One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 45

Crackerless, Polly drives with an open bag of cheese-flavored popcorn in her lap and a cold can of beer in the built-in cupholder on her customized command chair.

Having an open container of any alcoholic beverage in a moving vehicle is against the law, but Curtis refrains from advising Polly about this infraction. He doesn’t want to repeat the errors that he made with Gabby, who had taken extreme offense at being reminded that the law requires seat belts to be worn at all times.

Cleaving prairie, a lonely two-lane blacktop highway runs north-northwest from Neary Ranch. According to the twins, the southbound lane, not taken, leads eventually to a cruel desert and ultimately to the even crueler games of Las Vegas.

They have no destination in mind yet, no plan to ensure justice for the Hammond family, no idea of what future Curtis might expect or with whom he might live. Until the situation clarifies and they have time to think, the twins’ only concern is keeping him free and alive.

Curtis approves of this scheme. Flexibility is any fugitive’s greatest strength, and a fugitive burdened by a rigid plan makes easy quarry of himself. Mom’s wisdom. Anyway, he will leave the sisters soon, so planning beyond the next few hours would be pointless.

Polly drives fast. The Fleetwood rushes across the prairie, like a nuclear-powered battle wagon on a medium-gravity moon.

In the lounge, Cass relaxes on a sofa that backs up to the port flank of the motor home, thirdly behind the driver’s seat. The dog lies beside her, chin resting on her thigh, blissfully assuming a right of continuous cuddling, and having that assumption rewarded.

At the sisters’ gentle insistence, Curtis occupies the co-pilot’s chair, which boasts various power features, including one that turns it away from the road, toward the driver. Having powered the seat to port, he can see both women.

Although wearing only the beach-towel sarong, he’s no longer self-conscious. He feels quite Polynesian, like Bing Crosby in The Road to Bali.

Instead of chunks of coconut or a bowl of poi, instead of the shredded flesh of a wild pig spiced with eel tongue, he has his own bag of cheese-flavored popcorn and a can of Orange Crush, though he had asked for a beer.

Better still, he’s blessed by the company of the Spelkenfelter sisters, Castoria and Polluxia. He finds the details of their lives to be unlike anything he knows from films or books.

They were born and raised in a bucolic town in Indiana, which Polly calls “a long yawn of bricks and boards.” According to Cass, the most exciting pastimes the area offers are watching cows graze, watching chickens peck, and watching hogs sleep, although Curtis can perceive no entertainment value in two of these three activities.

Their father, Sidney Spelkenfelter, is a professor of Greek and Roman history at a private college, and his wife, Imogene, teaches art history. Sidney and Imogene are kind and loving parents, but they are also, says Cass, “as naive as goldfish who think the world ends at the bowl.” Because their parents were academics, too, Sidney and Imogene have resided ever in tenured security, explaining life to others but living a pale version of it.

Co-valedictorians of their high-school class, Cass and Polly skipped college in favor of Las Vegas. Within a month, they were the centerpiece feathered-and-sequined nudes in a major hotel’s showroom extravaganza with a cast of seventy-four dancers, twelve showgirls, nine specialty acts, two elephants, four chimps, six dogs, and a python.

Because of a mutual lifelong interest in juggling and trapeze acrobatics, within a year they were elevated to Las — Vegas stardom in a ten-million-dollar stage-musical spectacular featuring a theme of extraterrestrial, contact. They played acrobatic alien queens plotting to turn all human males into love slaves.

“That was when we first got interested in UFOs,” Cass reveals.

“In the opening dance number,” Polly reminisces, “we descended these neon stairs from a giant flying saucer. It was awesome.”

“And this time we didn’t have to be naked the whole show,” says Cass. “We came out of the saucer nude, of course—“

“Like any alien love queens would,” adds Polly, and they reveal delicious giggles that remind Curtis of the immortal Goldie Hawn.

Curtis laughs, too, amused by their irony and self-mockery.

“After the first nine minutes,” Cass says, “we wore lots of cool costumes better suited to juggling and acrobatic trapeze work.”

