West Of Here Part 13

"I see," said Lord Jim, though he knew this was not true. A thing acts according to its nature; that is the way it has always been. Everything knows better. "And who is the boy's father?"

Adam shot a quick glance out the window. "He doesn't have one."

"Everybody has one, cayci. cayci."

"His father was lost upriver in a storm."

"This is true?"

"It's not important."

"And what is important, cayci cayci?"

"That the boy be looked after."

Lord Jim retreated once more into silence.

"I will pay for his keep," pursued Adam. "And for the mother's, should she consent to come."

But lying on his back in bed, Adam knew Hoko would never consent to come; he knew she would fight him bitterly, and the knowledge made him restless. He stood and gathered his clothing off the straight-back chair. He dressed deliberately, as though the act of dressing might make his clothing warmer, fastening each b.u.t.ton with care, tucking wherever possible. Bundled up, Adam stole quietly down the hallway to the back door, which creaked on its hinges as he opened it against the wind. Squeezing through a narrow opening, Adam pa.s.sed through and padded down the wooden steps into the night.

The wind was whistling between the row of darkened houses. The scene was perfectly desolate, more desolate somehow than if the little houses had not been there at all. Adam turned his fur collar up against the biting wind and trudged in darkness toward the sh.o.r.eline. The snow had not stuck to the sh.o.r.eline, and Adam felt himself drawn to the water's edge, where he stood, face to the wind. Looking out over the choppy water, he could see the light of a distant steamer bobbing on its westward journey.

What if his life had taken a different path? What if he'd made different decisions, the ones he now knew to be the right decisions? Perhaps he would not be standing alone on the edge of the world at this moment but snug in bed with Hoko's warmth pressed up against him, perhaps he would know then the fullness of belonging: a hearth, a vegetable garden, and a boy he could call a son. Why had he allowed his father to influence these decisions? What was it that he so feared about his father? He held in contempt so much of what he stood for, and fought for, and yet Adam forever decided in life as though he had meant to please his father. And for this reason, though perhaps not this reason alone, Adam did not feel the fullness of belonging but the sting of an icy wind cutting his face like daggers.

The first time Adam laid eyes on Hoko, she was hardly more than a child, with a broad smooth face and downcast eyes. She moved with the thoughtless grace of a child, murmured softly to her cohorts, grinning like a child, as by dim light her slim fingers worked strings of coa.r.s.e cedar bark into something resembling cloth. And yet she was a woman, lithe and sure like a woman, smiling knowingly like a woman.

Adam was little more than a young man himself, collecting data for the Census Bureau, a job his father had finagled him in spite of Adam's short list of qualifications. He wore the beard of a man, spoke in the low authoritative tones of a man, clutching his leather case like a man. But inside he was waiting to be found out like a boy. The man-boy spent the better part of a week sitting in the acrid blue haze of the longhouse on the bank of the Elwha, questioning the Siwash as to their numbers, quantifying everything under the sun - pigs and acres and salmon and death - an act that the Siwash could not be made to comprehend.

"What good is all your counting for my people?" Hoko's father had demanded. "By counting you only make the world smaller."

Adam felt the young girl's eyes on him throughout his stay, and on those occasions when he looked back at her, she invariably bowed her head, not in shyness, it occurred to him, but in deference. The more Adam felt Hoko's eyes upon him, the more he yearned to look back, an impulse that was not lost on her father, who was anything but pleased - indeed, no more pleased than Adam's father might have been.

"I have only one daughter," he said. "Mark that in your books."

ON THE FOURTH day, the Potato Counter left one of his slim leather books on the dirt floor beneath a bench in the longhouse. n.o.body noticed when Hoko secreted the book away beneath her blanket. And n.o.body noticed when she took leave of the longhouse early in the chill evening, clutching the book flat against her stomach. Though she had little interest in the book itself - did not in fact so much as open it while it was in her possession - she had seized it reflexively, without a thought. She knew already what populated its pages, for she'd watched for several days as the Potato Counter made his notations - numbers, the language of the white man's stories. He asked questions and turned answers into numbers. Because numbers, he believed, were incapable of deception. day, the Potato Counter left one of his slim leather books on the dirt floor beneath a bench in the longhouse. n.o.body noticed when Hoko secreted the book away beneath her blanket. And n.o.body noticed when she took leave of the longhouse early in the chill evening, clutching the book flat against her stomach. Though she had little interest in the book itself - did not in fact so much as open it while it was in her possession - she had seized it reflexively, without a thought. She knew already what populated its pages, for she'd watched for several days as the Potato Counter made his notations - numbers, the language of the white man's stories. He asked questions and turned answers into numbers. Because numbers, he believed, were incapable of deception.

