Last Plane to Heaven (16 page)

She stepped into the surf. The water claimed first her feet, then her knees. Warm salt washed away the smoke and grime and blood and the last few stubborn beetles still clinging to her coveralls. The ocean slapped at her belly, at her bosoms, took her hands like an eager lover.

Springfield McKenna allowed herself to be claimed, because she had come to understand that there was no escape. There had been none since her affair with Roubicek. All that was left to her was to deny him the fruits of his evil investment. No nickel, no gain from claiming her body or soul or spirit. Whatever it was he'd sought.

When the sea came for her mouth, she cried out in gladness and spent her life freely.

At least it isn't fire
, she thought, choking on the water. The nickel thrummed in her gut. Already it sought a way back out into the world.

The sharks bumped her as they closed in.

 

Jefferson's West

This story is from my Original Destiny, Manifest Sin project. Unfinished, and likely never to be finished, it might have been my great work. I don't have a lot of regrets, but failing to complete this one before my writing brain blew out in a tide of chemotherapy damage is one of them.

“Damn me for a Kentucky fool,” muttered Lieutenant William Clark.

He and Captain Meriwether Lewis had climbed the crumbling white tuff for over an hour, finding momentary shade in tree-lined gullies before beetling across stone beneath the sun's heated regard. They explored without aid as Charbonneau and the men of the Corps of Discovery were down by the Missouri River playing at rounders and roasting a pallid sturgeon Sergeant Glass had caught.

Some things were best discussed between gentlemen first. Clark kept his knife close by. His old friend Captain Lewis had the expedition's written orders straight from President Jefferson, but Clark had his own, secret orders as well, whispered in the blood-warm darkness of a Virginia summer night.

“Hot, William?”

“Hot, yes, but that is the state of this interminable country at this particular season.” Clark wiped his face on the back of his sleeve, the wool scratchy and rank.

“What makes you such a particular fool, then?”

His friend's voice was gentle, but Clark felt the barb. He tried to explain himself. “Your great, pale towers here upon the high shore, Mr. Lewis. In your journal you named them ‘the remains or ruins of elegant buildings,' but up close they are just rocks. I am a fool for having held faith in them.”

“Hmm.” Lewis grabbed hold of a struggling sage and stepped up to a narrow, flinty ledge. The distressed plant perfumed them both. “I had an angle of view from the river. These cliffs are deceptive, sir. In both their appearance and their altitude.”

“Hence my foolishness.” Clark pushed past Lewis, scrambled up a gravel wash to make the next rise. He glanced over his shoulder. Lewis's face was lost in shadow beneath the wide-brimmed leather hat the commander had traded from the Mandan Indians the previous winter. For a moment the captain looked to be a fetch, a shade of himself, some dark ghost risen in the noontime sun.

Just as Jefferson had feared.

*   *   *

There were no powders or perukes when Lieutenant Clark called at Monticello in the summer of 1803. The president was there, though the papers said otherwise in Philadelphia and Washington City.

Jefferson and Clark took their ease on a small brick patio looking down the hill. A fat moon sailed the horizon, full-bellied and satisfied. Distant dogs barked as Negroes chanted around a pinprick fire visible through shadowed trees.

Clark wondered why he had been summoned to the plantation. Alone, no less, without Captain Lewis, who was deep in preparations back at the capital. This visit was passing strange and piqued his curiosity. He was equally fearful of being found out for coming here in secret.

“The War Department drags their heels at your promotion, Lieutenant,” Jefferson said slowly.

“It is their way, sir.”

“Meriwether is doing his best for you.”

“I'm sure, sir.”

Jefferson's teacup clinked against its saucer. Mosquitoes and larger insects buzzed in the dark around them as the chanting down the hill reached some crescendo before dying off into laughter.

Clark wondered again exactly why he had been called to this place.

“I am a rational man, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There is certainly a Deity, a Creator. No man could deny that, simply from witnessing the sheer complexity of the universe.” The president sighed. “His intentions with respect to our lives on this Earth, however, are entirely a matter of interpretation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ten days ago I had a dream. Do you dream, Lieutenant?”

