West of Here

by Jonathan Evison

  There was a new print hanging on his office wall — when you looked at it one way, it was a pack of wild horses running across a prairie, and when you looked at it another way, it was a head and shoulder silhouette of Chief Joseph. There was a name for that, too, the art docent told him — not a palindrome, but something else. Beneath the image there was a Chief Joseph quote: “The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no.”

  “Are you writing about your experiences at all?”

  “Drawing some.”

  “Anything you want to share?”

  “Nah.”

  “And what about the home front? How’s that going?”

  “Good, I guess.”

  “Your mom?”

  “She’s working at a new place. She’s talking about going back to school or something.”

  Setting the paper weight down, Coleman fingered its glass edges thoughtfully.

  “Can I ask why you changed your mind about the Jamestown position?”

  “I don’t know. It seems cool. And it would look good on a transcript, maybe, right? Isn’t that what you were saying?”

  Coleman smiled, nodding his head. “It’ll look dynamite on a transcript,” he said. “But you understand it’s just an internship, right? There’s no pay.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “There’s a stipend, though — for lunches and transportation. The casino’s got a great buffet. Just stay away from the Swedish meatballs.”

  Coleman fished a green organizer out of his desk, riffled through some paperwork until he found what he was looking for, and slid a paper across the desk to Curtis. “Fill this out, and I’ll submit it with a letter of recommendation.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Coleman.” Curtis took the paper, and turned to leave.

  “And Curtis.”

  Curtis looked over his shoulder.

  “Keep it local.”

  special features

  AUGUST 2006

  Krig sat alone at a two-top by the window, looking across the lot at Murray Motors, where he thought he saw Rhinehalter out in front of the showroom, cupping a cigarette against the rain. But a glance at the bar revealed Jerry in his usual spot. The guy was a spook. Krig did a double-take out the window nonetheless, half expecting to see Rhinehalter both places at once — but the smoker had fled. Krig couldn’t tell if the ’89 Seville was $2,450 or $3,450. A rip, either way. Tobin drove a Seville senior year. What a pile.

  Checking his watch, Krig saw Rita still wasn’t due for another five minutes. He’d been a half hour early. Of course he was early, he was always early for dates! It was a date, right? Rita initiated the whole thing, which was particularly surprising in light of the fact that she’d quit High Tide, which Krig viewed at the time as the final nail in the coffin of their romantic possibilities. So was it presumptuous to think this was a date? Maybe things weren’t on ice after all. Hadn’t she said that bad timing had been the whole problem? So there you go — everything was different now. Curtis was back to normal, better than normal from what she’d said. Randy was out of her life for good. Maybe she’d had a few weeks to reconsider; maybe leaving High Tide had helped her see that she could do worse than spend the rest of her days with Krig. The fact that she hadn’t cashed the check yet might suggest a change of heart as well. Maybe she’d decided to stay. Was he foolish to be hopeful — foolish to think that the three of them might share some kind of life together in P.B.? Maybe rent a house west of town, something with a decent yard and a view of the strait, maybe use the six grand to buy an old RV to go camping on weekends, or a boat, or hell, put it toward Curtis’s college fund. Why not? Krig made a decent living. J-man had even been hinting about a promotion lately. Hell, maybe they could even buy a place, get a loan and all that.

  Rita arrived right on time, clutching a flat colorfully wrapped package in one hand. She looked great, rested, Krig thought. Her hair was up, and one sexy little wisp had escaped the bun and hung down over her face. She was wearing heels and a silky red dress that looked Asian to Krig. As she sat down, she smiled sweetly across the table at him, but a little sadly, he thought. Already, his heart began to sink.

  “Here,” she said, sliding the package across the table. “I got something for you.”

  “My birthday’s not until October.”

  “It’s not a birthday present, silly. It’s just a token of my appreciation. It’s from Curtis, too.”

  The thought that Curtis should appreciate him had never occurred to Krig. If anything, he’d always feared that Curtis would resent him. Probably, she was just saying that — probably, Curtis didn’t even know about the gift. Deliberately, Krig began to unwrap it.

