Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  Rich watched him go, then looked at Jason. “What he tried so hard not to say was that we don’t have all the answers. And it’ll probably be a long time before we do.” He cleared his throat, lifted a finger. “Before I forget, I want to personally thank you for what you did for Erika this morning. She told me all about that. We’re the exceptions around here…both my wife and I lived, and we were already close to Erika and her family. I guess we’ve sort of adopted each other now.” His voice cracked, and he turned his head to one side while quickly swiping at an eye. “Hell, I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “It’s no crime.” Jason ate the last bite of ham, wondering how long he could make it last.

  Rich tooted his nose into a handkerchief. “Yeah. Anyway. I saw the way you were looking at her this afternoon. I know what’s behind that look. Now, you’re both adults, and you seem like a decent enough kid…”

  But try anything and my ass is Spam, right?

  “…but take it easy. Okay? She’s not had an easy time of it. Not ever. She’s…a little different from the rest of us. I don’t want to go into it, it’s not even my place to do that, so take my word for it. Okay?”

  Jason nodded slowly. Considering you make about two of me, I don’t have much choice, do I?

  “Father knows best,” Jason finally said.

  * *

  “Hey! Recognize me?” Jason straightened up from his car’s trunk. Erika was walking past in the parking garage, where they were alone with the cars and trucks and the odd pigeon or two.

  Erika stopped and smiled shyly. “What a difference personal hygiene makes, huh?”

  “I got tired of looking like a refugee.” He’d found a propane-fueled kettle up in sporting goods. It only held a gallon, but he was astonished at how thoroughly one gallon of warm water could clean you when you set your mind to it. He’d shaved, and while his hair was still wet, he’d had it trimmed back to a more manageable length. A stout lady named Juanita Morris had done the cutting, and while she was no Vidal Sassoon, it wasn’t a bad job. It was a simpler cut, with less layering than he was used to, but you get what you pay for. A new flannel shirt and jeans from down at men’s wear had finished him off.

  Their voices echoed faintly under the low concrete. Out from underneath it and its shade, the day was sunny and pleasant. The kind of autumn day when it had always been impossible to concentrate on studying, when there’d been such a thing as college.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  A shrug that looked forced, a quick furtive flick of her eyes, “Just out. For a walk.”

  “Remember what happened on Monday.” It was Thursday now. “You were lucky then.” And if memory serves me correctly, you’ve been out like this every day since, too.

  “I’ll be more careful. Really, I will.” She smiled, looked at a shoetip and then back up. “See you later.”

  “Sure.” Just where is it you go, huh? And is it so wrong to care?

  Erika disappeared into the stairwell as Jason lifted his shotgun from the roof of his car. He wandered over to the concrete retaining wall, leaned on its top to peer over into the street below. He soon saw her on the sidewalk four floors down, moving east, small and alone, her hair in a deceptively carefree bounce. Riverfront-bound, she was. And she did not look up.

  3

  It felt good to be on the move again.

  The saving of another human life had been what Caleb could number as one of his life’s finest accomplishments. But even with all the herbal and floral mysteries that his grandfather had opened his eyes to, Caleb couldn’t turn back the hands of time. Diane McCaffrey’s body had undergone a trauma, and that wasn’t going to change. She’d lost a lot of blood on the road and in the grass, and her thigh had sustained enough damage to have kept her limping for many days. She was weak as well, and shortly after that first night, Diane came down with a nasty, wracking cough that had serious staying power. They were still in eastern Indiana at the time, and Caleb had taken her to Madison. Sleeping under the stars would do only for the first night. They holed up in separate rooms of a motel, sharing it with three others who still hadn’t forgotten the milk of human kindness, and helped nurse her along as well.

  It was slow going. Time and again Diane insisted they get moving, get to her daughter in Denver. But no way was she fit enough to resume the trek she’d set out on. Not the way life was now.

  “Not before you’re well enough,” he’d tell her. “You almost got yourself done in once. No sense making it easier if there’s a next time.”

  “You’re a heartless old bastard,” she’d mutter.

  “Yup.” Then he’d grin. “That’s me.”

  But now it was into October, and she was fit as a patched-up fiddle again. Tough scar tissue graced her side and leg, and once she got behind the wheel, her better spirits seemed complete. They would travel together now, it was decided. She had a definite destination in mind while Caleb did not, though Diane said she wouldn’t mind his company, and he had to admit he’d grown fond of her as well. Plus he continually remembered the dream-Rachel, the daughter whose face bore a passing resemblance to Diane’s. Only a dream, right? Right?

  (Look for a silver door, Daddy.)

  They appropriated a new car, a 1987 Lincoln. Diane’s preference. Her old one had to be abandoned on Route 62 where it had been perforated by gunfire, while his ancient Comet was simply outmoded.

  “I’ll bet you’ve never ridden in a car this fine your entire life,” Diane said. “Have you?”

  “Not a once.” Caleb amused himself by raising and lowering the power window in his door. Push a button, let her whirr. Up and down, up and down.

