West of Here (41 page)

Nobody’s determination was less dogged, or progress more mechanical, than Cunningham, who plowed forward listlessly, pulling up the rear. The thoughts that crowded in upon the doctor were not welcome thoughts, or even sensible thoughts, but stray flashes of memory — crisp and vivid — the significance of which he could not comprehend: concrete steps, the hem of a coat sleeve, a leather-upholstered ottoman. An ink blotter, a flagpole, the pale flame of a
streetlamp. These benign images more than anything else were the source of the tears freezing upon Cunningham’s wind-stung face, not because they stirred his sensual appetites, or filled him with longing, but precisely because of what the images
didn’t
evoke, the meaning they didn’t possess.

Reese, owing not to his own depleted vitality, but to Dolly’s, was never far in front of the doctor. He coaxed Dolly forward on a short lead, encouraging her vocally on occasion with a pat on the rump. The beast was in poor shape, her ribs protruding, her breathing shallow and tattered.

Perhaps the heartiest member of the expedition by this time, Runnells remained right on Haywood’s heels throughout the ascent, pushing his compatriot forward. Runnells alone was not bothered by his thoughts or troubled by the future. His mind was fixed only on his next step.

13 March 1890
This afternoon, having traversed a saddleback and struggled up the face of a mountain we might well have named Exhaustion, the altimeter read 2,850 meters. I do not know if this number is accurate; I’m highly suspicious of it. Surely, we are at a higher elevation. I must confess that as I set my pen to paper, shivering in the dusky light of our fireless camp, with a sickening hunger gnawing at my insides and a chill in my limbs which cannot be thawed, I fear that other eyes may never look upon any of us again. It is now readily apparent to me that leaving the Elwha was a grave miscalculation and that I should have spoken my piece. For this, I cannot blame James Mather. That in some strange way he seems to be enjoying the catastrophe, that he continues to exude confidence in the face of disaster, nay, even a certain mocking good humor, is reckless and unforgivable. My patience has been exhausted, and I feel my wick burning low. I’ve half a mind to turn around, with or without them. But I haven’t the vigor. I am also of the mind that the remaining mule should be dressed while it still has something besides sinew on its bones.

On a morning in mid-March, as the men snowshoed up a thick bank toward the crest of another rise, Dolly finally gave out — tottering once, with a ragged wheeze, she toppled onto her side beneath her load. After numerous attempts, she could not be persuaded to rise again. For several minutes the party gathered wordlessly around Dolly and watched her languish, dull-eyed and senseless, in the snow. Reese squatted on his haunches and stroked the mule’s head. Looking up into the hungry faces of the men, he felt an unfamiliar shame and appealed to Mather with uncertain eyes.

Recognizing the naked hunger in Haywood’s eyes, along with an unsettling glimmer akin to madness, Mather spoke gravely. “No. Let’s move on.”

Reese stayed behind, kneeling in the snow. He watched as the other men crested the snow-covered rise. He stroked the beast one final time, and spoke her name softly, before setting the muzzle of his rifle between her eyes.

WITH ONE EYE
, Dolly watched the sky, dully, contentedly. It was a mottled shifting sky, many shades of gray. She breathed easily once more, as the clouds tumbled lazily on their way past. She could no longer feel the sting of the ice or the burning in her belly. She felt only a throbbing from the center of the earth. There was warmth still in the hand atop her head, comfort in the soft voice which uttered her name. When the hand was lifted, she felt a slight pressure between her eyes, heard a deafening ring in her ears. Then she saw black.

Now forced to bear their own burdens, the men dragged as never before beneath the weight of their loads. Throughout the morning, Mather could feel the piercing eyes of Haywood between his shoulder blades. Something was at work on Haywood, gnawing away at his good sense. Mather had never known this sort of weakness in his companion. If only Mather could give Haywood some of his own strength.

