Given World (24 page)

“Nope,” I say. “It’s all yours.” I tuck my feet under me as far as I can, and pull down the armrest.

She shoots me a timid smile and thanks me. Slides the banjo case and the knapsack into the overhead rack, creeps into her seat, and sets her box and the plastic bag on the floor. After a minute, she picks up the box and holds it in her lap, drawing little X’s across the top with her finger, pressing down the corners with her thumbs. She places it carefully on the floor again, and fidgets it between her feet like a kid OD’d on cotton candy. Finally, she pushes it under the seat with her heels, apparently aiming to trap it there.

As the train pulls out of the station, heads across and then up the Columbia, she holds herself tight and still, arms locked to her sides and hands in her lap, as if she is sitting at a school desk, having been scolded once already for accidentally elbowing the teacher as he passed by. I lean away from the armrest and toward the window, hoping she’ll eventually relax, or it is going to be a very long trip to wherever she’s going. I wait a little while and then ask where that is.

She seems surprised to hear a voice, and for a second appears not to know where it’s coming from. She peeks over her shoulder before she answers. “North Dakota?” she says.

I glance behind us too, but don’t notice anything suspicious. “Is someone following you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re probably going to want to get comfortable, then. It’s a long way to North Dakota. And I don’t bite. I bet none of these folks do.”

The girl cocks her head, as if she is trying to determine whether or not the part about biting is actually true. Evidently she decides it is. “That’s a relief,” she says.

And she does seem to relax then, reaching into her bag for a scratched-up silver CD player and a pair of headphones that look like the cord has been delicately gnawed upon. She paws through a small collection of uncased CDs, settling finally on
Elton John’s Greatest Hits
. I am a little bit surprised, having expected something more along the lines of Nirvana, or Alice in Chains.

As she listens to the music, she begins to move all ten of her fingers as if plucking the strings of a phantom instrument. Not wanting to appear nosy, I turn to look at the vast, sage-green, white-capped river as it runs through the gorge and toward the sea.

Ready or not
; the words appear vaguely neon tinted across my brain. I try to leave them alone, to not worry them like I would a loose tooth when I was little, until all that remained was a raw, gaping hole, and the prospect of a dime under my pillow to alleviate any residual emptiness. I know if I follow those words—ready or not—to Montana, ghosts will appear, rising up out of the goddamn prairie like those crazy little funnels of dust. A tornado: maybe that’s the answer to too damn many people packed into a too-small emotional space. Nothing, nobody really goes away—not once they’ve infiltrated your life. No matter how many brain cells you drench in rocket fuel and hold your little lit Zippo to.

God, I’m tired.

I fold up my jacket and stuff it between the seat and the window, lean my head against it, and try to think about other things, or to sleep. I’ve been up a day and a half already but can’t seem to keep my eyes closed long enough to nod off. We are headed into evening, but the sun hasn’t even come close to setting. We’ll follow the river farther and farther east, and it will still be light at nine o’clock, and at ten. I had forgotten, almost, how it goes up here in the summers: twilights lasting hours, skies the deepest, most ridiculous blue, horizons absurdly far off. It is like the ocean, in a sense, except that it really, absolutely, is not like the ocean at all. Not anymore it isn’t.

After some in-between time spent simultaneously beckoning and fighting sleep, I give up and turn to the girl next to me, who has been changing CDs every once in a while and is now listening with her eyes closed, fingers still picking away.

“You know,” I say to her, “all this used to be underwater.”

The girl blinks at me, takes off the headphones. “What?”

“Water,” I say again, pointing out the window. “All this used to be underwater.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“How much water?”

As the girl listens, wide-eyed at the sudden dissertation, I explain about the ancient glacial lake, the one that once covered a whole corner of Montana and then some. Lake Missoula. Every few hundred years, it would fill enough to float the two-thousand-foot-tall ice dam that held it back, in what would someday be (and still is) the northern Idaho panhandle we are heading for—home to old hippies, tweakers, skinheads and wolves, or so the papers say.

“They say that about us too.” The girl sounds disappointed, but I can’t be sure if it is with the reporters or the people they write about.

