Mink River: A Novel (2 page)

Not something you see every day, an eagle chortling over a beer box, eh?

And down the street goes the eagle, heading west, his capacious shadow sliding like a blanket over the elementary school, where a slim older woman with brown and silver hair and brown and green eyes is holding court over the unruly sixth grade, her eyes flashing;

and over her grandson Daniel age twelve with hair braided into three thick braids of different colors (red, black, brown) who is zooming on his bicycle just in front of a logging truck, giving the driver wiggy nightmares for a week;

and over a sturdy young woman named Grace in an open meadow high on a hill where she is slicing apart a small car with a blowtorch her muscular right arm pumping and flexing with the torque of the torch and the leap of her muscle making her tattoo flash like a neon sign
KISS
flash
MY
flash
ASS
;

and over a lithe woman called No Horses in her studio crammed with carving tools as she is staring thoughtfully at a slab of oak twice as big as she is which isn’t very big at all;

and over a man named Owen Cooney who is humming in his shop crammed with automobile parts and assorted related ephemera as his pet crow sits quietly on an old Oregon State University football helmet watching;

and over a grocer grocering a priest priesting a doctor doctoring teachers teaching two cooks cooking a man beating his son an insurer insuring a woman vomiting in a creek a banker banking an old nun’s heart faltering in her room on the top floor of the hotel a man telling a lie in court a teenage couple coupling on
top
of the blankets in the downstairs bedroom of her parents’ house so as to be sure that no rumpled sheets will tell tales of their vigorous unclothedness;

and so many more stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another and to the stories of creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see, and to stories that used to be here, and still
are
here in ways that you can sense sometimes if you listen with your belly, and the first green shoots of stories that will be told in years to come—so many stories braided and woven and interstitched and leading one to another like spider strands or synapses or creeks that you could listen patiently for a hundred years and never hardly catch more than shards and shreds of the incalculable ocean of stories just in this one town, not big, not small, bounded by four waters, in the hills, by the coast, end of May, first salmonberries
just
ripe. But you sure can
try
to catch a few, yes?

At the west end of the main street, where it begins to slide off precipitously toward the ocean, there’s a long low building faced all around with cedar shakes. Right over this sprawling structure the eagle turns south toward his nest, and as he wheels against the noon light his capacious shadow slides over two elderly men at a rickety alder table in front of the long low building, and they look up right quick.

That thing big as a tent, says the taller of the two.

Adult male, says the shorter man.

How can you tell from here?

Can see his ego. The angle of his dangle.

They grin.

Actually I can tell it’s a male, continues the shorter man, because you notice that he’s carrying a piece of cardboard, which is foolish, so there you go.

Gratuitous slur on our gender, says the taller man.

Men: the final frontier, answers his companion. As your lovely bride says.

The two men are drinking beer and eating salmonberries. Between them is one empty beer bottle; they split a beer every day at lunch. They work together in the long low building behind them. They are, collectively, the Department of Public Works. They have publicworked together for more than forty years, in various jobs. They are the best of friends. They are in their late sixties, they think. They are not totally sure about their ages because neither of them is in possession of a real actual birth certificate for reasons they were too young to learn at the time.

The salmonberries are the first of the season and the two men are eating them very slowly, tasting every bittersweetorangeyellowacidic drop and then slowly sipping the beer a tongueful a thimbleful at a time.

Yum, says the taller of the two men.

Yup, says the other.

Not everyone likes salmonberries.

Vulgarians.

I am told they are an acquired taste.

Vulgarians?

Salmonberries.

Yeh. Listen, this afternoon we have to get back to work on the Oral History Project. We promised that we would get back to work on it the day after the rains stopped and the rains stopped last night and we have got to get to work.We are behind something awful on the Oral History Project.

One of our best ideas absolutely. Whose idea was that?

Yours.

Was it?

You were going on interminably one day about how one way to defeat Time is by recording every story possible. Not only from people but from everything living.

For Every Thing that lives is Holy, says Blake.

Yeh, you said that. Also you said that with the Project we could build an impregnable bulwark against entropy. I remember you saying that because you hardly ever hear the word entropy. Excellent word.

Or impregnable, says the taller man thoughtfully. Unable to be made pregnant? I have to confess, says the taller man, that I was under the impression you invented the Project as part of your vast and overweening ambition.

Nope. Your idea. It fits the expanded public works idea beautifully though. What a resource, eh? Here is what I want to do this afternoon. I want to record osprey calls along the river—those high screams, you know? Piercing sound. On a May day as they are finishing their nests. I wonder if they are speaking in a different tone now than midsummer or early fall. These are the things to know. Let’s add that to the list of Things to Know. Thank God for computers. Remember when the Things to Know was on paper? My god, we had to buy that barn just to keep the reams of Things to Know. That was crazy.

Listen, says the taller man. I’ve been thinking …

Did it hurt?

Listen, my friend, says the taller man, holding on to his line of talk like a rope, did you ever consider that maybe the scope of public works as we have conceived it is too big altogether? I mean other towns and cities use their departments just to fix roads and sewer lines and streambeds and such.

We do those things.

But we also are prey to what I might call a vast and overweening ambition. I mean, really, to preserve history, collect stories, repair marriages, prevent crime, augment economic status, promote chess, manage insect populations, run sports leagues, isn’t that a bit much? We even give haircuts.

