West of Here

by Jonathan Evison

  * * *

  YOU DID NOT register the arrival of the new specialist. Nor did you recognize my mother. How could you? You stared straight ahead at the letters hanging on the wall. You tilted your head sideways to the left, then sideways to the right, then straight up again. You covered one eye, then the other. There was a letter f, and a letter c, but no matter how you looked, you could find no letter k pinned to the wall. The letter k seemed like the key to something. If you could find a letter k, perhaps you could order the universe once more, put everything back as it was supposed to be, make everything not quite perfect again.

  When the specialist walked into the room, you finally abandoned your letters and looked at the strange little man in white — so different from the other men in white. Do you remember how the old man seemed instantly familiar? Was it the smell of him, like lavender and fir needles and something burned? Was it the little skin tags flowering all around his eyes? Or was it the smiling eyes themselves, which seemed to share your secret right from the start? You knew immediately he spoke in white spaces, knew that he would hear your voice where the others had failed. He spoke directly to you — without looking at the others. It was as though the others were not there.

  “Hello, son. My name is Meriwether Lewis Charles. But you can call me Lew if you want. That’s what they call me at the casino. Or you can call me Running Elk. Nobody calls me that anymore, though.” The old man pulled up a metal stool and set it directly in front of you, and when he hopped up onto the seat, his white shoes did not quite reach the ground.

  “They tell me you aren’t talking.”

  “They aren’t listening,” you said.

  “Ah, yes, the age old story. But I can hear you.”

  “Who is he talking to?” demanded Rita. “Who are you talking to?”

  Kardashian smiled uneasily. His eye twitched.

  “Shush,” snapped the old man.

  The woman and the doctor exchanged glances, then promptly turned their attention to you.

  “They told me you had a dogfish,” said Meriwether.

  “The shark is the truth,” you said, just like George told you. You reached for your shark-tooth necklace and it was still gone.

  “They told me you’ve been shaking. When they told me that, I knew I had to meet you. I hope you were clean for the tamanamis. ‘Qway ya?nenict.”

  “What’s that?” said Rita. “What’s he talking about?”

  “Shush,” said the old man. “Aya hosca d’ ayahos,” he sang. “Aya hosca d’ ayahos.”

  “Is this some kind of joke?” demanded Rita. “What is he saying?”

  “Silence,” said the old man. “How did you burn yourself?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” you said.

  “It’s better if you do. Trust me.”

  “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “Too long to remember.”

  “I see. Are you sure you can’t remember anything?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Was it a fire?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “It was a fire, wasn’t it?”

  “It was nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  You covered your ears, my ears, and closed your eyes, and gritted your teeth, and began to swing your dangling legs and sway side to side in your stool.

  “Tell me.”

  “Stop,” said the woman. “Leave him be.” She reached out for you.

  “Ceqwewc! Ceqwewc!” you shouted. You pointed to your arms. Your heart was beating in your ears. You smelled the burning flesh and creosote, heard the dull groan of the planks as the ceiling collapsed.

  “Ceqwewc! Ceqwewc! Ceqwewc! Ceqwewc!” you shouted. You pounded your fists in your lap like hammers.

  But the woman didn’t understand. She only looked frightened.

  “Ceqwewc!” you shouted as they tried to calm you. “Ceqwewc! Ceqwewc!” as you watched the woman’s hope turn to fear and then to tears and finally to revulsion. You fought the white-coats when they came for you, clawing and lashing out at them with a fire in your belly and a fire on your tongue and the flames of an older fire consuming your memory.

  * * *

  RITA WAS SOBBING inconsolably as the attendants wrestled Curtis out of the exam room.

  “What happened to my baby?”

  “It’s okay,” assured Dr. Kardashian. “It’s okay. This is good, we’re making progress.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Rita choked. “What did you say to him?” she demanded of Meriwether.

  “Just part of an old song I thought he might know.”

  “What song? Why would he know an old song?”

  “He’s a traveler,” said Meriwether.

  “What does that mean? What are you saying?”

  Kardashian’s expression seemed to ask the same questions.

  “He walks between worlds,” observed Meriwether. “I don’t know what that means to you. We do not see things the way they are, we see things the way we are.”

  “What was he carrying on about?” said Kardashian.

  “A fire.”

  “The burns?”

  “That’s where things are complicated. His burns are fresh. The fire was much older.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” groaned Rita.

  Kardashian concurred with a furrowed brow.

  “Many things do not make sense in my experience,” said Meriwether. “Sense cannot explain everything. Why are the sharks dying? Why are the chinook changing sexes? How does a pigeon find its way home? I once met a man in Peru who knew everything. I was on a twelve-day Andean trail tour with my cousin, until her phlebitis started acting up. I met this man in a small village. He was not a clean man. He frequently walked about with food on his shirt, and often throw-up. His feet were caked with mud, his clothes were ragged. He smelled like a goat. Every night he drank rum until he was spinning stupidly in circles and slurring his words and spitting up on himself. His own family would not let him into their house.”

  “What does this have to do with my son?”

