East of the Mountains

by David Guterson

  Ben drew off his cap and entered the dining room. A mother and daughter were playing cards and eating a plate of onion rings. A man with a gray high pompadour scrutinized Ben with what looked to be a casual ill will for strangers. A wind-furrowed farmer in a flannel shirt trembled over his coffee cup and worked on a wedge of pie. At a table nearby sat a crowd of young people eating hamburgers and french fries. One was swellingly pregnant. She pulled on her soft drink, then on a cigarette. A name was tattooed on her shoulder.

  Ben washed in the bathroom. A vaultlike dispensary sold glow-in-the-dark condoms, the directions for their purchase inscribed on a decal in both Spanish and English. Ben combed his hair, brushed his teeth, and cleaned the lenses of his glasses. He dried his face and hands on paper towels, then paused to look at himself. His eye had blackened obscenely now. He looked, he thought, horribly old, as smashed and bruised as a boxer.

  It was difficult to accept that the face in the mirror belonged to him and could not be altered, the ravages of time reversed. But he gathered himself, pressed his hair into place, and tried to appear presentable. He dried his neck with a paper towel and examined his face in profile. His clothes were still wet from that mornings rain, and in the heat of the place he felt chilled.

  He strode onto the restaurant floor, set his rucksack against his leg, worked his wallet free of his pocket, and holding three twenty-dollar bills high, announced in the firmest voice he could muster that his dog waited, injured, outside, that he needed to get him to a vet right away, and for anyone willing to take him up to Quincy there was sixty dollars in it.

  A man stood up. Tall, thin, and hollow-eyed, he wore pointed, black sideburns. He wiped his lips with a napkin as he rose, then dropped it on his table. "I'll do it," he said. "Let's go."

  His name was Stu Robinson. He shook Ben's hand in his tall lanky way. He wore cowboy boots and a tight red windbreaker with the name of a saloon in Arizona printed in white across its back. "What happened to your eye?" he asked.

  "I was in a car wreck," Ben explained. "Up in Snoqualmie Pass."

  "Christ," Stu Robinson said with a wince. "Don't even tell me about it."

  They went outside. It was late in the day now. The light had begun to fade.

  Robinson was interested in Rex's wounds and in the story of the dog fight. He listened to Ben's brief, colorless account with no sign of questioning its omissions. He took the story of the dusk chukar hunt and the desert camp and the coursing hounds at face value, it appeared. Then he bent over Rex on his storklike legs to examine the stitches more closely. "I had a German shorthair fell off a cliff once and broke one of his hind legs. Out hunting quail."

  "Where was this?"

  "West Texas."

  "Is that where you're from?"

  "Montana."

  "Rex is a pretty good quail dog and adequate on pheasant, too."

  "I always kept shorthairs," Robinson said. "But I know Brittanies to be good dogs. I was just partial to shorthairs."

  He knelt a moment longer beside Rex, fingering his pockmarked chin. Robinson was acne-scarred in a raw, infected, graphic way, his face broken out in virulent eruptions of scarlet, blue, and purple. "I'm driving that tractor-trailer," he explained. "We can put him up in the sleeper, maybe. He'll ride comfortable there."

  "I appreciate that," said Ben.

  The truck's refrigeration was running—overworked, rattling compressors. "Restaurant salad," Robinson said, when Ben asked him about it. "Twenty-pound sacks of restaurant salad I'm taking to Calgary."

  He had christened his truck the Sweet Dreams Express, a Freight-liner painted freshly blue, loud racing stripes across its flanks, immaculate, pristine.

  Robinson scrabbled up the passenger-side steps and pulled back the door to the sleeper. He set Ben's rucksack inside, then took the dog bundled up in the blanket. Rex gave no fight.

  They climbed into the cab—it smelled faintly of diesel fuel—and Robinson pressured up the air brakes. The cab had the look and feel of a sarcophagus constructed out of gray plastic. It was high off the road and efficiently compact, like the cockpit of a jetliner. The roof and walls were covered with gray fabric, and everything seemed fastidiously kept, except that the windshield was much bug-bitten for this late in the fall.