Hoko did not understand her intense curiosity regarding the Potato Counter, because it was new and came to her not through her mind but up through her body like a fountain.

Why had she taken pains by the river to rinse her face and tie her hair back and don the silver bracelet that had once belonged to her mother? What was it about the Potato Counter that stirred her so? Was it something he was - clear-eyed, sober, ruggedly handsome, perhaps? Aloof, unfeeling, distant. All she knew for certain was that she felt herself pulled toward him, as sure as if she'd been caught in a current.

At the Olympic Hotel, the desk man could not persuade Hoko to leave Adam's leather book in the clerk's charge. She was thus directed up the stairs to the second floor, where, at the end of the hall, she knocked on the door. Clearly, the Potato Counter had not been expecting anyone, particularly not a female caller, for he was s.h.i.+rtless and clutching a washcloth when he opened the door. He hastily retreated from the open door, where, out of sight, he wrestled a s.h.i.+rt on, and then beckoned the girl to step inside. When she entered the room, Adam was b.u.t.toning his s.h.i.+rt, with his face to the window. The room was empty but for the bed and a small end table, on which a tiny puddle was forming from the washcloth that dangled over the lip of a ceramic basin.

b.u.t.toned up, Adam turned to face the girl, who looked more like a woman in the early evening light of the window than she had in the dull confines of the longhouse.

"I'm Hoko," she said. "Like the river."

"You've brought my book, I see. I hadn't even missed it. And here I'm supposed to be collecting information, not losing it."

She was gazing steadily at him now, and Adam could not withstand the power of her gaze. His eyes sought refuge in various corners of the room, as though he were looking for something, and indeed he wished he'd had something to offer her - a sweet, a biscuit, a cup of tea.

"Would you like to sit down?" Then, realizing that there wasn't a chair, he smiled sheepishly. "Hm. Well. Homey, isn't it? You could ..."

Hoko perched on the foot of the bed with her hands in her lap, watching him silently, as Adam began to move without purpose about the room. Finally, he decided he was looking for somewhere to set the book and dropped it on the bed. He could feel her eyes upon him all the while.

"Sit," she said.

He sat beside her on the bed.

"Look here," she said.

When he leveled his unsteady gaze at her, she set her hand against his unshaven face.

"You should go," he said, regaining his feet.

She stood without taking her eyes off of him.

"Go on," he said.

But the moment she was gone he ached for her in spite of himself, so much so that he felt himself growing beneath his denim trousers, and he admonished himself for this.

Now, standing on the sh.o.r.eline at Jamestown, sleepless and all but s.h.i.+vering as the cold wind cut him to ribbons, it occurred to Adam in retrospect that he had always held Hoko accountable for everything that had later transpired between them; had Hoko not forced him time and again to reject her advances, he would not have grown progressively frustrated by these temptations, would not have let his frustration harden into something akin to hatred.

When Adam turned toward the little village of Jamestown, he could see the lamplight still burning in the window of Lord Jim's house.

onward and upward FEBRUARY 1890 1890.

For nearly two weeks after their raft excursion had met its abrupt and disastrous end, the beleaguered Mather party contended with wet, heavy snow along their overland route. The elements proved to be a much bigger obstacle than the terrain itself. Though the hills were heavily b.u.t.tressed and growing steeper along their upriver course, the Elwha valley continued to offer relatively wide pa.s.sage. The country was still thickly wooded, but the understory had grown somewhat spa.r.s.e, and the brittle vegetation offered little resistance against machete, ax, and boot. The slushy snow played havoc with their snowshoes. Further complicating their travels was the loss of Daisy. Down to one mule, the men traveled heavy in the shadow of their packs, forced to drag with ropes what Dolly couldn't bear.

