West of Here

by Jonathan Evison

  “Oh,” said the dark-faced one. “Just you.”

  Probably, she would be stepping over them on her way back. Probably, they would both foul themselves before morning. Strange that she pitied them when she had no sympathy for drunks. Strange that she should view them as innocents when she knew that they were not to be trusted. But left to their own devices, they did less damage than most. They only wished to recover that which had been lost. But clearly, theirs was a hopeless cause.

  Once, in a courageous moment, she’d said to Tobin, “You’re killing them. Why do you do it?”

  He just looked at her with those laughing eyes and that cruel smirk. “Quit answering your own questions, whore. And quit asking them, while you’re at it.”

  Gertie arrived midway through intermission, where she found Eva awaiting her beneath the wooden marquee, dressed unseasonably light, her pale cheeks flushed, her breath visible in the night air. Gertie apologized for her late arrival.

  “I’m pleased you could come at all,” said Eva.

  Though Eva assured Gertie that the Opera House was to be on a grander scale than the theater, Gertie was not altogether unimpressed by the plank floors and high-vaulted ceiling of the theater. The lack of decorative flourishes lent the place an austerity that Gertie had never liked in churches but liked everywhere else.

  Collectively, the colonists cut a strange figure. There was something somber in their utilitarian dress, in the way they carried themselves a little more upright than most. The men were all clean-shaven and clean beneath the fingernails. The women seemed plain at first glance, but some — and none more than Eva — were quite striking upon closer inspection.

  The revue itself was a comedy of errors, and not a particularly good one. The leading man, a reedy fellow with pattern baldness, had a stutter that worked to tragic rather than comic effect. The buck-toothed ingénue, who looked like a whore Gertie once worked with in Colorado Springs, bungled her lines repeatedly. Still, Gertie enjoyed herself in spite of the scandalous whispers elicited by her presence, though she was relieved to take the open air when it was over.

  Walking side by side with Gertie, Eva could not help but think of her not-so-distant stroll down this very path with James Mather, then, as now, flush with a certain posttheatrical buzz, aglow with some ineffable human electricity that she found both thrilling and terrifying. For those few thrilling moments with Gertie, without Minerva, Eva’s bones did not feel heavy.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Gertie observed. “About making a difference.”

  “And?”

  “And you’re right. Even a whore can be of some service to society if she puts her mind to it.”

  “It was unfair of me to judge you. I’m a hypocrite. What utility have I served the greater good?”

  “You’ve inspired me,” said Gertie. “That’s a start.”

  Eva felt a warm rush of blood in her face. “Forgive me if I’m dubious. But I’m afraid my facility to inspire anything is highly suspect.”

  Seizing Eva’s hand, Gertie pressed it firmly against her own. “It’s not true,” she said. “Long before I ever took to whoring, I knew I was no damn good. The fact is, whoring was about the first thing that made me feel like anything at all. Like I had some kind of influence. I was good at it. And I know how funny that must sound, but nobody ever told me differently. Not even Jesus Christ himself ever made me feel like I could be anything but a whore. And maybe I can’t. But Miss Lambert — Eva — you’re the first person to convince me that a body’s more than just the station assigned them, that a person is made up of choices.”

  only temporary

  JUNE 2006

  When Curtis got home, the Monte Carlo wasn’t in the driveway. The front door was locked, and the key wasn’t under the mat. Circling around the side to the kitchen window, Curtis wondered why his mom bothered. She trusted a criminal with her heart, but she was afraid of being robbed by strangers? What was there to take, anyway? The TV? You’d need a furniture dolly to haul it. Wriggling through the kitchen window onto the countertop, Curtis knocked a coffee cup out of the dish rack as he pulled his legs through. The mug bounced a few times on the warped linoleum but didn’t shatter.

