B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery (15 page)

Chapter 29

After crossing
the Lewis and Clark Bridge to Longview, Washington, the library caravan
followed Highway 4 downriver, through the little burg of Skamokawa to the
launch site at Vista Park, where Steamboat Slough and Skamokawa Creek branched
off from the Columbia River.

The community’s
main buildings were a riverfront inn, the last remaining authentic steamboat
landing on the Columbia, now on the national historic register, and Redmen
Hall, an old fraternal lodge with a politically incorrect name that was now a
museum.

For breakfast, Gerhard
Gerbils distributed a Kielbasa-on-a-Stick to each of the crew, and while
sitting on a gray drift log next to the launching ramp Pim managed to spray her
red T-shirt with yellow mustard.

All was
proceeding normally.

“This isn’t
quite what the real Corps of Discovery had to eat,” announced Sage, the page,
in his high, nasal voice, as he sat in the lotus position atop a riverbank stump
surrounded by weedy willow trees. Sage, a painfully thin, goateed Reed College
dropout of about 19 with jet-black hair to his waist and a single emerald stud
piercing his nose, fancied himself a critic, be it of food, theater, literature
or life. For this trip, his hair was in two long braids, which he thought
suggestive of a Chinook brave. Others saw him differently.

“It’s like he’s
a tall, dark Pippi Longstocking,” Pim whispered to Hester.

While Sage’s
comment was nothing more than a bored dig at the world, it was taken as a
challenge by three Reference Line workers perched together on a nearby boulder
who had been answering Lewis and Clark trivia questions ever since Rose
Festival opened.

“Actually, a
sausage encased in buffalo intestine was a favorite preparation of their guide,
Toussaint Charbonneau, who called it boudin blanc,” said Jeannette Nelson, a tall
and lean woman with salt-and-pepper shoulder-length hair and a perennial scowl.

“But on this
stretch of the river they’d have almost certainly have been eating wapato, a
starchy potato-like root that was a staple of the Chinook tribe,” chirped
Debbie Wilkes, whose mousy-brown pixie haircut framed a cherry-cheeked face.   

“That is, of
course, if they hadn’t traded for a fresh dog from one of the tribal villages,”
added Eva Temple, a Hillary Clinton look-alike, giving a smug, self-satisfied
look over the top of her tiger-striped reading glasses as she paused from
reading a slim volume of Baudelaire. “In fact, dog was a coveted staple for the
Corps of Discovery by this late juncture in their hardscrabble voyage across an
unforgiving wilderness.”

At this
pronouncement, several of the group paused to look skeptically at their
half-eaten kielbasas.

“Well, they do
often call this sort of thing a hot dog,” Linda Dimple said with a gulp.

“Oh, don’t
worry, they only make the best German sausage at the Wiener Dog!” Pim reassured
her.

“Sorry, did you
not want a historical précis on the Corps of Discovery diet?” Jeannette asked,
pointing her thin nose at Sage, who was yawning widely. “Maybe you were just
making idle conversation.”

Sage gave a
nervous chuckle and pointed his forefinger at his nose to affirm the latter.

At this
juncture, Candy Carmichael strode over from where she had completed supervising
the unloading of the canoes with the help of Bob Newall, the maintenance man,
who had ridden along and would drive the bookmobile down Highway 4 and across
the four-mile-long Astoria-Megler Bridge to meet them in Astoria.

“OK, listen up
everyone!” Candy shouted, straining to be heard over a breeze that had come up
out of the west. “We’ll need to average about 5 miles per hour in order to get
to our destination in time for the picnic the Wiener Dog will provide for us
and other library guests in Astoria. And that will be a special treat! Thanks
to some strings pulled by our own Ethel Pimala, we’ve obtained an old family
recipe from a gentleman who is a direct descendant of Toussaint Charbonneau, an
actual member of the Corps of Discovery. So our picnic dinner will be…” Here
she stopped to study a clipboard “ – a special sausage called boudin blanc,
with a side dish of wapato, which I’m told is like a Native American potato!”

All around, the
group shared stunned looks.

Linda Dimple
finally broke the silence in a small voice. “Do you think they’ll use real
buffalo intestine?”

“I thought it
was a salmon barbecue!” whined Jeannette Nelson.

“At least it’s
not roast rack of spaniel,” Sage wisecracked.

Hester, taking
comfort in knowing of a few good restaurants in Astoria, quietly sang,

“You say
to-MAY-to, I say to-MAH-to,

You say
po-TAY-to, I say wa-PAH-to…
”

She stopped when
Pim gave her the stink eye.

 Candy,
oblivious of the rumblings in the ranks, continued down her list of
announcements.

“And as you
might know, we have the benefit of some leadership today by Vance Boylston,
from the accounting office, who grew up on Lake Oswego and has paddled a canoe
there since he was in diapers, to hear Vance tell it. Please give him your full
attention as he tells a little about our route today and goes over some safety
tips.”