  “I’m getting to that. You see, this man had never even left his village. He had no education. And yet he knew everything there was to know. He knew how far Anacortes was from São Paulo. He knew the train schedule for Laramie, Wyoming, in 1869. The elevation of Albuquerque, the population of Dover, the name of every mosque in Pakistan. This man had dined on betel nuts in a thatch hut in the Solomon Islands, and beer nuts in a sports bar in Milwaukee. He spoke Klallam perfectly. He spoke Mandarin, Portuguese, English, Arabic. He knew the name of my cousin, the location of my house, the mayor of Nome, Alaska. He could recite the Iliad, count backward in Gaelic, tell you who won Super Bowl XII. And this is not hyperbole, what I am telling you. This was a real man in Peru. And this man knew everything there was to know, saw everything there was to see. Now, how is it possible to know everything and see everything without ever having set foot out of a mountain village? Can you tell me how this is possible, how this makes any sense? Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “How?” asked Kardashian.

  Meriwether shrugged, and took a coffee nip out of his coat pocket, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth. “Beats the heck out of me,” he said. “Darndest thing I ever saw, though.”

  “What does this have to do with my son?”

  “He’s been places he’s never been.”

  “So you’re saying he’s delusional?” said Kardashian.

  “He has a better memory than most.”

  “How can he remember what didn’t happen?”

  “It did happen. Just not to him, exactly.”

  “That makes no sense,” said Rita.

  “As I said, everything does not make sense. Our memories are not ours alone. Our experience belongs to all that is living, and all that has ever lived. It even belongs to that which is not yet born and may never be born.”

  what’s what

&
nbsp; AUGUST 2006

  For nearly two weeks, Jared Thornburgh agonized over his Dam Days speech. Where was he supposed to begin? What the hell was he supposed to say? To christen something was one thing, sure, but to usher it out of existence? After all, it was official now. The feds had finally pulled the trigger. The news was all over town. The dam would slowly be undone. So was this spiel supposed to be hopeful like a toast or somber like a eulogy? And how do you shoehorn 150 years of history into a four-minute speech? And whose story do you tell, anyway? What about the Indians — should he talk about the Indians? What about those weirdos with the colony? Weren’t they socialists or something? Didn’t they put up a stink about the dam way back when?

  In an effort to bring all this history into focus, Jared decided to pay a visit to the North Olympic Library, which he did one unseasonably dreary Wednesday on his lunch hour. Although Krig had done his best to tag along, hemming Jared in between Dee Dee’s cubicle and the Xerox machine on the way out, Jared was able, by the tactful employment of the word we on several occasions, to insinuate Janis’s presence in the afternoon’s affairs, at which point Krig bolted.

  Aided by a flabby-armed woman in a corduroy dress, Jared located no less than eleven volumes in the 979.79s — ranging from slim to elephantine, hardback to tapebound — devoted to various histories of Port Bonita and Clallam County. One by one, the librarian pulled them out and handed them to Jared, never failing to comment.

  “The Gorseline accounts in this one are splendid,” she assured him. “This one has the most comprehensive coverage of the mills,” she informed him with a tap on the dust cover causing the flab of her arm to jiggle. “This one has the most dam and fishery coverage. This one here is about the Klallam tribe — both the Elwha and the Jamestown. Lots of interesting stuff about Shakerism. This here is probably the most comprehensive coverage of the fire of October 1890. But this one also covers the fire. This little one here is the first enviromental impact study done on the dam from 1931. Dry but informative. We have a much more comprehensive environmental coverage in Dr. Phillip Fenner’s Historical Assessment of the Elwha River, which, if I recall, is still out to that short-haired gal from Fish and Wildlife, but if you’d like to put a hold on it …”

  “I’m good,” said Jared. “Thanks.”

  “You’ll probably want something on the Mather expedition,” she said.

  “That’s cool,” he said. “I think I’m good with these.”

  “Oh, no, you’ll definitely want something on the Mather expedition.”

  “Uh, okay.”

  “Come, come.” Trailing in her wax-scented wake, Jared followed the librarian down the aisle to the 917s, where, expertly scanning the chaos of spines, she soon degenerated into a mild state of agitation upon discovering The Olympic Journals of Charles Haywood to be absent from their designated post at 917.9794 — absent, in fact, from the entire vicinity of of the 917s.

  “This is not good,” she intoned.

  “Oh well, that’s cool,” said Jared. “I’ll just get started with these.”

  “No, I insist. Let me look into this. Come, come.”

  A wax-scented stroll past the computer cubbies to the information desk, followed by a cursory check of the database, yielded a status of lost or absconded, causing Flabby Arms to frown and knit her brow.

  “Another one lost or stolen,” she said with a sigh. “And they’re actually cutting our budget next year, if you can believe that.”

