West of Here (30 page)

They ordered some hot artichoke dip. Jared caught Molly eyeing his wedding band as she delivered the dip but didn’t say anything to Krig. In what proved to be the crowning moment of their burgeoning familiarity, Jared got Krig to admit that 1:39 was a lot of time, even with only one time-out left.

“The game doesn’t end at one thirty-nine, Krig! A helluva lot can happen in one thirty-nine. Now, if you’d missed, say,
six
from the stripe, that’s one thing, but
one
measly free throw with a minute thirty-nine left? C’mon, Krig. That’s not a game breaker. Give yourself a break.” Jared drained his Kilt Lifter. “And besides, nobody remembers the details.”

If Jared was kind in his appraisal of Krig, he was merciless in his
appraisal of himself. By his fourth Kilt Lifter, Jared could barely contain his self-contempt.

“But I
am
an ass-munch! You were right in the first place. I’m a class A prick. I fucking hate myself. My life is a fucking act, Krig. I’ve co-opted every bit of potential I may have ever had, and for what?”

After five Kilt Lifters, it was all over. Jared told Krig about the stapler. “I’m the biggest pussy you’ll ever meet, Krig. You don’t even know what a —
hic
— pussy I am.” Jared pounded the bar with a fist, rattling the artichoke dip.

The little black dude shot them a look from across the room. Hillary Burch was fiddling with her blouse.

“C’mon,” said Krig. “Let’s get out of here.”

Jared reached for his wallet.

“I got it,” said Krig. Figuring the tab to be around forty, Krig dropped three twenties on the bar, but Molly didn’t notice. He rearranged the bills and fidgeted with his wallet a little, and was slow pushing his stool in, but Molly still didn’t notice. She was busy with Hillary Burch and the little black dude. But as Krig and Jared were on their way out the door, Molly called after them. “Nice meeting you, Jared.”

Krig laid rubber pulling out of the Bushwhacker lot. Though he was smarting a little over the thing with Molly, he was determined not to blame Thornburgh. Thornburgh was okay. He liked Thornburgh. The guy needed Krig. The poor sonofabitch had damned near stapled himself. And on his birthday, no less. Look at him there slumping in the passenger seat. This guy needed to look his demons right in the eye or at least get so plastered that he didn’t give a fuck. Krig swung into the Circle K parking lot and left the Goat idling.

“Back in a sec,” he said.

Jared watched Krig lumber toward the front entrance. He could hear the muffled
doon-doon
of the bell as he entered the store. He fished his clamshell phone out of his pocket and snapped it open. No missed calls. Janis still hadn’t remembered. He snapped the phone shut. Well, at least there was Krig. Jared was ready to submit his will to Krig altogether, go wherever Krig took him. Why not? Clearly, Krig knew something about having a good time. Tooling around drunk in the Goat was a lot better
than playing golf with Don Buford. He snapped his phone open again and checked the time. Ten forty. Let Janis worry. Let her figure out that she’d missed his birthday and feel terrible. He turned the phone off, snapped it shut, and replaced it in his pocket.

Jared could see Krig in the back of the store at the glass cooler, contemplating his beer choices. Why couldn’t he be Krig? Why couldn’t he be satisfied with
Krigness
? Who knows if the guy actually saw Big-foot? Did it really matter? The guy believed. Or he wanted to believe. That’s what mattered. And what was the deal with that waitress? Why did she have to do Krig like that? It was obvious the guy had a thing for her. He wished he could get Krig laid.

After considerable deliberation, Krig grabbed a twelve-pack of IPA and was on his way to the register when the thought of a Butterfinger stopped him in his tracks. He backed down toward the candy, where he found an Indian kid standing perfectly still in the middle of the aisle, clutching a bag of peanut M&Ms and a dead fish — was that a fucking shark? When it became apparent that the kid wasn’t going to move, Krig leaned over in front of him and grabbed two Butter-fingers. It was then he recognized his job shadow, Rita’s kid, Curtis.

“What up?” said Krig.

The kid said nothing. He was baked out of his gourd. It was like he was frozen there in suspended animation, except for his lips, which were silently at work.

“Dude, what’s with the fish?”

The kid wouldn’t answer. Bending closer to get a look at the fish, Krig saw the burns running up the kid’s arms.

