Mink River: A Novel (38 page)

V

1.

Sometimes something changes you forever and often it’s the smallest thing, a thing you wouldn’t think would be able to carry such momentous weight, but it’s like playground teeter-totters, those exquisitely balanced splintery pine planks with a laughing or screaming child at each end, where the slightest change in weight to one end tips everything all the way; and what tipped the doctor into a new life just happened a minute ago.

He was standing at his kitchen counter, having peeled and halved and quartered a pear for breakfast, and he had stepped to the left, to the sink, to rinse his hands, and dry his hands on a towel, and lift his coffee cup, and glance out the window—no reason really, just a casual look to see what’s out there, a man might flick a million such glances in a lifetime—and he saw two boys walking toward the ocean.

Perhaps they were brothers. They seemed to be. Something in their faces, their squarish jaws, the set of their shoulders, the similar surf of their dark hair. They walked slowly. One was older by three or four years. Maybe he was thirteen. The younger boy was maybe nine. The older boy led the younger by the hand. The younger boy was cheerful and bubbling, peering everywhere with delight and amazement, chattering back to the wheeling terns overhead. The older boy didn’t speak. He seemed intent on their destination, whatever it was. But he wasn’t impatient, and he held his brother’s hand gently. He didn’t haul or pull or yank or command him; his hand was only a rudder for his brother’s heedless ship. And the younger brother let himself be led with the most extraordinary faith and dignity and trust. His face shone. To him no harm could apply, no wound be inflicted, no seed of despair darkly flower, as long as his brother held him by the hand with such palpable patient love.

The boys walked slowly hand in hand to the corner and turned it and vanished, the younger one cawing like a crow now; but the doctor stood at the sink like a stone.

2.

Billy and May and Cedar carried Michael back to town in the Department of Public Works truck. He was unconscious. He bled on Maple Head’s jacket. No one said anything. They took him to the doctor’s house. The doctor was still standing at his sink. He ran out when he saw the truck. Cedar carried Michael into the office. He bled on Cedar’s shirt. His feet dangled over the edge of the examining table. His shoes were lost. His socks were blue. He bled on the table. One sock had a hole in the heel. Worried Man called the police department. At the police department Ellen the dispatcher cried and called Michael’s wife Sara. The doctor examined Michael. Worried Man called the hospital. Sara and her daughters ran out of their house and ran down the street to the doctor’s house. Maple Head went out to wait for them. Concussion, said the doctor to Cedar, who wrote it down. Fracture of the collarbone. Fracture of the right elbow. Fracture of the right wrist. Deep cut over right eye approximately one inch long. That’ll need stitches. Fractured right kneecap. Fracture left ankle, high. No other fractures evident. Help me get his clothes off. Cedar helps take Michael’s shirt off. Worried Man waits by the phone. Sara’s daughters arrive at the doctor’s house. The young one is sobbing. Bruised sternum, says the doctor to Cedar. Sara runs up.
Major
bruises to the sternum. No other injuries evident, says the doctor. Boy, is that a bruised sternum. His chest is going to be sore for months.

Owen pulls up in his truck with the guy who used to have the gun. The guy was alive and unconscious and tied hand and foot with a thousand loops of fine wire from Owen’s shop. The doctor examines him also. Six fractures. Cedar takes notes.

Sara, says the doctor, Michael is going to be fine. Do you hear me? All these injuries will heal fairly quickly and he will be fine. He will be back hale and happy. Do you hear me? All will be well and all manner of things will be well, Sara.

3.

Declan turns the engine off and the boat rocks quietly for a few minutes. The guy in the wheelchair has his eyes closed. Declan stares at the guy’s face. Man, he lost another ten pounds in the last hour, he thinks, guy’s going to fade away completely and there’ll be nothing left but a wheelchair with a pile of dust in it.

Declan, says the guy softly.

Yuh.

I think my time has come.

The boat sifts against the sea and gulls wheel silently.

You want me to …?

Yes, Declan, I do. I would be very grateful if you would assist me in this matter.

His voice sifting down below even where whispers live.

Declan unbuckles the guy and lifts him out of the chair and stands him up. Feels like the guy weighs about twenty pounds, he thinks. Guy weighs what that chinook weighed.

The guy feels everything on his face, the wild holy world, the salt and the wet wind and the wheel of the birds, the hot sweet fingers of the sun, and then he stops thinking, he loses thought, he sifts down below where thoughts are, the last images in his mind as his lights go dim are his children when they were very small, the squirm and wrestle and tumult of them, the very last picture in his mind is them tumbling on a brilliant wooden floor, and then he’s gone, and Declan is holding what used to be a man.

Very slowly Declan folds the guy back into the wheelchair and buckles him in again and sits quietly looking at the guy for a while. Then he lifts the chair onto the gunwale and scrinches it down to the water, holding on with both hands and bracing his feet against the slats. The guy’s eyes are closed and he’s smiling a little. His hair floats out around his head. Declan opens his hands and the guy and his chair sink endlessly into the green depths faster and quieter than you could ever imagine. The sea makes a little blurping sound as it drinks the guy and then there’s no sound except the boat sifting against the water.

I don’t know any prayers, says Declan out loud, startling the gulls, but if I knew any prayers, or thought they did any good, I’d say one for you. But I don’t know any prayers, and I don’t think they do any good.
You
did good, though. Amen.

He stands there at the gunwale another minute and then steps into the little cabin and starts the engine and turns the boat around and heads back to shore. He sets two halibut lines. He eats a sandwich. He sees a gray whale, two jaegers, a little whirlpool filled with sneakers and tampons and fishing floats, and what sure looks like the kind of little albatross that lives on Hawaii. Then, without any sort of momentous ceremony, he hauls in the halibut lines and turns the boat around and sets course straight west for where the sun goes when it falls over the rim of the world, and he stretches out for a nap in the stern, and the boat slowly putters into the endless ocean. The gulls follow, wheeling in huge circles.