  WHEN JARED RETURNED to High Tide, minus The Olympic Journals of Charles Haywood, he ducked past Krig’s cubicle, told Dee Dee to hold his calls, and locked himself in his wainscoted office for the remainder of the afternoon, poring over Shadows of Our Ancestors: Readings in the History of Klallam–White Relations, Taming the Elwha: The Story of the Thornburgh Dam, along with Port Bonita: From Steam to Electric and Beyond. Far from putting things into focus, or providing any kind of context whatsoever in which to couch his presentation, the information made Jared’s head spin. Still, he soldiered on — through Quimper’s early reports of the Klallam villages, past the establishment of the Customs House and the National Reserve, to the platting of Port Bonita, to the erection of the dam, to the fire of 1890, through five decades of booming mills and the harvesting of the greatest stands of Douglas fir on the face of the earth. He finally left the office around five forty-five, stack of books in arms. After a brief stop at Siam Palace to pick up dinner upon Janis’s request, Jared resumed his studies at the dining room table between bites of pineapple curry, perusing George C. McGurdy’s Port Bonita Days: Conquering the Last Frontier; A Photographic History, which, as promised by Flabby Arms, provided excellent photo collateral.

  “Man, what a dump,” Jared commented aloud in reference to a tin-type taken from the crest of Hogback in 1889, looking west down a muddy Front Street. “It looks like Dodge City after a tsunami. What were these people thinking?”

  Below this, another photograph offered virtually the same vantage a year later, shortly after Front Street had been gutted by fire.

  “That’s more like it,” Jared said.

  On the page opposite, two tiny mustachioed figures in suspenders, clutching one giant whipsaw between them, stood upon a massive butt log at the base of a rubble-strewn hillside. Little plumes of smoke unfurled here and there behind them. The sky was a slate gray wash. “What a mess,” Jared said, flipping the page, where he was immediately confronted by the proud personage of his ancestor, Ethan Thornburgh. “There he is,” he announced, sliding the open book across the table for Janis’s inspection.

  With a spring roll in one hand, and her other hand just below the tabletop resting firmly upon the imperceptible bulge of her abdomen, Janis peered down at the picture until a smile played at the corners of her mouth.

  The photo in question, an 1891 tintype studio portrait, was faded ghostly around the edges. Ethan was snug in waistcoat, morning coat, wing-collar shirt, and Burberry necktie, his thin mouth hard and straight beneath his mustache, his silver-eyed gaze pointed like a challenge directly at the camera.

  “I think he looks like you,” said Janis.

  west of here

  a talk

  AUGUST 2006

  Beverly was fifteen minutes late already, a fact that neither surprised nor perturbed Hillary. Nor was it any surprise that the Bushwhacker was dead on a Tuesday at three fifteen. The dining room wasn’t even open until five. The kitchen help was still tying their aprons and turning on the lights. Hillary sat alone nursing her flat Diet Pepsi, as the waitress circled the room with a tray, dispensing dimpled red candle holders. Quietly, Huey Lewis was “Workin’ for a Livin’,” and Hillary couldn’t help but think of Franklin Bell for an instant. It was a song he’d listen to.

  Hillary fought the impulse to stand up and leave before Beverly arrived. Anxiously, she buttoned up her puffy jacket to hide the evidence, though at six weeks it was hardly visible at all. She looked for something else to do with her hands but, finding no purpose for them, began tearing little pieces off the edge of her napkin and rolling them into balls between her fingers and dropping them on the carpet by her feet.

  Her mother finally showed up at three twenty, festooned from shoulder to wrist with shopping bags from the mall — Victoria’s Secret, T.J. Maxx, Alley Cat Boutique. She was sporting a pair of equestrian boots (though to Hillary’s knowledge she’d never been within thirty feet of a horse) and a freshly dyed Rachel cut that was way too young for her (not to mention ten years out of style). Tethered like a pair of water buoys beneath a tight brown sweater, her tits were riding high. Her lips looked puffier than ever. They were stuck open. Coupled with the tight skin around her cheeks and forehead (which lent her a saucer-eyed look), the overall effect was that of a blow-up doll.

  “Congratulations,” said Bev.

  Hillary blushed.

  “I mean about the dam coming down. I heard on the radio last week.”

  “Oh. Right. Why didn’t you leave that stuff in the car?�
� Hillary said.

  Beverly snuck a glance over her shoulder at the empty bar. “Here?” she half whispered. “Are you kidding me?” Staging her bags around the foot of the chair, she smoothed her black pencil skirt over her bony butt and sat down. “Incidentally, why on earth are you wearing that jacket, Hill? You look like the Michelin Man.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Honey, I didn’t mean —”

  “What did you mean? How am I supposed to take a comment like that?”

  “Well, dear, I just meant that — well, it’s so warm in here and …”

  “And what?”

  “Well, it’s not the most flattering jacket in the world. There, I’ve said it. I’m sorry I care about these things, Hillary. I know you think I’m shallow. I just think a person ought to give a little thought to how they present themselves. You look pale. Are you getting enough iron?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look thin.”

  “There’s one I never thought I’d hear from you.”

  “I’m concerned, dear, that’s all. Now, what’s good here?” she said, flipping her menu open.

  To Hillary’s surprise, her mother didn’t say anything when Hillary changed her order at the last minute from the chef salad to the Reuben. Beverly ordered the bacon bleu burger with home fries and a Manhattan. She could eat anything she damn well pleased and stay thin.