“I’m not going up there again, Ma. Dave made it abundantly clear I was not welcome.”
“What if something’s wrong?”
“He’s a big boy.”
“Bella’s not,” she said.
“We’ve already sent CPS and a ranger up there,” said Travers. “There’s not much else we can do.”
“You can go up there again.”
“I’ve been up there twice already, and neither time has done a damn bit of good. Remember, Ma, I got her back once already. Frankly, I can’t promise he won’t shoot me if I go up there again.”
“Something is wrong, I can feel it.”
“I don’t doubt something is wrong,” he said. “But I wouldn’t worry for their safety. They’re pretty dug in up there, and pretty well stocked. Dave knows what he’s doing.”
“Travers, please.”
“There’s just no way, Ma. I’ve got like fifteen meetings this week: the housing authority, three different contractors, the bank, the ownership group, four buyers.”
“So you’re too busy, is that what you’re telling me? You’ve got bigger, more important things to worry about than your brother, the one who taught you how to throw a football? The brother who—”
“That’s not fair, Ma,” said Travers. “You know I love Dave, and you know how much I care about Bella. I tried, Ma. I brought her down here, I put her back in school, I fed her and clothed her. And all she did was run back to him. Bella and Dave are outside my jurisdiction at this point.”
“Will you at least go to church with me on Sunday and pray?”
“I’m in the city all weekend. I’ll pray from my hotel. Look, Ma, I’ve got an eight-thirty up on the ridge with the roofers, so I’ve gotta run. I love you.”
Travers was right, of course. There was little if anything to be done that hadn’t already been attempted. But Judy would’ve been lying had she said she didn’t wish that Travers were more like Davey. Davey would’ve gone up there, she knew it.
Judy was restless after she got off the phone with Travers. She didn’t want to be alone. If not with somebody else, she wanted to be around other people. She thought about going to Dale’s for breakfast, but the food gave her heartburn every time. She thought about calling Carol Trembley from church, but Carol could be so exhausting sometimes. Finally, Judy decided to go to Red Apple and do her shopping for next week.
She dressed without showering, then put on lipstick, and made sure her checkbook and reading glasses were in her purse before she walked out the door.
The hour was still early enough that Judy got one of the non-handicap spots right out front of Red Apple. The Elfendahl girl was working the only open register. As Judy trundled her cart down the cereal, baking goods, and convenient breakfast aisle, a large, familiar, slightly obese gentleman, roughly Davey’s age, addressed her.
“Hey, Mrs. C.”
God, it had been twenty years since anyone called her Mrs. C.
“Who’s that?” she said.
“Joe Wettleson, from Ace Hardware. Dave’s pal from high school. I played right guard for two years for VFHS. I blocked for him. Dave got all the glory. But hell, he deserved it. Dave was a stud.”
“Oh, of course . . . Joe,” Judy said, though she still couldn’t place him.
“What do you hear from Dave?” said Joe. “Last I heard, he was living in the mountains or something.”
Judy could feel herself blushing. She never knew what to say in these situations. Was she supposed to make Dave’s life up there sound like something more than it was? How could she possibly spin the situation to play the proud mother? It was impossible. Oh, he’s still living in a cave. They’ve got a wonderful view.
Perhaps Joe sensed her discomfort, for he quickly filled the silence.
“I’ve got a ton of respect for Dave’s service,” he said. “I’ll bet he was a hell of a soldier.”
“Don’t ever let him hear you call him that,” she said, relieved to re-frame the conversation. “He was a marine.”
Joe smiled. “I never did understand their beef with each other.”
“Me neither,” said Judy.
“Well, if you see him, tell him I said hi. Tell him he should pop into Ace sometime. He owes me that much for all the punishment I took clearing his path every Friday night. Be great to see him. I’d love to buy him a beer and hash out old times.”
“I certainly will, Joe,” said Judy.
“See you around, Mrs. C.”
