Dad wanted to go up high where the fossils lay imbedded in silt. Brady, Fitz, and I went with him. My father was a man of few words. He gestured hesitantly through the screen of trees at a doe and her yearling. He didn’t feel his legs as he climbed. He tried to walk out of his misery in the timber company land. We all wondered if a stranger from overseas would buy it. We knew we were living on borrowed time. We knew that soon lawn mowers and fertilizers and BMWs would crowd the forested floodplain. We searched for small, hidden meadows where deer ate grass. We found still ponds where temporarily landlocked sea-run cutthroat got fat. The sunshine settled into our bones—it loosened a few tears. They fell without our noticing. We forgot about the crammed church and the small, hasty funeral. The people who didn’t know. We tried to eat our bread and meat and look down the sides of the canyon—hear the Skokomish River—watch for La Llorona. My molars throbbed. I threw my food down angrily. I sat across from Brady at a boulder. Some part of our grief was shameful—because of how my brother lived. And then how he died. Because we were not only mourning the loss of my only brother. We were also, in a sense, grieving for the great damage of a life wasted.
I lay down on the rocks. I couldn’t look at the men around me. I missed Annie and Monique and Mima and finally, earth shatteringly: Mother. A stick dug into my side. I didn’t move. We were quiet as the sunshine warmed us. Calm and sad and muted—afraid that the sound of our voices would take the light away. We would ruin it somehow. I tried to think of Granny—how her leathery face had howled about the family name—the loss of the grandson whom she had carried such desperate hopes for.
A bleak emptiness lay where all the screaming had been—the engine with its fan belt off, the transmission knocking. All the anger subsided into shaky, frantic fear that paralyzed my body as I twisted on the rocks. I felt injured and angry. My mind swirled with David and my memories. The good and the bad—the complex warehouse of unrecorded facts. I was an immigrant who could never go back. I did not belong anywhere. I wanted a sacred place to hold my head high. The ancient Chinook salmon fossils watched. The king salmon had been caught in the midst of spawning. Their images stayed encased in the crumbling rock. They had been there a million years. Dad kept staring at the swallows diving in and out of their holes in an embankment. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He cleared his throat as if to speak. But nothing came out.
I thought about Brady getting fired. How they’d asked him a lot of questions and saw Fitz’s shaved head when he came to tell him about Colin, and that I was back in town. His supervisors looked closely at his tattoos—the patches on his jacket. They remembered reading about Jimmy James in the newspaper. They told Brady not to come back.
I’d been packing his Bronco with my things.
Fitz had enlisted. He was going to be an army ranger—a ground troop. He would be dead soon. Or like the others who came back wary and broken. He knew there was no oil left. And they would use his blood to get more. The two would mix together in a black-and-red oxblood lake.
I thought about that color—how it meant good and bad things at the same time. Like the blood at birth. But how birth sometimes meant death. And how the man at the library so long ago described crude oil spilled out over water on a river delta in Nigeria. And the sunset over it while it burned. And the low beams turned the polluted water into a churning red with dark shadows.
Joey was going to join Brady as soon as the ferry docked in Bellingham. Nadine didn’t answer her phone anymore.
“If everything works out, you can go to Montana with us,” I coaxed Dad quietly. I was thinking of Monique and my new nephew, Colin James. Dad didn’t answer. He handed me a letter and a handgun instead. The letter was folded three times. He told me to read it later.
I knew Dad would never leave the hills. For better or worse. He would take his insurance money and buy supplies. He would hunt his own food. Cook over an open fire. He would sniff at the boundaries—view the strange houses that popped up with astonishing speed. He would shake his head at all the people—their thin skin and cruel stupidity. He would sneak back to his cabin like a beaten dog and keep his mouth shut. He would grow strange and tireless in his bitter solitude. He would wait.
The machine was up and running smoothly. It was oiled with Annie’s and Colin’s blood.
All thoughts of a future had long ago been buried in cement.
I got up and stared at the fish. I thought of the things Dad told me so long ago. About resources and devastation. About powerful men and trouble. And how if you didn’t fight, there could only be a land sucked dry and a world that was stormy and barren and drained. And then it would be too late—the fighting would be frightened desperation.
I remembered, It is worse to fight a man who is scared than to fight a man who is bigger than you. A man who has nothing to lose will do crazy things. Anything. Adrenaline takes over—the fight mode. He might bite and scratch and use scissors to stab you. Kick you in the groin. Stick your own switchblade in your back while you’re doubled over.
We left the salmon to keep watch from the rocks. There would be many storms to come. The fish saw the confusion, and the cold. They sensed the coming heat. The wind, and droughts, and floods. The hunger and despair. The mass extinctions and lack of adaptations. The ice age that would come whether we liked it or not. My father planned his cabin. It was becoming more and more clear.
From the trail down, I listened for the sounds of war to come along with the wet scent of the far-off, foggy sea air. The fresh blood mingled with the strong, painful scent of Douglas fir. I smelled the misty spring rain and heard the sounds of the train and felt the rumbling rumors. I listened for that scream in a cheating wind. That shout on the playground that I never heard.
That night I sat alone in the house on Cota Street. I waited for the sunset. And the time when every moment became one moment and then got lost. I had come up against a wall. I had to turn and fight. Luckily, I was a fighter. Luckily, I was born for it.
I closed my eyes against the waning light. I saw the blood dry and harden behind my eyelids. Colin’s stains were still on the cheap paint. I dreamed of legions of shaved heads and ships docking at discreet western ports. The men buried in the hills moaned and turned and grew restless. Soon, they would rise along with the rest. The stories circled my head. They agitated my every move. The images would not leave. It was in my blood. Words did not come easily. Words did nothing.
The body of the eighteen-year-old man from Angel Road was controlled in shackles and chains as the guards transported him from the county jail to the Washington State Correctional Facility in Matlock. They did not give him my letters. They photographed and documented his tattoos. They asked him questions about his affiliations. He knew they wasted precious time.
Jimmy James Blood’s shoulders sagged from the knowledge of what they did not know—at what they would not understand until it was too late. His spirit boiled from inside his handcuffs and clenched teeth.
Monique sat entombed in a lonely silence across state lines. She tuned her acoustic alone in her room. She knew I was coming to tell her the news. She wore black eyeliner to school. She did not look at her classmates directly. She did not look at anyone directly.
Dad watched from the tavern by the train tracks as his house burned down in hot flames—as the fire licked hungrily at the dry wood.
On the side of the highway, Brady’s Bronco sat with the engine running. Sam Cook sang “Summertime” as the windshield fogged up.
Dad watched the smoke make shadows on the cracked pavement of Cota Street. The flames burned the old blood, the broken glass, and the memories we left there: a bloodstained baseball bat and a pair of fourteen-eye oxbloods. It happened more quickly than I thought it would. I clambered up the ladder and into the crawl space. The window at the end had always been broken—the glass Colin had kicked through so long ago.
I jumped.
The ground flew at me. The stars shone brilliantly. I was screaming—my hair a golden flag of battle. The wind slapped my face—the cold air rolled up my body in waves. Just for a moment, I was the red-ocher glow and the sooty smoke. Before the fire overcame the wooden frame, I readied myself to run. Aerosol cans exploded as I hit the ground. I was frightened, but . . . I knew my boots would take the shock.