“Trying to juggle honeydews while nude,” Polly explains, “you risk grabbing the wrong melons and ruining the act.”

They both giggle again, but this time the joke eludes Curtis.

“Then we were nude in the last number,” Polly says, “except for the feathered headdress, sequined G-string, and stiletto-heeled ankle boots. The producer insisted this was ‘authentic’ love-queen attire.”

Cass says, “Tell me, Curtis, how many alien love queens have you seen wearing gold-lame, stiletto-heeled ankle boots?”

“None,” he answers truthfully.

“That was our argument exactly. They look stupid. Not queenly in any corner of the universe. We didn’t mind the feathered headdresses, but how many alien love queens have you met who wear those, either?”

“None.”

“To be fair, you can’t disprove our producer’s contention,” says Polly. “After all, how many alien love queens have you really seen?”

“Only two,” Curtis admits, “but neither of them was a juggler.”

For some reason, the twins find this highly amusing.

“But I guess you could say one of them was something of an acrobat,” Curtis elaborates, “because she could bend over backward until she was able to lick the heels of her own feet.”

This statement only rings new peals of laughter and more silvery giggles from the Spelkenfelter girls.

“It isn’t an erotic thing,” he hastens to clarify. “She bends backward for the reason a rattlesnake coils. From that position, she can spring twenty feet and snap your head off with her mandibles.”

“Try to turn that into a Vegas musical number!” Cass suggests, joining her sister in yet more laughter.

“Well, I don’t know everything about Las Vegas stage shows,” Curtis says, “but you’d probably have to leave out the part where she injects her eggs into the severed head.”

Through genuinely explosive laughter, Polly says, “Not if you did it with enough glitter, sweetie.”

“You’re a pistol, Curtis Hammond,” says Cass.

“You’re a hoot,” agrees Polly.

Listening to the twins giggle, watching Polly drive with one hand and wipe tears of laughter off her face with the other, Curtis decides that he must be wittier than he has heretofore realized.

Maybe he’s getting better at socializing.

Speeding northwest over a seemingly infinite stretch of two-lane blacktop as beautiful and mysterious as any view of classic American highway in any movie, speeding also toward a setting sun that fires the prairie into molten red-and-gold glass, as the mighty engine of the Fleetwood rumbles reassuringly, in the company of the fabulous Castoria and the fabulous Polluxia and the God-connected Old Yeller, with cheese popcorn and Orange Crush, showered and fully in control of his biological identity, feeling more confident than at any time in recent memory, Curtis believes he must be the luckiest boy alive.

When Cass excuses herself to take Curtis’s clothes out of the dryer, the dog follows her, and the boy turns his chair to face the road ahead. Co-pilot in name only, he nevertheless feels empowered by Polly’s fast and expert driving.

For a while they talk about the Fleetwood. Polly knows every detail of the big vehicle’s construction and operation. This is a 44,500-pound, 45-foot-long behemoth with a Cummins diesel engine, an Allison Automatic 4000 MH transmission, a 150-gallon fuel tank, a 160-gallon water tank, and a GPS navigation system. She speaks of it as lovingly as young men in the movies speak of their hot rods.

He’s surprised to hear that this customized version cost seven hundred thousand dollars, and when he makes the assumption that the twins’ wealth resulted from their success in Vegas, Polly corrects his misapprehension. They became financially independent — but not truly wealthy — following marriage to the Flackberg brothers. “But that’s a tragic story, sweetie, and I’m in too good a mood to tell it now.”

Because of a mutual lifelong interest in the mechanical design and repair of motor vehicles, Polly and Cass are well suited to the continuous travel that marks this phase of their lives. Regardless of what breaks or wears out, they can fix it, given the necessary spare parts, a basic supply of which they carry with them.

“There’s nothing better in this world,” declares Polly, “than getting dirty, oily, greasy, and sweaty while working on your wheels— and in the end putting wrong right with your own hands.”

