One Door Away From Heaven (7 page)

Staring at the partially crushed can in her small fist, avoiding eye contact, the girl said, “Well, I’ll admit it’s not as amusing as a good dumb-blonde joke, which I enjoy even though I’m a blonde myself, and it isn’t a fraction as hilarious as a highly convincing puddle of plastic vomit, and there’s no chance whatsoever I’d be making light of the subject if I were actually being molested.” She opened the cabinet door under the sink and tossed the can into the trash receptacle. “But the fact is that Dr. Doom would never touch me even if he were
that
kind of pervert, because he pities me the way you would pity a truck-smashed dog all mangled but still alive on the highway, and he finds my deformities so disgusting that if he dared to kiss me on the cheek, he’d probably puke up his guts.”

In spite of the girl’s jocular tone, her words were wasps, and the truth in them appeared to sting her, sharp as venom.

Sympathy cinched Micky’s heart, but for a moment she was unable to think of something to say that wouldn’t be the
wrong
thing.

Even more loquacious than usual, talking faster, as though the briefest interruption in the flow of words might dam the stream forever, leaving her parched and mute and defenseless, Leilani filled the narrow silence left by Micky’s hesitation: “As long back as I can remember, old Preston has touched me only twice, and I don’t mean dirty-old-man-going-to-jail touching. Just ordinary touching. Both times, so much blood drained out of the poor dear’s face, he looked like one of the walking dead—though I’ve got to admit he smelled better than your average corpse.”

“Stop,” Micky said, dismayed to hear the word come out with a harsh edge. Then more softly: “Just stop.”

Leilani looked up at last, her lovely face unreadable, as free of all emotional tension as the countenance of the most serene bronze Buddha.

Perhaps the girl mistakenly believed that every secret of her soul was written on her features, or perhaps she saw more in Micky’s face than she cared to see. She switched off the light above the sink, returning them to the silken gloom and the suety glow of the candle flames.

“Are you never serious?” Micky asked. “Are you always making with the wisecracks, the patter?”

“I’m
always
serious, but I’m always laughing inside, too.”

“Laughing at what?”

“Haven’t you ever stopped and looked around, Michelina Bellsong? Life. It’s one long comedy.”

They stood but three feet apart, face-to-face, and in spite of Micky’s compassionate intentions, a peculiar quality of confrontation had crept into their exchange.

“I don’t get your attitude.”

“Oh, Micky B, you get it, all right. You’re a smartie just like me. There’s always too much going on in your head, just like in mine. You sort of hide it, but I can see.”

“You know what I think?” Micky asked.

“I know what you think and
why.
You think Dr. Doom diddles little girls, because that’s what experience has taught you to think. I feel bad about that, Micky B, about whatever you went through.”

Word by word, the girl quieted almost to a whisper, yet her soft voice had the power to hammer open a door in Micky’s heart, a door that had for a long time been kept locked, barred, and bolted. Beyond lay feelings tumultuous and unresolved, emotions so powerful that the mere recognition of them, after long denial, knocked the breath out of her.

“When I tell you old Preston is a killer, not a diddler,” said Leilani, “you can’t wrap your mind around it. I know why you can’t, too, and that’s all right.”

Slam the door. Throw shut the locks, the bars, the bolts. Before the girl could say more, Micky turned away from the threshold of those unwanted memories, found her breath and voice: “That’s not what I was going to say. What I think is you’re
afraid
to stop laughing—”

“Scared shitless,” Leilani agreed.

Unprepared for the girl’s admission, Micky stumbled a few words further. “—because you…because if…”

“I know all the becauses. No need to list them.”

