Dad told me those things back when his truck still ran. When he was twenty-seven and good-looking. When he whistled and music played out of his radio in the driveway. When the future was bright and existed. Before we moved to Cota Street, I could fall asleep in the trailer in a clear-cut surrounded by other O’Neels. On those nights, I thought the wind chime was the rattling of the prisoners’ chains. And my dreams were of business owners who slept lightly— their billy clubs waiting.
But in my dreams, the men with shaved heads had brilliant eyes. Even though they were ensnared. Even though they were never allowed to speak.
3
AS I GOT OLDER
We moved to Cota Street when I was nine. Cota kids were born of immigrants and nomads and peasants. There was never royal blood. The families were not written about in important books with hard covers. The struggles reached their steadfast fingers through each generation with precision. Every family was touched.
Sometimes, I thought my own immigrant nomad ancestors weren’t really troubled. I imagined them relaxed and flexible—solving problems tenaciously. Good and faithful friends. Fighting and asking questions and making love long into the night. Sometimes, I thought of my great-great-uncles shouting curse words to the wet night sky and laughing. They must have known before me that nothing lasts forever. Not even the new buildings, massive trees, or frequent beatings. I imagined them searching for the wild lands and the wild things. I knew they understood, even as their deaths loomed closer, that someday they would rise again.
As I got older, the steelhead runs were not what they used to be. The big fish were near extinction. Natural resources dwindled down to the barest of bones. The forests that had once seemed to never end were shorn and overwhelmed. Corporations declared bankruptcy. Sold off their excess land. They finished with their liquidations and the mountainsides were left naked. Mini malls and developments popped up out of nowhere. The purple flowers were crowded out by introduced weeds. The butterflies flew away and did not come back.
I watched carefully as timberland became ritzy bedroom communities. The Esworthys, who bought our property after the bank foreclosed on my father, didn’t know anything different. They paid me and Colin to tend the stretch of fertilized turf they installed in front of their house. I watched Mr. Esworthy fight private battles with nature using herbicides and clippers. The stream started to look strange.
Distant grocery stores with organic produce from other countries took the place of Mother’s backyard garden. Her vegetables went to seed.
The Esworthys stayed on the highway that drove through town. They said they had no reason to visit the city of David. They swam in Wynoochee Lake, took pictures of moss-covered big-leaf maples, fished in the Hamma Hamma River, and gambled on the Squaxin Island reservation. Their wilderness was recreation. It was small and consumable. They conquered it with backpacks and hiking shoes. They had never seen an old-growth forest. Or been stalked by a wild thing.
The Esworthys smiled at my father’s ragged shirt and work boots as if they were a funny costume he put on for them. His clothes were out-of-date. From an era long ago. He had worked hard for no reason. The state now had a capitol building and a college, and the timber money had been invested in enterprises we could never touch. My father, and other men like him, were no longer needed. They had little to show for the generations of missing body parts and hard labor.
The Esworthys owned our land now. They would not sell it back to us. A five-bedroom house was erected for the childless couple. It was their second home. They went to the salmon ceremony in August with cameras. Mrs. Esworthy chatted excitedly with Colin and me about the plans to pave the roads to several wilderness areas. She would soon be able to drive her commuter car all the way to the tops of mountains.
Colin and I looked at each other in alarm. I pushed my dirt-rimmed fingernails down into the soil and didn’t answer. I knew the men who once owned the lumber companies had put on their expensive suits. And flown away in silver jets. The rain came in autumn like always.
The forests remained clear-cut. Bald hills turned to soupy messes that slid. The silt flowed into the rivers. Entire families of salmon died. Tributaries lost the ability to sustain life. Tourists held their noses against the smell of rotting fish carcasses. Grocery stores in small towns put up signs that read NO MORE CREDIT. Fishing rights that reservations had fought so hard for were almost useless. Their guns stayed in their holsters. It was hard to make a living from fishing anymore.
