One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 16

GUNFIRE but also frankfurters. Hunters loom, but the chaos provides cover. Hostility is all around, but hope of escape lies ahead.

Even in the darkest moments, light exists if you have the faith to see it. Fear is a poison produced by the mind, and courage is the antidote stored always ready in the soul. In misfortune lies the seed of future triumph. They have no hope who have no belief in the intelligent design of all things, but those who see meaning in every day will live in joy. Confronted in battle by a superior foe, you will find that a kick to the sex organs is generally effective.

Those sagacities and uncounted others are from Mother's Big Book of Street-Smart Advice for the Hunted and the Would-Be Chameleon. This isn't a published work, of course, although in the boy's mind, he can see those pages as clearly as the pages of any real book that he's ever read, chapter after chapter of hard-won wisdom. His mom had been first of all his mom, but she'd also been a universally admired symbol of resistance to oppression, an advocate of freedom, whose teachings — both her philosophy and her practical survival advice— had been passed from believer to believer, much the way that folk tales were preserved through centuries by being told and retold in the glow of campfire and hearth light.

Curtis hopes that he won't have to kick anyone in the sex organs, but he's prepared to do whatever is required to survive. By nature, he's more of a dreamer than he is a schemer, more poet than warrior, though he's admittedly hard-pressed to see anything either poetic or warriorlike about clutching a package of frankfurters to his chest, scampering like a monkey, and retreating pell-mell from the battle that has broken out behind him.

Around and under more prep tables, past tall cabinets with open shelves full of stacked dishes, taking cover behind hulking culinary equipment of unknown purpose, Curtis moves indirectly but steadily into the end of the kitchen toward which the workers had initially seemed to be directing him.

None of the employees any longer offers guidance. They're too busy diving for cover, belly-crawling like soldiers seeking shelter in an unexpected firefight, and saying their prayers, each of them determined to protect the precious bottom that his mama once talcumed so lovingly.

In addition to the sharp crack of gunfire, Curtis hears lead slugs ricocheting with a whistle or with a cymbal-like ping off range hoods and off other metal surfaces, slamming — thwack! — into wood or plaster, puncturing full soup pots with a flat bonk and drilling empty pots with a hollow reverberant pong. Shot dinnerware explodes in noisy disharmonious chords; bullet-plucked metal racks produce jarring arpeggios; from a severed refrigeration line, a toxic mist of rapidly evaporating coolant hisses like a displeased audience at a symphony of talentless musicians; and perhaps he's able to call forth his poetic side in the midst of warfare, after all.

The FBI doesn't as a matter of habit open negotiations with gunplay, which means the cowboys must have initiated hostilities. And the two men wouldn't resort to violence so immediately if they weren't certain that these Bureau agents know them for who they really are.

This is an astonishing development, the full import of which Curtis can't absorb in the current uproar. If federal authorities have become aware of the dark forces that pursue this motherless boy, then they are aware of the boy himself, and if they can recognize the hunters, they must be able to recognize the boy, as well.

Curtis had thought he was being pursued by a platoon. Perhaps it is instead an army. And the enemies of his enemies are not always his friends, certainly not in this case.

He rounds the end of another work aisle and finds an employee sitting on the floor, wedged into the corner formed by banks of tall cabinets. The kitchen worker is apparently paralyzed by panic.

With his knees drawn up to his chest, the guy's trying to make himself as small as possible, to avoid ricochets and stray bullets. He's wearing a large stainless-steel colander as though it's a hat, holding it in place with both hands, his face entirely concealed, evidently because he thinks this will provide some protection against a head shot.

Elsewhere in the kitchen, a man screams. Maybe he's been shot. Curtis has never heard the cry made by a gunshot victim. This is a hideous squeal of agony. He has heard cries like this before, too often. It's difficult to believe that a mere bullet wound could be the cause of such horrendous, tortured shrieks.

The terror-polished eyes of the man in the colander can be seen through the pattern of small drain holes, and when he speaks fluent Vietnamese, he can be heard in spite of his metal hood: "We're all going to die."

Responding in Vietnamese, Curtis passes along some of his mom's wisdom, which he hopes will give comfort: "In misfortune lies the seed of future triumph."

This isn't the smoothest socializing the boy has done to date, but the terrified worker overreacts to this well-meant if less than completely appropriate advice: "Maniac! Crazy boy!"

Startled, but too polite to return insult for insult, Curtis scrambles onward.