“You okay?” Krig looked down the aisle to the guy behind the counter. “Is he okay?” The guy at the counter shrugged. Shrugging back, Krig strode down the aisle to the register and set his beer on the counter.

“’Bout to kick his ass out of here in a minute, if he don’t buy some-thin’,” said the counter guy. “This town’s gettin’ weirder by the day.”

Upon his return to the Goat, Krig lobbed a Butterfinger to Jared, which careened off Jared’s wrist and landed on the floor.

“Butterfingers,” said Krig.

They crawled straight through town on Front and picked up Route 101 at Lincoln.

“Where are we —
hic
— going?” Jared wanted to know as they passed Gertie’s.

“You’ll see. Better eat that Butterfinger.”

As soon as Krig took the sharp left onto Elwha River Road, Jared knew they were headed for the dam. He wrestled an IPA out of the paper bag between his feet and tried to twist off the cap. Krig produced a church key from the glove box and flipped it to Jared. “Pop me one, too,” said Krig.

Jared cracked the beers and looked out the window at the blackness. Now and again he caught a silvery flash of moonlight on the river. Both men lowered their beers as they passed a ranger at the Altair entrance, where, through the alders, Jared glimpsed the glow of a lone campfire along the bank.

“Park rangers can’t do shit,” Krig observed, swilling his IPA.

He killed his headlights as they pulled into the parking slab. He fished his headlamp out of the glove box. Jared grabbed the rest of the beers, and they walked down the gravel path to the viewing area. The dam was bathed in moonlight. The roar of the spillway, the low, bone-rattling hum of the turbines, the vertiginous dropoff from the lip of the gorge — all of it was dreadful and thrilling to Jared as he gripped the chain-link fence.

“Damn,” he said, draining his beer. “Loud as ever.” Backpedaling a few steps, he hurled the empty bottle over the fence into the abyss, waiting for a distant shatter of glass, which never came. He grabbed a fresh beer from the box and opened it.

If the dam was a source of dread to Jared, to Krig, the thought of leaving it was dreadful; the thought of walking down the road alone toward the very trailhead where he’d had his recent encounter was nothing less than terrifying. And yet, he was compelled to do so, for his own sake, and for Jared’s. Give the guy a few minutes to himself. Let him put things in perspective.

“I’m gonna walk up the road a bit,” he said, snapping on his head-lamp.

Looking back after a hundred or so steps, Krig could no longer discern Jared’s figure in the moonlight. The closer he drew to the trailhead, the darker the night seemed to get. He sat on a big cement block half covered with moss and stared at the dark hulking form of the mountains beyond the clearing, frisking the night with the beam of his headlamp. What was he afraid of out there?

Jared listened to Krig’s receding footsteps in the gravel until the spillway drowned them out. After a long pull, he set his fresh beer down by his feet and squatted. Clutching the chain-link fence, he peered down beyond the spillway into the chasm, where he could see the powerhouse partially obscured by undergrowth. How many times had he stood in this very spot, awed as a toddler, curious as a boy, proud as an adolescent? But never had he stood there like this, frightened and ashamed of the thing. How many times had he been reminded of the dam in the years since he started avoiding it? Only to find that there was no avoiding it, that he forever lived in the shadow of this obsolete dam, his fortune linked inextricably to its hulking existence, its legacy of ecological menace. Though he had no vested interest in its fate, no real interest at all, still its presence was inescapable. And why? Because it bore his name. Such were the trappings of history.

“Tear the damn thing down,” said Jared Thornburgh aloud to nobody. “See if I care.”

JULY
2006

The first night Curtis failed to come home Rita managed to convince herself that he was probably at a friend’s house. But had Rita really wanted to be honest with herself (and later she would), she would’ve had to admit that there was absolutely no evidence — no phone calls (he didn’t event
want
a cell phone), no instant messaging, no mention of so-and-so to suggest that Curtis had any friends at all. Never a ride home from school, never the whispers of a conspirator from behind his locked door, always two eyes, never four, peering into the empty refrigerator. Aside from Dan, and to some lesser degree herself, Curtis had scarcely ever connected with anyone in any substantial way. He was a loner, he’d always been a loner. Only in recent years, though, had he become a brooding loner. As a boy, he was content in his aloneness, deep into his distance. He could sit for hours with little occupation. He could literally watch the grass grow. For a time, Rita thought he might be developmentally impaired. Now, he was anything but calm; now, it seemed he was perpetually agitated.

