The Brothers K (64 page)

On his first walk along the estuary a couple of miles downriver from “city center” he found an eight-foot weather-grayed chunk of totem pole—the torso of Wolf or Bear maybe (though some idiot had chain-sawed a “D.D. + A.A.” into its backside). And on the same walk, a few hundred paces from the totem, his boots began making odd crunching sounds, and he found himself standing on a clam shell midden as broad as an infield and several times the height of a pitcher’s mound.

Both the totem-chunk and the midden had been left behind by the Kwakiutl. An unsortable blend of archaeological evidence and folk legend had it that a southerly branch, or at least twig, of this tribe had lived on the Little Nessakoola estuary for some eight thousand years—four times the life-span of Christendom; five times the span of the Islamic world; forty times the span of that constantly backfiring experiment in self-government known as “the United States.” Then, one day in the early 1800s, an enterprising young tribesman paddled his canoe out into the Strait, hailed a passing ship, traded a few furs for a nice factory-made British blanket, and never lived to learn that the stuff it had been infected with was called “smallpox.” Two winters later his eight-thousand-year-old village was extinct. “But look on the bright side,” Everett wrote, again to Natasha. “Kwakiutl art was such a perfect expression of integration with this landscape that even the white folks felt they couldn’t live without it. So a group of generous industrial chieftains from our own fine culture got together and bequeathed Shyashyakook their own two favorite Pacific Northwest totems: Old Man Caved-In Salmon Cannery and Old Man Rusted-Out Sawmill.”

The estuary’s eight-thousand-year Kwakiutl history remains a mystery upon which shell-heaps and vandalized totem-chunks shed little light, but the sixty-year history of the town was so depressingly predictable that the two dead industrial totems pretty well told the whole tale. For a century or so after the mass death (or, as the B.C. tour guide prefers, “disappearance”) of the Indians, the townsite was just a camp for hunters and fishermen. Then in the 1920s the cannery, sawmill, church, tavern and forty houses were erected in a three-year span, business soon boomed in all forty-four structures, and for a decade or so it seemed that Shyashyakook’s industrial future might be bright despite its retrograde Indian name. But since it was a tidewater town with no oceangoing fishing fleet, its cannery was totally dependent on Little Nessakoola River gill-netting. And when the watershed was clear-cut to supply the sawmill,
it brought on winter floods and mudslides that flushed the river’s spawning beds out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, forcing its salmon to join the Kwakiutl in the Land of the Dead, and driving the cannery into bankruptcy. “Still plenty of trees!” gloated the town optimists—all of whom worked at the sawmill at this point. Then the Prince George Pulp and Paper Company—which owned every mature tree within a ninety-mile radius—found a more profitable market for their unprocessed logs at a modernized mill in Esquimalt, forty miles away. That was all it took. One day the mill was the town’s sole source of income; the next it was what Everett called “Shyashyakook’s second great neo-Kwakiutl
objet d’art.”
Industry had come. Industry had gone. It had lasted 1/267th as long as the Indian village.

Most of Shyashyakook’s population, not being neo-Kwakiutl-minded, had run off in pursuit of the falling trees and schooling fish that once meant easy money in the decreasingly Great Northwest. When his congregation dwindled to eight even the priest of the Catholic church was forced to vacate. But all forty houses survived, and after the mass exodus you could buy one for peanuts. So a number of “Shyashyakooks,” as they took to calling themselves, decided to try to stick it out.

It was rough going. To defy the God of Progress is often to marry the Goddess of Poverty, and a life of constant poverty and defiance can (as Circe’s mirror had recently shown Everett) lead to aesthetically and socially displeasing things. The average Shyashyakook male, when Everett first arrived, poached deer and elk year-round, killed every fish, clam and crab he could catch regardless of seasonal restrictions and bag limits, stole and sold blowdown logs from provincial parks and private forests, picked, preserved, and hoarded wild fruit and mushrooms, gardened as if his life depended on it, brewed, distilled, and illegally traded some highly unpredictable beverages, cheated on his unemployment or welfare benefits, and traded goods and services with surprising scrupulousness toward his fellow Shyashyakooks but with perfect ruthlessness toward all outsiders.

