West of Here (40 page)

The sky turned to snow in the afternoon; giant flakes floated through the air like ashes, dissolving as they touched the damp earth. The trees moaned as the wind rolled up through the valley. The spirit began to vibrate in the boy’s jaw as if it were trying to sing through his clattering teeth. The boy tightened his chest and gritted his teeth in an effort to contain the spirit. Then he saw what he was waiting for:
a shadowy figure along the bank beckoning him from upriver. His father had come back for him at last. When he stood to greet his father, the world turned to spots, until gradually a black curtain descended, and a warmth expanded inside of him, and the only sound was the thump of a heartbeat from the center of the earth.

S
UDDENLY
, T
HOMAS AWOKE
to a world he did not recognize. He discovered himself amid an abandoned sea of concrete, spreading in all directions atop a treeless plateau. He recognized at once that he was not himself. His body was a strange and cumbersome thing that moved of its own will yet with a purpose dimly familiar to Thomas. His shoes were odd and also cumbersome, slapping on the hard, black ground. His denim pants hung in tatters, and his baggy shirt smelled of tobacco and sweat.

Near the center of the empty expanse stood, or rather squatted, the largest structure Thomas had ever laid eyes on; slate gray, unadorned, its smooth surface broken by neither window nor door. Squinting through unfamiliar eyes, he now saw beyond the great structure — all the more minuscule in its massive shadow — dozens of tiny, driverless carriages of every shape and color, a few of them moving restlessly about, while the others huddled in rows.

Thomas could not help but marvel at the great structure, at how and why and where it came to be. It was ten times bigger than the Olympic Hotel, at least. Twenty times bigger than the Belvedere. It was as big as all of Port Bonita. Bigger than Jamestown. Bigger than Hollywood Beach. Its breadth might run the length of Hogback from the livery to the boathouse. Such was its scale that even as his oversized shoes piloted Thomas toward the structure, it did not seem to draw closer.

At last, after 184 steps, he arrived at what he presumed to be the back of the building and found himself creeping in the shadow of the great gray thing toward a line of heaping metal containers. The building was alive, monstrous, humming from the inside out.

There were seven heaping containers in all, slick midnight blue
like the wing feathers of an eagle, streaked and spattered down their steel fronts with the hardened liquid refuse oozing from their open mouths. Their breath stunk of fish and moldering fruit. Suddenly, his heart was beating out of his chest, and his shivering was such that his teeth set to clacking mechanically. Thomas felt the part of himself that was not himself ease like liquid pressure from behind his eye sockets and slide down the back of his throat with a shiver. Then, the world turned to spots again, and the darkness descended.

T
HIS TIME
, T
HOMAS
awoke in a place so strange that he was not sure if it was even a place at all, a place suffused with a light that was not the light of the sun but a light just as bright. It burned in even rows running the length of the room. The space was broken into colorful cluttered rows. And at the head of the place stood a glass door that talked when people passed through it, and it always said the same thing:

doon-doon, doon-doon doon-doon, doon-doon doon-doon, doon-doon

All but hypnotized by the talking glass door, Thomas stood before a confusion of small colorful things. The things came in various shapes and sizes and were arranged haphazardly in five long rows. None of the items was smaller than two fingers and none of them bigger than the boy’s fist.

A large man with curly hair and a stomach pressed tight against his shirt leaned in front of Thomas, snatching two orange sticks from the middle row.

“Curtis?” the man with the belly said. “Dude, what’s with the fish? Is that a
shark
?”

The boy said nothing. The belly man looked at him strangely, as though he were from another world.

OCTOBER
1890

Hoko stood all but invisibly in the light of the doorway, with Minerva silent in her arms. Inside, the room buzzed with electric tension. Cigar smoke hovered in flat blue clouds amid the rafters. Ethan presided over the assembly from the head of the table.

From Chicago and Seattle and Peoria they came, men of consequence, restless all, checking their pocket watches, shifting in their seats, daubing their brows, fidgeting with their tight collars. Even as Ethan addressed them, they murmured among themselves.

