The Door to Heaven Read online

  DOMINIC

  Dominic was dreaming of the Door to Heaven. The old face in the doorknob was watching him while he walked around the doorframe. There was no doorknob on the other side, no old face still looking at him, just the same brown wood that was neither shiny nor shabby, but old and smooth and well loved. Then he returned to the front. The old face smiled at him with a kind and welcoming expression. Leaning closer to the Door to Heaven, Dominic pressed his ear against the wood. He was not sure what he heard coming through it. The noise sort of sounded like thunder, yet more like a powerful voice speaking. He had never heard such power and authority.

  He stepped away from the Door. The white frame then began to divide and fold over itself. Then it turned into arms and hands and legs and feet. The wood of the door became the body of a boy. The boy looked somewhat like Dominic. But the boy did not have a face and the emptiness of his face seemed to be staring at Dominic. The doorknob was in the middle of the boy like a buckle. The old face was still smiling at Dominic. The boy took the doorknob off his middle and set it in the center of his face. The doorknob melted into two eyes and a nose and a mouth. Then the boy turned around and stood for a long time with his back to Dominic. He covered his mouth with his hands. His shoulders and neck bunched together. His body shook with laughter. Dominic thought the laughter sounded like sickness. He went closer to the boy. The boy lowered his hands to his side. Dominic reached out to touch him on the shoulder. The boy straightened. Dominic glanced at the boy’s hands. The boy was clenching and unclenching his fists. Dripping from his hands was the squaw bush berry’s red juice. Or is that blood, Dominic wondered. Then the boy turned his head slowly and glared at him from over his shoulder. He grinned. Dominic could not see his face, but he knew those eyes — they were the same eyes that had looked at him from behind the tree at his papa’s funeral, the same eyes that had looked at him through the branches of the squaw bush on Duck Island. “Eric Flu,” he whispered, backing away from the boy who had charged at him like a bull and attacked him near the island’s cave. Eric Flu whirled around. Hiding his face behind his hands, he stared at Dominic from between the divide of his fingers. Red juice splattered all over his cheeks and chin. He laughed at Dominic. The laughter was the gurgle and gasp of drowning. Red juice spat from his mouth. Red saliva ran in lines like veins from his teeth. Is that red juice, or is it blood, Dominic wondered. He was not sure why he had the taste of copper on his tongue and in his throat.

  * * *

  Dominic’s unconscious body was found later that night by his neighbor. Mr. King had swum out to the island with a flashlight in his teeth and his yellow Labrador retriever paddling beside him. Dominic was lying unconscious in the cave. Mr. King lifted him and set him on the raft and punted back to the mainland.

  He awoke in his room the next morning. He wondered where his papa was and he was excited about finishing the raft and punting out to the island. Then he remembered the day before, the funeral and the island and Eric Flu, all of it. A great sadness came over him. His chest began to hurt. He had never had a broken heart but the pressure on his chest felt like something was crushing him.

  His mamá was not there. But Mrs. King was. He did not know her age and he thought of Mr. and Mrs. King simply as “old.” He did not know his own grandparents because his papa’s parents had passed away and his mamá’s parents refused to leave Mexico, but he thought that the Kings were what grandparents must be like. Now in a rocking chair that had been in the living room, Mrs. King was absentmindedly rocking back and forth while focusing on crocheting a sweater for Mr. King. Her silver hair was mussed. Her eyes looked tired behind her half moon spectacles. Glancing up she noticed that he was awake.

  “Welcome back,” she said, smiling kindly.

  His mamá waited until Mr. and Mrs. King left. Then she released the fullness of her anger. He had never seen her so upset. She would speak to him, yet not with him: He had gone out to the island on the raft, he had sailed over La Muerta, he had hurt himself. It was a good thing that Mr. King had seen him punting out to the island or else no one would have known where he was when he did not return home. “What if you had died?” she demanded in her thick Mexican accent.