Boylston, a
fair-skinned, carrot-topped lump of a man who wore his official Assistant
Scoutmaster shirt from Troop 72, demonstrated how to put on life vests and
spoke for five minutes about paddling technique, how to balance the canoe and
strategies for a man-overboard rescue.

“And I think our
best route today will be to cross the river immediately, over to some of the
protected sloughs on the far side, out of this weather that seems to be blowing
up. The main thing is to get well out of the ship channel!” he bellowed, trying
to be heard over the rush of wind that continued to build.

“What did he
say?” Hester asked Pim, who was preoccupied with cinching a drawstring to keep
her woven pandanus hat from blowing away.

“Something about
how we should get well out in the ship channel!” Pim said distractedly.

Hester mulled
this advice. “Oh, I guess that’s how we catch the best current. That makes
sense.”

Boylston
concluded by passing out a folded paper to the designated lead paddlers for
each canoe. For Hester and Pim’s canoe, this was Sage, the page, who had won
the honor because of his long arms. Pim had already privately nicknamed him
Wilt the Stilt.

“I’m proud of
saving the library some money on this endeavor,” Boylston explained smugly. “I
was in Astoria for a conference last week and my favorite restaurant, the Pig ‘n’
Pancake, had this map of the Lower Columbia on their paper place mats. After my
group finished breakfast, I collected all the place mats! I know it doesn’t
have a lot of detail, but it ought to get us there.”

Hester looked at
him in alarm.

“Well, let’s
hope no killer reefs or giant whirlpools are covered by a gravy stain or a blot
of jelly, Captain Cook!” she said under her breath.

Chapter 30

“Pull! Pull!
Pull!”

Sage’s nasally
voice didn’t exactly inspire a Gold Medal performance, Hester thought as she
dipped her paddle into the cold and murky green water of the Columbia.

She and Pim were
in the last boat of the lineup heading out from the entrance of Steamboat
Slough into the wide waters of the main river at 10:20 that morning.

Hester felt a
sense of foreboding as they rounded a point of mossy rocks and suddenly got a
full view of the mighty river. It quickly widened from what reasonably looked
like a
river
to a four- or five-mile-wide windswept tideland pocked by
sandbars and edged by coastal hills and wild, undeveloped shore. Not far
downstream, a thick band of fog split the river midstream. It looked like it
was blowing their way.

And while the
whole idea of these dugout canoes, each created from a single log of Western
red cedar and with a carved wolf head at the prow, was excitingly historical,
Hester could already tell the thin neoprene pad they’d each been given to kneel
on in the rough-hewed vessels wasn’t going to stop her from being bruised like
a bad banana tomorrow.   

As they left the
slough’s entrance and headed out into the river, choppy waves acted like a
tractor beam, slowing the canoes.

Pim, just in
front of Hester in her canoe’s lineup, was immediately struggling.

 Hester noted
that the short and stout bookmobile driver was having trouble holding the
paddle as they’d been instructed, with one hand on the top of the shank and the
other just above the blade. Her arms just didn’t reach. Without proper
positioning she wasn’t getting leverage on the paddle, which kept glancing off the
water’s surface instead of digging deep as they’d been instructed. At one
point, Pim almost lost her grip on it entirely. Hester could see Pim’s
frustration quickly mounting.

And an
additional problem soon became apparent. Not only were Pim’s efforts for
naught, but several of the dugout’s strongest paddlers were paddling on the
opposite side from her. As a result of the imbalance, their canoe had soon veered
sharply to starboard, pointing downstream toward a prominent landmark a few
miles off called Pillar Rock, which poked up out of the river some 100 feet
offshore.

Sage, whose
lucky beret had slipped down over his eyes, seemed oblivious. Hester saw it was
time to take charge.

“Does anybody
see where we’re going?”

“Pull! Pull!”
Sage’s coaching was sounding more and more like some sort of mewling waterfowl.

“I think we
might need to balance out our paddlers,” Hester called, craning her neck to try
to catch Sage’s attention.

Her word of
caution was drowned out by an ongoing travelogue by the three women from Reference
Line, who sat between Sage and Pim.

“Did everybody
know that Pillar Rock was originally some 75 feet higher before it was altered
and flattened to position a navigational marker at its top?” Jeannette Nelson
announced as if emceeing a pageant.

“And that Lewis
and Clark camped onshore within sight of the rock twice on their journey?” Debbie
Wilkes added.

“In fact, that
it was from that campsite that Clark penned the giddy and famously wrong
pronouncement, ‘Ocian in View!’ because the river became so wide and wild, even
though they were still some 20 miles from the sea?” Eva Temple concluded in authoritative
triumph.

“OK, thank you,
Noble Oracles! Now STOP PADDLING!” Hester shrilled.

Suddenly it was
quiet and still. Necks craning, all eyes turned her way.

