“Okay, man.”
They get Trav’s pickup, ride in silence. Trav flips on the radio as a quiet song croons, Bob Dylan’s “Song to Woody.” At the break of morning, they are the only car on the white-capped road, the sun a line of orange on the horizon, the sky a violet explosion.
“You don’t have to do this,” Trav says, because it needs to be repeated one more time.
But Wyatt chides that he does. Nothing has ever been more essential. “Is there something else you aren’t telling me?” Trav asks.
More silence, the air clogged with unasked questions. Wyatt could reveal the entire truth right here: who he is, how they really are united. But that would slow down getting to the settlement and having more heroin to inject in his veins. There will be a time and
place for Wyatt to come clean. The Dylan song nears an end as they arrive at the settlement.
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of men
That come with the dust and leave with the wind
Trav snaps off the radio and puts the pickup in neutral as it idles. Around a bonfire, sleeps the group of teenagers, each in a sleeping bag. From a grainy window in Aylen’s trailer, a yellow light beams.
“You must leave now,” Wyatt says, stepping out.
Trav puts the car in drive. “I’m coming back here this time tomorrow to make sure you’re okay.”
Wyatt grips the side of pickup, leaning in through Travis’s window. “Here’s something I didn’t tell you.” He wipes a sweat ball from his forehead. “I can’t die. From most things that is. Rather immortal. So, there’s no need to worry.”
And then Wyatt whisks away, shuffling over to the teenagers and nudging their sleeping bags. They wake, blinking their eyes to a drug-induced morning. Trav turns the radio back on. The end of the Dylan song.
I’m a-leaving tomorrow, but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard-travelin’ too
32
The teenagers don’t have any heroin on them so Wyatt follows one back to their trailer.
Upon reaching it, he understands why they sleep outside. A dead drunk elder lies sprawled on the floor with a moonshine bottle clamped in his hand. Cigarette burns as artwork along the reed-thin walls. Stains along the floor, mix of water damage and dried blood. The teenager in his sleeping bag steps over the passed-out relative, disappears behind a curtain, and returns with a baggie.
“And a needle?” Wyatt asks.
The teenager vanishes again, returning with the request. Wyatt pays with crumpled-up bills as the teenager shuffles outside still cocooned by his sleeping bag.
“Do you stay out here all nights?”
The teenager narrows his eyes, agog that a stranger could care. “If it’s not below freezing,” he says.
“Who was that in your trailer?”
“Uncle.” Spit. “He’s a fuck.”
The teenager flops back between the two teen girls. Through sleeping bags, their limbs enclose him and he nestles.
“Thank you,” Wyatt says, heading to Aylen’s trailer.
Across from it, an elderly man steps out of his own. He grips a cane with intricate carvings, but he’s too far away for Wyatt to make out the details. The elderly man stabs the cane into the solid snow, chews at his gums since he doesn’t have many teeth, observing this new visitor, this white man. The elder would have been imposing in his younger years. Thick shoulders, a powerful torso that has sunken in due to age, beak of a nose and eyebrows like caterpillars. A sweet smoke pours from his trailer, honey-like and reaffirm-ing. He points his cane at Wyatt, calling out in a language Wyatt can’t understand. He dubs the elder as insane, then knocks on Aylen’s door.
It takes a minute of knocking before Aylen arrives. She opens the door in a pink bath-robe and fuzzy slippers, hair in shock mode, a mug of hot coffee steaming from her hands.
“What do you want?” She coughs as she moves away from the door but leaves it open.
He takes it as a sign to go inside. In the morning, the trailer looks sadder. Old magazines fill up tables. A sink overflows with dirty dishes. She sits on the counter with her knees up to her chin, lights a cigarette.
“You caught me on my day off,” she says, not excited, nor angry, simply letting him know.
“I have a favor to ask.”
He tells her as much of the story as her brain might handle. That gold exists in the wilderness, which he hid for some reason, and he needs to find out why and where. Her eyes dance at the mention of gold, but dull when heroin gets brought up.