These women are the cleanest, most well-groomed, most sparkling, sweetest-smelling people whom Curtis has ever seen, and though he’s hugely enamored of them in their current condition, he is intrigued by the prospect of seeing them dirty, oily, greasy, sweaty, wielding wrenches and power tools, confronting a recalcitrant 44,500-pound mechanical beast and, with their skill and determination, returning it to full operation.

Indeed, a mental image of Castoria and Polluxia, in the throes of engine-repair delight, pulses so persistently through his thoughts that he wonders why it has such great appeal. Odd.

Trailed by Old Yeller, Cass returns to report that she has finished ironing Curtis’s clothes.

Retreating to the bathroom to trade sarong for proper dress, he’s saddened that his time with the Spelkenfelter twins is drawing to an end. For their safety, he must leave at the first opportunity.

By the time he returns, fully clothed, to the co-pilot’s seat, the last sullen red light of sunset constricts in a low arc along a portion of the western horizon, like the upper curve of a bloodshot eye belonging to a murderous giant watching from just beyond the edge of the earth. Curtis is settling into his seat when the arc dims from mordant red to brooding purple; soon the purple fades as if the eye has fallen shut in sleep, but still the night seems to be watching.

If farms or ranches exist out in this lonely vastness, they are set so far back from the highway that even from the elevated cockpit of the Fleetwood, their lights are screened by wild grass, by widely scattered copses of trees, and primarily by sheer distance.

Rare southbound vehicles approach, rocketing by at velocities that suggest they are fleeing from something. Even fewer northbound vehicles pass them, not because the northbound lane is less busy, but because Polly demands performance from the motor home; only the most determined speeders overtake her, including someone in a silver 197 °Corvette that elicits admiring whistles from the car-savvy sisters.

Because of mutual interests in extreme skiing, skydiving, hard-boiled detective fiction, competitive rodeo bronc-busting, ghosts and poltergeists, big-band music, wilderness-survival techniques, and the art of scrimshaw among many other things, the twins are fascinating conversationalists, as much fun to listen to as they are to look at.

Curtis is most interested, however, in their wealth of UFO lore, their rococo speculations about life on other worlds, and their dark suspicions regarding the motives of extraterrestrials on Earth. In his experience, humankind is the only species ever to concoct visions of what might lie in the unknown universe that are even stranger than what’s really out there.

A glow appears in the distance, not the headlamps of approaching traffic, but a more settled light alongside the highway.

They arrive at a rural crossroads where a combination service station and convenience store stands on the northwest corner. This isn’t a shiny, plasticized, standard unit allied with a nationwide chain, but a mom-and-pop operation in a slightly sagging clapboard building with weathered white paint and dust-frosted windows.

In movies, places like this are frequently occupied by crazies of one kind or another. In such lonely environs, monstrous crimes are easily concealed.

Since motion is commotion, Curtis wants to keep moving until they reach a well-populated town. The twins, however, prefer not to let the on-board fuel supply drop below fifty gallons, and they are currently running with less than sixty.

Polly drives off the blacktop onto the unpaved service apron in front of the building. Gravel raps the Fleetwood undercarriage.

The three pumps — two dispensing gasoline, one diesel fuel — are not sheltered under sun-and-rain pavilion, as in modern operations, but stand exposed to the elements. Strung between two poles, red and amber Christmas lights, out of season, hang over the service island. These are taller than contemporary service-station pumps, perhaps seven feet, and each is crowned by what appears to be a large crystal ball.

“Fantastic. Those probably date back to the thirties,” Polly says. “You rarely see them anymore. When you pump the fuel, you can watch it swirl through the globe.”

“Why?” Curtis asks.

She shrugs. “It’s the way they work.”

A faint exhalation of wind lazily stirs the string of Christmas lights, and reflections of the red and amber bulbs glimmer and circle and twinkle within the gas-pump glass, as though fairy spirits dance inside each sphere.

Entranced by this magical machinery, Curtis wonders: “Does it also tell your fortune or something?”

