLANDS, through the night, as the clouds move east and the sky purifies, the boy drives westward to the dog’s direction.

Gradually the desert withers away. A grassy prairie grows under the rolling tires.

Dawn comes pink and turquoise, painting a sky now as clear as distilled water. A hawk, gliding on high thermals, seems to float like the mere reflection of a bird on the surface of a still pool.

The engine dies for lack of fuel, requiring them to proceed afoot in more fertile land than any they have seen since Colorado. By the time the Mountaineer coughs out the fumes from its dry tank, they’re finished with the prairie, as well. They are now in a shallow valley where cottonwood and other trees shade a swift-slipping stream and where green meadows roll away from the banks of the watercourse.

Throughout the long drive, no one shot at them, and no more charred cadavers tumbled out of the night. Mile after mile, the only lights in the sky were stars, and at dawn, the great constellations conceded the stage to the one and nearest star that warms this world.

Now, when Curtis gets out of the SUV, the only sounds in the morning are the muted pings and ticks of the cooling engine.

Old Yeller is exhausted, as she ought to be, good scout and stalwart navigator. She totters to the edge of the brook and laps noisily at the cool clear current.

Kneeling upstream of the dog, Curtis slakes his thirst, too.

He sees no fish, but he’s sure that the brook must contain them.

If he were Huckleberry Finn, he’d know how to catch breakfast. Of course, if he were a bear, he’d catch even more fish than Huck.

He can’t be Huck because Huck is just a fictional character, and he can’t be a bear because he’s Curtis Hammond. Even if there were a bear around here somewhere, to provide him with a detailed example of bear structure and bear behavior, he wouldn’t dare get naked and try to be a bear and wade into the stream after fish, because later when he was Curtis once more and put on his clothes, he’d be starting all over in this new identity that remains his best hope of survival, and therefore he would be easier to spot if the worse scalawags showed up again, searching for him with their tracking scopes.

“Maybe I
am
stupid,” he tells the dog. “Maybe Gabby was right. He sure seemed smart. He knew
everything
about the government, and he got us out of that trouble. Maybe he was right about me, too.”

The dog thinks otherwise. With typical doggy devotion, she grins and wags her tail.

“Good pup. But I promised to take care of you, and now here we are without food.”

Relying on his survival training, the boy could find wild tubers and legumes and fungi to sustain him. The dog won’t want to eat those things, however, and won’t be properly nourished by them.

Old Yeller calls his attention to the Mountaineer by trotting to it and standing at the closed passenger’s-side door.

When Curtis opens the SUV for the dog, she springs onto the seat and paws at the closed glove box.

Curtis opens the box and discovers that Gabby travels prepared for the munchies. Three packets of snack crackers, a package of beef jerky, turkey jerky, two bags of peanuts, and a candy bar.

The box also contains the motor-vehicle registration for the SUV, which reveals that the owner’s name is Cliff Mooney. Obviously, if he’s related to the immortal Gabby Hayes, it must be through his mother’s side of the family. Curtis memorizes Cliff’s address, which he will one day need in order to properly compensate the man.

With the glove-box vittles, boy and dog settle by the silvery stream, under the wide-spreading branches of a seventy-foot
Populus candican,
also known as the balm-of-Gilead or the Ontario poplar.

Curtis knows more than movies: He knows local botany as well as local animal biology. He knows local physics, also complete physics, chemistry, higher mathematics, twenty-five local languages, and how to make a delicious apple pandowdy, among many other things.

Regardless of how much you know, however, you can never know everything. Curtis is aware of the limitations of his knowledge and of the abyssal ignorance that lies beneath what he knows.

Sitting with his back against the trunk of the tree, he tears the beef jerky into pieces and feeds it to the dog, morsel by morsel.

Anyway, knowledge isn’t wisdom, and we aren’t here just to stuff ourselves with facts and figures. We are given this life so we might earn the next; the gift is a chance to grow in spirit, and knowledge is one of many nutrients that facilitate our growth. Mom’s wisdom.

As the sun climbs higher, it cooks the night dew, and a low mist shimmers just above the meadow, as though the earth breathes out the dreams of the vanished generations buried in its breast.

