Free A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain by Adrianne Harun Page A

block away before I truly felt her touch, a compression that reached my heart in stages. Although Tessa had vaulted the half-size cinder-block wall by the railroad tracks and was nearly out of view, I found myself leaping blindly across Fuller to follow her.
    I barely made it. I heard the squeal of tires, a promised acceleration, and with instincts well honed from my battles with my mother’s own terrible driving, I flew across Fuller, tossing the gun duffle ahead of me, and grabbed a lamppost as a car pealed by, its hubcaps scraping the curb. I was making a good show of myself, I was sure, as I wobbled in midair, hugging the metal pole. I caught sight of a Nagle brother, the older one, of course, mocking me from the open window of that flash orange car they were driving that week, a middle finger jabbed toward me.
    The Nagles again: cripes, what hopes their clueless mother must have had for them. She’d even gone and christened them Godfrey and Markus, like they’d be real men one day with permanent postal addresses and government-issued pensions. Markus, given a better model, might have had bullied his way into regular company, causing the usual amount of trouble a big white guy who liked to drink might cause.
    Bur Godfrey . . . Godfrey was something else.
God-Free,
he used to announce himself in grade school, as if declaring his intentions even at that young age. Along the line, he’d transformed into GF, pretending to be like his famous ancestor, the pioneer G. F. MacFlouggle. The current GF was a rager, a criminal to the core. For all anyone knew, G. F. MacFlouggle had been a rager—and a rapist and thief and gambling cheat—as well. The local bands still used “Flouggling,” a curse that Uncle Lud told me covered everything from penny-pinching to pissing in public to stealing a wife. He had a way of showing up when you were most vulnerable, the threat so palpable I still wondered how I’d survived all these years without a real beating, a knife wound, a burning accident. If the devil had Flacker in his pocket, he had GF Nagle on a string and he dangled him continually in our midst.
    Bryan had taken over a little dealing for the Nagles after his friend Dean died. In that last note, left down in the basement with him, Dean had suggested as much, even pointing out that Markus was the easier brother to deal with, and a desperate Bryan grasped the opportunity, only much later realizing the trouble he’d invited was the same trouble that had chased his friend Dean to another world. He started keeping guns, cocked and loaded and pointed down, behind the curtains by both the front and back doors.
    â€œIf they ever come here,” Bryan had told Ursie, “don’t you hesitate.
They
won’t.”
    Meanwhile, he’d kept on with the Nagles. He had to once he started. No way they’d let any useful association slide, and Bryan was desperate for money, of course. Which is how he’d come to Flacker’s in the first place and seen those Magnuson kids. Me, I would have never gone back. Even as I recognized GF, saw the sneer that came whenever GF was ready to go after a “dirty Indian,” I tried to close my eyes. But here was Hana Swann again, that long neck thrown back in laughter, and God help me, I threw the finger right back at GF Nagle.
    Still clinging to the lamppost, I saw the brake lights scream on as if my own chicken heart had finally lit up, and I was wondering how far up that pole I could actually climb as the orange Matador circled back, the door already half open, one fist pushing outward. I hung on tight. GF was going to have to pull me down. And he would have too, I guess, if just then Kenny Dargarh hadn’t driven by in his fire chief’s truck, eyeballing GF and me and the duffle on the sidewalk below me until—and I could see it happen—I changed color before the fire chief’s eyes, shading into a tanned white, and