But all was not somber at the end of each day. Supper, no matter how paltry, along with the comfort of a crackling fire, never failed to lift the party's spirits, if only a little. Layers of leather and wool were shed, clothing was strung on lines to dry, aching backs were stretched and rested, bare toes wiggled in the firelight as the men dined on bacon grease and flour and a precious bit of meat. And they talked as men will talk, of exploits and dreams and even small defeats. However, it was generally but never verbally agreed upon that conversation should not veer toward the home fires, and so each man's domestic longings remained in isolation but were expressed without words - by silence, distraction, long looks into the fire.

In the art of conversation, Cunningham leaned heavily on his medical exploits in Tacoma: bullet wounds and shattered legs, two cases of typhoid, one emergency appendectomy performed on a bandstand amid an electrical storm, goiters the size of cantaloupes. Mather, for his part, told frequently of his formidable Canadian adventures, including the Riel Rebellion, in which Mather had narrowly escaped the Frog Lake Ma.s.sacre.

Runnells continued to confirm his status as a man of few words, content to whittle sticks and organize stores, now and then a.s.senting or dissenting with a grunt or a guffaw. Reese, meanwhile, proved increasingly preoccupied with the mule, by whom he began to station himself at mealtime, and whom was frequently in recent days - to the silent disapproval of the other men - the recipient of his supper sc.r.a.ps.

Haywood's silence was generally understood. While Mather might have led them, Haywood in large part directed them. More than anyone, Haywood observed, not only in the geological details that were his charge but also in the subtle underpinnings of the party's morale, the direction of the wind, the state of supplies, along with any and all signs of the promised land. Though he was usually scribbling in his journal - mapping, logging, musing - Haywood remained at attention around the fire, at times offering perfunctory commentary, even as he mapped and logged, but rarely initiating conversation.

"Now those those were mountains, gentleman," Mather said one evening. " were mountains, gentleman," Mather said one evening. "These are merely hills, b.u.mps, trifles. Ask Haywood about the Rockies. Charlie, how big were the Rockies?" are merely hills, b.u.mps, trifles. Ask Haywood about the Rockies. Charlie, how big were the Rockies?"

All eyes turned to Haywood.

"They get bigger every year," Haywood observed wryly, without looking up from his pad.

"There, you see. And so will these mountains," said Mather. "That's a promise. All of this will get bigger. Whatever we put behind us in this wilderness, gentleman, will get bigger and tougher with each pa.s.sing year. That's how it works. Take it from me."

Mather wanted to believe this - indeed, he used to believe it - but the truth was, he no longer held it to be true. On the contrary, the further he put things behind him, the smaller they seemed; his boyhood, the mighty Mackenzie, Eva. His most bitter grudges of the past were all but forgotten, his greatest sorrows and triumphs stirred but the weakest of flames. Only now, now, Mather knew, in the immediate, did the mountains Mather knew, in the immediate, did the mountains truly truly look big, and the river run wide, only now could one feel their bigness and wideness, now, while your heart beat in your chest, and the hairs of your arms stood at attention, and death was the enemy. look big, and the river run wide, only now could one feel their bigness and wideness, now, while your heart beat in your chest, and the hairs of your arms stood at attention, and death was the enemy.

That night, for the first time in twenty years, James Mather prayed - something neither the Indian Wars nor the perils of the tundra had ever inspired him to do. He prayed for clear skies and discovery, for danger and heartache and laughter, for a life beyond fear, a life that got bigger, really got bigger, as it receded. And after he prayed, he slept.

The temperature dropped overnight. The haze lifted. The skies cleared. Haywood was first to emerge from the tent shortly after dawn and taste the cold brittle air. Before he could enjoy three breaths of it, however, he spotted something on a high ridge several miles in advance of the expedition that nearly took his breath away.

22 February 1890 The silver light of morning revealed a most extraordinary and completely unantic.i.p.ated spectacle on the ridge some two or three miles in advance of the party to the southwest: a thin blue ribbon of smoke curling its way toward heaven, from what appeared to be a rather sizable cooking fire. Needless to say, the party was at a collective loss as to the ident.i.ty of who might be cooking over such a fire, having left all vestiges of human settlement behind weeks ago. Each speculation proved more unsettling than the last, from hostile natives (indeed, more than one Port Bonita Indian made mention of a tribe of "giant" Indians of a volatile disposition dwelling in these higher elevations) to the far more troubling possibility of a competing expedition. It was this latter possibility that saw us break camp with great haste and proceed directly to the source of the smoke.