“I need you to inject me,” he says. “Again and again so I don’t come out of it too soon. And to monitor me so it doesn’t kill me neither. Is that something you can do?”
She stubs out her cigarette, sick of it. “Tohopka came back. Tore through this place last night looking for something, swearing like hell. Not sure if it was because he found whatever it was, or because he didn’t.”
“If you want my opinion, you shouldn’t live with him.”
“No, I don’t want your junkie-ass opinion. What gives you the right? But he was high like the devil. That was plain to see. And he wasn’t himself, or maybe that’s who he actually is. So, you want me to inject you?”
“All I want is my past. You have that. Most do. Only fair I find a way to get mine too.”
“The past,” she says, with a thumbs down. “You can have mine. A million dicks I didn’t need. Starting from when I was as high as your knee.”
She bites a knuckle, pops another cigarette out of the pack. “The illusion of Raye’s is gone, isn’t it?”
“What you mean?”
“This is me, nothing to be idolized like the men do there. We have no souls, just bodies.” She lights another cigarette, the cherry glowing. “Being sick these last days and having time off has got me thinking.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“Really? I have your permission?”
“You’re smart. You can excel at whatever you choose.”
“Do you see where I’m from?” She indicates her surroundings, yanking on dirty curtains and giving a view of the apocalyptic settlement, an area that time has ravaged. “No one gets out of a place like this. We only get older.”
“No one has to stay stuck,” he says, lip quivering, recalling his own hundred-year stasis. “Why, because you melted like the fantasy you are? You’re just a parlor trick. Your whole story nothing more than that. And no amount of heroin will make it any more re-al.” “It is real,” he thunders, towering over her, letting her smoke coat his face. “Adalaide, Little Joe, our farm, the steamboat, the Gold Rush and landing in Alaska. I set forth a chain of events by coming here. My son followed soon after when I never returned. It can’t all be for naught.”
She flips her hair between her fingers. “Just cause you want something to be true doesn’t make it any less false. You’ve told your heart this is how things were and your heart has believed. But men cannot survive a hundred years trapped in ice. That’s the tale of a fool. And that’s what you are.”
He clenches the needle, raising it like a weapon. “Are you gonna stab me or what?” he asks.
She chews on the cigarette as she gets a spoon and a lighter from the drawer. Bringing him over to a crowded table, she searches his arm for a ripe vein.
“And what are you gonna give me?” she asks.
He swallows, digs for an answer. “I’d like to be someone to you.”
She laughs a sad laugh. “Lies. More lies. You don’t want me. I’m a placeholder.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“A stopgap. A moment. You come when you need things. You’ll never stay. You’ll use and abuse because that’s how I’m destined to be treated.”
“You should stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
She exhales. “Got no one else to feel sorry for me.
Why can’t you at least let me have that?”
“I do care,” he says, but his voice strains. He knows she’s right.
“You’re sweet enough to at least try. And for that I’ll hold your hand like I’m your mama while you go under. I’ve certainly been around enough heroin comas to know what to do. In each of these trailers a needle is entering someone’s blood right now. We were delivered an escape some years ago and we all like it enough to keep it around.”
“This is my last high.”
She taps a vein she decides she likes. “Is that so? Well, congradu-fuckin-lations.” After pouring a scoop of heroin onto the spoon, she lights under the base. The sizzle cutting the silence. Needle sucks it in.
“And what if it kills you?” she asks. “What if I can’t bring you back?”
“I don’t die easily,” he says, for the second time that day.
“Right, the whole hundred years thing. But sweetie, you know what that means?”
With her tongue, she moves her cigarette from one side of her teeth to the other. “It means that you’ve stolen from Death. And that son-of-a-bitch is gonna come one day with his scythe and want what’s owed to him.”
“So be it then.”
“So be it.”