  Ben turned to survey Rex's situation. The dog lay staring back at him, as though these circumstances were dubious, beyond all understanding. The sleeper unit was like a motel room, clean, sterile, claustrophobic. A neatly made bed, a refrigerator, a closet, and a television set mounted in one corner. A remote-control channel switcher lay squarely in the middle of Robinson's plumped pillow. "This is something," Ben said. "I've never seen this before."

  Robinson shook his head, rubbed his jaw, and picked at the tip of one sideburn. "What you see back there is my home," he said. "This is where I live."

  "All year round?"

  "Just about."

  "You don't have a house?"

  "This is it."

  "You don't have a family waiting somewhere?"

  "This is it," Robinson repeated.

  "Well," said Ben. "I've never seen this before."

  "It's a good rig," said Robinson.

  Ben's heart recoiled. The lean, spare life of the wanderer, which had held some attraction an hour before, held no attraction now. It was time, he thought, to head home, defeated. What in God's name was he doing out here, beaten the way he was? He tried to embrace some other end than the one he'd chosen for himself—he thought of dying in a hospital room, imagined languishing in one. He fell silent and stared out the window. There were no good answers to important questions. He tried to picture the shape of Stu Robinson's final days, but he couldn't even begin.

  Robinson shifted gears, let out the clutch, and teased his truck from its spot. He turned to the left, then leaned to his right to check his rearview mirrors. The Sweet Dreams Express bounced over deep potholes and onto the Frontage Road. They passed a field of wind-blown corn, beyond which cars flew by on the highway, toward Vantage and Moses Lake, toward both Seattle and Spokane. Robinson ground patiently through the gears, and the truck crossed over the interstate and onto Highway 281, the way north to Quincy.

  The road made a bend just after the interstate, then straightened to run through fields of seed peas, potatoes, alfalfa, peppermint, and wheat. There was a stand of low bare walnut trees and a feed lot thronged with cattle. It was not familiar as the country of Bens youth, because it had been so deeply alchemized by the coming of irrigated water. What he recalled as wastes of sagebrush broken by coulees and willow draws was now fields and orchards. The river of his youth had been diverted and poured out broadly across the land to seep through dirt to the roots of crops instead of running in its bed. The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert. Nothing was as it had been.

  He knew what had happened to the sagelands. He himself had helped burn them. Then men like his father had seized the river without a trace of evil in their hearts, sure of themselves but ignorant, and children of their time entirely, with no other bearings to rely on. Irrigators and fruit-tree growers, they believed the river to be theirs. His own life spanned that time and this, and so he believed in the old fast river as much as he believed in apple orchards, and yet he saw that the two were at odds, the river defeated that apples might grow as far away as Royal Slope. It made no more sense to love the river and at the same time kill it growing apples than it made sense to love small birds on the wing and shoot them over pointing dogs. But he'd come into the world in another time, a time immune to these contradictions, and in the end he couldn't shake old ways any more than he could shake his name.

  He was coming into the place he'd sought when he'd set out on his journey. From Quincy it was six miles to the Columbia. Over the crest of Babcock Ridge and across the mouth of Lynch Coulee, beyond the trading post at Trinidad, and then upriver toward Rock Island. Northwest of Baird and Willow Springs, but southwest of Moses Coulee. Southwest of the Burlington Northern
Line and the road to Palisades. It was the place Ben wanted to end his life, if he could only get to it. A surcease from living where his life had started. A neat, uncomplicated end.

  SEVEN

  Just before dusk they pulled into Quincy at the junction with Highway 28, the Ephrata-Wenatchee Road. Robinson asked a boy at a gas station where a veterinarian might be found, and the boy, without any hesitation, gave elaborate directions. Then they drove west down 28 until they were opposite the Quincy cemetery, not far from a cold-storage warehouse as cavernous as an airplane hangar. Robinson pulled into the parking lot of a low building made of cinder blocks, the Quincy Veterinary Clinic. Its lights were out, it was late on a Sunday, but posted on the window just left of the door was the after-hours telephone number, which Robinson wrote down. "We'll get this thing licked," he said.

  They found a phone booth at the Quincy Deli-Mart. Ben climbed down the ladder steps while Robinson sat with the engine running, clawing his chin and cheeks. In the parking lot Ben drew his hunting coat close and looked across at the cold-storage warehouse, then at the gate of the cemetery. The October wind blew east across the headstones. Darkness was settling in.

