The Big Both Ways (2 page)

Dew was still on the grass alongside the road. The morning wrens and sparrows were calling to each other in the shade. Just under the whine of the saws, he could hear the white noise of the Skagit River roiling down the valley.

He got a ride with a kid from Sedro Woolley, who talked about his girlfriend and asked him for gas money. He got another ride from a salesman whose car was burning oil at an alarming rate, so Slip asked to be dropped off by the river, preferring to walk a while rather than be stuck with the salesman when the car broke down.
As the salesman drove away, a cloud of exhaust hung like a storm squall moving in.

He walked along the river, thinking of the dough in his toolbox and about a piece of ground he might be able to buy. Every time the thought of Jud White’s body welled up from the sickness in his stomach, he choked it back down and would think instead of the place he would build, maybe along a river with a few fruit trees and a loyal cow of his own.

Slip had been an active baby, always trying to wriggle out of his grandma’s arms. He arched his back, twisting and kicking at the cradling bath towel or the pair of strong arms reaching out for him. “This boy’s slippery,” the old woman had said, and the name stuck. Teachers heard his name and assumed he would try to get out of his studies. Girls chased him at church picnics instead of the greased pig. When he started working on the big dam project up the Columbia River at Grand Coulee, other workers assumed he was going to drop his rivet gun off the scaffolding. But he never did. In some ways his name was the anvil his personality had been forged against. If anything was true about Slippery Wilson, it was that he wanted to stick.

Near a bend in the river road, a new Lincoln was pulled over with its left front tire hooked down into the ditch. The Lincoln had wire wheels and fine chrome headlamps mounted outboard of the grill. The rear wheels had scuffed two ditches in the soft dirt of the road’s shoulder. A blonde woman in a housedress and a cardigan walked around the back of the car, looking under the bumper and running her hands along the edge of the chrome. The wind riffled her short hair, and as she knelt down Slip could see the thick muscles of her thighs pressing against the fabric. When she stood up and turned, he saw the blush of rising bruises under her eyes and some redness under her nose as if maybe she were getting over a cold.

“You wreck your car?” he called out to her.

She turned quickly and almost jumped away from the trunk. “What?” she said, shielding her eyes to look at him.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Slip said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No … no …” the girl said.

It was then he noticed that her hands were shaking and her skin seemed sickly pale. “Are you all right? Would you like some help?” He waved at the front of the car and took off his wool cap with a short brim, aware now of how shabby he must look to this girl.

“Yes,” she said, and he set down his tools.

It would take weeks for him to understand what he was feeling as he walked toward the blonde woman. There would be storms and killings to come, there would be beatings and long hours of recrimination, but still he would try to hold on to his original impulse: the sound of the river with a beautiful woman standing under a tree. All he wanted to do was help her in a way that he hadn’t been able to help Jud, or his parents for that matter—or even himself. He wanted to make something right, on this fine morning when he was headed out for his fresh start. But, of course, by the time he recognized his mistake it would be too late. The future, like a breaking wave, would have washed over him.

“Somebody run you off the road?” he asked.

She looked up from where she was still running her hand along the edge of the rear bumper. She looked at her fingers and then up at Slip. “I hit a dog back a ways and I was just looking to see if there was any damage.”

“Must have scared you,” Slip said.

“What?” she asked, not taking her eyes off his.

“Hitting the dog. It must have scared you.”

“Oh that, yes, it was frightening.”

Slip walked to the front of the big Lincoln and bent down to look at the front bumper.

“Don’t bother with that,” she said, putting her fingers lightly on his shoulders. “Let’s just get the car out of the ditch.”

In ten minutes the Lincoln was back out in the road, engine idling and a thin haze of exhaust slithering along the road.

Slip was panting and gathering up his things when she walked over to him with a paper cup of river water for him. “Thank you,” he said, “that’s nice of you.” Then he folded his kerchief and gestured down the road. “Can you give me a lift?”

“Oh … sure. Where are you heading?” She nervously wiped her hands on her dress and walked around to the passenger’s side, and then seeing she was in the wrong place, walked back around the car with Slip following her.

“I’m headed to Seattle for a bit. I’ve got a friend who runs a barbershop,” Slip said.

“You need a shave?” she said, still wiping her hands.

“I suppose I do,” Slip said, and he doubled back toward the trunk to open it.

“I didn’t mean it,” she said, looking down at her feet. “You look fine.”

Slip smiled at her, and he too looked down at her feet as if the answer to what was to happen next was down there somewhere.

“Here,” she said, suddenly waking up. “Just put your things in the back here. I … I don’t have the key for the trunk.”

“All right.” He smiled and opened the passenger door.

Slip settled into the front seat and she got behind the wheel. In reality the car smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, but Slip could only smell the cedar trees along the river. The woman’s hair was dyed blonde and was showing dark roots. Her eyes were the cobalt blue of a medicine bottle. The steering wheel was about as wide as her shoulders and she gripped it as if it were the wheel of a ship. She looked around for the starter button down on the floor and before she remembered that it was already running, she pressed the starter, and it shrieked in distress. She jammed the gears, then with a grinding lurch wheeled out onto the road.

Out in the woods the loggers liked to talk about sex. For some of them the very nature of their work, the felling and the skidding of timber, was erotic. Slip had sat on the butts of massive fallen trees and listened to the exploits of men who hadn’t actually been with a woman for years. There had been many stories about sex and most of them were lies and exaggerations; he had even told some of them himself. But he was not a natural when it came to rough talk, while others made a kind of ragged poetry out of their lies.