  “Then where would I be with a dead husband and a dead son?”

  His mamá said that he would never go back to the island. He was the man of the house now, he had more responsibilities, and he had to do the work of a man.

  “Should I build the designs on the walls papa left unfinished?” he asked her.

  The question seemed to make his mamá’s eyes narrow with fury, made her mouth sneer with such contempt at the absurdity of the idea. She shouted louder than before in the rapid Spanish that he did not understand. She stomped around the house in her bare feet. She would make him sink the raft. He begged her to change her mind. She shouted even louder. He offered to make her buñuelos. She bared her teeth like a growling wolf.

  “You have a head full of rocks!” she snapped.

  “Better than a heart of stone,” he said beneath his breath.

  That night Dominic snuck from his house with a flashlight and punted back out to the island. The work of punting was more difficult than the day before. Winter was coming. The wind was very cold across the surface of the lake. The waves were choppy. His hands felt frozen. The full moon shone on the lake. The light glinted like tinsel on the waves. The treetops in the forests along the mainland were silvery but the bases were shadowed. The high hill of the island glowed with a pale light. The shadows in its crevasses looked darker. The whole scene seemed magical. But he did not believe in magic. He believed in his papa’s hammer. My hammer now, he thought. He believed in his screw-driver. My tools and my tool belt and my work now, he thought. He believed in working with his hands. He believed in God in the way he believed that the earth revolved around the sun.

  Dominic moored the raft on shore to the punt pole. He called for Eric Flu in a soft voice although he knew his mamá could not hear him. He hoped the boy was gone. He hoped his mamá would not find out that he had snuck away. He just wanted to be left alone on the island, in the cave with the ancient art depicting life and death and the struggle to balance both. Mallards were clustered together along the shoreline. He walked around them. Some ruffled their feathers, others turned their heads, but none rose from their resting places. He called for Eric Flu again. No answer came back. But that does not mean anything, Dominic thought and he remembered how the boy liked to hide and attack like a guerrilla soldier.

  He had brought a flashlight. He turned it on now and he swung its light along the ground searching for footprints. He saw mallard prints and his own footprints. He saw larger footprints and paw-prints, and he knew that those had come from Mr. King and his yellow lab. Eric Flu had been wearing shoes but they had not left any tracks in the sand. Not seeing Eric Flu’s footprints gave him the chills more than if he had seen them.

  Dominic hurried from the shore to the cave. Going in, he shone his flashlight on the wall. He studied the ancient painting of the two men wrestling together. One was light. The other was dark. He liked the lighter figure. The darker one looked a little too crooked. The sight made him shiver again.

  “Eric Flu, who are you?” he asked the dark figure.

  He punted back across the lake toward an inlet where juniper shrubs grew. He would hide the raft behind the foliage. His mamá never went into the woods. She was too afraid of the foxes and the bears and the mountain lions. She would never find the raft.

  “And I’ll never sink it,” he said to the wind.

  He hid the raft well, covering it with fallen branches and leaves. Few people lived around the lake then and fewer people sailed over it. There was not a house around for miles. He had found a good hiding place. No one would find the raft, no one would make him sink it now, and no one would take away the last work his papa had built.

  He went back to his house along the shoreline. He was fascinated by the moonlight on the water, but mountain lions hu
nted at that time, and he had to be wary of the nighttime glow of their predatory eyes. He might see one crouching, but he would probably not see it charging toward him until it was much too late. A cold wind blew against him. It went from the forest to the lake. No predator would catch his scent. He breathed easy. He did not fear death as much as he feared dying. For a moment, he thought of Eric Flu.

  Dominic stole back into his house and slipped into his bed. His mamá would never find out. She would never find the raft. He did not lay awake for long before he fell asleep. His mind was making plans while he lay and while he slept. He would return to the island — that he knew. He would not make it fit to his needs. He would adapt to it. He would live off the land. Whatever it gave him, he would eat. Whatever it had, he would build with. He would use the designs his papa had sketched on the walls of the house. He would finish his papa’s work. He would give thanks to God for each gift, for the food and the wood, and also for the silence and the solitude.

