by Jeff Ewing
She closed her eyes, felt herself spinning. She hoped this wasn’t really the end, or some new beginning. Fumbling around in a cave with the ghosts of all the people lost in whatever disaster floating through the air above them. She saw her father marching hand-in-hand with the other dead miners in a long line down toward the chiseled-out face, past rows of machines humming and whirring, right through the rock, jagged and ancient, waiting patiently for its next incarnation.
She kicked her foot against a plastic bin: “REDUCE, REUSE.” She giggled, and he stopped for a second. She stifled herself, and he started up again. She whispered a name, even though it was just a guess and couldn’t possibly have been his: “Henry.”
Some familiarity was called for, after all. Some attempt, however clumsy, at picking up the thread. He looked at her.
“I’m Kyle.”
“Kyle?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
She pulled his head down onto her shoulder.
“Who’s Henry?” he said.
“Nobody.”
His breath was warm against her collarbone, coming in ragged bursts, all the tension and thrill gone suddenly out of him. He might have been crying, she wasn’t sure; she hugged him as best she could. How was she supposed to tell him about the guy she’d seen in her mind a thousand times, walking toward her with a hand raised and a big smile, opening his mouth to ask her where she’d been all his life.
THE MIDDLE GROUND
HE CLAIMED HE WAS AIMING where he hit me, but I don’t buy it. I was moving through trees, cutting downhill—he wasn’t that good. Granted, he did find me, tracked me through some pretty unforgiving country. I watched him doing it, saw the careful way he stepped alongside my trail, the almost delicate way he slung his rifle. The smile too, when I went down. All of it familiar in a way I’m sure he didn’t understand. It was the little things that reminded me of his mother, and I told him so.
“She squinted like that when she got excited.”
“Leave her out of this.”
I tried to explain our history to him, the nights riding in my car up to the bluffs above the river where we could look out and beyond our puny little home. The itch we both had that she was the first to scratch.
“She was beautiful,” I said, and not just to soften him up, to get him thinking about letting me go. It was true. I wanted him to understand what it was like for us to be young who weren’t any more. The way we just went where we felt like—up into the mountains, out to the coast—no plans or maps. I wanted him to see us how we were when it was a new day every day, with the sun bright and blinding, how we saw each other before our eyes adjusted to the light.
“She never mentioned you,” he said.
It was a disappointment, I’ll admit, to think I’d never come up. I had imagined at some point she’d have wanted to pass her full self on. If you don’t show your kids all of you, how are they going to do better?
“Doesn’t mean she wasn’t thinking about me.”
He considered that.
“It doesn’t mean she was either.”
He was one of those, who can’t see any farther than the negation of something. No nuance, no middle ground.
“She never disappeared on you? In the car maybe when a certain song came on, or looking out a window at the leaves changing?”
“It’s all pines where we are.”
“She must miss it.”
He laughed and shook his head.
“You think nobody’s tried this before? Humanizing is what we call it.”
“That’s what everybody calls it.”
“It doesn’t work.”
He’d taken a job that made him narrow his field of view, with no idea what he’d traded off. I felt sorry for him. Still, it seemed he gave a little more care to binding my shoulder than he might have otherwise.
He’d chased me quite a distance, almost to Canada. I’d recognized him right off, even bundled up and Kevlared. But don’t think I let him catch me—he wasn’t a little kid that had to be let win, and I’m not so sentimental I’d surrender to prison just so we could have our heart-to-heart. I’d gotten old and slow, is all, and had maybe lost some of the motivation he still had.
The nearest road was a good ten miles away, so I told him about some of our trips, his mother’s and mine, as we walked out—skiing off into the untracked nothing, the emptiness like a cold drink; her lying naked on a rock sunning herself, a vision in an unbroken expanse where nothing moved but my eyes taking her in. Thinking of the recounting as a favor to her. I didn’t tell him about the way she tore me down little by little, how she would visit me after we’d broken up and hardly say a word. Come to me at her lowest, where she could be the northern star and not just another guttering match.
A gust out of the north scooped handfuls of loose snow off the trail and into our faces.
“She still hate the wind?”
He turned and looked me up and down again.
“When it blows up like this,” I said, “and the trees all start rattling, I think about how it used to scare her. I never found out why, I never understood it.”
“You don’t have anything to do with her.”
“I do, though. I wish you were right sometimes, believe me.”
Another gust slammed us, knocking him sideways. I could have made a move, he knew that, but I didn’t. He saw it and relaxed a little.
“It still scares her,” he said.
I nodded, reassured there was still a part of the past close enough you could just about touch it. A half-smile I half recognized flashed across his face.
“It’d be hard to find a windier place than she picked,” he said.
“That’s true, isn’t it? Why do you think she’d do that?”
“To look it in the eye, I guess.”
And right there, that was it. He’d nailed it. It made me feel a little easier toward her—and him—picturing her standing outside her house, watching the wind come across the Palouse carrying dust and torn wheat heads and who knows what all. Listening to it build and build, wanting to run but fighting it with everything she had. Holding her ground to show her only son there wasn’t any door you could close tight enough as the one leading into your heart.
