Mink River: A Novel (41 page)

Okay, says Billy. Whole body, but leave me head and arms.

I don’t think …

Hands?

Well … one hand.

One hand it is. Head and one hand, then. Agreed. Which hand?

Your choice.

Let’s go lefty. A new frontier. And if I am keeping my head I really should be left with my voice, yes? You could change it if you want. Could we go an octave lower? That would startle May. It’d be funny.

I am not authorized …

But time marches on, says Billy briskly, and I am sure you have a great deal to do with your time. I can only imagine the press of your duties, the messages to be delivered, the crucial importance of every passing instant. And I am sure I have kept you longer than you intended. Garrulity—it’s a problem for me. May says so, and May has never been wrong.

Well …

But inside Billy roils, he shivers. No body! No more making love to May! No walking! No holding babies like footballs! No kneeling or sprawling or scuttling or shambling or ambling or shuffling or sprinting! No canter and no gallop! No dancing with May ever again in the velvet dark of the Department of Public Works with a bottle of wine waiting on the shelf! No throwing footballs to the boy on the beach and prancing about like a stork on acid when Danno makes an unbelievable spectacular diving catch flying face-first into the surf and emerges soaked and triumphant holding the ball like a dripping golden trophy and the boy and his grandfather laugh so hard their cheeks and stomachs ache for days! No wrapping his arms like tree trunks around the lean grin of his sweet swift daughter and muttering stories into the thicket of her hair! No puttering around in the shop with Owen trying to make real from steel the ideas hatched in his hoary head! No more shaking Cedar’s hard hand like a slab of wood! No cupping May’s left breast in his right hand as they fall asleep mumbling and smelling like salt and honey!

Time, says the voice. You are a deft negotiator. Permission has been granted. Remember that kindness is first. I would recommend that you lie flat now so that you don’t crack your head.

Billy is suddenly exhausted. He stretches out, staring at the ceiling of the cave. Stalactites hang from the roof, stalagmites grow from the floor. C is for ceiling and G is for ground. We are aware of the quicksilver nature of time. The rushing of the waters. Time is a storyteller. Time is a …

14.

Cedar, walking northeast and steadily uphill on a diagonal, sees one cave slit after another and marks them carefully on a map he draws to scale in his notebook. He numbers the caves, giving them all NE prefixes to distinguish them from the caves Billy has no doubt identified on the northwest side of the scarp: NE1, NE2, NE2.5 (a tiny one), etc. He pokes into the ones he can get to without undue strain. Some are mere cracks, without depth beyond the gape of their opening; others narrow immediately upon entrance; others bend back upon themselves; one (NE8) makes an immediate right turn and opens to a sort of window in the mountain. Lovely sculpture, thinks Cedar. Cave design, there’s a life’s study. Forces of geology at work in fissure. Nature of stone under duress. Effect of climate and weather. Index of temporary inhabitants. Comparison of conditions by amount of sunlight captured by mouth of cave. Does cave structure reflect orientation? Do temporary inhabitants prefer south-facing caves? I have not seen hide nor hair of any inhabitant in these caves. Too cold. No food at this elevation. No prospect of food, no reason to be here. Except if you are on a goose chase looking for unimaginably huge spools of what might appear to be film of some sort. As if such a thing would ever in this life be possible. Maybe I shouldn’t have humored him. Maybe a real friend would have long ago said, Billy, this is nuts, could we get back to fences and water supply and piping and ditch dredging and building a jetty? But no:
sure
, we can climb a huge mountain at our age.
Sure
we might find immense spools of used time.
Sure
such a discovery would create a stir unlike any other in the history of human beings and change the nature of human consciousness.
Sure
it makes sense that two obscure public works employees from an obscure town on the Oregon coast would be the guys to make such a discovery. No, we don’t have anything better to do with our dwindling time and infinitesimal savings than parade off to a mountain and probably have heart attacks and freeze to death and be found decades later by intrepid mountaineers half our age. Headlong pursuit of the most ridiculous speculation in the history of the world:
ex
cellent idea! I am
all
for it! What an
idiot
I am! What an idiot
he
is! Where
is
that idiot?

15.