  “The least I can do is haul you around in a little style.” She tilted her head up to peek in the mirror, checking the makeup she still insisted on wearing, of all things. “Even though we’re a little cramped for space with everything. And you never did really answer me, Caleb. Why’d you insist on bringing that old forked stick along? I still say it’s just taking up room.”

  He snubbed out a cigarette in the virgin ashtray. “Sentimental value.”

  Diane took them to I-65 and they followed it south until New Albany. There she picked up I-64 west. Denver ho. They stopped midway across southern Illinois for the night, laying over in an interstate motel in Mt. Vernon. It was only late afternoon, with a fair amount of daylight ahead, but it seemed best to find someplace safe well before nightfall. She heated beans and franks over a Sterno can while he refilled their gas tank by siphoning from another.

  And they waited the night away.

  * *

  “That’s the trick,” he was saying. It was just after nine and they’d been back on the road for maybe a mile. “Don’t get too greedy for miles each day. Cover two-fifty or three hundred, safe, none too fast to get your best gas mileage. That’s the trick.”

  “Mmm hmm.” She drummed her fingers on the wheel. “So when does that put me in Denver? What is today anyway? Sunday?”

  “Don’t ask me. You’re the one with the fancy Rolex watch.”

  “So I am.” She checked it. “Sunday, right. The eleventh.”

  Caleb traced his finger on the U.S. map in their atlas. I-64 to I-70 in St. Louis. From then on it was a straight shot to Denver. “A thousand miles, give or take. Three days, four tops. Tuesday or Wednesday.”

  They veered west off the 57/64 interchange, leaving 57 behind. Somebody stood on the overpass above them, leaning idly on the railing, wearing a backpack. Seeing the country at the grass roots level, no doubt. He waved, she tooted the horn, and he was behind them.

  “You think I’ve got any chance of seeing her again?” Diane asked.

  “Got to watch out for Kansas, though,” he said, suddenly studying the map again. “Lots of miles of pure nothing there. Gas up full in Kansas City and hope for the best.”

  Diane clen
ched the wheel harder, her eyes narrowing. “If you don’t want to answer me, just say so.”

  Caleb slowly closed the atlas and gazed toward her until she finally looked his way. His eyes were moist in a web of squint lines. “How can I answer that one, huh? I don’t know. I hope and pray you find her. But you don’t want me sittin’ here tellin’ you lies, do you?”

  She watched the highway again, hit the radio by reflex. Static, loud and clear. In disgust she switched it off. “Sometimes I do,” she finally said. Her fingers ran up to the cassette player and lingered. If they only had some tapes. Have to remember to hunt for some the next chance they got. “You know something? I don’t think it’s ever come up, but what is it you’re looking for?”

  silver door silver door

  “I don’t know that either. Guess it’s just one of those things, that I’ll know it when I see it. I hope.”

  “Good luck,” she said.

  He pursed his lips and nodded. He thought he’d need it.

  * *

  Erika sat on concrete steps, hands joined, elbows propped on her knees. It was one of the first cool days of autumn, and the nylon jacket she’d picked out in women’s wear kept the breezes at bay. She watched the Mississippi flow by down below. The showboats, both new and renovated, lined along the levee reminded her of a caravan of showy circus elephants, and she was saddened by thoughts of their fate. She couldn’t imagine a world where they did anything other than stay there until they sank.

  How many days had she spent nearly all of her free time here? They were blurring together, numbers lost, and she had nothing to show for it. A dream of a dust storm from the east? Maybe it didn’t mean a thing. What was it Freud once said? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

  Some of them back at the store (still not home yet) were getting puzzled by her absences. They never said much, but that same old familiar look was in their eyes. She recognized it, recalling the first pair of eyes she’d ever seen it in: her mother’s.

  Even the new guy was giving her odd little glances. Jason. But I’m not sorry I brought him back. Not yet. He was nice enough. Good-looking, too, now that he’d cleaned up and made himself look more civilized. She wondered if they would have had much in common before things started going wonky with the world.

  “Don’t think about that,” she whispered to herself. Because it wasn’t safe.

  Erika grabbed a John Irving paperback she’d taken from the store and started reading about the life of T. S. Garp.

  Seemed like she’d been waiting most of her life for something or other, whether it showed up or not. Surely a little longer wouldn’t hurt.

  * *

  Diane was just bringing the car over the Mississippi when the pieces clicked in Caleb’s head.

  The eastern rim of St. Louis had been visible for several minutes, and Caleb had studied the skyscrapers and stadium with idle interest. From the few cities he’d ever seen in his lifetime, he couldn’t much tell the difference between one and another.

  Except there was something more distinctive here…

  “You know, we’re not even a third of the way across the country,” Diane said. “Can you believe they used to call St. Louis ‘the Gateway to the West’?”

  Caleb merely grunted. And then the connection cemented. The Gateway Arch, that was its full name. And there it stood, majestic and gleaming with its silver skin. The Gateway to the West.

  What do you know—a silver door.

  “Could you do me a favor?” he quietly asked. “Could you pull off here?”

