The Door to Heaven Page 3

  Pascala was busy writing in her journal. She did not notice her momma’s anxiety. The red truck was driving too close. Her momma turned on her blinker and went into the next lane. But the evil spirit inspired the driver of the red truck to go over into the next lane at the same time. It sped closer to the bumper.

  The evil spirit hissed to the driver of the red truck, “Go around this fool.” So the driver swerved from that lane back into the other lane, and then sped up to go around the car. The evil spirit then hissed to the driver, “Show this fool that you have more power.” So the red truck sped past the car and the driver made a rude gesture through the window.

  Pascala was writing and did not see the gesture. Her momma was glad.

  The red truck barreled through the construction zone. The driver did not see the pebble in the road. He ran over it and the pressure from the tire flung it and struck a construction worker in the head. The impact made the worker stumble over and go senseless.

  He fell into the road. Her momma swerved out of the way in time and did not hit him. Pascala was startled by the jolt and she skewed through her words. She looked up and saw her momma swerving into another lane. The car came close to hitting another but her momma veered toward the side of the road. She lost control of the car. It drove through the construction area. Workers dove out of the way. The car was driving straight toward a deep ditch that the workers had dug. Pascala was too stunned to think.

  Ruth her angel whispered to her momma’s guardian angel. And that angel whispered to her momma. She heard the words and she listened. Looking over she saw that Pascala had not buckled her seatbelt. So without thinking, she unbuckled her own and leaned over protectively.

  The car nosedived into the ditch. The impact knocked Pascala out — but she did see for a brief moment a brown door nearby. It had a white frame and a brass doorknob. She thought she saw in the doorknob the face of an old man. The old man’s face was looking at her with an unhidden expression of sorrow and sympathy.

  DOMINIC

  Dominic buried his papa the day he met Eric Flu.

  Many villagers came to his papa’s funeral. Mr. and Mrs. King also came. They were the nearest neighbors a few acres away. They were older and had no children. They didn’t appear to have jobs either. They were always at home. The village priest presided over the wooden casket that Dominic both loved and hated because it was something else his papa had built before he died. It was one more reminder that his papa was gone. He was not going to show Dominic how to build a house, or talk about his favorite characters in his favorite books and was not going to teach him good words for working. “Righty tighty,” he said under his breath. “Lefty loosey.” He wished he had a screwdriver. He wanted to tighten something. All he had was a hammer.

  The casket’s design was so simple that his papa had not sketched it on any wall of the house. It had been made of pinewood. It was oblong. It had wrought iron handles. The lid had to be nailed shut.

  “Doors to Heaven appear when we least expect them,” the priest said.

  Dominic looked up. He had heard the sermon but he was not listening to the priest. He was thinking about sailing out to Duck Island on the raft that he and his papa had built. “Caskets and rafts,” he said to himself. “One keeps you in the earth. The other keeps you away from the world.”

  The funeral rite ended and he nailed down his papa’s coffin lid. He did not feel the blows of the hammer. He was imagining punting to the island over the rough chop of the lake. He watched the coffin being lowered into the earth, but he did not see it. He was picturing himself burying his bare feet in the sand along the shore of the island. The sand of the shore was not like the earth in the grave, Dominic thought. Worms with hungry mouths live in the earth to eat the dead. But the sand along the shoreline seemed like Heaven.

  Villagers queued up and took turns shaking his hand. Each offered him almost the exact same condolence: “I am so sorry for your loss.”

  “Why do they keep saying they’re sorry?” he asked himself. “They didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The mountain’s high-desert forest surrounded them. The air was cold in the shade. Sunlight shone in bright shafts through the canopy. The stereophonic song of hidden mockingbirds seemed a proper requiem for his papa. He turned away from the villagers, away from the funeral, away from the casket sailing away what seemed like the last vestige of his childhood. Now I must be a man, he thought as he looked in the direction of the lake. He was staring in the direction of a nearby thicket although he was not focusing on it. Then in the blur of his steady vision he noticed movement in the thicket. His eyes focused. He saw another boy peeking out from behind a tree. He could not see his whole face and he did not know him. The boy grinned and waved at him. He looked about eleven also. Dominic wanted to go speak with him. But the boy hid behind the tree.

  Then two men came out from where the boy had been. Dominic knew the men. They lived in the next village over. Other villagers called them sextons. He did not know that word, but he knew what these two men did and what they would do. They would hide his papa from him forever.

  That body in the casket is not my father, he thought. He could not forget how the vines of light had wrapped around his papa. If he closed his eyes, he could still picture how his papa had laid back in such happy surrender, letting himself be carried over the threshold of the Door to Heaven. His papa had never let anyone do anything for him before. He had seemed like a child needing his papa’s help up — or like a runner after having run a long race and needing help to cross the finish line — or like both.

  The two sextons with their shovels had already dug the grave. Now they would bury the casket deep in the earth. But first one gave his shovel to Dominic. He took it. The tool was not from his papa’s tool belt. It felt awkward in his hands as he shoveled the first clod of earth into the open mouth of the grave, a six-foot deep throat, a stomach of worms and maggots where his papa’s body would decay.

