One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 10

Eighteen-wheelers loaded with everything from spools of abb to zymometers, reefer semis hauling ice cream or meat, cheese or frozen dinners, flatbeds laden with concrete pipe and construction steel and railroad ties, automobile transports, slat-sided trailers carrying livestock, tankers full of gasoline, chemicals: Scores of mammoth rigs, headlights doused but cab-roof lights and marker lights colorfully aglow, encircle the pump islands in much the way that nibbling stegosaurs and grazing brontosauruses and packs of hunting theropods had eons ago circled too close to the treacherous bogs that swallowed them by the thousands, by the millions. Rumbling-growling-wheezing-panting, each big truck waits for its communion with the nozzle, feeding on two hundred million years of bog distillations.

This is how the motherless boy understands the current theory of bitumen deposits in general and petroleum deposits in particular, as put forth locally in everything from textbooks to the Internet. Yet even though he finds the idea of dinosaurs-to-diesel-fuel silly enough to have first been expounded by Daffy Duck or another Looney Tunes star, he is excited by the spectacle of all these cool trucks congregating at rank upon rank of pumps, in a great dazzle and rumble and fumy reek here in the middle of an otherwise dark, silent, and nearly scent-free desert.

From his hiding place in the Explorer on the lower deck of the car transport, he watches as purposeful men and women busily tend to

their rigs, some of them colorful figures in hand-tooled boots and Stetsons, in studded and embroidered denim jackets, many in T-shirts emblazoned with the names of automotive products, snack foods, beers, and country-and-western bars from Omaha to Santa Fe, to Abilene, to Houston, to Reno, to Denver.

Disinterested in the bustle, not stirred — as the boy is — by the romance of travel and the mystery of exotic places embodied in these superhighway Gypsies, the dog is curled compactly on the passenger’s seat, lightly dozing.

Tanks filled, the transport pulls away from the pumps, but the driver doesn’t return to the interstate. Instead, he steers his rig into an immense parking lot, apparently intending to stop either for dinner or a rest.

This is the largest truck stop the boy has seen, complete with a sprawling motel, motor-home park, diner, gift shop, and according to one highway sign glimpsed earlier, a “full range of services,” whatever that might encompass. He has never been to a carnival, but he imagines that the excitement he feels about this place must be akin to the thrill of being on an attraction-packed midway.

Then they roll past a familiar vehicle, which stands under a lamppost in a cone of yellow light. It’s smaller than the giant rigs parked side by side on the blacktop. White cab, black canvas walls. The saddlery truck from Colorado.

A moment ago, he’d been eager to investigate this place. Now he wants only to move on — and quickly.

The transport swings into a wide space between two huge trucks.

Air brakes squeal and sigh. The rumbling engine stops. After the twin teams of Explorers stir slightly in their traces, like sleeping horses briefly roused from dreams of sweet pastures, the silence that settles is deeper than any the boy has heard since the high meadows of Colorado.

As the puddle of black-and-white fur on the passenger’s seat becomes unmistakably a dog once more, rising to check out their new circumstances, the boy says worriedly, “We’ve got to keep moving.”

In one sense, the nearness of those searching for him doesn’t matter. The likelihood of his being apprehended within the next few minutes would be just as great if he were a thousand miles from here.

His mother has often told him that if you’re clever, cunning, and bold, you can hide in plain sight as confidently as in the most remote and well-disguised bolt-hole. Neither geography nor distance is the key to survival: Only time matters. The longer he stays free and hidden, the less likely that he will ever be found.

Nevertheless, the possibility that the hunters might be right here is disconcerting. Their nearness makes him nervous, and when he’s nervous, he’s less likely to be clever or cunning, or bold; and they will find him, know him, whether he’s in plain sight or hiding in a cave a thousand feet from sunlight.

Hesitantly, he eases open the driver’s door and slips out of the SUV. onto the bed of the transport.

He listens. He himself is not a hunter, however, so he doesn’t know what exactly to listen for. The action at the pump islands is a far away grumble. Muffled country music, oscillating between faint and fainter, seasons the night with enchantment, the landlocked Western equivalent of a siren’s irresistible song drifting across a night-shrouded sea with a promise of wonder and companionship.

The ramped bed of the auto transport isn’t much wider than the Explorer, too narrow to allow the dog to land safely in a leap from the driver’s seat, which he now occupies. If in fact he had jumped from the porch roof at the Hammond farmhouse, surely the mutt can clear the truck entirely, avoiding the vertical supports between the decks of the open cargo trailer, and spring directly to the parking Id’ However, if he possesses the agility to accomplish this feat, he doesn’t possess the confidence. Peering down from his perch, the dog cocks his head left, then right, makes a pathetic sound of anxiety, stifles the whine as though he recognizes the need for stealth, and stares beseechingly at his master.

