“We just gotta make a phone call when we get to where we’re going. They’ll tell us a time and where to go from there.”
Myrtle looks beautiful in the back seat.
She’s the last of her kind, for sure.
***
They’re almost out of money again, but it doesn’t matter now. They’re driving into Portland, Oregon. Boring is so close.
“So where’s the drop-off place?” Jesse asks.
“Hey man,” Andrew says, “I ever tell you how much I love strawberries?”
“Yeah, strawberries are pretty good, but how are we supposed to get paid for these snakes?”
“I just love them strawberries.”
“Sounds to me like he’s evading,” Myrtle says to Jesse.
“That’s bullshit. I ain’t evadin’,” Andrew says.
“Then tell us about the plan for these damn reptilians,” Jesse says.
“Fine, if you wanna know so bad. These scientist people, they expect to do the transaction with just one guy. That’s me. Means you two can’t be around when business goes down. The other thing to keep in mind is we might not be getting paid as much.”
“Why the hell not?” Myrtle says.
“We lost a lot of snakes when you got bit back there. Not to mention some have died along the way. We are dealing with what those in the service industry call damaged goods.”
“Shit, he’s right,” Jesse says.
“But riches ain’t all there is to life. There’s love, and there’s uh…” Andrew trails off. “I’m pretty fuckin’ tired.”
“Andrew,” Jesse says.
Andrew says nothing.
“Andrew.”
“Huh?”
“You not gonna fuck us over, are you? You splitting the money with us like we agreed?”
“Yeah, of course. You like my brother. You both’s family. I’d never do anything to hurt family. I just need to sleep, man. I just need to sleep is all.”
Andrew pulls off the freeway. They drive through an industrial district where mattresses, couches, tents, and hovels built out of shopping carts line the streets. They approach a bonfire surrounded by dirty faces. As they come near, the dirty faces look up at them.
“You got any beer?” Andrew says.
A young man in a wheelchair—one festering, infected foot looking like a white mushroom propped up on a milk crate—gestures to a red ice chest. “Help yourself,” he says.
Andrew, Jesse, and Myrtle stand by the fire and drink beer. They shoot the shit with the strangers and are even offered a couple couches to crash on for the night. Everyone’s having a good time, but nobody asks where they’re from, what they’re doing here. Everybody comes from the same place. Everybody ends up in the same place too.
Andrew excuses himself, says he’s going to find a payphone so he can call and make plans for delivering the snakes. He’s gone a good half hour, and upon his return, he appears restless.
Before they sleep, Andrew finally tells them the plan. He says, “In the morning, we drive out to Dodge Park, right on the Sandy River. That’s where we claim our riches.”
Jesse and Myrtle, spooning on a couch, hold each other closer. “We’re so close, baby,” Jesse whispers, and in the dark above their heads, their future kids can be seen playing on the green lawn of their future home.
***
The next morning, they head out for Boring.
They park on the side of a steep mountain road under a dense, rainforest-like canopy of trees. There’s a bridge that spans the river. Beneath the bridge, two fishermen stand thigh-deep in the white-capped water.
“This is exactly how it should be,” Andrew says. “The scientist we’re meeting here will be disguised as a fisherman.”
“How do you know which dude fishing is him?” Myrtle asks.
“I was told I’d know.”
Jesse and Myrtle watch from the car as Andrew takes the two suitcases—repacked with snakes—across the bridge and down to the fishermen. They’re too far away to hear the conversation as Andrew approaches them, but one of the fishermen reels in his line, wades back to shore, and follows Andrew into the woods downriver.
Five or ten minutes pass before the fisherman returns from the woods, but he isn’t toting the suitcases.
He goes back to fishing.
Alone in the forest, Andrew releases the rattlesnakes.
Another five or ten minutes pass before Andrew reemerges, toting the now-empty suitcases. He stomps back up the hill as if he’s pissed off, crosses the bridge.
“What happened?” Jesse asks.
“He wouldn’t take the snakes,” Andrew says.