“I suppose so, sir.” Clark's dreams were rarely recalled and seemed mostly to involve grappling with angry phantoms. It was as if he dreamed the idea of a dream, rather than the jumble of thoughts and images others spoke of.

“Every man dreams. Some remember more than others.” The saucer clinked again. “And there are those rare dreams possessed of such a compelling verisimilitude—a reality, Lieutenant, as sure as any waking journey through the hallways of your own home.”

Clark's neck began to prickle. Down the hill, the dogs and slaves had fallen silent. “Sir?”

Jefferson's voice was sad. Tired. “An angel came to me, Lieutenant. In my rooms. He— No, it. It was black. Not ‘black' as we speak of our Negro slaves being, but black as my boots. Black as a Federalist's heart, sir. Its wings glittered like stars, or perhaps coals in a furnace, and it spoke to me in a voice of iron.”

The night remained silent. Even the moon seemed to have paused in her rise. Clark's curiosity finally overcame his discretion. “What did the angel say, sir?”

“I do not know. It spoke the tongue of Heaven, perhaps. I did not know the words in my dream, and I do not know them now. But in one hand it held a bloody knife, in the other a broken arrow. And mark this, Lieutenant Clark … the dark angel had the face of Captain Lewis.”

The words slipped from Clark before he could consider them fully. “Do you fear betrayal?”

Jefferson laughed without any tone of amusement. “Betrayal? From Meriwether? Sooner would I be betrayed by my own fingers. I have already entrusted him with various affairs of state, and make no second thoughts about it.” A pale hand shot out of the shadows to grab Clark's arm, nearly startling a scream from him. “But watch over my captain, Clark. Watch for the broken arrow and the bloody knife. Be my wits out there past the frontier.”

“Yes, sir.”

Then the slaves chanted again, and the dogs barked, and the moon moved once more across the fetid Virginia sky.

*   *   *

Clark stared up at the crumbling white towers set on the flat peak they had just climbed. They were real after all, these buildings, made of the same pale stone as the cliffs below. Brush and gravel obscured the bases of the towers, but there were large openings higher up, of no particular plan or symmetry that he could see.

He tried to imagine dark angels flying in and out of the high windows. Though it was hard to tell with their state of disrepair, there seemed to be a paucity of ground-level entrances.

Lewis sucked in his breath. Clark knew without looking that his captain would be idly chewing on his lower lip. “Burr came to me just before we left,” Lewis said.

Clark was shocked. Simply conversing with the vice president was close to an act of treason among good Democratic-Republicans. Jefferson had not taken kindly to Burr's Federalist maneuverings during the contesting of the election results. That Lewis would talk to Burr at all was amazing. That he would admit such a conversation to Clark was inconceivable.

“Offered me ten thousand pounds on deposit in London, in exchange for certain reports.”

“Reports of what?” Clark asked. The bribe was a magnificent fortune, enough for a lifetime of a gentleman's ease and most likely his heirs' as well.

“He had a list. I said no, of course, but I still remember what he wanted to know of. It was fantastical. Old Testament, if you will. Giants, woolly mammoths, angels.”

Angels?

“Lost cities,” Lewis continued.

“'Tis definitely a city,” said Clark, nodding at the towers before them. “And 'tis definitely lost.” Then, because he could not help himself, “Did you tell the president?”

“He would not listen.” Lewis shrugged. “Burr's ambitions are not a mystery to those who know him. Our vice president would be king of the West. I will not scout for him.”

The two of them pushed forward, down into the brush that grew around the towers—sprawling junipers and close-set berry vines, cluttered with sage and a dozen other bolting bushes and flowers. There was water up here then, at least at certain times of the year.

Was this what Jefferson had feared, Clark asked himself. Had Burr been the dark angel with Lewis's face?

They came upon a wall hidden in the brush. It was worn with age and erosion, a dragon-backed thing marked mostly by gravel where once had risen an imposing barrier. Wordless, Lewis headed to the right, so Clark continued to follow. He wondered why neither the guide Charbonneau nor the voyageur's Indian wife Sacagawea had made mention of this place.