The boy lifts the dog out of the Explorer, as earlier he had lifted him up and in, not without considerable contortion. He teeters but keeps his balance and puts his shaggy burden down on the floor of the transport.

As the boy eases shut the door of the Explorer, the mongrel pads toward the back of the auto carrier, following the ramped bed. He is waiting immediately behind the truck when his master arrives.

The ears arc pricked, the head lifted, the nose twitching. The fluffy tail, usually a proud plume, is held low.

Although domesticated, this animal nevertheless remains to some degree a hunter, as the boy is not, and he has the instincts of a survivor. His wariness must be taken seriously. Evidently, something in the night smells threatening or at least suspicious.

Currently, no vehicles are either entering or leaving the lot. No truckers are in sight across the acres of blacktop.

Although a couple hundred people are nearby, this place in this moment of time seems as lonely as any crater on the moon.

From the west, out of the desert, arises a light breeze, warm but not hot, carrying the silicate scent of sand and the faint alkaline fragrance of the hardy plants that grow in parched lands.

The boy is reminded of home, which he will most likely never see again. A pleasant nostalgia wells within him, too quickly swells into a gush of homesickness, inevitably reminding him of the terrible loss of his family, and suddenly he sways as though physically battered by the flood of grief that storms through his heart.

Later. Tears are for later. Survival comes first. He can almost hear his mother’s spirit urging him to control himself and to leave the grieving for safer times.

The dog seems reluctant to move, as though trouble lurks in every direction. His tail lowers further, wrapping partly around his right hind leg.

The motel and the diner lay out of sight to the east, beyond the ranks of parked vehicles, marked by the fiery glow of red neon. The boy sets off in that direction.

The mutt is gradually becoming his master’s psychic brother as well as his only friend. He shakes off his hesitancy and trots at the boy’s side.

“Good pup,” the boy whispers.

They pass behind eight semis and are at the back of a ninth when a low growl from the dog halts the boy. Even if the animal’s sudden anxiety hadn’t been strong enough to feel, the nearest of the tall pole lamps provides sufficient sour yellow light to reveal the animal’s raised hackles.

The dog peers at something in the oily Muck gloom under the big truck. Instead of growling again, he glances up at the boy and mewls entreatingly.

Trusting the wisdom of his brother-becoming, the boy drops to his knees, braces one hand against the trailer, and squints into the pooled darkness. He can see nothing in the murk between the parallel sets of tires.

Then movement catches his eye, not immediately under the rig but along the side of it, in the lamplit passageway between this vehicle and the next. A pair of cowboy boots, blue jeans tucked in the tops: Someone is walking beside the trailer, approaching the back where the boy kneels.

Most likely this is an ordinary driver, unaware of the boyhunt that is being conducted discreetly but with great resources and urgency across the West. He’s probably returning from a late dinner, with a thermos full of fresh coffee, ready to hit the road again.

Another pair of boots follows the first. Two men, not just one. Neither talks, both move purposefully.

Maybe ordinary drivers, maybe not.

The young fugitive drops flat to the pavement and slips under the trailer, and the dog crawls beside him into hiding. They huddle together, turning their heads to watch the passing boots, and the boy is oddly excited because this is a situation encountered in all the adventure stories that he loves.

Admittedly, the character of his excitement is different from what he feels when he experiences such exploits vicariously, through the pages of books. Young heroes of adventure stories, from Treasure bland to The Amber Spyglass, are never eviscerated, decapitated, torn limb from limb, and immolated — which is a possible fate that he envisions for himself too clearly to embrace fully the traditional boys’-book spirit of derring-do. His excitement has a nervous edge sharper than anything Huckleberry Finn was required to feel, a darker quality. He’s a boy nonetheless, and he’s virtually programmed by nature to be thrilled by events that test his pluck, his fortitude, and his wits.

The two men reach the back of the trailer, where they pause, evidently surveying the parking lot, perhaps not quite able to recall where they left their rig. They remain silent, us though listening for the telltale sounds that only born hunters can perceive and properly interpret.

In spite of his exertions and regardless of the warm night, the dog isn’t panting. He lies motionless against his master’s side.

Good pup.

Instrument of nostalgia, scented with desert fragrances that remind the boy of home, the breeze is also a broom to the blacktop, sweeping along puffs of dust, spidery twists of dry desert grass, and scraps of litter. With a soft rustle, a loosely crumpled wad of paper twirls lazily across the pavement and comes to rest against the toe of one of the boots. The parking-lot light is bright enough that from a distance of a few feet, the boy can see this is debris with value: a five-dollar bill.

