Mink River: A Novel (21 page)

Every inch of every wall in Cedar’s office is covered with maps and charts. Even the ceiling is a vast map of the town and environs so that when Cedar leans back in his chair and stares at the ceiling he is immersed still in the town he has sworn with vows immense and binding to protect and advance and celebrate and defend.

He sips his coffee and goes over his list of today’s projects. He begins his day by thinking about each one—squeezing them, as it were, pondering them from different angles, listening to their shrill voices clamoring for his attention, eyeing them in different lights, pondering their substance (if any) and considering time, resources, energy, effect, precedent, implication, and anticipated public response. Today’s projects: analyze and issue draft ruling on proposal to lease berry bushes in town according not to property lines but traditional harvest rights. Note to self: check laws appertaining. Check on and update as necessary beach safety station; anonymous report of theft of surfboard(s). Note to self: see Peadar O Donnell. Normal post-Memorial Day maintenance work on cemetery. Note to self: request Mass for soul of nun. Issue final budget request to county. Note to self: laugh hilariously at very idea of county ever issuing seven cents more than what they think we need for sewer system. Issue heated complaint to state fish and wildlife department as to lack of assistance during massive smelt run in March. Letter of personal thanks to sixth-graders at Neawanaka School for their assistance in harvesting and milling several million dead smelt into fish pellets for the hatchery. Letter to hatchery denying reimbursement for purchase of fish pellets during month of May. Phone call to director of hatchery with courteous request for director to get a grip and stop blowing smoke on Public Works. Work order: destruction of beaver dam and/or construction of steel cage covering culvert draining Panther Creek through Trailer Town. Note to self: remember Michael’s request to keep eye peeled for any unusual item or detail in and around creek near Trailer Town. Work order: street sweeping, southwest quadrant of downtown. Letter to Stella at pub noting gently that this is fourth street sweep of southwest quadrant in four weeks and Public Works is (a) not budgeted for weekly sweeps of area and (b) of the opinion that debris in that quadrant is traceable not to church, union hall, library, grocery, or kite shop, but to chaos and hubbub after hours in vicinity of your premises. Work order: dispose of dead owls on church property. Note to self: dead owls? See WM. Work order: construction of temporary wheelchair ramp to back entrance of library. Note to self: salmonberries to Daniel.

2.

WM his own self is in his office at the other end of the building. He is typing:
Notes, Research Results Vol. XXVI, Time Project.
There is no question at this juncture that time as we know it is not at all the ephemeral energy we commonly assume it to be. It assumes various forms at various periods. Measurement is the key. Clearly perception is the language with which we attempt to grapple with the idea, the concept, the phenomenon. List any ten speeds for time: summer morning, winter dusk, boring lecture, first time making love with woman you actually really love, drunkenness, moment of death, car crash, heart attack, any and all meetings of more than seven people, childhood, and not one happens at the same speed as the others, some are blindingly fast and over instantly and others drone and moan on until you contemplate removing your spleen with a pepper shaker just for entertainment’s sake. Conclusion: time is a substance. Codicil: time unrolls, time is narrative, time is consecutive; we do know that it has not as yet reversed, rewound, been subject to miscellaneous revisits, despite popular culture adventures to the contrary.
Why cultural imagination so absorbed with time travel?
Because cultural intelligence knows full well that it is not possible.
Maybe it isn’t possible
yet
.
Maybe so.
Are you a nut case?
My research over many years shows time to be a malleable substance, and anything that is malleable, which is to say affectable by energy of some kind, has only to have its specific affective energy to be identified. This is why we have brains.
Do you really think that you, an amateur engineer and shaman, will be able to discover the secret of time, when all the geniuses of history to date have not been able to uncover any such secret?
Perhaps the secret to discovering the secret is to
not
be a genius, in which case I am an excellent candidate.

3.

