Doors Don't Open Just Because You Want Them To

I've wandered a few back roads in my time, and perhaps you have as well, dear reader. The kind that summon up pleasant smells of hay in summer, or good fresh dirt underfoot.

A few, and I'm guessing you have seen them too, showed me little places. Nooks, crannies.

Cracks and dark hidden places. Doors, perhaps, into somewhere else. Good or bad, either way, pass such a hidden doorway and the hackles raise on the back of your neck. From that which might be concealed.

And, from those who guard them? Perhaps, perhaps. The world is jealous of secrets, and so too are those who've sought them out.

How, then, reader, those who've discovered that, somehow or another, the place they've grown up on, the little bit of land their family has held through trials and tribulations, conceals such a passage?

How does someone like Tre Brown react when someone, a friend even, comes knocking at the family door?

Doors Don't Open Just Because You Want Them To by M. K. Dreysen

"Tre."

Ever woken up with a knife to your throat?

"Tre, wake up."

I did. I can't recommend it.

"Tre, I know you're awake."

"Gonna put the knife away, Denny?"

He didn't put it away. But he did stop pushing the point against my temple.

I sat up, little by little, watching him the whole time.

"What's this about, Dennis?"

"The door to the infinite, Tre. Shangri-la. The Elflands, whatever the hell you want to call it. I know it's here, Tre. And you're going to open it for me."

****

It started with a trip to Intergalactic.

Intercontinental Airport, I mean. Buddy of ours, Oren Young, needed a ride to the airport. And us being the other two aligned fools of the trio, we volunteered to throw Oren and his bags in the back of Denny's old Blazer and dare the traffic.

Back before Uber and high security and all the rest of it. Not that we walked Oren to the gate. Two guys seeing a third one off? On a work trip?

Oren's lucky we dropped him at the right gate. Given the way Intergalactic's laid out, I mean. Anyway, we got out, shook hands and all that, trying not to be awkward about it, and then once Oren walked through the doors, Denny had his idea.

"Why don't we go to your Dad's place? We're halfway there already?"

Of course, he'd already had that idea, when he found out Oren needed the ride in the first place. Me, I figured he'd had something like a brainstorm, realized Highway 90 lay just a couple stoplights and a stretch of road away and decided that made it an easy trip.

Compared to heading back south of Houston in the middle of rush hour? Well, if you're gonna spend the hours in the car anyway, might as well put 'em to better use than whatever trouble we found to get into on a Friday night in the city.

"Ok, let's do it."

"You need to call?"

No, I didn't need to call. If Daddy had anything going that weekend, we'd be just another pair of welcome faces in the family crowd. And if he didn't, even better.

We'd have the place to ourselves.

I tried not to pay attention to how heavy Denny's foot got. The way he'd jump when the needle crept up to the limit, let it ride back down to sanity and Not Getting Pulled Over land.

And then five minutes later do it all over again.

"Tell me about your Dad's land, Tre."

"Not much to tell, Denny. Just our fourty acres. No mule, unless you count Daddy's four-wheeler. But we've got a pond." And a little notch that went down to the Calcasieu. A woodlot, a couple little pastures going back to timberland as fast as the scrub oak and pines could work their magic.

Daddy had sold off the cows and the chickens when Granddaddy passed. He'd quit hunting years before that. I'm not sure when the last time he'd even put a line in the pond was. Same thing. So far as anybody knew, Daddy'd let it all go, except for mowing around the old house and keeping it in good shape.

A place to put his feet up on the porch rail, drink one of his little Miller beers, and enjoy a little peace before he went back to the world. That's the face he, and our little bit of heaven, presented to the world these days.

Growing up, we'd been louder. The pond, catfish and perch if you wanted that. Wood duck and teal when they whistled their way down.

Summer, if you showed up with an inner tube, you could throw it in the pond and lay out there until you couldn't anymore. Or if you had enough interest, you talked someone into leaving a pickup truck at the bridge a couple miles down the river.

And everyone who wanted to threw their inner tubes into the river and floated down a couple hours worth of the slow life.

Granddaddy's grandfather had worked for it. Put aside his pennies; found a mutual-aid group when, inevitably, the banks refused to loan him anything. Bought the place from a white family that turned deaf and mute when the question came around of "Who sold land to that black man?", and a handful of other families similarly situated.

If there were tracks through that old plantation, we'd all be on the other side of them, I'd guess. Granddaddy had never let the pastures, or the barn or house, look like much. "Enough for what we need, but not so much we attract attention, Tre."

Denny's old Blazer fit right in. Granddaddy's Chevy truck, a rolling rust monster, had retired to the barn along with his tiny little Kubota tractor. Daddy used that to mow the grass around the house; both of them welcomed the Blazer as another survivor, I thought.