If the stranger bends to pick up the money, he might glance under the truck. …

No. Even if the man drops to one knee, instead of simply bending down, his head will be well above the bottom of the trailer. He won’t inadvertently get a glimpse of a boy-shape-dog-shape cowering in the shadows cast by the rig.

After trembling against the boot toe, the five-dollar bill blows free… and twirls under the truck.

In the gloom, the boy loses track of the money. He’s focused intently on the cowboy boots.

Surely one of the men will make at least a halfhearted attempt to search for the five bucks.

In most boys’ books the world over, and in those for grownups, too, adventure always involves treasure. This globe rotates on a spindle of gold. A peglegged, parrot-petting pirate said exactly that, in one tale or another.

Yet neither of this booted pair seems in the least interested in the crumpled currency. Still without speaking a word to each other, they move on, away from the truck.

The possibility that neither of them noticed the money is slim. By I heir disinterest in the five dollars, they have revealed their true nature. They are engaged in an urgent search for something more important than treasure, and they won’t be distracted.

The two men walk westward from the back of the semi — in the general direction of the automobile transport.

The boy and his companion crawl forward, farther under the trailer, toward the cab, and then they slip out of shelter, into the open space between this rig and the next, where they had first glimpsed the cowboy boots.

Evidently having snatched a small treasure from the teeth of the desert breeze, the dog holds the five-dollar bill in his mouth.

“Good pup.”

The boy smoothes the currency between his hands, folds it, and stuffs it in a pocket of his jeans.

Their meager financial resources won’t carry them far, and they can’t expect to find money in the wind whenever they need it. For the time being, however, they are spared the humiliation of committing another larceny.

Maybe dogs aren’t capable of feeling humiliated. The boy’s never had a dog before. He knows their nature only from movies, books, and a few casual encounters.

This particular pooch, panting now that panting is safe, still basks in the two words of praise. He is a scamp, a rascally fun-loving creature that lives by the simple rules of wild things.

In becoming brothers, they will change each other. The dog might become as easily humiliated and as fearfully aware of ever-looming death as his master is, which would be sad. And the boy figures that during their desperate, lonely, and probably long flight for freedom, he himself will have to guard against becoming too much like a dog, wild and given to rash action.

Without shame, the mutt squats and urinates on the blacktop.

The boy promises himself that public toileting is a behavior he will never adopt, regardless of how wild the dog might otherwise inspire him to be.

Better move.

The two silent men who had headed toward the auto transport won’t be the only searchers prowling the night.

Skulking among the trucks, staying as much as possible out of the open lanes of the parking lot, the alert dog ever at his side, he chooses an indirect route, as if making his way through a maze, toward the promise of the red neon.

Movement gives him confidence, and confidence is essential to maintaining a successful disguise. Besides, motion is commotion, which has value as camouflage. More of his mother’s wisdom.

Being among people is helpful, too. A crowd distracts the enemy — not much but sometimes enough to matter — and provides a screening effect behind which a fugitive can, with luck, pass undetected.

The truck lot adjoins a separate parking area for cars. Here, the boy is more exposed than he was among the big rigs.

He moves faster and more boldly, striking out directly toward the “full range of services,” which are provided in a complex of structures farther back from the highway than the service islands and fuel pumps.

Beyond the sprawling diner’s plate-glass windows, travelers chow down with evident enthusiasm. The sight of them reminds the boy how much time has passed since he ate a cold cheeseburger in the Explorer.

The dog whines with hunger.

Out of the warm night into the pleasantly cool restaurant, into eddying tides of appetizing aromas that instantly render him ravenous, the boy realizes he is grinning as widely as the dog.

The dog, not the grin, draws the attention of a uniformed woman standing at a lectern labeled HOSTESS. She’s petite, pretty, speaks with A comic drawl, but is as formidable as a prison-camp guard when she assumes a blocking stance directly in his path. “Honeylamb, I’ll admit this here’s not a five-star establishment, but we still say no to barefoot bozos and all four-legged kind, regardless of how cute they are.”

The boy is neither barefoot nor a clown, and so after a brief confusion, he realizes she’s talking about the dog. By bursting into the restaurant with the animal at his side, he’s drawn attention to himself when he can least afford to do so.

“Sorry, ma’am,” he apologizes.

Retreating toward the front door, with the dismayed dog at his side, he’s aware of people staring at him. A smiling waitress. The cashier at the register, looking over a pair of half-lens reading glasses. A customer paying his check.

None of these people appears to be suspicious of him, and none seems likely to be one of the relentless trackers on his trail. Fortunately, this blunder will not be the death of him.

Outside once more, he tells the dog to sit. The pooch settles obediently beside the diner door. The boy hunkers in front of the mutt, pets him, scratches behind his ears, and says, “You wait right here. I’ll be back. With food.”