“No. It’s just cool to look at.”

“They went to all the trouble of incorporating that big glass globe in the design just because it’s cool to look at?” He shakes his head with admiration for this species that makes art even of daily commerce. With affection, he says, “This is a wonderful planet.”

The twins disembark first — Cass with a large purse slung from one shoulder — intent on conducting a service-stop routine that is military in its thoroughness and precision: All ten tires must be inspected with a flashlight, the oil and the transmission fluid must be checked, the window-washing reservoir must be filled. …

Old Yeller’s mission is more prosaic: She needs to toilet. And Curtis goes along to keep her company.

He and the dog stand at the foot of the steps and listen to a mere whisper of a breeze that travels to them out of the moonlit plains in the northwest, from beyond the service station that is now blocked from sight by the Fleetwood. Apparently the night air carries a disturbing scent that inspires Old Yeller to raise her talented nose, to flare her nostrils, and to ponder the source of the smell.

The antique pumps are on the farther side of the motor home. As the twins disappear around the bow in search of service, the sniffing dog trots toward the back, not with typical wayward doggy curiosity, but with focus, purpose. Curtis follows his sister-become.

When they round the stern of the Fleet wood to the port side, they come into sight of the weather-beaten store about forty feet away, past the pumps. The door stands half open on hinges stiff enough to resist the breeze.

The dog halts. Backs up a step. Perhaps because the fantastical pumps disconcert her.

On closer consideration, Curtis finds them to be no less magical but less Tinkerbellish than they appeared from inside the vehicle. As he stares up at the globes, which are currently filled with darkness instead of with churning fuel, reflections of the red and amber Christmas lights shimmer on the surface of the glass but appear to swarm within it, and suddenly this display has an air of malevolence. Something needful and malign seems to be pent up in the spheres.

Near the bow of the motor home, a tall bald man is talking to the twins. His back is toward Curtis, and he’s forty feet away, but something seems wrong with him.

The dog’s hackles rise, and the boy suspects that the uneasiness he feels is actually her distrust transmitted to him through their special bond.

Although Old Yeller growls low in her throat and clearly has no use for the station attendant, her primary interest lies elsewhere. She scampers away from the motor home, almost running, toward the west side of the building, and Curtis hurries after her.

He’s pretty sure this isn’t about toileting anymore.

The store sets eater-corner on the lot, facing the crossroads rather than fronting one highway, and all the lights are at its most public face. Night finds a firmer purchase along the flank of the building. And behind the place, where the clapboard wall offers one door but no windows, the darkness is deeper still, relieved only by a parsimonious moon carefully spending its silver coins.

A Ford Explorer stands in this gloom, its contours barely traced by the lunar light. Curtis supposes that the SUV belongs to the man who’s out front talking to the twins.

The silver Corvette, which passed them on the highway earlier in the night, waits here, as well. Intently studying this vehicle, Old Yeller whimpers.

The moon favors the sports car over the SUV, plating its chrome and paint to a sterling standard.

Even as Curtis takes a step toward the Corvette, however, the dog dashes to the back of the Explorer. She stands on her hind legs, forepaws on the rear bumper, gazing up at the tailgate window, which is too high to provide her with a view inside.

She looks at Curtis, dark eyes moon-brightened.

When the boy doesn’t go to her at once, she paws insistently at the tailgate.

In this murk, he can’t see the dog shuddering, but through the psychic umbilical linking them, he senses the depth of her anxiety.

Fear like a slinking cat has found a way into Curtis’s heart, and from his heart into the whole of him, and now it whets its claws upon his bones.

Joining Old Yeller behind the Explorer, he squints through the rear window. He isn’t able to discern whether the SUV carries a cargo or is loaded only with shadows.

The dog continues to paw at the vehicle.

Curtis tries the door handle, lifts the tailgate.

Disengagement of the latch activates a soft light in the SUV, revealing two corpses in the cargo space. They have been tumbled together in such a way as to suggest that they were heaved in here as if they were bags of garbage.

