West of Here (21 page)

The two Indians arrived at the shoreline a half mile east of Hollywood Beach, at which point they turned back toward the distant fires, ambling along the water’s edge in a stiff wind, passing the bottle back and forth.

“Why did we take this way?” Small Fry wanted to know. “This is a circle.”

“Because, stupid. This way we came from somewhere else.”

Thomas found little need for stealth, as he followed the two men with the bottles at a distance of a hundred feet. They were blinded by whiskey. Small Fry was laughing a lot and began to spin in circles as he walked.

“Shut up,” said Stone Face. “Quit playing.”

A quarter mile from the nearest fire, the two men followed a narrow trailhead up the slope. Thomas followed them at a short distance. Small Fry started humming a white man’s song.

“Quit singing stupid songs.”

“You quit.”

“I’m not singing, stupid.”

They paused yet again along the trail to set the box down and uncap the whiskey. As he brought the bottle unsteadily to his lips, Small Fry began to retch, and Stone Face seized the bottle from him, just before the small man dropped to his knees and retched again. Stone Face wiped the rim of the bottle with the sleeve of his shirt. He looked at the rim disgustedly before sipping from it. After he put the cap back on, he kicked his slumping companion.

“C’mon,” he said, and picked up the box.

But Small Fry didn’t get up. Instead, he lay down on his back in the wet grass.

“Get up.”

Small Fry only moaned.

Stone Face jostled him with a foot. “Stupid pig. Get up.”

When Small Fry failed to comply again, Stone Face simply left him there on the ground. “Stupid Indian,” he said, proceeding up the trail.

Thomas stepped right over Small Fry, who rolled over with a groan and looked up at him with lolling yellow eyes. And reaching up as if to touch Thomas, he moaned.

A quarter mile further on, the Makah left the box of remaining bottles in a small clearing by the side of the trail. Grasping his own half-empty bottle, he approached within mere feet of Thomas squatting in the brush and began to urinate, swaying considerably as he emptied himself near the boy’s feet. He laughed at the unwieldiness of his own body. Thomas clutched the mirror in his sweaty palm, as Stone Face gathered himself and fastened his pants and squatted down on his haunches about ten feet in front of the boy. He began to hum the same white man’s song that Small Fry had been humming.

Thomas crouched in the brush in perfect silence. If he was still enough, he could forget where he was, and if he could forget where he was, he could turn invisible. That’s how invisibility worked. Soon a chaos of hushed voices converged on the trail in front of him, both male and female. Thomas soon recognized them as Klallam voices, and among them he thought he could discern the dry, aching voice of his grandfather.

“Shush. Over here,” said Stone Face.

They congregated around the box. Six in all, two women among them. The Indian from Port Gamble was there, the one who sometimes passed out beneath the boardwalk.

“Be careful,” his grandfather said.

“Give me that,” said Stone Face.

A bottle dropped to the ground and shattered in the grass more like an egg than a bottle.

For an instant, everybody froze. Then, like a bolt of lightning in the darkness, an arm shot out, striking his grandfather square in the face. He cried out and fell to his knees.

“Look what you did, old man,” said Stone Face. “Now you’ve got none.”

The Indian from Port Gamble laughed, and one of the women laughed. Clutching his nose in his hand, the old man reached for the box, but the Indian from Port Gamble kicked his arm away and laughed once more. This time everybody laughed. They uncapped their bottles and gravitated to neutral corners and squatted. There were only four bottles. One of the women shared with her man. The old man scrambled on all fours over to the other woman, who pushed him away.

“Get out.”

“Please,” he said.

“Get.”

The old man slunk over to Stone Face and reached out to him hopefully. “Just one.”

“None for you, old man. You’ve had enough.”

“Just one. Please, just one.”

“Okay, just one.” Stone Face held out the bottle. But when the old man reached for the bottle, he slapped his hand away. “Go.”

He began to writhe in agony. “Please,” he kept saying.

Finally, Stone Face gave him the bottle, and so greedily did the old man partake of it that the liquid overflowed from his mouth and ran down his face, and Stone Face wrestled the bottle back from him and slapped him across the face.

Hunkered beneath a dripping maple, Thomas felt the icy tingle of a rivulet running down his spine. His jaw tightened. Rising to his feet with a rustling of vines, he stepped out into the clearing and walked ten steps until he stood right in their midst, unafraid.

