West of Here (39 page)

“You come down to Forks, sometime,” he’d say. “I’ll show you real dukes of Hazzard.” Or “Three is a crowd, and eight is more than enough, if you ask me. But … different strokes for different folks, I guess.”

Other than those two and a half months with her grandparents, when had Rita ever known life to be reliable, predictable, comforting, something to sink into like a green sofa? The refrigerator was always deliciously full at her grandparents’ house. There existed in the lives of her grandparents a sense of the imperturbable, a sense that nothing could jeopardize the foundation on which their house was built — indeed, it
had
a foundation, it was a real house, not a metal box. Even the rain didn’t matter in the summer of ’79. The ten weeks went by in an instant, though Rita tried to preserve them for a lifetime. But the ruinous effects of time were stronger than nostalgia in the end.

After that summer at her grandparents’, things only got worse at home. Rita’s presence made things tougher on everybody. Her mother seemed to resent her and did little to buffer her from her stepfather’s fury, which needed no impetus. There was no youth center on the rez in those days, no library, no bus to town, and soft-spoken Rita had few friends to offer her distraction. And like Curtis after her, she spent long hours in her tiny room, yearning for invisibility. Her stepfather could not be avoided, though, and as Rita approached womanhood, even her bedroom fell under his dominion. The doorknob was removed, so that Rita could not so much as dress without fear of intrusion. And as she blossomed into maturity, she took to wearing baggy sweatshirts and did not bother with cosmetic frivolities. Her voice had grown willowy soft. Some nights her stepfather would burst through
the knobless door in his underwear and order Rita to make him a sandwich or fetch something from the carport, and always when she obeyed she could feel his eyes upon her.

Finally, Rita left home at fifteen, following three months of sexual humiliation that, though it never evolved past the touch of a calloused hand upon a thigh or beer-stinking breath upon the back of her neck, was all the more humiliating because it made her feel ultimately unworthy of such attention.

The decision to flee that afternoon in 1983 — following a particularly humiliating episode involving a tampon — had proved to be neither for better nor for worse in hindsight. Rita could not help but wonder how things might have turned out had she sought the safe haven of her grandparents’ instead of the patchwork support system of marginal personalities she’d woven together while planning her escape. Sometimes she slept in Trish Groves’s garage. Sometimes at Mal’s, a forty-year-old woodworker she’d befriended at Traylor’s Diner, where she often whiled away the late-night hours drinking coffee in a booth farthest from the window. Mal never laid a hand on her, but Rita often felt the force of his gaze. His desire was palpable from the sofa across the room, and though she slept, she never slept easily at Mal’s. She should have never dropped out of school. That decision, perhaps more than anything else, sealed her isolation. It forced her underground. Throughout her fifteenth year, Rita’s invisibility, like her survival, became a matter of guile. She avoided the rez altogether. But even two long miles away, avoiding authority in its many guises proved to be an unrelenting challenge in a town the size of P.B. She kept odd hours, avoided downtown, she walked down the least trafficked streets. The worst part of it all, though, was the fact that she was frightened to leave Port Bonita. What held her there?

Rita’s meditations on the past were rudely interrupted when on the edge of town, the Monte Carlo stalled in front of Murray Motors, where Jerry Rhinehalter was standing in the showroom window with a Styrofoam cup of coffee gazing wall-eyed at the rain. The car stubbornly resisted numerous attempts at restarting, but there was nothing unusual about that. The old heap always started back
up eventually. After applying a little finesse — a butterfly fluttering of the gas pedal, a pat of encouragement on the dashboard, a breathless willing for ignition — invariably it coughed and sputtered back to life with a cloud of black exhaust. But not this time. This time the Monte Carlo wouldn’t start.

“
YOU’RE WHERE?” SAID
Krig into his cell, releasing his Kilt Lifter long enough to check his wristwatch.

“In front of Murray Motors. Across from Beehive Odor Control.”

“Yeah, okay, I know where you’re at. I’ll be there in five.”

“Thank you sooo much, Dave. Seriously, you don’t know how much I appreciate this.”