Sometime during the two days she’d known Leilani, Micky arrived, as though by whirlwind, in a strange territory. She’d been journeying through a land of mirrors that initially appeared to be as baffling and as unreal as a funhouse, and yet repeatedly she had encountered reflections of herself so excruciatingly precise in their details and of such explicit depth that she turned away from them in revulsion or in anger, or in fear. The clear-eyed, steel-supported girl, larky and lurching, seemed at first to be a fabulist whose flamboyant fantasies rivaled Dorothy’s dreams of Oz; however, Micky could get no glimpse of yellow bricks on this road, and here, now, in the lingering sour scent of warm beer, in this small kitchen where only a trinity of candle flames held back the insistent sinuous shadows, with the sudden sound of a toilet flushing elsewhere in the trailer, she was stricken by the terrible perception that under Leilani’s mismatched feet had never been anything other than the rough track of reality.

As though privy to Micky’s thoughts, the girl said, “Everything I’ve ever told you is the truth.”

Outside: a shriek.

Micky looked to the open window, where the last murky glow of the drowning twilight radiated weak purple beams through black tides of incoming night.

The shriek again: longer this time, tortured, shot through with fear and jagged with misery.

“Old Sinsemilla,” said Leilani.

Chapter 8

LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after the close call in Colorado, with the house fire and the hideous screams still vivid in memory, the motherless boy relaxes behind the steering wheel of a new Ford Explorer, while the harlequin dog sits erect beside him in the passenger’s seat, listening to a radio program of classic Western tunes—at the moment, “Ghost Riders in the Sky”—as they sail through the Utah night, four feet above the highway.

Sometimes, from the side windows, depending on the encroaching landscape, they are able to see the starry sky, low near the horizon, but nothing of the greater vault above, where ghost riders would be likely to gallop. The windshield provides a view only of another—and unoccupied—Explorer ahead, plus the underside of the vehicles on the upper platform of this double-deck automobile carrier.

In the late afternoon, they had boarded the auto transport in the immense parking lot of a busy truck stop near Provo, while the driver lingered over a slice of pie in the diner. The door of one of the Explorers opened for the boy, and he quickly slipped inside.

The dog had continued to be an instinctive conspirator, huddling quietly with his master, below the windows, until the pie-powered trucker returned and they ventured out upon the road again. Even then, in daylight, they had slouched low, to avoid being seen by passing motorists who might signal the driver about his stowaways.

With some of the money taken from the Hammond farmhouse, the famished boy had purchased two cheeseburgers at the truck stop. Soon after the truck began to roll, he’d eaten one sandwich and fed the other, in pieces, to the mutt.

He had been less generous with the small bag of potato chips. They were crisp and so delicious that he groaned with pleasure while eating them.

This apparently had been an exotic treat to the dog, as well. When first given a chip, he turned the morsel on his tongue, as though puzzled by the texture or the taste, warily tested the edibility of the offering, then crunched the salty delicacy with exaggerated movements of his jaws. The hound likewise had savored each of three additional tidbits that his young master was conned into sharing, instead of wolfing them down.

The boy had drunk bottled water from the container, but this had proved more difficult for the dog, resulting in splashed upholstery and wet fur. In the console between the seats were molded-plastic cupholders, and when the boy filled one of these with water, his companion lapped it up efficiently.

Since decamping from the Colorado mountains, they had journeyed wherever a series of convenient rides had taken them.

For now, they travel without a destination, vagabonds but not carefree.

The killers are exceptionally well trained in stalking, using both their natural skills and electronic support, so resourceful and cunning that they are likely to track down their quarry no matter how successful the boy might be at quickly putting miles between himself and them. Although distance won’t foil his enemies, time is his ally. The longer he eludes that savage crew, the fainter his trail becomes—or at least this is what he believes. Every hour of survival will bring him closer to ultimate freedom, and each new sunrise will allow a slight diminishment of his fear.

Now, in the Utah night, he sits boldly in the Explorer and sings along with the catchy music on the radio, having pretty much learned the repeating chorus and also each verse as he first heard it. Ghost riders in the sky. Can there be such things?