What we found were natives, a hunting party of perhaps two dozen. There was a large store of elk meat being made ready for curing and a half-dozen hides in various states of preparation. The natives were clothed in hide outfits consisting of a pointed hood, s.h.i.+rt, leggings, mittens, and moccasins, and they were all in possession of snowshoes. We soon ascertained they were friendly and versed in the pijin Chinook, the implications of which were most humbling indeed, as we believed we had ventured where no man had ventured before, only to find a tribe of traders and hunters thriving amid this rugged terrain. They soon brought to our attention an ancient trail at the foot of the next ridge that led over the Devil's Backbone to - and I must pause here to confess that my translation may be imprecise - the place of no more. In any event, they made it sufficiently clear that they did not venture beyond that point.

We were treated to a feast by the natives, who exhibited a predilection for raw elk meat, a delicacy that we were all strongly encouraged to partake of but gracefully declined with the exception of our fearless leader, who ate ravenously, with no regard for the blood streaming down his face. He continues to exhibit curious and troubling behavior. On any given day of late, he oscillates between despondency and the sort of carefree eastern bravado that fails to convince. Moreover, he is reckless in a way I've never known him to be, both on the trail and with his words. Throughout the feast, he made merry, but his eyes darted about the proceedings like a man with designs. I find it increasingly difficult to trust his judgment. I'm not at all certain that the natives trusted it. These natives of the upper Elwha were altogether more primitive than their Port Bonita counterparts. They were in possession of a number of trivial artifacts from the civilized world, which were treated as objects of some reverence, including a bra.s.s key, and an L-shaped metal instrument with a wooden handle, which Cunningham soon identified as a cauterizer.

Well nourished, though admittedly a little discouraged by our encounter, and in Jim's case suffering from a mild gastric disturbance no doubt caused by the copious consumption of raw elk, we set off in the early afternoon in search of the ancient trail to the Devil's Backbone.

all the noise JULY 2006 2006.

When Timmon Tillman set off from the Crooked Thumb trailhead, fully outfitted for the backwoods to the tune of $614, not to mention an additional $800 in stolen merchandise, five stolen library books (including the Olympic journals of Charles Haywood), an aluminum skillet, along with modest stores of jerky, rice, and Snickers bars, he had no intention of ever returning to civilization. His GoLite frameless backpack was anything but light. He had never fired a crossbow. He was on his second Snickers by the time he reached the dam. Never in his thirty-one years had he ever felt so free. At last, he was afoot and light-hearted with his path before him, his slumbering pa.s.sions awakened, creamy nougat betwixt his teeth.

Having skipped his parole meeting, Timmon knew that Frank Bell was s.h.i.+tting bricks, just as sure as the district court had already issued a bench warrant with the name Tillman on it. If they ever caught up with him, he was f.u.c.ked. But nothing, it seemed, could temper his optimism as he paused to marvel at the last vestige of civilization he would ever lay eyes upon, or so he hoped. Hooking his fingers through the chain-link fence above the spillway, he watched the frothing white water pound the river a hundred feet below. He found the low rumbling of the turbines unsettling.

Suddenly, there came the shrill laughter and frantic mirth of children from the parking slab behind him. Twenty of them, at least, which he figured for third-graders with a few adults in their midst, flooding out of a dingy yellow school bus and gathering in a chaotic scrum in the parking lot; frenetic, full of life, bouncing off of each other like dirty-faced electrons, clutching brown bags, bonking each other on the head with them. How long before life put the fear in them, the real fear, not the dark-closet-boogeyman fear, but the rational kind, the everyday kind, the kind based on facts and observations and the cold hard mechanics of the world? How long until they clutched their brown bags tighter and stopped bouncing off of each other? Timmon wanted a cigarette but resisted the urge.