Dave?
Dave?
His ears rang. Had she really said it? That had to mean something. A boundary had been crossed there, no doubt. “Not a prob,” he said. “See you in a sec.”

An hour later, after Krig had called AAA and the Monte Carlo was well on its way to Rita’s, after they’d sat in the Goat for a half hour waiting for the tow truck, with the heat on so high that the furry dashboard was warm to the touch, listening quietly to Steve Winwood’s first solo album as the rain rolled down the windshield in sheets, Krig and Rita sipped weak coffee at Traylor’s, of all places, in one of the back booths of Rita’s teenage exile, a fact that Rita did not mention.

It was dark now. Out the window, Rita watched the rain falling diagonally, illuminated by the purplish wavering light of the parking lot.

“I honestly don’t know why,” she said. “Why do I keep making the same mistakes over and over? It’s all right there in front of me — or behind me. I can see it. But still I keep rushing blindly at it. And I make every possible excuse for myself. Habit. Laziness. Fear. I’m never ready to own the consequences. Oh, I’m sorry, Dave.”

She liked that Dave always listened. He didn’t pretend to have all the answers; he didn’t feel like he had to offer commentary on every single thing. He just listened like he was interested; listened to her
wax on about a thousand small fears, and a few very big ones; listened silently to her litany of regrets, her inventory of woes. Now and again — if she gave him the chance — Dave would emerge from all that silent nodding and say something unexpectedly sage. Again, on this occasion, he did not disappoint.

“It sounds like the stuff you’re scared of already happened.”

OCTOBER
1890

Eva marched through the weak light of the warehouse clutching the
Commonwealth Register
like a baton, liberating her frazzled hair from a bun and shaking it loose as she came.

Griffin was hunched over his desk, scratching out notes on a legal pad. He didn’t look up as Eva approached, but he’d been expecting her.

“Yes, Miss Lambert?”

“Where’s my story?”

“I didn’t run it,” he said.

Eva slapped her newspaper on the desktop, where it remained furled. “I can see that. When do you intend to?”

Dotting an
i
with gusto, Griffin looked up from his work impatiently. “Frankly, I don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

He busied himself writing once more. “Simply put, I’m not interested.”

“How can you say that? You told me to bring you a cause! You told me —”

“Not a lost one, Miss Lambert. You’re six months too late.”

“How is this a lost cause?”

Griffin paused in his writing and looked up. His lips were bloodless. His eyes were rimmed with thin blue crescents.

“It’s an avalanche,” he said. “It can’t be stopped. And besides, I’d no sooner stop it than —”

“It can be regulated!” Eva said. “It can be altered! The structure is not even built yet! They’ve hardly begun! How can you call it a lost cause? You’re talking about the future of this place. You’re talking about the very corporate plundering that inspired you to start this newspaper in the first place! And there’s other things at stake here
besides equity. How can you fail to consider the fish? What happens to those fish when they can no longer propagate? What happens to the natives who depend on them? What happens to our
economy,
which could well depend on fishing. Don’t you see? The designs don’t even allow for —”

“I’m not interested in fish!” bellowed Griffin. “I’m interested in people. I’m interested in what benefits society. And before you go admonishing the editorial decisions of this newspaper, consider that I’ve been in this business longer than you’ve been alive — long enough to know that you’ve got to choose your battles wisely if you wish to be an instrument of reform.”

“So you’re backing down?”

“I’m doing nothing of the sort! This is not my battle, Miss Lambert. It seems to me that this particular battle belongs to you and your husband.”

“He’s not my husband. And that’s ridiculous! I’m not the one confusing the issues here. The public has a great stake in all of this — and you know it! It’s all spelled out right there in a thousand words.”

“A thousand sensational words of speculation and innuendo.”

“I’ve seen the designs, and there’s no passage for the fish! I know the investors, I’ve seen the contractors — and they’re not from around here!”

“You said all that in your story.”

“And what about the workers? They’re not from around here either!”

“At least they’re not coolies.”