Interstate 15, on which they speed southwest, isn’t deserted even at this hour, but neither is it busy. Beyond the wide median strip, traffic races northeast toward Salt Lake City, with what seems like angry energy, as knights might thunder toward a joust, lances of light piercing the high-desert darkness. In these nearer southbound lanes, cars overtake the auto transport and, from time to time, large trucks pass, as well.

The digital readout on the radio, powered by the car’s battery, emits a glow, but the faint radiance is insufficient to illuminate the boy or to draw the attention of any motorist rocketing by at seventy or eighty miles per hour. He’s not concerned about being seen, only about losing the comforting music when the battery eventually dies.

Cozy in the dark SUV, in the embracing scent of new leather and the comforting smell of the damp but drying dog, he isn’t much interested in those passing travelers. He’s peripherally aware of them only because of their roaring engines and their wind wakes, which buffet the transport.

“Ghost Riders in the Sky” is followed by “Cool Water,” a song about a thirst-plagued cowboy and his horse as they cross burning desert sands. After “Cool Water” comes a spate of advertisements, nothing to sing along with.

When the boy looks out the window in the driver’s door, he sees a familiar vehicle streaking past, faster than ever it had gone when he and the dog had ridden in the back of it among horse blankets and saddles. The white cab features a spotlight rack on the roof. Black canvas walls enclose the cargo bed. This appears to be the truck that had been parked along the lonely county road near the Hammond place, less than twenty-four hours ago.

Of course, that vehicle hadn’t been unique. Hundreds like it must be in use on ranches across the West.

Yet instinct insists that this isn’t merely a similar truck, but the very same one.

He and the dog had abandoned that wheeled sanctuary shortly after dawn, west of Grand Junction, when the driver and his associate stopped to refuel and grab breakfast.

This auto carrier is their third rolling refuge since dawn, three rides during a day in which they have ricocheted across Utah with the unpredictability of a pinball. After all this time and considering the haphazard nature of their journey, the likelihood of a chance encounter with the saddlery-laden truck is small, though it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.

A coincidence, however, is frequently a glimpse of a pattern otherwise hidden. His heart tells him indisputably what his mind resists: This is no random event, but part of the elaborate design in a tapestry, and at the center of the design is he himself, caught and murdered.

The brow of the cab gleams as white as skull bone. One loose corner of black canvas flaps like the Reaper’s robe. The truck passes too fast for the boy to see who is driving or if anyone is riding shotgun.

Supposing he had glimpsed two men wearing cowboy hats, he still couldn’t have been sure that they were the same people who had driven him out of the mountains and west through Grand Junction. He has never seen their faces clearly.

Even if he could have identified them, they might no longer be innocent horsemen transporting ornate saddles to a rodeo or a show arena. They might have become part of the net that is closing around him, straining the dry sea of the desert for the sole survivor of the massacre in Colorado.

Now they are gone into the night, either unaware that they have passed within feet of him—or alert to his presence and planning to capture him at a roadblock ahead.

The dog curls on the passenger’s seat and lies with his chin on the console, eyes glimmering with the reflected light of the radio readout.

Stroking the mutt’s head, rubbing behind one of the floppy ears and then behind the other, the frightened boy takes comfort from the silken coat and the warmth of his friend, successfully repressing a fit of the shivers, though unable entirely to banish an inner chill.

He is the most-wanted fugitive in the fabled West, surely the most desperately sought runaway in the entire country, from sea to shining sea. A mighty power is set hard against him, and ruthless hunters swarm the night.

A melodic voice arises from the radio, recounting the story of a lonesome cowpoke and his girlfriend in faraway Texas, but the boy is no longer in the mood to sing along.

Chapter 9

BANSHEES, SHRIKES TEARING at their impaled prey, coyote packs in the heat of the hunt, werewolves in the misery of the moon could not have produced more chilling cries than those that caused Leilani to say, “Old Sinsemilla,” and that drew Micky to the open back door of the trailer.

