West of Here (42 page)

“It’s always raining. Get used to it.”

They didn’t even need the windshield wipers, a fact that Timmon was quick to note but afraid to mention. Neither did they get on the expressway toward home, another fact Timmon was afraid to mention. Instead, his father piloted the Dart south down Wentworth, producing a pint-sized paper bag from under the seat, and uncapping it at the first stoplight, where he hunkered down slightly and snuck a few quick draws before restashing the bottle under the seat. He fiddled with the radio reception until he found the Cubs game. The Cubbies were in St. Louis, down 6–0.

“There. There’s your ball game, okay, you satisfied?”

Timmon pressed his face to the window. The afternoon sun was trying to peek out from behind the clouds.

“I thought I told you to quit sulking,” his father said.

“I don’t care about the stupid Cubs.”

His old man’s arm shot across the seat in a flash and grabbed him by the coat collar. “Snap out of it, God damn it! Quit sniveling.”

Timmon felt all the blood drain out of him as his father released his grip. He stared straight ahead with his jaw trembling, pretending to listen to the Cubbies as his father guided them still farther south through the fifties and into sixties streets, where he began to circle unfamiliar blocks. Finally, they parked in front of a crumbling brick apartment building. His father fished out the bottle and took a few more quick hits before stuffing the pint in his coat pocket.

“Keep the doors locked,” he said. “And don’t drain the battery listening to the radio.”

Timmon watched him walk away down the sidewalk, bobbing between people as he went, past a drugstore, past a liquor store, and around the corner. The terror was still palpable all these years later. How long had his father been gone? How long had Timmon sat locked in that car as the strange dark faces passed by? And worse, the group of young men gathered on the stoop, looking right in at him. He could feel their eyes on him. He knew they were talking about him. He knew they had guns and knives. He knew they were not to be trusted. The city was full of them. Everything was going to hell.

Timmon took comfort in the old black man who emerged from the apartment across the street and seated himself on a piece of cardboard on the top step, where he leaned slightly forward on his cane, looking out over the street through a rain so light that Timmon could barely hear it tapping on the roof of the Dart. The man was graying at the temples. He wore orange plaid pants and an old-fashioned porkpie hat and brownish red shoes so shiny he could see them shining all the way across the street. A young woman in pink hair barrettes walked by and said something to the old man and smiled, and the old man smiled and said something in return, then went back to leaning on his cane. Timmon began to feel that he was safe as long as the old man remained. With the old man watching, he could almost forget the men on the stoop. He scooted over into the driver’s seat to be closer to the old man. Once, he went so far as to wave, and the old man nodded his head and raised a finger without letting go of his cane, and Timmon could’ve sworn that he’d winked. That’s when he felt certain that the old man was watching out for him. This certainty was short-lived, for at the first clap of thunder, the old man took up his cardboard and his cane and went inside, and Timmon was once more alone with the men on the stoop. The men on the stoop didn’t seem to care that it was raining. They made no effort to huddle in the broad entryway at the top of the steps. They weren’t afraid of getting wet. They were laughing. And smoking. And talking too loud. They weren’t afraid of anything. Like animals, they could smell fear. Timmon tried to will his father back to the car. He thought about turning on the radio, just for a minute, just to check the score, but was afraid of wearing down
the battery. After a few minutes, he curled up on the floor in the foot well of the backseat and closed his eyes.

Two months later, his mother took her own life. Two months after that, on yet another rainy day, his old man dropped him off at his grandmother’s house with a flower-spotted canvas suitcase and never came back. It’d been raining ever since.

A cold stream of water slithering down his neck awoke Timmon suddenly. He sat up in the darkness, and groped for his headlamp. Outside it was pouring. Rainwater streamed in through the boughs of the ceiling directly above his head. From all corners came the sound of dripping water.

“Fuck me,” said Timmon.

Strapping on his headlamp, he wiggled out of his bag, wrestled his wet boots and jacket on, and procured his tent from beneath the tarp. For fifteen cursing minutes in the downpour, Timmon struggled with the tent by the light of his head lamp. By the time he commenced draping the rain tarp, the fabric was already wet through. He fetched his sleeping bag from the abandoned shelter and slipped inside the tent. The bag was damp when he wiggled inside of it. The rain was rat-tat-tatting on the tent with machine-gun rapidity, but even as the tarp began to sag beneath the weight of it, Timmon remained reasonably dry inside his sleeping bag. Mercifully, sleep was quick to claim him once more.