“Why not?”
“He asked where the rest of them were. I told him we had complications, but then he started pointing out how the snakes were delivered in poor condition. He said they’d be useless to the sick people, and then he refused to pay.”
Jesse and Myrtle are visibly agitated, panicked. Andrew tries to keep them calm, but they’re too far embroiled to listen.
“Fuck this,” Jesse says. “If you won’t take care of this, I’ll do it myself.” And he storms away from the car, toward the bridge.
Myrtle remains by the car, biting her knuckles.
Andrew chases after Jesse, steps in front of him to block his path on the midway point of the bridge, with the clear river running beneath and moss-covered trees jutting up like spikes all around.
Andrew lays his hands on Jesse’s shoulders, looks the best friend he ever had straight in the eye.
“Let me go, Andrew. That man owes us. It’s our right to take what’s ours.”
“Listen,” Andrew says, and he realizes they’ve reached the end. There’s nowhere else to go from here. No desert to return to either. And so he spills forth a confession. “There are no medicinal snakes.”
“Bullshit. Of course there are. We took ’em all this way. We were gonna sell them for a million dollars.”
“There’s no such thing, Jesse. I made them up. I collected those snakes myself. Like you said when we were robbing that bank, they look just like regular old diamondbacks. That’s because they are. And now they’re loose in these woods. The ones that survived, at least.”
Jesse throws a wild, emotion-fueled punch, but Andrew is unprepared and takes it in the nose. There’s a crunch and then iron and wetness, a blossoming of something that should be pain but isn’t. It’s only heartbreak, an explosion inside both of them, as they tangle muscular arm in muscular arm, scars rubbing against scars, teeth grinding, feet twisted.
Myrtle is crying and the fisherman who’d gone into the woods drops his pole and runs up toward the bridge to stop the fight but as he’s running up there Jesse pulls out a gun and turns to shoot the person who’s pulling on his back, trying to tear him away from Andrew, but the person clawing at his back isn’t the fisherman. It’s Myrtle.
Jesse shoots her, not seeing until the trigger’s pulled, and the look of surprise on her face as she falls dead is the look of defeat. And the fisherman backs away, so Jesse shoots him too. And Jesse drops the gun and collapses in a heap beside Myrtle, cradling her, crying. And this is when Andrew peels his bloody skull off the concrete and scoops up Jesse’s discarded gun. And he walks up to Jesse, puts the gun to his head, and finishes him.
Andrew looks over the side of the bridge and the second fisherman who’d been down there is gone, so he hurries down and finds the man cowering under the bridge and he puts a bullet in his head too.
One of the men has caught a nice steelhead. The fish floats dead in the shallows, a green nylon stringer tied through its jaw. Andrew takes the steelhead and hurries back to the car. He drives away from Dodge Park. He drives straight through Boring, past the swampland and the dogs that chase his car. He passes a police cruiser on the narrow road that winds through farm and forest, but the sirens aren’t blaring and anyway he’ll soon be gone. Of course they’ll find the bodies, but the cop seems in no rush to get there. Probably thinks some
fisherman or dumbass kid was just out target shooting by the river. Tell them to knock it off and move on to the next call. Poor bastard has no way to predict the nightmare that awaits him.
Andrew ditches the car near a rundown apartment project on SE 82nd with the doors unlocked and the windows rolled down. He breaks his own rule and sells the rest of their guns to a pawn shop for fifty bucks, then checks into a roach motel run by a senile Chinese man for two nights.
He turns on the news, and they sure have made it. Every cop in Texas is looking for Jesse and Myrtle, after the squad car was found at their burnt-down farmhouse. The catfish farm massacre has been discovered too, and cops suspect it’s all linked up to the bank robbery that shortly thereafter ensued, and the rocket launcher found in the back of an ice cream truck at a rest stop further on up the road. In addition to Texas, authorities in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California are on the lookout for Jesse and Myrtle. Oregon’s not in on it yet, and by some miracle of the lord, there’s no mention of a third suspect. Andrew tries not to think about the implications of that. But it won’t be long before the Texas boys get wind of Jesse and Myrtle’s bodies being found in Boring, at which point the Oregon police will be out in droves. Unless they bill it as a murder-suicide. Unlikely, but Andrew can hope.
