The Five Gates of Hell (28 page)

‘You going to work on the beaches?'

‘I think so.' He pushed a bead around on the end of his finger. ‘What could be better than saving people's lives?'

She recognised her own line and smiled.

He knew how their voices would sound from above. The hum of a plucked string. Like warmth, if you could hear such a thing.

‘I wish –'

‘What?'

He wished he could explain about Donald. But he knew she'd cut him off. That's old history, she'd say. That's cats for drowning. In any case, at some deeper level, perhaps she already understood. And in the future would remember.

He shook his head. ‘Nothing.'

Lumberjack's paw tapped the floor. Lumberjack was dreaming. Once, last fall, he'd walked Lumberjack to the pine forest in the next valley. Lumberjack had started barking and then, just as abruptly, stopped again, and in the silence he'd heard a tree come down. Lumberjack had looked up at him, as if for approval, his tongue dangling from his jaws. No wonder there were no trees left standing round the farm. Lumberjack had sawed them all down with his voice. And now he was dreaming, dreaming of some great forest stretching out in front of him …

India-May lit a joint. ‘When I first met you, in that bar, you were all cut out round the edges, like something out of a cereal packet that
doesn't stand up when you've made it.' She touched the tip of her joint to the ashtray and smiled. ‘You seemed, I don't know, kind of brave, somehow.'

This woman, she was so vague, so blind. But she could surprise you with moments of sharpness. She was like a needle in long grass, a knife in fog.

The next morning he wheeled his bike out of the barn and into the winter sunshine. Lumberjack lay panting in the dirt beside him while he changed the oil, checked the tyre-pressures, adjusted the tension of the chain. In an hour he was ready, his map taped to the gas tank, his few possessions strapped on the seat behind him. India-May came outside to wave goodbye. She seemed to be frowning, but it was probably just a bad hangover and the white sun in her eyes. His rear wheel spun on the loose stones, searching for grip, then he pulled away. Lumberjack came leaping around his front wheel, and he had to go slow. As he topped the rise he let out the throttle. But Lumberjack was running alongside him now, a serious expression on his face, as if he saw this as a real test of stamina.

‘Go back,' Nathan shouted, ‘go back,' and he pointed behind him. But Lumberjack just leapt at his outstretched hand. It was part of the game.

After three miles Nathan had to turn round and ride all the way home again. India-May locked Lumberjack inside the house. As Nathan pulled away for the second time he could hear Lumberjack in the kitchen, frantically sawing the legs off tables and chairs. Somehow that was worse than anything.

But he rode hard to the end of the track and when he reached Baby Boy's white cross he hesitated, then he turned right, into the mountains, something that he'd never done before.

Jed drove north to begin with, his wrist a rectangle of heat and all that numbness just behind his eyes, but after two days the roads drew him inland, over high mountains, and soon he was heading due west. The mountains lay down, sprawled on the land like tired dogs. Then there were no mountains at all. Sometimes he saw a row of trees on the horizon. In the heat-haze they were saints walking on water, they didn't seem to touch the ground at all. Towards nightfall the sun balanced on the end of the road and then not even his special lenses helped. He'd be half blind by the time he stopped for sleep, his vision clunking with green and purple balls. In the mornings, standing in some motel parking-lot, the air scorched his lungs, it was like breathing the air above a fire. He drove with the windows shut. It was cooler. Skulls and dust outside. Tornadoes that spun across the blue sky like vases thrown on some mad potter's wheel. The weather was like a scourge, the land could kill you. Out here, on the desert's edge, penance could be done. Out here he could spend his years of exile.

The first time he drove into Adam's Creek he saw a picture of Creed in a store window and he stabbed the brake. The car slewed. A truck filled his mirror and overflowed. A sneezing of brakes, a clash of gears, and it lumbered past, the driver glaring down, fingers twitching and a black hole for a mouth. It wasn't Creed in the window, after all, it was just some advert for brilliantine, but his heart didn't know the difference and he sat there until it slowed.

Two miles out of town he pulled into a shallow ditch and switched the engine off. Looking around, he saw that he'd parked outside a graveyard. There was no church. Only a tin shelter with three walls and a bench. A few gaunt trees. Some rocks. It was the kind of place where you waited for a bus that never came.