Aylen stabs the needle into Wyatt’s arm. Draws out some blood to mix with the heroin. A curl of a smile plastered on her face. She releases the drug slowly into his vein as the world goes warm. He’s dipped in honey, recalling the sweet smell of smoke that oozed from that elder’s trailer. The needle is removed and the ritual resumed. Spoon heated again. Another vein searched and found. The ease of the tip breaking skin. The ethereal pleasure of giving oneself over to its power. Aylen becomes hazy and then she’s gone, along with the trailer and the settlement too. He passes over snow-capped mountains until Laner recedes as well. Now he’s a soaring bird exploring the wilds of Alaska’s isolated frontier. The wilderness where he fell asleep and awoke in a brand-new century. But he hasn’t reached that place of embalmment yet. He’s gotten off the boat after killing Carl Finnegan Langford, flecks of the man’s blood still staining his shirt. He’s passed by his nemesis and former friend Frank who seeks the same shine that he does, the brilliant gold that has turned others inside out, wrung out all that is good and left bodies filled with discarded rot. The root of evil in a nub. He’s killed to get to it and understands he might have to kill again. For there are no laws here in the wilderness, in the rush for treasure, no lawmen, no jail time, only victory and hardened defeats. While it may seem like he’d been defeated, he’s outlasted all his contemporaries, none of them given a second chance like him.
So when he’s placed down one hundred and twenty years ago in an ice town called Sitka where his journey will begin, he’s as hopeful as he was back then, when success seemed inevitable and failure far from his vocabulary. What perilous adventures await?
What high-stakes challenges must he face? Whatever they may be, at least he knows he survives.
This allows Wyatt to take the first step.
Back in the trailer, Aylen wets a cloth she drapes over his forehead. He’s twitching and his eyes have escaped into his skull. He murmurs something about a cave, a future his mind travels to where his body has already been. He’s so cold it seems to her like he’s been injected with ice water. At first, she’s scared and debates not sticking him with another needle. But as she feels his extremities, hands and feet, ears and the top of his head, she understands he exists not like anyone else, the coldness he exudes warming and safe.
So she gets him on the floor, tucking him beneath her legs, guiding his journey as best she can, this frozen man at her whim.
And then he moves suddenly, reaching down his shirt and pulling out a notebook attached by a string around his neck. A pen gripped. Words furiously erupting. And not just chicken scratch. Beginning with a date.
August 18th, 1898
33
From Sitka to Juneau
August 18th, 1898
I glow like a freshly scrubbed piece of gold upon my arrival in Sitka. The journey aboard the steamboat has been difficult, but I learned early on in life that the past must remain in the past. No use in letting it damper the wonder of my present. This will be the entry to my destiny.
Many millennia ago, gold was formed in the earth’s core and then traveled upward toward the surface into nooks and crannies as the planet shifted. Abrasion caused the rocks to loosen the gold and the waters carried it to valleys and riverbeds, down streams and creeks, of which Alaska had plenty. One could get it by mining, but us prospectors call it “placer gold” and we get it through panning. Stick a tin pan in the water, give it a good shake, hope for golden colors.
Sitka is a harbor town, a commercial and trading center of the Alaska Territory, the entryway of thirty thousand some-odd folks who lived in a state of lawlessness roughly a third the size of the US. But it holds a promise, this new and uncivilized land. The Wild West has ended, an era to be remembered on trading cards, and I know I’ll be joined by cowboys, wayfarers, journeymen, trappers, and Indian savages in my quest for dreams. I have little money in my pockets and must rely on trade and charm to get me up the Yukon where the true gold lies.
The freezing air packs a wallop, even in mid-August, a foreboding sense of what will come. Sitka Harbor overlooks ominous mountains capped with black ice that walls in the small town. Other prospectors seem to welcome one another’s arrival: shaking hands, slapping each other on the backs, showing off their gear, but I pay them no mind. A key to success in the unchartered land is to partner with an Indian guide that can take me into the crevices which haven’t been tapped yet. For the white men attempting this on their own, death will likely be their fate.