The anguished screams are to the boy's blood as vinegar to milk, and although a thunderous fusillade halts the screaming, it doesn't as quickly halt the curdling. He's losing his appetite for the hot dogs, but he holds fiercely to them, anyway, because he knows from long experience that hunger can quickly return in the wake of even nauseating fear. The heart may heal slowly, but the mind is resilient and the body ever needy.

Besides, he's got Old Yeller to think about. Good pup. I'm coming, pup.

The roar of the long barrage has left his ears ringing. Yet in the aftermath, Curtis is able to hear people shouting, a couple men cursing, a woman, shakily reciting the Hail Mary prayer over and over. The character of all their voices suggests that the battle isn't over and perhaps isn’t going to be brief be brief; there's no relief in even one voice among them — only shirk anxiety, urgency, wariness.

Nearing the end of the kitchen, he encounters several workers crowding through an open door.

He considers following them before he realizes that they're entering a walk-in cooler, apparently with the intention of pulling shut the insulated steel door. This might be a bulletproof refuge, or the next-best thing.

Curtis doesn't want a refuge. He wants to find an escape hatch. And quickly.

Another door. Beyond it lies a small storeroom, approximately eight feet wide and ten feet long, with a door at the farther end. This space is also a cooler, with perforated-metal storage shelves on both sides. The shelves hold half-gallon plastic containers of orange juice, grapefruit juice, apple juice, milk, also cartons of eggs, blocks of cheese.

He grabs the handle on a container of orange juice, making a mental note to return to Utah someday — assuming he ever gets out of the state alive — to make restitution for this and for the hot dogs. He's sincere in his intention to pay for what he takes, but nevertheless he feels like a criminal.

Putting all his hopes on the door at the end of this cooler, Curtis discovers that it opens into a larger and warmer receiving room stacked with those supplies that don't need refrigeration. Cartons of napkins, toilet tissue, cleaning fluids, floor wax.

Logically, a receiving room should open to the outdoors, to a loading dock or to a parking lot, and beyond the next door, he finds logic rewarded. A warm breeze, free of kitchen odors and the smell of gunfire, leaps at him, like a playful dog, and tosses his hair.

He turns right on the dimly lighted dock and sprints to the end. Four concrete steps lead down to another blacktop parking lot, which is only half as well lighted as those he's seen previously.

Most of the vehicles back here probably belong to employees of the restaurant, the service station, the motel, and the associated enterprises. Pickup trucks are favored over cars, and the few SUVs have a desert-scorched, sand-abraided, brush-scratched look acquired by more arduous use than trips to the supermarket.

With the container of Florida's lines! in one hand, the package of hot dogs firmly in the other, Curtis clashes between two SUVs, frantic to get out of sight before the FBI agents, the hunters in cowboy disguise, possibly the juice police, and maybe frankfurter-enforcement officers all descend on him at once, blasting away.

Just as he plunges into the shadows between the vehicles, he hears shouting, people running — suddenly so close.

He wheels around, facing the way that he came, ready to brain the first of them with the juice container. The hot dogs are useless as a weapon. His mother's self-defense instructions never involved sausages of any kind. After the juice, all he can count on is kicking their sex organs.

Two, three, five men burst past the front of the parallel SUVs, a formidable pack of husky specimens, all wearing either black vests or black windbreakers with the letters FBI blazing in white across their chests and backs. Two carry shotguns; the others have handguns. They are prepared, pumped, pissed — and so intently focused on the rear entrance to the restaurant that not one of them catches sight of Curtis as they race past. They leave him untouched, and still in possession of his dangerous jug of orange juice and his pathetic wieners.

Sucking in great lungfuls of the astringent desert air, giving it back hotter than he receives it, the boy weaves westward, using the employees' vehicles for cover. He's not sure where he should go, but he's eager to put some distance between himself and this complex of buildings.

He rounds the tailgate of a Dodge pickup, hurrying into a new aisle, and here the loyal dog is waiting, a black shape splashed with a few whorls of white, like tossed-off scarves of moonlight floating on the night-stained surface of a pond. She is alert, ears pricked, drawn not by the frankfurters but by an awareness of her master's predicament.

Good pup. Let's get out of here.

She whips around — no older than she is yellow — and trots away, not at a full run, but at a pace that the boy can match. Trusting her sharper senses, assuming she won't lead them straight into any associates of the cowboys who might be — surely are — in the vicinity, or into another posse of FBI agents bristling with weapons, Curtis follows her.