Shades of Eva (4 page)

All of these things: drinking, fucking,
fighting, they all had one thing in common—they were all
impermanent. They held a fleeting burst of happiness, at best, that
fell short of anything resembling the permanence, to me, that true
happiness implied. The happiness I craved implied constancy,
contentment, and an end to the age-old restlessness that had thus
far dominated my life.

Then I thought of my mother’s hugs. Why? I
don’t know. Hugs can smother a child, and there’s nothing lasting
about a hug. There was nothing permanent about my mother, either,
for that matter. Mom was gone, twenty-five years gone, in fact,
which was about as long as I’d been running.

That’s when something else came to mind.

“The trains,” I told Scotty. “The trains
made me happy.”

The one constant in my life had been the
rails, and more so, that view from the railcar where for so many
days and nights I lay staring out an open door, a doorway through
which I gazed that appeared over time less like the passageway to
unexplored lands and more like a moving picture screen.

With every season, from the white shades of
winter to the greens of summer, from the dark shades of autumn to
the amber sunrises and crimson hues of spring mornings, the
changing landscapes brought a sort of wandering, yet steady peace
to me. Mountains rolled on in stereoscopic wonder, and the deeper I
traveled into them the more their splendor emerged. Trees grew out
of nothingness, and then passed. Camps and communities displayed
themselves in a moving picture, asking nothing in return but a
glimpse of themselves. Prairies gave way to deserts, and deserts to
deep gullies and vast canyons, and then to rivers, and sometimes
ocean-side vistas. In all there was something about the railcar and
peering through its locomotive lens that called to me, and had,
somehow, made me happy.

“The trees,” I told Scotty. “It’s always
been the trees.”

I could look upon the canopies of distant
forests and be at peace. From the blue ridges of Tennessee to the
blackened tips of the Adirondacks in New York the forests called to
me, and they came to life. Even in the desert, where trees seemed
most disparate, they always emerged, offering me relief, it felt,
offering me a renewed glimpse of the life they sang of.

“The trees never took from me,” I said.
“They never have.”

Aside from the trees, there was nothing and
no one who hadn’t taken from me. I stopped in Neah Bay because of
them. I stayed a year in that lumbering town for them. The lumber
trade put me right in the middle of the forest, and for once the
picture stopped moving. Trees fell beneath our axes. They
disappeared leaving the ground from whence they stood without sign
or signal they ever existed. To that end, I envied them. Their
stumps were pulled. Even their roots disintegrated, unlike the
shame beneath me, which seemed impervious to insult or even time.
Trees fell around me like faceless, fallen ancestors and unborn
children—and yet they returned. Maybe I saw in them the children I
might never father. Maybe I saw in them the good people of my
ancestry who must, by odds, have existed, though I never knew
them.

And then again, maybe I was insane.

So in that nondescript bar on the outskirts
of Neah Bay I slammed my whiskey glass on the Mahogany as Meade
lost yet another hand. An unfelt tear made its way from my
cheekbone to the edge of my chin just as Jake Meade turned that
oaken Poker table over. Chips and glasses went flying. Ogelthorpe
and the boys stood up, and then Meade did something strange: he
stood up, took off his belt, and then pointed it at me.

Our eyes met, his full of anger and daring
impudence, mine behind a haze of uncontrolled passion and
self-abasement. Meade hadn’t the scars of a fighter of my
experience, but what he did have was the willingness to humiliate,
if not kill me, and the size to do just that.

He began waving his belt in the air like a
lasso, as if he were going to offer up a public whipping to the
whipping boy. He wrapped the buckle end once around his fist and
then started snapping it like a whip. The sound it made was enough
to make you wonder what sort of sting it might give to bare skin.
Scotty yelled at Meade not to start any trouble, but Meade only
laughed, snapped his belt again, and said, “Trouble came in when
pecker here came in!”

I could see Spence and Pritchett looking to
me for direction. Spence was laughing nervously, and waiting.
Ogelthorpe was standing back and smiling. Scotty had picked up the
phone and was making what was quickly becoming a routine call to
police.

I looked to Spence and shook my head, in
essence, telling him and the boys to step back, that Meade and I
had something to settle.