A man looms over them — tall, with a glossy black beard, wearing a green cap with the words DRIVING MACHINE in yellow letters above the bill — not the customer who was at the cash register, but another who’s on his way into the restaurant. “That’s sure a fine tailwagger you have there,” the driving machine says, and the dog obligingly swishes his tail, sweeping the pavement on which he sits. “Got a name?

“Curtis Hammond,” he replies without hesitation, using the name of the boy whose clothes he wears, but at once wonders if this is a wise choice.

Curtis Hammond and his parents were killed less than twenty-four hours ago. If by now the Colorado authorities have realized that the fire at the farmhouse was arson, and if autopsies have revealed that the three victims were savagely assaulted, perhaps tortured, all dead before the fire was set, then the names of the murdered have surely been heard widely on news broadcasts.

With no apparent recognition of the name, the bearded trucker, who may be only what he appears to be, but who may also be Death with facial hair, says, “Curtis Hammond. That’s a powerfully peculiar name for a dog.”

“Oh. Yeah. My dog,” the boy says, feeling stupid and dismally incompetent at this passing-for-nobody-special business. He hasn’t given a thought to naming his four-legged companion, because he’s known that eventually, when he bonds better with the animal, he’ll arrive at not just any name, but at the exactly right one. With no time to wait for better bonding, scratching the dog under the chin, he takes inspiration from a movie: “The name’s Old Yeller.”

Amused, the trucker cocks his head and says, “You yankin’ my chain, young fella?”

“No, sir. Why would I?”

“And what’s the logic, callin’ this beauty Old Yeller, when there’s not one yellow hair from nose to tail tip?”

Abashed at his nervous bumbling in the face of this man’s easy and nonthreatening conversation, the boy tries to recover from his foolish gaff. “Well, sir, color doesn’t have anything to do with it. We like the name just because this here is the best old dog in the world, just exactly like Old Yeller in the movie.”

“Not exactly like,” the driving machine disagrees. “Old Yeller was a male. This lovely black-and-white lady here must get a mite confused from time to time, bein’ called a male name and a color she isn’t.”

The boy hasn’t previously given much thought to the gender of the dog. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He remembers his mother’s counsel that in order to pass for someone you’re not, you must have confidence, confidence above all else, because self-consciousness and self-doubt fade the disguise. He must not allow himself to be rattled by the trucker’s latest observation.

“Oh, we don’t think of it as just a male name or a female name,” the boy explains, still nervous but pleased by his growing fluency, which improves when he keeps his attention on the pooch instead of looking up at the trucker. “Any dog could be a Yeller.”

“Evidently so. I think I’ll buy me a girl cat and call her Mr. Rover.”

No meanness is evident in this tall, somewhat portly man, no suspicion or calculation in his twinkling blue eyes. He looks like Santa Claus with a dye job.

Nevertheless, standing erect, the boy wishes the trucker would go away, but he can’t think of a thing to say to make him leave. “Where’s your folks, son?” the man asks.

“I’m with my dad. He’s inside getting takeout, so we can eat on the road. They won’t let our dog in, you know.”

Frowning, surveying the activity at the service islands and the contrasting quiet of the acres of parked vehicles, the trucker says,

“You shouldn’t stray from right here, son. There’s all kinds of people in the world, and some you don’t want to meet at night in a lonely corner of a parkin’ lot.”

“Sure, I know about their kind.”

The dog sits up straighter and pricks her ears, as if to say that she, too, is well informed about such fiends.

Smiling, reaching down to stroke the lovely lady’s head, the trucker says, “I guess you’ll be all right with Old Yeller here to take a chunk of meat out of anyone who might try to do you wrong.”

“She’s real protective,” the boy assures him.

“Just don’t you stray from here,” the driving machine warns. He tugs on the bill of his green cap, the way a polite cowboy in the movies will sometimes tug on the brim of his Stetson, an abbreviated tipping of the hat, meant as a sign of respect to ladies and other upstanding citizens, and at last he goes inside.

The boy watches through the glass door and the windows as the hostess greets the trucker and escorts him to a table. Fortunately, he is seated with his back toward the entrance. With his cap still on, he appears to be at once enthralled by the offerings on the tall, two-fold menu.

To the faithful canine, the boy says, “Stay here, girl. I’ll be back soon.”

She chuffs softly, as though she understands.

Out in the vast parking area, where cones of dirty yellow light alternate with funnels of shadow, there’s no sign of the two silent men who wouldn’t stoop to pick up five dollars.

Sooner or later, they’ll come back here, run a search through the diner, around the motel, and wherever else their suspicion draws them, even if they’ve searched those places before. And if not those same two men, then two others. Or four. Or ten. Or legions.

Better move.