West of Here

by Jonathan Evison

  At the top of the ridge, Timmon paused for one last look at mighty Olympus. But this time a shiver didn’t run through him as he stood on the Devil’s Backbone — this time he swelled with courage and conviction. His new fancy pack rested comfortably on his back, so that neither his shoulders nor his lumbar were forced to bear the burden alone. There was still two hours of light left. Not a cloud in the sky. Everywhere the warm smell of fir needles, birdsong, the burbling of nameless streams. Somewhere out there in that big country was his destiny. In between, who knew? Timmon began wending his way down the bald face of the ridge toward the tree line, three hundred feet below.

  the wisdom of water

  FEBRUARY 1890

  Even as the men stood on the ridge looking over the steep valleys toward Mount Olympus, the weather was threatening to take a grim turn. Rolling gray cloudbanks tumbled over the sawtooth range that would soon be christened the Baileys. Mather could not help but wonder at the party’s fortunes had they wisely embarked upon this journey in spring rather than winter. But spring was too late. Destiny could not wait until spring.

  “Best be getting on,” said Mather. “Before our friend Thunderbird comes calling.”

  And without further pause, the Mather party and their one remaining mule, Dolly, packed tight to the tune of 250 pounds, began trudging through the chest-deep snow, down the bald wayward face of the Devil’s Backbone toward the tree line, three hundred feet below.

  With the wet wind stinging his face, Mather could not help but wonder where this mythical valley of wide prairies and lush grasses lay. Might they be buried in the snow beneath their feet? Where was this place where the wind stopped howling and the sun nested in a bowl of green goodness? Would this be the place that would awaken in Mather the yearning to pause, to stop, to settle even? He doubted it, as he was beginning to doubt that such a place even existed. The lay of the land was only getting rougher and more precipitous. Between the ridge and Olympus, Mather counted no less than three steep valleys. And none of them appeared to offer easy passage. More disquieting than the terrain was the sleeping wilderness of his spirit, which nothing could seem to stir. While he had little doubt that the passage ahead was to be the greatest and most perilous physical challenge of his life, he could not summon the same thrilling intensity he had experienced along the Mackenzie. He was alert, his senses were sharp, but his steps did not spring with aliveness, the cold air did not excite his lungs. Driven not by his customary restlessness, nor by any crowning sense of anticipation, Mather led his men into the heart of the Olympics mechanically.

  For a day and a half the party battled their way through wet, heavy snow, over rugged spurs, switchbacking up and down heavily timbered inclines — valleys within valleys. This terrain had a strange quality that did not speak to its natural formation the way the Yukon, the Rockies, or the Cascades had.

  Haywood was also moved to note the odd topography of the Olympic interior.

  27 February 1890

  There is an observable lack of uniformity to this rugged terrain that suggests great chaos and upheaval in its past. These mountains do not seem to rise up, so much as explode out of the earth, colliding, as though they were competing for room, all crowding in on Olympus as though huddling around her for warmth.

  On those increasingly rare occasions when his thoughts turned to Eva, something bitter began to rise in Mather’s throat, not because he would never possess her, and not because he could no longer summon her smell or the touch of her delicate hand, but because, like everything else, the thought of Eva did not arouse him; not even the thought of her swollen belly stirred him. Love may abide in some quieter form, Mather thought, but nothing was more transitory than passion.

  Upon the second morning following their departure from the Devil’s Backbone, the party broke camp from the narrow wooded bottomlands of the first hollow. The steep valley was bitter cold, receiving only scant hours of sunlight each day. Ahead lay a convergence of ranges, a sort of eruption in their path resulting in two giant clefts running west and southwest respectively.

  Reese, who in recent days had become quite friendly with his former nemesis, the mule, was pulling up the rear with Dolly’s lead firmly in his clutch, as the party ascended the rise past the tree line, past the last stunted firs, and onward toward the next ridge.

  “Hope you know where you’re going,” Reese shouted. “Because I sure as hell don’t!”

  Gathering all the spirit he could muster, Mather looked over his shoulder and, raising a fist, broke into a bearded grin. “Straight down the gullet of Thunderbird, gentleman!”