To the door and through it, down three concrete-block steps, onto the lawn in the last magenta murk of twilight, Micky proceeded with caution. Her wariness didn’t halt her altogether, because she was certain that someone in terrible pain needed immediate help.

In the yard next door, beyond the sagging picket fence, a white-robed figure thrashed in the gloaming, as though ablaze and frantic to douse the flames. Not a single tongue of fire could be seen.

Micky crazily thought of killer bees, which might also have caused the shrieking figure to perform these frenzied gyrations. With the sun down, however, this was not an hour for bees, not even though the baked earth still radiated stored heat. Besides, the air wasn’t vibrating with the hum of an angry swarm.

Micky glanced back at the trailer, where Leilani stood in the open doorway, silhouetted against faint candleglow.

“I haven’t had dessert yet,” the girl said, and she retreated out of sight.

The apparition in the dark yard next door stopped squealing, but in a silence as disconcerting as the cries had been, it continued to turn, to writhe, to flail at the air. Its diaphanous white robe billowed and whirled as though this were a manic ghost that had no patience for the eerie but tedious pace of a traditional haunting.

When she reached the swagging fence, Micky could see that the tormented spirit was of this earth, not visiting from Beyond. Pale and willowy, the woman spun and swooned and jerked erect and spun again, barefoot in the crisp dead grass.

She didn’t seem to be in physical pain, after all. She might have been working off excess energy in a frenetic freestyle dance, but she might just as likely have been suffering some type of spasmodic fit.

She wore a silk or nainsook full-length slip with elaborate embroidery and ribbon lace on the wide shoulder straps and bodice, as well as on the deep flounce that hemmed the skirt. The garment appeared not merely old-fashioned but antique, not feminine in a liberated contemporary let’s have-hot-sex style, but feminine in a frilly post-Victorian sense, and Micky imagined that it had been packed away in someone’s attic trunk for decades.

Exhaling explosively, inhaling in great ragged gasps, the woman flung herself toward exhaustion, whether by fit or fandango.

“Are you all right?” Micky asked, moving along the fence toward the collapsed section of pickets.

Apparently neither as a reply nor as an expression of physical pain, the dancing woman let out a pathetic whimper, the fearful sound that a miserable dog might make in a cage at the animal pound.

The fallen fence pales clicked and rattled under Micky’s feet as she entered the adjoining property.

Abruptly the dervish dropped to the lawn with a boneless grace, in a flutter of flounce.

Micky hurried to her, knelt at her side. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

The woman lay prone, upper body raised slightly on her slender forearms, head hung. Her face was an inch or two from the ground and hidden by glossy cascades of hair that appeared to be white in the crosslight of the moon and the fading purple dusk, but that probably matched Leilani’s shade of blond. Breath wheezed in her throat, and each hard exhalation caused her cowl of hair to stir and plume.

After a hesitation, Micky put a consoling hand on her shoulder, but Mrs. Maddoc didn’t respond to the touch any more than she had reacted to Micky’s questions. Tremors quaked through her.

Remaining at the stricken woman’s side, Micky looked across the fence and saw Geneva at the back door of the trailer, standing on the top step, watching. Leilani remained inside.

Reliably off-center, Aunt Gen waved gaily, as though the trailer were an ocean liner about to steam out of port on a long holiday.

Micky wasn’t surprised to find herself returning the wave. After a week with Geneva, she’d already absorbed a measure of her aunt’s attitude toward the bad news and the sorrier turns of life that fate delivered. Gen met misfortune not simply with stoic resignation, but with a sort of amused embrace; she refused to dwell on or even to lament adversities, and she remained determined instead to receive them as though they were disguised blessings from which unexpected benefits would arise in time. Part of Micky figured this approach to hardship and calamity worked best if you’d been shot in the head and if you confused sentimental cinema with reality, but another part of her, the newly evolving Micky, found not only solace but also inspiration in this Gen Zen. This evolving Micky returned her aunt’s wave.

