West of Here

by Jonathan Evison

  West of Here

  ALSO BY JONATHAN EVISON

  All About Lulu

  West of Here

  A NOVEL BY

  Jonathan Evison

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2011 by Jonathan Evison.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Maps by Nick Belardes.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Evison, Jonathan.

  West of here : a novel / by Jonathan Evison. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56512-952-8

  1. Washington (State) — Social life and customs —

  Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3605.V57W47 2011

  813’.6 — dc22 2010020224

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  For Carl,

  who I think would’ve liked this one.

  I will sing the song of the sky.

  This is the song of the tired —

  the salmon panting as they fight the swift current.

  I walk around where the water runs into whirlpools.

  They talk quickly, as if they are in a hurry.

  — Potlatch song

  West of Here terra incognita

  footprints

  SEPTEMBER 2006

  Just as the keynote address was winding down, the rain came hissing up the little valley in sheets. Crepe paper streamers began bleeding red and blue streaks down the front of the dirty white stage, and the canopy began to sag beneath the weight of standing water, draining a cold rivulet down the tuba player’s back. When the rain started coming sideways in great gusts, the band furiously began packing their gear. In the audience, corn dogs turned to mush and cotton candy wilted. The crowd quickly scattered, and within minutes the exodus was all but complete. Hundreds of Port Bonitans funneled through the exits toward their cars, leaving behind a vast muddy clearing riddled with sullied napkins and paperboard boats.

  Krig stood his ground near center stage, his mesh Raiders jersey plastered to his hairy stomach, as the valediction sounded its final stirring note.

  “There is a future,” Jared Thornburgh said from the podium. “And it begins right now.”

  “Hell yes!” Krig shouted, pumping a fist in the air. “Tell it like it is, J-man!” But when he looked around for a reaction, he discovered he was alone. J-man had already vacated the stage and was running for cover.

  Knowing that the parking lot would be gridlock, Krig cut a squelchy path across the clearing toward the near edge of the chasm, where a rusting chain-link fence ran high above the sluice gate. Hooking his fingers through the fence, he watched the white water roar through the open jaws of the dam into the canyon a hundred feet below, where even now a beleaguered run of fall chinook sprung from the shallows only to beat their silver heads against the concrete time and again. As a kid he had thought it was funny.

  The surface of Lake Thornburgh churned and tossed on the up-river side, slapping at the concrete breakwater. The face of the dam, hulking and gray, teeming with ancient moss below the spillway, was impervious to these conditions. Its monstrous twin turbines knew nothing of their fate as they hummed up through the earth, vibrating in Krig’s bones.

  Standing there at the edge of the canyon with the wet wind stinging his face, Krig felt the urge to leave part of himself behind, just like the speech said. Grimacing under the strain, he began working the ring back and forth over his fat knuckle for the first time in twenty-two years. It was just a ring. There were eleven more just like it. Hell, even Tobin had one, and he rode the pine most of that season. Krig knew J-man was talking about something bigger. J-man was talking about rewriting history. But you had to start somewhere. When at last Krig managed to work the ring over his knuckle, he held it in his palm and gave pause.

  “Well,” he said, addressing the ring. “Here goes nothin’, I guess.”

  And rearing back, he let it fly into a stiff headwind, and watched it plummet into the abyss until he lost sight of it. He lingered at the edge of the gorge for a long moment and let the rain wash over him, until his clinging jersey grew heavy. Retracing his own steps across the muddy clearing toward the parking slab, Krig discovered that already the rain was washing away his footprints.

  storm king

  JANUARY 1880

  The storm of January 9, 1880, dove inland near the mouth of the Columbia River, roaring with gale-force winds. It was not a gusty blow, but a cold and unrelenting assault, a wall of hyperborean wind ravaging everything in its northeasterly path for nearly four hundred miles. As far south as Coos Bay, the Emma Utter, a three-masted schooner, dragged anchor and smashed against the rock-strewn coastline, as her bewildered crew watched from shore. The mighty Northern Pacific, that miracle of locomotion, was stopped dead in its tracks in Beaverton by upward of six hundred trees, all downed in substantially less than an hour’s time. In Clarke County, windfall damage by mid-afternoon was estimated at one in three trees.

  Throughout its northeasterly arc, the storm gathered momentum; snow fell slantwise in sheets, whistling as it came, stinging with its velocity, gathering rapidly in drifts against anything able to withstand its force. In Port Townsend, no less than eleven buildings collapsed under the rapid accumulation of snow, while some forty miles to the southwest, over four feet of snow fell near the mouth of the Elwha River, where, to the consternation of local and federal officials, two hundred scantily clad Klallam Indians continued to winter in their ancestral homes, in spite of all efforts to relocate them.

  It is said among the Klallam that the world disappeared the night of the storm, and that the river turned to snow, and the forest and mountains and sky turned to snow. It is said that the wind itself turned to snow as it thundered up the valley and that the trees shivered and the valley moaned.