  “Oh, go on!” she said.

  He tore back the wrapping to reveal a DVD: Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science.

  On the cover, cast in not-so-crisp relief against the Bluff Creek riverbank, was the familiar digitally enhanced female form of the P.-G. Bigfoot: tits sagging, arms swinging, lips like hot dogs.

  “The most comprehensive and conclusive inquiry to date into the Bigfoot phenomenon,” blurbed Willamette Weekly.

  “I noticed that videotape of yours is all squiggly from all the pausing you do,” she explained. “This one pauses automatically frame by frame throughout the whole clip. It’s got all kinds of special features — a whole extra DVD — including a Roger Peterson interview.”

  “Patterson.”

  “And a segment on the Skookum thingy.”

  Krig ran his fingers over the DVD cover. “Thanks,” he said, with a forced jauntiness. Why was he disappointed? What did he expect? And really, it wasn’t the gift that was disappointing but the presentation, the implication — real or imagined — that the gift belonged to the past, to something they would never share again. But why had she dressed up — simply to torture him? Why wouldn’t she wear a baggy sweatshirt? Surely, she’d intended to impress him. The thought of it heartened Krig momentarily.

  “I’ve got something else, too,” Rita said, fishing around in her purse, from which she produced Krig’s check. She slid it across the table, facedown, the seam fuzzy from all the folding and unfolding. “I think that was the single nicest thing anybody has ever done for me, Dave. But I can’t take it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t.”

  “It’s just a loan. You’re not taking anything.”

  Rita sighed and gave Krig something of a pleading look. Suddenly she didn’t look so rested. The wisp of hair hanging over her face seemed more tired than sexy. Even her red dress seemed to have lost a little of its shimmer.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I thought at first that money might be some kind of solution, a ticket out. But now I see that the stuff in my life that needs fixing can’t be fixed with money — and it especially can’t be fixed by running away.”

  Krig straightened up in his chair. “So you’re staying?”

  Rita glanced down at her menu, then up at Krig, then back down at her menu. “Yeah. I think we are.”

  “Does this mean that maybe you and I … ?”

  Rita sighed, and looked at him pitiably, with her lower lip pouty. “No. Dave, no. And it’s nothing personal. Really. It’s like I said before —”

  “But the timing is different now.”

  “It’s still wrong. Don’t you see? I need to stand on my own two feet. I need to concentrate on supporting Curtis.”

  “So cash the check. Nobody said you had to leave town to take the money.”

  “I don’t mean support him financially, Dave. I mean be there for him one hundred percent — with no distractions. I owe him that. At least for a year.”

  Krig slumped slightly in his chair and diverted his eyes.

  “Look,” Rita said. “I didn’t come here to get your hopes up. I just wanted to thank you.”

  “So why are you all dressed up?” snapped Krig, surprising them both.

  Rita cast her eyes back down at the menu. “I’m going dancing with a f
riend.”

  “What friend?”

  “He’s just a friend.”

  Krig’s jaw tightened. His tongue tasted like brass. “No distractions, huh?”

  “He’s eighty years old, Dave! He’s just a friend.”

  “Friends,” said Krig. He sharpened the word into a little arrowhead.

  “Why are you acting this way?” she said.

  “What way?”

  Krig thought about saying it. All of it — about the house, and the yard, and the happily ever after. He thought about saying that he loved her, that he wanted to take care of her, that he wouldn’t get in the way, he promised.

  “You’re acting like a jerk,” she said.

  Couldn’t she see how this was hurting him? How could she not see it? She had to see it.

  “Go to hell,” he said, regretting it immediately.

  Rita stood without a word and swiped the stray hair from her face. “I’m sorry, Krig, I really am,” she said, and turned and walked away.