Eva turned and faced the high windows. There was dust swimming in the light. She felt a quavering in her chest and the bitter sting of bile in her throat. “I gave up my daughter to write this story,” she said.

“Well then, perhaps you owe your daughter an apology, Miss Lambert. That’s beyond my jurisdiction. Whatever the case, I simply cannot allow you to grind your personal axes in my newspaper. I’m concerned with more pressing issues.”

Eva swung around to face him once more. “This is a labor issue! This is an economic issue! This is a conservation issue!”

“Conservation?” Straightening up, Griffin looked almost amused. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “Look around you. How do you convince the public to conserve what they cannot even see the end of? You’re taking a narrow view of this issue, Miss Lambert.”

“I most certainly am not. You know as surely as I do that no resource is unlimited — or none of these people would have come west to begin with. There would be no land rush if land were unlimited! There would be no —”

“I know that sometimes the benefits of a thing outweigh the unpleasant necessities,” Griffin interjected. “Sometimes the end justifies the means.”

“You don’t expect to sway me by resorting to cliché?”

“I don’t care to persuade you one way or another. The decision has already been made.”

“But the decision defies reason! It defies every intention of this newspaper. The decision is unacceptable!”

“Well, you’d better start accepting it!” snapped Griffin.

Eva could see the veins of his forehead standing out. She looked for the truth in his eyes, and no sooner did Griffin divert them than Eva experienced a plummeting sensation and the vacuum effect of sudden and unexpected recognition. For a moment she was struck dumb. When she finally spoke it was as though her voice were coming from outside of herself. “He paid you, didn’t he? He
paid
you not to run the story!”

Griffin’s eyes sought occupation on the desk top. “Nonsense. Had I received payment, Miss Lambert, I should think I’d invest in a rotary press or at the very least buy a lamp for my desk.”

Eva felt a numbness washing over her. “I can’t believe he actually paid you.” This time she said it as though to herself.

AUGUST
2006

Your days ran together as one long day, and you took to pacing back and forth down the sterile corridor, speaking in white spaces to nobody, bobbing and dodging the punches as the many worlds shadow-boxed inside your head. Sometimes the light inside your mental room was too bright. Dimly, you knew you were not yourself. But how could you recognize me?

The white coats were pleased with your appetite, satisfied with your reflexes and the rhythms of your heartbeat. But clearly you vexed them with your behavior. They talked about you as if you were not there, shaking their heads in disappointment.

If anything, he’s regressing.

The one with the bad breath became short with you. His curiosity gave way to impatience. His grip became firmer and more forceful as he poked and prodded you, jostled you around on the crinkly paper sheet, held your eyes open and blinded you with sharp pointy lights. Sometimes you tried to slow down the many worlds, tried to pin them in columns on the wall like charts for him to see.

Take it easy,
he would say.
Just hold still.

How could you trust them when they could not see?

OCTOBER
1890

When at last Thomas felt the sickness welling up in him, tasted the blood rising in his throat, he understood that his time was near. The Siwash were beckoning him home. Shortly before dawn, wrapped in a goatskin rug, Thomas crept out the back door of Lord Jim’s and into the chill darkness. The air was heavy with moisture, and the ground was not quite frozen beneath his feet. An icy moon still clung to the western horizon. In spite of the chill, Thomas sweated profusely. His body rang with the spirit; it vibrated inside of his bones, it pushed at the back of his eyeballs, it spit at the fire burning in his belly with a hiss. And even before he took his first steps toward the Siwash, Thomas felt the spirit grab hold of his lungs and squeeze. He feared that the spirit would overpower him but resolved himself to fight it. Trudging west along the muddy road, the boy began to hear whispers, voices both human and not human. They circled the inside his head, faster and faster, until they were but a blur, and still they spun faster until they swallowed time, and the world turned to spots and finally to black.

The boy awoke eighteen miles away at the mouth of the Elwha, where he waded into the icy riffle up to his hips and bathed his feverish body until he could no longer feel himself. He scrubbed his skin until it was raw. Then he huddled on the bank beneath his goatskin and waited, his body racked with shivering.