  At dusk, in a cedar shack near the mouth of the river, a boy child was born who would come to know his father as a fiction, an apparition lost upriver in the storm. His young mother swaddled the child in wool blankets as she sat near a small fire, holding him fast, as the wind whistled through the planks, setting the flames to flickering and throwing shadows on the wall.

  The child remained so still that Hoko could not feel his breathing. He uttered not a sound. A different young mother might have unwrapped the infant and set her cool anxious fingers on his tummy to feel its rise and fall. But Hoko did not bother to check the child’s breathing. She merely held it until her thoughts slowed to a trickle and she could feel some part of herself take leave; and she slept without sleeping, emptied herself into the night until she was but a slow bleating inside of a dark warmth. And there she remained for several hours.

  In the middle of the night, the child began to fidget, though still he did not utter so much as a whimper. Hoko gave him the breast, and he clutched her hair within tiny balled fists and took her nourishment. Outside, the snow continued in flurries, and the timber creaked and groaned, even as the wind abated near dawn.

  Shortly after sunrise, the shack tottered once, issued a long plaintive moan, then collapsed in a heap. There followed a flash of fire and ice, and one dull moment of confusion, be
fore Hoko extricated herself and the child from beneath the rubble and hurried the infant through the veil of snow toward the safety of the longhouse, oblivious of the burns up and down her arms.

  Her father was already awake when Hoko burst into the longhouse clutching her newborn son. He did not look up from the fire.

  “Shut the door,” he said, and fell back into a dense silence.

  FOR SIX MONTHS, the boy would have no name. For six months he would remain anonymous in the eyes of his mother, until finally Hoko gave him the name Thomas Jefferson King. But he was soon given another name. Upon meeting the mute blue-eyed child for the first time, George Sampson, a Klallam elder who lived in seclusion upriver, gave the boy a different name. Indian George called him Storm King.

  succeed

  NOVEMBER 1889

  In 1889, upon the behest of a public clamoring for adventure, and a press eager to package new discoveries, thirty-four-year-old Arctic explorer, Indian fighter, and rugged individual James Mather was consigned to conquer the last frontier of the Washington Territory, mere days in advance of its statehood. The sum of Mather’s orders, as issued by Governor Elisha P. Ferry himself in a champagne toast and roundly endorsed by the expedition’s underwriters, were as follows: “Succeed.”

  The vast uncharted interior of the Olympic Peninsula, between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the rockbound coast of the Pacific, was ripe for discovery. For centuries the region had fueled speculation among seafarers, and for centuries the rugged obstacles it presented discouraged even the heartiest explorer. Viewed from the strait, as Juan de Fuca allegedly viewed it in 1579, the heart of the peninsula comprised a chaos of snow-clad ranges colliding at odd angles, a bulwark of spiny ridges defending a hulking central range like the jaws of a trap. The high country was marked by gaps so steep and dark that the eye could scarcely penetrate them, and all of this was wrapped tightly about the waist with an impenetrable green blanket of timber.

  When viewed from Elliot Bay on a clear day, the leeward side of the Olympics presented another dramatic facade: a sheer wall of basalt inclining suddenly and precipitously from the banks of Hood Canal, stretching some hundred miles along the western horizon, so steep in places that snow would not stick to the face of them. Indeed, the Olympics presented to Seattle no less than a mile-high barrier to the unknown. And by 1889, the unknown was fast becoming a finite concept.

  That Mather chose to launch his expedition in the dead of one of the worst winters on record is less a testament to his poor judgment than his determination to be the first in breaching the Olympic wilderness. He was harried from the outset by the fear that someone would beat a trail to his destiny before him, and this fear was not unfounded. Within a year, no fewer than a dozen expeditions would set out to penetrate the Olympic interior.

  With little data to support him, Mather selected the narrow Elwha River valley as the point of entry for the party’s crossing. The river ran flat and shoal at its mouth, and the wooded bottomlands seemed to offer an inviting path through the foothills and over the divide. Moreover, the proximity of Port Bonita, just east along the strait, would allow the party a base for their operations during the muddy weeks of trailblazing into the foothills.

  Mather and his party of five set out from Seattle aboard the steamer Evangel on December 7, 1889, fully outfitted for a six-month expedition, though unprepared for the fanfare that greeted them upon their arrival in Port Bonita. Morse Dock was wrapped in silk bunting, with a dozen coronets sounding “The Spanish Cavalier.” Men, women, and dirty-faced children formed parallel lines and watched the parade of trunks emerge from the hold and move serpentine through their midst. Mather himself, a bear of a man, crated a sizable trunk on his shoulder, unaided, gritting a bearded smile as he passed through the crowd. At his heels, untethered, came a pair of big fine bear dogs.

  Near the end of the line, seeming to Mather out of place, a small native child seized his attention. Boy or girl, Mather was unable to ascertain, but the child, lithe and moonfaced, squinted fiercely with pointed blue eyes as he passed.

