Rupert Thomson - The Five Gates of Hell

India-May lit a joint. ‘When I first met you, in that bar, you were all cut out round the edges, like something out of a cereal packet that doesn’t stand up when you’ve made it.’ She touched the tip of her joint to the ashtray and smiled. ‘You seemed, I don’t know, kind of brave, somehow.’

This woman, she was so vague, so blind. But she could surprise you with moments of sharpness. She was like a needle in long grass, a knife in fog.

The next morning he wheeled his bike out of the barn and into the winter sunshine. Lumberjack lay panting in the dirt beside him while he changed the oil, checked the tyre-pressures, adjusted the tension of the chain. In an hour he was ready, his map taped to the gas tank, his few possessions strapped on the seat behind him. India-May came outside to wave goodbye. She seemed to be frowning, but it was probably just a bad hangover and the white sun in her eyes. His rear wheel spun on the loose stones, searching for grip, then he pulled away. Lumberjack came leaping around his front wheel, and he had to go slow. As he topped the rise he let out the throttle. But Lumberjack was running alongside him now, a serious expression on his face, as if he saw this as a real test of stamina.

‘Go back,’ Nathan shouted, ‘go back,’ and he pointed behind him. But Lumberjack just leapt at his outstretched hand. It was part of the game.

After three miles Nathan had to turn round and ride all the way home again. India-May locked Lumberjack inside the house. As Nathan pulled away for the second time he could hear Lumberjack in the kitchen, frantically sawing the legs off tables and chairs. Somehow that was worse than anything.

But he rode hard to the end of the track and when he reached Baby Boy’s white cross he hesitated, then he turned right, into the mountains, something that he’d never done before.

Jed drove north to begin with, his wrist a rectangle of heat and all that numbness just behind his eyes, but after two days the roads drew him inland, over high mountains, and soon he was heading due west. The mountains lay down, sprawled on the land like tired dogs. Then there were no mountains at all. Sometimes he saw a row of trees on the horizon. In the heat-haze they were saints walking on water, they didn’t seem to touch the ground at all. Towards nightfall the sun balanced on the end of the road and then not even his special lenses helped. He’d be half blind by the time he stopped for sleep, his vision clunking with green and purple balls. In the mornings, standing in some motel parking-lot, the air scorched his lungs, it was like breathing the air above a fire. He drove with the windows shut. It was cooler. Skulls and dust outside. Tornadoes that spun across the blue sky like vases thrown on some mad potter’s wheel. The weather was like a scourge, the land could kill you. Out here, on the desert’s edge, penance could be done. Out here he could spend his years of exile.

The first time he drove into Adam’s Creek he saw a picture of Creed in a store window and he stabbed the brake. The car slewed. A truck filled his mirror and overflowed. A sneezing of brakes, a clash of gears, and it lumbered past, the driver glaring down, fingers twitching and a black hole for a mouth. It wasn’t Creed in the window, after all, it was just some advert for brilliantine, but his heart didn’t know the difference and he sat there until it slowed.

Two miles out of town he pulled into a shallow ditch and switched the engine off. Looking around, he saw that he’d parked outside a graveyard. There was no church. Only a tin shelter with three walls and a bench. A few gaunt trees. Some rocks. It was the kind of place where you waited for a bus that never came.

He left his car and moved through the yellow grass, his arms clutched across his chest. He felt the inch of bare skin above his socks as two cold metal bands. He’d never thought that you could shiver in a desert, but it was late afternoon and the sun had fallen behind the hills and a chill wind cut across the graves. The wind dropped once, and he watched in astonishment as flies landed on his face and hands in clots. Then the wind rose again and plucked his top hat off his head and sent it bowling among the stones. He’d been sitting in the car so long, it was hard for him to run. His ankles clicked, his knees snapped, but he was after it, past crosses, round tombs, over mounds. Families passed beneath his feet, and he caught glimpses of their tragedies: TREASURED DAUGHTER. OUR DEAR BABIES. BELOVED WIFE. Only two days before he’d called his mother from a pay-phone on the highway. When she answered, he just listened.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Who’s this?’

He waited.

‘That you, Henry?’ she said.

So. It was Henry now.

‘Henry?’ she said, raising her voice now. ‘Is that you?’

He put the phone down. He didn’t exist for her. Henry existed (whoever Henry was). But he didn’t. That was the truth.

His BELOVED MOTHER.

‘Stop,’ he shouted at his hat. ‘Stop,’ he shouted. ‘Wait for me.’

All the biggest words rose off the stones towards him: mother, love, father, memory, son, heaven. He felt nothing. He was nobody his mother knew, and there were no beloveds. He caught his hat and put it on.

He was so cold when he climbed back into the car, his lips mauve in the mirror, his teeth drumming in his head. All week he’d been trying not to think. He’d wanted to drive until anything he remembered would seem as if it had happened to someone else. A movie, another person’s memory, the words of a song. And finally, that afternoon in the graveyard, he knew the door had slammed on his life and the door was one of those big silver refrigerator doors and he saw his life hanging behind that door like meat. It no longer felt like a life. His or anyone else’s.

He fumbled the key into the ignition with numb fingers. Once the engine caught, he turned the car round and drove back into Adam’s Creek, population 2,200, elevation 21 metres.

When he arrived he found that he’d already become something of a legend. The landlord of the Commercial Hotel gave him a nod as he walked through the door. ‘How are you doing?’

Jed nodded. ‘Not bad. You?’

The landlord nodded. ‘Saw you earlier.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. You were the one who braked on Main Street. Denny Buder nearly crushed you flat.’ The landlord was smiling, his face broad and red and open.

Strange to be seeing still things, Jed thought. He was used to white lines, asphalt, trees. All moving. Towards and past. Faces didn’t do that. They just hung in front of you, like lamps.

He blinked. ‘You got a room?’

‘We got single rooms. Seven dollars a night.’ The landlord licked his thumb and flicked the register open. ‘You going to be staying long?’

‘I don’t know yet. A couple of nights, maybe.’

‘Names’s Wayne,’ the landlord said. Jed stuck a hand out.

‘Jed,’ he said. ‘Jed Morgan.’

He paid cash for the room.

‘Yeah,’ Wayne said, ‘just about everyone must’ve saw you this morning. Not often you get someone braking like that on Main Street. And wearing a hat like that and all. Thought you were selling bibles, some of them did.’

When Jed said nothing, Wayne said, ‘You don’t sell bibles, do you?’

Jed shook his head slowly. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘So what do you do then?’

Jed couldn’t figure out why, but he didn’t mind the landlord’s curiosity. In other towns he’d left way before the question mark, his Coke still fizzing at the top of the glass. Now it seemed like a relief to be talking, a novelty, a test of wit.