After walking some while off the main strip, I see a Tlingit settlement. Whale blubber mixed with dried salmon hangs in the air like foul cheese. They have cabins made from cedar logs scattered about, some touching each other, a few almost hidden. Soon I am surrounded by a circle of brown faces with flat noses and sunken eyes. I do my best to smile while I reach into my pocket and remove some of the money I have left. Unim-pressed, they grunt at each other. One slaps the money from my palm as it falls to the muddy ground. I scramble to pick it up while they laugh and puff out their chests at this foolish white man.
“I need a guide to go up the Yukon,” I say, acting out rowing in a boat so they might understand. But they don’t care. These are not savages. The jewelry they wear intricate, their campsite filled with well-built wares like an artist’s colony. They do not need my money or anything to do with me at all. Even the children are brought over to make fun, aping the way I walk and talk. I leave disillusioned.
Back on the main strip, I debate going into an inn for a drink but then I hear a cannon announcing the arrival of a passenger ship called the Ancon with a picture of a side-
wheeler. Rushing over to the dock, I ask a gentleman with a smushed face where the boat will go. He tells me Juneau and I ask him the price. It will be fifteen dollars. I only have about fifty dollars on me and figure I can’t bear to part with fifteen, but then another cannon fires and a freight ship pulls in. It docks to unload some goods and I overhear two men discussing the next stop at Juneau. The Ancon takes off distracting them and I swing onto the freight, wedging between two crates. I wait, expecting to be discovered, but soon I’m in motion. We sail past green glaciers shining in the harsh light and thickets of forests that lead to dark worlds, glimmering valleys with flowers, and oozing marshes along with dark slabs of rock.
The sun wanes as we sail into Juneau, the air fresh with the tang of fish. In the late 1890s, I knew Juneau would be a prosperous place, but I’m astounded to see its boom. I hop off the freight ship on the wharf surrounded by one-smokestack steamers tied up to the dock. A light rain pours. Men in hip-length coats head down the wooden wharf to Front Street. Some with packs while others have valises, their hats pulled low over their heads. Buildings are raised on stilts with makeshift ladders lea
ding to the front doors because of flooding or muddy streets. Hundreds of workers spill out of hard rock mines after being done for the day, the town coated in a gray mist from the smelting furnaces that seem to stretch toward the rain-forest country in a labyrinth of trees. I’m famished and thirsting for alcohol, but as the sun sinks, the artificial lights from the mines turn on, blaz-ing the area. On my farm, I have no electricity but here the future rages. And I’m saddened. We got along fine with the sun as a guide and there would be no preventing machines and electric lights from taking over. A frontier land soon to be buried in the past and here I am getting a taste of the brand-new world. That’s progress! So my spirits become slightly uplifted.
Since so many workers are streaming out of the Treadwell mine, it’s easy to worm my way inside without anyone questioning. The place is filled with stamps that are heavy metal rods powered by a hydraulic engine. They slam down on tiny boxes like hammers.
Rocks are being smashed to pieces in the hunt for gold. The floor vibrates and the continual slamming sounds so loud I think my head is going to explode. Without realizing, I whirl backward and the sleeve of my mackinaw coat gets stuck in the hydraulic mechanism in the belt of the rollers that carry the rocks. I try to wiggle out, but it’s like being in the grip of a bear. Any second the heavy metal stamp will come crashing down on my hand.
I attempt to remove my coat, but it’s impossible due to the way I’m trapped. My right arm in range of being crushed. I debate closing my fist to receive the brunt better and avoid getting my fingers severed. The stamps smash into the metal box, obliterating the rocks inside, surely about to turn every bone in my hand into a fine silt.
And then, a magic gift! An arm reaches in, grabs the sleeve of my coat, and yanks it free. I spin back as the stamp slams down. I turn to see an Injun walking away. I rush after him, figuring he doesn’t speak English, needing to thank him for saving my life. But when I catch up, I see he has a drooping mustache like the Tlingit’s at the last settlement, along with a string of green beads around his neck and a grimy hat with a salutary feather in the brim. But this is not an Injun. His eyes not sunken, his nose protruding rather than flat, his skin color pale save for the grime.
The Ancestor Page 19