AUGUST
2006

“Another specialist? I thought he
was
the fuckin’ specialist,” said Randy, firing up a Salem and kicking his bare feet up on the kitchen table. “What the fuck kind of specialist are they talking about? And how you gonna pay for it? Crazy fuckin’ kid.”

For weeks Rita had been teetering on the edge of Randy as though she were teetering on the edge of a cliff. Now she could feel her narrow purchase giving way. Gripping the skillet tighter, she did her best to ignore him.

“State ought to pay for this shit,” he pursued. “I sure as shit ain’t payin’ for it, I’ll tell you that much. The hell if I’m gonna bust my ass so that kid can sleep in a better bed than me.”

Rita dropped the skillet on the burner and whipped around to face Randy. She couldn’t believe she was actually going to say it. But now that the words were on her lips, she was fearless of the consequences. “Get out,” she said, calmly.

Randy smiled stupidly. “What the fuck?”

“Out.”

His smile wilted. “Whaddaya mean,
out
? Is this some kind of joke?”

Rita dropped her spatula in the sink. Seizing his boots off of the kitchen floor, she swung the back door open and winged them out onto the dead lawn.

“No joke,” she said. The surface of her calm threatened to shatter.

Randy’s face was a prairie of blankness. “What the hell crawled up your ass? I’m just sitting here minding my shit. Is this about your kid? Because that ain’t got nothin’ to do with me. I’ve put up with a lot of shit around here. I didn’t sign on to be no daddy to your screwy kid. You should be thankin’ me.”

Later, Rita would wonder how she managed to hold out so long. “You know what,” she said. “You’re right.”

“Fuckin’ a right, I’m right. Hey, you’re burnin’ that shit — watch what the fuck you’re doin’.”

Rita snapped the front burner off, pushed the sizzling skillet aside carelessly, tore the fire extinguisher off of the wall, unclamped the hose, clasped the trigger, and began firing it with a spate of forced air directly into Randy’s face. He jumped up from the table and began backpedaling. His feet got tangled in the chair legs.

“What the fuck?” he said, shielding his face.

“Thank you,” she said. As he tried to right himself, Rita moved in closer. “And Curtis thanks you.”

“Holy shit, you crazy fucking Indian! I’m gonna …”

“What, Randy? You gonna bounce me off the walls? Bust my lip open?” Grasping at her blindly, he got hold of her sleeve and went for her neck with his other arm. The instant she felt his fingers around her neck, a lightning bolt ran up her back, and Rita snapped. Later, she would remember this instant as a hot suffusion of joy, a blinding red flash, and a flood of adrenaline. The very thought of it would cause her knees to weaken. Famished for violence, she swung the tank at Randy with all her might. The canister offered a sickly thud and the faintest of reverberations as it connected with the side of his head. Rita would remember thinking Randy’s head felt a lot softer than she might have guessed. Randy reeled backward into the refrigerator and almost lost his footing. He didn’t look angry anymore. He looked stunned. Too stunned even to cover his head for the next blow.

“Fuuuck, babe,” he said groggily.

Had Rita’s rage allowed her to see him clearly, Randy might have looked pitiable with his dull eyes and wounded expression. She saw only confusion on his face — and the fact that any of this should confuse him drove her rage to new places. She swung the canister again, grazing his shoulder, only to connect with his cheekbone. She paused long enough to watch him slump to the floor and reel around on the linoleum trying to get his bearings. He managed to prop himself up with his back against the fridge, deliriously. He started bleeding from
the nose and tried to dab at the blood, but his fingers missed his face completely on the first pass. When he managed to bloody his fingers, he stared stupidly at them, then, swooning, looked up at Rita just in time to see black.