“Now, I’m not suggesting that the outside firm is in any way incompetent, incapable, or otherwise. And the same applies to any other outside firm that wants this or any other contract. What I’m suggesting is — and Jake and I have figured and refigured the numbers — that the expense of moving all this equipment from the outside is going to result not only in delays but cost overruns, too. Maybe as high as fifty percent. Which is why I’m strongly of the opinion that —” Ethan, unable to ignore Hoko in the doorway any longer, cut himself short. “One moment, gentlemen.” Leaving his station at the head of the table, he met Hoko in the doorway and pulled her aside.

“What is it?” he said.

“I have to go,” said Hoko.

Ethan stole a quick glance over his shoulder, and lowered his voice. “What do you mean ‘go’?”

“I have to leave now,” Hoko said flatly. She passed him the child, and he opened his arms tentatively to receive her, clutching the bundled girl in front of him like a vase. He stole another look over his shoulder. “For heaven’s sake, can this wait twenty minutes?”

Hoko shook her head. The color began to drain from Ethan’s face. Minerva began to wriggle, and issued a plaintive whimper. He
bounced the child gently in his arms a few times for good measure, and she reached up to tug upon his wilting mustache. “And when can I expect you back?”

“There’s no saying.”

“Come again?” he said, liberating his seahorse from Minerva’s clutches.

“I don’t know if I’ll come back.”

Ethan felt himself go cold. It was happening again. Had he not built the nursery? Had he not rocked the child to sleep for thirty nights or more? Had he not sat Minerva on his knee, cradled her in his flannel embrace through meeting upon meeting with engineers and contractors and shareholders? He had, in fact, run himself to the ragged edges of exhaustion, walking her to sleep at dusk each day, circling and recircling the entire perimeter of the compound until his very being begged for rest, with still more candlelit hours of labor left in front of him. Was it too much to ask for a little help? “But you’ve been contracted,” he said lamely. “You can’t simply leave and not come back.”

“It’s my son. He’s ill. I must go to him.”

“But you can’t just … What on earth am I supposed to do about … ?”

“Good-bye,” said Hoko, turning on her heels.

Watching Hoko go, Ethan nearly gave in to pessimism but turned instead to greet the future.

Even as Minerva slumped in his arms, alternately giggling, whining, and fouling herself, Ethan tried to quell the mutinous whispers of his stockholders.

“Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I’m questioning the fiscal wisdom of Chicago — though I’d be lying if said I didn’t have a few misgivings. My primary concern is local. I put my faith right here in Port Bonita, where it belongs.”

Ultimately, Ethan found his associates disagreeable and was forced to concede to Chicago, because Chicago had the grease that kept the wheels spinning, Chicago had money — and only money, Ethan came to realize, offered total control.

“I don’t like this one bit,” he said upon his concession. “The whole idea was to invigorate our own economy, put our own contractors to work, not bring in outside help. This dam was supposed to be for Port Bonita
by
Port Bonita.”

After the meeting had adjourned, and the men had filed out of the office, heading for town by carriage, then onward by water and rail to their great cities, Ethan slumped in his chair at the head of the table and sat Minerva on the tabletop before him as the empty room cooled down and the pale blue smoke began to dissipate. The girl dangled her feet over the edge of the table, sitting upright by her own strength, though Ethan’s hands were there to guide her. A smile played at the corners of his mouth. The child smiled back at him.

“What are we to do, you and I? What is written in our future, child?”

Minerva reached out for one of his seahorses and gave it a playful tug. Looking at the girl, her wonder-eyed, expectant face, Ethan tried to see her future written there. He ran a coarse thumb down Minerva’s face, and she batted her eyelids and kicked her legs.

“We shall see,” he said with a sigh. “We shall see.”

After the blasting had ceased for the day, Ethan walked Minerva about the little valley as the dust settled, and the afternoon air surrendered its warmth. He walked until the child fell asleep in his arms. Circling back in the direction of the office, Ethan took a detour and cut through the camp that had sprung up along the western fringe of the compound. The workforce had outgrown the bunkhouses, erecting shacks and lean-tos willy-nilly beyond the mess hall. All of it would be thirty feet under water one day. Workers were milling about in doorways and in the road as Ethan walked with Minerva through their midst.
Evenin’, Mr. Thornburgh. Howdy, Mr. Thornburgh. Comin’ right along, Mr. Thornburgh.
The smell of cooking hung everywhere in the air. A single staccato laugh cut through the evening. And even with his daughter in his arms, Ethan felt a pang of loneliness.

