West of Here

by Jonathan Evison

  In three days’ time, over the foothills and through the bottomlands, the party would come upon a squat little cabin with a smoking chimney on the wooded edge of a small glen, where, standing beside a woodpile with one leg propped on a chop log, and a rifle slung at his hip, a skinny stooping figure with a long gray beard would finally move Mather to speech.

  “God help his plug of tobacco,” he said.

  make it stop

  OCTOBER 1890

  On the bluff to the northeast came the baying of hounds, maybe a half dozen, maybe more. Even before Adam crested the hogback on Lord Jim’s mare, a cloud of black smoke unfurled into the moonlight. He could hear the distant shouting. Already the air was thick with the acrid stink of creosote and burned timber. Ascending the rise, first at a canter, then at a trot, Adam felt the frantic heat of panic rising all around him. There was sure to be chaos on the other side. Finding the boy might be impossible under the circumstances.

  The mare reared back on two legs and whinnied at the first sight of the flames, and Adam eased her down on all fours. Dismounting, he settled the horse with an expert hand, surveying the scene below as colonists hurried past him down the hill. The flames were fanning out in both directions along the south side of Front Street, though the prevailing wind was doing its best to push them southeasterly. Furious bucket brigades were strung out on all sides, heaving and splashing vainly at the blaze. The Belvedere, its fiery roof caving in on itself, was nearest to the center of the inferno.

  The horse nickered and balked, worrying her head all around the bit as Adam led her down the hogback slowly toward the center of town, with a hot, ashy wind blowing into his face. Front Street was littered with rubble, burning shingles and scattered brick amid shattered glass. From the back lot of the leather works, a phalanx of fifty or sixty men drove the flames back. Others scurried about madly in the street to no apparent purpose. Dogs skulked in the shadows. Doc Newnham darted across the street in front of Adam, flanked by a pair of teenage boys; he clutched his leather bag in his right hand as he ran. Flames consumed the hardware store, lapping at the roof of P. G. Rhinehalter. Old man Rhinehalter, in spite of the advices of a half-dozen screaming men, scrambled to save his inventory, heaving tack and leather into the street with desperate haste. The mare fought Adam harder and harder as they drew closer to the center of town, continually rearing her head back in the halter. Adam ran a comforting hand over her damp withers and coaxed her along gently.

  The muddy street pulsed wildly with shadows. Chaos cut through the night on wings, breathing fire. Suddenly there came a commotion from up the street as the frantic crowd dispersed, and right through their midst with a furious clopping came a pair of frenzied black geldings hitched to a flaming carriage. The mare pitched, landing on stiff forelegs as the carriage shot past like a cannonball. Then, from the east end, came an explosion of plate glass, followed by the staccato cries of a dozen or more voices as a column of flames flared thirty feet into the air, roaring at the center like a great furnace. A tethered mule brayed in earnest before the Olympic Hotel, where luggage of all shapes and sizes was cloistered in the mud nearby. They came upon the gutted Belvedere, a dozen splayed timbers and a collapsed roof and a row of blistered piles still flaming. The boardwalk, too, had collapsed, running like a black shattered spine west down Front Street. In front of a charred splintered section of railing, Adam came upon a human torso, charred blood red and black beyond recognition. The second body was draped with a blanket, but even so, by its very configuration Adam could guess at the brutality of its repose. Up ahead, he could see several other bodies in a line, even as another was being dragged into their midst by a man Adam recognized as the druggist’s son. On the west end of town, near the foot of Morse Dock, women and children gathered, their faces at turns stunned and terrified in the firelight. Some of the children were crying. One child, charcoal-streaked and tear-soaked, clung tightly to her mother’s waist.

  “Make it stop,” Adam heard her say.

  He cut through the crowd to Hollywood Beach, where up and down the shoreline the Klallam huddled in clusters of five and ten, murmuring. Adam led the mare through their midst, searching for a familiar face. He came upon Abe Charles clutching his rifle as he stood in a small group before his shack. Another rifle was propped against a saw log.

