West of Here (3 page)

Ethan stood tall and lean on the dock, flattening his lapel, as he gathered his bearings. This did not take long. The town ran only one direction. Indeed, it had nowhere else to go, hemmed in as it was by heavy timber and steep inclines. There was only Front Street, a ragtag row of structures running east to west in an arrangement that suggested jetsam spewed on the shoreline.

Skirting the muddy creek that ran down the middle of Front Street, Ethan passed a feed store and a darkened real estate office before he came upon the Northern Pacific office. Smiling inwardly at the town’s prospects as he peered through the mud-spattered glass, he found the premises empty. Along the fringes of the creek, the street was heavily
rutted and thick with the churned-up mud of wagon teams, though presently Ethan saw none about.

At the Olympic Hotel, he came upon a rather rough looking gent with wild hair and a permanent scowl, who was leading two mules. When Ethan inquired as to the direction of the commonwealth colony, the stranger looked him up and down at length, squinting like a marksman.

“What is it you want with the colony?” he said.

“I want to locate it,” said Ethan.

“Hmph,” said the stranger. He spit on the ground and jerked his thumb once toward the east. Ethan tipped his hat as he mounted the sodden boardwalk.

Clomping clear-headed past the smoke and laughter of the Belvedere, Ethan was determined to pass without incident. He’d sworn off those immoderate houses of woe. What need of whiskey, he thought, drawing a deep breath, when the rare air of Port Bonita was free for the taking? With purpose and resolve, he proceeded for eight or ten strides before surrendering finally to temptation. Just a nip for courage, he assured himself. A little cheer to color the cheeks. A toast, as it were, to the adventure that lay ahead. Just enough so Eva wouldn’t notice.

Ethan took a stool and, in spite of local custom, removed his hat and set it on the bar before him, revealing a head of straight dark hair parted cleanly down the center. Casting a look around the establishment, it occurred to him that the Belvedere did not live up to its name. In fact, not only did the saloon fail to offer the grand view its namesake promised, it conferred no view whatsoever, save for a partial vantage of the flooded street, obscured further by the mud-caked windows.

The Frontier Room, thought Ethan. Now
that’s
the name for this saloon. Promptly he produced a small pad and the dull nub of a pencil from his coat pocket, whereupon he jotted his newest idea alongside two hundred other flashes of inspiration, including the Walla Walla chip (a variation on the Saratoga chip — made with sweet onion), the electric stairs, the electric pencil sharpener, the magnetic coat hanger, and a flatulent comic revue titled
Will-o’-the-Wisp.

Replacing pencil and pad in pocket, Ethan turned to the gentleman next to him — a dough-faced fellow of forty or so, with a steam-shovel jaw — and extended a hand.

“Thornburgh, Ethan. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr…. ?”

Dough Face eyed Ethan doubtfully. “Whatever you’re selling, mister, I’m not buying.”

Undaunted, Ethan forged ahead. “You’re certainly not, my friend, because
I’m
buying. Barkeep! Two whiskeys,” he called out to Tobin.

The pale man still did not offer a hand. “Dalton Krigstadt,” he said, as Tobin poured out the whiskeys.

Lowering his hand casually, Ethan looked his new friend up and down: denim trousers, leather boots, coarse hands. “Let me venture a guess,” he said. “Woodsman?”

“Nope,” said Krigstadt, staring straight ahead.

“Mason?”

“Nope.”

“Railroad man.”

“Nope.”

“Hmm. Well, then, I’m beat. What’s your line of work?”

Krigstadt suppressed a sigh. “Mostly, I haul things,” he said.

“Ah, transportation! Where would we be without it? Especially here, where things are always moving. To transportation,” said Ethan, raising his glass.

Krigstadt offered a less than enthusiastic nod and promptly shot his whiskey in a single throw. “What about you?” he said, wiping his mouth.

“I, Mr. Krigstadt, am a businessman.”

Krigstadt eyed him doubtfully, once more; the flashy mustache, the ill-fitting jacket, the moth-eaten trousers. “What sort of business would that be?”

Ethan smiled and slid his empty glass forward for a refill. “Presently, sir, that remains to be seen. My background is in accounting. But I’ve come here to make a new start, Dalton. May I call you Dalton?”

“That’s my name, ain’t it?”