  His mamá never cried after the funeral. She did not eat the buñuelos he had made. Mold grew over them after a week. Dominic had to throw them away. He wondered if he had ruined the recipe. Soon she stopped looking at his papa’s designs on the walls. She had begun whispering to herself in Spanish more and more. Dominic could only understand a few words. He felt he understood his mamá less and less. She was thinking about dyeing her hair blonde.

  Time had to pass before his mamá started seeming kinder to him. She would run her hands through his hair and scratch his scalp with her long fingernails. She would look him in the eyes and smile and her smile seemed sincere. She would call him, “Hijo mio,” yet she would speak English only to shopkeepers and villagers. She would often look down at her shoes and hands but she would never look at the house. “It is like looking at a museum of your papa’s life,” she would say. She was trying to move on from feeling mournful to feeling normal.

  His mamá called her family in Mexico. Dominic only caught a few of the fast short foreign phrases. “Mami, te echo de menos… Deseo trasladar… Desprecio a esta casa…” The conversation ended when his mamá slammed down the telephone. It fell and broke on the floor. She could not move back across the border and live with her family because Dominic was a pocho and they refused to know him. She wept for days afterward. He made more buñuelos.

  Dominic’s papa had built his house long before Dominic was born. It was the first house built around the lake. Mr. and Mrs. King’s house had been the second. They had asked his papa to build it for them, and he sketched a simple design of their house on a wall in the attic. Official blueprints would come later. Dominic had seen the sketch many times. He felt he knew Mr. and Mrs. King’s house from the inside out although he had only been in there a few times.

  There was no design of his house on any wall. He surmised his papa must have designed the house on another wall in another house. So he made a sketch of his house on one of the walls in his bedroom. He drew the way his papa used to draw. He would build the way his papa used to build. He would make a home for himself. He pitied his mamá because she could not move back across the border to be with her family, but he was glad that she would not take him from his house to another house made by someone else’s papa.

  Dominic tried to divide his time the way his papa had done. In the mornings before school he worked on the house, taking care of little maintenance projects. He began by working on the roof above the bathroom. Then he worked under the kitchen sink. After that he worked on the porch, then the inside stairwell, and then anything else he could find that he felt needed fixing. Sometimes he worked because not working was more exhausting. He repeated the lessons his papa had taught him until he knew them by heart and could teach them himself. He never forgot his papa’s catchwords for tightening screws, and in time the words became his working song. “Righty tighty, lefty loosy” became as common to him as the folk song I've Been Working on the Railroad. Dominic did not use the electric hand drills that were popular with other millwrights. He preferred to tighten screws with his hands gripping the screwdriver. He enjoyed feeling the metal drive down into the wood. His arm muscles became more defined in time. Tight wood groaned like unhappy people. He would talk to his projects as if they were alive: “Don’t worry. I’m almost done. Soon you will have a new screw in you and you will feel better.” He felt good after he tightened a screw. He felt safe. He felt in control.

  The day came when Dominic did not find any more work around the house. He searched for other projects with his screwdriver in his back pocket. But there were none. His house was tight as a drum. It almost maintained itself. He had made his home an image and likeness of himself. Then he wandered outside in his backyard. It was midafternoon. Dragonflies were zipping around the edge of the lake. One landed on the low-hanging branch of an old juniper tree. A feeling came to him that he had forgotten something. What was it? He stared at the dragonfly on the juniper tree, watching it slowly flex its wings. He walked closer to it until it zipped from the branch back out across the surface of the lake — toward the inlet where he had hidden his raft.

  “The raft!” he exclaimed. “How could I’ve forgotten about it?”

