The Other Oregon
Page 3
This was how it had happened, about twenty years ago. Greg had just turned eighteen. Donny was still seventeen. It was March. They had been snowboarding all day at Mt. Hood Meadows on the south side of the mountain. Donny had wanted to take a snowboarding lesson, just one lesson, but Greg had insisted he’d show him how instead. As it turned out, Greg wasn’t much help and hadn’t meant to be. It was just too much fun watching Donny bite it. Donny had laughed too but then it became one bite too many and Donny had sulked off, making Greg go find him and show him a few pointers. Donny ended up tired, beat up, responding to Greg only with grunts.
As always, Greg had made Donny drive. The routine got started because the sight of Greg riding in Donny’s country pickup brought laughs from guys and girls Greg knew, not to mention the respectful stares from would-be toughs who had picked on him. Plus, Greg had realized he could save on gas money this way, always promising Donny he’d pitch in but rarely doing it.
On the way back, just a few miles from the mountain, they found a minimart off Highway 35, at one of those little junctions that served as a bridge between highway and some neglected small town further off the beaten path. They sat parked in the far corner of the parking lot, drinking the two cans of Rainier they had stolen from Donny’s Uncle Jerrod. Donny lived with his uncle. That’s why he came to Portland. His parents had sent him to stay there while they finished off the all-out nuclear war of attrition that had been the last year of their marriage. Donny’s dad had worked in logging and had never recovered from the death of the industry. The man’s odd jobs as a mechanic and cook all over Southern and Central Oregon did not make him a happy dad. They had spent the longest time in a town called Pineburg. Donny loved it there. His dad didn’t care. Donny’s Uncle Jerrod in Portland didn’t have a better temper, but he was a long-haul trucker so wasn’t around much. This new kid Donny, Greg saw, had time, freedom and a certain gullibility. This Donny kid could be a type of project. Let’s see how much of the country bumpkin Greg could remove from Donny and replace with something new. He even told Donny his plan, joking about it. Donny grumbled about it but fell in with whatever scheme Greg planned. At the time Greg claimed to be a “neo-punk nihilist” type, even though he dressed like an Abercrombie and Fitch preppy. Punk and anarchism were all about creating something new, Greg told Donny, which demanded having no respect for what came before. It was all about pushing yourself. Clothes didn’t mean shit, not really, except as a means. It was what was inside.
Donny was sitting at the wheel of his old Ford pickup, Greg in the passenger seat. They still wore their ski gear—stocking caps, sunglasses, bandannas. “I can’t believe I never been snowboarding. Thanks for letting me borrow stuff,” Donny said in that tender voice of his that Greg said sounded like the hick stud in that old movie Midnight Cowboy.
“Totally,” Greg said. He was smoking a joint. The parking lot of the minimart was packed with cars and people coming and going from skiing, snowboarding. “Bet the only time a shithole like this does any business is when the snow is killer,” he added.
He passed the joint to Donny, who took a hit and coughed. Greg chugged the last of his beer and held it up.
“Keep it down, boy,” Donny said.
Greg laughed. “You say some funny shit. What the fuck they gonna do? Yours done?”
“Yeah,” Donny said.
Greg handed Donny an ID. It was an Oregon Driver’s License with Donny’s photo on it. The way it worked was: Greg sold pot to this artist guy, who did up the ID in trade.
Donny held the ID with his fingertips. “It’s even got my photo on it. How you do all that? You’re good at this.”
“You can do it. Fucking easy. Now don’t look at it. Good. Ready? Tell me, what’s your name, son?”
Donny closed his eyes even though Greg hadn’t told him to, which the conniver that Greg was back then had loved. Donny said, “Uh, Charles. Charles Adler.”
“Nice. Told ya, fucking easy to do.”
“But, I don’t know if we need any more beers going here.”
“Sure we do. They’re empty.”
They laughed, but Donny’s laugh sputtered. “Why’s it always me going though?” he said, looking out the window.