DICK FLEMING IS LOST
GEORGE WASN’T FRIENDS, EXACTLY, WITH Dick Fleming. He knew him well enough to nod to in the halls and, later, at the meeting house. He thought Kip might remember him, might even have kept in touch, but all he said was “sort of a washout, wasn’t he?” Which bothered George more than he would have imagined. It wasn’t a fitting way for anyone to be remembered.
He opened the alumni bulletin again, hoping it was more helpful this time—that more detail had been added while he wasn’t looking, as happened from time to time. It was a phenomenon he didn’t understand, or question overmuch. How he could see a thing in one way—the view out a window, an illustration in a book—then later, going back, find it changed in some small respect. Elizabeth put it down to absent-mindedness, but George had come to believe—though he’d never say it—that things were less fixed than people understood.
This time, nothing had changed. Dick Fleming was still lost.
Class of 1926
Dick Fleming is lost. When last heard from he was living at Hotel Olhm, Martinez, California. Any information about his whereabouts will be appreciated.
Hotel Olhm? What kind of a name was that, Olhm? It seemed a made-up one, something arrived at by shaking letters in a dice cup.
George took an atlas down from the bookshelf, opened it to California. The map took up two pages. He had assumed, by the sound of it, that he’d find Martinez in the south, down in the brown and wrinkled desert section of the map. Somewhere close to Mexico. But it was much farther north, near San Francisco. Where, by contrast, fat blue lines abounded, merging into amoebic blue masses spreading like a living thing, parting and joining such that it was hard to tell whether the land enclosed the water or the water was in t
he process of consuming the land. George would have put his money on the water.
Elizabeth had been enamored of California when they were first married, before the bank runs and soup lines. She’d lobbied him to take her there, describing their imagined journey vividly: The sway of the train like a ship, the land passing in endless variety—prairies and lakes and mountains—while they sat in the dining car and watched. Appreciative and aloof, it had seemed to him, hardly a part of it at all.
“What would we do there?” he’d wanted to know. Which had struck her as an insulting question. Getting there was the point. Having an adventure. “We’d just turn around?”
He didn’t recall her response. A sigh, he imagined, and an angry exit. But now, he understood—or thought he did. When she got home from her bridge group that night, he was waiting up.
“I’m ready now,” he said.
“For what?”
“California.”
She’d just laughed, as he must have known she would. The idea of California was as much a part of their past as any of the other things they’d discussed and discarded when they were young enough to act and failed to.
The train lurched out of the station, shaking a bag loose from someone’s arms. A small bottle of dark liquor was snatched up quickly, having somehow remained intact in the fall. A miracle, the man who’d dropped it must have thought. Such was the state of miracles at present. George turned back to the window to watch the trees give way to open farmland and, in the distance, a clutch of puffing stacks. The smoke from the stacks hung low over the intervening fields, throwing a wide, ragged shadow across them. The ride in this direction was always the same, light into dark.
How had Dick Fleming made his decision—if it had been a decision, and not just circumstance carrying him along. Perhaps it had been a job that didn’t pan out, a company that had gone under like so many others. A lost opportunity before he’d even stepped off the train. George pictured him knocking on a wide, heavy door, waiting in vain for a man in a suit to answer, a fat man swollen with optimism and rosy forecasts. Then sitting on the curb, thinking: maybe everyone’s gone to lunch. The sun dropping slowly behind him, reflecting off the water until the water turned black and he picked up his suitcase and began looking for somewhere to stay.
Decisions came harder to George. How many days and nights of waffling, back and forth, would he have gone through before boarding that train to Martinez? There was so much uncertainty in any proposition, finding a single right answer was next to impossible. It drove Elizabeth mad, almost to tears at times. But who could say now he’d been wrong to weigh his arguments so carefully, to favor the safer choice, when Dick Fleming—who maybe hadn’t—was lost.
Mr. Pitcall was out, as George had known he would be, when he made his way to the Train Manager’s office. Another emergency meeting. Claire helped him locate the number to the Hotel Olhm, and put in the call.
The connection was poor, with a steady whine like mosquitoes swarming at his ear. The voice on the other end was faint and watery. He saw the atlas again, the pervasive ingress of blue.
“I’d like Dick Fleming’s room, please.”
“Let me check.”
More water and mosquitoes, the far end of the line a swamp lapping around the Hotel Olhm.
“I don’t see him.”
“No, of course. But … sorry, is he registered there?”
“I don’t see him,” the desk clerk repeated.
George raised an eyebrow at Claire, shook his head faintly.
“May I ask if he has been registered,” George said. “Recently.”
“People come and go,” the man said.
“I understand.”
“It’s the nature of the business, really. No fixity.” George weighed his response to that, but before he could formulate one the man was gone. Hung up, or the line failed. The Hotel Olhm, perhaps, finally succumbing to the flood.
“No luck?” Claire asked.
“No fixity.”
“Fixity?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Huh. I guess that’s that, then.”
