West of Here (44 page)

“Why would I want to see Bigfoot? I mean, if I can see anything I want to, why don’t I see Gwyneth Paltrow rubbing my feet every night after dinner? Why don’t I see myself playing two-guard for the Spurs? What, I want to see myself damn near shitting my pants in the woods in the dead of night, cowering like a fucking rabbit under a bush, clutching an aluminum bat?”

“Well, admit it, Krig. You
want
Bigfoot to exist, right?”

“Yeah, okay, fine. So what? What’s wrong with that? I think all kinds of stuff exists that we haven’t discovered yet. Look at the panda bear — for hundreds of years everybody thought they were a myth. Look at dark matter, or black holes, or all those weird-ass glowing jellyfish and stuff they’re discovering at the bottom of the ocean. It’s not like I’m fooling myself by thinking that there’s still stuff to be discovered. Even if they do have Wi-Fi in Papua New Guinea.”

“I’m just saying — shit, I don’t really even know
what
I’m saying, Krig. You probably did have an encounter. Let’s just say that I’m not overwhelmed by the Peterson —”

“Patterson.”

“The Patterson footage, that’s all. That big clump of fur on his face —”

“Her.”

“It looks fake. It looks like a novelty beard. And he’s got —”

“She.”

“She’s got a weird mouth. Those lips look like hot dogs. And there’s no hair in that one little strip around the eyes.”

“Duh.”

“It’s just too boxy. The hair would thin out or whatever. It wouldn’t just stop in a perfectly rectangular strip. It looks silly to me. And isn’t six foot seven kind of short for a Bigfoot? I thought they were like eight feet tall.”

“Just watch
Legend Meets Science,
dude. The
whole
thing. They address all that stuff.”

“All right, okay, I’ll watch it in my office on Monday.” Jared checked his watch and downed the rest of his beer in a single long gulp. “Shit, gotta go.”

“You just got here.”

“I know, I’m supposed to be at the video store. Fucking
Jane Eyre
or some shit. I just popped in for a beer. Sorry, man, you know how it is.”

“Yeah,” said Krig. “I know how it is.”

“See you Monday.”

“What about the M’s game on Sunday?”

“No can do. We’ve got a baby shower.” Jared fished out his wallet and dropped two twenties on the bar. “I got this one,” he said. “Sorry about bailing.”

Once Jared made his exit, Krig finished his beer and fidgeted restlessly with the glass for a few minutes, half watching
SportsCenter,
which had rolled over and begun repeating the same highlights from the five o’clock hour. Molly had disappeared into the kitchen a good ten minutes ago to box his food. Probably out back smoking. The Bushwhacker felt dead. Even Jerry Rhinehalter wasn’t around. Just as Molly reappeared with Krig’s boxed appetizers, Krig dropped an additional twenty on the bar and walked out without a word or glance at Molly. Who the hell wants leftover oysters anyway?

The stars popped cold and white, but Krig paid them little notice as he ambled across the parking lot toward the Goat. The crisp bite
of fall infused the air, but Krig hardly noticed that either. When he guided the Goat north onto Route 101, without the accompaniment of Van Halen, or the Stones, or even Billy Squier — indeed, it felt as though his life no longer had a sound track — Krig didn’t leave any rubber in his wake. The traffic was light. All of Port Bonita was dead. Krig slumped lower than usual in his seat as he proceeded over the hump past KFC and Taco Bell. To his own surprise, he crawled right by the hallowed lights of Circle K without getting his customary six-pack for the bluff. His senses were dull enough already.

As always, the park gate was closed after dusk, so Krig parked on Kitchen-Dick Road, hopped the bar, and hiked the quarter mile through the grassy meadow to the bluff. The wind knifing in off the strait was so sharp that Krig couldn’t ignore it, and he walked with his arms folded for warmth. At the first turnout, he didn’t proceed to the high spot overlooking the slide cleft, as he normally would. Instead, he just stood at the split-rail fence in front of the darkened picnic area and stuffed his hands in his pockets, gazing west. The lights of Port Bonita — from the newly developed stretch east of town, to the hills west of Ediz Hook — burned cold and clear along the strait. The little lights filled the bottomlands: purple and yellow and green and white. They spilled over into the hollows, where they began a gentle rise up the foothills below Hurricane Ridge. There was even a smattering of lights on the ridge itself. Dead and still spreading.