  Hurrying through the woods to the inlet, he was glad to find the raft still safely hidden in the juniper shrubs. Juniper nettles and royal blue berries covered the raft. How much time had passed since he had been there? He cleared off the raft and punted out to Duck Island. The work was difficult, but not as much as before. His own work on his house had made him stronger. Mooring the raft to the shore, Dominic walked around the island and watched the mallards watching him. They had forgotten him. He decided that he must bring bread next time and feed them. Then they will love me again, he thought. He went to the cave and plucked squaw bush berries and ate them. The taste still made him pucker but less so than before. Their sourness tasted sweet and their sweetness tasted sour. He wished his papa were there with him.

  Dominic entered the cave. He ran his fingers along the cool walls. He looked at the primeval picture with the light and dark figures struggling against each other. He knelt and studied the rocks speckled in ancient fingerprints. His papa’s prints were also there. He studied his own fingers. The tips were slathered in red berry juice. He pressed his fingers against the rock. The ancient fingerprints had faded to a brown color. His papa’s fingerprints had faded to a rust color. But his own smaller fingerprints were red and vibrant. Dominic smiled, but then he frowned. His papa’s fingerprints were much larger than his own. And he wondered when he would grow bigger and stronger like his papa. He closed his eyes and he breathed in the clean scent of the cave. He listened. Sound was different in the cave than in other places. He made clucking noises with his tongue and he listened to the quick echoes. He smiled and laughed. Silence seemed to swallow every sound. He felt swallowed in the cave. He imagined that he was inside the belly of a whale and he suspected that this was how a child must feel in the womb.

  Dominic returned to the mainland just before suppertime. He hid the raft in the inlet behind the juniper shrubs and he walked back to his house along the shoreline without listening to the forest. He watched the sun setting behind the island and shining deep gold rays through thick pink clouds in the blue sky. He wondered if Heaven could look that beautiful. He thought about what time might be like in Heaven. He knew that Heaven was eternal, but he did not understand eternity. He wondered if time was forever. And he wondered if forever was time. He imagined his papa being in Heaven for all eternity and he wondered if his papa was bored. He hoped his papa had walls to sketch on and projects to build. Thinking about forever was the only thing that really scared him. He could not imagine himself not doing anything forever. He pictured himself in Heaven kneeling on a cloud with bright white wings. What would I do with all that time, he thought. Are there games and puzzles in Heaven? Are there toys or tools? Or is there every tool and toy and trade that has ever been since the end of nothing and the beginning of everything else? And would that include the end of e
verything too? Why would there be tools since Heaven would never break? The more he thought, the more uncomfortable he felt. And the more uncomfortable he felt, the more he wished he had a reason to tighten a screw.

  Dominic came home to groups of people gathered together on his front lawn. The dining table and other tables from his house were lined along the driveway with villagers and strangers huddled over them, talking and laughing, and rifling through the things on the tabletops. Some tables had clothes, others had books, most had tools. But everything on every table had once belonged to Dominic’s papa. A cardboard sign by the driveway had words written in his mamá’s handwriting. Dominic read the words aloud in astonished disbelief: Garage Sale. His mamá had not told him about this. Fear overcame him for a moment. He started to tremble. His eyes almost began to water. But then his fear suddenly turned into the fuel of the fire of his anger. And he would make the earth tremble with his wrath.

  Dominic saw his mamá holding up his papa’s tools, showing them to Mr. King. He pushed his way through the crowd and went to his mamá to show her his anger. She gestured for him to wait. Then she continued her conversation with Mr. King. Dominic stood stunned for a moment. Then he roamed the garage sale with a pain like a rock sitting deep in his stomach. He likened the people to circling vultures and then he asked God to forgive his bad thoughts. He did not know how much had been sold. Some tables were almost empty. The front yard had become a collection of random things that his papa had worn or used or forgotten about. His eyes stung. He was tempted to scream at the top of his lungs. He needed something to fix in the house.