“I guess it is,” George said, knowing full well that was not that. He hadn’t expected to find Dick Fleming so easily. He was lost, after all. It was doubtful the bulletin editor—Chub Neely, Class of 1928—would have said so if he hadn’t expended some minimal effort at locating him. And by the way, why lost? Wasn’t it explorers who were lost, or shipwrecks? Not classmates, even unremarkable ones, just setting out. Amid an established populace.
That afternoon—when he should have been reworking the road maintenance schedule to account for the men let go during the week—he wrote a letter to Chub Neely. Asking, among other things, how he had arrived at the conclusion that Dick Fleming was indeed “lost.” Where did he get the name of the Hotel Olhm? Had someone crossed paths with him in Martinez?
Chub would, of course, wonder what his interest was and ask questions in return. Bulletin housekeeping questions, but nonetheless prying: How long had George been married? Did he have any children? Who were his wife’s family? Was it a crushing disappointment to be passed over, to have your father hand his company’s reins to someone else? George crumpled the letter up and threw it away. Then retrieved it, tore it up, and threw it away again.
He worked on the schedule, knowing the job was impossible, that the tide was against them. How could the backlog of repairs and upkeep possibly get done if they continued laying off crews? Eventually there’d be an accident, and someone would take the blame. It wouldn’t be Pitcall.
His mind persisted in wandering through the day, and each time it did there was Dick Fleming. George saw him with a clarity of imagination that was foreign to him. Flights of fancy were not his strength. Never once, that he could remember, had he set himself down in as thoroughly imagined a place as the steep, hide-brown hills Dick Fleming was now ascending in switchbacks. In full summer, evidently, the sun dazzling and merciless directly overhead. The back of Fleming’s shirt was dark with sweat, the suitcase in his hand fraying at its seams, the halves held closed with a cross of twine.
He stopped at a flat spot by a rock outcrop and looked back the way he’d come. Sweat ran into his eyes and he blinked it away. Far below, he could hear a door slamming in the wind off the strait. The door of some vast, empty warehouse, maybe Fuchs & Co. Its mouth gaping as it had when he’d walked around the corner that second morning to find it weeks out of business, rust already working its way across the rows of empty shelves.
When the job had first been broached, he’d moved down to Delaware for a time to be near the water. Twice a day he’d ridden the Cape May ferry over and back to get the feel of a ship under him, so that when he boarded the international freighters coming into port to perform his inspections he wouldn’t be laughed off. He’d have his sea legs under him. He had imagined Martinez, exotic and new, free of all the history that crowded into every corner of the East. Lost battles and won wars cloaked in verdigris, stiff old customs rubbing his will raw.
Something rustled off to his left. He turned to see a coyote coming over the crest of the hill—he presumed it was a coyote, what else could it be? It stopped and sniffed the air. Its belly looked caved-in, its ribs like a corset cinched tight and hurriedly draped in dun hide. When it spotted him, it lurched to one side as if kicked. It backed away over the brow of the hill, never taking its eyes off him. Dark, sunken eyes that anticipated nothing but misfortune. Dick Fleming picked up his bag and started up the hill again.
A whistle sounded in the yard. George looked up at the clock. He’d missed his train.
Elizabeth would expect him, but wouldn’t be worried; he was sure of that. Even when the dinner went cold and she had the girl from next door take it away. Elizabeth had hired her to cook for them, dinners only, without asking him. He’d hoped she would understand, without George having to point it out, that they couldn’t really afford the girl. Maybe she could try her hand at it again, she’d only g
et better. To which Elizabeth would have replied that she had no wish to get better, that being good at something like cooking was almost a disgrace.
He slowed as he passed The Cobbles, stole a glance through the window. He was quite hungry, his lunch had been a single spindly leg of overcooked chicken. Looking up from a plate of roast beef and scrod, he found Mr. Pitcall watching him from the bar. Mr. Pitcall! He was three years younger than George. By all rights he should have been Tommy, and George should have been Mr. Evans. George nodded, hoping that would be enough. But Pitcall waved him inside, mouthing “Get in here.”
“You’re a lucky man, George.”
“Very much,” George said.
“You might have had my job. Might have spent your evenings here.” He swept his arm around the room, knocking over the empty glass beside his half-full one.
“I never much cared for it. All this. I like a clear head and a quiet room.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“We each have our preferred ways. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Preferred ways of what?” Pitcall asked. “Kicking time along? Running out the clock?”
It was unseemly, his complaining like this. George’s father would have thought twice if he could see him now.
“Your implication, I take it,” George said, to his own surprise, “is that it’s all been for the best. I should be grateful.”
“Is that what I’m saying?”
“You got the short end, despite appearances.”
Pitcall squinted at him.
“Are you getting a backbone?”
“It’s distasteful, is all. Sitting here like this, with all this. People are lost, genuinely lost out there.”
“And now you’re a priest to boot.”
George pounded his fist on the bar, sloshing the bourbon from Pitcall’s glass. Pitcall watched the dark spill spread on the wood.
“People count on you,” George said.
Pitcall grabbed his sleeve as he rose to leave. George looked at his hand, the white knuckles and prominent veins. Almost an old man’s hands. Pitcall let go.