  “I’m looking for Hoko King’s boy,” said Adam.

  “They’ve gone after him,” said Abe.

  “Who?”

  “Tobin and maybe a dozen others. With dogs and rifles. They’re headed east along the bluff.”

  A chill washed over Adam. “Give me your rifle.”

  No sooner did Abe surrender his rifle than Adam mounted his horse and galloped east down Hollywood Beach.

  * * *

  GEORGE STOOD LIKE a statue in the shadow of Morse Dock, still perplexed by Storm King’s puzzling revelations. What did it mean to hold nothing in your hand? What did it mean, this strange song? Even as the flames threw long shadows down the length of Front Street, even as George heard the frantic shouting and the clanging of bells from all quarters, he sang softly under his breath:

  doon-doon, doon-doon

  doon-doon, doon-doon

  A dozen Siwash brothers streaked past him, headed toward the blaze, clutching buckets and hatchets. A dozen horses whinnied crazily in the night. A black and terrible cloud threatened to blot out the moon. And still George puzzled and pondered. What did it mean, the fingers? Why did it matter how many he held up? While others huddled in whispering groups up and down Hollywood Beach, George stood alone and turned toward the shore, with one hand holding nothing and the other holding up three fingers, singing louder now as the flames reared up behind him:

  doon-doon, doon-doon

  doon-doon, doon-doon

  His trance was broken when a young woman, whom he soon recognized as Hoko, wandered dazedly into his midst, moving like a ghost between worlds. Stopping a short distance in front of George, she swayed faintly side to side, wide-eyed like a blind person, open-mouthed but silent like a mute, with one hand out in front of her, reaching toward nothing.

  And when it seemed that she was totally without voice, she spoke, not to George, but to no one.

  “They,” she said. “Them.”

  * * *

  MINERVA WAS SCARCELY three days in the ground when Ethan came down the mountain for the first time since the funeral in a rickety old carriage bursting with caged chickens, driven hard by an old white-beard named Lofall who lived just downriver of the gorge. As they began their descent of Homestead Hill, Ethan could see the pale yellow nimbus of fire glowing on the horizon. He wondered if it was already a lost cause. They rattled in on the east end of town, where Ethan jumped from the moving carriage and began fighting his way west down Front Street toward the center of town, through the frenetic crowd of onlookers, through the mad scramble of bucket brigades. He claimed a station squarely in front of the post office, where driven slantwise by the wind, a tongue of flame lapped at its roof and clapboard walls. Wresting a bucket from a confusion of hands, Ethan attacked the fire with furious haste, ducking low under tentacles of flame. Narrowing his silver eyes against the heat, which seemed almost liquid itself, he heaved bucketful upon bucketful of water at the fiery onslaught. The post office must be saved, above all else — it was the address of Port Bonita, the very proof of its existence, its link to the outer world. Without an address, Port Bonita was no longer a destination. Without an address, Port Bonita was not a place. To what purpose would the great twin turbines of Ethan’s conception hum without a town to power, without a place to light?

  Beside him at the front, where the heat singed and chafed, a squarish, dough-faced man, slick with perspiration and ruddy about the cheeks, called out instructions to the mob.

  “Heave!” shouted Dalton Krigstadt. “To the left, to the left! Heave!”

  Preceded by an ominous creaking, then a great yawn, an interior wall came crashing down, and a burst of flames roared from the
center of the blaze, swelling to a forty-foot crescendo. The men in front recoiled breathlessly. From behind them in the muddy street came a collective gasp.

  “Heave!” Dalton spurred them on. “She’s jumping the break. Cut her off at the break! Heave! You there, shift to the left! Heave! To the left, to the left, you!”

  Shifting to the left, Ethan was grateful for the instruction, grateful to be a cog in a machine greater than himself.

