West of Here (25 page)

Within forty minutes, the pint was half empty and Timmon was the master of his own universe. Being master only meant letting go, surrendering, letting his thoughts drift of their own accord, until he
laughed without cause, until the downy hair of a child’s sunkissed face was no different than the notion of his own mortality, until believing was no different from disbelieving, until his dick was in his hand and his seed was spilling out into the river, and spilling, and spilling until he was empty of everything, until the emptiness filled him up and the fire died and he fell asleep face down beside his tent with his dick hanging out of his trousers.

JULY
2006

Hillary had planned on ordering a single glass of the house red and nursing it through the evening. But by the time she parked the Silverado, wobbled across the gravel lot in high heels, and stepped through the double doors of the Bushwhacker, her nerves were already getting the best of her. She knew immediately that all bets were off. She was wringing her hands under the table when Molly arrived for the orders.

“I’ll have a gin and tonic,” she said.

“Y’all got eggnog?” said Franklin.

Molly arched an incredulous brow. “Uh, in like,
four
months we
might.
”

“Just give me a glass of milk, then.”

He was older than Hillary expected. She hadn’t expected salt and pepper. And blacker, too. Not that there was anything wrong with that. Strange that Genie had failed to mention it, though, since there were only about three black people in Port Bonita.

“Nice place,” she said.

Franklin surveyed the Bushwhacker. Something smelled like fish. “Yeah,” he said. “Not bad.”

She was younger than Franklin expected. A little chunkier, too — but in all the right places. Still, Franklin couldn’t seem to muster his characteristic exuberance. The loss of Timmon Tillman was still nagging him. He’d forgotten how much he hated losing them. It wasn’t even about facilitating anymore. The knowledge that some tattooed knucklehead was out fixing leaky radiators instead of marking time was not the payoff. The payoff was the knowledge that Franklin was good at what he did, that he packed his lunch and got the
job done — 317 consecutive times he’d gotten it done before Tillman walked through his door. How had he miscalculated?

“You seem down,” Hillary observed, hitching up her blouse. “It’s me. You’re disappointed.”

“No, no, far from it,” he said. “It’s work.”

“Genie said you’re a parole officer?”

“That’s right.”

“That must be interesting.”

“Yeah, well, don’t know about that. S’pose someone’s got to do it.”

The drinks arrived. Franklin wasted little time in getting started on his milk.

“So then, you must believe in second chances?” said Hillary.

“S’pose I do. Now that you put it that way.”

“What about third chances?”

“Depends.” Franklin wrinkled his face and set his glass down. He had a milk mustache. “This taste sour to you?” He slid the milk across the table to Hillary, who eyed it suspiciously, took a tentative whiff, and slid it back.

“Smells okay.”

“Hm,” he said. “Damn if it don’t taste sour to me. So, Genie says you’re some kind of environmentalist.”

“I work for Fish and Wildlife.”

“Yeah? You like a ranger or somethin’?”

“I do environmental impact studies.”

“That so? Interesting,” lied Franklin. The very word
environmental
conjured mosquitoes in Franklin’s imagination.

“I don’t wear a uniform or anything like that,” Hillary said. “Mostly, I just count fish and measure silt levels — we’re trying to predict how the landscape will react once the dam is removed.”

“Yeah, I heard somethin’ about that. Dude on the TV said the other day how that dam’s on roller skates, that a fact?”

Hillary smiled politely, uncertain whether Franklin was joking. He seemed earnest enough. “That’s just an expression. It means there’s nothing under the dam but alluvial.”

“Alluvial, huh? You mean like dirt?”

“Something like that. More like sand. Some people are afraid the structure will blow out before the restoration even begins.”

“Inconvenient truth,” said Franklin.

He had great teeth. Must be the calcium. Kind of an airhead, though. That she was attracted to Franklin Bell on some level came as a relief to Hillary. Not that she had butterflies. Not that she felt the flush of sexual attraction. Still, there was something there, a sort of magnetism. But then, how could she be certain that she wasn’t just talking herself into this attraction out of some perverse sense of defiance? Had being called lesbo all these years finally pushed to her to the fringes of rural social convention? She liked that Franklin was black — it had to be a character builder in Port Bonita. She smiled inwardly at the thought of Beverly’s reaction.

