One Door Away from Heaven

With a Grrrrrrrrr, spoken and thought, Old Yeller draws Curtis’s attention away from the chopper in the west to action in the east.

Two big SUVs, modified for police use, with racks of rotating red and blue emergency beacons on their roofs, sirens silent, are departing the interstate. They descend the gently sloped embankment and proceed westward across open terrain, paralleling but bypassing the halted traffic on the highway.

Curtis assumes they will continue past him, all the way to the roadblock. Instead, they slow to a stop at a point where a group of people apparently waits for them on the embankment approximately due south of him.

He hadn’t noticed this gathering of tiny figures before: Eight or ten motorists have descended part of the slope from the highway. Three have flashlights, which they’ve used to flag down the SUVs.

Above this group, on the interstate, a larger crowd—forty or fifty strong—has formed along the shoulder, watching the activity below. They have assembled just west of the Windchaser owned by the psychotic teeth collectors.

Alerted by Curtis’s warning as he’d fled the motor home, maybe other motorists investigated the Windchaser. Having found the grisly souvenirs, they have made a citizens’ arrest of the geriatric serial killers and are holding them for justice.

Or maybe not.

From the roadblock, vehicle to vehicle, word might have filtered back to the effect that the authorities are searching for a young boy and a harlequin dog. A motorist—the jolly freckled man with the mop of red hair and one sandal, or perhaps the murderous retirees in the Windchaser—could then have used a cell phone or an in-car computer to report that the fugitive pair had only minutes ago created a scene on the interstate before fleeing north into the wildland.

Below, the three flashlights swivel in unison and point due north. Toward Curtis.

He’s at too great a distance for those beams to expose him. And in the absence of a moon, although he stands on the ridge line, the sky is too dark to reveal him in silhouette.

Nevertheless, instinctively he crouches when the lights point toward him, making himself no taller than one of the scattered clumps of sagebrush that stipple the landscape. He puts one hand on the back of the dog’s neck, Together they wait, alert.

The scale of these events and the rapidity with which they are unfolding allow for no measurable effect of willpower. Yet Curtis wishes with all his might that what appears to be happening between the motorists and the law-enforcement officers in those two SUVs is not happening. He wishes they would just continue westward, along the base of the highway embankment, until they reach the helicopter. He pictures this in his mind, envisions it vividly, and wishes, wishes, wishes.

If wishes were fishes, no hooks would be needed, no line and no rod, no reel and no patience. But wishes are merely wishes, swimming only the waters of the mind, and now one of the SUVs guns its engine, swings north, drives maybe twenty feet deeper into the desert, and brakes to a halt, facing toward Curtis.

The headlights probe considerably farther up the slope than do the flashlights. But they still reach far less than halfway toward Curtis and Old Yeller.

On the roof of the SUV, a searchlight suddenly blazes, so powerful and so tightly focused that it appears to have the substance of a sword. Motorized, the lamp moves, and each time the slicing beam finds sagebrush or a gnarled spray of withered weeds, it cuts loose twisted shadows that leap into the night. Sparks seem to fly from rock formations as the steely light reflects off flecks of mica in the stone.

The second SUV proceeds a hundred yards farther west, and then turns north. A searchlight flares on the roof, stabbing out from the jeweled hilt of red and blue emergency beacons.

Paralleling each other, these two vehicles move north, toward Curtis. They grind along slowly, sweeping the landscape ahead of them with light, hoping to spot an obviously trampled clump of weeds or deep footprints where table stone gives way to a swale of soft sand.

Sooner rather than later, they are likely to find the spoor they seek. Then they will pick up speed.

The officers in the SUVs are operating under the aegis of one legitimate law-enforcement agency or another, and they most likely are who they appear to be. There’s always the chance, however, that they might instead he more of the ferocious killers who struck in Colorado and who have pursued Curtis ever since.

Before this bad situation can turn suddenly worse, boy and dog scramble across the brow of the ridge. Ahead, the land slopes down toward dark and arid realms.

Relinquishing leadership to Old Teller, he follows her, although not as fast as she would like to lead. He skids and nearly falls on a cascade of loose shale, thrashes through an unseen cluster of knee-high sage, is snared on a low cactus, crying out involuntarily as the sharp spines prickle through the sock on his right foot and tattoo a pattern of pain on his ankle—all because he doesn’t always proceed exactly in the dog’s wake, but at times ranges to the left and right of her.