  * * *

  RIDING LOW AGAINST the wind, Adam pushed the mare to her limit, and she was responsive to the reins, galloping gracefully on sure hooves through the long grass. Adam’s thoughts, however, did not gallop so gracefully but scrambled madly to order themselves. How was this happening? How did this come to be? He was almost upon the hounds now and gaining fast. He could see the shadowy mob strung out behind them in the purple moonlight. Even from a distance, he sensed the danger coursing through them and knew he could not reason with them, though he must try. When it seemed the mare had no more to give, Adam pushed her harder and she obliged in spite of the rutty terrain. He came up fast on the bluff side of the mob, overtaking them at the crest of a gentle grassy slope, where swinging the gray mare around in a half crescent, he stopped them in their tracks.

  Sure enough, Tobin was among them with an oil lamp and a rifle. The Makah also had a rifle. He was sneering in the purple moonlight. As always, his tiny companion was there beside him. The tethered dogs were all but pulling over the postmaster’s son, who leaned back on his heels. Adam did not recognize the others. He spoke forcefully to be heard over the cacophony of hounds.

  “Best leave matters to the law, John.”

  “We’ll have justice, Adam. The boy started this, and I intend to finish it. Now, stand aside.”

  “I can’t do that, John.”

  Tobin smiled cruelly in the moonlight. The tethered hounds continued pulling at their leads, baying frantically.

  “C’mon, boys,” said Tobin. “We’re losing ground.”

  Adam leveled his rifle.

  Tobin’s smile did not budge. “Somehow I don’t think you’ll be using that,” said Tobin. “That would be out of character for you.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Release the dogs!” Tobin shouted. And with that, the tall boy let go of the leads, and the hounds bounded off furiously down the hill. Adam gave chase on the mare and was soon running abreast of the pack, all but stumbling over themselves in their haste. At the bottom of the hill, the grassland leveled out for several hundred yards before diving into a wooded gulley. Halfway across the flat expanse, Adam caught his first glimpse of the boy bathed in the eerie purple light. Apparently, Tobin saw him, too, for a shot rang out in the night. Adam rode straight for the boy, and when he was beside him, he pulled hard on the reins with his left hand, and when the mare had managed a gait, Adam swung side saddle, sweeping the boy up in his arms. When he heard a terrible yelp, Adam knew he’d crushed one of the hounds, but still the others kept after them. The boy weighed little more than a sack of feed. Adam swung him onto the saddle front, just as another shot rang out. Without looking back, he drove the mare toward the tree line and blindly down into the gulley; to her credit, she didn’t balk or falter once. Within ten strides, they hit the creek at a trot and galloped up the far side of the gulley through dense brush. With the cold limbs stinging their faces like razors in the darkness, they thundered up the far side of the ravine and back into the moonlight. The boy could feel his father’s heart thumping between his shoulder blades.

  * * *

  SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT the blaze jumped the break completely, and within minutes thirsty flames were consuming the clapboard walls of the post office, and the tower of flames reared to new heights, and a plume of soot black smoke rippled a hundred feet upward before it began to mushroom. Within minutes the post office was a lost cause, and yet, to Ethan, the defeat proved nothing less than thrilling. That the heaving brigades did not surrender, that they did not step back awestricken into the muddy street and defer to the flames — did not, in fact, so much as break their rhythm — sent a noble chill running up Ethan’s spine. That’s when he knew all was not lost, that there was something to be gained by the fight itself. And Ethan crept closer still under the fingers of flame, threw himself that much harder into the fiery heart of destruction, as the dough-faced Krigstadt led the charge.

  “Heave!”

  The heat of the battle was glorious, the glow of the flames cleansing. The machine was unstoppable — feeding, it seemed, on the very flames themselves. Even the gritty spoils of defeat tasted sooty and delicious on Ethan’s tongue as he heaved, and heaved, and heaved, untold times, tired but unflagging. The heat melted in his mouth and ran down his throat like fuel.

  “Heave!”

  As the brigade fought for precious momentum in the early morning hours, a sudden and fortuitous change of winds arrived from the west to push the flames back upon themselves. And emboldened by the wind, the brigades took the offensive, putting their shoulders straight to the flames and heaving, heaving, heaving with the persistence of a steam engine as they drove the flames back, hour after hour after hour, inch by hard-won inch, until shortly after dawn they had managed to contain it. From there, it was only a matter of hours before they had reduced the inferno to a broken patchwork of smoldering heaps.