Geneva waved again, more exuberantly, but before Micky could become involved in an Abbott and Costello routine involving gestures instead of banter, the fallen woman at her side whimpered pitiably, more than once this time. Her thin cold plaints melted into a moan of abject misery, and the moan quickly dissolved into weeping—not the genteel tears of a melancholy maiden, but wretched racking sobs.

“What’s wrong? What can I do?” Micky worried, although she no longer expected a coherent reply or even any response whatsoever.

At the Maddocs’ rented mobile home, drapery-filtered lamplight glowed dark sour orange, less welcoming than the baleful fire in a menacing jack-o’-lantern. The draperies were shut tight, and no one watched from any window. Beyond the open back door lay a deserted kitchen dimly revealed by the face of an illuminated wall clock.

If Preston Maddoc, alias Dr. Doom, was at home, his disinterest in his wife’s extreme distress couldn’t have been more complete.

Micky squeezed the woman’s shoulder reassuringly. Although she believed it was the fabrication of Leilani’s pyrotechnic imagination, she used the only name that she knew: “Sinsemilla?”

Whip-quick, the woman snapped her head up, blonde tresses lashing the air. Her face, half revealed in the gloom, drew taut with shock; the startled eyes flared so wide that white shone around the full circumference of each iris.

She threw off Micky’s hand and scooted backward in the grass. A last sob clogged her throat, and when she tried to swallow it, the thick cry resurged, although not as a sob anymore, but as a snarl.

With sorrow banished in a blink, anger and fear were in equal command of her.
“You don’t own me!”

“Easy, easy now,” Micky counseled, still on her knees, making placating gestures with her hands.

“
You
can’t control me with a name!”

“I was only trying to—”

Fury fired her rant, which grew hotter by the word: “Witch with a broomstick up your ass, witch bitch, diabolist, hag, flying down out of the moon with my name on your tongue, think you can spellcast me with a shrewd guess of a name, but
that’s
not going to happen, no one’s the boss of me or ever will be, not by magic or money, not with force or doctors or laws or sweet talk, nobody
EVER
the boss of me!”

In response to this wild irrationality, with the potential for violence implicit in this woman’s nuclear-hot anger, Micky realized that only silence and retreat made sense. Rocking knee to knee in the prickly grass, she edged backward.

Evidently inflamed by this movement even though it represented a clear concession, Sinsemilla spun to her feet with such agitation that she seemed to
flail
herself erect: skirt flounce churning around her legs, hair tossing like the deadly locks of an enraged Medusa. In her furious ascension, she stirred up an acrid cloud of dust and a powder of dead grass pulverized by a summer of hammering sun.

Through clenched teeth that squeezed each sibilant into a hiss, she said, “Hag of a witch bitch, sorcerer’s seed, you don’t scare me!”

Having risen from her knees as Sinsemilla whirled upright, Micky sidled toward the fence, reluctant to turn her back on this neighbor from the wrong side of Hell.

A thieving cloud pocketed the silver-coin moon. At the western horizon, as the last livid blister of light drained off the heel of night, Micky glimpsed enough of a resemblance between this crazed woman and Leilani to be convinced against her will that they were mother and daughter.

When brittle wood cracked and she felt a picket underfoot, she knew that she’d found the passage in the fence. She wanted to glance down, afraid the pickets might trip her, but she kept her attention on her unpredictable neighbor.

Sinsemilla seemed to shed her anger as suddenly as she’d grown it. She adjusted the shoulder straps on her full-length slip, and then seized the roomy skirt in both hands and shook it as if casting off bits of dry grass. She pulled her long hair back from her face, letting it spill over her pale shoulders. Arching her spine, rolling her head, spreading her arms, the woman stretched as languorously as a sleeper waking from a delicious dream.

At what she judged to be a safe distance, perhaps ten feet past the fence, Micky stopped to watch Leilani’s mother, half mesmerized by her bizarre performance.