  Only Runnells laughed.

  The truth was that Mather did not know where he was going. Throughout the previous afternoon, he had been pondering the two massive clefts that lay ahead and knew that within two days’ time a decision would have to be made as to which direction to cast their fates. In spite of the levity he projected for the benefit of the party, Mather understood all too well the gravity of this decision. The stakes did not get higher. Stores were dangerously low. The weather and the terrain were growing increasingly hostile. The decision could well mean the difference between success for the expedition or the death of the entire party. Never along the Mackenzie had Mather agonized thus over his course. With the Mackenzie, decisions had been rather clear. The river had been his guide in most cases. In this case, the Elwha seemed to offer no clear guidance; this was not the wide river they’d come to know but rather a narrow and circuitous channel dashing their expectations at every turn. Neither did the mountainous terrain suggest a logical route through the high country.

  The very morning of the impasse, while eating his cold stack of gillettes by the weak fire — the last gillettes he would eat for the remainder of the journey — Mather pondered the decision still.

  “You ain’t said two words all morning,” observed Reese, on his haunches by the fire.

  “Just putting some coal in my belly,” he said, producing a half smile.

  Indeed, there was coal in Mather’s belly, and it was a slow burning panic. Was it fear that had him leaning toward the west? Fear that the southwest route would be the longer crossing and that food scarcity was more likely to catch up with him and his men? Or was it recklessness that drove him west? The courage to lower his shoulder and charge straight at Olympus, just as he’d charged up the gut of the Elwha. An honest accounting of himself that morning by the fire yielded the unsettling suspicion in Mather that it was the former. And had he given his own doubts the power, had he been able to summon any passionate response whatsoever to the journey ahead, it might have been one of mortal fear.

  After an hour march up a pristine snowfield — the last visible thing approximating a gentle rise — the party arrived at the base of the wedge-shaped collision of mountains that formed the junction of the two valleys, one running southwest to the head of the Elwha, the other due west toward Olympus. Mather stopped in his snowy path until the others pulled nearly even with him. The wind was whistling on the plateau, swirling with snowflakes, stinging the men’s faces.

  To be heard over the blow, Mather was forced to project his voice. “Well then, here we are,” he said.

  “And just where the devil is here?” said Cunningham, uneasily.

  “In the thick of it,” was Mather’s reply.

  Reese was scratching Dolly’s neck, though the beast was disconsolate. The skin of her legs was scraped clean below the knee. Her forelegs festered. She wheezed for breath in the thinning air and did not bother to narrow her eyes against the windblown snow, as Reese tried to give her comfort.

  “What have you got in mind?” said Haywood.

  Mather had both options in mind. “I suspect west will get us where we’re going more directly,” he said. “Does anybody reckon differently?”

  Nobody reckoned differently — at least, not out loud — that the westward route was not the right choice.

  1 March 1890

  I fear that leaving the Elwha, rather t
han rejoining her on her southwest journey, will prove to be a fatal mistake. Given the state of our fortifications, it is madness to proceed due west. I held my tongue only for fear of dividing the party, and I strongly suspect I shall regret not saying my piece. We’d be infinitely wiser to follow the Elwha as originally planned. All things considered, this broad valley has been good to us, and I suspect she would offer more of the same eventually. There is a wisdom to water, and I would sooner follow this wisdom than put my trust in the instincts of men. Especially not the James Mather we’ve come to know in recent months. Though perhaps it bears mentioning that I have doubted Jim’s judgment in the past, and he has proven me wrong. For this reason, alone, I consent to go west.

  * * *

  ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN years later, even with the benefit of Haywood’s grim accounting of the fateful decision, Timmon Tillman, standing tall upon the same gentle incline — though it was bare of snowpack in high summer — would make the exact same decision as Mather and head due west straight at Olympus.

  looking back

  JULY 2006

  Already, Hillary could feel the full force of her hangover approaching, a beating of blood in her temples, a fog of juniper rising up out of her throat. Beside her on the bed, flat on his back with the sheet pulled back, exposing the springy gray hairs of his chest, Franklin snored calmly in long, even measure. With her head propped on two pillows, Hillary stared straight ahead at the window, where the flashing neon of Bonita Lanes played upon the Levolors. Maybe it had been a little different with Franklin, maybe Franklin was gentler than most, a little more generous and attendant with his physical offerings, but now that it was over, she only felt dull and remote, like a stranger in her own body.