  Krig didn’t watch her go. He looked at his menu intently as if he were really considering the prime-rib dip. Coleslaw or potato salad? He could feel Rhinehalter’s eyes on him, he was sure of it. He heard the swinging door close as Rita made her final exit; he kept his eyes glued to the menu, feeling Rhinehalter’s curiosity. What fucking business of Rhinehalter’s was it, anyway? Krig thought about calling J-man but remembered it was date night. He and Janis were probably out at the Regal Seven seeing some chick flick. He thought about driving out to the bluff, clearing his head, looking at the lights, putting things in perspective, but somehow he couldn’t muster the wherewithal to stand up and begin the journey. Hard as it was to believe, the truth was, he didn’t even feel like draining his beer.

  divided

  APRIL 1890

  Bright and early on the morning of April 6, the party broke camp in a businesslike fashion and set out in search of the Quinault. The pale light from the southeast and the waning chill of dawn seemed to promise spring. Spirits were cautiously optimistic as they began their trek up the steep face of a mountainside soon to be known as Barrier Ridge.

  Within the hour, the weather took a turn for the worse, as low cloud cover crept in from the leeward side of the Baileys. Mather’s men soon had to contend with poor visibility as they crossed the path of yet another recent avalanche. The slide had cut a wide swathe through the timber and left in its wake a rutty snowfield cut through with shallow gulleys and uprooted trees. In single file, they ascended slowly at roughly thirty degrees for the better part of the day, until they reached the slope above the destruction, where they began switchbacking toward the summit.

  Leading the way, the filthy length of his ragged headband dangling in tatters, Mather plodded onward, step by crunchy step, even as his thoughts reached backward into the past — thoughts of flagstone hearths, and perfumed women, and that aching restless compulsion for discovery. He made no effort to govern these recollections but let them run their course like windblown clouds. He saw himself, a child, holding his baby brother at the foot of an endless prairie as darkness began to fall, and amber was turning to gray, and he saw himself again at his brother’s graveside, where beside him his father clutched a wilting hat as he looked toward the horizon. At night, shadows playing on the wall, and his mother’s forgiving face, drawn in the lamplight. And then came the prairie again, suffused with hot light and laughter and, somewhere beyond the flatness, the promise of a future.

  By noon they had gained thirteen hundred feet in elevation and paused to look back over the Elwha, which they could barely glimpse through the cloud cover.

  “Perhaps we’ve seen the last of her after all,” commented Mather.

  The terrain ahead of them, though nearly free of snow, was most formidable, a broken ascent of bare ledges and outcrops, studded and splintered with jagged basalt, riddled with stunted trees struggling to maintain their hold on the cliff face. However, the men did not linger long enough to be daunted but began instead to secure their loads and ready their lines. The dog, now a lusterless bag of bones and a pair of dark pleading eyes, could not be coaxed forward. When confronted with the cliff, she took only a few nervous paces, whimpering twice without looking up before she lay on the ground at the foot of the escarpment, where she lowered her head onto to her forepaws and stared shiftlessly straight ahead.

  “Sitka. Up girl!” said Mather.

  But the dog did not lift an eye.

  “Up!”

  This time the dog slowly exhaled, but her black eyes were frozen. When she finally blinked, it was sluggishly.

  Mather issued a staccato whistle, and still the dog would not budge. Runnells approached her as though to rouse her, but Mather stopped him with an outstretched arm.

  “No. Leave her in peace.”

  “We could hoist her with ropes,” Reese suggested.

  Mather shook his head grimly and ran a hand through his shaggy beard. “No. She’s out of fight.”

  Mather almost envied the dog. Looking at her there on the frozen ground, the pale flame of her spirit all but spent, he felt a welling of emotion for which he was grateful. Even in her present condition, she was, by his estimation, a nobler beast than he. He squatted down next to her and ran his hand over the dog’s head, past her ears, and she exhaled once more with a wheeze. He could not bear to look at the washboard of her rib cage or look her in the eyes. He could not bear to feel her spine running like a row of gravestones down her back. The best he could do was pat her head.

  “Rest now,” he whispered.