The big people herded the kids in a squiggly line toward the viewing area, where they jostled for places along the fence, clutching the hexagonal links in their grubby fingers, tugging at the mesh, kicking it until it rung like shattering icicles, clambering up it despite the protestations of their chaperones.

The calmest child of the bunch, a saucer-eyed girl in red rubber boots and an unseasonably warm jacket, gravitated toward Timmon immediately and took her place beside him along the fence, a few feet removed from the others, where she peered alternately at the spillway and the sluice gate, sneaking frequent glances at Timmon's tattooed hand. He did his best to ignore her. But something about the dirty fur lining of her coat, something about those three long feet separating her from the others, would not allow him to.

One of the adults began issuing various edicts and instructions as to the occupation of their hands and feet during the presentation before she began reading from her blue factoid sheet, projecting her voice over the roar of the spillway.

"The Thornburgh Dam, which is over one hundred and twenty feet tall and produced over six thousand kilowatts of hydraulic power in its heyday with its twin turbines. It is named after Ethan Thornburgh and was completed in 1896 - Trevor, give Charlie his lunch back this instant! - Trevor, give Charlie his lunch back this instant! - the same year that saw the opening of the Sons of Peoria sawmill at the base of Ediz Spit - - the same year that saw the opening of the Sons of Peoria sawmill at the base of Ediz Spit - Trevor, I mean it Trevor, I mean it - which became the county's largest employer for the next four decades until its closure in ..." - which became the county's largest employer for the next four decades until its closure in ..."

"Psst. What's that blob on your hand?" the little girl said.

"Nothing," he said, looking straight ahead.

"Mm." She bit her lower lip and tilted her head a bit to one side. "It looks like the Liberty Bell, sorta. With angel wings."

Timmon had to look at her. Something in her voice melted him, and hearing it, a little cloud of regret pa.s.sed over him, but did not linger. "Yeah, well, it ain't."

"Oh," she said.

Timmon could feel the persistent eyes of the girl on him again and tried in vain to ignore her curiosity. Sneaking a sidelong glance at her, he could see the downy blonde hair of her face glistening in the sunlight. It was a good face, honest. Not cute, just unsullied by disappointment. And that alone was enough to make her beautiful. But her beauty was fading. Give her a year. Wait till next summer when she was still wearing that jacket, and began to see herself from outside of herself, and three feet was no longer a big enough buffer against the rest of the world.

"What about that one?" she whispered. "What does omward omward mean?" mean?"

Timmon gave a little sigh. Loosening his grip on the fence, his manner softened somewhat. "Onward, dummy. Not omward."

"Oh. Well, what does it mean?"

"It means just keep going."

"Hm," she said, biting her lower lip once more. "Going where?"

Timmon gripped the fence tighter. He thought he'd just let the question pa.s.s, thought he'd just ignore her altogether. But then she tugged at the dangling strap of his backpack.

"Well," she whispered. "If you're going to keep going you've got to be going somewhere, because going isn't a place."

"Wherever," he sighed.

The girl furrowed her brow and scrunched up her mouth and set to work on the information.

"... in nineteen ninety-two the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act was pa.s.sed to fully restore the ecosystem and native fish habitats by allowing reservoir sediments to naturally erode downstream. The act called for the removal of the dam by the year two thousand seven. However, in recent years the act has ..."

"Wherever isn't a place, either," the girl whispered, finally. Timmon fished a Camel out his GoLite and sparked it up. "Wherever like wherever," he said. "Like out there, like everywhere, anywhere, wherever, just onward."

The girl knitted her brow.

Timmon's voice, or perhaps it was his cigarette, attracted the attention of one of the chaperones, a stern little woman, squat and gray as a government building, who shot Timmon an icy glare and a frown as she took the girl by the shoulders and shepherded her away.

The girl looked over her shoulder, her little forehead still wrinkled. Timmon released his grip on the fence, hefted his pack, and took leave of the dam with a sense of relief. For a hundred yards he could feel the girl's eyes stuck to him.