Are we doing insects? Did I know that?

I’m teasing. But we try to do everything.

Not everything.

I think maybe too much.

I think not enough, says the shorter man.

Don’t you ever think we could be wrong? asks the tall man.

Billy, says the shorter man,
this
is why people call you Worried Man.

Cedar, my friend, says the taller man, not smiling, I worry we are arrogant.

Cedar leans over the table and stares his friend in the eye.

Billy, he says quietly. Billy. We heal things. That’s what we do. That’s why we’re here. We’ve always agreed on that. Right from the start. We do as well as we can. We fail a lot but we keep after it. What else can we do? We have brains that still work so we have to apply them to pain. Brains against pain. That’s the motto. That’s the work. That’s what we do. Soon enough we will not have brains that work, so therefore.

We could stop interfering, says the tall man. Who are we to talk to that young woman, for example? Grace?

Who else would say anything to her?

Her family.

What family? Her mother’s gone, her brothers are donkeys, and the father … isn’t much in the way of a moral compass, let’s put it that way. Look, Billy, what good are we to anyone if we are not ambitious to make a difference? If we don’t use our brains we are just two old men fixing potholes. Are potholes enough, my friend? I think not.

I watched that girl’s face as we talked to her, says Worried Man. She was humiliated. You know it and I know it. Her face stays with me. Was that right? Did we have the right to sting her like that? Is that the purview of the public works department, to embarrass the public?

To speak to her honestly about her behavior is to care about her, Billy. In a way it is to love her.

Is it?

Isn’t it?

Is it?

They drain the last thick dense bitter drops of their beer.

Owen says today is Joan of Arc’s feast day, says Cedar, standing up to go.

Her name wasn’t Joan, says Worried Man, also rising. It was Jeanne. Jeanne La Pucelle of Domrémy.

Brave child by any name, says Cedar.

She was a meddler too and look what happened to her, poor thing, says Worried Man.

She changed the face of history, says Cedar.

She was roasted to death one morning and her ashes were thrown in the river and the men who murdered her also managed to murder her real name throughout history, says Worried Man.

They bow and part: Cedar to visit a client, as he says, and then to the river to record osprey calls, and Worried Man to his office in the Department to record an answer to this question from his grandson Daniel:
How did my mother get her name?

2.

This is me, Worried Man, making a tape for my grandson Daniel, about how his mother, who is my daughter, got her name.

Well, No Horses got her name because our people were the best horse stealers
ever
. By our people I mean the People, capital P—we who have lived here in the coast hills longer than even our stories remember.

We were terrific horse stealers. We were
awesome
. No one could steal horses like us. And stealing a horse is
hard
. I mean, the creature weighs half a ton, and they’re skittery, and they’re smart, some of them, and they know they’re not supposed to hustle off quietly into the bushes in the middle of the night; they’re supposed to stand drowsily in the milky dew until the morning when they get to eat again. Horses just want to eat. Anyway, you have to get to the scene silently, sometimes slipping past sentries and sentinels, and then you establish an immediate rapport with the horse, silently of course, and then detach all ropes and hobbles and such, and then you calm the horse, and lead him away, past the sentinels again, and the fact is that slipping past a sharp-eared sentinel with a confused fat half-ton animal is no easy matter, as you can imagine.

Well, if you got caught they’d slice your throat.

I’m always hearing about counting coup in battle in the old days, where a guy at great risk to life and limb touches his enemy with a coup stick, escaping with great acclaim and all, but what’s the point? I mean, you touched a guy with a stick. Big deal. I’d rather risk life and limb and come out of the fray with a
horse
. Now
that’s
an accomplishment. You got something to show for your labors.

Well, one time we were berrying in the valleys east of here, boiling berries into cakes, cooling the cakes in the creeks, and packing down horses with enough berry cakes to choke a small whale—an orca maybe. Though they’d eat anything. Coyotes of the ocean.

Of course to carry the cakes back here to Neawanaka we needed horses, because this was before everyone and their aunt had a truck. We had a lot of horses. These were fine animals absolutely, and they needed to be guarded carefully by stalwart sentinels with sharp ears and sharp eyes. I was chosen as sentinel, being then young and sinewy and in the fullness of my itchy first strength. But I was also in the fullness of my first cocky stupidity, and I had boasted that I could pick more berries than any other man or woman, and also be a sharp-eared and sharp-eyed sentinel, and it turns out I was wrong. On the third night I was so tired and sore that I fell asleep, and that’s when horse thieves from the valley made their move.

They slipped up on me and under my horse blanket they affixed four long thin poles of red cedar, willowy whippy things, and then ever so gently ever so daintily they lifted me on the blanket and propped up the poles so that they could gently urge the fat fool horse out from under me, which they did, and left me propped up in the air sound asleep. Then they unhobbled our horses and silently made away with all of them—a dozen of the finest horses you ever saw.

The next morning was difficult.

We all walked home, of course, a very long walk, all my former friends jeering and cursing, and all of us carrying those damn berry cakes, and when we got to Neawanaka everyone was hooting and jeering and telling the story of how I fell asleep, and I have to say that there was a lot of embroidering going on. I know a little about embroidering stories myself, as you know, but this was wholesale embroidering, all sorts of exaggeration, really not suitable at all to the occasion.