"Huh," Denny grunted when we pulled through the thicket that had grown close over the dirt lane. He was looking around at all the scrub and tall grass that walled off everything but the house and rickety old barn. "I thought the Blazer would be our beach-mobile this weekend."

I laughed at that. Once upon a time, sure, we'd have driven to the back, and then down to the water. Now? "We'd spend all weekend just brush-hogging our way back there. Don't worry, it's not that far a walk."

And besides, being at the old place on the weekend, for me at least, meant cold beer and relaxation, not work.

Which was a lot easier to say to myself when I'd seen that Daddy had already cut the grass, probably last weekend. Sure, it had grown up some, but we'd hit August, and there'd been little enough July rain this year, so that the grass hadn't returned to mid-thigh and rising.

Yet. Short enough I wasn't guilty at all about not fooling with it.

****

Thinking about it, I tell myself that I should have noticed Denny's wandering eyes. Like, if I'd been paying attention that Friday night, when we dropped everything at the house and walked to the river, I would have seen just how interested he was in the place.

Sure, and if I had a Maserati I'd be one happy go lucky individual. I didn't notice. First, it was getting on dark. And second, when you're treading your way through knee-high grass in the gathering gloom, you're be a little interested in your surroundings.

"Snakes?" Denny asked.

"Yeah, just keep an eye out." Given we wandered through in hiking sandals, we'd have needed a lot more than an eye out, if we had run across a snake. Fortunately for fools like us, they'd found something more useful to do, I guess. But we did stick to the track.

Overgrown, sure, but not eye height. Daddy usually made a pass or two a year to keep it knocked down enough to do what Denny and I were after.

The track down the bluff looked about like it always did. Once you get back among the trees, close to the river the sand and the clay and the shade take over. The notch we used to get to the beach is a washout carved through tree roots.

Wide enough for a tractor or truck, slick when the rain's been good. It had dried out that summer, though, and we walked down to the white sand as easy as you could imagine. "Wow," Denny murmured when we got there.

The sun hung around somewhere on the other side of the river, down below the trees that way. Enough to light the sky in reds and golds.

And give us the river and the pure white sand of our little beach. "Yep."

And Denny was gone. He took off running for the water, throwing sand around him until he hit the wet line, and then laid out in a clean straight dive.

The water had that kind of call. The heat had followed us from Texas; we'd hit a hundred and a bit this early August day. No wind. Humidity somewhere around the point where I felt slick from the sweat. I followed Denny into the river.

It's like hitting a wall, a cold, clear shock between the eyes and then down your back. She holds you tight, that first agonizing second. And then the shock clears and you paddle up again.

The bank's a long shallow one, no depth to speak of until you get out of the flat and into the river's main channel. I flatten out after a few yards under water, push from the bottom and leap out of. Come down on my feet, standing where the river's just below my waist.

"Hot damn." Yeah, it felt good. Rebirth from the walk. Clear head and no worries of the job. Junior engineer that's me, too many projects and not enough titles to do more than chip away at the designs and hope.

None of it mattered here. I sheered the water out of my face, stretched, and dove for the far side while we still had light to see by. Denny followed me across, once he realized; the other side's a sheer clay bluff, with a chin bank underneath that's good for catching the spring floaters, stumps coming downriver with the storms.

The stumps, when they catch there, make a great place to sit. Assuming none of the locals had a catfish line tied there, which is why I took the chance while we could see. Tangling myself in a trotline is not my idea of a good way to spend an evening.

I didn't anticipate what I got; another one of those moments, I guess, where I should have known something was up with Denny.

He was quiet. And Denny was rarely, almost never, quiet.

In that moment, I lay back against the clay bank, feet up on the stump beneath me, and enjoyed the sounds of the river. Locusts winding up and down. A fox squirrel somewhere overhead, barking his indignation now that he figured we weren't coming after him.

No motors. No other human sounds at all.

It was the grumble of my belly that dragged me away from there. Most times, out in the river, I tell myself that I'd love to go river rat. Take myself down to the waterline someday, and the only reason I'd come back out would be for... a clean place to shit, to be honest. Take a piss under water, no problem, but I've just never been able to do the other business.

Just can't stand the idea.

But that one, or dinner on my mind, they call me. Make me lean out into the water, current takes me, I angle with it and kick and pull my way back to the clean sand. Stumble up to my feet and drip dry while the hunger, or other needs, call me back to the house.

Denny followed me, once he saw I meant to walk back.

I didn't clue to the fact that he kept his quiet the whole way, either.

Market Basket had chicken wings and thighs on sale when we'd stopped to fill up for the weekend. So a pile of charcoal went into the barrel pit, and we sat back to await the sizzle and the waft.

"You ever get lost out here, Tre?"

Me? How could I get lost, here? Where I'd mowed the grass, and before Momma and Granddaddy left us I'd cut hay twice a year? Walked to the pond twice a day, morning and evening, to pull two or three perch from?