But nobody seemed to see him there. The boy hoisted the mirror aloft, so that its muddy face was pointing out at them, and gritting his teeth, he spun a slow, furious circle, pointing the instrument at each of them in turn.

But it was no use. He was invisible.

Gripping the mirror fiercely, he marched out of the clearing and rejoined the trail, where he again came upon Small Fry, sprawled flat
on his back in the middle of the path, chortling like a pig in his sleep. Thomas had a mind to defile Small Fry, to step on his face, to spit on him, but he could not bring himself to do it. Emerging once more at the trailhead, Thomas walked to the water’s edge, where he tossed the mirror aside, disgustedly. The first wave washed over the mirror and receded, leaving a smattering of tiny shells upon its surface. The second wave took hold of the mirror and dragged it out into the surf.

Thomas marched west toward Hollywood Beach.

FEBRUARY
1890

Hardly had Tobin emptied himself in Gertie’s mouth than he pushed her head away and hitched his pants, checking his pocket watch as though he had a stage to catch.

“I want you back on the floor in ten minutes,” he said.

“But this afternoon you said —”

“Never mind what I said. Turn twenty dollars between now and eight o’clock, and you’re free to watch the end of the show with the rest of the crackpots. But I’m warning you, don’t make it a habit. I’ll be damned if I’ll have that colony whore putting ideas in your head, you hear? You’re not some lesbian preservationist. Your daddy’s not a wealthy industrialist. Your daddy was a rapist, and you’re a whore.”

There were days, not so far removed, when Gertie would’ve talked back to Tobin. Back then, she had ground to stand. Back then, it was worth taking it on the chin. This was her house, she was the draw: Gallopin’ Gertie McGrew, the most generous working girl west of the Missouri. Could suck a billiard ball through a drainpipe. Once rode a man so ragged he couldn’t get back in the saddle for three days. The fact that Gertie continued to manage the house, that she still governed the girls and ran the trade, was little more than a technicality anymore. How long before Peaches or some other young girl elbowed her out?

Tobin turned back to Gertie on his way out the door. “And nobody’s paying you to spit.”

Shortly after the dinner hour, Gertie took it in both barrels from a Wichita rug merchant, accounting for half of the twenty dollars she presented Tobin shortly before eight o’clock. The other half she paid herself. The ground was muddy beneath her feet, as she navigated the back alley toward Hogback, hoping to make the colony by intermission.
Her thoughts were already stuck derisively upon Tobin when her approach startled his two Indian stooges upon their nightly charge. The dark one straightened up alertly while the small one shrunk in his shadow with the box of bottles.

“Oh,” said the dark-faced one. “Just you.”

Probably, she would be stepping over them on her way back. Probably, they would both foul themselves before morning. Strange that she pitied them when she had no sympathy for drunks. Strange that she should view them as innocents when she knew that they were not to be trusted. But left to their own devices, they did less damage than most. They only wished to recover that which had been lost. But clearly, theirs was a hopeless cause.

Once, in a courageous moment, she’d said to Tobin, “You’re killing them. Why do you do it?”

He just looked at her with those laughing eyes and that cruel smirk. “Quit answering your own questions, whore. And quit asking them, while you’re at it.”

Gertie arrived midway through intermission, where she found Eva awaiting her beneath the wooden marquee, dressed unseasonably light, her pale cheeks flushed, her breath visible in the night air. Gertie apologized for her late arrival.

“I’m pleased you could come at all,” said Eva.

Though Eva assured Gertie that the Opera House was to be on a grander scale than the theater, Gertie was not altogether unimpressed by the plank floors and high-vaulted ceiling of the theater. The lack of decorative flourishes lent the place an austerity that Gertie had never liked in churches but liked everywhere else.

Collectively, the colonists cut a strange figure. There was something somber in their utilitarian dress, in the way they carried themselves a little more upright than most. The men were all clean-shaven and clean beneath the fingernails. The women seemed plain at first glance, but some — and none more than Eva — were quite striking upon closer inspection.

The revue itself was a comedy of errors, and not a particularly good one. The leading man, a reedy fellow with pattern baldness, had
a stutter that worked to tragic rather than comic effect. The buck-toothed ingénue, who looked like a whore Gertie once worked with in Colorado Springs, bungled her lines repeatedly. Still, Gertie enjoyed herself in spite of the scandalous whispers elicited by her presence, though she was relieved to take the open air when it was over.

