What would it look like? Beyond which horizon would this new world lie? These were the speculations that occupied N’ka, these were the reckonings that soothed his restless spirit in the face of limited experience. For long were the winters alone with his mother, ever watchful, ever restricting and amending his freedom as she saw fit. Longer still were the thaws, the interminable, hopeless days when the giants no longer fulfilled their promise. Who knew, perhaps their shaggy allies had left in search of their own new world. Perhaps the long valley brimming with buttercups was no longer enough for them. Perhaps this restlessness, this impulse to change and adapt, to seek out new places and new means was the true nature of the world.
“Maybe the elders were right,” N’ka dared to suggest, bracing himself for the inevitable blowback.
But his mother said nothing; she only stared distantly into the fire, working one hand inside of the other, as though for warmth.
“Maybe there’s another place,” N’ka pursued.
“Bah,” S’tka said. “You’re a dreamer. Our place in this world is not our own to decide. What do you suppose got us in this mess in the first place? I’ll tell you what: thinking there was anything more than what is in front of us. Look around you. What you see is what you get, child. The better you understand this, the more equipped you will be to survive it.”
“What do you know?” he said. “What have you ever seen but these mountains?”
“I’ve seen the ice,” she said.
“So have I, Mother.”
“You’ve seen nothing, boy. Have you ever seen a man ripped to shreds by a pack of wolves? Have you watched your husband beat to death by savages who looked no different than you and me?”
N’ka cast his eyes down.
“No,” she said. “You haven’t.”
But N’ka found it increasingly difficult to accept his mother’s limited concept of the world. He refused to believe that the possibilities were finite, that what you saw was what you got. His appetite could no longer be sated by the bland offerings of his mother’s limited belief system and experience. Ground squirrels and tree sloths were no longer enough to satisfy N’ka’s appetites.
Still, like a reasonable ten-year-old yearning for adulthood, the boy complied, a half-willing accomplice to their gradual surrender: hunting squirrels, stalking sloths, listening to stories that went nowhere but further into the past.
But all the while, N’ka’s mind was busy working on a plan. Someday, even if it took years, he would convince his mother to leave this place.
A Big Pat on the Back
When they were finally discharged, soldiers got a big pat on the back, maybe even a Purple Heart if they were lucky. Marine brass told them to keep their noses clean, they told them to stay away from drinking and drugs and gambling. They told them to mind your angry impulses, not to visit frustration on your spouse or kids. They told them that they were marines, that they would always be marines. They told them to drive on.
Never mind Dave’s hip. Never mind that his nerves were so severely fried that he actually thought he could smell them smoldering inside his head. Never mind that his emotional faculties were in ruin. Never mind that there were no official resources in place to help him integrate or re-orient himself to civilian or domestic life, no counseling to help prepare him for his forever changed life moving forward. They ran him back into the regular world, just like they ran him out there on patrol after patrol.
Never mind that his marriage was crumbling at the foundation, or that guilt was his relentless passenger. Guilt over the acts he’d committed, traumas that belonged to Dave alone. Guilt over his failure as a husband, his failure as a marine, his failure as a normally functioning human being in a hundred little ways every day. Guilt was the only meaningful connection Dave could seem to make once he rejoined civilian life. He couldn’t even make himself return phone calls from his war buddy Duane Barlow, and the voicemails stacked up:
You all right, buddy? Give me a call.
Hey, buddy. We need to talk.
Cartwright, you sonofabitch, don’t leave me hanging.
In his four months back in V-Falls, Dave hadn’t accepted a single invitation, not for a cup of coffee, or a game of darts, not from Jerome, who had reached out on a half-dozen occasions, not even from Coach Prentice, who was courting Dave for his new offensive coordinator and assistant coaching position. To call Dave anti-social was an understatement. Not only did he routinely duck old classmates and acquaintances in Red Apple and Vern’s, he avoided his own mother and brother. Just about every time somebody did manage to stop Dave, they thanked him for his service, and each time Dave fought the impulse to ask them if they had any earthly idea what they were thanking him for. What Dave wanted anymore—beyond quietude and dim light—was beyond his conception. On so many levels, he was no longer the man he once was. No longer was he sure of himself, no longer was he confident, no longer was he hopeful. His hands shook to where he could hardly hold a nail gun, or a cup of coffee. His sleep was tortured. He was wary of crowds. Christ, he hardly drove anymore because he was so terrified of being blown to shit, still haunted by the sudden blast of IEDs glittering along the shoulders, the wreckage and the remains scattered across the roadway. Arms and legs, and pretzels of twisted steel.
On only one occasion, when pressed, did Dave open up to Nadene about his experiences in the desert. It was an incident involving a Shiite boy, maybe ten or eleven, standing on the side of the road with no shirt on, and a green bandana over his face, who may or may not have been phoning coordinates ahead of their convoy.
“I could’ve given him the benefit of the doubt,” Dave said. “He was just a kid. A skinny little runt of a kid with his ribs poking out like a washboard.”