“Think about it, dude. You look way older,” Greg said. Donny didn’t really look much older, but Donny always bought the bluff. As long as Greg didn’t have to go in there.
“Okay. Okay,” Donny said.
Greg watched from the truck as Donny went inside the minimart. An elderly security guard followed Donny around inside, a middle-aged guy with a silver-gray ponytail. Donny and the guard exchanged words, each puffing up their chests.
The security guard moved on to another group, and Donny bought beer without any problem. He came out and jogged across the parking lot with the short case tucked under an arm like a football.
Back in the truck, though, Donny’s face was different. His mouth hung open a little, and his eyes had gone dark. He stared back at the store as if it was a house fire he’d just escaped. “That tin badge bastard was in my face the whole time,” he said in a strange, mechanical voice. “Reminds me of my dad.”
“That’s fucked up,” Greg said.
“Fuck you dad!” Donny shouted.
Greg faked a giggle. Donny’s outburst had stunned him. He had never seen Donny act dark, or violent. It was not in his plan for Donny. Greg decided to keep it light. “There you go, McCloud,” he said.
“Shut up with that McCloud shit,” Donny said.
Greg showed Donny a snicker. “Hey, come on. ID sure worked, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, it did. Damn.”
They cracked the beers. Greg lit an American Spirit, one for him and one for Donny. The magic of the ID, the way it gave Donny a brave new power, did seem to work for Donny despite the dark stuff. Donny had stayed puffed up, his face shining with intensity. So vanity was the key. Pride. Greg would have to pursue this line further.
“Don’t let that tin badge give you any shit,” Greg said when their third beers were halfway down. “Just like all those guys in Portland—they live for fucking with outta-town dudes like you.”
“Girls try it, too. But then I got em right where I want em,” Donny said, smiling, joking now.
“There you go,” Greg said. “Next time, you go show that fucking tin badge. You’re the cowboy.”
“Damn straight there, son.”
They laughed, toasted cans.
The parking lot had emptied out, leaving their pickup exposed in the corner. Inside the minimart, the security guard was peering out the window, scanning the parking lot. Greg kept an eye on him. The way the old guy was facing them gave Greg an uncomfortable feeling, a slow-moving shudder inside that made his forearms bristle. It reminded Greg of a forest animal looking out for dangers, but with a sadness, a deliberateness to it. A creature sharing a fate.
“Maybe we should go somewhere else,” Greg said. “We could drive back. See who has coke or some shit.”
“Okay by me, but I gotta pee.” Donny pushed himself out the door and dropped down to the pavement, bending his knees like a paratrooper as he landed. Greg watched him go around the side of the minimart, into darkness.
The security guard headed outside. He went around the side of the building, where it was darker. To where Donny was?
Greg moved to get out, but he couldn’t. His fear had become an iron belt on his waist, pressing him to the seat. He shivered from the cold. He felt like some little kid waiting for a parent who’d been in the bar way too long.
Donny had emerged from the darkness, arms bent, hands clamped up. He ran back wheezing, almost hyperventilating. He heaved himself up into the cab, started up the truck, threw it in gear, and drove them around to the back of the building.
“What? What the fuck’s going on?” Greg said.
A minute later, in the side alley around the back of the building, Greg and Donny were standing in the darkness looking down on the security guard lying next to that dumpster, the bloo
d from his head leaking on the pavement. Staring up at them, gurgling his words.
Donny muttering about hardly hitting him, he wasn’t no fighter, Jesus. Greg didn’t console or even answer Donny. He was trying too hard to think.
The security guard didn’t carry a gun. Greg told himself that was a good thing, but he wasn’t sure why. The pickup stood behind them idling, its lights off.
“Let’s get him in the truck,” Greg heard himself say. “Donny, listen to me. We have to think about this.”
Ten minutes later, Donny was driving them hard and fast on the mountain highway. “I think I know where there’s a hospital,” Greg had told him. Darkness surrounded them. No other cars on the road. Thick snow hit the windshield and started to flock on the road.
“You get rid of the beers?” Donny shouted now. “Did you?”