The brief exchange left Judy feeling better somehow. She guessed it was just the knowing that there was still some good will out there for Davey despite everything. Her spirits were buoyed somewhat as she wheeled past the pharmacy toward the deli counter.
By lunchtime, with a little help from prayer, and her now daily cigarette, smoked surreptitiously on the back porch so that nosey Rose Van Hooris from across the street couldn’t see her, Judy was able to ward off her anxiety.
All she could do was pray.
S’tka
That spring, for the first time in S’tka’s lifetime, the giants did not lumber south after the thaw, they did not amble down the broad valley to graze on the green grasses, their tusks digging at the soft earth, their big, shaggy ears twitching against the onslaught of mosquitoes. S’tka and N’ka waited on the ridge north of the bluff, spears sharpened and at the ready for the appearance of their ancient benefactors. They clung to their hope, they braced their ears for trumpeting in the distance, but their patience was not rewarded. Where were those restless bulls, ready to stomp them to smithereens? Where were those tusky upstarts to challenge the alpha, while the calves were left to wander the ice alone, vulnerable and unsuspecting? Surely they would come eventually, as they’d always come since the beginning of time. Perhaps the mild early spring offered no sense of urgency. Perhaps they would come yet. Perhaps the giants were simply taking their sweet time getting there.
Oh, how S’tka wished she could take her own sweet time, schedule her own existence, as though the endless progression of day and night was something she could ever bargain with. That their adversary and unwilling patron should never arrive was unthinkable. For the coming of the giants was an absolute, like the inevitable dawn of day, and the inexorable shroud of night. And yet, when the wildflowers exploded in the valley, and the days grew longer and warmer, the giants were still not to be found scratching their backs on the great pillars of rock, or idly trumpeting in the meadows.
For days and weeks and months, S’tka and N’ka awaited their arrival with mounting unease, routinely checking the wallows and muddy sluices of the bottomlands. And when they were not scouring the basin, they roosted at the edge of the bluff, waiting.
“What if they don’t come?” said the boy.
“They will come.”
“How do you know?”
“Because some things never change.”
This assurance rang hollow even to S’tka’s own ears. Because all around her she saw change: the shortened season, the melting ice, the proliferation of forests and grasses in the hollows once mired in ice. One might’ve easily suspected these symptoms were harbingers of life, not portents of starvation.
“Maybe we should go to them,” said the boy, leaning upon his spear as he stared out over the bluff into the long, wide valley sprawling north.
“No, we will wait for them,” she said. “Trust me, nothing good ever came of going.”
And so they continued their interminable wait. Anxiously on the bluff, restlessly, desperately, hopelessly they waited, until the warm season began its not-so-gradual retreat, and S’tka was forced to acknowledge that once again the Great Provider had failed them. Had she failed the giants, too? Had they starved? Had the weather prevented their migration?
“What if they never come again?” said N’ka.
“Shush,” she told him.
“Are we to wait again in another year?” he said. “Just sit here and starve, and hope for something that may never come?”
“Bah!” he said. “Why must we always wait? You say no good comes from going. But I say no good comes from waiting.”
“That is because you are still a child, still impatient,” she said.
Were it not for the roots and ground squirrels and the sloths, were it not for the lone mule deer, mangy and half-starved that wandered into the meadow below the bluff, S’tka and N’ka might themselves have starved that winter. But they soldiered on doggedly, huddled about the fire in the shelter of the cave, sustaining themselves on the promise of stories, the stories of the mighty herds that once sustained them, and the great choreography of the hunt, which joined their feeble spirits and puny bodies into a single entity, greater and more intelligent than any giant.
And so, as another lean winter beat down upon them, they took refuge and comfort in their stories.
When the Great Provider created this world for the people, she made it out of mud, and ash, and ice. She formed the rivers and the mountains to shelter them. Then, she made the sun and the moon to protect them, and watch over them, and count their days for them, so they could mark the eternal march of time. There was a rhythm to the world, and that rhythm was a human heartbeat.