I took a drunken step toward the Poker table
and reached for the nearest barstool. In one moment I was swinging
a highboy, the next I was flying through Scotty’s picture window
out onto yet another boarded walkway. Neah Bay slapped me square in
the back and my lungs reacted, giving back a premature breath to
her night air. It felt as though I had been impaled by the glass in
which I lay, as if a giant vacuum had at once and immediately
sucked every molecule of oxygen from my body. Neah Bay seemed to be
laughing at me, and I couldn’t respond to her. I couldn’t catch her
wind.

I looked up into the rain, then down at my
stomach, gasping in vain for air, half-expecting a shard of glass
to be sticking out of my chest, but there was nothing there, only
blood. Then Meade stepped through the window’s frame and started
whipping me with his belt.

Spence and Pritchett jumped him, but Meade
threw them off like two rag dolls and bore down on me. The flogging
made me think of my uncle Ully, Mom’s brother, who had adopted me
after Mom died, and his whippings. Then it made me think of Dad and
his belt and the still small voice of the Psalmist, whose proverb
of chapter forty-six and verse ten of the Psalms used to ring so
fervently in my ear that it still rings to this day:
Be still
and know that I am God.

I had the unmistakable sense that it wasn’t
Neah Bay laughing at me, but my ancestors; and perhaps, the still
small voice of God who was finding amusement, again, in yet another
of my many squabbles.

Again and again Meade struck me, and that
belt did give a sting. Ogelthorpe had come through the door
carrying a wooden chair and slammed it over Meade’s back, but that
did little good. Meade shrugged it off like he’d shrug off a winter
coat. Lightning fell around us and thunder followed, creating a
sort of absurd symphony of leather and lightning cracks amidst the
bass rumble of the night sky. I took the whipping amidst a choir of
laughing, crying, admonishing spectators, some real, some imagined,
ancestors, Psalmists, unborn children and the spirits of trees
alike, all singing out in a chorus of sad darkness, and I was
unable to respond to any of them because I was unable to catch my
wind.

This was my life to that point. It was all
that I ever knew.

Then Meade pulled a switchblade from his
back pocket. I could see its tip sparkle in the rain amidst the
lightning. People began to scatter. Ogelthorpe and the boys looked
frozen, but Meade wasn’t. He had a smile on his face like he’d been
to this kind of party before, and I had no doubt that he had.

He began to bring it down, and that’s when I
heard a click. That’s when another bolt of lightning lit up the
scene as if God had just turned a spotlight on all of us, and I was
finally able to sip a breath of air from Neah Bay.

The click had come from a pistol whose
barrel end was a finger’s length away from Meade’s forehead now,
and Meade wasn’t moving.

I could read BERETTA 9 MM in etched black
letters on the underside of the pistol’s barrel, and something also
on the tattooed forearm that cradled it. A single word scripted in
ink: Amethyst, with the face of a little girl silhouetted behind
the letters in holly. It was surreal, but there was an inherent
humor to the situation as my chest rose, and then fell again,
finally: Meade had just brought a knife to a gunfight, and me, a
barstool to a knife fight.

All of a sudden Meade backed off of me and
began to stand. The Beretta stayed cocked and aimed at him. I sat
up trying my best to stand, but couldn’t. Whoever was holding the
gun had also put a hand on my shoulder and was insisting I stay
where I was.

Meade took a few more steps back. That’s
about the time I coughed up some blood and then realized the person
restraining me, the person cradling that Beretta, was a woman, and
a young one at that. Then I heard her say, “That’s right, now put
the knife down and move the fuck on!”

Suddenly, Meade, the voices, and the
stragglers were gone. It was just this stranger and I, Ogelthorpe
and the boys, and the rain. 

“Thank you,” I managed to say, and
half-mumbling, I asked this stranger her name.

“My name’s Amelia. Amelia
Hawkins…Mitchell.”

I wasn’t sure I heard her right. I thought
she had just called me by my true name, just loud enough for me to
hear it, just quiet enough so that no one else did. My eyes grew
wide. Silently I was asking her to repeat herself, but I didn’t
dare ask. The relief I felt at having been spared was suddenly
replaced by the sheer panic of having been found.