You know, says the doctor to the man with thirteen days to live, you might as well have a cigarette now, all things considered. It is late afternoon and they are sitting on the deck of the doctor’s house while the doctor smokes. Tobacco is not all bad, continues the doctor. There is a certain ruminative ritual to its consumption that I enjoy. For example here is my eighth cigarette of the day, Matthew the publican. He is different from his companions. Matthew is relaxed. He is the late afternoon. He is the end of the working day. He is a publican, after all. He has seen it all. He has seen every type and stripe of man and woman. He likes people but is no fool. He works hard but there is a thoughtful social aspect to his work. With him the day draws to a close. There is a warm feeling in the air. We have worked and we are satisfied. We have done what we ought to have done and for the most part we have done it well with a few minor slippages here and there but those are things to worry about later. Right now we sprawl a little. Lean back. Ponder. Consider the sparrows of the air. The hairs on their heads. Dinner will come soon but not right now. Matthew is that moment late in the afternoon when you don’t have to be anywhere in particular. Soon will come James the son of Alphaeus, before dinner, and then Labbaeus who was surnamed Thaddaeus, after dinner, and then Simon the Canaanite, and then, closing up the day, the last line of the story, the last man, Matthias, who was chosen to succeed Judas. There was a time, a long time ago, when things were different for me, that I smoked all day long, many dozens of cigarettes, more than I could count, more than I want to admit to really, and they had so many names I can hardly recall them all now. It was a hard time. Wartime. Let me think: there was Cleopas and Joses, Cephas and Nicodemus, Mnason and Manaël, Rufus and Lucius and Eurion the splay-footed, Zabdon and Zakron. And many more. I was smoking cigarettes all day long, and all night long, except when coughing or kissing, because the tenor of my life in that place was unbearable, and I could find no rest, I could not sleep, I still can’t sleep. The first morning I was there I was sent to pick up pieces of men. All the wounded men and all the dead men had been carried away and there were only pieces of men left. Someone had to try to match the pieces together. That was me. Does this arm go with that arm? This leg with that leg? And worse. I was twenty years old. I began to smoke. I smoked all day long and all night long. Tobacco is not so bad. The ritual is soothing. The brief flare of flame. The sweet pull of that first drag. It makes you forget for a moment. But I remember them. Their names on their shirts. The scraps and tatters of shirts. Their names on their metal necklaces. The necklaces glittering in the mud. Let me think: there was Johnny and Joey, and Peter and Phil, and Eddy and Teddy, and Bob and Bill, and Michael and Matthew. Matthew the publican. I found some of him late in the afternoon. He was a child. The bones of a bird. A boy in a uniform asleep in a field, his head resting gently on a bed of ferns.

4.

Cedar and Worried Man stare at the maps on the long table in the cavernous central well of the Department of Public Works building. The maps sprawl and splay. In the center is a topographical map of a mountain.

That’s where it is, says Worried Man.

They stare at the mountain.

No way, says Cedar.

Yes way, says Worried Man. Consider all factors. If, as we have discussed, time is capable of different speeds, let us say ten speeds for ease of discussion though there are certainly more, then it is akin to film or video and can be sped up and slowed down. There is a master mechanism for its control. We do not know the master mechanism, nor the master mechanic, nor if there
is
a master mechanic. Such questions are not our purview. However the actual material at hand, the stuff of time,
is
our purview. Such material must be tactile. It cannot be ephemeral. Time does move, it does pass, it consists, it exists, it is not a dream, it is a thing. If as we have agreed we are talking not just perception but reality, actual phenomena perceived by more than one person at one time and not attributable to mob psychosis or misperception, then we are talking about tactile material. For ease of operation such material would be stored near the site where it is to be processed. For ease of storage after use it would be stored near the site where it
was
processed. A sensible arrangement would be to divide the processing areas into regions. Suitable storage places in regions would require isolation, difficulty if not impossibility of discovery, and, I believe, inasmuch as they are probably filmic, temperatures at or below freezing. In this region only two sites present themselves as serious candidates, and of the two sites one, Lavelatla, the fire mountain, is dangerously active seismically. The other, however, is essentially stable, is sufficiently remote and isolated in its nether parts, bears ice every day of the year. And I would argue further that it is agreeable as a storage site because of its very proximity to a large urban area. One would never think something so valuable would be stored in plain sight, as it were. If there is a master mechanic we can assume he is as devious as all other mechanics, exhibit A being you. Therefore.