“Isn’t truth just generally inconvenient?” she said.

Franklin flashed his nice teeth. “S’pose so,” he said, sipping his milk.

“Before the dam there were ten andromonous fish species in the Elwha,” Hillary pursued. “All but one of them is extinct now. And all of it could’ve been avoided with fish ladders.”

“Fish ladders, huh? You don’t say.”

Franklin supposed he was still just a city boy deep down, still a son of Windy City steel and concrete, crowded el trains and noisy storefronts, because already he had a few questions that he was afraid to ask. For instance, how the hell’s a fish supposed to climb a ladder in the first place? Also, this was the first he’d heard about fish being transsexual. How was it that after eleven years in Port Bonita, gateway to the Olympic National Wilderness, the mysteries of nature were still foreign to Franklin? Fish run, tree harvest, snowpack; these were just phrases, things, to be quite honest, he didn’t even care to understand. The fact is, he could hardly stand the wilderness, it struck him as lifeless and dull. All those trees just standing around to no purpose. The deafening silence. The mosquitoes. Franklin felt no more at home in the wilderness than a giraffe might feel on the Dan Ryan
Expressway. The fact was, he was a little terrified of the wilderness. Given the choice, he’d rather stroll through Cabrini Green waving a fistful of cash at one in the morning than walk through Lincoln Park at noon. And yet, not only had he applied for a position in this outpost a decade earlier, he’d even passed up positions in Muncie, Detroit, and Indianapolis — urban locales all, and all of them exponentially closer to Chicago. Only later did it occur to Franklin that he’d been trying to outrun anything.

“Any kids?” said Hillary, as though she were reading his mind.

“Naw, nothin’ like that.”

“Me neither,” she said.

“Never got around to it, I guess,” said Franklin. “Heck, I can hardly take care of myself.”

“I know what you mean.”

In the ensuing silence, Hillary downed her G and T in an effort to soothe her nerves. Franklin followed suit with his milk, grimacing slightly.

“Needs rum,” he said.

After the second gin and tonic, Hillary’s nerves settled into a pleasant state of arousal. It felt good being tipsy. Franklin got better by the sip. Maybe he was different than the others. At least, he didn’t talk about himself the whole time. Hillary felt something bubbling up in her chest that wasn’t tonic, as though the evening might be leading somewhere.

Franklin was also pleased by the evening’s progress. He wasn’t forcing anything, like he had with the Longaberger basket rep from Port Townsend or the administrative assistant from the women’s correctional facility in Purdy. Franklin was laying back, and everything was smooth sailing until shortly after the third round arrived, when Hillary asked him if he did much hiking.

“Heck no,” he said, waving it off, with a grin. “It’d be a cold day in you-know-where before you’d catch me walkin’ around out there. My idea of the great outdoors is a potted plant.”

Like an anchor chain, disappointment plummeted down the back
of Hillary’s throat. Franklin could see it and was determined to recover from the misstep.

“’Course I can’t say I really ever gave it much of a chance. Never cared much for baseball until I saw Wrigley Field. So I guess I could be persuaded to give it a try. Can’t really judge a thing until you’ve tried it.”

It wasn’t that Franklin redeemed himself — because, let’s face it, this was a deal breaker — it was more that he tried to redeem himself that kept Hillary from slamming the door on the evening’s possibilities. Still, her interest was waning the more he tried to save face, and Franklin could feel it. It was time to push it, he decided.

He smiled over the rim of his rum and milk. “I gotta say, blind date and all, I wasn’t expecting anyone half as smokin’ as you.”

Hillary felt her face color, simultaneously thrilled and annoyed at herself for taking the bait. She had to admit she liked his directness, if nothing else.

“Really,” pursued Franklin. “Usually, I wind up with, well, you know — not that I’m Paul Newman or anything. But a fine-looking lady like yourself? Girl, you must be beatin’ ’em off with a stick.” Damn it, why did he always start talking like Bobby Brown? Bobby Brown never worked. It was too forward, it always had lewd undertones. But to Franklin’s surprise, on this occasion Bobby Brown worked, if not by way of its intended effect, then simply by its directness.