As afternoon approached, the terrain leveled out in a narrow whitewashed valley running east to west. Perhaps a mile ahead — though
such short distances had become nearly impossible to gauge — the valley doglegged to the south, beyond which point the lay of the land was invisible. It was the dogleg that spurred Mather on through the deep snow. The gentle curve amid a landscape otherwise sudden and brutal suggested to Mather that something forgiving lay ahead, a wide river valley descending into the tree line, perhaps. So tight did Mather cling to this hope that his pace quickened as he plowed through the waist-deep snow toward the bend. Shortly before sunset, they reached the wide arc of the valley, and Mather pushed harder than ever through the snow until he had almost managed a trot. By the time he reached the far end of the bend, he’d put a distance of a hundred yards between himself and Haywood. And when at last Mather rounded the bend, he stopped dead in his tracks and fell to his knees.

28 March 1890
When I saw Mather drop to his knees, all that was not broken in my spirit rose in a flash of warmth. I ran toward the bend with a heart full of contrition, an apology taking shape upon my wasted lips.

AUGUST
2006

Having renounced Mather’s upland route and rejoined the upper Elwha at the foot of the Press Valley, Timmon Tillman came upon a small creek a half mile southwest of river mile 19. It was shortly before noon, and already his feet were itching when he decided to stop and catch his breath. The clouds had burned off and the thrushes were sounding their otherworldly whistle. Timmon stood on the edge of the burbling stream, which ran a meandering downhill course for a half mile, where it fed into the Elwha at the head of a wide channel. Not only was the spot idyllic with its nearby grassy glade and its dramatic vistas of the rugged interior, but surely, Timmon reasoned, there were plenty of fish in the upper Elwha to sustain a hundred men through fall. By winter he’d have a grasp on bow hunting — hell, if Ted Nugent could do it, an Irish setter could probably do it. Everything he would ever need was right there. The fast little creek would provide fresh water, the dense canopy would shelter him from the elements, and the isolation of the place — twenty-odd unihabited miles from Port Bonita and fifty or more from anywhere else — would ensure Timmon a life of unmolested solitude.

What had really distinguished this little creek from two dozen other lovely little creeks was the fact that Timmon was tired — tired of plodding ever onward, tired of packing and unpacking his fancy backpack, tired of sweat pooling in his socks and the insatiable itch of athlete’s foot. He was tired of starting all over again every morning with the unzipping and zipping of zippers and the clicking and unclicking of carabiners, tired of the multitude of tedious chores — wrestling his tent into its sheath, folding his damp clothes, shaking the needles off his tarp — tired of the endless details. In spite of what he’d told the parole board, Timmon came to realize that he really didn’t want to
live his life one day at a time after all — he wanted to live it like one long day, without all the packing and unpacking. The more still you sat, the fewer problems you seemed to attract. The less you moved, the fewer obstacles you were bound to encounter. Hadn’t he adapted quite easily to prison life for these very reasons?

He christened the place Whiskey Creek but soon decided that it sounded too much like a steakhouse and redubbed it Lost Creek, Clear Creek, Fish Creek, and Little River, before settling finally on the frank and unpretentious the Creek. In the warmth of early afternoon, he scrupulously cleared and graded a flat expanse between three giant cedars. He dug a circular fire pit and ringed it with rocks he hauled from the creek. He shed layer upon layer of clothing as the hours unfolded, until he was shirtless, pale and skinny and tattooed, limbing fir trees with his Felco in the afternoon sunlight. He sawed limbs in six foot lengths, two to three inches in diameter, until it seemed he’d amputated every reachable limb of that description for a half acre in all directions. He dragged them two by two through the forest and staged them in a clearing at the edge of the glade. Late in the afternoon, he began to construct a shelter between the three cedars — part lean-to, part cabin, part teepee. And as the structure took shape, Timmon was fully engaged in his task and outside of time. Now and again, he stepped back to clear the sweat from his forehead and scratch his beard, and to admire his work in all its confused glory. Sure, it wasn’t Hearst Castle — it looked more like an upside-down bird’s nest than anything else. But it was a hell of a lot homier than a tent, and hell of a lot roomier. Though the doorway might have served a hobbit quite comfortably, Timmon was forced to bend his lanky frame almost in half to gain entry. Once inside, the structure had all the charm of a fox den.

In the waning hours of day, as Timmon was shoring up his patchwork roof, he was alerted by a nearby trilling and looked up to find a chipmunk watching him from a high crook in a cedar. Cute little guy. Huge cheeks. Funny little buck teeth.