  “Earth to earth,” he said under his breath.

  The clod struck the casket. The sound was hollow and mute. The casket seemed empty yet full. The sound made him shiver. He thought about the worms in the dirt and how they breathe through moistened skin. Dried worms die from suffocation, he thought as he imagined how the surviving worms would with tender mouths slowly eat down into the earth and then one day through the coffin. He looked at the tree where the boy had been. But the boy had not come from his hiding place. He fought the urge to weep. He wondered how many worms were suffocating now in the open air of his papa’s grave.

  Dominic went home with his mamá. He changed his clothes and went into the backyard. His mamá had not wept that day and he could not understand why. His papa had reminded him to make buñuelos whenever she was sad. Dominic had done so before the funeral, using the recipe his papa had taught him. But she did not eat them. The buñuelos were still on the countertop, lukewarm by now. His mamá was now wandering through the house, sipping a cup of chamomile tea, and pausing sometimes to stare at his papa’s designs on almost every wall. “Cave art,” she had called them. His papa had built many things from his designs. But there were many more plans that he had left unfinished.

  He compared his papa’s design of the raft to the actual raft that they had built together in the backyard. He saw that there was still more work to be done before the raft could be seaworthy. He felt compelled to finish his papa’s work. He did not like not working. Not working gave him time to think about what he was not doing. There was so much that he was not doing. He did not like thinking about the missed opportunities. They were to him countless losses. Thinking about the things that he was not doing made him think of the word inferior. He did not like that word. His mamá used it often as though it were a curse-word. He could not define it according to a dictionary but he understood its meaning the way he understood tools. He could not tell you how one was made, but he could use one well. For him there was always work to do. There was always one job or one task or one tho
ught that bound all his other thoughts together and balanced them. He wanted to think more about what he was doing more than what he was not doing. So he worked more to think less about all the threads of life that made him feel inferior. He combated his mamá’s curse-word with hard work because it meant that he was industrious. It was his papa’s word and he liked that word very much. The word industrious and the word inferior battled inside him most days, and most days the word industrious won, and Dominic was happy then. He did not work to be superior but to be not inferior. He worked to be industrious. He worked to be just like his papa.

  They had already cleft notches at one end of the raft and inset crossbeam support. Now the other side needed the same. So he alone without the power of his papa cleft notches at the other end of the raft. He fastened the crossbeams in place. He screwed in the last plates. He did not forget the catchwords of his papa. And he said them to himself while he worked. “Righty tighty. Lefty loosey.”

  He worked on the raft from the time the funeral ended. He worked in the moonlight throughout the nighttime. He did not have the strength to pull the raft onto the grass so he moored it to the shore. He did not go to his bed in the house. He slept under the stars on top of the raft. He felt like one of his papa’s heroes, Robinson Crusoe or Huckleberry Finn. He was not sure which. Perhaps both. He promised the spirit of his papa that he would read those books soon.

  The maiden voyage to Duck Island began at sunrise. Dominic left his shoes and socks on shore, rolled up his pant legs, and he punted to the island with a long weather beaten branch. The sensation was exhilarating! He could not describe it. Like being a bird. Like being a fish. It was like being in control of his life. Balancing on the raft took some getting used to. The waves were rocky. The wind blowing in his face was cold yet invigorating. The muscles in his arms and shoulders were getting tired, but in time they would grow strong. In time, he knew, he would be as strong as his papa. He could almost see his papa on the raft with him. Then his thoughts turned to the Door to Heaven. He remembered the kindness of the old face in the doorknob. He could not forget how the vines of light carried his papa away. Some part of him could not believe that his papa was gone. He still expected to see him again. His expectation had not had time to be disappointed.

  The raft landed on the shore of the island faster than he expected. He staked the punting branch in the shore and moored the raft to it. Then he walked around the island along the shoreline in his bare feet, keeping the hill to one side and the mainland to the other. He paused a few times to face the mainland. The land stretched along either side of the horizon with evergreen forests of pines and oaks and cedars. Families of mule deer and coyotes and mountain lions and big black bears lived in the forest. He knew he was safe from them. No animals ever came out to the island except him and the mallards. He liked watching the ducks. He liked their velvet green heads and gray bodies and black tail feathers and their pumpkin colored webbed feet.

  He found his way back to the raft. The early morning was over. Midmorning was passing. How long had he been there? Two hours? Four? He did not know. He knew that he should return soon to the mainland. Mamá might be wondering where I am, he thought as he watched his house in the distance on the mainland. He felt guilty because of his hesitancy. The last thing he wanted to do was leave the island. He enjoyed the silence and the solitude. He enjoyed the mallard ducks. He enjoyed the idea sparking in his mind at that moment.

  “What would life be like living all alone on this island?” he asked the mallards that were crowding nearby. Could someone really live on an island like Robinson Crusoe, he wondered. Huckleberry Finn might have. Then he promised himself that he would read both books.