Walking side by side with Gertie, Eva could not help but think of her not-so-distant stroll down this very path with James Mather, then, as now, flush with a certain posttheatrical buzz, aglow with some ineffable human electricity that she found both thrilling and terrifying. For those few thrilling moments with Gertie, without Minerva, Eva’s bones did not feel heavy.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Gertie observed. “About making a difference.”

“And?”

“And you’re right. Even a whore can be of some service to society if she puts her mind to it.”

“It was unfair of me to judge you. I’m a hypocrite. What utility have I served the greater good?”

“You’ve inspired me,” said Gertie. “That’s a start.”

Eva felt a warm rush of blood in her face. “Forgive me if I’m dubious. But I’m afraid my facility to inspire anything is highly suspect.”

Seizing Eva’s hand, Gertie pressed it firmly against her own. “It’s not true,” she said. “Long before I ever took to whoring, I knew I was no damn good. The fact is, whoring was about the first thing that made me feel like anything at all. Like I had some kind of influence. I was good at it. And I know how funny that must sound, but nobody ever told me differently. Not even Jesus Christ himself ever made me feel like I could be anything but a whore. And maybe I can’t. But Miss Lambert — Eva — you’re the first person to convince me that a body’s more than just the station assigned them, that a person is made up of choices.”

JUNE
2006

When Curtis got home, the Monte Carlo wasn’t in the driveway. The front door was locked, and the key wasn’t under the mat. Circling around the side to the kitchen window, Curtis wondered why his mom bothered. She trusted a criminal with her heart, but she was afraid of being robbed by strangers? What was there to take, anyway? The TV? You’d need a furniture dolly to haul it. Wriggling through the kitchen window onto the countertop, Curtis knocked a coffee cup out of the dish rack as he pulled his legs through. The mug bounced a few times on the warped linoleum but didn’t shatter.

A quick check of the fridge confirmed what Curtis already suspected, that there wasn’t much to eat. He snatched a Silver Bullet from the top rack, a box of Rice Chex off of the counter, and retired to his room. He locked the door and plopped down on his springless mattress. It was a dank little retreat, especially in winter, when the sun cut its arc in the southern sky, reaching the high window for but a few precious minutes per day in late afternoon, whereupon it was forced to contend with a dirty and mottled screen. But even in the half-light, the creeping gray blotches were visible in the corners where moisture had leached in through the outside wall. The chaos of the room was decidedly oriented toward the floor, around the mattress, where clothing was strewn about and heaped in piles and the lamp listed to one side near the head of the mattress. Next to the lamp lay a can of black Krylon, a paper clip corroded with pot resin, along with the shredded remains of the pencil-and-ink work he’d torn from the walls a week earlier in a fit of disgust.

The stack of salvaged comics lay fanned out under partial cover of mateless socks and black T-shirts. The room may not have been glamorous, but it was his. If Randy came to live with them, he’d lose
it, for sure. If Randy came to live with them, things would be fucked. Worst-case scenario, they’d relocate again, probably even farther from school, deeper onto the rez. His mom would go back to tiptoeing around, focusing all her energy on Randy, who’d reject her at every turn. Best-case scenario was more of the same.

Snapping on the lamp, which immediately toppled sideways onto its shade and was left uncorrected, Curtis popped his Silver Bullet and reached for the stack of comics. Between handfuls of Chex, he started flipping through issues, no longer ordered, not even by series. He paused briefly on
Alpha Flight
#2. Olivetti’s pencil work kind of sucked when you really looked at it. His character didn’t bend — even Mister Fantastic looked stiff.

Curtis liberated an issue of
Exiles
from its plastic jacket and perused it. Calafiore had a surer hand than Olivetti with the pencil — maybe too sure; his musculature was overwrought. Even Mister Fantastic looked beefy in Calafiore’s treatments. Calafiore’s figures smiled when they should be grunting, grunted when they ought to be smiling. But the real problem was the stories. The whole premise of the Exiles was preposterous: holes in the fabric of the time-space continuum had created alternate realities. The Exiles traversed these alternate realities, trying to undo the damage and set the omniverse in order.