“You couldn’t take the chance,” said Nadene. “You had to protect the others.”
“But what if he wasn’t, Dino? What if he was just some kid, fooling around on the side of the road? What if that bandana was just to keep the dust out?”
“You did what you had to,” Nadene said.
“I did more than I had to, Dino. He couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds.”
Dave’s voice began to waver, as he clenched and unclenched his fist.
“Dino, that kid wasn’t fifteen yards away when I laid into him.”
“Shush, baby,” said Nadene.
“I nearly tore him in half,” Dave said.
“It’s over now,” she said reassuringly. “It’s not your fault.”
What else could Dave ask of Nadene beyond that? Not only was she willing to withstand his unpredictable moods, his days on end of silence and evasion, she was willing to forgive him for taking the life of a child. So why had he been pushing her away?
The night Dave told Nadene about the boy in the bandana was the same night Bella was conceived. For two hours in bed, they talked themselves into it. Maybe the only way to forget the dead left behind was to bring somebody new into the world. What could heal death, if not life? They could finally have the family they’d been putting off. That would put them back on the right track. If it was a boy, they could call him Gordy, after Coach Prentice.
“But no football,” Nadene insisted.
“Fair enough,” conceded Dave.
And so, after eight years of marriage, though the proceeding days had been some of their darkest, Dave and Nadene, against their better judgment, decided to start a family. And they left little margin for error that night. They would not leave the bed for the next eight hours, making love on no less than three occasions during the night, and again shortly after sunrise, Nadene rousing Dave from his sleep to mount him.
Breakfast was eggs and toast and coffee. Dave and Nadene ate on the back porch, looking out over the greenhouse to the studio. That was the first time since 2003 that Dave remembered feeling hopeful.
But Dave and Nadene didn’t even make it to lunch before Dave blew a gasket over something, and soon they found themselves in another shouting match, until Nadene f
inally ran off to her mother’s house. Dave stayed in bed for two days after that.
N’ka
They sat by the fire, mother and son, picking their teeth with slivers of spruce, unloosing the stringy flesh caught there. For nearly a week, they’d been feeding on the big buck that N’ka ambushed in the meadow.
N’ka, the mighty hunter, and still only a boy.
They spoke less and less as the seasons passed, though often their thoughts seemed visible to each other. They were twelve winters removed from U’ku’let’s death, now but a distant memory to S’tka, and nothing more than an old story to N’ka, one told less and less frequently with the passage of time. Any mental picture he’d once had of his father faded long ago. Gone were the days when N’ka plied his mother for details about his father’s exploits.
N’ka looked the part of a man now, lean and sinewy and hard. He walked with his shoulders straight and his chin up. The downy hair of his face had grown coarse and dark, the hair of a man, not a child. And like a man, he’d grown restless. And who could blame him? Every winter seemed to grow leaner.
The giants had never returned from the north to gorge on the grasses and scratch their wooly backs. They had become legends, like his mother’s clan. This was the valley of the forgotten, the valley of the dead and the forsaken.
“Mother,” he said. “You must listen to me. The time has come.”
“The time for what?” she said, irritably.
“The time to leave this place. To find our clan.”
“Bah,” she said. “Our clan is nothing but so many ghosts on the ice. Follow them and you will only share their fate.”
“You don’t know that,” he said.
“I heard it on the wind,” she said. “They are ghosts, boy, dead and gone.”
“They are alive.”
“Bah,” she said. “Don’t delude yourself, child. They are nothing but bones strewn on the ice by now.”
“What makes you so sure?” he demanded.
“Because they are fools.”
“So, what if they are gone?” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not somebody or something else out there for us.”
“There is nothing for us,” she said.
“Says you,” he said.
The young man stared into the embers, his thoughts troubled. This was not a life. Somewhere out there, beyond the ice, men were gathered in a circle, hollowing the tips of their spears in readiness, talking nervously amongst themselves before the hunt, their hearts beating fast, their nerves buzzing, eyes and ears and hearts attuned as they hollowed their points.
And when the hunt finally commenced, they would relinquish their fear and give themselves whole to the heat of the pursuit, throw themselves at the necessity of the kill, risking life and limb. They would hoot and they would holler. They would besiege and taunt their massive adversary, their hearts beating in their throats, their arms and legs electric, all of them in concert together like one living thing.
That is what it meant to be alive. And N’ka had yet to feel it.
III
The Book of the Living
Darla Dayton; Dale’s Diner
“Did Dave Cartwright really lose his way up there, mentally speaking? I really can’t say for sure. Really, nobody had a way of knowing, beyond the few people who actually made contact with him. It sure seemed to be the consensus around town that he was crazy, I mean that he was writing some kind of manifesto, and letting that little girl wander off untended, uncared for. That part I find hard to believe, personally. I saw him thirty different times with that little girl over the years, and it was pretty clear he was a good daddy. Not like some. He talked to her like an adult. He really took the time to explain things to her. I once heard him explain to her the difference between a diesel engine and a regular engine. Compression, ignition, injection. Wasn’t any wonder that child was so smart.
