Escape

When smoke filled the stairwell and slipped under the apartment doors on the third floor, the Tuktaway family was huddled in their living room on the sixth floor, high above the ice-covered city of Ulaanbaatar. The three Tuktaway children fought over who would sit closest to the heater, when the second daughter began to cough and wheeze.

“Do you smell smoke?” Mother said with alarm.

Father jumped up from the sofa and opened the door of their little sanctuary just wide enough for his body to squeeze through the gap. “I’ll go check,” he said.

Holding his nose and face with a wet cloth, he followed the smoke and found its source. Flames rose from the massive pile of refuse at the bottom of the cavernous, six-story shaft where all the families, who called this building their home, dropped their trash.

A man who passed him on the stairs said in tones as flat as wooden planks, “Some kids lit the trash on fire. It happens all the time.”

As the smoke grew thick and dark, Father knew he had to do something. This fire could burn for days and kill his asthmatic daughter. So, he lugged bucket after bucket of water from his apartment on the top floor to the garbage shoot on the second, until he realized he had made the smoke worse.

Family Tuktaway took a walk. They described their predicament to their native friend Davaa, and plans for a weekend at the Railroad Union Resort took shape. Davaa made arrangements for passenger train tickets and lodging just a few stops north of the city on Gray Head Mountain.

“The name honors retired railroad workers,” Mother told the children. “Let’s wait out the fire there, far away from everything.”

And so it was agreed that Davaa would escort them to the resort. The Tuktaways packed their bags and bundled themselves up to their noses in down-filled parkas and thick wool scarves. Wearing three pairs of socks a piece inside their Sorrel boots, the family of five disembarked the train lumbering like sleepy bears.

Directly adjacent to the train station, the Resort sat peacefully in a bed of snow. It was an asymmetric building, a cross between a spaceship and a cement version of a Frank Lloyd Wright. As the sun set, they posed for a photograph at the entrance, and Davaa returned to his family on a train bound for the city.

The foyer was dark and wide. The floor creaked beneath their feet, and the older son surveyed looked a million pieces of narrow hardwood that had been painted bright yellow, but was scratched and bruised from decades of use. The hall stretched before them, and hiding in the shadows was a pool table. However, he know that if the clerk who controlled the key for the storage closet wasn’t on duty, there would be no games….