But the departure of industry had brought healing changes too. For instance the quiet. You could hear the river slapping along, and the spruce trees shishing; you could follow the changes of season by sound alone—hummingbirds warring in the April willows, skeins of geese discussing pilot error high overhead in November. Another nice change: precisely because they lacked a priest, the eight Catholics were able to procure a special dispensation from the bishop in Victoria to convert a side hall of the church into a play school and kindergarten during the
week, a bingo casino on Friday nights, and a dance hall whenever anybody got lonely, happy or hyperactive enough to throw a celebration. Nor, Everett soon discovered, were the priestless community’s spiritual needs being neglected: not only was the Muskrat Tavern religiously attended by townsfolk of both genders, its 280-pound Scotch-Tlingit bartender, Yulie MacVee, slung around advice with an authority and accuracy that put the departed priest to shame. She couldn’t legally back her homilies with the Body and Blood that supposedly make priestly badgering palatable, but a “Muskrat Burger” (which was really beef, with an illicit bit of elk or venison mixed in from time to time) cost ninety-five cents complete with lettuce, onion, pickle and fries, a draft beer cost two bits, and in the time it took him to down just one such feast, Everett once recorded the following typical MacVee counseling gems, which he mailed on to Irwin “as a homeopathic dose of sanity: take one per day as an antidote to Army Brain”:

1. “Hell
no
you can’t shoot Bella’s ewe for eatin’ your irises, Agnes! Use your wig-holder, honey. It idn’t the damned sheep’s fault. What if Everett here stepped out to the John and you sat down, thought his burger was yours, and downed it? ’Zat give him the right to shoot you? Here, come ’ere. Take a load off. Have a beer. And listen, Agnes. You know Jeddy Redstone? He’s got a
zillion
irises in the strip there along the south side of his barn. And Bella, it so happens, has some terrible hots on Jeddy. Get the picture? Just you sigh a little, say you sure do miss that splash o’ color along your fence, but hey, maybe you’ll mosey on over and get some irises from Jeddy. Believe me, honey, she’ll break your legs to save you the trip! You’re gonna have irises sproutin’ out your kwakiutl.”

2. “Hell no you can’t go settin’ bear traps for the game warden, Roonie! Use the hat rack God gave you! You might catch somebody’s kid, or worse yet, a bear! And say you did nab the warden. Say you crippled him up good. You know he only lives over in Port Renfrew and already likes it here. What’s to say he wouldn’t gimp on in and bore us shitless every night? But now listen, have one on me here, Roonie, and think about this. Dudn’t
everybody
need a predator? Hunt and be hunted, Roon. That was the old way. Our predators keep us healthy and on our toes. So why mangle yours? You’re smarter and faster, you know the woods a hundred times better. So outsmart him, outrun him, outwoods him.”

3.
[in a whisper]
“For chrissake, Lulu! Wudn’t that Nina’s boyfriend you were mauling out in that car there? Yeah, I know he’s cute. Yeah, I know they fight. Yeah, I know it’s your life, but here. Simmer down.
Come ’ere. Have one on me. And listen. Between you, me and the moose on your bottle, I heard from the best source south of God that your cute new friend has got himself one ugly-lookin’ boo-boo smack-dab on his you-know-what. I am
not
shitting you! And Nina’s checked out healthy. So see why they’re fighting? If he was your man, wouldn’t you wonder where the hell he’d—
Huh?
What’s that? Oh no. Oh, Lulu. You didn’t!
[laughing manically now]
Oh Christ! Judas priest, Lu! Clear the aisles! Don’t touch nuthin’! Go scrub your goddamn hands!”

And sin no more. Years, tourists and the wonders of industrial progress kept passing Shyashyakook by without pausing, but small good things kept happening there. A film buff began showing rent-by-mail movies in her barn every Thursday. Four families combined skills and funds and opened a combination food co-op/hardware store/post office that made the town a little, but not too much, like a town again. A couple of enterprising strangers, pretending to be Prince George Pulp and Paper employees, spent two weeks stealing the metal guts out of Old Man Rusted-Out Sawmill, trucking them to Victoria and selling them for scrap. Scrub alders and Himalayan briars knocked Old Man Caved-In Salmon Cannery to the ground, buried him under a green shroud, and raccoons turned his remains into low-cost housing. The gardens got bigger and better. The kindergarten became a full-fledged grade school. The ex-millworkers and hippies got harder and harder to tell apart. The game warden never caught Roonie, but did his job well enough that the fishing, hunting and clamming began to improve. “I didn’t see it at first,” Everett wrote, again to Natasha, “but this isn’t a town of townspeople, really. This is a town of tribespeople. This is a bona fide bunch of modern-day hunter-gatherers with a female chief named Yulie, really and truly muddling their way from post-industrial ruin back toward a more Kwakiutl way of life. And even if you don’t visit me, Natasha, even if you stay in the room the Chief rents up over the Muskrat, you ought to come check it out. Because it’s a beautiful, painful, hopeful thing to see.”