“Yes, of course. You see, Dalton. I’ve come west because I’m tired of toiling for others. I want to work for myself.”

Krigstadt spun his empty glass. “Don’t anybody work for themselves when you get down to it. Less he can make money out of thin air.”

“Exactly my point,” said Ethan. “You’re a wise man, Dalton Krigstadt. A wise man, indeed.”

Krigstadt slid his empty glass forward on the bar just as Tobin replenished Ethan’s.

Two more rounds ensued, during which Ethan elucidated at some length upon his status as
an idea man.
Krigstadt offered little encouragement beyond the act of sliding his glass forward each time the barman approached.

After roughly an hour, Ethan, whose neatly parted hair was now mussed, referred to his pocket watch, plucked his hat off the bar, and stood to leave.

“Well, then, Dalton Krigstadt. It’s been a pleasure. I trust in a town this size we shall soon meet again.”

“Probably,” said Krigstadt.

On his way out of the Belvedere, pleasantly flush from the whiskey, though not so flush, he imagined, that Eva would notice, Ethan stopped to inquire more specifically as to the colony’s location. On this occasion, he solicited a one-eyed gentleman with what appeared to be gristle in his beard, whom he found leaning against the splintered rail of the boardwalk, carving a naked female form out of a potato. The result was a decidedly stubby female form. The artisan paused long enough to subject Ethan to a thorough visual inspection, whereupon he gruffly issued the coordinates “over the hump.”

Ethan trod onward in the pitchforking rain. His mustache took on water and began to wilt. His heel was squeaking and his suit was heavy with rainwater by the time he arrived at the foot of a stumped and muddy hogback on the east end of town. Twice he lost his footing clambering up the muddy path and on one occasion very nearly lost his suitcase down the stubbled hillside.

As he crested the hump, he got his first look at the colony below. He took out his pipe, packed it, and attempted to smoke in the rain, as he looked down upon the Utopia for which Eva had abandoned him. The model commonwealth, free of working-class turmoil, free of labor strife, free of corporate tyranny, in short, the solution to the Chinese problem. A mill, a boat shed, a theater, a hotel, a schoolhouse. A cluster of little white houses huddled together like Indians on the shoreline. Doomed to failure, thought Ethan, all of it. Human nature would never allow for cooperation on such a scale. But it was nice to think so. How orderly the colony appeared clustered on one side of the hill, with the ragged outpost of Port Bonita on the other, how refined in comparison was its very conception. Yet, it was Port Bonita that called to Ethan, not the colony. Port Bonita, with its crude and youthful vigor, its laughing, belching, bawdy can-do spirit. A pugnacious town, Port Bonita, a fighter, and a damn good bet. It was Port Bonita into which Ethan would invest all his of faith and energy. And one day, God willing, he would invest his fortune there, too.

A full two minutes passed in contemplation before Ethan took notice of the spindly native child standing downhill of him at a distance of some twenty feet, arms akimbo, impervious to the rain. Clearly, there was something odd about this round-faced boy, if indeed, it was a boy. His lips were moving silently. Odder still were the child’s glacial blue eyes, almost as pale as his own, which seemed to be focusing on some distant point beyond Ethan. Glancing back over his shoulder, Ethan found himself hemmed in by a muddy hillside.

“Boo!” said Ethan, swinging around.

But the child did not budge.

“Don’t frighten easily, eh? That’s good. That’ll get you far, son. What’s your name?”

The boy remained silently fixated on his distant point.

“I see. Silent, too. That’ll get you even further. My name is Ethan. Ethan Thornburgh. Remember that name, son. One day it will mean something.”

The boy tilted his head slightly to one side and squinted.

“Not convinced, are you? Well, that’s okay. I should think you’re not
alone there. No, I’m rather used to that by now. But let me tell you a little secret, boy. A man’s destiny is not in the eyes of others. It’s in his own. And that, my young friend, is as good as any bank note.”

Covering one eye with his hand, the boy tilted his head to the other side.

Ethan did the same.

The boy took a step forward, and Ethan, too, stepped forward. When the boy stepped back again, Ethan followed suit. This dance continued for several minutes. When it became clear to Ethan that the boy would win any war of repetition, he emptied his pipe with a tap and replaced it in his hip pocket. Thumbing the thin roll of bills in his pocket, he surveyed the mud-spattered condition of his trouser legs and laughed.