When Randy slumped to the floor and stopped moving altogether, Rita set aside the canister and instinctively stepped away from his body. But almost immediately, she was on her knees, nudging his arm, tentatively at first, then earnestly. His eyes were as lifeless as a mannequin. He was still bleeding from the nose. Looking upon her work, the cold crippling reality of it spread through Rita like numbness from her chest to her fingertips, until she was frozen in place, unable to move. It was the slowest panic she would ever know. She knelt there on the warped linoleum, watching through her haze of panic, as the blood pooled. Finally, she noticed, ever-so-faintly, the rise and fall of his chest.

Rita would later wonder what she might have done if she’d actually killed Randy that evening in the kitchen. God knows, a couple more shots to the head, a few more delirious seconds of hot red joy might have done the trick. She might have staved his skull in had she managed to land a square shot. In retrospect, it was terrifying to think how close she had come to that reality, bewildering to think how many things had conspired to save Randy, how many velocities and angles and height differentials figured in his favor. If she hadn’t killed him, it wasn’t for lack of intent. And that was the most difficult thing for Rita to reconcile.

What would she have done if Randy hadn’t regained consciousness after the third or fourth nudge, if she hadn’t called the cops and the paramedics, if reality had taken that hard left turn? Would she have turned herself in? Disposed of the body? Dug a grave in the back yard in the middle of the night? Bewitched by the dumb luck that had prevented her from murdering Randy, Rita was nonetheless grateful that reality hadn’t taken that hard left turn. This time.

OCTOBER
1890

While Dalton Krigstadt recognized the man behind the desk by his formidable mustache and his silver eyes, he was also quick to notice certain changes in Ethan’s manner since the day he met him nearly a year ago in the Belvedere, when Ethan was still just an idea man with moth-eaten trousers and a thirst for conversation. The man behind the desk looked tense and distracted. He seemed to have no idea that Dalton even stood before him.

Indeed, Ethan was distracted and tense, not himself, and he had become increasingly so in the weeks since Eva left the child, weeks in which the days grew shorter and shorter and pressure from Chicago continued to mount. Fussing absently with his crooked thumb, Ethan scanned the
Commonwealth Register
spread out on the desk before him. Shipping news from Port Townsend, a scathing editorial on railroad promoters, but still no byline reading Lambert, a fact Ethan noted with both disappointment and relief.

Finally, Dalton cleared his throat. “Mr. Thornburgh, sir?”

Looking up, Ethan did not recognize the dough-faced man with the shabby work clothes — garb that seemed all the more tired from having apparently submitted to laundering recently. “Yes, what is it?”

“Krigstadt’s the name, sir. Dalton. We met the day you came to Port Bonita.”

Ethan was drawing a blank.

“At the Belvedere,” Dalton pursued. “You thought it should be called something else. We drank whiskeys. You said I was the first person you’d met.”

“Ah, yes, the mason.”

“Nope.”

“The woodsman.”

“Nope„

“Railroad man?“

“Nope. I haul things, sir.”

“Well, sir, I came because of an idea.”

“Yes, yes. The hauler, that’s right.” Ethan turned his attention back to the
Register.
“What is it I can do for you, Mr. Dalton?”

“Well, sir, I came because of an idea.”

Looking up from his paper, Ethan made another skeptical appraisal of Mr. Dalton, whom he reasoned to be a brute of a man — hewn from the raw materials of flesh and bone with little attention to detail. This Dalton was not a man of angles. Framed in a rectangle of sunlight, his very silhouette was amorphous. His shadow on the dusty floor may well have been the shadow of a whiskey keg. “I thought you were a hauler, not an idea man.”

“So did I, sir.”

Ethan did nothing to disguise his impatience. “Very well, then. What sort of idea, Mr. Dalton? Briefly.”

“You see, Mr. Thornburgh, it’s about ice.”

“Ice.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And how is that?”

“Well now, first let me explain how I came upon the idea, sir. See, I started thinking how you had all this work going on up here, and all these workers to house, and so forth. Then I was thinkin’ how you’ve got that road extending way up the mountain, well past the clearing and into the high country.”

“And?”

“And there’s bound to be mountains of ice up there.”

“One would presume, Mr. Dalton. And no shortage of snow either. What good is it to me?”

“Well now, if you had you a great big icehouse up here, I’d say you could lay yourself into a pretty good store of ice.”