“Hey, there, little buddy. You live around here?”

The chipmunk trilled.

“Guess I’m you’re new neighbor then. Make yourself at home.”

Locking in on the chipmunk, Timmon slowly backpedaled toward his equipment, crouching as he went, groping blindly behind his back for the bow. Running his hand down the riser, he found the grip and began to pat around for his quiver with the other hand.

The chipmunk trilled.

“That’s right, little buddy. Just stay right there and make yourself comfortable.”

Timmon fitted the arrow into place and lifted the bow. Steadying himself, he angled the bow up and steadied his aim at the chipmunk, who trilled once more with a playful singsong. Slowly Timmon drew the bow string back tauter and tauter until he hit the wall. Holding his breath, he let the arrow fly. The bow kicked back unexpectedly hard, and Timmon faltered backward a step as the arrow disappeared with a whiz into the canopy. The chipmunk never moved a muscle. The arrow never came down.

Timmon dined not on chipmunk that evening but on a small handful of pumpkin seeds and the last of the shriveled huckleberries he’d collected two days prior. He did his best to quiet his grumbling stomach with water as he hunched over the fire. Tomorrow he would fish. He’d catch an even dozen and cure them in a salt brine and smoke them just like he’d read online at the library. He’d pan-fry a couple, too. In the afternoon, he’d practice with the bow. He’d find that arrow that never came down. He’d make a few improvements on his shelter.

Late in the evening it began to drizzle. Abandoning the fire, Timmon gathered his things and took cover beneath his shelter. As he lay in his sleeping bag, he listened to the hiss of the rain and stared up at the thatch ceiling. He had a mind to talk out loud but resisted the temptation. Outside he thought he heard something scratching around by the fire pit but decided it was only the rain playing tricks on his ears. For no apparent reason, with his mind set free to wander, Timmon recalled his elementary school gym teacher, Mr. Black, and his knee-high tube socks and his hairy arms and his whistle. He recalled playing crab-soccer with that huge canvas ball. He’d actually been
decent at the game. He could move fast like a crab. He remembered stealing Fudgsicles from the walk-in freezer in the kitchen adjacent to the gym. He remembered those big buttery rolls they served on the yellow plastic trays next to the already cut-up spaghetti. He remembered Sloppy Joe Thursdays. Corn Dog Fridays. A green lunch ticket. Glowing casseroles crisp around the edges and cheesy in the center. The abundance of school lunch. Often, those lunches held him over until the next day. Once in a while, his father’s heavy footsteps clomping up the wooden steps would wake him in the middle of the night, and he knew what was coming, and was powerless to stop it. His father would clomp right to Timmon’s bedside and turn on the light. Smelling of whiskey, arms loaded with white boxes of cold Chinese takeout, he would rouse the boy out of bed. This was the closest his father ever came to being gregarious.

“Up! Get up!” he’d say.

He’d tear the covers off the boy and march him to the sickly light of the kitchen and set him down at the table and foist the boxes on him.

“Eat! Go on, eat!”

And when the boy continued rubbing his eyes in sleepy bewilderment, his father’s temper would rise.

“I said eat! What are you waiting for? I got chink food!”

He’d clomp to the bedroom and rouse Timmon’s mother, too, and march her to the kitchen, and the two of them would silently eat cold Chinese food under the watchful gaze of his father, standing magnanimously over them with his arms folded.

Timmon thought he heard the scratching again, and when he thought he heard something large disturbing the brush, he bolted upright and listened intently. But all he could hear was rain. Rain, and the beating of his own heart. He lay back down and resumed staring at the thatch roof and tried to empty his head. But one recollection crowded in on him: eight years old and the disappointment of a rainy afternoon at old Comiskey Park as the tarp was rolled out even before the first pitch. If anything, his old man had seemed pleased about the rainout.

“We would’ve lost anyway.”

Even as they filed out of the stadium — his old man hurrying him along with two fingers pressed to his shoulder — the rain began to subside. It was hardly raining at all as they emerged on West Thirty-fourth and cut through the dispersing crowd toward the old Dart. They could’ve played that game, Timmon was sure of it.

“Quit your sulking,” his old man said. “It ain’t the end of the world.”

“But it’s hardly raining.”