  Hillary crept from beneath the covers and padded to her heap of clothing at the foot of the bed, where she dressed in darkness. When Rupert began to whimper, she stroked his big square head to settle him down. Franklin sputtered briefly, rolled over onto one shoulder, but didn’t awaken. Tiptoeing out of the bedroom, she closed the door behind her without latching it, crossed the living room, and slunk into the night, clutching her high heels.

  The night was unseasonably cool. A thick marine layer was rolling off the strait. At the bottom of the steps, she fastened her heels, wobbled a few steps across the parking lot, and nearly tripped in a pothole. Wrestling the shoes off, she threw them aside disgustedly and proceeded barefoot across the lot. She never was comfortable in heels. Heels were frivolous. So much of being a woman seemed frivolous to Hillary. By tenth grade, she’d stopped cultivating her feminine mystique altogether. She started wearing shirts instead of blouses, chose wood shop over home ec. When she double-lettered in soccer and volleyball, a few of the boys started calling her Lesbo.

  But her crowning moment of humiliation came junior year, when Kip Tobin asked her to the prom. For about eleven minutes, she was foolish enough to believe that Kip actually saw something in her, until she intercepted a hushed confidence in front of Dave Gubb’s locker. That was the end of innocence for Hillary.

  Going to that prom was probably the last courageous thing she ever did. She drank rum and root beers in the parking lot by herself beforehand, and showed up a half hour late. Kip and his friends seemed surprised to see her at all. Kip was not complicit at first. The punch line had already been delivered, as far as he was concerned. But Hillary grabbed Kip’s hand and dragged him onto the dance floor, where, finally, after a little encouragement from his wrestling buddies — Lauridson, Gubb, and Gasper, mostly — Kip began playing his role to full effect. And all night long, Hillary obliged, playing the fat oblivious Cinderella to Tobin’s leading man, as he spun her in circles on the dance floor, winking not so covertly at the jeering student body gathered round them. Hillary smiled through it all, until, finally, the joke got old, and apparently it no longer felt like sport to Kip. He was actually contrite by the end of the evening, or at least willing to let Hillary suck his dick in the parking lot after a half-baked apology. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Hillary had been pushing her breasts up against him on the dance floor all night, while the Lonesome City Kings maligned everything from “Space Cowboy” to “Thriller.”

  But she showed Kip Tobin, didn’t she? She brought him to the knee-buckling edge of climax, and right when the flash pots were due to explode, right when his eyes started rolling back in his head, she bit into him as though he were a celery stick. Sure, he gave her a lump on the head, and a shiner, and rekindled his campaign of humiliation with a new fervor in the coming weeks. But who got the last laugh that night? And who got the last laugh the night of their ten-year reunion at the Seven Cedars Casino, when everybody was still calling Kip “Happy Meal”?

  Somehow, though, that last laugh never redeemed her. Even now, twenty years later, barefoot and fogbound in the parking lot of Bonita Lanes, the sting of humiliation couldn’t have been fresher had Franklin Bell delivered it an hour ago.

  nothing personal

  AUGUST 2006

  When his nine o’clock still hadn’t arrived at ten after the hour, Franklin anxiously checked and rechecked his schedule. Randall Hobart: assault with a deadly weapon, two counts aggravated assault, resisting arrest, a string of drunk and disorderlies, and a history of domestic calls. The thought of losing another one made Franklin momentarily queasy. After a final glance at his watch, he was relieved to discover a lean tattooed figure standing defiantly in the doorway.

  “Hobart?”

  Hobart nodded his shaved head, just barely.

  “Step inside. Take a seat.”

  Hobart took a seat, sitting low in his chair.

