Klickitat

by Peter Rock

  “All I want,” I said, “all I want is to take a shower and then to sleep in my bed.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  I slept almost until noon in my clean sheets, and when I woke up I could hear Mom and Dad, downstairs in the kitchen. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but I liked the sound of their voices, mixed with the rain on the rooftop.

  I lay there like that, listening, and then I got up and walked across the hall into Audra’s room. It was just like the last time I’d seen it, and it still smelled like paint. The blue walls, the empty shelves. I sat down on her bed.

  There were footsteps on the stairs, and then Mom stood in the doorway, watching me. I didn’t look up, but she came in and sat down on the bed, too. She put her hand on my shoulder for a moment and set it down on her lap again. There was only the sound of the rain.

  After a little while, I could tell that she was crying.

  “Are you going to work?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “We’ll stay home until we’re sure you’re okay. We’ll need to get straight with school and the doctor and everything—”

  “School?” I said.

  “Not until you’re ready,” she said. “Mostly we want to make sure you’re all right.”

  “I am,” I said. “I think I am. And I don’t need the doctor. I’m fine.”

  “Just a checkup.”

  “I’m not taking the pills anymore,” I said.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  Around us, the blue walls looked perfectly smooth. The drawers of the desk were closed, and the door of Audra’s closet.

  “You changed everything in this room,” I said. “All her things.”

  Out the window, the tree’s wet leaves shone.

  “We got your letter,” she said. “You said you were with Audra—”

  “That was before,” I said.

  “You said you were moving away. Where were you?”

  “I can’t—” I said. “I can’t tell you that, about that, yet.” My fingers were itching, and my hands felt like they were about to start shaking.

  “It’s all right.” Mom touched me again, then stood up. “It’s all right. It is. Are you hungry? Why don’t you get dressed, then come down and have something to eat?”

  “Sit down,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Just sit beside me for a little bit,” I said. “Sit with me. We don’t have to talk.”

  Mom sat down again and I could feel that she was close and smell her perfume, hear her breath. It was tender, and we stayed like that until Dad called up, saying he was making lunch.

  When I went downstairs I put my shoes back on and walked outside, into the backyard. The rain had stopped, and I crossed the wet grass. I checked that my bike was still in the garage, and then I walked out to the edge of the yard, under the trees. I looked up into the empty branches where Henry had once hidden, that first night I met him, when he came for me. I could feel Mom and Dad watching me from the house, their nervousness, even if I couldn’t see them in the windows.

  It was later on that first day after my return that I was drinking orange juice in the kitchen and heard Dad in the basement. There was the creak of his chair, the switching of switches.

  He didn’t notice me, at first, coming down the stairs, standing behind him. I pulled over a wooden chair, from next to the washing machine, and sat down next to him. Then he smiled, pulled the headset down, around his neck.

  “You shaved your beard,” I said.

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “I missed you,” he said. “I really missed you a lot. I was just telling some friends that you came back.” He reached his arm loosely around the back of my chair, then, and I could smell the dusty smell of his wool shirt that I liked, and could see the skin of his head through the tangle of his hair.

  “My girl,” he said.

  Sounds, words, buzzed in the round black earpieces around his neck. In the lighted glass windows, the red needles jerked.

  “I missed you, too,” I said, and before it got quiet I said, “You have a friend in Iceland?”

  “Did I tell you that?”

  “Yes. Is that her name?”

  “I doubt it.” He laughed, scratched the side of his face. “That’s what she calls herself, though, and from her call sign I can tell that’s where she is. The numbers tell me.”

  “And what else?”

  “About her?” he said. “You know, mostly we talk about the weather, or she asks me about you girls. She has two sons—she’s very old, and they want to put her in an old folks’ home, but she has some kind of a truck, with a radio setup, and she drives around from place to place like that.”

  “In a truck, in Iceland?”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  Dad wore those ragged felt boot liners, and sitting close to him it smelled like his wool shirt, and coffee. His dented thermos sat on the desk, his blue mug next to his logbook.

  “Whatever happens in our family,” he said, “that’s for us to figure out, to try to understand. We’ll work it out the best way we can. It hasn’t been easy for your mom, for any of us.”

  It was quiet, then, and I wondered which one of us would stand up first, climb the stairs to the kitchen.

  “How did you meet her?” I said.

  “Your mom?” he said. “You know that story.”

  “No,” I said, “this other lady. Iceland.”

  “Oh, that was a couple of years ago. I was just listening in, on different channels, and I heard her talking about Number Stations, and that was interesting, she sounded interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “Here.” He pulled the headset from his neck and closed it down to make it smaller before putting it over my head, the black foam around my ears so I heard the sound of the ocean, my blood circling. And then he switched the switch and turned the dial. In the middle of the tiny window, the red needle lifted.