The dog watches the mist with such interest that she exhibits no impatience when Curtis takes a while to strip off the stubborn wrapping from the second jerky. Ears pricked, head cocked, she focuses not on the treat, but on the mystery that is the meadow.

Her species has been granted limited but significant intellect, also emotions and hope. What most separates her from humankind and from other higher life forms isn’t her mental capacity, however, but her innocence. The dog’s self-interest expresses only in matters of survival, never degenerating into the selfishness that is expressed in an infinite variety of ways by those who consider themselves her betters. This innocence carries with it a clarity of perception that allows her to glory in the wonder of creation in even the most humble scene and quiet moment, to be aware of it every minute of every hour, while most human beings pass days or even weeks—and too often whole lives—with their sense of wonder drowned in their sense of self.

Unwrapped jerky, of course, takes precedence over the meadow and the mist. She eats with a sense of wonder, too, with pure delight.

Curtis opens one of the packets of crackers. He allows the dog two of the six little sandwiches with peanut-butter filling. She’s had all she needs now, and he doesn’t want her to be sick.

Eventually, he’ll provide more balanced nutrition for her—but a better diet will have to wait until they are no longer in imminent danger of being gutted, beheaded, shredded, broken, blasted, burned, and worse. Running in desperate fear for your life is pretty much a righteous justification for eating junk food.

Old Yeller takes another drink from the stream, then returns to Curtis and lies with her spine pressed snugly against the length of his left leg. Eating cracker sandwiches, he strokes her side with his left hand—slowly, comfortingly. Soon she is asleep.

Commotion contributes to concealment, and motion is commotion. He would be safer if he remained on the move, and safer still if he reached a populous area and mingled with a great many people.

The dog, however, doesn’t have his stamina. He can’t ask her to exhaust herself from lack of sleep and risk running herself to death.

He finishes the four cracker sandwiches in the first pack, eats all six in the second pack, follows the crackers with the candy bar, and concludes breakfast with a bag of peanuts. Life is good.

As he eats, his thoughts are drawn to Gabby’s abandonment of the Mercury Mountaineer in the middle of the salt flats. The caretaker’s conduct was at best eccentric and at worst psychotic.

Gabby’s personality and behavior have been the most alien that Curtis has encountered on this adventure. Although many things about the cantankerous desert rat puzzle the boy, the explosive exit from the SUV, punctuated by a storm of foul language, and the flight on foot across the fluorescent plain are the most baffling. He can’t quite believe that his well-meant criticism of Gabby’s pronunciation of
cojones
could have caused the old man to hightail it into the barrens in an uncontrolled emotional fit of rage and /or humiliation.

Another possibility teases at the back of Curtis’s mind, but he can’t quite haul it out in the light for inspection. As he’s puzzling over the matter, he’s distracted when the dog begins to dream.

She signals her dreaming with a whimper: not a cry of fear, but a wistful sound. Her forepaws twitch, and from the movement of her hind legs, Curtis infers that she is running in her dream.

He puts his hand on her flank, which rises and falls rapidly with her breathing. He feels her heartbeat: strong and quick.

Unlike the boy for whom he named himself, this Curtis never sleeps. Therefore he never dreams. Curiosity compels him to employ the special boy-dog bond that synchronizes his mind to that of his sister-becoming. Thus he enters the secret world of her dreams.

A puppy among puppies, she suckles at a teat, enraptured by the throb of her mother’s heart, which pulses through the nipple into her greedy lips, and then she submits to her mother’s licking, the great warm tongue, the black nuzzling nose icy with affection…scrambles clumsily over Mother’s furry flank, climbing eagerly as though some mystery lies beyond the curve of her mother’s ribs, an astonishment that she must see, must see…and then fur fades into meadow, cicadas singing, their music shivering in her blood…and now she’s an older dog racing through succulent grass in pursuit of an orange butterfly bright as a fluttering flame, burning mysteriously in the air…from meadow into woods, shadows and the scent of hemlock, the fragrance of decaying leaves and needles, here the butterfly as bright as the sun in a shaft of light but now eclipsed and lost…around her the croaks of woodland toads, as she follows the scent of deer along trails overhung by ferns, unafraid in the deepening shadows because the playful Presence runs with her here, as always elsewhere….

