One Door Away From Heaven (43 page)

“Nun’s Lake,” Aunt Gen replied without hesitation. “Leilani said he was up there in Nun’s Lake, Idaho.”

Chapter 49

HULA GIRLS, HULA GIRLS, hips rotating, swished their skirts of polyester grass. Ever smiling, black eyes shining, arms extended in perpetual invitation, they would dance their hip joints to dust if bone were the issue; however, their femurs and acetabulums were made not of bone, but of extremely durable, high-impact plastic.

The word
acetabulum
appealed to Leilani not merely because of its magical resonance, but because it didn’t sound like what it was. You might expect acetabulum to be a substance that old Sinsemilla smoked, sniffed, popped in pill form, shot into her veins with huge veterinary hypodermic needles, baked into brownies and ate by the dozen, or ingested by more exotic means and through orifices best left unmentioned. The acetabulum was instead the rounded concavity in the innominate bone that formed the hip joint in conjunction with the femur, which sounded like a jungle cat but was another bone. Since Leilani had no intention of becoming a medical doctor, this information was largely useless to her. But her head had long ago been filled with useless information, anyway, which she believed helped to keep out more useful but depressing and scary information that would otherwise preoccupy her.

The dinette table, at which she sat reading a paperback fantasy novel, provided a dance floor to three plastic hula girls that ranged between four and six inches in height. They wore similar skirts, but their tube tops were different colors and patterns. Two had modest breasts, but the third was a busty little wahine with the proportions that Leilani intended to acquire by the age of sixteen, through the power of positive thinking. All three were constructed and weighted in such a fashion that even the most subtle road vibrations passing through the motor home were sufficient to keep them gyrating.

Two more hula girls danced on the small table between the two armchairs in the lounge, another three on the table beside the sofabed that faced the chairs. Counter space in the kitchen was at a premium, but ten additional figurines danced there, as well. Still others were performing in the bathroom and bedroom.

Although simple counterweight systems kept many of the dancers moving, others operated on batteries to ensure that when the motor home stopped to refuel or when it dropped anchor for the night, the hula-hula celebration would continue unabated. Sinsemilla believed that these ever-swiveling dolls generated beneficial electromagnetic waves, and that these waves protected their vehicle from collisions, breakdowns, hijackings, and from being sucked into another dimension in an open-highway version of the Bermuda Triangle. She insisted that never fewer than two dancers be in motion in every room at all times.

On the sofabed in the lounge at night, Leilani was occasionally lulled to sleep by the faint rhythmic whisper of hula hips and tiny swirling skirts. But as often as not, she clamped a pillow around her ears to block out the sound and to resist the urge to jam the little dancers into a pot, put the pot on the cooktop, and smelt them down in a dramatic production that she’d already written in her head and had titled
Dangerous Young Mutant Hawaiian Volcano Goddess.

On those not infrequent occasions when the incessant sound of hula dolls in the night irritated Leilani, the seven-foot-diameter face painted on the ceiling of the lounge, over her fold-out bed, sometimes soothed her to sleep. This kindly countenance of the Hawaiian sun god, faintly phosphorescent in the dark, gazed down with a sleepy-eyed, stone-temple smile.

Their motor home, which featured other Hawaiian motifs in its interior design, was a high-end luxury custom coach converted from a Prevost bus. Old Sinsemilla christened it
Makani ’olu’olu
—Hawaiian for “fair wind”—which seemed no more appropriate for a vehicle with a gross weight of over fifty-two thousand pounds than
Fluffy
would have been the right name for an elephant. With slide-out bedroom and galley-lounge extensions, it reliably proved to be the biggest vehicle in any campground, so large that children gaped in awe. Retiree vagabonds of a certain age, already worried about turning radiuses and tricky angles of approach to their campsite hookups, turned as pale as Milk of Magnesia if they were unfortunate enough to be required to slot-park their humbler Winnebagos and Airstreams in this beast’s shadow, and most regarded the leviathan with resentment or paranoid terror.

It sure rode well, however, as stable and solid as a bank vault on wheels. The motion-triggered hula dolls danced steadily, but in pleasantly lazy swivels, never with spasmodic abandon. And while in transit, Leilani could read her novel about evil pigmen from another dimension with no risk of motion sickness.

She was so accustomed to the dolls that they didn’t distract her from her book, and the same could be said of the colorful Hawaiian-shirt fabrics in which the dinette chairs were upholstered. Plenty of distraction was continually provided, however, by old Sinsemilla and Dr. Doom, who occupied the pilot’s and co-pilot’s chairs.