Downtown, the tidewater mill wasn’t as busy as it used to be. The mill workers stood around and shook their heads at the loss. Heavy fog hid the town. The angry prisoners deep inside had been forced into silence for more than a century. The Wobblies had been killed and imprisoned eighty years ago.
My father told my mother that he would try to “work harder,” that it was just a “bad time.” My mother planted a garden on Cota Street. My father tried to believe his boss paid him what he was worth. He was anxious. He wore his work boots through to the floor.
My brother and I stood beside him as he picketed in the parking lot of the mill where he had worked for fifteen years. We were out of school for the summer. I fished for sea-run cutthroat trout in Goldsborough Creek with a homemade fishing pole. My father’s workmates did not grow angry and throw fists in the air. They held their signs in a deep, reserved silence. The price of lumber declined. Manufacturing moved overseas. Somewhere inside of them the workers wanted to believe the owners had hearts—that fairness would overcome. But the men with the money were long gone. Large tracts of land lay abandoned and muddy. The picket lines were futile. The damage was done. Greed won out. And the land could no longer support us.
Students from the state college poured salt in open wounds. They spit on our father’s work trucks and protested a century too late. They didn’t see the difference between loggers and the multimillion-dollar corporations. Thousands of men and women were out of work. The students didn’t understand. They didn’t know the children who waited in cabins without electricity and trailers without toilets. They didn’t see the rotten vegetables of food bank food on scarred wooden tables or the long drives into town in rusty, rickety vehicles. They fought to protect the northern spotted owl, and old-growth timber that was mostly, already gone—that accounted for little of the logging companies’ profits. Their parents paid their bills. They used the big words they learned in classrooms. I furiously wondered how they could think they were so much better than us.
The investors laughed, slapped each other on the back, and made plans for their logging companies in Latin America. Union activists for indigenous people printed books of songs and poetry in resistance. They didn’t want to give up their land. But the union workers were mysteriously shot down on street corners. Old games. Old tricks. Blood soaked into the soil of Oaxaca.
The college students in Olympia eventually put down their chains and protest signs. They moved on to a new fad. They went back to their drum circles and smoked the marijuana that we sold to them—that our parents had grown to feed and clothe us in the sparse new economy. Cota kids got locked up so that college students could get stoned and travel the 101 loop on bicycles. They wore expensive clothing made from hemp. Ate vegan health bars and refused to shower.
They were very proud of their body hair and pale dreadlocks.
The remaining five hundred pairs of northern spotted owl nested in the hollowed-out cavities of old-growth, coniferous timber. They huddled close to the trunks of the Douglas fir. They blended with the bark and the shadows. The big trees were gone. Aggressive barred owls moved into the clear-cuts. A small group of stricken biologists considered the word defeat.
Unemployment rates in the logging towns jumped above state and national levels. The economy moved out. Methamphetamines moved in. Logging roads were closed to the public. Meth labs were expensive to clean up. Dealers left the waste behind when they were done. There were abandoned travel trailers and buckets of foul-smelling liquid tha
t could kill. Workers in hazard suits cleaned it up. Rates of domestic violence rose. Families became fractured. The rain poured down relentlessly. But there were some things the water just could not wash away.
Teenagers got pregnant at alarming rates—the highest rates in the nation. But there were no immaculate conceptions in the city of David. Arguments about whose fault it was were lost in the cries of the next generation of hungry babies. The children were talked about in big-city newspaper articles as unwanted vermin. As we were raking her leaves, Mrs. Esworthy told us that kids in timber towns “breed like rabbits.” She was tired of her tax dollars going toward our welfare benefits.
Colin watched my body tense as I grew red in the face. It was more salt in more open wounds. He glared warningly. I swallowed and said nothing. I avoided her gaze. She pulled her polar fleece close around her neck. Colin told her we were finished. We walked down the long driveway with our money, stood in a bend of the road, and smoked reservation cigarettes before heading home in silence. I stared at the ground and clenched my jaw in soundless anger that betrayed nothing. It was a long walk back to town.