One dream flows swiftly into another, lacking a connective narrative. Joy is the only thread on which these images are strung: joy the thread, and memories like bright beads.

Sitting against the balm-of-Gilead, Curtis shivers, first with exhilaration and delight.

This meadow becomes less real to him than the fields in the dog’s mind, the chuckle of this brook less convincing than the croak of toads in her clear and vivid dreams.

Spates of shivers build into continuous trembling as Curtis more clearly experiences the dog’s profound joy. This isn’t simply the joy of running, of springing agilely from log to mossy rock; this isn’t just the joy of freedom or of being fully
alive,
but the piercing joy that comes with the awareness of that holy, playful Presence.

Running with her in the dreams, Curtis seeks a glimpse of their constant companion, expecting suddenly to see an awesome countenance looking out from the layered fronds of the ferns or gazing down from the cathedral trees. Then the dog’s ultimate wisdom, arising from her perfect innocence, is shared with Curtis, and he receives the truth that is simultaneously a revelation and a mystery, both a euphoric exaltation and a profound humbling. The boy recognizes the Presence everywhere around him, not confined to one bosk of ferns or one pool of shadows, but resonant in all things. He feels what otherwise he has only known through faith and common sense,
feels
for one sweet devastating moment what only the innocent can feel: the exquisite
rightness
of creation from shore to shore across the sea of stars, a clear ringing in the heart that chases out all fears and every anger, a sense of belonging, purpose, hope, an awareness of being loved.

Mere joy gives way to rapture, and the boy’s awe grows deeper, an awe lacking any quality of terror, but so filled with wonder and with liberating humility that his trembling swells into shakes that seem to clang his heart against the bell of his ribs. At the moment when rapture becomes peals of bliss, his shaking wakes the dog.

The dream ends and with it the connection to eternity, the joy-inducing nearness of the playful Presence. A sense of loss shudders through Curtis.

In her innocence, waking or sleeping, the dog lives always with the awareness of her Maker’s presence. But when she’s awake, Curtis’s psychic bond with her isn’t as profound as when she sleeps, and now he cannot share her special awareness as he did in her dreams.

The iridescent blues of summer sky shimmer down, becoming golden currents as they descend, greening in meadow grass, sparkling silver in the purling brook—as though the day takes inspiration from one of those 1940s jukeboxes that phases ceaselessly through a custom rainbow, silently waiting for the next nickel to be dropped.

Nature never seemed this vivid before; wherever he looks, the day is electrified, radiant, shocking in its beauty and complexity.

He wipes his face repeatedly, and each time that he lowers his hands, the dog licks his fingers, partly in consolation, partly with affection, but also because she likes the taste of his salty tears.

The boy is left with a memory of transcendence, but not with the
feeling
of it, which is the core of the experience—yet he doesn’t mourn the loss. Indeed, life would be unlivable if at every moment he felt the full intimacy of his spiritual bond with his Maker.

The dog was born in that state of grace. She is accustomed to it, and she is comfortable with her awareness because her innocence leaves her unfettered by self-consciousness.

For Curtis, as for humankind, such spiritual intensity must be reserved for a life beyond this one, or for many lives beyond, when deep peace has been earned, when innocence has been recaptured.

When he can stand, he stands. When he can move, he leaves behind the shade of the tree.

His cheeks are stiff with dried tears. He wipes his face on his shirt sleeves and takes a deep breath filtered by the cotton cloth, relishing the faint lemony fragrance of the fabric softener used in Mrs. Hammond’s laundry and the patina of scents laid down by hundreds of miles of experience since Colorado.

The apex of the sky lies east of the sun, for noon has come and gone while they have been at rest under the tree.

Refreshed, Old Yeller ambles along the stream bank, sniffing yellow and pink wildflowers that nod their bright heavy heads as if conferring on a matter of importance to flowers everywhere.