They were up to something. Of course, being
up to something
was the natural condition of these two, as sure as bees were born to make honey and beavers to build dams.

Conspiratorial, they kept their voices low. Since Leilani was the only other person aboard
Fair Wind,
she was inclined to suspect that they were conspiring against
her.

They wouldn’t be scheming up a simple game of find-the-brace or its equivalent. Such mean fun was impromptu by nature, dependent on opportunity and on what chemicals dear Mater had recently ingested. Besides, petty cruelties had no appeal for Dr. Doom, whose interest was excited only by cruelty on an operatic scale.

From time to time, Sinsemilla looked sneakily over her shoulder at Leilani or peeked around the wing of the co-pilot’s chair. Leilani pretended to be unaware of this surreptitious monitoring. Her mother might interpret even fleeting eye contact as an invitation to wreak a little torment.

More than anything else, the giggling unnerved her. Sinsemilla was a frequent giggler, and perhaps seventy or eighty percent of the time, this indicated that she was in an effervescent girls-just-want-to-have-fun frame of mind, but sometimes it served the same purpose as a rattlesnake’s rattle, warning of a strike. Worse, more than once during this long conversation, between whispers and murmurs, Dr. Doom giggled, as well, which was a first; his giggle had the artery-icing effect of Charles Manson merry-eyed and tittering with delight.

They were eastbound on Interstate 15, nearing the Nevada border, deep in the blazing Mojave Desert, when Sinsemilla left the cockpit and joined Leilani at the dinette table.

“What’re you reading, baby?”

“A fantasy thing,” she replied without looking up from the page.

“What’s it about?”

“Evil pigmen.”

“Piggies aren’t evil,” Sinsemilla corrected. “Piggies are sweet, gentle creatures.”

“Well, these aren’t pigs as we know them. These are from another dimension.”

“People are evil, not piggies.”

“Not all people are evil,” Leilani countered in defense of her species, finally looking up from the book. “Mother Teresa wasn’t evil.”

“Evil,” Sinsemilla insisted.

“Haley Joel Osment isn’t evil. He’s cute.”

“The actor kid? Evil. All of us are evil, baby. We’re a cancer on the planet,” Sinsemilla said with a smile that was probably like the one that she had worn when the doctors shot enough megawatts of electricity through her brain to fry bacon on her forehead.

“Anyway, these are pig
men.
Not just pigs.”

“Baby, Lani, trust me. If you combined a piggy and a man, the natural goodness of the piggy would overcome the evil of the man. Pigmen would never be evil. They’d be good.”

“Well, these pigmen are total bastards,” Leilani said, wondering if anyone, anywhere, in the history of the world, had ever engaged in philosophical discussions like those that her mother inspired. As far as she was aware, Plato and Socrates hadn’t conducted a dialogue on the morality and the motives of pigmen from other dimensions. “These particular pigmen,” she said, tapping the book, “would gut you with their tusks as soon as look at you.”

“Tusks? They sound more like boars than piggies.”

“They’re pigs,” Leilani assured her. “Pigmen. Evil, nasty, rude, obnoxious, filthy pigmen.”

“Boarmen,” Sinsemilla said with a serious expression that most people reserved for news of untimely deaths, “would never be evil, either. Piggymen and boarmen would both be good. So would monkeymen, chickenmen, dogmen, or any type of animal-man crossbreed.”

Leilani wished that she could fetch her journal and record this conversation in her invented form of shorthand without making her mother suspicious as to the true nature of the diary. “There aren’t any chickenmen in this story, Mother. This is
literature.
”

“Smart as you are, you should be reading something enlightening, not piggymen books. Maybe you’re old enough to read Brautigan.”

“I’ve already read him.”

Sinsemilla looked surprised. “You have? When?”

“Before birth. You were reading him even back then, over and over again, and I just absorbed it all through the placenta.”

Sinsemilla took this declaration seriously and was delighted. Her expression brightened. “Cool. That’s so cool.” Then a sly look found fox features in her face and brought them to the fore as if she were undergoing a moon-driven transformation. She leaned across the table and whispered,
“You want to know a secret?”

This question alarmed Leilani. The impending revelation surely involved whatever the mother and the pseudofather had been murmuring and whispering about all the way from Santa Ana to San Bernardino, to sun-baked Barstow, to Baker and beyond. Anything that tickled them could not be good news for Leilani.

“I’m making a little piggy
right now,” Sinsemilla whispered.

On some level, perhaps Leilani knew immediately what her mother meant but simply couldn’t bear to contemplate it.