4.

Grace and Stella are in the corner of the bar where fat buttery bars of sunlight hang out every time it is sunny which is, as Grace says, it’s sunny like twice a year, you don’t want to miss summer here, it’s a great weekend.

The rest of the year is a fecking hell hole, says Grace, but she is smiling.

We can get this signed today with McCann, says Stella. You sure you want this?

Yup, says Grace.

And Declan is cool?

Yup. The land is in both our names and we agreed to make it pay however we could so we can take care of the boys. Dec wants them to go to college.

You don’t want to go to college?

Nope. I got things to do. I got ideas. I don’t want to study other people’s ideas.

It’s hard not to drink the profits, as if there are any profits, says Stella very quietly. Believe me I know. Believe me.

I believe you, says Grace, not smiling. I got ideas about me and drinking not being the closest of companions any more.

And the hours are long and you’ll have trouble. Drunks, distributors skipping on bills, broken glass, sudden inspections, demand outstripping supply, supply outstripping demand. Whatever you think running a place like this will be, it isn’t. It’s like being a den mother for idiots, and there’s a smell of stale beer and old grease that never quits. And the bathroom is always a mess, and no one will clean it for you, no matter how much people offer to clean it for you, they never actually get around to it, not that I am bitter or anything. And sometimes the field mice come in when it’s cold.

You’re being too persuasive, says Grace.

Got to be honest.

I’ll be honest in return, says Grace. I got one word for you. Mud. You are buying a lotta mud. It’s deep and evil and it smells like shit. It’s always cold and windy even in summer. There’s coyotes. There’s skunk cabbage in the ravine and in March when the skunk cabbage flowers open it smells like shit more than it usually smells like shit. For every lovely day when goldfinches are surfing on the thistles and a falcon zooms by and you hear sea lions in the cove down below, there are a hundred days when it’s cold and wet and muddy and it smells like shit. Also there’s at least one huge cougar up there somewhere. Any questions?

They stare at each other for a moment, two sturdy flinty roiling fearful brave women, Grace with her chopped hair beginning to assume some sort of shape again, Stella with a cold face and the most gentle eyes you ever saw, and then they burst out laughing.

This is nuts, says Stella. Let’s go for it.

Jesus, a vineyard and a tree farm and a nursery, you got balls, says Grace.

No, I got a bank loan, says Stella. And look who’s talking. I could never make this pay more than enough just to keep me slaving away at it. Hope you make it work.

It’ll work, says Grace. I got ideas. I got a lot of ideas.

5.

Moses didn’t die but he lost both wings, shattered to tatters, and he lost a lot of blood, and he was unconscious for a couple of days, dreaming dark corvidian dreams, but then he woke, murmuring, and he and Owen are in Other Repair this morning, contemplating wings. Moses standing on the old football helmet, Owen sitting at the workbench, goggles on. Smell of paint, cedar, maple, fir, alder, varnish, cigars, tears, sweat, rubber, oil, sawn metal, burnt gasoline, smoked fish, sawdust, old newspapers, woodsmoke, footballs, turpentine, apples, ink, crow.

I’m thinking steel, says Owen. We could pull that off. Superlight steel with hinges that I design to work off your chest muscles. Your shoulders, so to speak, are still there, so you have the engineering to make this work. I had a good talk with the doctor and there’s a lot we can do with implants. It’s kind of an engineering problem.

I don’t know, says Moses.

Look at these sketches, here, see, if I use your rotator cuffs, and figure it out with wires, I could make a pair of wings that would work. No way they would be as good as the originals but they would be functional. I
think
they would be functional. At least they would be cosmetic. Glossy black paint. We can get Nora to engrave them maybe. What say?

I don’t know, says Moses.

You don’t want new wings?

I don’t know.

Or wood, says Owen. What if George and Nora found some superlight wood, like balsa, and we made a set of wooden wings? Or you could have several pairs for various occasions. Like suits of clothes. Linen wings, paper wings, wooden wings, steel wings. Or you can have wings made from all sorts of feathers. Not just crow feathers but hey, osprey feathers! Heron feathers! Wouldn’t that be cool? You could wear whatever wings you wanted in the morning. Be an osprey for a day. Boy,
that
would freak out the ospreys, eh? Or wings in different
sizes
, wouldn’t that be cool? Like huge wings for summer, when you can be a kite. We’ll take you out on the beach and fly you, wouldn’t that be cool? And different colors. You can have bright orange wings for Oregon State University football Saturdays, hey?

I don’t know, says Moses. I think maybe wings are a thing of the past for me.

What?

I find that I don’t actually want new wings.

You don’t want to fly anymore?

It’s not that I don’t want to fly, says Moses slowly, it’s that I don’t want to try to fly the way I flew. Does that make sense? I was one sort of creature and now I am another sort of creature, and I find that I am curious about the new creature. I’ve never seen the world steadily from this angle, from the pedestrian point of view, and it’s sort of interesting
not
to have a bird’s-eye view, you know? Everything is flatter. Everything is at an oblique angle. There are a
lot
more corners. It’s a different geometry. Previously I perched, but now I walk. Yet I am aware that there may come a time when I mourn flight. I am aware of prospective sadness. But at the moment I am filled with curiosity. I would almost rather that you designed some sort of conveyance or vehicle for ground transport. Also I suspect that I will have to get comfortable with riding on shoulders and in the seats of cars. Perhaps a small seat belt is the engineering problem we should be contemplating.