The trail ran along a low bluff on the west side of Lake Thornburgh for a half mile, until it diverged in a southwesterly direction and began to gain elevation, switchbacking up the western slope of the valley. Clear-cutting had mottled the low foothill country in a checkerboard pattern and cut huge swathes into the steep higher elevations. Timmon pa.s.sed no one along his way. By the time he stopped for his third Snickers at the top of the ridge, he'd put all thoughts of the little girl and civilization behind him. He sat on a downed tree and loosened his right boot, which was chafing his heel, and smoked a cigarette and looked out over the lake and beyond the valley, where he could see a series of rugged spurs spread out in a wide arc from the north to the east, some of them scarred by landslides on their steep faces. Surely, somewhere out there, on the banks of some nameless stream, at the foot of some nameless mountain, was a home for Timmon Tillman, two-time loser; a sun-dappled place where he could pa.s.s his days unenc.u.mbered by the existential h.e.l.l of other people, a place to be left alone, a place so remote that the smoke of a campfire would not betray his existence. No more offices, no more leering desk clerks, no more meaningless toiling in body shops or clam factories. No more Gooch, no more walls, no more cells. Just wide-open s.p.a.ces and bountiful wilderness, a place where he could engage the circle of life, no matter how grueling the business of survival might prove to be.

Crumpling his Snickers wrapper, he threw it on the forest floor and got to his feet. Spurred by a burning impatience, he trudged onward, down the ridge and over the saddle and through the next gap, where the trail leveled out in a narrow thickly wooded valley and rejoined the river along a low bank. The water flashed silver and white in the sunlight, and the roar of it was even greater than the roar of the spillway had been. Now and again as he plodded along the rutty path, he came upon horizontal blazes hatched deeply into the bark of trees at eye level, to which he gave little thought, until later, when reading Haywood's journal, he would come to realize the significance of these blazes.

Where to stop? Where to begin his new life? Onward! Onward through the broad-shouldered foothills and into treeless high country and over the divide until Timmon Tillman ceased to exist, until the past and the future ceased to exist and all that remained was the difference between life and death. By late afternoon, he was exhausted. A blister had formed on his heel. He stopped where the river emerged boiling from the mouth of a gray canyon, and sat on a ma.s.sive rock, and unburdened himself of his GoLite bag with the clink of carabiners and the thud of his empty thermos, and smoked the last cigarette of his life.

He chose a small sandy clearing along the bank in the shadow of the canyon to set up camp. He spent twenty minutes wrestling his camo-spotted bivouac tent into shape. He gathered firewood and started a smoky fire. He ate jerky and another Snickers bar and wished he had another cigarette. Taking up Haywood's journal, he read distractedly for a few minutes until the sun began to set, whereupon he decided it was time. He fished the pint of Smirnoff out of his GoLite and uncapped it, then held it out in front of him and took a long hard look at its contents before braving a tentative sip. The old familiar sensations visited him at once; the icy-hot sting on his tongue, the s.h.i.+ver, the welling of giddy antic.i.p.ation in his chest, as though he were standing on the edge of a precipice and couldn't wait to jump. The second sip was less tentative. On the third sip, he took the leap.

Within forty minutes, the pint was half empty and Timmon was the master of his own universe. Being master only meant letting go, surrendering, letting his thoughts drift of their own accord, until he laughed without cause, until the downy hair of a child's sunkissed face was no different than the notion of his own mortality, until believing was no different from disbelieving, until his d.i.c.k was in his hand and his seed was spilling out into the river, and spilling, and spilling until he was empty of everything, until the emptiness filled him up and the fire died and he fell asleep face down beside his tent with his d.i.c.k hanging out of his trousers.

deal breaker JULY 2006 2006.

Hillary had planned on ordering a single gla.s.s of the house red and nursing it through the evening. But by the time she parked the Silverado, wobbled across the gravel lot in high heels, and stepped through the double doors of the Bushwhacker, her nerves were already getting the best of her. She knew immediately that all bets were off. She was wringing her hands under the table when Molly arrived for the orders.

"I'll have a gin and tonic," she said.

"Y'all got eggnog?" said Franklin.

Molly arched an incredulous brow. "Uh, in like, four four months we months we might. might."

"Just give me a gla.s.s of milk, then."

He was older than Hillary expected. She hadn't expected salt and pepper. And blacker, too. Not that there was anything wrong with that. Strange that Genie had failed to mention it, though, since there were only about three black people in Port Bonita.

"Nice place," she said.