But that is not to say that the world was made for people alone. The Great Provider imbued all the things of the world with a spirit: the wind, the clouds, the rocks. Even the ice.
The Great Provider made a promise to the things of the world, and that promise was that so long as the sun and the moon circled the horizons, she would provide for all things. For the plants she would provide nourishment from the soil, for the great, roaming beasts of the lowlands, she would provide grasses and roots and shrubs in abundance. And for the people, she would provide fire and water, and those same furry beasts in endless supply to feed and clothe them on the ice.
And that was the promise of the world, passed along through the epochs on the tongues of men and women.
We are not alone. We are watched over and cared for. So long as the sun and the moon circle the horizons.
The Damage
Books, books, and more books. Books in stacks, and toppled piles, books dog-eared, face-down, and spine-split, books morning, noon, and night. Here was Dave, in the grips of a mania that apparently no amount of knowledge could appease. He no longer busied himself about camp, stowing and organizing and preparing for eventualities. Where he once cut and stacked, sawed and plowed, he now read and read and read, pausing only to feed his daughter, and relieve himself, one area in which he had grown lazy in recent weeks, for the mouth of the cave was beginning to stink of piss. The weather was getting colder, and Dave could feel the change of seasons in his aching hip, which lately took half a day to warm up.
Their most recent trip to the public library, nine days ago—upon which occasion Bella insisted on combing her hair, and wearing her least muddy pants, and walking thirty feet behind Dave who lugged a lumpy, construction grade garbage sack in addition to his stuffed backpack—had yielded some twenty-three dollars in fines. Bella had gone to great lengths to keep her distance from Dave during their visit, as though she was embarrassed by him. And frankly, Dave didn’t blame her. He wasn’t so old, nor so checked out, that he couldn’t remember the indignities and insecurities of childhood.
They left with no less than thirty-five pounds of books, on subjects ranging from genealogy to meteorology to quantum mechanics to cat breeding to football. There was hardly any room left in his pack for supplies, though he managed to squeeze in bouillon cubes, multi-vitamins, iodized salt, herbal tea, a pound-and-a-half of raisins, and, for the first time in his life, a pair of reading glasses.
In the dank of the cave, or by the light of the fire, reading glasses perched upon the bridge of his nose, Dave comprehended wormholes, waded through epochs of geologic strata, wondered at the miracle of genetic design, and experienced Super Bowl III through the eyes of Broadway Joe.
But most of Dave’s reading was reserved for his new favorite subject: Iraq. Not Iraq as Dave came to know and abhor it. Not the hellish nursery of his worst nightmares, or the sandy course of his psychological and spiritual undoing. Not the Iraq of blasted cities, and maimed children, and improvised explosives concealed within the carcasses of dead animals. Not the sight of global trauma, and misplaced ideologies, and craven greed, but Iraq as the fertile crescent, the Garden of Eden that the Sumerians had once deemed it; a land of wheat on the edge of the great sea.
Of all the mortal sins, of all the human follies, it seemed to Dave that greed had done the most damage.
Reacting and Pretending
Dave had been home from his final tour in Iraq less than twenty-four hours before he officially lost his shit. No excuses, but looking back, maybe he could have used a palate cleanser between six months of combat, a week in the hospital, and full immersion into a domestic life he had lost all familiarity with. It was almost like having amnesia, like having to learn everything all over again when it came to dealing with other people, particularly civilian people. So Dave mostly defaulted to a rusty auto-pilot in which the world was a dull blur of reacting and pretending.
When he deplaned, hobbling down the jetway stairs on crutches, and saw Nadene standing at the edge of the tarmac in Bellingham on that unseasonably dry afternoon in late fall, her a good ten pounds skinnier than when he’d left, all made up with her red shoes and a print dress he didn’t recognize, Dave’s heart seized up like a pulled muscle. Though there was fifty yards between them, time enough for him to prepare, it felt like the journey was over in three steps, despite his crutches. But when Nadene threw her arms around him, Dave’s whole body went stiff as a cadaver.