He flips through the channels until eventually settling on a preseason game between the Houston Oilers and Seattle Seahawks. Steve McNair is a promising rookie and Oilers fans have high hopes that he can lead their team to glory, but Andrew just doesn’t know how he feels about a quarterback who tucks the ball under his arm and runs so often. Andrew believes in pocket passers. He hates the goddamn Dolphins, but Dan Marino, he’s what a quarterback ought to be. Nonetheless, Andrew roots for the Oilers because they’re his team, and if the coaches believe McNair is the man, well, shoot, Andrew believes it too.
The Boring murder-suicide story breaks during the midnight news. Once again, a third accomplice is never mentioned. Jesse and Myrtle are painted as psychotic redneck lovers.
Is it a miracle?
No.
It’s life.
***
In the morning, the news just replays all of last night’s stories, along with a weather report and something about a dog show happening in Portland that day.
Andrew goes to a dark sports bar across the street and orders a burger and a beer. On the television, an ESPN retrospective on Walter Payton is playing. There are plenty of pictures of Payton’s family, but Harold the truck driver is in none of them. Andrew wonders what Harold will think when he sees Jesse and Myrtle on the news. What will he think of that sweet young couple? Will he call the police and inform them of the other man accompanying them? Will Harold Payton be Andrew’s downfall? Andrew doesn’t know and presently doesn’t care. He’s feeling good, godlike.
But when Andrew returns to his motel room, he turns on the television to tune in to the evening news—and there, in the opening news previews, is a police witness sketch of Andrew. He about shits himself as commercials play and the news takes its time getting to the story. Finally, it does. Police are now looking for an unidentified male suspect connected to the crime spree in Texas and yesterday’s tragedy at Dodge Park. The man is believed to still be at large in the greater Portland area.
Andrew racks his brain. Where can he go? Canada? Out of the question. Out to sea? Also no. He’s still got ten bucks left, so he does what he does best. He waits until one in the morning, then goes out to the seediest bar he can find within a couple blocks of his motel. He buys a drink for the drunkest, loneliest woman in the bar. He talks her up and it doesn’t take much effort to convince her to take him home. So they go back to her shitty apartment where she lives alone and they drink some more and then as they’re stripping down, getting ready to do the thing, she passes out cold. Andrew waits a couple minutes to make sure she’s really out, then he tucks her into bed and erases all sign of his presence in her home. He finds her car keys (he’d asked at the bar what kind of car she drove then acted impressed when she named something shitty, and he said something like, “The kind of car a woman drives says a lot about her. I can tell you’re a classy lady,” even though she wasn’t).
He takes the whiskey bottle they were drinking from along with twenty dollars from her wallet and a package of hot dogs from the refrigerator.
He finds her car in the parking lot of the shitty apartment complex and he drives north on the I-5.
Somewhere in these green mountains, he will find a place where a man can disappear.
***
A decade has passed since all of that went down.
Andrew’s still on the lam, but he’s settled down, at least to the degree that he can. He works on a farm for people who don’t mind too much if he’s got a past about him. They don’t ask questions. There’s a woman he goes out dancing with every other Friday night, when her kids are at their father’s. Her name is Isabella.
Last year he took a drive back to Boring. He visited Dodge Park, and he nearly stepped on a baby rattler. Rattlesnakes weren’t native to this part of Oregon. He’d considered the ones he released good as dead, once the cold came. But the snakes held on. They began breeding up a storm, and ten years later, they’re still here. The snakes of Boring are real, although they’re not medicinal. The snakes of Boring are only full of poison.