  Rising to his feet, he turned to face the cliff, doing everything in his power not to look back at her as, hand over hand, he began climbing ahead of the party. The going was exceedingly slow and measured, and the rock was given to crumbling under the force of their toeholds. Mather paused at each crevice to lower a cod line. Halfway up, he could not help but look back at the dog and immediately wished he had not. She was lying just as he’d left her, head on forepaws, staring straight ahead, at nothing. Part of him wished he was lying there beside her.

  Along with the precarious ascent itself, the jangling of nerves had taken a toll on the men by the time they reached the flat narrow shelf, which hung as though suspended just below the ridge, not a hundred feet above the wispy cloud tops. The sky was deep blue again, though Mather could hardly see it through the blinding sun as he approached the final stretch, where, just below the crest, the face gave way to a series of natural steps, not unlike a ziggurat. A final step brought Mather’s head above the sharp wedgelike saddle, and the curtain rose from before the unknown region, and there before them, wide and green and pristine, lay the valley of the Quinault. Mather might have fallen to his knees and wept then and there were it not for his impatience to put it all behind him.

  After grueling months in the wilderness, through the most perilous winter on record, having traversed some of the most rugged terrain in North America, ever in the shadow of death, the Mather expedition had reached the central divide at long last. From this vista, they could see to the west, unobstructed, all that lay between them and the Pacific. Beyond the first range lay a wide, handsome valley. The thickly wooded bottomlands gave way gently on either side to a range of mountains that rose gradually, green about the waist and capped with snow. The river, visible some two thousand feet below, where it emerged out of a dark funnel of rock, appeared to run wider and generally straighter than the Elwha.

  Bountiful country, there could be no doubt, a generous watershed running right to the very edge of the world. Endless resources. Boundless timber in every direction and a wide, navigable waterway to move it. Yet standing on the divide, with the wind whistling past his ears, Mather could not shake a certain disillusion in knowing that what lay in front of him had already been discovered, had no doubt seen the restless footsteps of other men. Paradise, if it existed, lay somewhere behind them — perhaps they’d trudged right through its midst without recognizing it. Mather would not be the man to discover it
. He’d known that this day was coming, or at least sensed it, the day when everything before him had yielded to discovery. Thus, it felt to Mather less like he had arrived here and more like this place had been following him all along.

  “We can reach bottom by sundown,” he said. “There, we can camp.”

  “Onward,” said Haywood wearily.

  Thus the party gave pause but momentarily before they began their zigzagging descent down the wayward side of the divide. And even the fitful past gave way to Mather’s footsteps, as he plodded through the thick snow, while behind him, the men strung out in a crooked line, trudging onward one ragged step at a time. Nobody said a word.

  In a day’s time, they dove into the dense bottomlands and began fighting their way westward. Haywood would describe a high-canopied forest fecund with rot, a brackish cathedral festooned with moss. He would describe the biggest timber he’d ever laid eyes on, spruce wider than train cars, colonnades of hemlock so massive that “the wingspan of three men stretched finger to finger could not match the diameter of these giants.” He would describe a soft and yielding forest floor, presenting a crust so brittle with rot that the casual footfall would break through the surface. He would describe the party’s perilous crossing of the the raging gray Quinault, whose swift current they forded some fifty yards across. Late in the afternoon, in a sloping valley brimming with maple and spruce, they would come upon the first evidence of human activity in two months — blazes consisting of two sets of slanting lines conjoined at an apex in the manner of a chevron. Like their own blazes, they were relatively fresh and notched high on the trunks of the great gnarled trees, suggesting deep snowpack in the recent past.

  Awash in silence as he trudged through the fertile bottomlands, Mather scarcely paused to observe the wonders he passed, which might have taken his breath away were he still the man he was when he left Port Bonita. Perhaps, with enough rest, he would be that man again. Perhaps a few months spent in the relative ease of society would reawaken that restless urge to discover. But for now, he was no longer that man nor certain what man he might become. Perhaps his days of discovery were not over after all. More than anything else, with each muddy step westward, Mather was eager to get home — wherever that was.