  I heard a tone, a beeping like someone tapping the key of an electrical organ as fast as they could, then someone whispering, then a woman counting in a language I didn’t know. Dad reached out, switched the station, turned the dial. In my ears another woman said, “Mike, India, Whiskey, One, Delta, Four, Seven, Delta.” Static crowded around the voice, and she was serious like she was reading the numbers, trying to be sure that she got the numbers right, that she didn’t get lost. “I say, Three, Two, Eight, Delta,” and then a buzzing, a machine behind her. The hairs came up on my arms, a chill inside, a kind of feeling that was like seeing something at night and not knowing what it is, or when a dog barks at you and you don’t know if it’s going to bite or lick your hand. I couldn’t tell what it was. Dad turned the dials again, to another number, and then there was the woman again, speaking more quickly, sounding scared: “Nancy, Adam, Susan, Nancy, Adam, Susan.”

  Dad watched me, listening. He switched off the radio and helped me take the headset off my ears.

  “What was that?” I said.

  “Just messages that were sent out.”

  “Who sends them?” I said.

  “No one knows,” he said. “They’re a kind of code, and they play at the same time every day, or some never stop. Some people think they’re for spying, for spies and their secrets.”

  “But Iceland understands them,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I don’t think so. She just thinks they’re beautiful.”

  He told me how the sounds and numbers and words stood in for letters, and that only two people had the code to make sense of the message. The sender, and the receiver. He showed me the chart on the wall, all the frequencies where the Number Stations were found. I put the headset back on and listened as he turned the dial. Static, and then a bugle. Buzzers speeding up, music playing too slow or fast or backward, the sound of a gong, and always people counting, men and women and children in different languages, in different orders, circling and circling around. They sent out their message for years and years, h
oping that someone would understand them, that they would find the right person.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Today I’m going to finish writing this. That doesn’t mean the story is over, or that there aren’t other stories. I’ve written to the end of the blue notebook, then a green one, then red, and now into another blue one. I wanted to show what happened to my sister, and how I got from where I was to where I am. That’s what it means to finish this.

  The yellow notebook, the words slowed, but they haven’t stopped. New words rose up in it, not long after I came home:

  One single bolt or screw holds a scissors

  together. Animals quickly take notice of

  white teeth and the whites of the eyes.

  We can read the animals, and you pick

  up on things others don’t. Hello, we are

  interested in you. Klickitat. Our bodies are

  so fluid, they can hardly be called bodies,

  they are made for where we are. The words

  and sentences we say still wait in the air;

  words find their channels, traveling in

  currents like at the bottom of the oceans,

  a channel cut to depths where the signals

  can find you. Hello, it’s your sister and

  I am coming apart as I write you from

  beyond. We will tell you the when and

  the where, the what to do, but we must be

  patient, all of us. We wait, always moving,

  never still, for the time. The time must be

  ripe, right—not rife, that is a different

  word, a disagreement. A disagreement

  changes the air in a room for a time. Every

  word means something different to every

  person. We think we understand what

  someone is saying, but we don’t, not really.

  Sometimes we make sense and sometimes

  we make no sense. I’m sorry and a current

  underwater is a wind in the sky, we can

  breathe, but it doesn’t hurt. We are your

  sister and more than your sister. The words

  and sentences we say still wait in the air,

  even after the sound is gone, hoping someone

  will come along and understand them.

  And words that we write down or read, too,

  are messages that we send out again and

  again, trying to find the right person, the

  person who will understand.

  Some of this seemed familiar to me; reading back through the yellow notebook, I recognized sentences from earlier messages, all shuffled together, mixed with new sentences, other voices. I remembered things Henry had said to me, and Audra. I thought about the books I’d been reading. The words came snarled, all at once. Sounding me, seeking a channel.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I keep expecting Audra’s voice, or her footsteps clattering up the stairs. Mom and Dad never raise their voices, never make any loud noises; they are so careful, almost afraid of me. They tell me things will get easier, and they will, they do. And then, at the same time, I don’t feel that I belong here, that I will stay.

  I have written this sincerely. I never asked for anything to change, to see and hear beyond this world around me. That’s one way to say it: In one of Audra’s books, Indians of the American Northwest, I read that Klickitat is not just the street in my neighborhood, the street where Beezus and Ramona live in the books, and it is not only the name of a county in Washington and a river. It is also the name of an Indian tribe. The Indian word Klickitat means “beyond.”

  I was back for two weeks before Mom and Dad would leave me by myself at home. Even after they went to work, I kept expecting them to double back, to check on me. Mom called me five times and Dad four, that first day, to know that I was home, and I could tell by the sounds around them that they were at work. That meant that I had some time before they could make it home, if they decided to come check on me.

  What I did, then, was go downstairs and switch on my dad’s radio. I sat down in his chair, put the earpieces of the headset over my ears, and dialed in the numbers.

  “CQ, TF8GX,” I said into the microphone. “N7NTU calling TF8GX. CQ.”