Trust. They are bonding: He has no doubt that their relationship is growing deeper by the day, better by the hour. Yet they are still becoming what they eventually will be to each other, not yet entirely synchronized spirit to spirit. Curtis is reluctant to commit blindly and headlong to his companion’s lead until they have achieved total synergism.

Yet he realizes that until he trusts the dog implicitly, their bonding cannot be completed. Until then, they will be a boy and his dog, a dog and her boy, which is a grand thing, beautiful and true, but not as fine a relationship as that of the cross-species siblings they could become, brother and sister of the heart.

Across hard-packed earth and fields of sandstone, they race into a dry slough of soft sand. The surefooted dog at once adapts to this abrupt change in the terrain, but because Curtis is not fully attuned to his sister-becoming, he blunders after her into the waterless bog without adjusting his pace or step. He sinks to his ankles, is thrown off-balance, and topples forward, imprinting his face in the sand, fortunately quick-thinking enough to close his eyes and his mouth before making a solid but graceless impact.

Raising his face out of its concave image, snorting sand out of his nostrils, blowing a silicate frosting off his lips, blinking grains from his eyelashes, Curtis pushes up onto his knees. If his mother’s spirit abides with him now, she is laughing, worried, and frustrated all at once.

Old Yeller returns to him. He thinks she’s offering the usual doggy commiseration, maybe laughing at him a little, too, but then he realizes that her attention is elsewhere.

The moonless darkness baffles, but the dog is close enough for Curtis to see that she’s interested in the top of the hill that they recently crossed. Raising her snout, she seeks scents that he can’t apprehend. She clenches her muzzle to stop panting, pricks her ears toward whatever sound engages her.

A flux of light throbs through the air beyond the ridge line: the moving searchlight beams reflecting off the pale stone and soil as the SUVs ascend the slope.

Although Curtis can’t prick his ears—one of the drawbacks of being Curtis Hammond instead of being Old Yeller—he follows the dog’s example and holds his breath, the better to detect whatever noise caught her attention. At first he hears only the grumble of the SUVs. . . . Then, in the distance, a flutter of sound arises, faint but unmistakable: helicopter rotors beating the thin desert air.

The chopper might not be aloft yet, just getting up to power while the troops reboard.

Whether already airborne or not, it will be coming. Soon. And if the craft itself doesn’t possess the latest electronic search-and-locate gear, the troops will. Darkness won’t thwart them. They have special ways of seeing that make the night as penetrable as daylight.

Trust. Curtis has no choice now but to put his full faith in the dog. If they are to be free, they will be free only together. Whether they live or die, they will live or die as one. His destiny is hers, and her fate is inseparably twined with his. If she leads him out of this danger or if she leads him off the edge of a high cliff, so be it; even in his dying fall, he will love her, his sister-becoming.

A little moonlight nevertheless would be welcome. Rising out of the distant mountains, great wings of black clouds span the western sky, and continue to unfurl in this direction, as though a vault deep in the earth has cracked open to release a terrible presence that is spreading its dominion over all the world. A generous seasoning of stars salts the clear pant of the sky, but still the desert steadily darkles, minute by minute, deeper than mere night.

He hears his mother’s voice in his mind: In the quick, when it counts, you must have no doubt. Spit out all your doubt, breathe it out, pluck it from your heart, tear it loose from your mind, throw it away, be rid of it. We weren’t born into this universe to doubt. We were born to hope, to love, to live, to learn, to know joy, to have faith that our lives have meaning . . . and to find The Way.

Banishing doubt, seizing hope with a desperation grip, Curtis swallows hard and prepares himself for an exhilarating journey.

Go, pup, he says or only thinks.

She goes.

With no hesitation, determined to make his mother proud, to be daring and courageous, the boy sprints after the dog. Being Curtis Hammond, he isn’t designed for speed as well as Old Yeller is, but she matches her pace to meet his fastest sprint, leading him north into the barrens.

Through darkness he flees, all but blind, not without fear but purged of doubt, across sandstone but also sand, across loose shale, between masses of sage and weather-sculpted thrusts of rock, zigging and zagging, legs reaching for the land ahead, sneakered feet landing with assurance on terrain that had previously been treacherous, arms pump-pump-pumping like the connecting rods on the driving wheels of a locomotive, the dog often visible in front of him, but sometimes seen less than sensed, sometimes seen not at all, but always reappearing, the two of them bonding more intimately the farther they travel, spirit sewn to spirit with the strong thread of Curtis’s reckless trust.