“Good day,” Ethan said, doffing his soggy hat to the boy. He then turned and began trudging east down the squishy path toward the colony.

THOMAS FOUND HIS MOTHER
seated alone by the fire at the mouth of the creek. The rain had let up, but the fire still hissed, unfurling a ribbon of black smoke toward the shoreline. Thomas sat beside her. His lips stopped moving. His mother did not look up but out across the strait. Thomas scooted closer, but still she did not acknowledge the boy. Upbeach to the east, a chain of six fires at roughly even distances unfurled their own black ribbons into the wind. Thomas could hear, just above the lapping shoreline, the low chatter of his people and occasionally the shrill voice of a white man in their midst.

DECEMBER
1889

But for the cedar placard reading
LAMBERT
, and the lone decorative flourish of a holly wreath fastened to the door, Eva’s plain white house, quaint and ugly, was all but indistinguishable from the thirty small houses huddled around it. Nothing Utopian about it, to Ethan’s way of thinking. The thought of the place made him restless.

The Eva who greeted Ethan at the door, just as he was straightening his waterlogged salmon pink tie, was clearly not the bustle-and-petticoat Eva who had abandoned him in Seattle, but rather a new incarnation, replete with divided skirts and a hard little bun atop her head, and a floppy hand-painted tie. However, it was apparent at once, as she stood fiercely in the doorway, jaw set, with one hand on her hip and the other on the bulge beneath her white blouse, that she was the same hardheaded Eva Lambert who had twice refused his hand.

“Oh, Ethan, no,” she said, blocking his way. “Do you never learn? Have I not been brutally honest with you?”

“Brutal, yes,” said Ethan. “Are you going to let me in?”

“What happened to your eye? You look awful. You’ve been drinking.”

“I had a skirmish in Seattle. Now, may I come in?”

“You’ve always been less of a physical coward than a moral one.”

“I’ve changed,” he said.

“I’ve not,” she said. “But come in if you must.”

Eva led him to a cluttered sitting room, where Ethan sat himself down. He commenced rolling up his muddy trousers, removing his squeaky shoes and wet stockings, and setting his feet on the quilted pad of a sizable divan, where his toes set to wiggling, as he finessed his wilted mustache back into shape.

The room was populated by an upright piano, a pair of balloon-backed chairs upholstered in red velvet, and no less than three curios,
riddled with bric-a-brac ranging from exotic butterflies and souvenir spoons to gleaming silver urns and porcelain gravy boats. It occurred to Ethan that the room’s tumultuous decor was probably not so different from the furniture of Eva’s mind. There was nothing plain about Eva. No tight hair bun could belie the frazzles; no high-necked blouse could button up her spirit.

“All right, Ethan, what are you doing here? The condensed version.”

Ethan could not look at her. His eyes sought the clutter all about him and lit upon a little cluster of porcelain figurines arranged in a half circle atop a tasseled runner: a man, a woman, a boy, a dog, and two penguins. “There’s an honest woman in you somewhere, Eva, I just know it.”

“Ha! An honest woman! Really, Ethan, what have you been reading? And just what is an honest woman? One unburdened by initiative? One without opinions, one without—”

“Damn it, I mean it! It’s time to put aside all the rest of it and get serious.”

“The rest of what? The rest of me? The rest of my life? Why is it every time a woman gets serious, she has to set something aside?”

“It’s not like that! I’m not asking you to give anything up. I’m not asking you to come back to Seattle. I want you exactly as you are, not one bit different. I just want to join you, to make a life with you. The life we set out to make when we left Chicago. Be sensible, Eva. You could use a man around here.”

Eva turned toward the window. The rain was coming harder. “Even if that were true, you’re too late. We’ve sold the cows. The brickyard has closed. The opera house sits half finished like a monument to our failure.”

“I don’t mean here. And I don’t mean in town, either. I mean out there.” He gestured vaguely toward the window. “Gads, look at it out there! It’s glorious, it’s endless. It’s up for grabs.” He reached up and grabbed two possibilities out of the air, and closed his fists around them. “Why not us, Eva? You’re a new woman, why not a new life?”

“What do you think
this
is?” she said, clutching her swollen belly with both hands. “How many people do I have to surrender my will to?”

“I’m not asking you to surrender anything, I’m asking you to be a part of something bigger.”