My father’s work boots stood by the door while he slept through the daylight. He still worked swing shift—but not at the mill. My father’s work boots stood for something that I wasn’t sure about anymore. The security leaked from them. His assurance left along with his pride. His stories were fading. Grandpa passed away from lung cancer. He had breathed in wood dust for too many years. Mother left soon after. Her garden wilted. My blood boiled with the memories of our ancestors. But the stories of the angry prisoners and the deaths of the revolutionary Wobblies were finished. Long ago, the blood had dried and hardened. It was a different color now.
In the new bedroom community, my father was no longer a man, and this hurt him. Hard work didn’t matter. He must learn to serve the picky tourists. He took retail and service jobs that didn’t pay well or offer health insurance. His strong shoulders withered. He stayed out late into the night trying to make a living. He squinted over his books in the morning. His step became shuffled. He said nothing, over and over and over again. His shame filled up the house on Cota Street. I breathed it in as I slept.
As I got older, I learned to love my father in a different way. His fleeting existence made him transitory. And because of this, perhaps, I loved Jimmy James Blood before I ever saw him. The look of his face or the sound of his voice didn’t matter. I liked what happened when the other Cota kids said his name. Their eyes got brighter, and their smiles showed bad teeth. The weariness and indignity backed off their faces. They were proud for a moment. Finally, their very existence was not a burden. A certain power clung to accounts of him. His presence offered a peculiar new feeling to Cota Street. I knew little about him. His reality eluded me. He was from Angel Road back in the hills. He dropped out of school long ago. He was not reluctant. He wore fourteen-eye oxblood boots.
I finally saw him on a summer night—those boots planted with firm arrogance on the pavement in a dying, industrial town. He stood in the parking lot of the All Night Diner. He looked me in the eye and nodded an affirmation: Yes. It is true. All of it. Of course it would be the Fighter Boy from the playground so long ago. Grown up and smirking. He remembered everything. An ocean of writhing, living blood surged between us. It enveloped the parking lot. It discolored the moon. This time the wind did not steal his words from me. Our intention lay naked and squalling in bright red newborn blood. It was dangerous and confusing. But there was no choice.
We were fighters. We were born for it . . . Jimmy James Blood had a whole crew. And a shaved head.
4
FOURTEEN-EYE OXBLOODS
Later (after Annie died). After Brady rolled his Galaxie and Duane burned down the I.W.A. building, I left and took the boots with me.
The fourteen-eye oxbloods were left over from a time that was growing indistinct and far away—a time when Jimmy James could strut into just about any place downtown and everyone turned to watch. The boots were from the time when all us Cota kids knew everything. We held our futures in our laps. They were lean pieces of raw meat hanging tenaciously on to bones and cartilage. We took bites cautiously. We chewed warily. We babied rotten molars and poked out elbows to protect our little portion. We savored the taste of blood in our mouths—the flavor of our destinies.
The fourteen-eye oxbloods were scuffed and muddy and covered in elk blood. I couldn’t stand to think of leaving them in the closet and having them found—unpolished. They would be too big of a prize for the Cota kids. Colin let every one of those rats inside the front door. They filled the empty rooms with loud music and cigarette smoke. They stole everything they could while Colin closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and got high. He didn’t care much about who was around or what they did. He paid attention to his alcohol, his needles, and global politics. He sighed and let everything go. His black hair grew long and curled at the ends. His black Irish blue eyes were vague and red-rimmed. His body detached. He was nineteen. It was finally too much for him.
I was afraid the Cota kids might take the oxblood boots and use them in a black magic spell. I was afraid they might take them and wear them and spoil everything. They would mock their old leader. They would burn the boots in an angry ceremony—all their respect turning to disappointment and loss. I didn’t want the Cota kids to own a piece of anything from that time: the time that was growing hazy in my mind—the time when Jimmy James could walk with such a proud posture of freedom.