B
ut I need to slow down here a minute. My problem with Shyashyakook is that I loved it so much when I finally managed a visit that I have only to picture it and about half of me tries to fly back and live there. When Everett first arrived in 1970, though, several miserable moons passed before he ever suspected he’d crash-landed in a good place. I haven’t explained just where he lived, or how. More importantly, I haven’t explained why he was taking such pains to describe his new home so alluringly
to a young woman whose last words to him had been: “I never want to see you again!” So let me swoop back around for another pass:

On the south slope of the Little Nessakoola estuary, directly across the river from the clamshell midden, stood three somewhat ostentatious, beautifully furnished, contemporary “second homes.” All three were owned by Vancouver, B.C., professional families. All three stood empty at least ten months of the year. But on the north side of a spruce grove directly behind the houses was a caretaker’s cottage. This was where Everett ended up. His job—in exchange for free rent and a hundred bucks a month—was to occupy the cottage full-time, to guard the three homes from possible depredation by the Shyashyakook hunter-gatherers, and to perform a few simple maintenance tasks on the buildings, road and land.

His most demanding task turned out to be the daily tethering of an enormous, taffy-colored, petroleum-scented billy goat who was supposed to serve the same general purpose as a lawn mower, but who, unlike any mower Everett had ever operated, had a ferocious preference for the cedar shakes on the owners’ houses to the grass that grew around them. After many lost tug-of-wars and several shake repair jobs, Everett renamed the goat Booger, found that didn’t really help much, headed down to the Muskrat to seek liquid therapy, met Chief Yulie MacVee instead, discussed his goat problem over a free beer, told her his life story and all the rest of his problems over four more, and ended up hiring Yulie’s twelve-year-old Dr. Do-Little-ish daughter, Corey, to deal with what the Chief saw as the one unnecessary difficulty in his life: the billy goat. Within weeks Everett found Corey so competent to deal with all of his caretaking tasks that he phoned his bosses in Vancouver, told how he’d befriended the chief of the Shyashyakooks, explained that his security-guard function was obviated by her stature in the community, and said he’d like to take a part-time job for the rest of the summer—eight hours a day, three days a week—vacuuming and polishing cars at a Rub-a-Dub in Victoria while Corey covered for him at home.

His bosses said fine, and the Rub-a-Dub days proved, as hoped, to be a mindless balm: Everett just did the work, prowled the city afterward till he’d filled his noise and chaos quota, drank a nightcap or two (in memory of his abandoned Seattle self) at a posh little pub called Churchill’s, slept in his car the two nights, collected his pay, and drove back home to his estuary. But the other four days of his week, the Little Nessakoola days, presented the same basic
Velella velella
situation he’d first encountered in the Underground motels of Seattle—and this time a small spheroid
scar in the center of his chest wouldn’t let him forget that a woman’s body was no surefire cure for his dreadful sense of amorphousness.

“I don’t even know me,” he carped in his new journal one interminable May evening. “And if I don’t know me,” he added, boldly going where few Campus Rads had gone before, “no wonder I don’t know how not to get pissed off or restless. Because how can you control somebody you don’t even know? Maybe the real me isn’t pissed off or restless at all. Maybe this temperamental guy here is somebody else, somebody completely extraneous! So maybe what I need—besides a woman, which would always be nice but can possibly wait, since the pickings in town look damned slim, or damned the opposite actually, besides which Booger, speaking of ‘pickings,’ has a pretty okay-lookin’ little ass on him (just kidding, Posterity!)—is to do some inner work, some work on
me
, whoever that is, till I at least shuck this restless son of a bitch and this pissed-off guy here, slim myself down to its Basic Everettness, and take it a day at a time from there. (Shit O. Deer! Are all journals this dumb?)”

Dumb or not, there was nothing much else to do. And one way to seek “Basic Everettness,” my brother decided, was to fill in certain irresponsible gaps in his “Previous Everettness.” To that end he had Stoner Steve mail all his boxes of unread text and history books up from Seattle, then challenged the mildew in his cottage to a race to see who could get through them first! But the contest, to his surprise, gave him a new appreciation of his old college professors. Without their lectures, assignments, deadlines and tests the reading never developed into anything more than guilt-motivated drudgery: mildew won by a mile.