Both men stare at the map some more.

No way, says Cedar.

Yes, says Worried Man.

You make a good case.

We have to go there.

Do we?

We do.

Billy, we are neither of us young anymore.

Yet we have to go.

Do we?

We do.

What about May?

I’ll talk to May.

What if we don’t come back?

We’ll come back.

What if we don’t? What if we freeze or fall off a cliff or get buried in ice?

We won’t. What’s the matter with you?

She’d be alone. We’d be leaving her alone.

Cedar. We’ve waited all our lives for this. This is our chance. This is it. I know it is. It’s there. If we wait we will just get older. If we wait we will lose the chance. If we wait we will always be waiting. We’ll regret not going the rest of our lives. And if we find it we could change everything. We could fix everything. We could save millions of children. Billions. We could feed the world. We could stop wars. We could change everything. We are the Public Works. This is the greatest work of all time. Brains against pains. We have to go. It’s what we are here for. It’s our calling. You know and I know that you get a set of tools and talents and experiences and you have to meld them into your work. What you are here for. This is what we are here for. You know it and I know it. We have to go.

Do we?

We do.

5.

The river thinks too, you know. Did you think that rivers did not think? The Mink is thinking. Salmon and steelhead and cutthroat trout, it thinks. Fir needles. Salmonberries dropping suddenly and being snapped up by trout who think them orange insects. Alder and spruce roots drinking me always their eager thin little rude roots poking at me. Rocks and pebbles and grains of stone and splinters of stone and huge stones and slabs and beaver and mink and crawdads and feces from the effluent treatment plant upriver. Rain and mist and fog and gale and drizzle and howl and owl. Asters and arrow-grass. Finger creeks feeder creeks streams ditches seeps and springs. Rowboats and rafts. Canoes and chicory. Men and women and children. Dead and alive. Willows and beer bottles and blackberry and ducklings and wood sorrel and rubber boots and foxglove and buttercup and rushes and slugs and snails and velvetgrass and wild cucumber and orbweaver spiders and that woman singing with her feet in me singing. Baneberry and beargrass. Thrush and hemlock and coffee grounds. Thimbleberry and heron. Smelt and moss and water ouzels and bears and bear scat. Bramble and bracken. Elk drinking me cougar drinking me. Ground-cedar and ground-ivy and ground-pine and groundsel. Sometimes a lost loon. Cinquefoil and eelgrass. Vultures and voles. Water striders mosquitos mosquito-hawks. Dock and dewberry. Moths and mergansers. Huckleberry and snowberry. Hawks and osprey. Water wheels and beaver dams. Deer and lupine. Red currant. Trees and logs and trunks and branches and bark and duff. I eat everything. Elderberry and evening primrose. Bulrush and burdock. I know them all. They yearn for me. Caddis fly and coralroot. I do not begin nor do I cease. Foamflower fleeceflower fireweed. I always am always will be. Lily and lotus. Swell and surge and ripple and roar and roil and boil. I go to the Mother. Madrone and mistmaiden. The Mother takes me in. Nettle and ninebark. Pelt and peppergrass. She waits for me. Pine-sap and poppy. I bring her all small waters. Raspberry and rockcress. I draw them I lure them I accept them. Salal and satin-flower. She is all waters. Tansy and trillium. She drinks me. Velvetgrass and vernalgrass. I begin as a sheen on leaves high in the hills, a wet idea, a motion, a dream, a rune, and then I am a ripple, and I gather the small waters to me, the little wet children, the rills of the hills, and we are me and run to Her muscling through wood and stone cutting through everything singing and shouting roiling and rippling and there She is waiting and whispering her salty arms always opening always open always o.