“But you know how people talk, especially people around here, nothing to do. Heck, half of them’s unemployed, or too old to work, and none of them’s very good at minding their own business either. And more than a few of them are just plain mean-spirited. I can’t count how many times I’ve caught customers talking about my mole—which is exactly why I don’t do nothing about it. So I can’t say whether he went bonkers up there, like they say.
“Sooner or later everything gets exaggerated. Stories just move from one person to another, and they have a way of growing. But usually, there’s a little bit of truth to them, don’t you think? This place here, it’s like the nerve center of V-Falls in a lot of ways. Nothing really happens that somebody isn’t talking about it at the counter, or in one of these booths. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say “Cave Dave,” I could take Thursdays off. But who’s to say how much of it’s fake news, and how much of it’s the truth? Doesn’t even seem to matter anymore.”
The Pull of the Unknown
Among recent changes in her dad’s behavior was the fact that he no longer obsessed over order and organization around the camp. Bella found tools lying carelessly about, firewood piled up willy-nilly, and tarps left unsecured to flap in the wind. The fire pit was heaping with ashes. The pots and pans were in disarray. The cave was a mess, with books strewn everywhere.
Her dad read ceaselessly, often muttering under his breath, or scribbling notes in the margins of library books, an offense that would have been unthinkable a few months prior. Unnerved by these new habits, Bella forced him to engage in frequent conversation.
“Maybe he won’t come back,” she said.
“Who?” said her dad, slumping before the dead fire.
“The ranger.”
She was standing at the edge of the bluff, scanning the canyon south to north for movement, just as he taught her.
“Maybe so,” he said, like he didn’t care one way or another.
“I hope Mr. Moseley comes back, though,” she said.
“Be careful what you hope for,” he said. “Mr. Moseley is not our friend, Bella.”
“He’s my friend,” she said. “Even if he’s not yours.”
All afternoon, Bella found that she was especially restless, and unable to focus.
“I’m bored,” she said.
“Go down to the meadow.”
“I’m sick of the meadow.”
“Then read a book.”
“I’m tired of reading. I’ve read all my books a gazillion times.”
“Hmph,” he said.
Bella felt the pull of the unknown, as though something out there was calling her. So, she ventured east beyond her dad’s set boundaries, winding through the stunted forest for a half-mile until she emerged from the trees onto a bald ridgeline, high above a broad, deep valley. She recognized the place immediately. Here, the great herds of mammoth once came down from the steppe to graze. Here, people had once eked out an existence until the place would no longer sustain them, and they began their journey west, across the ice.
How different would her own life in the mountains have looked had she never known anything else, not known her own bedroom, her friend Hannah B., whom she hardly remembered anymore, her Cousin Bonnie, her Auntie Kris and Uncle Travers, and Uncle Jerry. What if she had never known the thrill of the bustling playground, or the comfort of her grandma’s well stocked refrigerator? Bella wished she’d never known her mother’s embrace. She wished she’d never known a dresser full of clothing, or the satisfaction of a warm, dry, orderly house on a rainy day. She wished she’d never known the luxury of sitting in her pajamas in front of the TV on a Saturday morning watching Cartoon Network for hours at a time, eating Pop-Tarts and Rice Krispies. What did Saturday even signify anymore? It was no different than Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday. If only she’d never experienced what it was to look forward to something.
The prospect of being seen by someone as she stood atop the ridge was thrilling. There were days when Bella was sure she was invisible, when even her dad didn’t see her, and days when she really, truly did
wish that she were a cat, instead of merely acting the part. Yes, she’d gone whole days without uttering a word, licking her hands, and scratching her back on trees. But it always felt like pretending.
Bella lingered all afternoon on the ridgeline, giving herself to the otherness. When she awoke from her reverie, she began working her way back toward the cover of the forest. She was halfway to the tree line when something at her feet seized her attention. She stooped to pick it up with both hands. The object was lighter and more delicate than she expected, bleached, and smooth with age, but well preserved, the mandible still fixed precariously below the bun: a human skull, its forehead marred by a three-inch cleft, as though struck with blunt force by a hatchet, or a rock.
“U’ku’let,” she whispered beneath her breath.
S’tka
Now in his fifteenth year, N’ka was moodier than ever. Half of the time he wouldn’t do as S’tka instructed, and on those occasions when he complied in executing the simplest of tasks—tending the fire or getting water—the act was usually accompanied by a plaintive sigh or some form of grumbling protest. Some days the boy slept until the sun was directly overhead, frequently awakening with a persistent erection. He usually spent a good portion of the afternoon hours skulking and grousing and lounging about the cave, lazily scratching his chest.
Beneath the surface of his boredom, S’tka could see that he was restless. His yearning was only natural. It was her own resistance to change, her own aversion to risk that kept them from a more expansive life.
Legends of the North Cascades Page 20