Promised myself a deer, when I was a teenager, and then done nothing but watch as the beautiful ladies and their snorting, rack-wearing escorts ignored me.

Oh, I could get lost, I guess, but only in myself and the sounds of the place. "I've been here just a little too long to get lost, Denny."

"That's not what I mean." He leaned out of his chair, elbows on his knees and beer condensation dripping over his fingers. "What I mean is, doesn't it feel like the land's calling you, telling you to come in, and never leave?"

The dude's been here five hot minutes, and he's telling me how I should feel about our own land?

****

Friday evening went by with chicken crisped by fire and eased down with cold clean beer. Saturday went on, too, pressed on by the sun on the sand and the lazy water carving its way south. I didn't have much to say, and neither did Denny.

Until the knife came out. And then, the walk under the moon, halfway to her new phase with plenty of light for the grass and the track and the pair of us walking through both. "What are you looking for?"

"You'll show me. I'm following my... my nose."

Nose? But he still carried the knife, five dollars of ugly cheap stainless wrapped in fifty of marketing budget. So I kept my mouth shut, wonder as I did at what he'd smelled, and from how far away.

He'd talked his way this far. So I figured, with the knife and the gleam in his eye, I guessed I was in it until the end.

We'd walked most of the way to the river bank before he turned us back; toward the pond. He walked us back and forth a couple times before he turned that way. "We used to keep it fenced off here," I said.

He grunted an acknowledgment. Daddy and I had pulled the wires, used the Kubota to push over most of the posts, the ones in the field at least. Denny settled onto what had been the track to the pond.

The grass had done a much more thorough job of it on that track. Trees had even started breaking their way through the growth. I tried to remember just how long it had been since I'd walked this path. Especially at night.

Denny cast back and forth, like a hound after a rabbit. Something had him. "Here, it's here. I know it, and so do you."

"What is, Denny? What's here?" I really wanted to know.

He waved the knife around like a pointer. "The... the opening. The door."

"To Neverland."

He turned on me, fast and close. Then he dropped away, hands down, shoulder slumped. When he saw I wasn't making fun of him. "It's been in my head..."

"How long?"

"Forever. But then, when I met you and you described what your dad's place was like, I knew, I just knew this was where I needed to come."

I moved my hands now, slow and easy in the moonlight. Casual. "Denny, what do you see? What do you smell?"

"Freedom..." he whispered.

"I see moonlight over the water." The pond glistened with the moon's reflection. Oak and willow decorated the top of the picture, inverted in frame. "I see what I do whenever I come to this place. My home."

"You don't smell anything, then?"

Grass. Water. The heat lightning on the horizon, breaking ahead of a rare early August front. Fear, I think, from Denny. "It smells like that place where I always know I'm welcome."

"Home, right. But nothing else?"

Narnia? Middle Earth? I didn't say these words or the others.

I just waited for Denny to drop the knife. He left it there as I turned him back for the house.

****

Years later, I met Denny's parents. They called it bi-polar disorder. The dream that had taken their son from them.

I'd come with his ashes. Denny had taken to driving the back road to our place. Once he'd lost his job and family ties and everything else, I mean. I never did find out where he'd parked the trailer. The state didn't care.

Denny found the side rail of a bridge late one night in the fog. A bad set of roads there, and old concrete railing the bridges. The coroner found my number in Denny's cell phone, just about the only personal contact left there.

His parents refused the little box. "No. We can't. He... he..."

"He did us too much damage, son," Denny's father said. "I can't do it. We cut him off, we can't take him back."

Even now? I didn't ask.

I remembered the damage Denny had threatened me with.

And the hell of it is, I knew why.

His parents called it bi-polar.

The place beyond doesn't call itself anything. When it calls to you, it's just a whisper in the dark.

Daddy named our little piece of it Marrakesh. Not because he'd ever been. But because he'd come back from Vietnam with a wife, a baby, and a love of Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

Shangri-la you take a boat to, these days. Daddy went to Thailand on leave, before he met Momma. Found the entrance to the Valley, hiding where the ex-pats will walk by it forever and never know.

Marrakesh, our Marrakesh, our door to it hides just a step in front of the pond. Where the moon hangs in the water and the inverted trees frame her between the sound of breath and the quiet of the empty mind. "I don't want folks stumbling into it," he'd told me, the day we buried Granddaddy there, next to Momma.

I'd agreed. It's not greed, so much as a healthy respect for the broken and the lost, and the damage they can do.

I wondered, in the moments before and after I walk there, when I can wonder again, whether I should have offered. But away from the place, Denny never mentioned it again. Not to me, anyway. He threw off contact and made his way to places I nor any other could follow.

I'd have told Denny more, done more if I could. But a half-moon won't open the door for you, nor me. So tonight under her now-full embrace I walked the little cardboard box into the space between, and I laid him down next to our little family. "Here you are brother, home at last. I'm sorry it took so long."