She watched with the pensiveness of one accepting the lockdown of a slow journey while other events ran at full speed. The train rumbled on, finally approaching its maximum velocity. Cadence opened one of her grandfather’s journals, one she had packed after thumbing through it and finding that a part of it had been written on a train. Her attention was diverted, though, with a whoosh of air compression. Looking up, she saw a long row of salvaged doors riffling by, very close by the train. Hundreds of doors, it seemed, were all nailed side by side to make an endless color-chip fence, a bright sampler book of discarded gates to unknown lives.
As she watched the kaleidoscope of doors pass by, she thought of the many houses she had lived in. All the bedrooms and bathrooms … and back doors.
The procession ended abruptly with a de-whoosh and a return to slightly more open spaces. She thumbed through the journal, put a bookmark at one spot, and fell into a ragged, dreamless sleep.
An unwelcome consciousness came to her, stiff and crumpled. Bleary, gray, morning light fused with atonal flatness so that all land and sky were a single-hued haze. The Great Salt Lake stretched off to the north. A porter came by with coffee. It was hot and cheap and surprisingly good. She set it on the next seat’s tray table and opened the journal again. Each page or so had a heading and entries in her grandfather’s jittery script, etched with different instruments — pencils, exhausted Bics, fine-lined points of apparent pedigree. Finally she found the entry she was looking for:
Lakeside Ballroom, June 12 ’74
Hopped off the D&RGW last night. Slept in dry culvert on the ROW. Saw strange building mile or so off toward the lake. Went over and found huge abandoned resort and ballroom, maybe from the 1920s. Then at the shoreline, now stranded half mile inland. Looks funny there, standing on huge pilings. 20 foot ceilings, 3 stories. Grand staircase all gray and forlorn and crusted and scary as hell. Easy to get lost in there. Always sounds going on. Birds fluttering in and out. Wind moving non-stop, like an off-key organ with only a few pipes left. Echoing so the sound is amplified. Old boards clapping somewhere in the wind. Put it all together and it’s like ghost music resonating eternally from past revelry.
Too sad for me. I hoofed back out and caught this westbound. Am huddled inside a firewood boxcar now. Snug here, writing by slats of light. Vienna sausage for lunch.
She watched the lakebed stretch away as minutes and miles clacked by. There! That had to be it! Coming up and passing by in the distance was a pile of burned timbers and a high framework of tottered concrete beams. Those gray-black remnants had to be the ruins of the Saltair Pavilion. It was used as a set in the 1965 cult film
Her mother’s voice came to her, timbre-perfect: “Two generations of romantic misfits. That’s the men in this family!” That voice was imbued with yearning for a touch of normalcy that marriage never dealt her.
The voice echoed away as the train wailed out a long whistle, decelerating to the station stop in Salt Lake.
She reopened her grandfather’s journal at a bookmark:
Montana summertime with high cumulus ranges and big blue-sky days to knock your eyes out. I’m looking at this good luck charm given to me this week. I did a favor for a man who needed help. The favor’s not important now, though it was important to him. He searched me out and said maybe he’d give me a blanket, but that was too easy. Then he said maybe a beaver skin, which could have magic aplenty but was too heavy to lug around. Then he said he had something that was just right. He knew, he said, because his father was a shaman. He’d been off the rez too long, but he said he still knew what it was all about. So he gave me this thing. Said it was good luck if I used it, but serious back luck if I didn’t use it and keep it sacred. “Not like rabbits’ feet where you can take em’ or leave em’. You got to be one with this,” he said.
I told him I wanted to give it back to him, but he said that was also bad luck.
Then he leaned very close. “Not only do you got to use it, you got to change your ways.” I dreaded what he was gonna say next. “Your spirit is lost. You got to quit wandering like a man with no home.”
Maybe someday I will. But that’s a scarier thought than hitching rides right now. I’ll keep this thing safe and maybe pass it on. If I ever get home again, that is.
Anyway, I’m sitting in a truck stop, just finished eating lemon pie, and I’m looking this thing over. It looks kinda special. It’s ivory and it’s old. Looks like a tooth from a giant bear maybe, back when bears were twice as big as they are now. Maybe like Alaskan bears in the museum except beefed up even more. There’s a spot for a hole to be drilled and a key chain, if I had any keys. I’ll keep it and hope my luck doesn’t sour. I sure as hell can’t let go of it now. I guess whoever has it has to figure out the truth it’s trying to say. Even if, like me, they know bad luck is their own damn fault.
Cadence looked into the mirror of the train window and studied the part of her that were her dad’s features. His, of course, were an echo of the man whose journal she held. She unzipped a pocket on her backpack and took out a tinkling assemblage of keys and chains and little gewgaws, all of it anchored by a polished tooth four inches long and punctured by a hole with a small welded chain, looped though it.
A talisman with interrupted history.
Up till this moment, all she knew was that it had been her father’s. He used it for his truck key, but couldn’t find it that fateful day, so he grabbed the spare off the keyhook. The fire’s orange glow was already spilling over the canyon rim and sending Halloween shadows through the house as he gunned the truck and took off. She knew the story of the fire line and where it happened. She still had videotape of the news reports, including interviews with firefighters who had been there. One of them even spoke at the funeral.
Three years later she asked that man to tell her what really happened. He told her there were two dozen men and three pumper trucks lined up at the narrows at Old Topanga Canyon Road where a cluster of cabins stood. The canyon walls were steep, closing almost to creek side. The fire had already crested behind them so they couldn’t retreat more than a half mile. The fire crew chief said, “This is where we’ll fight.”
The fire was coming fast, the wind shifting and blowing its furnace-breath down the narrow sandstone corridor into their faces. Still unseen, the red monster stalked up around the canyon bend, its shadows dancing clear up the orange-lit walls. Then it turned the corner. It bellowed and raged like a furious living thing, then gathered force and marched forward.
They’d cut a line up the canyon sides, their fire hoses quickly draining a rubber dam placed in the creek. Three pumps sprayed huge plumes of water into the air, challenging the beast.
It stepped into the first plume. Hose-drenched trees erupted like match heads. The water boiled in the air as it arced, steam hissing as the beast thrust out a fiery arm. The spray only angered it, like acid on the back of rippling red flesh. It lashed out another tentacle, and the next moment they were surrounded on three sides by walls of Day-Glo red and orange.
Arnie was there. He had said he was going to help his friend defend his cabin. It was so like him, trying to do right but never getting it together. He was driven by something he could no more discern than a meteor understands its destiny before it flames out in the silent night sky.
Six men died that night — Arnie and five firemen. The fire finally grew impatient or bored, skirting a last piece of canyon and sparing the cabin en route to once again confront its old nemesis, the ocean.
Thinking about it rekindled her utter hatred for fire, the abomination, the true rough beast. The recurrent dragon that stalked her inner landscape.