“It’s just that –
look, the others are going that way, and we’re veering back toward shore,” she
explained, nodding toward the other canoes, already some distance off and
making quick progress toward the middle of the river.

There was some
debate over simply reassigning paddling sides, but Jeannette Nelson complained
that she couldn’t switch because she was very strongly left-handed and that she
had faced discrimination and bullying over it all her life.

 Candy
Carmichael, sitting in the rear, agreed to trade sides with Linda Dimple, but
while Eva Temple insisted she was ambidextrous and would swap sides whenever
needed, she reserved the right to take frequent breaks because her bursitis was
flaring up again.

To be sure the
balance was right, Sage decided, he would stand in the bow and look back to
observe as they all took their best strong paddle stroke.

And, of course,
when the canoe suddenly thrust forward, he fell overboard.

It was to their
credit that the ladies figured out how to counterbalance the narrow canoe while
Jeannette and Debbie, who regularly spent their lunch hours power lifting at
the downtown Y, hauled him back aboard.

He was quickly
shivering in the cool breeze, and low scudding clouds gave no promise of a
warming day. Hester handed Sage a Haystack Rock souvenir beach towel she’d stashed
in a dry bag, and he wrapped himself up in it, looking surprisingly like Sacajawea
with his braids protruding as he settled back in his paddling position at the
bow and looked out to find the other canoes.

Where the other
canoes had last been seen a half-mile off, a giant ship, riding low in the
water from the weight of thousands of raw logs stacked high on its deck, plowed
a four-foot bow wave as it headed downstream en route to Japan.

Once the ship
passed, that snaking band of fog – the “smoke on the water” for which Skamokawa
was named – now obliterated their view of anything beyond.

They were as alone
as Lewis and Clark felt 200 years earlier.

Chapter 31

“So, Nate, can
you picture some blind guy in line at Safeway with My Little Pony clomping its hoof
on the linoleum 46 times to tell him how many cents he should be getting from
the change machine?” Harry Harrington asked with a howl as they sipped
cappuccinos during a break at Jitters Coffee Co.’s Northwest Portland café.

Darrow was
shaking his head with a wry smile when a buzzing like an angry hive of bees
sounded from the pocket of his houndstooth-checked jacket.

“Yikes, I keep
experimenting with different rings on this phone but I’m not sure that’s the
one yet,” Darrow exclaimed as he dug for the gadget.

Fiddling to
raise the antenna and peering to punch the right button, he finally yelped into
the mouthpiece: “Nate Darrow!”

Leaning close to
the earpiece, Harry could hear the caller identify himself as Ranger John Vouri
from Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Then came a few exchanges of more
muffled conversation that included several comments from Darrow such as
“Really?” and “You’re sure?”

When Darrow
signed off, he picked up his coffee and sipped at it with a distant look in his
eyes while Harry stared at him like a cat waiting for a canary to fly his way.

“So?!” Harry
finally cajoled.

Darrow responded
by looking vacantly Harrington’s way, then picking up a little wooden stirring
stick that sat in a small pool of brown liquid next to his cup and rapidly stirring
his drink until all the foam dissolved into the coffee.

“Earth to Nate!
Earth to Nate!” Harrington heckled.

“Oh. Harry.”
Finally his eyes focused on his partner. “That was the ranger from Fort
Vancouver, the one who had been to his father’s funeral.”

Harrington
nodded expectantly.

“Um, well, it
seems he’s back now.”

Harrington threw
himself back against his chair and groaned. “Yes, I got that much, Nate. So
what did he say?”

“Hmm, I’m trying
to figure out what it means.”

“Nate! Give!”
Harrington spoke in clipped syllables, like a trainer instructing a show dog.

 Darrow looked
at him from heavy-lidded eyes. “Well, it seems the old French pistol
was
returned
to the library on time, according to arrangements this Vouri fellow made by
phone from Ohio with one of his assistants.”

Harry jutted his
chin out while he thought about this for a moment.

 “So that
confirms that van Dyke, not Charbonneau, had easier access to the weapon!”

Darrow nodded.

 “But there’s
something else. Vouri also says that because of the potential for accidents, he’s
absolutely meticulous in tracking which of the re-enactment replicas is loaded
with blanks for use in skirmishes and which is loaded with live ammunition to
be used in target shooting.”

Harrington was
turning red now. “Yeah? And?”

“Well,
apparently this pistol was loaded for target practice but wasn’t fired before Vouri
got the emergency call about his father. In fact, he’s quite worried now that
in all the confusion the pistol was returned to the library without proper ‘decommissioning,’
as he describes it.” Darrow pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head
as he concluded.

Harry looked
like a gasping salmon that had just been pulled off the gaff hook. Then the
significance of what Darrow said dawned in his eyes.

“Nate, you don’t
mean…”

Darrow still
pinching between his eyes, nodded now.

“Whether Pieter
van Dyke knew it or not, that antique pistol he took to the park was likely
loaded and ready to fire.”