  I could hear my breathing inside my head, and then bursts of static, the voice finally rising through it, becoming clearer and louder.

  “Be happy,” she said.

  “Iceland,” I said.

  “You wandered your way back home—your father told me so. He must be so happy. He’s been so worried. And your sister?”

  “She’s gone,” I said.

  “You’re there,” Iceland said. “I’m here. Let’s have a conversation.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I like to talk to people who can’t see me,” Iceland said. “Though my walking is improving, day by day. When I was a girl, I couldn’t walk at all. I just sat in my wheelchair all day watching the barges go by—did I tell you that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Are you really in a truck?”

  “In the back of a truck,” she said. “It’s a camper, of a sort. With an antenna, yes, and windows and this radio setup. I can see the lava flows now, out my window.”

  “You like the Number Stations,” I said. “My dad told me that. You listen to them.”

  “Yes,” Iceland said. “That is correct.”

  “I listened,” I said. “I don’t know how it made me feel.”

  “They’re mysterious,” she said, “those stations, and sometimes they make me sad, sometimes they make me hopeful. It’s nice and it’s sad, isn’t it, to think that they’re always out there, waiting for someone to understand them?”

  “But you don’t understand them,” I said.

  “Me? No, not really, I don’t.”

  “Spies use them,” I said. “That’s what Dad said.”

  “Spies?” she said. “That’s what he said?”

  “Are you a spy?”

  “I wouldn’t say so. I believe I’d know if I were.”

  The static rose up in my ears, a thick tangle, and I didn’t know how to change that, and for a moment I thought our talk was over.

  “People are always trying to reach people,” she said. “Sometimes people who aren’t alive anymore.”

  “But you’re alive,” I said.

  “Of course I am. I’m old, but I’m still here! But the others, they can sound so different. My sister Berglind, for instance—she talks in the voice she had as a little girl.”

  “What does she say?”

  “She says that she loves me, and that it’s crowded, that the winds blow every direction where she is. Still, she speaks to me, her little voice finds a way through the static.”

  “I get messages in a notebook,” I said, after a moment. “Handwriting.”

  “They can come to us any number of ways,” she said.

  “It’s from a lot of people at once,” I said. “So it’s hard to understand.”

  “Of course it is,” Iceland said.

  Again, the static—voices whispering, pieces of words. Again, it cleared.

  “I’m listening for my sister,” she said. “My sister Berglind, who has died. She comes on different channels, she’s trying to find me. Dead people have to learn to talk again, how to count, how to make any kind of sense. And we also need to be patient, to listen.”

  “I’m patient,” I said. “I can be.”

  “How did you lose your sister?” Iceland said.

  I’d been watching the red needle as it lifted and fell, as it jerked with our words, but now that was blurry, the tears in my eyes. I closed my eyes and all I could see was the black of Audra’s neck, all I could hear was what she said about the body rolling across the bottom of the ocean.

  “She drowned,” I said. “She was in a boat and it capsized.”

  “And that’s where she is now?”

  “I think so.” I was crying. I held my hand over the microphone.

  “You can still t
alk with her,” Iceland said. “It will take time. Everything you need to know is inside you, the same as it’s inside her. You’ll figure out how to talk to each other. You’ll have to figure out how to listen, to understand.”

  “I’m listening,” I said. “I will.”

  “It’s so cold, here,” she said. “I can see snow on the volcanoes, right from this window.”

  “Volcanoes?” I said.

  “You’re thinking of Snæfell, yes? The one from the book?”

  The static again, my curled toes cold inside my socks.

  “Is it cold there?” she said.

  “Not really,” I said. “It might still be raining.”

  “There is so much for you to do,” she said. “So many places.”

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “I can feel it,” she said. “Let’s have another conversation, another time.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Yesterday I walked in Forest Park. The sun was out—it’s almost summer, now. It wasn’t easy to find where the blind had been, but I found it. All torn apart, the box dug up and stolen.

  I climbed up into the tree house and read the letters I cut into the wood. KLICKITAT. There was no answer carved there.

  The only tunnel I saw was when a rabbit shot across the path, disappeared into its hole.

  I saw people, but not Taffy, not Audra, not Henry.

  I still think about Henry. I wonder. Did he make it back to where he was from? Did he also drown? Will he write to me? I wait, I listen. At night I think about how he can see in the dark and I remember his deep voice, the way he walked, all the stretches and yoga poses, the things he’d do with his body. His feet and hands, the sound of him cracking his knuckles. He appreciated me, the ways I am different. Will he come back for me? When will the messages tell me where and how to find him?

  We will tell you the when and the where, the what to do, and still we must be patient, all of us.

  Henry needs me, he said that, like he said his people needed the man who could hear the boats coming by listening to the ground, who could read animals and see people others couldn’t see. Klickitat is a word that means beyond, different than how this world is, around me, and when Henry comes I’ll be ready to go with him.