I dropped my chin and reached around to my
back. There was a lot of blood there, and a lot of blood on my
hands, a lot like there was in that toolshed that night when Mom
killed a man.

I was spared again—just like I was by my
mother twenty-five years ago in that shed—this time by a stranger
bent on taking as compensation a listening ear to her story, a
story of mothers and fathers and missing children. It was a story
that sounded much, too much, like my own.

***

April 20, 1995: Sometime after midnight 

Mitchell

Since I was about the age of nine or
ten-years-old, I had been having a recurring dream about a little
girl. It happened again the night I met Amelia Hawkins.

In this dream I’m standing in the middle of
a little girl’s bedroom. The room feels old. The girl is lying in
her bed. She’s maybe twelve years old. She doesn’t seem to be able
to see me, but I can see her. She’s very still as if listening for
something, or for someone. A frost has formed on her window pane. I
can see the girl’s breath vaporizing in the air around her. She’s
also shaking, but I can’t tell if it’s from the cold or from fear.
There is a thump, not a loud one—just a thump, as if someone has
knocked on a wall or a distant door. The little girl looks to her
closet. Its door begins to open. The girl has an expression of
frozen terror on her face.

It’s that thump and that expression I can’t
seem to stop dreaming about. I wake up gasping, and I woke up
gasping again that night in Neah Bay.

I sat up and looked around, and tried to
catch my breath. My head was still pounding. My ribs were killing
me. At first I thought I was in my cabin near the marsh butting the
ocean, but as my eyes adjusted to the dark, and my ears to the
steady beeping of an intravenous pump, I realized I wasn’t. I
turned toward a window to my left to see if there was frost on the
window, to see if I was still dreaming. There was no frost, but
there appeared to be someone sitting there in silhouette, legs
crossed, and facing me. She was also smoking a cigarette.

I stared at this stranger for a moment. I
remembered her from the bar, but I couldn’t remember her name. Then
she said, “Nightmare?” It was a question that came out more like a
statement.

“No, that’s how I always sleep!” I replied.
“What are you doing here?”

“They think I’m your wife,” the woman said,
“so don’t say anything to the contrary.”

I didn’t have a wife. I never had. “You had
the gun,” I said. “The Beretta.”

“That would be me.”

“It was Emily…or Amy, or something like
that.”

“Amelia Hawkins.”

I nodded. I remembered.

“How are you feeling, Mitchell?”

“Like a nut in a metal press.”

I tried again, unsuccessfully, to make out
her face. It was still too dark. Then something else came to mind:
a tattoo. She had a tattoo on her arm. April. Sapphire. Something
like that. “Your arm. Your tattoo,” I said, prompting Amelia to
explain.

“Amethyst,” was her only reply; that and a
long, steady stream of smoke out her nose.

I guess a better question would have been
what do you want with me, but I honestly didn’t care. I was in too
much pain, and she just happened to have been there, a Good
Samaritan who happened to have had a gun. She’d also happened to
have probably saved my life, and happened to have volunteered to
stay overnight to see that I was okay. But had she really told the
docs I was her husband?

Amelia uncrossed a long pair of shapely legs
and leaned forward, her face a bit more visible now. I couldn’t
tell what color her eyes were, not just then, but there was
something intense about them. Something penetrating!

“What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“Here, as in Neah Bay, or here in this
room?”

“Both.”

“I’m doing you a favor. That guy you got
into it with wants to finish the job. Said he knows where you live,
and knows where you’re going.”

“So what!”

“So what?” Amelia said laughing just a bit.
“Do you have a death wish, Mitchell?” She sat back and re-crossed
those long legs of hers. “That wasn’t a fight you were in. That was
a suicide attempt if I ever saw one.”

All of a sudden it dawned on me that she’d
been calling me by my right name. This was—this had to be—someone
from back home. “How do we know each other?” I said.

“We don’t, but I know who you are. You’re a
hard call to trace! What the hell are you doing out here in
Washington under some alias? You have no warrants. Your people
aren’t from around here.”