Downing her G and T, Hillary felt the stirrings of an old recklessness. “What now?” she said.

MARCH
1890

One morning in early March, the suffocating cloud cover that had characterized the long winter finally lifted, and the cool crisp light of day slanted through Eva’s frosty window. Pulling herself upright beneath the covers, she discovered at once that the heaviness was gone from her limbs and that a certain clarity and sharpness had returned to her perceptions.

As she padded across the creaking floor to tend to the stove, she paused at the sight of Minerva sleeping soundly in her crib, her tiny pinched mouth pulsing, her little fists clenched and twitching ever so slightly. For week upon plodding week, in spite of her tired limbs and dull senses, Eva had attended to the infant’s every physical need. She had fed and bathed and clothed and quieted the child, and yet it was clear to Eva that she had failed miserably in the most basic measure of motherhood. She had forsaken her child, as sure as if she’d abandoned her on a doorstep.

After stoking the fire, and setting the pot to boiling, Eva retired to her desk by the window and reread her letter to Ethan for the fourth time, wondering if today were the day she would send it. Before she got halfway through the letter, however, just after
I was unaware that the practice of husbandry now extended beyond the perimeters of matrimony
and right before
I have a moral responsibility to society at large,
Eva calmly folded the letter twice, walked it to the kitchen and, pulling back the iron hatch, dropped the letter into the coals, which she set about stoking.

She’d been tough on Ethan, and she’d known it all along, known that those who’d abandoned hope would discourage hope in others, those who’d given up the pursuit of a dream — often long before the mad scramble had ever begun — would make it their business
to obstruct the dreaming of others. And so it had been with Ethan. Eva discouraged Ethan’s dreaming without ever having put her own shoulder to the wheel. Yes, she’d relocated two thousand miles away; yes, she’d adopted a belief system, a philosophy; yes, she’d chopped a little wood, donned a floppy bow, made flapjacks, painted some seascapes, and written a few ephemeral pieces for the
Register.
But how had she really suffered by it all? By not being taken seriously? By not being heard? If so, it wasn’t for lack of complaining; she’d objected, dissented, refuted, opposed, torn down, cast aside, or dismissed everything the world presented her. If she had lacked a sympathetic audience, it was no small wonder. And hadn’t this child been part of Ethan’s dream? And hadn’t she denied him that, too?

When she could no longer see her own breath, Eva woke Minerva and lifted her from her crib, bundled in her nest of blankets, the mark of sleep still spread across her wrinkled face.

“Good morning,” Eva said, smoothing the downy hair atop the infant’s crown. “Things are going to be different now.”

Receiving this intelligence, Minerva cooed once and grasped at the air with tiny fingers.

“And what have we here?” Eva said. “Ha, why it looks like little mittens! And a little scarf.”

The girl began to fidget immediately, but suddenly Eva had patience to spare. Hoisting the bundled girl up in her arms, Eva walked her out into the crisp bright morning, where the child fell silent in the brilliant light. How clear and miraculous the world appeared in the light of a new day. How enlivening that first breath of cold air, how wondrous the crunch of fresh snow. To the south, Eva saw the mountains as though for the first time, every chasm, every cleft, every sawtoothed ridge against a crisp relief of deep blue sky. How tiny and restless the colony, with its little white houses and busy little chimneys, seemed in the shadow of such grandeur.

Minerva began to squirm in her arms. Lacking any immediate purpose, Eva plodded toward the hotel for the sake of plodding toward somewhere, until at last Minerva settled once more. Crunching down the snowy path toward the colony, she shielded the child’s eyes against
the blinding sunlight. In the distance, the pounding of a hammer could be heard, soon joined by the reports of a second hammer, and the laughter of children from the schoolyard. A woman with a shovel was clearing the steps of the half-finished Opera House. A handful of men were at work beneath the boat shed, three on deck with ropes, and two on the scaffold alongside the hull, calling instruction out to one another as they guided a timber into place. A carriage man readied his team in front of the hotel. Even at a distance, Eva could see the fog of the horses’ breath. All around her was industry and purpose.