  He dialed the after-hours number, but it gave him only a recorded voice instructing him to call a cellular phone number or a second number Ben took to be the veterinarians home. He dialed the latter, and a woman answered; he asked for the vet and she said, flatly, "I am the vet. Is this an emergency?" Ben said it definitely was, he was standing in front of the deli-mart, his dog was severely wounded. "How severely is severely?" asked the vet, and he explained to her that he was a doctor and detailed the nature of the dogs wounds, the treatment he'd administered, and the distance he and the dog had traveled, from Vantage to George, on foot. "Go back over to my office," said the vet, "and wait for me, right out front. Give me fifteen minutes."

  "All right," said Ben. "I appreciate it."

  "Fifteen minutes," said the vet.

  Robinson drove Ben back to the clinic, and they sat in the cab with the engine running while the darkness deepened outside. The Sweet Dreams Express hummed extravagantly: its cab felt snug and warm. Ben gave Robinson the sixty dollars, which Robinson said would buy enough diesel fuel to get him five miles up the road, maybe ten if the price of fuel hadn't gone up in the last three minutes. They laughed at this and drank Robinsons coffee, thick and overly sugared. Holding plastic cups in hand, they turned together to check on Rex, who looked content to be where he was, asleep sprawled on the floor. Robinson tuned in the radio traffic and lit a cigarette. He said he'd come up north from The Dalles on Highway 97, but at Ellensburg he'd headed east in order to avoid Swauk Pass. It was all the same to him, he said, if he hit the 97 at Wenatchee or followed the 28 to Soap Lake and. caught the 17 to Brewster. He could make Wenatchee or Ephrata for the night or drive on up into the Okanogan and pass the night at Omak. He could stop anywhere, he said. It didn't really make any difference. He had a bed and enough food—salad to feed two armies. Sitting here didn't mean anything, twenty, thirty minutes either way.

  "You're not on a schedule?"

  "There's leeway in it."

  "How many years have you been driving like this?"

  "Sixteen. I quit for a couple once."

  "What did you do?"

  "I tried out a day job. Down in Texas."

  "How was that?"

  "Not so good."

  "You didn't like it?"

  "I don't know. It wasn't the job so much, I guess. It was being married did me in, put me back on the road."

  Ben looked at him. "Married?"

  "Not even for seven months. If you want to call that married."

  "I don't know," answered Ben.

  Robinson picked at a sideburn. He adjusted the heat in the cab.

  "I was married for fifty years," said Ben. But he couldn't think what he might add to this. He didn't even know why he'd offered it.

  " Was married," Robinson said. "Now you've moved along?"

  "No, I haven't," Ben replied. "My wife died nineteen months › ago.

  Robinson nodded and held a respectful silence. "How's your eye?" he said finally.

  "It's doing all right."

  "Dog seems comfortable."

  "I'd just as soon see the vet show up. He needs attending to."

  "We can wait," Robinson assured him. "However long it takes."

  "You don't have to," Ben said.

  When the vet pulled in, Robinson helped; from the door of the sleeper unit he lowered the dogs blanket-sling as though from a helicopter cable. Then he looked down on both of them, rubbing his ravaged face. "All right," he called, with an air of finality. "The best of luck with everything." And he cast his eyes in a far-off direction, as if something there drew his attention.

  "How far is it up to Calgary?" Ben asked.

  "Not too far. Maybe five hundred miles."

  "All right," said Ben. "Good luck with it."

  "All right," answered Robinson. "Same to you."