  And as the thinning mob spread out to wander amid the wreckage, Ethan straggled west down Front Street in the full light of day, with the ground smoking and hissing all around him. He gravitated toward Morse Dock, where he propped his weary elbows on the rail and gazed back toward the gutted center of town. All that was left of Port Bonita was a railroad office, long vacated, a sundries store run by an old deaf woman, and two real estate offices — one of them bearing the name LAMBERT AND SON.

  With a limp mustache draping over the corners of his thin mouth, and his shirt dangling in blackened tatters, Ethan knew in his bones that something had been born in the fire, though it was hard to pin down what, and harder still to measure. Perhaps Port Bonita was not an address, after all, not even a place, but a spirit, an essence, a pulse — a future still unfolding.

  * * *

  THE SKY WAS the color of oyster shells at daybreak, and it was drizzling, and Thomas was cold, and a lone plume of smoke unfurled from Lord Jim’s chimney on the horizon. The mare beneath him was slick with rain and sweat, her gait a tired saunter. The boy’s eyes were burning, and a cool aching weariness dripped down the back of his throat. He knew beyond all certainty that his father was dead in the saddle behind him.

  In a few minutes time, Thomas would bring the news of Adam’s death to Lord Jim, who lay pale and weak on the mattress on what would prove to be the eve of his own death. And Thomas sat with the old man late into the evening, by candlelight, as the wind off the strait rattled the windows, until Lord Jim said unto to Thomas the last words he would ever speak — words that Thomas himself would later say unto the people at Jamestown, as they laid Lord Jim to rest.

  “We are born haunted,” he said, his voice weak, but still clear. “Haunted by our fathers and mothers and daughters, and by people we don’t remember. We are haunted by otherness, by the path not taken, by the life unlived. We are haunted by the changing winds and the ebbing tides of history. And even as our own flame burns brightest, we are haunted by the embers of the first dying fire. But mostly,” said Lord Jim, “we are haunted by ourselves.”

  wooly bully

  SEPTEMBER 2006

  Silently, Timmon and Franklin broke camp shortly after dawn, amid a fog so thick that it clung to the forest like a cool curtain of mist. A fitful night’s sleep and one more night of hunger had left Timmon restless and precariously on edge, a state of affairs further aggravated by the fact that Franklin was forced to proceed cautiously over the bumpy path, lifting his knees ever so slightly with a grimace each step of the way. Progress was so slow that Timmon could hardly contain a frenetic impulse to forge ahead and leave Franklin behind. With a ste
ady pace, he could be out of here in a day and a half tops. But with Bell holding him back, he might never get out of here. Hell, he might starve at this pace.

  Two miles in, following a stretch of moguls on a downhill course, Franklin felt the cold tug of a rip cord beneath his lower spine, and progress was halted altogether as Timmon ministered for twenty minutes to Franklin’s knotted psoas. When at last they resumed the trail, Franklin was forced to rely heavily on Timmon’s shoulder for support, slowing their pace still further. Finally, resigning himself to the futility of his pairing with Bell, Timmon ceased wrestling with hunger and impatience and gave into his better instincts. What was an extra day? Hadn’t he decided that he would dare to give a shit? Why not start with Bell? Christ, the guy hauled his ass all the way out here to look for him, right? The guy was a Boy Scout.

  Franklin’s condition only worsened as the day wore on and the terrain grew rougher. Stops became more frequent. Bell’s steps only seemed to get smaller. But Timmon remained steadfast in his patience.

  “Hold steady, Bell. We’ll get you out of here, man. May take a while, but we’ll get you out.”

  Late in the afternoon, on the backside of Deception Divide, Timmon was forced to lift Franklin up and over a washout, sidling cautiously over the uneven grade, as he strained under the weight of his companion.