Jesse was a good friend to chase this dream all the way up to Oregon, Andrew thinks, and Myrtle was a good woman. Andrew will never have a friend like Jesse again. It’ll just never happen. Maybe there’s justice in that. He probably doesn’t deserve one, but on nights and days when he’s feeling especially lonesome, he says aloud to himself, “I wish I had a friend like Jesse in my life.”
Then again, he’s not complaining.
You are born in August at Memorial Hospital in Bakersfield, California. Your mother is a third grade teacher. Your father works for a beer distributor. Just a few months before your eighth birthday, they will file for divorce and you’ll be asked to make the biggest decision of your life. The choice is yours. Don’t worry. This isn’t about choosing a favorite. It’s about you. It was always about you.
Your mother keeps the house in Bakersfield. Your father moves north and buys a small riverside cabin in Oregon. Do you want to remain in Bakersfield, where you have your friends and the comfort of a familiar backdrop, or do you pack it in and rebuild with your father in Oregon? A single mother household or that eternal father-son fishing trip you always wanted. In a room full of strangers, you will be asked to decide.
If you choose to remain with your mother, go to BAKERSFIELD.
If you choose to move with your father, go to OREGON.
BAKERSFIELD: Two years later, your mom remarries. You move into a big new house in a nicer, newer part of town with your stepfather. He’s a businessman. The license plate on his Hummer: BSNSMAN. You’re not even in middle school yet, but suddenly you have a college savings account full of money for when you go off to college. Your mother no longer spends her nights at the kitchen table, weeping over a stack of overdue bills. You have nice new clothes. Those Air Jordans you always coveted? They’re yours now. And the swimming pool in the backyard is sure to attract a whole bunch of brand new friends. Life is shiny. Life is good. You’ve seen your real father once since the divorce, but maybe that’s for the best. You’re practically a different person now.
OREGON: You and your dad live in a one room cabin that backs up to a scenic river full of trout. It is cold and it is damp and it is lonesome out in the wilderness, but you love almost every second of it. You wake early in the morning to fish before school and afterward you fly down those backwoods roads on your ten-speed, anxious to wet your line. One autumn, in the year your muscles have started to develop, your father takes you out and teaches you to shoot a gun. You bag your first deer that season. You hang its antlers in the corner, above your little sweat-stained cot.
BAKERSFIELD: You meet a girl named Sarah. She has blonde hair and wears Abercrombie & Fitch. You
go out to movies on the weekends and some nights her parents invite you over for dinner. Other nights she has dinner at your house, where you eat your favorite takeout. You share your first kiss together and maybe a little something more. Sarah is your first true love.
OREGON: You meet a girl named Sarah. She has blonde hair and climbs trees better than any boy. You explore the woods together and some nights her parents invite you over for dinner. Other nights she has dinner at your house, where you eat the fish that you have caught and the deer that you have hunted. You share your first kiss together and maybe a little something more. Sarah is your first true love.
BAKERSFIELD: You’ve just passed your driving test. Never mind that your stepfather is cheating on your mother and screams at her almost every night. He’s handing you the keys to a brand new BMW. You drop by Sarah’s place unexpectedly to take her out for a drive, and that’s when you receive the call.
OREGON: You’ve just passed your driving test. Never mind that you’ve been driving your father’s truck since you were thirteen, or that you drove yourself unaccompanied to the DMV to take the test. You’re legal now. You drop by Sarah’s place because the two of you are heading to Crater Lake for a weekend camping trip alone. You and her have taken drives in your father’s truck many times before, so that part is nothing new. What’s got your belly tingling is the prospect, the feeling, that maybe this weekend you two will go all the way. You don’t own a cellphone, but if you did, you’d be receiving that call about now.
BAKERSFIELD: Your father killed himself. You’d seen him what, three times since he moved to Oregon. He never remarried but he always sent you a birthday card with some recent pictures of fish he’d caught and a small check that your mother reminded you was a lot of money to him. They ship his body back to Bakersfield, where he’s buried in the same graveyard as his father, who died in Vietnam, who you never met.
Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon Page 13