His heart, a sudden stutterer, spasms on the l in lub, and on the d in dub.

He would run if he were not his mother’s son, but he’d rather die than, by his actions, cast shame upon her memory.

Pity and revulsion would turn him away had he not been taught to react to every horror like this as though it were a survival text, to read it quickly but closely for clues that might save his life and the lives of others.

Others, in this case, means Cass and Polly.

Tall, bald, and male, the first of these cadavers appears to be a physical match for the station attendant who’d been talking to the twins a moment ago, Curtis didn’t sec that guy’s face; nevertheless, he’s convinced that it will prove to he identical to this one, though not wrenched by terror.

Billowy, glossy, chestnut hair surrounds and softens the dead woman’s features. Her wide-open hazel eyes stare with startlement at the first glimpse of eternity that she received in the instant when her soul fled this world.

Neither victim bears a visible wound, but each appears to have a broken neck. Heads loll at such unnatural angles that the cervical vertebrae must have been shattered. For these hunters, who thrill to the administration of terror and who revel in murder, such kills are unusually clean and merciful.

Necessity rather than mercy explains the simple wounds. Each corpse has been stripped of its shoes and outer layer of clothing. To masquerade as their victims, the killers needed costumes without rips or stains.

If the combination service station and convenience store is a mom-and-pop operation, then here lie mom and pop. Their business and their identities have been subjected to a hostile takeover.

The dog’s attention is directed once more at the Corvette. Her interest, though intense, isn’t strong enough to draw her toward the sports car, which she regards with obvious dread. She appears to be as puzzled as she is apprehensive, cocking her head left, and then right, blinking, turning half away from the vehicle but then snapping her head toward it as if she’d seen it start to move.

Perhaps in the Corvette waits something worse than what he found in the Explorer, in which case he’ll keep his distance, too. Instead, seeking to learn what he can by sharing the dog’s perceptions, Curtis opens himself more completely to their bond, and looks at the ‘Vette through her eyes.

At first his sister-become seems to see nothing more than Curtis sees — but then for just a second, no longer, the moonlit car shimmers like a mirage. Dream car in more ways than one, internal-combustion illusion, it is merely the suggestion of a 197 °Corvette, masking a fearsome reality. The dog blinks, blinks, but the sports car remains apparently solid, so she turns her head away from it, and out of the corner of her eye, for two seconds or three, she glimpses what Curtis can’t perceive from the corner of his: a transport not of this earth, sleeker even than the sharklike Corvette, like a beast born to stalk sharks with a vengeance. So mighty-looking is this vehicle that you can’t think of it in the language of designers or engineers, but must resort to the vocabulary of military architecture, because in spite of its sleekness, it seems to be a fortress on wheels: all compact buttresses, ramparts, terrepleins, scarps, counterscarps, bastions made aerodynamic, condensed and adapted to rolling stock.

With this evidence before him, no doubt can linger any longer. The worse scalawags have arrived.

His nerves feel as taut as high-tuned violin strings, and his dark imagination plucks them with dire possibilities.

Death is here now, as always it is here, but it is not always as engaged and attentive as it is at this moment, waiting for a third course in its supper of bones.

The hunters must suspect that Curtis is in the motor home. Kind fate and his clever sister-become brought him out of the Fleetwood and around the building to this moonlit killing ground without being detected. He won’t remain undiscovered for long: perhaps two minutes, maybe three if his luck holds.

The instant that he shows himself, he will be known.

In his place, therefore, he sends the dog to Polly.

Fearful but obedient, she trots away, retracing the route along which she led him.

Curtis has no illusions that he’ll survive this encounter. The enemy is too near, too powerful, too remorseless to be defeated by one as small and defenseless as this motherless boy.

He harbors some hope, however, that he might be able to warn off Cass and Polly, that they might escape with the dog rather than be slaughtered with him.

Old Yeller disappears around the corner of the building. Beloved familiar, companion spirit, she walks always with an awareness of her Maker — and she will need Him now as never before.