  Dominic stared at the raft for a long time. He knew he should go although he felt he should stay. He knew his raft would obey the drive of his arms and legs punting back to the mainland while he also hoped his legs and arms could not obey his will. He wondered if he had two wills, the will of his heart and the will of his mind, or perhaps it was the will of his soul and the will of his body. He did not know and he did not like to think about things that he could not tighten with his screwdriver or nail down with his hammer. He knew only that he felt divided. I could bind two pieces of wood together with clamps and glue, he thought and he wished that the unspoken life inside him was more like wood. He wished he could glue himself together. He remembered the last time he swam out to the island with his papa. They had eaten squaw bush berries. “Sweet and sour like lemonade,” his papa had said with a mouthful.

  Dominic had the sudden feeling that he was not alone. He had never seen anyone else on the island before, only him and his papa. This was a new feeling — like being afraid of the dark — knowing that no monsters are hiding under the bed yet fearful that they were, despite common sense. Perhaps someone was watching him from the mainland. He would not be able to see them even if they could see him. What if it was his mamá? He had to go back home. But was someone else on the island with him? He stayed on the shore, very near his raft, yet he turned around and searched through the trees surrounding the base of the small mountain in the middle of the island — the witch’s hat, he called it. No one seemed to be there. He looked up and down the witch’s hat. No one was there either. Then he happened to look toward the mouth of a small cave at the mountain’s base. He noticed movement in the squaw bushes near the cave’s mouth. He heard laughter. He stepped a little closer. Then he saw what he feared to see: He was not alone. It was the boy from the funeral! He was hiding in the squaw bushes, watching Dominic through the branches. The boy was picking berries and eating them, gnashing them, grinding them in his teeth. His mouth was smeared with red juice. It looked like blood. It made the boy seem as though he were a hunter and had just gobbled up his prey.

  Dominic had come to think of the island as his. The vast unexplored solitude did not belong to anyone else. Now that he was no longer alone he felt an urge to chase away this trespasser.

  “Where did you come from?” he asked.

  “I was just about to ask you the same question,” the boy said with a mischievous smile.

  “What is your name?”

  “Eric Flu.”

  “Do you live near here?”

  Eric Flu shrugged. “I roam the earth,” he said, “and go back and forth on it.”

  “Is your dad in the army?”

  “My father,” Eric Flu spat, “has always been too militant for me.”

  “Flu is a strange name,” Dominic said.

  “Do you know what your name means?” asked Eric Flu.

  “I didn’t know names had meaning.”

  “Everything has meaning.”

  “What does your name mean?”

  “The name Eric has many meanings.”

  “Like what?”

  “Forever.”

  “And what else?”

  “Alone.”

  “And what else?”

  “Ruler.”

  Dominic thought for a moment. “So what does Flu mean?”

  “Sickness,” said Eric Flu in a slow whisper.

  Eric Flu moved suddenly, almost standing up, although his face was still hidden. He was staring at Dominic through the top of his eyes. Then he hissed like a crocodile. Dominic stepped back in shock. His heels splashed in the tide. He almost jumped onto the raft and punted back to shore. But then Eric Flu’s expression changed. He pointed and laughed at him. “I’m only playing with you,” he said, waving Dominic back over. Then he turned to the squaw bush and picked more berries.

  Cautiously, Dominic went nearer. This was his island, after all — not this trespasser’s, not Eric Flu’s. He had found it first. He would not be chased away. He angled his head to see Eric Flu’s face. But the boy moved as Dominic moved, angling his head away, shifting his body away from him. He is like a mirror image, Dominic thought.

  Eric Flu seemed to be letting him see only a part of his face, not every feature together, not the full picture of who (or what) Dominic was no
w confronting. That didn’t seem normal, but it didn’t seem awkward either. It seemed like school — where Dominic was with others his age, yet was also very, very alone. “Sometimes a name says something about someone,” Eric Flu said, stuffing his mouth full of berries, slathering his face in the blood-red juice.

  “What about at other times?” asked Dominic.

  “It says everything.”

  “What does my name mean?”

  “The lord God heard.”

  “Heard who?”

  “Who named you?”

  “My mamá and papa.”

  “Then you must be an answer to their prayer.”

  “Do you pray?”

  Eric Flu smirked. “I prey.”

  “Does God listen to you?” asked Dominic.

  “Do you listen to God?” asked Eric Flu.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know.”

  “How come you know so much?”

  “How come you don’t know anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you know that Eric is not only what I’m called?”

  “You have many names?”

  “I have one name but I am called many things.”

  “Name one.”

  “Lord.”

  “What kind of name is lord?”

  “It used to be a title.”

  “Of a book?”

  “Of power.”

  “What did you have power over?”

  “Flies.”

  “Did you say lies?”

  “If I did would you believe me?”

  “Do you know what this island is called?” asked Eric Flu.

  “I call it Duck Island,” Dominic said.

  “Other people have called it something else.”

  “Who?”