  Franklin snatched the file off the desktop, and scanning it momentarily, began absently humming “Night Moves.” “Okay, Randall,” he said, at length.

  “Nobody calls me Randall but my mama. It’s Randy.”

  “Well, you’re ten minutes late, Randy.”

  Randy narrowed a snake-eyed gaze at Franklin. “Yeah, well what can I say? Shit happens.”

  “Not on my clock. And just what shit would that be, anyway, Hobart? What could possibly be more important than your parole status? You like it on the inside, is that it?”

  “Hell no. My shit is all fucked up.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “For starters, it means my old lady’s kid got himself locked up in psych ward. Cops picked him up high on acid or some shit. But not before he jacked a hundred bucks from my wallet.”

  “This happened this morning?”

  “A couple days ago. But she was supposed give me a ride. Instead she’s down there at the loony bin. So I had to take the shame train. Fuckin’ thing was twenty minutes late.”

  “Always somebody else’s problem, ain’t it, Hobart?”

  “Fuckin’ a.”

  “Always somebody else fuckin’ things up for you, ain’t that right? Somebody always makin’ your road tougher, right, Hobart? Isn’t that how it goes?”

  “Just a-fuckin’-bout.”

  “Let me ask you something, Hobart. What do you do for fun now that you’re sprung? No, wait, let me guess. I’ll bet you like to go down to the bar and have a few beers with your old lady, or maybe just solo. I’ll bet you like to feed a few crisp dollar bills into the jukebox and play some pool. And I’ll bet you’re pretty decent. Bet you run a table now and then. Bet you hardly ever lose — at pool, anyway. And I’ll bet you’re feelin’ okay for the first three beers or so. But maybe as the night wears on, you start feelin’ a little restless, like you been there before. Sorta stuck, am I right?”

  “You ain’t wrong.”

  “I know how it is, Hobart. You think I don’t know how it is? It’s cold out there. You find a little comfort, you stick. That’s human. We like that. We like to stick. Let me tell you about stuck, Hobart.”

  But even as he began telling Hobart about stuck, Franklin knew two things: (A) that he already had this kid dead to rights and (B) that he couldn’t care less what became of Hobart as long as he
didn’t break parole. There was no light in Hobart’s eyes. Hobart wasn’t the kind you inspired — too lazy and unimaginative. And dumb. Hobart was the type you cajoled into submission by dotting his i’s for him. You facilitated Hobart’s dependence by scaring him with paperwork, by convincing him, finally, that keeping your nose clean and following a few simple rules was easier than negotiating the intricacies of the state, should he fail to comply. Hobart was one of the ugly victories you ground out in the fourth quarter from the stripe, not the harrowing victories that distinguished the sterling record above all else. The kind of victory Timmon Tillman might’ve been. Tillman had potential. Tillman wanted something better for himself. The guy read a lot of books — obviously, he was looking for answers. Maybe Franklin had asked the wrong questions. Maybe his pep talks had sounded disingenuous in the end. Where had he lost Tillman? Was it the second meeting, when Franklin had decided against his better judgment to keep Tillman on a steady diet of optimism?

  “So you’re sayin’ it doesn’t matter shit about my past?” Tillman had said.

  “Hell, no. That was then. All you gotta do is take the initiative, son.”

  Why had he called him son? He’d never in a million years call a guy like Hobart son. So why Tillman?

  “Bullshit,” Tillman said, halfheartedly.

  That’s why, the halfheartedness. Because somewhere in him, Tillman wanted to believe in something, wanted his glass half full. Franklin could see in Tillman’s eyes the potential for decisive action, the determination to make some great leap in the face of lousy odds, the sort of reckless heroism that could drive a man to extraordinary acts.

  “Look, we both know I’m stuck with the record,” Tillman had pursued. “Which means I’ve got shit for opportunities on the outside. It doesn’t matter what kind of high-minded bullshit I fill my head with — trust me, I’ve read books, hundreds of them in the klink: poets, philosophers, you name it. None of it means shit on the outside when it comes to getting ahead. The only thing that means shit out here is my record.”