  The veterinarian was a solid young woman with the sturdy hands and face of a farmgirl and thick, soda-bottle glasses. She spoke in the direct, firm way of the country, with the vigorous practicality and certainty that had remade the sage desert into fields. Kneeling in the parking lot, she examined Rex, and Ben guessed she was not yet thirty, even though her professional manner suggested years of experience. There was something irrepressibly young in her, some vague crack in her doctorly demeanor through which her private self seeped as she introduced herself as Dr. Peterson and made note of his blackened eye without commenting on it. He had the idea she was shelving small talk until some later, less critical time, after the dog was treated. There were Petersons, he knew, up and down the plateau, from Manson south to Royal Slope—more Peter sons than Petersens—and he guessed that she was a daughter of this clan, born and raised in the river basin amid the builders of the dams and farms and the fruit and potato growers. He guessed she rode horses from an early age and had decided as a child to become a vet, staunchly sticking with her girlhood plan even as the romance wore off and she found it to be hard work. She must have been admired for her perseverance, praised by her grandparents, aunts and uncles, her church pastor, Bible class instructor, the leader of her 4-H group—all, perhaps, had smiled on her pursuit of a profession both honorable and useful. Now there was no hint of hesitation in her as she turned the lock to the clinic door and held it open wide for him so he could haul Rex inside. He found, despite her youth, that he trusted her. She was just the sort to do well by Rex. She communicated proficiency, as all good doctors must.

  "There's a registration form on the counter," she said. "Go ahead and fill one out, and I'll get things started back here."

  She left, and Ben collapsed on a bench, where he massaged the ache in his side for a while before filling in the form. Rex lay sprawled at his feet.

  On the counter he found her business card: ILSE PETERSON, DVM, DEDICATED AND CARING. A bubbling aquarium full of angelfish, an orange canary in a spacious cage, pamphlets on canine parvovirus and enterotoxemia in sheep, copies of Cat Fancy magazine. The room was orderly, efficient, well lit, with a pill dispensary behind the counter and notices posted high on the walls: Does Your Pet Have Bad Breath? Ask about Our Dental Program. Tired of Getting Scratched? We Have Safe Pet Carriers. Member Quincy Valley Chamber of Commerce—Promised Land of the Columbia Basin. Please Keep Your Pet Leashed.

  Ilse Peterson hurried around a corner and opened a file cabinet. "You can bring him in," she called.

  Ben took Rex up in the blanket sling and followed her into a warren of rooms, past an office with shelves of neat veterinary texts, past a tiny operating theater, finally into an examining room—an anesthesia machine on wheels, a stainless steel table with a drain hole and bucket, a bright, adjustable light overhead, and an electric razor poised high, hung from a retractable cord.

  "Good, then," Dr. Peterson said. "Let's take a look at him."

  Ben set Rex on the stainless steel tabl
e and assessed, critically, the equipment on hand: a blood cell counter, a blood chemistry unit, a high-powered tissue microscope, an X-ray machine with folded lead drapes, a pair of sealed plastic bins for the safe disposal of waste. "Just relax now," the vet said to Rex, one hand stroking the top of his head, the other patting his dusty side. "We'll find out what your problem is and see what we can do about it."

  There was no condescension in her voice. She did not pretend the dog was a child or a difficult human being. She pressed her glasses against the bridge of her nose, pulled her light closer. Then she checked Rex's feet for warmth. She pressed on his gums, pinched the skin at his forehead, palpated his chest, stroked him. "So you're a doctor," she said.

  "I was a doctor," Ben told her. "I've been retired for a while."

  "Where at?"

  "Over in Seattle."

  "General practice?"

  "Thoracic surgeon."

  She nodded a bemused assent. "I hate to say it," she said over her shoulder, "but you don't much look like anyone's idea of a surgeon just now."

  "It's a long story," Ben said. "I was in a car wreck yesterday."

  "You can tell me later," Dr. Peterson said. "In the meantime, I could use some help. There's a lot of resuturing that'll have to be done. I'm going to have to put him under, set up his IV support. And you're going to have to sign a consent form. We're looking at two or three hours here—a hundred fifty to three hundred dollars."

  "I'll stay," said Ben. "I want to."

  "It'll get him off the table quicker."

  "Whatever I can do," said Ben.

  He unbuttoned his field jacket, peeled it off, and set it on the floor in a corner. It had been nineteen months since his last surgery—repairing a human heart in trouble, not this work of assisting a veterinarian in sewing up a dog. Nevertheless, he felt a twinge of excitement. He rolled up his sleeves and washed his hands. He had not expected anything like this. Strange and stranger still, he thought, that at a moment in which he'd intended to be dead, rotting and eaten by flies in the sage country, he was instead scrubbing for surgery as he had thousands of times.