He left his car and moved through the yellow grass, his arms clutched across his chest. He felt the inch of bare skin above his socks as two cold metal bands. He'd never thought that you could shiver in a desert, but it was late afternoon and the sun had fallen behind the
hills and a chill wind cut across the graves. The wind dropped once, and he watched in astonishment as flies landed on his face and hands in clots. Then the wind rose again and plucked his top hat off his head and sent it bowling among the stones. He'd been sitting in the car so long, it was hard for him to run. His ankles clicked, his knees snapped, but he was after it, past crosses, round tombs, over mounds. Families passed beneath his feet, and he caught glimpses of their tragedies: TREASURED DAUGHTER. OUR DEAR BABIES. BELOVED WIFE. Only two days before he'd called his mother from a pay-phone on the highway. When she answered, he just listened.

‘Hello?' she said. ‘Who's this?'

He waited.

‘That you, Henry?' she said.

So. It was Henry now.

‘Henry?' she said, raising her voice now. ‘Is that you?'

He put the phone down. He didn't exist for her. Henry existed (whoever Henry was). But he didn't. That was the truth.

His BELOVED MOTHER.

‘Stop,' he shouted at his hat. ‘Stop,' he shouted. ‘Wait for me.'

All the biggest words rose off the stones towards him: mother, love, father, memory, son, heaven. He felt nothing. He was nobody his mother knew, and there were no beloveds. He caught his hat and put it on.

He was so cold when he climbed back into the car, his lips mauve in the mirror, his teeth drumming in his head. All week he'd been trying not to think. He'd wanted to drive until anything he remembered would seem as if it had happened to someone else. A movie, another person's memory, the words of a song. And finally, that afternoon in the graveyard, he knew the door had slammed on his life and the door was one of those big silver refrigerator doors and he saw his life hanging behind that door like meat. It no longer felt like a life. His or anyone else's.

He fumbled the key into the ignition with numb fingers. Once the engine caught, he turned the car round and drove back into Adam's Creek, population 2,200, elevation 21 metres.

When he arrived he found that he'd already become something of a legend. The landlord of the Commercial Hotel gave him a nod as he walked through the door. ‘How are you doing?'

Jed nodded. ‘Not bad. You?'

The landlord nodded. ‘Saw you earlier.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Yeah. You were the one who braked on Main Street. Denny Buder nearly crushed you flat.' The landlord was smiling, his face broad and red and open.

Strange to be seeing still things, Jed thought. He was used to white lines, asphalt, trees. All moving. Towards and past. Faces didn't do that. They just hung in front of you, like lamps.

He blinked. ‘You got a room?'

‘We got single rooms. Seven dollars a night.' The landlord licked his thumb and flicked the register open. ‘You going to be staying long?'

‘I don't know yet. A couple of nights, maybe.'

‘Names's Wayne,' the landlord said. Jed stuck a hand out.

‘Jed,' he said. ‘Jed Morgan.'

He paid cash for the room.

‘Yeah,' Wayne said, ‘just about everyone must've saw you this morning. Not often you get someone braking like that on Main Street. And wearing a hat like that and all. Thought you were selling bibles, some of them did.'

When Jed said nothing, Wayne said, ‘You don't sell bibles, do you?'

Jed shook his head slowly. ‘No, I don't.'

‘So what do you do then?'

Jed couldn't figure out why, but he didn't mind the landlord's curiosity. In other towns he'd left way before the question mark, his Coke still fizzing at the top of the glass. Now it seemed like a relief to be talking, a novelty, a test of wit.

‘I used to work back east,' he said. ‘Got laid off. Thought I'd take a trip.'

‘You got here a week ago, you'd've cooked.'

‘Still pretty hot.'

‘You did right coming through Adam's Creek,' Wayne said. ‘It gets a bit rough round here from time to time, there's a power station out past the ridge and the boys do their drinking here, but mosdy we're pretty friendly.'

Rough. Jed smiled. They didn't know what rough was.