I wanted to have the fourteen-eye oxbloods near me—to be able to touch them. I needed the comfort of the leather that had molded to the contours of his ankles. I yearned for the knowledge of how he walked: straightforward and solid—as if he were ready to die for what he believed in.
I tossed the boots in the back of my pickup. I slid my suitcase in over top. The boots scraped along the metal of the bed and nestled into a corner. I bit my lip to keep the tears from coming. The taste of blood reminded me I was alive.
In the house, I stared at the ceiling of the bathroom after I brushed my teeth. The Sheetrock was crumbling in spots. There was a pull-down ladder above me. It allowed access to the crawl space where Colin and I once hid with a fifth of gin. There was a broken window at the end of the crawl space. Colin had kicked the glass out joyously. He’d been drunk and having a fit. “We’ll find our own way,” he’d told me proudly. He’d kicked his boot through the glass to prove he would swallow his future whole—the blood and raw muscle would settle into his hot belly.
I remembered that day. We had clung to a sick euphoria from the cheap liquor.
Crouching in the hot crawl space, Colin had turned to me and grinned. And before I could stop him, he’d jumped through the broken glass and out the window. I’d screamed his name drunkenly and crawled on my belly toward the light of the window. The piney gin odor had curdled in my nostrils. I had peered over the windowsill and expected to see him sprawled out and broken-legged at the bottom. But he’d been laughing and stomping his feet on the broken glass. And yelling for me to follow. I’d glared at him and stayed put.
For a few months, the crawl space was a good hangout. On black nights we stared out at the stars together—shoulder to shoulder out the broken window. Before Mother left, we slept outside to get away from the house on Cota Street—the stress and despair that made our throats close up. We put bottles of beer into our coat pockets and walked to the park. We slapped at mosquitoes. Back then we still wondered what would happen to us. Back then I still wondered what Colin had meant by “our own way.”
But now, after everything, I didn’t think about what was to come. I threw my toothbrush into my canvas backpack. I woke my bewildered father. I told him I’d be back. He looked at me as if I were speaking to him across a great distance of wilderness filled with a thick, swirling, gray fog. I didn’t say I loved him. Neither of us put words to our thoughts—they were too fluttery and numerous.
I walked numbly on the dirt path through the fron
t yard. More car parts would soon nestle inside the moldy picket fence that had fallen inward. Colin would set them there. The grass would grow through them.
I knew that as my father watched me drive away he wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about Mother leaving the same way: hurriedly, distractedly, and with assurance.
That day I left the house on Cota Street. I left Colin’s broken window, our battered acoustic guitar, and a shelf of priceless records. I packed nothing but a few clothes and notebooks. I filled my truck suddenly and with little thought toward the future. I left with strong shoulders, healthy skin, freckles, and tan lines. I was youth and versatility. I was wisdom and tenacity. I was smiling and sobbing. I was leaving. I didn’t really feel alive.
I drove through Eastern Washington with a weight resting on my chest—a cloth bag filled with fishing lead. I drove through Idaho with a tense knot between my shoulder blades. My muscles were granite. I tried rubbing at the anxiety with my fingertips. It wouldn’t go away.
In Montana, the sun went down. I was alone, and it was dark, and those big long hills rolled on and on into forever. There was a prairie fire—the tall grass was burning. Black smoke hovered in the night sky. The hills loomed on both sides of the interstate. Glowing orange patches like hell seeped up through the earth to capture me. The full moon kept watch. The gloomy smoke and the glow from the fire made a dense screen between its light and my truck. The smoke was tinged with shadows—burnt and black around the edges. I did not hide from the moon. I drove faster. It was big and like a ghost. It called to me. I took my eyes away from the snaking asphalt to stare.
The smoke drifted in through the cracks in my truck. It was hot—acrid hotness like leaning over glowing coals with your whole body. I took my shirt off because I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was lonely on the interstate. Nobody could see me.
Vera Violet Page 2