For nearly a half hour, Krig turned his face to the wind and endeavored to see the lights of Port Bonita as though for the first time, presuming by the sheer force of will to see in the distant winking lights an unfamiliar city, a whole new set of possibilities. But try as he might, Port Bonita was still Port Bonita.

OCTOBER
1890

The child grew to trust her chubby legs, though they failed her when she gave the slightest pause, and pitching backward on her rump, she knew not frustration but only a fleeting impatience to move forward. She grew to understand that the scented breeze and the light of day were things outside of herself. She began to see the world as the world. Tiny birds flitted in and out of the brush, and the swishing treetops painted invisible circles in the sky, and the silver and white flashing miracle in front of her, with its rumbling and roaring, its hissing and tinkling, gave off a cool breeze all its own. All that fell under her gaze or touch, it seemed, was a revelation to the watchful eyes of her father, too, as he sprawled out on the bank with his papers and his pipe. With each discovery grew the irrepressible impulse to master all that was outside of herself. And so she touched and smelled and tasted the world, paused to inspect it, and spin it within her tiny fingers — the brittle husk of a pinecone, the peeling red length of a madrona limb, a flat rock worn as smooth as the skin of her belly. Things that sat still, and things that crawled, things that skittered across the sandy bar in the breeze.

FROM CHICAGO CAME
improbable deadlines and a three-page letter from the board voicing their disapproval of the very cost overruns that Ethan had not only predicted and forewarned against but publicly condemned as well. The board even had the gall to insinuate that Ethan was not the man for the job — not
committed to the job,
were the words they used. What did they know of commitment? Ethan breathed the chalky dust of his commitment hourly, felt it drilling and blasting and hammering at his bones, while they sat in leather chairs, smoking. What did they know about unforeseen logistical
hurdles, conflicted engineers, and squabbling contractors? What did they know of dredging a riverbed that refused to yield rock, shearing off cliff faces given to crumbling, taming a raging river that rose by the hour?

Sprawled on the bank in his shirtsleeves, with his back propped against the mossy ledge, Ethan read the board’s letter for the third time with a bitterness rising in his throat.

It occurs to the board that administrative and technical mismanagement may well have accounted for costly scheduling delays. Having taken the matter up with Mr. Lambert, the board is of the opinion that certain changes in administration may be in order.

So, that was it? Jacob was to take charge? By what turn of events, behind which closed doors, by what plotting means had this decision come about? Why had Ethan not heard of these matters being taken up with Jacob?

Irritably, Ethan looked up from the letter to check on Minerva and saw her lolling on the sandy bar, a safe distance from the bank.

“I knew you were capable of a lot of things, Ethan Thornburgh,” came a voice from behind him. “But not this.”

Ethan spun around to discover Eva, standing arms folded at a distance of ten feet. “Darling,” he said, climbing to his feet. “How did you find me?”

Eva folded her arms tighter, as though fighting a chill. “Don’t you dare.”

“What is it?”

“How could you?”

Ethan set his papers on the mossy ledge and approached her, smiling tentatively. “What are you talking about?”

No sooner had he said it than he felt the sting of her outrage across his cheek. He didn’t flinch at the blow.

“How could you pay them, knowing how hard I’ve worked on that story, knowing all that I’ve sacrificed in the name of … of — how could you?”

He grasped her by the shoulders. “Who? What are you talking about?”

She shook free of his hold, and turned her face from his. “Quit pretending,” she hissed.

“My God, Eva, you have to believe me. I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. Pay whom? What story?”

His silver eyes seemed to hide nothing. His slightly parted lips seemed to express only confusion. Eva believed him.

“Then it wasn’t you?”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Somebody bought Griffin.”

“I don’t follow.”

“
The Register
pulled my story.”

Ethan still did not comprehend the implications. The fact was, he’d hardly given a thought to Eva’s story in the weeks since she last stormed down the mountain intent on ruining him. As if a newspaper story could stop progress. Ethan himself could not stop it, and he’d put it in motion. If anything, he’d hoped her writing would come to something, so that she could feel whatever sense of accomplishment necessary to remedy her wrongheadedness. Gradually, the light of recognition shone in his eyes, even as his face darkened. “The scoundrel,” he said. “He threw
me
under the train, why should I be surprised that he’d trample his own sister underfoot.”

“Jacob? You think it was Jacob?”