  A quick check of the fridge confirmed what Curtis already suspected, that there wasn’t much to eat. He snatched a Silver Bullet from the top rack, a box of Rice Chex off of the counter, and retired to his room. He locked the door and plopped down on his springless mattress. It was a dank little retreat, especially in winter, when the sun cut its arc in the southern sky, reaching the high window for but a few precious minutes per day in late afternoon, whereupon it was forced to contend with a dirty and mottled screen. But even in the half-light, the creeping gray blotches were visible in the corners where moisture had leached in through the outside wall. The chaos of the room was decidedly oriented toward the floor, around the mattress, where clothing was strewn about and heaped in piles and the lamp listed to one side near the head of the mattress. Next to the lamp lay a can of black Krylon, a paper clip corroded with pot resin, along with the shredded remains of the pencil-and-ink work he’d torn from the walls a week earlier in a fit of disgust.

  The stack of salvaged comics lay fanned out under partial cover of mateless socks and black T-shirts. The room may not have been glamorous, but it was his. If Randy came to live with them, he’d lose it, for sure. If Randy came to live with them, things would be fucked. Worst-case scenario, they’d relocate again, probably even farther from school, deeper onto the rez. His mom would go back to tiptoeing around, focusing all her energy on Randy, who’d reject her at every turn. Best-case scenario was more of the same.

  Snapping on the lamp, which immediately toppled sideways onto its shade and was left uncorrected, Curtis popped his Silver Bullet and reached for the stack of comics. Between handfuls of Chex, he started flipping through issues, no longer ordered, not even by series. He paused briefly on Alpha Flight #2. Olivetti’s pencil work kind of sucked when you really looked at it. His character didn’t bend — even Mister Fantastic looked stiff.

  Curtis liberated an issue of Exiles from its plastic jacket and perused it. Calafiore had a surer hand than Olivetti with the pencil — maybe too sure; his musculature was overwrought. Even Mister Fantastic looked beefy in Calafiore’s treatments. Calafiore’s figures smiled when they should be grunting, grunted when they ought to be smiling. But the real problem was the stories. The whole premise of the Exiles was preposterous: holes in the fabric of the time-space continuum had created alternate realities. The Exiles traversed these alternate realities, trying to undo the damage and set the omniverse in order.

  Curtis tossed the issue aside without returning it to its protective sleeve. He drained his Silver Bullet in one long gulp and squashed the aluminum can like the Hulk, tossing it in the general direction of the wastebasket. He thought about reaching for the pencil and pad but reached for the Krylon instead.

  WITH THE STOP-AND-GO traffic on Front Street, it was nearly six thirty by the time Rita got home from work. Finding the door locked, she fished in her purse for the key. The tendinitis in her wrist was throbbing. Forty tons of Alaskan chum in three days and still two days left in the week. Then what? A double at Gertie’s on Saturday and maybe a hot bath and a frozen pizza on Sunday. But what was she complaining about? Money was money. With enough overtime, she could buy Curtis a car by the end of summer, so he could drive to school senior year, even get a job, if he wanted one. Maybe then, he wouldn’t be so isolated, maybe then he’d make some friends. Barring unforeseen expenses (the Monte Carlo), Rita could clear an extra four hundred bucks this month and the same next month, hopefully. She saw a red ’92 Accord for fifteen hundred out in front of Murray Motors.

  Setting her handbag down on the kitchen table, Rita liberated her hair from a ponytail and shook it out in long black waves. There was a day when she might have combed it out. Instead, she opened the refrigerator and snatched a Coors Light, lingering in the sickly ligh
t to contemplate the rest of the fridge’s contents. She should’ve stopped at Albertson’s. Popping her Silver Bullet, she sat at the kitchen table, fished her Merit Ultra Lights out of her bag, and sparked one up, exhaling a thin blue cloud into the kitchen.