The doctor in his study reading. First light. There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job, he reads. The ocean below his window is a swirl of mist. And that man was perfect and upright, and he eschewed evil. Ebb tide, the doctor notes. What? says Job, shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? The three clocks in his study murmur together. Wrath killeth the foolish man, and envy slayeth the silly one. He removes his spectacles and examines them patiently and opens a drawer and takes out a tiny pristine towel and cleans his glasses thoroughly and folds the towel and puts it back exactly as it was. Despise not thou the chastening of the One: for he maketh sore, and bindeth up, he woundeth, and his hands make whole. The first cormorant of the day whirs heavily over the house. Now my days are swifter than a post: they flee away, they are passed away as the swift ships, as the eagle that hasteth to the prey. The mist over the sea is shredded and the face of the ocean revealed. Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. A parade of pelicans sets forth, somehow flapping and cruising in unison, how do they
do
that? He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. The first heron of the day lands in the surf and conducts sand-crab research. I have said to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister. The heron changes tactics and takes up the one-legged ballet stance. How long will ye vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words? Question, writes the doctor in his daybook: how long on average does a heron wait to make a play? The light shall shine upon thy ways, and he shall save the humble person, and he shall deliver the island of the innocent, and it is delivered by the pureness of thine hands. And what, continues the doctor in his neat crisp handwriting, does a heron
think
about while waiting? God speaketh, yet man perceiveth it not. Or is the heron keyed to a terrific pitch of attentiveness? In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed, then he openeth the ears of men. And how
do
they manage to stand for so long on one leg? Behold, God is great, and we know him not, neither can the number of his years be searched out, for he maketh small the drops of water, they pour down rain according to the vapour thereof, which the clouds do drop and distil upon man abundantly. By now the morning mist is dissolved, and the ocean laid bare in its roiling majesty, and upon it are boats and the animals of the skin of the sea, and in the distance leviathan; gray whales, thinks the doctor, noting that they are heading south earlier than usual. Hear attentively the noise of his voice, and the sound that goeth out of his mouth, he thundereth marvellously with his voice; great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend. He checks his notebooks for whale migration dates for the last ten years. Fair weather cometh out of the north, and a terrible majesty. A quiet voice comes to the doctor from the kitchen, and the sheer surprise of another voice in the house, and the gentle salt of the voice, and the realization whose voice it is, causes him to pause in his labors, and he lifteth up his head, his spectacles glinting. Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? He puts down his pen, and closes his notebook, but does not shelve it properly among its numbered predecessors, and he rises to his feet, and stands at the window, and bows his head, and turneth to leave; but as he passes under the lintel of his study, he opens his mouth, and out therefrom issues his voice, saying, I would love a cup of tea, Stella, thank you.

16.

Cedar checks his watch and has a sinking feeling in his stomach. He had a heart attack, the old goat, and he died, and he’s frozen stiff. Bastard. No flare. Shit. He works back across the ice field to the northwest sector and slowly and steadily works his way back and forth across the field of caves. Shit. Finds bootprints, enters cave, finds Billy supine and unconscious. Shit. Medical training, United States Army. No broken bones. No dislocation of neck or spine. Pulse normal. No apparent injury or trauma. Smelling salts. Billy wanders awake. Croaks unintelligibly and then grins. Flexes left hand. Grins again.

What are you smiling about, you old goat?

Billy tries to explain but his mouth isn’t working right.

You aren’t making a whole lot of sense, as usual.

Yes.

Can you sit up?

No.

Did you fall?

No.

Heart attack?

Stoke, says Billy, working away at the
s
for a bit. Stork.

Does anything work?

Head. Hand.

Any pain?

No.

I’ll carry you out.

Yes.

Let’s get down to the lodge and I will call Owen.

Yes.

I got you, Billy.

Yes. Good.

I’m going to tie your hands around my neck, okay?

Yes.

It’s a long way down. Stop me if you are hurting.

Yes.

We’ll go slow but we’ll get there.

Yes.

I owe you a rescue, eh?

No no.

You’ll be okay. You’ll be all right. We’ll find a way through this, Billy. The doctor will know. All right. Here we go. You ready?

Yes.

What are you grinning about?

Time, says Billy distinctly.

You’re in shock, says Cedar.

Seventh, says Billy.

Pipe down and rest.

Yes. Yes.

Cedar, who has terrific peripheral vision still, notices and doesn’t notice the startling depth of the cave as he hoists Billy to his feet and wraps him around his back; and later he will wonder if he saw or dreamed or wished to see a glint of metal in the rear of the cave, some kind of silvery flash, as if some big machine was huddled there; or an immense spool of some kind, as May would quietly say one afternoon, neither of them saying anything about it again, but both thinking about it more than they would ever admit.

17.

Down and down and down through an afternoon the color of bobcats and new footballs and fresh-sawn wood. Not golden but buttery. Faintly the simmer of surf. Down and down they come, Nora first, Maple Head putting her hand on her daughter’s shoulder sometimes in steep passages. That bony shoulder like a wing. Tucked against me when she nursed. When she ran her shoulders flexed faster than they eye could see. My girl in flight.

Past the little copse where the chickarees came out to chitter and stare.

Pausing for tea and cookies.

There are doors and windows everywhere, Mom, says Nora. I see that. I see that. I didn’t see that.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, says Maple Head,

We would see everything as it is, infinite, says Nora. Dad says that all the time. He says a lot of things all the time. He spends all his time saying lots of things. That’s William Blake, isn’t it? What’s the deal with Dad and William Blake?

He’s wiser than he knows, your dad. Let’s not tell him that.

What happens when this comes again?

Maybe it won’t.

Probably it will.

Probably it will.

Will you walk with me then?

As long as I can walk and long after that too.

There’s no medicine, is there?

Just the doors and windows.

Did you…?

Sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes we had no money and no prospect of ever having money and that wears and eats at you. Sometimes we were ill and hungry and the rain was relentless and I couldn’t see any way we would ever get out. Love doesn’t save anybody. But I found doors and windows. I think maybe they are always there and we don’t see them too well. This is why people invent religions, to map doors and windows maybe. Maybe that’s what art is in the end. Who knows. But they’re there. Consider the fowls of the air. Consider the water ouzel. This is one of those things that maybe the more you talk about it the more stupid it sounds, but there are a lot of things like that. You are like that for me. I can’t explain more than a jot of how I feel about you but as long as there is a you I have joy in my bones. The fact that there was a you is a joy beyond calculation. It hurt when you were born and it hurts still. Let me keep my hand on your shoulder the rest of the way home. I think my hand is hungry for your shoulder.