One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 14

PERCHED HAPPILY ON HIS STOOL at the lunch counter, poor dumb Burt Hooper knows that he himself is a truck driver and knows that he himself is eating chicken and waffles, but he doesn't know that he himself is a total Forrest Gump, good-hearted but a Gump nonetheless. Well-meaning, Mr. Hooper points toward the hallway that leads to the restrooms.

As one, the two cowboys start toward Curtis. Donella calls to them, but even she, in her majestic immensity, can't restrain them by word alone.

To Curtis's right lies a pivot-hinged door with an inset oval of glass. The porthole is too high to provide a view to him, so he pushes through the door without knowing what lies beyond.

He's in a large commercial kitchen with a white-ceramic-tile floor. Banks of large ovens, cooktops, refrigerators, sinks, and preparation tables, all stainless steel, gleaming and lustrous, provide him with a maze of work aisles along which a stooping-crouching-scuttling boy might be able to escape.

Not every delicacy is prepared by the two short-order cooks out front. The kitchen staff is large and busy. No one appears interested in Curtis when he enters.

Oven to oven, past a ten-foot-long cooktop, past an array of deep fryers full of roiling hot oil, around the end of a long prep table, Curtis hurries into a narrow work aisle with loosely thatched rubber mats on the floor. He stays low, hoping to get out of sight before the two cowboys arrive. He avoids collisions with the staff, squeezing around them, dodging left, right, but they're no longer disinterested in him.

"Hey, kid."

"What're you doin' here, boy?"

"iTener cuidado, muchacho!"

"Watch it, watch it!"

"iLoco mocoso!"

He's just entering the next aisle, one layer deeper into the huge kitchen, when he hears the two cowboys arrive. There's no mistaking their entrance for anything else. With the arrogance and the blood hunger of Gestapos, they slam through the swinging door, their boot heels clopping hard against the tile floor.

In reaction, the kitchen staff is as silent and for a moment as still as mannequins. No one demands to know who these brash intruders are, or makes a clatter of pots that might draw attention, probably because everyone fears that these two are federal immigration agents, rousting illegal aliens — of which there's no doubt one present — and that they will hassle even properly documented workers if they're in a belligerent mood.

By their very presence, however, the cowboys have won allies for Curtis. As the crouching boy progresses by hitch and twitch through the kitchen, cooks and bakers and salad-makers and dishwashers ease out of his way, facilitate his passage, use their bodies to further block the cowboys' view of him, and direct him with subtle gestures toward what he assumes will be a rear exit.

He's scared, mouth suddenly bitter with the taste of what might be his mortality, lungs cinched tight enough to make each breath a labor, heart rapping with woodpecker frenzy — and yet he is acutely aware of the delicious aromas of roasting chicken, baking ham, frying potatoes. Fear doesn't entirely trump hunger, and though the flood of saliva is bitter, it fails to diminish his appetite.

Noises in his wake suggest that the killers are trying to track him. Contentious voices quickly arise as the kitchen staff, realizing that these two cowboys have no law-enforcement credentials, object to their intrusion.

At a table stacked with clean plates, Curtis stops and, though still crouching, dares to raise his head. He peers between two towers of dishes, and sees one of his pursuers about fifteen feet away.

The hunter has a handsome, potentially genial face. If he were to smile instead of glower, put on a mask of kindness, the kitchen staff might warm at once to him and point him toward his quarry.

But although Curtis is sometimes fooled by appearances, he's perceptive enough to see that this is a man whose face gives out at every pore the homicidal toxins in which his brain now marinates. Pressing sweet peach juice from a handful of dried pits would be easier than squeezing one drop of pity from this hunter's heart, and mercy would more likely be wrung from any stone.

As he moves along the salad-prep aisle, the grim cowboy looks left and right, shoving aside the men and women in his way as if they are mere furniture. His partner isn't immediately behind him, and might be approaching by a different route.

The restaurant employees are protesting less, maybe because the hunters' steely indifference to every objection and their cold-eyed persistence is too intimidating to resist. You see guys like this on the TV news, shooting up shopping centers or office buildings because of a wife's decision to file for divorce, because they've lost a job, or just because. Yet with discreet nods and gestures, the workers continue to shepherd Curtis toward escape.

In a half squat, shambling side to side and using his swinging arms for counterbalance, just as a frightened monkey might scamper, the boy turns a corner at a long butcher block and encounters a cook who's gazing out across the enormous kitchen, wide-eyed, watching the hunters. The white-uniformed cook might be an angel, considering that he holds a plastic-wrapped bundle of hot dogs, which he has just taken from the open cooler behind him.

A crash rocks the room, rattles cookware. Someone slamming through the swinging door from the restroom hallway. Following the cowboys. More hard and hurried footfalls on the tile floor. Voices. Then shouting. "FBI! FBI! Freeze, freeze, freeze!"

Curtis clutches at the hot dogs. Startled, the man lets go of the bundle. Having claimed the meaty treasure, Curtis scuttles past the cook, bound for freedom and a makeshift dinner, surprised by the arrival of the FBI, but not in the least heartened by this unexpected development.

When it rains, it pours, his mother had said. She never claimed that the thought was original with her. Universal truths often find expression in universal cliches. When it rains, it pours, and when it pours, the river runs wild, and suddenly we're caught up in a flood. But when we're in a flood, we don't panic, do we, baby boy? And he always knew the answer to that one: No, we never panic. And she would say, Why don't we panic in the flood? And he would say, Because we're too busy swimming!

Behind him, elsewhere in the kitchen, dishes clatter-shatter on the floor, and a soup pot or some such bounces bong-bong-bong across the tiles. Spoons or forks, or butter knives, spill in quantity, ringing off stainless-steel and ceramic surfaces with a sound like the bells that might announce a demonic holiday.

Then gunfire.