“I told you. I told you I did,” Greg said.
“Sometimes you say that but then you didn’t.”
“I’m telling you. Besides, what does it matter?”
“Dammit, where’s that hospital around here?” Donny said.
Greg stared back through the cab window, at the pickup bed. The security guard lay still there, half under an old blanket. Blood had soaked into the fabric and seeped out from under and glistened on metal of the truck bed. Snowflakes swirled inside the bed, sticking to the blanket and exploding as swirling steam in the hot blood.
Donny shouted: “Dammit, where is it? You told me. You told me you saw a sign before.”
“There wasn’t one,” Greg said. “I lied. I lied to get you to go. To get out of there.”
“You what?”
Five minutes later, Donny was still driving onward. He hadn’t spoken to Greg since—ever since glaring at Greg with a hardness Greg had never seen before. Donny’s face had fixed into a white mask, and it wasn’t from the snow illuminated in the headlights.
“What are we gonna do with him?” Greg muttered, and his voice broke as he did. He didn’t care what it sounded like. “Donny? Help me.”
Donny drove on. They rode in silence. Donny had both hands on top of the steering wheel, his knuckles white now, but his face had regained color.
“I know this one place,” Donny said after a few minutes, his voice monotone and hollow, like a phone recording giving instructions. “Back up in the high mountains, on the old route to Pineburg. My dad took me there once. No one goes there. Doubt it’s even on a map.”
“Okay, good, okay.” Greg stared at the pickup bed again. Skis, a toolbox, and a shovel lay back there too.
A half hour later, the pickup was parked. Donny had driven them to a secluded little lake. The snow was falling heavier. Donny and Greg hauled the security guard’s body, wrapped in the blanket, out of the bed. They had thought about it, talked about how. They were careful to hold the blanket by the dry ends and not its blood-sodden center.
The body twitched. The man gasped like a man held underwater. A hand grabbed at Greg.
They dropped him, and the blanket unraveled just enough to show the man’s face and blood-soaked neck, chest. Darkness obscured his face, but his eyes glinted, from what Greg wasn’t sure. The man clawed at the cold air, at them, and his silver ponytail unraveled now too and splayed out beneath his head, stretches of it sticky with blood and others shining like corn floss. The man gasped again. Greg started.
“He’s just an old man,” Donny whispered, his voice breaking, “just doing a job …”
Greg felt something click inside him, a clarity. He said, “Listen: He’s just like your dad, that’s what he is. You said he was.”
They stared at the man, his mouth open. Was he dead? They must have stared a good minute.
The man reached for them, this time in a slow arc as if doing an arm exercise.
“Just like your dad,” Greg repeated to Donny.
Donny kicked the man. The man groaned and seemed to shrink up.
Greg stared at Donny in shock. Donny glared back at him.
“You do it,” Donny said, his voice strong and set again, stronger than Greg had ever heard it. It sounded military, maybe like his dad or uncle might have sounded.
Greg shook his head. “I don’t even know the guy’s name,” he muttered.
“That’s exactly right.” Donny stepped closer to Greg and showed teeth, but it wasn’t a smile. “Where I come from. You put a wounded animal down. With mercy. That’s how you do it.”
“No. Wait …”
Donny, still grimacing at Greg, grabbed a corner of the blanket and pressed it to the man’s face. He held it there, watching Greg gape in horror as the man’s features stilled for good.
Greg kept his eyes locked on Donny’s for as long as he could. It was all he could do. Later, he would tell himself that he had never looked away.
They dragged the corpse along a trail to the other side of the lake. They took turns shoveling, burned the clothes and blanket, and Donny kicked the charred security badge and metal fittings of the uniform’s belt off into the lake. They argued about marking the spot or not like two teens arguing over a video game—like the two teens they were, but Donny had a can of orange marking paint in the back of the truck so they might as well use it. They might want to know where the spot is someday, they both decided.
By the time they finished, the snow was dumping and making it down through the tree branches to help cover the slight earthen bump they had left—the burial spot, marked with the orange-painted rock embedded in dirt.