  Caleb would later be unable to recall the interim minutes when they’d finished crossing the river and pulled off the interstate. He’d blanked out, his mind whirling beyond the here and now, beyond the immediate. Surely this had to be the spot. He’d never put much store by thoughts of destiny, but maybe it was time to do some rethinking. Whatever he might find here, be it heaven or hell or something in between, that’s what would be his to grapple with. To own up to.

  Caleb didn’t remember passing the Old Cathedral, didn’t remember instructing Diane to take him to the Arch. He didn’t remember her leaving Memorial Drive and following the signs that led them down to a riverfront drive, where they parked beneath the Arch’s immense legs. He only remembered ascending a near-endless flight of wide concrete steps, noticing someone else sitting near the top, at the monument’s base. Diane was doing her best to keep up with him, blurting questions, demanding reasons…for things she might never truly understand. Because it wasn’t in her nature. Wasn’t her gift.

  But the woman on the steps looking back at him…woman? She was just a girl, the way he saw it. She would understand. He sensed it as intuitively as he knew that something was different about her. The way something was different about himself. As he finished the climb, the slightest bit winded, he stood looking at her. Beneath dark blond hair, her eyes stared frankly back…partly quizzical, partly skeptical, and partly awed. She set a paperback book aside.

  Caleb knew they’d never met, knew they were strangers to one another, yet it felt as if something had just been completed, two pieces of an unfinished puzzle fitting together. And while the questions arising from this peculiar union were without number, he had no idea how to begin asking for the answers.

  “You’ve come a long way, haven’t you?” the girl finally said.

  “That we have.” He scuffed a boot against the step. “I started off from Ohio, originally. A while back.”

  “Are you just passing through, or…are you needing someplace to stay?”

  “I’m not sure, offhand.” He slowly shook his head. “I guess right now I’m just looking.” He felt a sharp tug at his sleeve.

  “Caleb, I don’t know about you,” Diane said, “but I need to get going.”

  He turned and touched her shoulder. Her pale blue eyes stared back, pleading and irritable. Diane twitched her shoulder free.

  “Could you just give me a little more time? Please?”

  She sighed and glanced at her watch. “Two hours. Then I’m gone, with you or without you.”

  He nodded, and spoke to the girl for another couple of minutes. Then the three of them headed down to the Lincoln. Caleb noticed Diane keeping her hand in her right pocket most of the way. That was where she kept her gun. And as Diane drove, Erika directed them toward the parking garage of the biggest store Caleb had ever seen. He had no idea what he was getting himself into (okay, both of them), but he’d at least see it through.

  And as they passed a pair of armed guards at the end of the bridge leading into the department store she called Brannigan’s, Caleb overheard the guards say only one thing: “Looks like she’s brought home two more strays.”

  * *

  “Time’s up.” It was Diane. He’d known it was coming. “Are you leaving with me, or…?”

  Caleb looked her straight on for several seconds. Sometimes you had the most unfair decisions forced on you. Diane was one person he’d grown truly fond of, and to see her travel her own road while his forked off elsewhere…it hurt.

  “No,” he finally said.

  Where had the time gone? He and the girl, Erika, had spent most of it talking alone, seated near a giant fern that kept them company. From time to time he’d caught sight of Diane while he’d told most of his story to this new stranger, and listened to her tell hers. He’d seen the way Diane restlessly wandered about the floor, hands stuffed into jacket pockets, now and again responding curtly to questions the others here put to her. He knew she was only counting the seconds until she could get moving again.

  “Simple as that, huh?” she said. “You’ve finally found what you’ve been after all along.”

  “No, not that simple. It’s like I just got a better idea where to look is all.”

  “Then I guess you’d better unload your junk from my car.”

  “Reckon so.”


  Diane shifted her weight from one foot to the other and back again. “Who is that girl, Caleb?”

  He shrugged, fished for a cigarette. “I don’t know, really. I mean, we both know her name, but it feels like we got something in common that we ain’t quite figured out yet. I expect we will before long.” He chuckled, played the cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. “It’s so damned hard to try and explain all this. But you know that feeling you get inside you when there’s something you gotta do but you forgot what it is? Well, that’s the way I been feeling a long time now. Only I never knew what it was to begin with. Her? I think she’s part of it. Don’t ask me how I know, ’cause I couldn’t tell you in any way that’d make much sense. You just gotta trust me on this.”

  She nodded, bit her lower lip. Then she laughed. Good to see her brighten a little. “I think you’ve worried someone here, though. This kid was asking me who you were, if you knew her already, what you wanted.” Diane subtly pointed across the floor toward a young fellow with longish hair. “Him. The one that looks like he lost the rest of his band in a plane crash.”

  “Maybe I’ll have a talk with him.”

  “Assure him your intentions are strictly honorable.”

  They both laughed, and then wordlessly, Caleb rose and they retraced their path back down to the fourth floor, across the bridge, into the garage. It wasn’t long before he stood amid a pile of what constituted all his worldly goods…and a small pile at that. A few clothes, some knickknacks, the dowsing rod, a photo album brimming with good memories, now held together by tape and a prayer. The food and the water cooler he’d let Diane keep.