The gate was before them soon enough. It was an arch formed of a pair of ivory tusks that swept up fourteen feet or more, though whatever barrier had once stood between them was long gone.

“This gate faces east.” Lewis pointed downward. “And look here…”

At their feet was a flat stone, much scorched by flame.

“‘So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden,'” quoted Lewis. “‘To work the ground from which he had been taken. After He drove the man out, He placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.' From the third chapter of Genesis.”

“I know that,” whispered Clark, his hand more firmly on his knife. Hair stood up all over his body, prickling harder than it had even that night in Virginia. He could almost hear Jefferson's slaves chanting. “Come away from this place, Captain. It is not for us.”

Lewis sounded bemused, or perhaps enchanted. “But the president set us to explore the West. If we walk through this gate, we will be heading west.”

Drawing his knife against what foe he was not sure, Clark grabbed Lewis by the elbow with his free hand. “I do not trow if this is Eden or not. I disbelieve that it could be, but that doesn't matter.” He tried not to let his rising desperation seep into his voice as the blade shook. “Come back to the river. Forget this. Tell the men we saw tall rocks. The Republic isn't ready for this, Meriwether. The human race is not ready.”

The captain tried to shake Clark off. Clark wouldn't let go, so Lewis stepped into him, chest to chest, ready to shove, except that he stepped into the blade of Clark's knife.

“Oh, Lord, no!” shouted Clark.

“Oh, Lord, yes,” said Lewis with a tinge of surprise and disappointment, as the arrows of the Teton Sioux began to rain around them.

*   *   *

In the summer of 1805 Captain Meriwether Lewis's body was recovered at St. Louis by two Negro slaves scraping paint above the waterline of a river barge. They told the sheriff, and later the Territorial governor, that a little canoe had just sort of bobbed up and nudged them where they stood waist-deep in the water. Despite the automatic suspicion of Negro involvement in the death of a white man, their story was eventually believed. The slaves ran away up the Missouri shortly after the inquest, however, which reopened the question and considerably delayed official reports to Washington City.

When the canoe was brought to shore, the captain's hands were folded over a black feather almost as long as he was tall, that glinted in the sunlight and was later seen to glow pale red under the night's moon. He was otherwise unclothed, making it clear that he had died of grievous wounds. His body was accompanied in the tiny boat only by the corpse of his dog Seaman and a single gigantic tooth fit for the mouth of Leviathan—or at least a mastodon.

God didn't send anyone else from the Corps of Discovery home that year. Lieutenant Clark eventually returned to the Republic a very changed man, accompanied by Lewis's servant York, Sacagawea, and an army of Indians and Negroes. When they finally came they hunted justice with rifle and bayonet.

The Bible was wrong in a few other particulars as well. Eden had only one river, not four, and it was the Missouri, not the Euphrates. But God had made His point just like Clark and his army would someday, and later on Aaron Burr made his point as well in Spanish Tejas.

The West was never the same.

 

They Are Forgotten Until They Come Again

In 2000, I moved from Texas to Oregon. In some very important ways, the Columbia River defines the Pacific Northwest, and in the years since then, I have learned to love her. The river is older than the mountains, and older than the coastline. Which is quite a feat for a ribbon of water.

Once bound by iron ribbons on each bank, River has been unfettered for more years than the lives of the salmon who leap Her rubbled rapids. She runs wide and powerful through deeps and shallows, over the stubs that formerly bridged and trussed Her and the shattered walls that at an earlier time impounded Her waters. She is a pool of memories, a current of thought, a channel through which all of life itself must pass. In Her time, River has sundered mountains and cradled thundering floods as great as any raging fires of the earth. Now furtive men slink to Her verges and cast throat-cut sacrifices into Her waters that they might scavenge metals and other wonders from what remains in the margins of Her embrace.

She flows. In flowing, She is, was, and always will be.

*   *   *