He looked over at the woman driving the Lincoln. It had been weeks since he had been this close to a woman. He wondered why there had never been any stories about the curve of a woman’s arm, about how it might look like a slender limb of a fruit tree. There were no stories about the softness of her skin or the smell of her scalp. There were no stories about the sound of her voice or the way she sat in a chair. There was never anything about what a woman said, or felt, or thought. As he thought about it driving down the road he wasn’t surprised, for to mention something tender about a woman would cast a pall of loneliness on these men, who had long ago chosen their bunkhouse lives and the day-to-day heartache of ruining the woods.

The Lincoln lurched from one side of the road to the other. She jerked at the wheel and bounced up and down on the accelerator. Slip braced his right hand against the top of the open window frame and wedged his foot against the door for support.

They drove for an hour, the car tacking back and forth across the road. She drove so erratically that the cows along the near fences stopped in mid chew and watched her pass. Slip sat upright and watched the road. The miles ticked off and the young woman said nothing but stared through the windshield as if trying to bore a hole in the glass. To Slip, her bad driving
was a testament to her innocence. He imagined that she was a farm girl who had snuck away with her brother’s car. She was learning to drive to surprise her family back home, or her boyfriend.

“You drive really well,” Slip said, his eyes darting back and forth from the road to the steering wheel, his left hand arching out a bit ready to grab for it.

“Look’s like you’ve got something there,” he said, and pointed to the front of her shirt.

“What?” She looked down.

The top three buttons of her sweater were undone, and she looked down to where there was a small smear of blood across the top of her chest.

“Oh … oh …” she said, and started wiping at the blood. The left tires crunched on the road apron. Slip reached over and took the steering wheel.

“Slow down and let’s pull over,” he said, straining to keep the car on the road.

She let up on the gas and her hands fumbled at the stain. The big Lincoln slowed to a stop on the side of the road, and Slip reached across her lap to pull on the brake. “You must have gotten some of that dog’s blood on you after all.”

“I’ve got a clean handkerchief in the glove box,” she said, her fingertips twisting at the fabric of her dress. Suddenly she looked down the road to where there was a small gas station beside the river with a few cabins behind it.

“I need to rest,” she said, and wheeled back out onto the road.

It was awkward watching the woman making arrangements with the homely boy wearing overalls. It was only the middle of the afternoon and she was renting a room. When she came back, she threw the key on his lap and lurched the car up to the first little cabin along the edge of the woods. She opened the door and her hands were still shaking.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I was only able to get one room with a small bunk.” She didn’t look him in the eyes. “You could stay on the floor, or you could wait for a ride out on the road. The boy here said there is a bit more traffic later in the afternoon.” She pulled a leather bag out of the backseat and dug around in it. She pulled out a surprisingly big roll of bills and peeled off a ten dollar bill then waved it nervously in his direction, still without looking at him.

“For your trouble,” she said.

“No,” Slip said, “I think I’ll stay.”

She held out her hand. “My name is Ellie Hobbes,” she said.

He took her hand, and though the skin was soft her grip was much stronger than he expected.

There was a tin stove in the corner of the cabin, one bed, and one chair next to a table that stood beneath the only window. Slip brought in his bindle of clothes and his toolbox and set them both under the table. Outside, the river slid past in a constant rush. The water was a light emerald green, and the spring current turned the rocks in the riverbed so that there was a consistent chunking and chortling above the sizzle of water. Slip started a fire in the stove with some cedar chips and a couple of pages from a magazine. Then he added splits of dry fir. They crackled inside the stove sending whiffs of smoke puffing out the seams until the flue started to draw.

Ellie sat on the narrow bunk. The metal webbing creaked underneath her and she seemed even smaller than she was. Her hands cupped around her elbows as if she were trying to hold herself in. Slip sat on the floor in the corner of the room. He propped his bindle behind him and leaned against it.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said. She shivered even though the room was warming up and the dampness was retreating through the cracks in the walls.

He told her that his friend had died in the woods earlier in the day. He had been topping a tree. He told her because he believed
that women were sympathetic, but all she said was, “bastards,” very softly under her shivering breath.

“Tell me about what you want to do,” Ellie said, breaking the awkwardness between them. So he told her about working on Grand Coulee Dam. He told her his plans to go back east of the mountains and get land to start a ranch. He told her about electrification and power to pump water, about irrigation and how the Great Basin country would soon be a productive paradise. He talked about how beautiful and green the fields would be and how there would be nothing like it anywhere in the world. He was happy talking about this fantasy he told himself was his future, for he really didn’t know how to talk about Jud’s death.

He talked about his friend Andy who had worked alongside him on the Grand Coulee Dam, and about how they had talked about going in together on a place, about how Andy was a good worker and had been saving up some money by working in his uncle’s barbershop down in Seattle. He explained that he was intending to go to Seattle and round up Andy, and as soon as they could get a truck and a few materials together they’d head straight over Stevens Pass and start looking for a place.

Ellie laid down on top of the covers. She lay on her side with her hands for a pillow. Slip knew that she was only partially listening but he didn’t mind. He stopped talking, thinking she was asleep. But as soon as he did she opened her eyes, staring intently toward the stove.

“I don’t mean to talk so much,” he said.

She closed her eyes softly once and then opened them again. In the darkening room he noticed she had faint scars under both eyes, fishhook size, right in the spots where the bruises were rising.