  She didn’t see Curtis’s book bag lying around anywhere. The bedroom was conspicuously quiet. The front door had been locked. Most likely, he was out wandering again. Yesterday, on her way home between shifts, Rita had passed him walking along the ditch on South Ennis with his head down. When she slowed down to offer him a ride home, he’d refused. When she offered to turn the car around, and drive to KFC for takeout, he’d even refused that. And in an act that struck Rita as aloof rather than defiant, he hadn’t even tried to hide his cigarette. After three and a half years, he still hadn’t forgiven her for Dan. How differently things might have turned out if she hadn’t chased Dan off that night. She would’ve never got the phone call. They’d probably live in a house, a real house, like the old one on South Tenth, something that didn’t creak and groan under the weight of each step, something without monstrous green carpet, something with two bedrooms and decent water pressure. But most important, she’d still have Curtis. She lost both of them the night Dan screeched out of the driveway for the last time. Randy could never replace him, and she knew it. But at least Randy had helped them keep the house, if nothing else. For a while. When he got busted, they had little choice but to relocate without his income. Rita had been telling herself for thirteen months that the move was only temporary, maybe as short as three months, depending on parole. Then they’d get a place, maybe not the old place on South Tenth, but a bigger place, somewhere closer to the river, off the rez.

  * * *

  IT BEGAN ON the mattress with a slow shudder; once, twice, as the icy fumes ran up Curtis’s nostrils, past his eye sockets, to his brain stem. Inky black ghosts converged from all corners, swimming figure eights in his peripheral vision, and the only sound was a slow bleating from the center of the earth. Behind the veil, an orange glow pulsed like the heart of a dying sun, beckoning him, as the ghosts swam playful circles around its glow. And soon Curtis forgot he was in his room, on a mattress, trapped in an imperfect time line. Soon he forgot that he was anyone at all, but only something, something slipping, slipping, falling, forgetting.

  The forgetting ended when the canister slipped from his grasp and thumped on the carpet. Soon came successive raps on the locked door. A voice, his mother’s voice, reached him through the fog.

  “Curtis? Are you in there?”

  The world was still a thousand pinpricks under Curtis’s scalp, as he wiped away the moist halo around his mouth and rolled over on his shoulder, facing the wall.

  “Go away,” he heard himself saying.

  kilt lifter

  JUNE 2006

  Having been forced to work the line in place of Timmon for the remainder of the first shift, Krig smelled even more like fish than usual when he took his customary stool at the Bushwhacker for happy hour. By his third Kilt Lifter, the general irritability that had marked the end of his workday had been replaced by a very specific and very acute self-contempt. How had he managed to offend Tillman? How did he always manage to offend, alienate, repulse, or suffocate? Even as a starter on varsity, Krig had found himself an outsider, and never for lack of effort. Familiar to all, loved by nobody. It didn’t seem to matter how much towel slapping and dick waving he engaged in during the week any more than it seemed to matter that he shot a league-leading 68 percent from the field. Come Friday night, Krig often found himself alone in the parking lot of Payless or the ferry terminal, nursing a Mickey’s Big Mouth in the front seat of his primer-riddled Camaro, listening to Jethro Tull. And not because he had tragic acne, or he was insecure, or he lacked social currency, but because he was bad with what his guidance counselor called boundaries. And wasn’t he still making the same mistakes? Still jumping the gun? Still trying too hard?

  The fact that such a concept as trying too hard even existed was troubling to Krig. Did he shoot 88 percent from the stripe senior year because he tried too hard all those nights in the driveway shooting free throws blindfolded? Did he find that little extra spring in his hops come the fourth quarter because he tried too hard to condition himself? Why should a guy like Jared Thornburgh, who didn’t try at all, walk into a job as general manager? Why did the Thornburghs of the world succeed as if it were their birthright while the Krigs should be forced to endure years of loyal service, pulling guts and slitting necks? Talk about boundaries. Jealous? Just pissed off. Okay, jealous. Of course he was jealous! Why should Thornburgh have a smokin’ wife like Janis while Krig dabbled in online dating? And even in that arena he proved to be an abject failure. Boundaries. On paper he looked great: production manager of the largest (okay, only) commercial seafood processor on the peninsula, respected member of the amateur cryptozoological community, athletic build (aside from a little paunch), nice car, good conversationalist, fun (loves happy hour, classic rock, car camping), seeks SWF who enjoys same … seeks SWF with varied interests … seeks SWF … seeks anyone, really.