“Of course, it was Jacob. Apparently, there’s no end to his subterfuge.”

It struck Eva as ironic that her brother, he who by his very arrival in this place had threatened to tear her and Ethan apart, had become the force that now unified them. Eva felt herself pulling in two directions, tethered between the disillusion of her brother’s betrayal and the relief — considerable and unexpected — that Ethan had acquitted himself of the charge, that he had not proved himself unworthy. A third consideration presented itself with chilling suddenness.

“Minerva!” she shouted, breathlessly.

Ethan spun around, the hair on his neck bristling, as frantically he scanned the riverbank. One black thought eclipsed all others, ringing in his ears, as he scrambled madly up and down the bank searching
for his daughter. He took a grim inventory of the current as it moved swiftly toward the bend like a dark mass.
My God, what if the river took her?
Suddenly, something flashed among a cluster of mossy rocks jutting from the shallows upstream, and Ethan took off running.

With her heart beating in her ears, Eva desperately ransacked the wooded hillside, fighting her way madly through the brush, giving no thought to the limbs slashing and stinging her face as she called the child’s name. Neither could she escape the blackest of thoughts:
This is my fault. I’ve done this. I’ve killed her.
Eva froze when she heard Ethan’s shouts from upriver. She could not decipher them. Holding her skirts aloft, she scrambled down the hillside to the bank and moved desperately over the rocks toward Ethan’s shouts, running the length of an upended cedar, where she caught her first glimpse of Ethan, just upriver, knee deep in the riffle along the right bank. He turned to face her, wading toward the bank with the child’s body cradled in his clutches, her wet hair cascading down his arm. She was not moving.

Eva fell to her knees.

Ethan looked to the heavens. “Noooooooo!”

From across the gorge, his own voice echoed back at him.

MARCH
1890

Mather was still kneeling in the snow when a heavily panting Haywood staggered up beside him. What Haywood beheld upon his arrival was not some paradisiacal view of their deliverance but an impassable wall of rock rising some four or five hundred feet directly in their path. Haywood, too, fell to his knees, and for an interminable moment the two men kneeled side by side in a deafening silence, the only sound that of Haywood’s labored breaths hacking away at the thin air like a dull saw blade. When the others straggled in behind, their own uneven breaths sullying the silence still further, Mather did not allow them to linger in blighted hope.

“We’re losing light,” he said. “We’d best make camp before we freeze.”

And like the walking dead, they collectively set about making camp.

With nothing to burn, the best they could hope to do was break the wind with tattered canvas, hunker down beneath their blankets, and hope that sleep would carry them through the worst of it.

They awoke, stiff to a man, covered in snow. To add further insult, Mather soon discovered that the dog had gotten to the lion’s share of the jerked elk, which, beyond a bit of bacon grease, represented the last of their protein. Haywood, in an uncharacteristic outburst, got ahold of the dog and might’ve killed her, had Mather and Runnells not subdued him. Mather, for his part, found it difficult to blame the poor beast in her bony state of degradation. Following her beating, as the men broke camp, Sitka paced nervous half circles in the snow at a safe distance from the party, whimpering on occasion. When the party set off and began retracing their path, Mather was uncertain whether the dog would follow.

After nearly three months in the backcountry, only Reese had managed to preserve the dignity of a hat. As for the rest of the party, a piece of cloth knotted at the back sufficed. They were down to a single blanket per man. By the slimmest of estimates, they had enough food remaining to sustain the party for a week. Shouldering sixty pounds each, Mather and his men backtracked through the narrow valley. In spite of flagging spirits, they made steady progress with the hard snowpack and the wind blowing at their backs. By early afternoon, they had ascended into the wide windless basin they’d left two days earlier. They skirted the edge of the valley until they found what Mather reckoned to be a suitable route for western passage, a deep saddleback bridging two snow-covered peaks. With the better part of the day still in front of them, they struck up the side of the mountain, if not with a nose for the Quinault watershed, then at the very least with the hope of finding some way out of the wilderness. The steep incline forced them to attack the rise hillside fashion, painfully and deliberately kicking footholds in the deep snow. They were nearly three hours in reaching the narrow shelf that ran several hundred feet below the crest of the ridge. The prevailing western winds had formed snow cornices on the leeward side of the crest, a fact that made the men more than a little uneasy, particularly as afternoon approached, and they began to hear the distant rumble of avalanches.