Wayne showed him to a room on the first floor, at the front of the building. A cracked sink, an iron bed. When Jed opened the wardrobe, the empty hangers jangled like wind-chimes. It was a nice illusion. Not even the faintest of breezes here. The window looked out on to a wide wooden verandah with a few deadbeat chairs and a metal table that took one leg off the ground when you leaned on it.

‘Bibles,' he muttered.

From the verandah you looked down on Main Street, with its asphalt all cracked and splintered by the heat. A high wire-mesh fence divided the street from the railway tracks beyond. The line wasn't used much any more, Wayne had told him. Only for taking coal from the hills in the south to the power station just over the ridge. The yard was a desert of flint chips and rolling stock that was almost extinct. The signal box had shed its paint. Weeds grew, mauve and yellow, between the rails.

He lay down on his bed that first night, his hands folded on his chest, his boots still on. He'd been driving for days, he'd forgotten how many, and he was tired of the white lines painted down the middle of the highway, he was tired to the centre of his bones. The trouble was, once you'd been driving for that long, you drove right through your tiredness and out into a dreamland where only the road was moving. He'd driven into Adam's Creek the same way he'd driven into a hundred other small towns. But he'd braked suddenly, and broken the momentum. He'd looked round and it had seemed like just about the first place he'd seen, and some part of him deep down had said: It's got to be somewhere, why not here? After all, he couldn't go on driving for ever, he'd just drive straight into another ocean, and that was what he was trying to get away from, wasn't it, the ocean?

At nine o'clock he left his room and went down to the bar. Wayne drew him a beer. ‘Welcome to Adam's Creek.' Wayne turned to the two men at the bar. ‘One creek that never runs dry, eh, boys?' The laughter that followed was routine. The echo of a million other nights.

Jed hadn't drunk beer since the night he met Sharon, but he didn't flinch. He raised his glass. ‘It's good to be here, Wayne,' he said, and swallowed half of it before he put it down. He made that noise that men who drink beer make, and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist.

One of the two men leaned over. ‘So where's all the bibles then?'

‘Bibles?' Jed said. ‘What bibles?'

‘Ain't you selling bibles?' The man had slack cheeks that shook like jelly when he spoke.

Jed smiled and took a risk. ‘I'd sell my sister first.'

Wayne spluttered. He turned and yelled to the woman who was polishing a glass at the other end of the bar. ‘Did you hear that, Linda? He'd sell his sister first.'

Linda took one look at Jed and went on polishing the glass. ‘Wouldn't fetch much by the look of it.'

Jed raised a grin. ‘What are you drinking, Linda?'

‘I'll have a beer,' she said.

He got drunk that night, though not as drunk as he pretended to be. He was a man drowning his sorrows, he'd decided. He was a man drinking to forget. And slowly he let his sorrows spill. He'd seen a hundred funerals. He knew how it was done. Six or seven drinks inside him, he leaned on the bar. ‘I just want to forget her, Wayne.'

‘Who's that, Jed?'

‘My wife.'

You couldn't show up in a place like Adam's Creek without a few questions being asked, Jed knew that, so he'd dreamed up a story. He'd got the idea from a song he'd heard on the radio while he was driving. It was about a wife who'd cheated on her husband, she'd left him for his best friend, and now the man was on the road trying to mend his broken heart. To him it sounded ridiculous, but he thought it was the kind of lie that people might believe. People like feeling pity for people, it makes them feel lucky. Well, he was going to give them the chance, wasn't he? After being the man who'd sell his sister, he was about to become the man who'd lost his wife.

‘She made a fool of me, Wayne,' he said. ‘I just want to forget the whole damn thing.'

‘You go ahead,' Wayne said. ‘She wasn't worth it. You just go right ahead and forget her.'

And because Jed couldn't picture the wife who was supposed to have left him, because he had no idea what she looked like, he found himself believing that he was doing a pretty good job.

When, just before closing, Wayne said, ‘So what's with the top hat, Jed?' Jed knew what the answer was, and he was drunk enough to carry it off.

Slowly he removed the hat and slowly he looked down at it, his vision blurred by alcohol, but for all anyone knew it could have been tears. ‘This hat?' he said. ‘This is the hat I wore to my wedding.'