Reading her daughter’s blank expression, Sinsemilla gave up the whisper and spoke slowly, as though Leilani were thickheaded. “I’m making…a little piggy…
right now.
”

Leilani couldn’t keep the revulsion out of her voice. “Oh, God.”

“This time, I’m going to do it right,” Sinsemilla assured her.

“You’re pregnant.”

“I used a home-pregnancy test two days ago. That’s why I bought thingy, my little snaky fella.” She indicated her left hand, where the bite was now covered by a large Band-Aid. “He was my gift to me for being preggers.”

Leilani knew that she was dead already, still breathing but as good as dead, not on her birthday next February, but much sooner. She didn’t know why this should be true, why her mother’s pregnancy meant that she herself was facing an earlier execution date, but she had no doubt that her instinct could be trusted.

“When you were such a baby about poor thingy,” Sinsemilla said, “I thought you brought bad luck. Killing thingy, maybe you jinxed me, and maybe I wasn’t knocked up anymore. But I gave myself another test yesterday and”—she patted her belly—“piggy’s still in the pen.”

Nausea brought a sudden flood of saliva to Leilani’s mouth, and she swallowed hard.

“Your daddy, Preston, he’s wanted this for a long time, but I wasn’t ready till now.”

Leilani looked toward the driver’s seat, toward Preston Maddoc.

“See, baby, I needed time to figure out why you and Luki never developed psychic powers even though I gave you, like, a magic bus full of truly fine psychedelics from my blood to yours while you were in the mommy oven.”

The back of the pull-down sun visor featured a makeup mirror. Even at a distance of sixteen or eighteen feet, Leilani was able to discern Maddoc’s eyes repeatedly shifting focus from the highway to the mirror in which he could see her and Sinsemilla.

“And then it just hit me—I have to stay
natural
! Sure, I was doing peyote, you know, cactus buttons, and I was doing psilocybin, from mushrooms. But I also did some DMT and plenty of LSD, and that shit is
synthetic,
Lani baby, it’s man-made.”

Pain throbbed in Leilani’s deformed hand. She realized that with both hands she was twisting the paperback that she’d been reading.

“Psychic power comes from Gaea, see, from Earth herself, she’s alive, and if you
resonate
with her, baby, she gives you a gift.”

Without realizing what she’d been doing, Leilani had broken the spine of the book, crumpled the cover, and wadded some of the pages. She put the book aside and held her aching left hand in her right.

“But, baby, how can you resonate when you’re being strummed with both the good natural hallucinogens like peyote but also hammered by chem-lab crap like LSD? That’s where I went wrong.”

Maddoc wanted to make a baby with Sinsemilla, knowing full well that throughout pregnancy she’d be heavily consuming hallucinogens, resulting in a high likelihood of yet another infant with severe birth defects.

“Yeah, went way wrong with the synthetic crap. I’m enlightened now. This time, I’m going to use nothing but pot, peyote, psilocybin—all natural, wholesome. And this time, I’m going to get myself a miracle child.”

Dr. Doom wasn’t also Mr. Sentimentality. He didn’t get weepy on anniversaries or while watching sad movies. You couldn’t imagine him playing with children, reading fairy tales to children, relating to children. The desire to have a child with anyone, let alone with this woman under these circumstances, was out of character for him. His motives were as mysterious as his furtive eyes glimpsed in the mirror on the sun visor.

Sinsemilla drew the damaged paperback across the table and began to smooth the rumpled pages as she talked. “So if Gaea smiles on us, we’ll have more than one miracle baby. Two, three, maybe a litter.” She grinned mischievously and winked. “Maybe I’ll just curl up on a blanket in the corner, like a true bitch, with all my little puppies squirming against me, so many tiny hungry mouths competing for just two tits.”

All of her life, Leilani had lived in the cold tides of this deep strange sea called Sinsemilla, struggling against its drowning currents, riding out daily squalls and storms, as though she were a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a floating length of shattered deck plank, grimly aware of dark and murderous shapes circling hungrily in the fathoms under her. During these nine years, as far back as she could remember, she had coped with every surprise and every writhing horror this sea threw at her. Although she hadn’t lost respect for the deadly power of the elemental force called Sinsemilla, although she remained wary and always prepared for hurricanes, her ability to cope had gradually freed her from most of the fear that had plagued her as a younger child. When strangeness is the fundamental substance of your existence, it loses its power to terrorize, and when you tread weirdness like water for nine years, you gain the confidence to face the unexpected, and even the unknown, with equanimity.