  “You ready for another, Dave?” It was Molly. The mud shark. The only person in Port Bonita to address him as anything but Krigstadt or Krig, because she was an outsider, a transplant from Aberdeen, and Krig liked that. Molly, meanwhile, had given Krig little indication that she liked anything about him, not even his 40 percent tips. Ever since he started talking his Bigfoot bullshit the second night she worked there. Beyond a nod of recognition each night as he took his stool at the bar, Molly exuded an air of indifference, tinged with the slightest scent of annoyance.

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “Does the pope shit in the woods?” said Krig.

  “Uh. No, Dave. Last I checked he didn’t. Kilt Lifter?”

  “Yeah.”

  Fucking boundaries. But, really, what did he expect? As far as Krig knew, no woman in the history of the world had ever looked into a guy’s eyes and said, “You had me at Bigfoot.” But wasn’t that the foot he always got off on? As soon as he was nervous in a social situation, didn’t he start yapping about Bigfoot and other cryptozoological anomalies? Chupacabra. The Minnesota Iceman. Why couldn’t he just shut up about it? Why was he so convinced Bigfoot existed in the first place? Really, what had he heard that night? Could he really say? Could all the follow-up investigations in the world really change that? When had he taken that leap of faith? Long before the events of May 6 on the upper Elwha, that’s for sure, long before even the class C sighting out in Joyce back in ’99. He’d gone looking for that one, too. Just like Roger Patterson. Who’s to say he didn’t see and hear exactly what he wanted to?

  Sasquatch Field Research Organization

  Report 1017 (class B)

  Follow-up Investigation by SFRO investigator Greg Beamer

  I met the witness six days after he filed the original sighting report. Initially, Mr. Krigstadt was too frightened to return to the scene of his encounter above the Thornburgh Dam. After some persuasion, Mr. Krigstadt finally consented to accompany me to the spot, where we scanned the area for tracks. We found nothing conclusive. However, it is worth noting that our search was conducted following two days of heavy rainfall. There were a number of broken tree limbs in the surrounding area at heights of six to ten feet, and one possible hair sample, which has been sent along with the scat sample to Dr. Kurtz for analysis. Mr. Krigstadt is, in my estimation, a credible witness. He has a good knowledge of Sasquatch behavioral patterns and utilizes a scientific epistemology. But what I found most convincing was Mr. Krigstadt’s very palpable uneasiness about returning to the scene of the sighting. I’ve seen this fear and felt it myself. Mr. Krigstadt was more than willing to cooperate with the follow-up investigation and even volunteered to transport the samples to Dr. Kurtz in person. Both samples came back inconclusive.

  Verdict: Inconclusive

  kilt lifter redux

  JUNE 2006

  What Krig had not t
old Greg Beamer as they walked the upper Elwha above the dam that dewy morning in May was that he had endured night terrors for the past five days: feverish, twitching, adrenaline-addled ordeals, the likes of which he’d never known. In an effort to ward off the visitations, Krig began sleeping on the sofa, fully clothed with the lights on, medicating with even larger than normal quantities of beer and weed and falling asleep in the glow of the television to the innocuous fare of Nickelodeon. But it was no use; even SpongeBob was no match. So vivid and terrifying were these dreams that Krig had actually begun to question whether his experiences on the upper Elwha might have been a dream. Further investigation had yielded nothing. Even the poop was inconclusive. Perhaps Krig had dozed off that night on the trail. The possibility even occurred to Krig that he had not gone upriver that night, at all. But then clearly he had awakened on the Crooked Thumb trail clutching a Louisville Slugger, clearly he had humped all that gear back to the dam in three trips, clearly he had received a parking infraction.

  There was, of course, another possibility. Once, several years prior, following a fruitless Singles Night at the Seven Cedars Casino, during the course of which Krig had nearly fractured a woman’s fifth metatarsal on the dance floor, doing the Sprinkler to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” Krig had met an old Indian at the bar afterward. The guy must have been two hundred years old. He couldn’t have been an inch over five three. His face looked like melting wax. He had little skin tags all around his eyes.