Running with this strange blind exuberance, he loses all sense of distance and time, so he doesn’t know how far they have gone when the quality of the night abruptly changes, one moment marked by a worrisome air of danger and the next moment thick with a terrifying sense of peril. Curtis’s heart, furiously drumming from the physical demands of flight, now booms also with fear. Into the night has entered a threat more ominous than that represented by the officers in the SUVs and the troops in the helicopter. Dog and therefore boy together recognize that they are no longer merely the objects of a feverish search, but again the game in n hunt, the prey of predators, for in the August gloom arise new scents-sounds-pressures-energies that raise the hackles on Old Yeller and pebble-texture the nape of Curtis’s neck. Death is in the desert, striding the sand and sage, stealthy under the stars.

Drawing on reserves that he didn’t know he possessed, the boy runs faster. And the dog. In harmony.

Chapter 27

SNAKE KILLED, mother patched, prayers said, Leilani retired to bed in the blessed dark.

Since the age of three or four, she hadn’t wanted a night-light. As a little little girl, she’d thought that a luminous Donald Duck or a radiant plastic Tweetie Bird would ward off hungry demons and spare her from all sorts of supernatural unpleasantness, but she had soon learned that night-lights were more likely to draw the demon than repel it.

Old Sinsemilla sometimes rambled in the most wee of the wee hours, restless because she craved drugs or because she had stuffed herself with too many drugs, or maybe just because she was a haunted woman. Though she had no respect for her children’s need to sleep, she was inexplicably less inclined to wake them when the room was dark than when a plug-in cartoon character watched over them.

Scooby Doo, Buzz Lightyear, the Lion King, Mickey Mouse— they all drew Sinsemilla into their light. She’d often awakened Luki and Leilani from sound sleep to tell them bedtime stories, and she had seemed to deliver these narratives as much to Scooby or to Buzz as to her children, as though these were not molded-plastic lamps made in Taiwan, but graven images of benign gods that listened and that were moved by her tears.

Tears always punctuated the conclusions of her bedtime stories. When she told fairy tales, the classic yarns on which they were based could be recognized, although she fractured the narratives so badly that they made no sense. Snow White was likely to wind up dwarfless in a carriage that turned into a pumpkin pulled by dragons; and poor Cinderella might dance herself to death in a pair of red shoes while baking blackbirds in a pie for Rumpelstiltskin. Loss and calamity were the lessons of her stories. Sinsemilla’s versions of Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm were deeply disturbing, but some-limes she recounted instead her true-life adventures before Lukipela and Leilani were born, which had more hair-raising effect than any tales ever written about ogres, trolls, and goblins.

So goodbye to Scooby, goodbye to Buzz, to Donald in his sailor suit—and hello, Darkness, my old friend. The only light visible was the ambient suburban glow at the open window, but it didn’t penetrate the bedroom.

No slightest draft sifted through the screen, either, and the hot night was nearly as quiet as it was windless. For a while, no sound disturbed the trailer park except for the steady hum of freeway traffic, but this white noise was so constant and so familiar that you heard it only if you listened for it.

Even by the time the midnight hour had passed, the distant drone of cars and trucks had not lulled Leilani to sleep. Lying with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, she heard the Dodge Durango pull up in front of the house.

The engine had a distinctive timbre that she would never fail to recognize. In this Durango, Luki had been taken away into the Montana mountains on that slate-gray November afternoon when she’d last seen him.

Dr. Doom didn’t slam the driver’s door, but closed it with such care that Leilani could barely detect the discreet sound even though her bedroom window faced the street. Wherever their travels led them, he treated their neighbors with utmost consideration.

Animals elicited his kindness, as well. Whenever he saw a stray dog, Preston always coaxed it to him, checked for a license, and then tracked down its owner if the address was on the collar, regardless of the time and effort involved. Two weeks ago, on a highway in New Mexico, he’d spotted a car-struck cat lying on the shoulder of the road, both rear legs broken, still alive. He carried a veterinary kit for such emergencies, and he tenderly administered an overdose of tranquilizer to that suffering animal. As he’d knelt on the graveled verge, watching the cat slip into sleep and then into death, he’d wept quietly.

He tipped generously in restaurants, too, and always stopped to assist a stranded motorist, and never raised his voice to anyone. Without fail, he would help an arthritic old lady across a busy street—unless he decided to kill her instead.