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

Kenny Dargarh recognized me as Karl and Evie Kreutzer’s son and Lud’s nephew, and then (shading again), more important, he recognized me as the baby cousin of his treasured dispatcher, Trudy Samson, not simply another stoned Indian dangling halfway up a lamppost.
    â€œYou’re screwed, asswipe,” GF was saying, even as Kenny pulled a U-turn and drew his official four-by-four up onto the curb behind the orange Matador. GF took off then, folding himself back into the car as nonchalantly as he could, but not before cutting me one last look.
    â€œI don’t forget,” he said. “I’ll see you again.”
    As if for good measure, he gave me the finger one more time as the Matador took off with a screech of tires. Kenny Dargarh grimaced. He’d had his own run-ins with the Nagles, who even on these bone-dry days threw lit cigarettes out car windows and trampled fire-zone blockades. Kenny sent me a quick, beleaguered wave and lingered by the curb with his windows open, listening to a garbled radio transmission until that Matador was well away and I’d jumped back to the sidewalk and managed my own awkward nod.
    Despite Kenny’s presence, I cast one more look back in the direction in which Tessa had vanished, my heart in tatters, before shouldering the duffle and walking the blocks from Fuller to Lamplight Hill, wishing as always that I had a car of my own. My mother seemed to believe that she was saving me from certain death by keeping me afoot, conveniently putting out of mind the fact that I often cadged rides with drivers like Bryan, whose vehicles had damaged souls of their own, demented by bad roads and worse weather, and were given to startling lapses or lunges that provoked continual near-misses. And if I complained aloud about the boggling inconvenience of not having a car to use, she might make an absurd offer.
    â€œI’ll take you,” she’d say without a hint of sarcasm, as if I’d arrive at a party down some deserted lane with my mum, whose own driving skills could be judged by the three banged-up fenders on our old maroon station wagon. The back door was almost fully staved in too. Only the fourth fender appeared untouched. A still-pristine radiant blue, it had only recently replaced the worst of them, so bent up, my mother couldn’t fully turn the wheel.
    Bryan long ago declared he couldn’t let me be such a pussy, and he’d set out to teach me how to drive, but he soon tired of being a passenger in his own lurching truck and he, too, rapidly transformed into an old auntie, chiding me about clutches and gear-grinding until we were both happy to go back to the way it was. In a pinch—meaning if Bryan ever was so blind drunk he couldn’t drive—I could theoretically take over now, or so we told ourselves.
    At home, I kicked off my dust-spattered sneakers behind the back door, emptied the duffle and shoved it behind the boots, pushed the guns back up on the high shelf where my father kept them, and nudged a box of pellets back into the holding cupboard’s sticky bottom drawer. For a moment I thought again of that golden light that had pursued us down the logging road and, dazed, I lingered in the utility room. The heated scent of the marten must have rubbed right into my fingertips, because as I pushed back my hair, damp from my long walk up the hill, the spicy scent of fur and blood nearly became visible; it was that sudden and strong. Right in front of me, my father’s chainsaw lay on the middle shelf, a reminder that I needed to sharpen it before he arrived home next month from his work up on the pipeline, and idly, I began to run my finger along the blade’s outside edge, remembering Hana Swann’s lean white forearm balanced against the gun. I was just thinking “sticky” when I noticed the thin ridge of blood on my fingertips and felt the sting. At the same moment, all four dogs began the joyful howls that