Of course, he was happy, at least as much as the idea of happiness was still discernible to him. Of course, he was relieved to be out of that stinking hellhole desert. Yes, Nadene should have been a sight for sore eyes. Yes, Dave should have crutched those final steps a little faster to reach her waiting embrace. But something, or many things, perhaps, all of them beyond his comprehension, held him back.
God, he prayed for some kind of transition, for a week of decompression alone in the wettest, furthest-from-Iraq environment possible: Cameroon, the Hoh Rain Forest, Equatorial Guinea. A motel room, a hut, anywhere wet and alone with a stack of books, and a TV, and a bottle of Advil. Christ, even a rubber room somewhere for a couple of days might have helped.
The town of Vigilante Falls, the house he remodeled with his own hands—everything felt smaller upon his return. Every interaction with Nadene seemed to start off benignly enough, but quickly elevated to a dangerously charged state before anyone knew what happened. Chalk it up to nerves, or combat fatigue, or just the unattainable imperative of being alone, but Nadene’s voice, her questions, even her physical closeness became nearly unbearable.
Dave couldn’t even remember what had started them arguing that first night back, but by the time it was over, the quarrel covered a dizzying amount of ground, and looking back, it did irreparable damage. In the end, Nadene stormed out of the bedroom. He literally remembered seeing red. The whole goddamn world had been bleeding red. How dare Nadene give him hell for being absent after what he’d just been through. As though he’d had any damn choice in the matter.
After their quarrel, Dave and Nadene each had apologized, and Dave had cried like a damn baby, until Nadene held his head close to her chest and stroked his hair, and Dave promised he’d get a handle on himself, and tried through his sobs to articulate what was going on inside of him. And then it had been Nadene’s turn to cry, and Dave’s turn to hold her close, and stroke her hair mechanically.
“We’ll get past this,” he said.
“I know we will,” she said.
But two hours later, they were at it again, and Nadene stormed out of the house before he could stop her. And when she returned, somewhere around noon the following day, eyes bloodshot, hair tangled, Dave remembered distinctly wishing that she hadn’t come home.
“My little sister was soft-hearted, always had been. She hardened up in the end, I suppose, but before that, she always tried to save things, ever since we were kids. Taking in stray dogs, watering dead plants, tending to injured squirrels. Nadene trapped spiders in glasses and released them outdoors. Wouldn’t even kill a mosquito if it was biting her. In summer, she’d stop in the middle of the road, didn’t matter whether there was a car coming or not, just to transport a caterpillar safely across to the shoulder, even though the caterpillars were a pestilence. She’d cup her hands and strain a wet moth out of her bathwater, and blow its wings dry for ten minutes, hoping it might fly again. Nadene went about springing mouse traps, and freeing houseflies from spider webs. She didn’t like to see things end, I guess.
“It was the same with broken things, whether it was toys, or knickknacks, or favorite mugs. Nadene never wanted to throw things away. She was convinced everything could be fixed. And that included Dave. Didn’t matter that it wasn’t easy. And it didn’t matter how anyone tried to talk her out of it. I’m not the first to point out that Nadene was stubborn, but she was patient, too, and maybe to a fault. My sister was slow to give up on anything. It was both a blessing and a curse.”
N’ka
The world as N’ka knew it was written on his mother’s face, all the struggle and endless worry could be read there in the blue crescents beneath her eyes, in the crow’s feet at her temples, and in the dual creases running deeply down her cheeks, as though they were there to contain her smile.
Then, there was the world as N’ka yearned to see it, a world of possibilities beyond the tedious business of mere continuance, a world of glorious, lusty hunts, and unimagined adventures, a vibrant world of other people, a predictably bountiful world, teeming with giants, a world that adhered to certain expectations, that could be counted upon to provide. Or better yet, a world that surpassed all expectation, a world that did not test their fortitude, or strain their belief at every turn.
Legends of the North Cascades Page 19