“Us?”

“Oregon. The parts that aren’t Portland or Ashland or Bend. That leaves a whole lot of spots to park your little meth lab in. Your pot farm. Or your gun rack full of semiautomatics. For Bambi.”

“You think they’re right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I never did ever see a wolf, though.”

“Maybe we’ll see one in Montana.”

“When do we get there?”

“Early tomorrow morning. And all day to cross it. I’m supposed to get off about halfway.”

“Supposed to?”

“Going to.”

She nods, tentatively, but keeps looking at me with something that could be mistaken for attentiveness, so I go on talking about the ice dam. When it started to float, I tell her, it would break down a little bit at a time, and eventually all the water would come crashing through, the whole lake draining in a few days. Billions of gallons, carving out new channels in the land, or widening and deepening old ones, every time it happened.

“Sounds crazy,” she says, but there is no detectable disbelief in her voice, just a familiar and painful wonder. Of course it was Mick who told me this story, among a million others, as I sat at his feet with that very expression on my face.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, not missing more than a single beat. “That’s where this entire river came from, and this gorge, and smaller canyons, lakes, ponds—everything we can see. They’ve found pieces of Montana all the way at the Pacific Ocean.”

I consider the broken and fused-back-together landscape. Chunky, ash-colored rock and scrubby brush, more gray than green; buttes and huge potholes that must sometimes hold water but are all dried up now, cracked earth the predominant decorating scheme. Evidence of calamity is all around, if you know what to look for.

“Does it have a name?”

“Scablands,” I say.

“Like scabs you pick.” The girl raises one sermonizing finger. “And make them bleed. And if you do it too many times, you get scars.” The words sound ingrained, as if she has been admonished for the very thing on more than one occasion but still has to do it, just to prove to herself that some things will always hold true.

“Exactly.”

The train tracks hug the river; they are so close that sometimes I can see only water even if I press my forehead to the glass and look straight down. No more than a few stops between Portland and Spokane, because there isn’t much out here to stop for. Unless you want a closer look at the geology—how all the different pieces fit—and I would very much like that, if the train would only stop moving, if only for a little while. It is a place Mick would have loved, and maybe once came to—digging holes and pocketing treasures, dusting off the debris of past lives.

I visited him in Missoula once, in 1967, his sophomore (and last) year in college. He showed me, on the mountains surrounding town, the high-water marks, which in a particular sort of late-afternoon light looked almost drawn there, penciled in by some disembodied hand. I imagined the town and buildings already in place at the bottom of the lake bed, twelve thousand years before. Imagined swimming deep underwater down Railroad Street, Higgins and Front, past the train depot and the Oxford Saloon, Eddie’s Stud Club and the old hotels, looking through the windows at the people playing poker and drinking beer, fighting, stomping out chain-smoked cigarettes on sawdust-covered floors. I was eleven and hadn’t yet learned how to swim, but nevertheless had no difficulty seeing myself as a fish or some other meandering water creature. Aside from my fascination with all things aquatic, I tended to live an existence not wholly hitched to reality anyway. Mick called me Dolphin Girl sometimes, or Miss Fish Lips.

Aside from the skinny on the lake, the rocks, and the rivers, he filled my malleable young brain with countless other miracles. Then left it to me to figure out how much of it he’d simply made up. The time he told me about water coming from stars, for example, seemed like an easy one—completely not true—but years later I found out it did happen, sometimes, through an intricate, tandem process involving explosions and compression of intergalactic gas and dust. I didn’t understand it enough to explain to someone else, but was still suitably impressed by the magic of the process itself, the fact that Mick knew about it, and the even more astonishing fact that he was not bullshitting me.

The part about coming back, though—that part had been pure bunk. Dead or alive, he said, like it was some kind of gangster-movie joke. A joke with the worst punch line ever. I have still not come to terms with how old old is, but I know how gone gone is. Dead-end-tunnel gone. No exit through the gift shop.