  When he reached the staging area, Mather hefted his trunk onto the growing pile, and before he’d even ventured to get his bearings, was met by a very pregnant woman, with a very earnest handshake, and a frazzled knot of hair atop her head.

  “Mr. Mather, is it?”

  “It is. And you are?”

  “Eva Lambert of the Commonwealth Register.”

  Mather glanced past her at the muddy hillside and the ragtag assembly of wooden structures riddling the shoreline, then eyed doubtfully the colorful floppy bow dangling from beneath Eva’s shirt collar. “A social register? Here?”

  “A newspaper, Mr. Mather. The region’s only newspaper. And not here, but there, over the hill at the commonwealth.”

  Mather smiled down at her through his formidable red beard. He snuck a glance at her belly pushed tight against her blouse, then another at her tiny left hand and saw no band adorning it.

  Neither look escaped Eva’s notice. “No woman, Mr. Mather, should have to wear seven pounds of underwear. Furthermore, marriage is not a career.”

  Mather beamed his amusement down upon her once more, scratching his big shaggy head. “So, then, no hearth and needles for you, is it?”

  Eva smoothed the cotton blouse over her belly and looked right up into his smiling brown eyes. “It was not my intention to stir your playful side, Mr. Mather. I was hoping to ask you some questions.”

  Mather could not ignore the heaviness of her breasts but resisted the impulse to look at them. He looked instead at her jawline, sleek in spite of her condition, and the feline complexity of her carriage. “Ah,” he said. “You want answers. Well, if that’s what you’re after, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. I’ve made an exclusive with the Seattle Press. They ask the questions.”

  “And who else owns your expedition? Who else has designs on our resources?”

  “I’m afraid those are questions, Miss Lambert.” He shifted distractedly, removing his elbow from its perch, as another parcel was hefted onto the pile. “Sitka,” he called out to one of the bear dogs sniffing among the crowd. The dog came zigzagging back and planted herself at his heels, whereupon Mather rested a huge hand on her head and left it there.

  “Well, then,” said Eva brightly. “Perhaps you have some questions for me. Perhaps you’d like to ask me about the commonwealth? Perhaps you’d like to know where our colonists stand on the subject of corporations? After all, the colony is a corporation, albeit not a greedy unsympathetic one, like some.”

  Mather looked about the dock restlessly. The native child, whom he now presumed to be a boy, was still standing nearby, staring at him.

  “Do they serve whiskey at this colony of yours?”

  “Buttermilk, perhaps. And eggnog is not out of the question. In any event, I assure you our hotel is superior to anything you’ll find here in town.”

  “Ah, well, I’m afraid we’ve already made arrangements in town.”

  “Well, should you find them lacking anything in the way of refinement, please call on us, Mr. Mather — that is, call on me. The colony is scarcely a mile from town. We have a theater, you know? And razors.”

  “A theater. Is that so?”

  “There’s a vaudeville running this week that is positively scandalous from all reports.”

  “Scandalous, you say?” Rarely had Mather experienced a woman so forward and undaunted.

  “Perhaps we’ll see you there, Mr. Mather. Good day.” Without further ceremony, Eva turned on her heels.

  Mather watched her backside as she went. She walked with conviction but also with grace, soft steps and undulating hips. After a half-dozen steps, she turned.

  “Mine is the door with the wreath,” she called over her shoulder.

  Soon she was swallowed up by the crowd. Turning to resume his duties, Mather’s eyes landed once more on the native boy, who was presently tilting his head sideways as he continued to stare at Mather. Something was a
miss with the child; his spastic movements, his broad forehead, his apparent lack of self-awareness. The boy was an imbecile. Smiling uneasily, Mather resumed his work.

  * * *

  WHAT THE OLYMPIC HOTEL, with its splintered beams and crooked eaves and buckled floors, lacked in refinement, it offered in proximity to the Belvedere just across the muddy way. The Belvedere, for its part, lacked all refinement but offered whiskey in excess, and a venue to conduct interviews. In spite of its high ceilings — the flimsy construction of which did not inspire confidence — the Belvedere was choked with tobacco smoke. The establishment was a hive of activity and chatter when the party arrived in late afternoon. Perhaps a hundred men, more than half of them standing, crowded the bar. An inventory of their hats alone spoke of the Belvedere’s clientele; top hats and coke hats and westerns and cattlemans, homburgs and Dakotas and Sinaloas. Wide-brimmed and narrow-brimmed, tall and squat; of felt and leather and Italian straw. Mather even spotted a lone cavalry hat in their midst. The men beneath them were every bit as dynamic as their haberdashery; clean-faced and stubbled and mustachioed, lean and wide, tall and short, stooping and straight. But every one of them — big or small, wealthy or impoverished — shared an appetite for new possibilities. The same spirit that drew them each to Port Bonita in the first place accounted, too, for the palpable air of excitement in the Belvedere, as Mather and his men made their entrance.