He came upon Indian George squatting on his haunches in front of the bunkhouse. He was packing a bag.

“What’s this?”

George rose to his feet and dusted off his backside. “I’m leaving.”

Ethan was less shocked than disappointed by the news. “Leaving? You, too?” Indeed, it was an exodus: first his woman, then his helper, now his loyal companion.

Indian George tied off his bag and heaved it on his shoulder. “The boy is back among the Siwash,” he explained. “And the people are saying he’s changed.”

AUGUST
2006

With summer winding down, Hillary lowered her shoulder and charged at her work with renewed diligence. She spent long afternoons on the river mapping fish holes and riffles, kneeling along the banks in her baggy pants to measure flow and velocity, scurrying up and down embankments, collecting silt and gravel and detritus. But she knew in her bones that her labors were futile. A dozen flow hydro-graphs, a gazillion velocity plots — none of it would save the salmon, who would continue to suffocate with mucus-coated gills in the light flows and tepid waters of the lower Elwha until the day they shunted the headwaters and started building the dam in reverse, draining Lake Thornburgh, liberating countless tons of silt, creating dozens, perhaps hundreds of jobs directly and indirectly. The day was coming. Hillary was certain that the politicos would quit stalling, face the music, and finally succumb to pressure, pushing the restoration through. Once again, the dam would be the engine of Port Bonita, only this time in reverse. And what would be left to power? What was Port Bonita without the Thornburgh Dam?

Some afternoons, Hillary took her lunch up to the dam and lingered in the rainbow-colored mist near the foot of the spillway, while the great turbines rumbled up through her bones. Eating her lunch, Hillary watched the futile plight of the fish, leaping time and again at the dam to be rebuffed at each pass. She admired and despised their determination. She figured that after a hundred years they’d get it. After generation upon generation of beating their heads against the same concrete wall, the fish would figure it out at some point, the people of Port Bonita would figure it out. For five generations, Port Bonita was an orgy of consumption that seemed like it would never
end. Every day was Dam Day. But now it was time to clean up the mess.

Hillary had put all thoughts of Franklin Bell behind her, until one morning in late August, collecting silt samples up near the rubble diversion at river mile 3.4, a numbness washed over her as she forced herself to consider the distinct possibility that she was pregnant. It wasn’t enough that at thirty-eight years old she was sexually conflicted and willfully single, that she had no equity, and was essentially working herself out of a job in a dying town. No, she had to go and get pregnant by the only black guy in three counties. Her numbness broke suddenly like a fever, and Hillary began to cry for the first time in ages, and it felt good. The tears gushed for the better part of an hour, and when she was all cried out, she squatted on the bank of the river, where the fast eddies swirled, and contemplated various futures.

On her way home, she stopped at Fred Meyer for a chocolate cake and an EPT. She never ate the cake.

MARCH
1890

Having left the Elwha behind nearly two weeks prior, Mather had unwittingly led the expedition into the most rugged and precipitous terrain they had yet to encounter. Ascending far past the timberline, out of the wooded valleys and canyon country they trudged, starving and beleaguered, straight into the jaws of the alpine wilderness. They soon found themselves besieged by a jumble of jagged peaks, their steep faces scarred by slides and avalanches. Down the hulking shoulders of the mountains ran great yawning crevasses cut through with veins of glacial ice. The thin air burned icy hot in their lungs. The absence of anything as small as a frost-stunted tree or a shrub or even a bare patch of earth in this vast white world, distorted all sense of scale. Carving wide switchbacks up snowfields in their ragged single file, the men seemed even to themselves insignificant. Their progress — so hard won — seemed infinitesimal. For days on end, they marched silently but for their own labored breaths and the plodding progress of their snowshoes, toward the broad face of Olympus. The brittle wind chapped their faces, burned their eyes, whistled past their ears with a ghostly howl. Hunger would not be ignored, nor was it content to simply gnaw at their bellies; by the middle of March, it began to work upon their minds. Trudging forward, they were as five strangers — together yet alone — imprisoned by their thoughts.