And now my father is preparing to slip away too, or so his letter said. I have no reason not to believe him. If he had his heart set on something so ordinary as luring his transient daughter home, he probably would have tried it a long time ago, and a lot more directly. My mother—in postcards and letters, during rare phone conversations and that one time the three of us met in the middle—has deliberately avoided asking, or even hinting. It is as if they have both always understood that whatever inexplicable trajectory I was on would lead me home in its own good time. Or wouldn’t. And maybe that was not an outcome they’d ever been waiting for anyway; maybe it was for the best that I left and stayed gone, since my presence would only have reminded them every day of their other kid. Maybe they didn’t want to be reminded. There is really no good way around it, though, except maybe to go and stay gone. Exhibit A: how well that has worked out. Exhibit B: not so perfectly, but.

Somewhere between Pasco and Spokane, I finally fall asleep. Familiar dreams play on a smudgy screen: flying dreams, where I sail and spin effortlessly on thermals, like the hawks, or crows just before a storm. And Mick dreams, the two of us riding on his motorcycle, my cheek pressed to the back of his warm, worn leather jacket and my hands in his pockets; leaning with him into the turns, sure he will not let us crash, certain that of his many inglorious traits, unlucky is not one.

In real life, there were a few near misses: one with an elk in the Bearpaw Mountains, a few more with wet roads and gravel, a loopy bird once that caught Mick right in the chest. It was a small one, though, and we didn’t go down that time, or any other. I was never even scared enough to take my feet off the pegs, blind faith a waking specialty then.

I open my eyes around two thirty just outside Sandpoint, where the ice dam was, and the just-past-full moon is on the rise, huge and unworldly amber, rolling like Sisyphus’s rock up the side of the first real mountain we’ve come anywhere near. The train rumbles slowly over the long bridge spanning the western end of Lake Pend Oreille, and I can see a few lights on in the town, but not many. The bars have already closed by now and the bartenders given everyone the boot. The only stragglers will likely be the really drunk ones, arguing in the street about things they won’t even remember tomorrow, or trying to get lucky, trying to talk some warm human into bed or a skinny-dip in the lake.

At the edge of town, where the train tracks meet up with the land again, I see a wolf, or a big coyote, pull something out of the water, but can’t tell what it is. Maybe a fish. Or a goose. Maybe an old mukluk. Some kid’s stuffed animal, lost for all time. I remember our conversation about wolves and turn to the girl next to me, but she’s sleeping. I sneak a look at the box, which has crept out from under the seat and is now loose on the floor between us. I want to pick it up, shake it, but I don’t.

At Sandpoint a few passengers get off, a few board, and we are traveling east again, so nearly in Montana that I can taste it low in my throat. I have begun to feel a clear sense of both anticipation and panic, to fist and unfist my hands, occasionally shaking them in front of me like a little kid performing the corralled equivalent of bouncing off the walls—at the dizzying prospect of something anticipated but more than a little scary and, in a sense, withheld too long. My chest is tight and full—of what, I have no idea, but it feels like tar, or clay, not like oxygen at all. I do understand about heartache, why they call it that, but don’t know the anatomy, the chemistry, whatever. It doesn’t matter, so long as I don’t explode, which every few minutes feels like a real possibility.

By four, I know we have crossed the border, even though there is no sign, like there would be on the highway, saying
Welcome
or
Now Entering the Treasure State
. Something has changed, though: the trees, or the hills, or maybe the moon. My hands are going like hamsters jacked up on Dexedrine, and I leave them to their own recognizance.

I hear the girl next to me say, “Are you okay?” and flinch.

“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s just been a long time since I’ve been back here.”

“Back here where?”

“Montana.”

“We’re in Mon
tana
already?” Like she’s saying, “We’ve already reached Mars?”

I bring my clenched fists up to my face; press them to my cheeks. “I’m almost sure.”

“Is this where you came from?”

I repeat the words in my head, but they don’t completely make sense. What does “came from” even mean?

“I was born here,” I say. “East. The other side of the mountains. Hard telling, however, where I came from.” I laugh, but my hands are still fluttering like drunken luna moths, in complete disregard of how others might interpret their behavior. I stare at them briefly, shake my head, and wedge them between my legs.