Back out on the highway, the snow was piling up on the road. Greg felt a new horror, compressing his gut like a steel belt ratcheted, ratcheting tighter. Could they even make it through this weather? He looked to Donny.
Donny drove with one hand on the wheel, nice and easy, and his grip had relaxed.
“The passes go one way, that’s what we always say,” Donny said, shaking his head.
“What?”
“When it snows, you city people always expect us to come over the mountains to you.”
“We don’t know how to drive in it.”
“That’s right. You sure don’t.”
As Donny drove on, he smoked one of Greg’s smokes and drank a beer. “Good thing you didn’t throw out them beers,” he said.
At that point, at three in the morning it must have been, Greg had no energy left to speak. He sat slumped against the cold passenger door and window and felt like he had lost ten pounds and a foot in height. Even the cab’s bench seat had seemed double the size. For the first time in years, he had felt far younger than his age. He was just a boy. Unformed. Squishy like a soft fruit.
“We gotta be smarter next time,” Donny had said. His voice sounded even fuller, hardened, more adult. And he cracked another beer.
His words had made Greg sit up. “Next time?”
“I don’t mean killing. Just mean, in general. None of that rough stuff, no sir. So that killing like that don’t happen again. Never again. Smarter. Like you do it. With words, all friendly like. Using my head. You know, smarter. That’s the way I aim to be.”
5
After the always disturbing shock of seeing the Portland Timbers lose, Greg rode back over the Burnside Bridge to his apartment close-in on the Eastside. To a guy like Greg, Eastside was the alternative to the Westside’s manufactured, too-clean, and new Pearl District that had risen up from a similar graveyard of warehouses and grimy workshops. Skaters and punks still lived here, day laborers could stand on a corner without getting harassed, and a few workshops and repair garages lived on, dying hard and proud. But don’t let it fool you, Greg thought. The change was already coming. The warehouses, garages, print and machine shops were becoming galleries, small presses, pop-up cabarets, local meat purveyors and butchers, small-batch distilleries—a Russian doll of do-it-yourself urbanism. Greg was another aging poster boy for it, he knew. He could crow, if need be, that he was one of the few actually from Portland. But the reality was still damning: Everything gets found out and then it’s damned.
As he pedaled down into the Central Eastside, as the silhouettes of squat old buildings enveloped him, he couldn’t help thinking about the ghost of Donny Wilkie. What would Donny have thought of him now? Would Donny even recognize the new Greg—a Greg that worked hard, knew what he wanted, and treated people with fairness? Greg had come back for a reporting job at the Oregonian, but they cut staffers six months later and the newcomers had lost out. Fleeting, low-paying stints followed, mostly for magazines or content sites that started up fast and went under faster. He did some freelancing and got a few articles published to support the book, none of them paying. He could have earned more pouring beers in a brewpub. His money was running out. He had emptied his meager 401k. He told himself he was no worse off than half the country with their overpriced mortgages that they had no jobs for. Besides, he had resolved to become who he wanted to be instead of masquerading—hiding—in New York and on the road as something he wasn’t. There he was always boasting about how great the Pacific Northwest was. People had no idea. So why didn’t he live there?
He climbed the slight rise of East Burnside. A parked car’s door swung open; he swerved, almost went down into traffic, and passed through a yellow light, cursing not the car door but himself for giving his fellow bikers a bad name by running a yellow.
Ten minutes later, he was sitting on his sofa—his girlfriend Emily’s sofa to be exact. Considering his financial situation alone, being able to live with a catch like Emily was a blessing. It was a nice setup. Emily had the first-floor apartment in a brick, townhouse-style building near her job at a small boutique that carried local clothing lines. The street wasn’t prime but close-in, and she somehow had three bedrooms, one as her workspace. He could hear her finishing something down the hall in her workspace—a mix of vintage and carefully selected IKEA-style pieces arranged so well even her savvy friends had a hard time telling what was old and what was new. The right lighting helped. Emily was all about correct lighting.