Betwixt (3 page)

“Man. I told you. I’m no good.”

“Nix, take a friggin’ break and come back and do your job.”

“No.” He let go of the nozzle. The fire diminished. It calmed him, made him more certain that he needed to leave. “I’m just
fucking you up.”

“What?” Jacob asked. “What are you talking about?”

Nix started to walk out of the kitchen, but stopped. He couldn’t just leave. He owed it to the man. When he finally looked
up, Jacob looked confused and sad.

“You tried, man. You tried.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jacob shook his head. “But suit yourself, Nix.”

“I think I will.”

He had to say it. He had to make Jacob think he was a punk kid, an asshole with an attitude. A prick. A tweaker. Someone you
didn’t want around.

The slice he took on his way out of the kitchen—artichoke hearts and feta, Yuppie’s Delight, Jacob called it—would get him
through till tomorrow.

I
N
S
ITKA IT HAD GONE THAT WAY, TOO.

Nix walked down the sidewalks of Northwest Portland toward the forest that crowned downtown like a shaggy head of hair, and
he thought about Alaska. He hadn’t let himself think about home often since he’d left, but in the last few weeks since Jacob
had gotten the light, Nix had been thinking about his mother.

Bettina Saint-Michael had been the prettiest Indian to come out of Sitka’s Mt. Edgecumbe High School since no one knew how
long. Or that’s what the white principal had said when he tried to pick her up at the grocery store she worked at after graduation.
Bettina wasn’t having any of it. She rang up Principal Harkin’s mayonnaise; his cans of salmon (caught somewhere out in that
water she looked at every afternoon while trying to picture what life was like across it); his white bread; his canned green
beans; and the bottle of vodka Bettina knew was for Abby Harkin, his drunk wife; and ignored him when he said they should
meet for lunch at Koloskov’s Diner on her break to discuss college plans. Bettina knew what Principal Harkin was after and
it had nothing to do with her fine Indian mind.

“Nicholas,” Bettina had said to her only child many years later, “you treat women right, you respect them for what they know,
and they will open up to you like flowers in springtime.”

Bettina had laughed when she said that. She was undoing her hair from work at the cannery, and while she spoke, she ran her
fingers through the soft dark-brown strands.

Nix loved to hear his mother laugh. She started like a bird, little pulses of high cool notes, and ended with her head thrown
back, her hands holding her stomach. She would bang the table or the wall or whatever she happened to be next to and tickle
her son and nuzzle and kiss him. She smelled like woodsmoke and fish and coffee.

That time so many years ago Bettina had laughed not because it was funny, but because she had to. Otherwise things would have
been too sad. That winter was a long one. It was the
first year she stopped putting in a summer garden, the year Daddy Saint-Michael had died and Bettina and Nix were left alone.

“Did you hear me, son? Treat a woman right and …” She trailed off, fingers still touching her hair.

Daddy Saint-Michael was Nix’s grandfather, and he loved Bettina and her son more than anything in the world. Nothing was good
enough for Bettina. Which somehow made Bettina think that she was not good enough for anything.

Nix, pudgy, saucer-eyed, was the son of a ghost who passed through Sitka on his way to somewhere else. Bettina didn’t talk
about him except to say that he had been her first love, and that he was smart and sad, and that he played Ann Peebles’s “I
Can’t Stand the Rain” on Koloskov’s jukebox the summer night they met.

He figured his father had worked for the mill or the fisheries, seasonal help like everyone else. Which would explain why
Bettina always shimmered during the warm months, even in a town that slept for three quarters of the year. He figured he was
Aleut, too, from somewhere farther west, because Nix himself was dark haired, dark eyed, full cheeked, and stockier than his
mother, had thick hambone muscles when he was eight that he tried to hide under the parkas his mother was always buying him
from hippie friends who had made their way to Sitka from California or wherever.

“Hello, little brother,” they’d say with a straight face.

“You’re not my brother,” Nix once retorted. Bettina slapped him for that one.

By that time, the halos (he took to calling them, though only to himself — he never told anyone about the rings he saw) were
already starting to appear. On strangers, blurry at first, as if he were losing his sight. Nix even asked Bettina for glasses.
They started as a vibration, a slight fuzziness around the edges. He began to look at people, watch them. First the signs
were subtle. How that old friend of Bettina’s — his name was Jerry Klein but he went by Raven in Sitka — how Raven had turned
silvery before Nix’s eyes before he died of cancer. Then Mary Ives’s little baby, turning blue in her crib. Mary so sad she
didn’t have another one and started to stand outside the bar down by the harbor, winter and summer both, bumming menthols,
which turned to quarters, which turned to entreaties to take a pretty little Indian home.

Bettina and Nix moved into Frank Shadwell’s house when Nix turned ten. Shadwell lived out near where the forests started,
so Bettina didn’t go into town as much as she used to. Nix worked for Shadwell at his mill; his mother cooked and watched
satellite TV, and Shadwell peeled back the mask he had put on and turned into the mean drunk he’d always been.

He hit Bettina and called her a fat ’skimo whore only when he was drinking, but he was drunk often enough that Bettina didn’t
leave the house for fear of showing her old friends her face
and neck. Nix’s hatred of the man was clear and cold as a midwinter morning. He knew there was nothing he could do to Frank
Shadwell, or for his mother, as long as Bettina stayed. All he could do was stare, his black eyes frozen, and wish his step-father
were gone. Sometimes, despite himself, Nix looked at his mother the same way.