From her back door, Aunt Gen said, “Micky dear, we’re putting dessert on the table, so don’t be long,” and she went inside.

Repenting its larceny, the cloud surrendered the stolen moon, and Sinsemilla raised her slender arms toward the sky as though the lunar light inspired joy. Face tilted to bask in the silvery rays, she turned slowly in place, and then sidestepped in a circle. Soon she began to dance light-footedly, in a graceful swooping manner, as though keeping time to a slow waltz that only she could hear, with her face raised to the moon as if it were an admiring prince who held her in his arms.

Brief trills of laughter escaped Sinsemilla. Not brittle and mad laughter, as Micky might have expected. This was a girlish merriment, sweet and musical, almost shy.

In a minute, the laughter trailed away, and the waltz spun to a conclusion. The woman allowed her invisible partner to escort her to the back-door steps, upon which she sat in a swirl of ruffled embroidery, as a schoolgirl in another age might have been returned to one of the chairs around the dance floor at a cotillion.

Oblivious of Micky, Sinsemilla sat, elbows propped on her knees, chin cupped in the heels of her hands, gazing at the starry sky. She seemed to be a young girl dreamily fantasizing about true romance or filled with wonder as she contemplated the immensity of creation.

Then her fingers fanned across her face. She hung her head. The new round of weeping was subdued, inexpressibly melancholy, so quiet that the lament drifted to Micky as might the voice of a real ghost: the faint sound of a soul trapped in the narrow emptiness between the surface membranes of this world and the next.

Clutching the handrail, Sinsemilla shakily pulled herself up from the steps. She went inside, into the clock light and shadows of her kitchen, and the jack-o’-lantern glow beyond.

Micky scrubbed at her knees with the palms of her hands, rubbing off the prickly blades of dead grass that had stuck to her skin.

The pooled heat of August, like broth in a cannibal’s pot, still cooked a thin perspiration from her, and the calm night had no breath to cool the summer soup.

Although the flesh might simmer, the mind had a thermostat of its own. The chill that shivered through Micky seemed cold enough to freeze droplets of sweat into beads of ice upon her brow.

Leilani is as good as dead.

She rejected that unnerving thought as soon as it pierced her. She, too, had grown up in a wretched family, abandoned by her father, left to the care of a cruel mother incapable of love, abused both psychologically and physically—and yet she had survived. Leilani’s situation was no better but no worse than Micky’s had been, only different. Hardship strengthens those it doesn’t break, and already, at nine, Leilani was clearly unbreakable.

Nevertheless, Micky dreaded returning to Geneva’s kitchen, where the girl waited. If Sinsemilla in all her baroque detail was not a fabrication, then what of the murderous stepfather, Dr. Doom, and his eleven victims?

Yesterday, in this yard, as Micky had broiled on the lounge chair, amused and a little disoriented by her first encounter with the self-proclaimed dangerous mutant, Leilani had said several peculiar things. Now one of them echoed back in memory. The girl had asked if Micky believed in life after death, and when Micky returned the question, the girl’s simple reply had been,
I better.

At the time, the answer seemed odd, although not particularly dark with meaning. In retrospect, those two words carried a heavier load than any of the freight trains that Micky had imagined escaping on when, as she lay sleepless in another time and place, they had rolled past in the night with a rhythmic clatter and a fine mournful whistle.

Here, now, the hot August darkness. The moon. The stars and the mysteries beyond. No getaway train for Leilani, and perhaps none for Micky herself.

Do you believe in life after death?

I better.

Four elderly women, three elderly men, a thirty-year-old mother of two…a six-year-old boy in a wheelchair…

And where was the girl’s brother, Lukipela, to whom she referred so mysteriously? Was he Preston Maddoc’s twelfth victim?

Do you believe in life after death?

I better.

“Dear God,” Micky whispered, “what am I going to do?”