More than Curtis’s whereabouts, Randy was concerned with the whereabouts of his “hundred bucks.” Settling comfortably back into civilian life, in spite of the fact that he was down to $180 with no foreseeable employment (the muffler shop had been a bust), Randy would have just as soon been without the kid anyway. Christ, even if the little shit stole a few bucks, it was worth it to have him gone. But he knew the kid would be back soon enough, glaring at him from behind those greasy bangs, filching his Salems, basically just being a little shithead all the time.

“He’ll come back when he’s hungry,” Randy insisted.

Rita was more than ready to accept this proposition and did so for the better part of two days. By the third night, however, she required
a bottle of Chablis and three beers to ward off her mounting uneasiness, until she finally fell asleep watching an infomercial.

The police phoned at 8:00 a.m. The instant the officer identified himself, Rita felt the unexpected weight of panic like a bowling ball in her stomach, and his voice came to her as though from some great distance. The more the voice explained, the less she understood.

“Found your boy last night in Circle K clutching a bag of M&Ms and some kind of dead fish with no eyes. Stunk to high hell. Wouldn’t let go of the damn M&Ms. Got burns on his arms, blood on his shirt. Pupils like saucers.”

“But how — what happened? Is he … ?”

“He won’t say a word. Found a half sheet of Barney Rubble in his coat pocket. Must’ve been selling the stuff. That’s probably at the root of our problem here. Sending him to Olympic Medical Center for psych evaluation … Tell me, does he normally, you know, talk? Any kind of verbal communication at all? … Hello? Are you there?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m here. He talks. But not a lot. Is there something wrong? Did something happen to him?”

“We don’t know anything. He won’t talk. It’s like he … well, like he
can’t.
Moves his lips to beat the band, but nothing comes out. Best get down here, ma’am.”

By the time Rita hung up the phone, all the warmth had drained out of her.

Randy could see something was wrong. “What the fuck was that all about?”

“The police picked him up.”

“Pfff. Figures.”

“They’ve taken him for some kind of psychological evaluation.”

Randy burped. “Yeah, well, ’bout fuckin’ time.”

JULY
2006

As she watched him square the tab, Hillary willfully ignored an ambivalence that extended far beyond Franklin Bell. What was this impulse to act? Why, when it was crystal clear that she and Franklin had no future, when she felt little attraction toward him sexually, was she compelled to prove something? It was the sum of these nagging uncertainties, and her inability to silence them, that finally drove Hillary to the edge. Not two steps into the gravel parking lot, she took the leap.

“How about your place?” she said.

Abandoning the Silverado — along with all contingencies — in the Bushwhacker parking lot, Hillary accompanied Franklin in his green ’88 Taurus wagon. The car looked new in spite of its age. The interior smelled like a rental. Hillary liked the car immediately for its sheer lack of pretense. It was quiet and smooth — a gazelle trapped in the body of a warthog.

Having relinquished all preconceived notions the moment he popped in a Neil Sedaka CD, Hillary tried to imagine what it would be like to be with Franklin. He seemed totally at ease at the wheel in spite of the fact he could barely see over it. Piloting the Taurus past Circle K, Murray Motors, and KFC, he hummed along quietly and unashamedly to “King of the Clowns.”

From the passenger seat, Hillary scanned Franklin’s profile, her eyes straying down to the jelly roll beneath his green-shirted belly.

Feeling her eyes on him, Franklin smiled. “That’s my twelve-pack,” he said.

That’s another thing she liked about him: he was unapologetic. There was so much to like about him, really. She appreciated all the things he
didn’t
say, all the sage male wisdom he
didn’t
dispense, all
the tiresome opinions he
didn’t
solicit, even when she tried to draw him out. She liked his short answers. There was nothing ambivalent about Franklin, it seemed. As the Taurus crested Hogback to reveal the panorama of Port Bonita, all lit up from the tip of Ediz Hook to the mouth of the Elwha, Hillary wondered at the futility of her actions. Why did she persist? Why make poor Franklin an accomplice?