That’s when the light hit Shadwell. So fast and bright, Nix knew it wasn’t a problem with his vision.

He tried to be good around the house, tried to calm things when Bettina and Shadwell started fighting, but every day the light
around his stepfather gathered itself brighter. Then one day, Nix came home from school and Bettina was sitting in the kitchen,
Shadwell bloody on the floor. She had shot him at close range, then sat there and waited for her son to come home from school.
She said she didn’t know what had made her do it. He wasn’t drunk and hadn’t even tried to hit her, but now he would never
do it again. At least that’s what she told the police.

Nix sat on a chair beside his mother and listened to her confess. He had wanted to scream that it was his fault. He had wanted
to take the blame. He didn’t. Nor did he take her hand and tell her that they should run away, like a good son should have,
for when he looked at her, he saw the thinnest sliver of light outline his mother’s slack shoulders, the ends of her soft
fine hair.

He left town on a Greyhound the next day. He was fifteen
years old and had once been to Anchorage for the wedding of one of Bettina’s high school friends, but other than that, hadn’t
been off the island where he was born.

Thousands of miles and Nix didn’t know how many buses later he made it to Portland. He stopped in Vancouver; Canadian immigration
hassled him and he had to leave. Seattle was too expensive, and he felt more alone there because of all the kids from U. Dub.
He didn’t know how to do anything besides work in a mill, but because of Shadwell he hated cutting down trees. Though he’d
liked school and had been a pretty good student in Sitka, he was a runaway, and getting into the system would mean he’d be
sent back up to Anchorage, where his uncles and aunts lived, to watch the people he loved die.

So he wandered. When he didn’t know anyone, he didn’t care what light they carried. He watched them on buses and in diners,
in urinals and on the sides of roads. Bright ones, pale ones, lights strong as streetlamps and soft as match flame. Sometimes
he stuck around so he could figure out how long it took for them to die — a few months, sometimes as little as a week or two.
He learned to gauge the time based on the brightness and activity of the light. At first, when the light was thin, he thought
it meant
maybe
— as in, maybe the wisecracking woman in the vintage mauve sundress and combat boots who worked at the Vancouver hostel had
a curable kind of cancer, or maybe the old dude at Elliott Bay Book Company would quit smoking. But it
only meant the end was further away; the cancer would take a year to metastasize; the debilitating — and fatal — stroke would
come in many months. He’d memorize their faces or their names and then look in the paper for them. But even that made him
love them in a way, so he’d leave.

He fell for a girl in Seattle. She worked at a flower stand, sold sweetpeas from her garden, and she never had the light around
her, but someday Nix figured she would, so he stopped coming around. He moved and moved again, selling newspapers, dish washing,
cleaning bathrooms and offices, delivering drugs — so many lights then — hawking fish, picking berries and apples, and, yes,
cutting trees. He even drove an illegal migrant-worker van for a while. He didn’t know where the visions came from, but he
didn’t question them either. Daddy Saint-Michael had once talked about people with the gift; Nix just figured he was one of
them.

It felt more like a curse, anyway, but he was used to good things turning bad.

By the time he got to Portland he was tired. He’d been on the road for two years. He was seventeen and he had gotten taller,
his wide cheeks sunken from scrounging for food day after day, and walking, always walking. He hadn’t decided to stay, exactly;
he was just too exhausted to leave.

There
was
something holding him in Portland. Something he didn’t understand about the mountains that floated in the distance like faraway
islands and the forests just at the edge of
downtown, as if another world were on the other side of that blue-gray Oregon sky. He found a group of kids to sleep with
in the park. They put up tents and moved around to avoid the cops. Things were clean — the people he was with were good —
and no one had the light. No one close to him anyway. He got a job washing dishes at Jacob’s: steady work, free food. He started
to save money, even bought a book to study for the GED, which he read at night in his tent while the rest of the squat talked
about politics and how they were going to hitchhike to Seattle or DC for the next protest. People played music and talked;
Nix wrote letters to Bettina, knowing only his uncle in Anchorage would get them, but still feeling the need to let someone
know he was alive. He even made a friend down at Jacob’s, a straight dude, captain-of-the-soccer-team type who’d been delivering
pizza there since he was in ninth grade. His name was K.A. D’Amici, and Nix hung out with him once or twice a week. He liked
K.A.’s style, his honesty. He was planning to see him that night, the night he quit.

When the girl at the squat got her throat slit, and Jacob got marked, Nix had been in Portland a little under a year. He had
just bought a SpongeBob sleeping bag from Goodwill and had started to feel something like safe. But then, a roll or two of
dust every other week helped with that.

N
IX TOOK A RIGHT PAST WHAT HE’D HEARD
was the biggest Doug fir in PDX and down the trail marked with cross-country ski signs. At the split hemlock he veered right,
careful to arrange the branches so as not to show the trail. Even a few pass-throughs would reveal where the squat was, and
this one was so well hidden they’d already been there three weeks. Portland’s cops weren’t pigs — they fought crime on mountain
bikes — but every so often they did their sweeps so that the Nike/Adidas/Intel nation up in Southwest could have something
to talk about over their lattes.