The Queen of Everything (34 page)

"It was just too much pain? Did he snap or
something? Was that it?"

"All it needs is to feel important enough for
one minute. Your father, my Clyde."

"My grandma says it never would have happened
if Grandpa were still alive," I said.

"Well, we can't know that, can we? Maybe your
grandpa's voice would have come stronger and clearer than the others, and maybe
no. We can only guess, can't we, unless your father tells us
himself?"

"I just don't understand why," I said. "Why do
you think he did this, Big Mama?"

"Me too. I'd be only guessing."

341

"Guess then."

"Maybe he just
wanted
things without
knowing exactly what they were."

"That's something my mom would say."

"Truth is worth hearing twice."

"I don't know," I said.

"Don't expect all the answers at once," she
said. "It's going to take a long time."

"It was scary, Mama," I said. I
cried.

"I know it was, darlin'."

She held me until I was quiet again. She kissed
me on the top of the head, then turned out the light. I slept. I woke because I
heard a horrible howling sound. Coyotes. A pack of coyotes sounding both tough
and suffering, a frightening thing to wake to. I sat up in bed. I wondered about
Jackson. Where he was for the night, if he'd made it home. I could feel by the
temperature of the room that the weather had changed. In the Northwest, late
summer can fall as definitely as the curtain in a play's last act, rising
perhaps for a last applause, perhaps not--show's over. Get out the coat, which
feels surprisingly heavy after its stay in the closet, and go fetch the beach
towel, hung over a chair to dry and now flung across the yard by the
wind.

I got out of the tight covers and walked to the
window.

I smiled.

342

Jackson's truck was parked across the street a
few houses down.

I worried about him, though, sleeping in that
truck. I hoped he had a blanket. I told myself that someone who had been lost in
the woods, to the point of near death, would have a blanket. Still. I thought
about going out there, making him come inside.

What I did instead was, I went back to bed. And
I slept well, knowing he was still near. When I woke it was late, I could tell.
I'd slept better than I had in weeks. I got out of bed, went right to the
window. Jackson's truck was still there, but I couldn't see him inside. I
wondered if he had slept in the back, under the stars as Melissa said he did
sometimes. I wondered if he was cold and horribly stiff or if he'd been abducted
by the coyote pack.

But I shouldn't have worried. Because Big Mama
had
gone outside the night before and made Jackson come in. When I went
into the kitchen, I saw him sitting with Big Mama at the kitchen table and
drinking coffee. The two of them just as chummy as ham and eggs.

343

Chapter Sixteen

"Wed here, you'd better take one of my
sweaters," Big Mama said. "You take off somewhere next time, Jordan, make sure
you've prepared yourself for every kind of weather."

"I'll remember that," I said.

"Yes, I know how much you'd like to come,
Frankie. But today's your day to stay and guard the house." Big Mama gave the
dog a nudge with her foot as she opened the door for us to go out. That sorry
dog; he was a small rug that went through the wash when it was supposed to be
Dry Clean Only.

"I'm not sure Frankie could guard an anthill,"
I said.

"Shh, now, we don't want him getting
his

344

feelings hurt," she said. "He's sensitive."
Frankie looked up at us with old watery eyes. You wouldn't hesitate to blame any
bad smell on him.

Outside, the yard and the flowerpots and even
the neighbors' painted mailboxes had lost their brightness. The sky just hung
there, fuzzy and gray as a slab of laundry lint. I put Big Mama's sweater on. It
hung down to my knees, and if I put my arms out, I looked like I had
wings.

"You want me to help put the top up?" Jackson
said. He walked around the Volkswagen and bent to look at it.

"There's a small problem with the top," Big
Mama said. "It's called 'Stuck Open.'"

"You drive like this all the time? Even in the
winter?" I said.

"This'll be my first winter. But on rainy days,
well, we just use those." Big Mama pointed to the floor of the car. Jackson
reached inside, picked up one of the umbrellas, and opened it up. It was a clear
plastic bubble umbrella with a banana yellow handle. I'd had one like it when I
was eight.

Jackson looked out from it. "You want to take
my truck?" he asked.

"No need," Big Mama said. "I'm the one that
knows where to go. We can stand a little cool air."

345

Big Mama could stand a little cool air, with
her extra flesh and heart like a furnace, but I had to stick my arms down inside
her sweater so the sleeves hung loose and empty, and I had to hunch low behind
the windshield where the heater in Big Mama's Volkswagen was turned up high.
Which, if you've been in a Volkswagen on a cold day, you know doesn't mean much.
Jackson sat in the back. His chin was tucked down into his jean jacket, and his
hair blew out behind him in a solid sheet. He looked afraid to move in case he
might disrupt the workings of his circulatory system. I wanted to laugh. It
occurred to me that I might love Jackson Beene.

Big Mama drove through town, leaving the quaint
buildings and sidewalked streets behind. The winding back roads outside Nine
Mile Falls passed farmlands garnished with backdrops of great snowy mountains
before the roads curved and rose once again to enter shaded forests. She took
the curves slow--you had to watch for deer, she explained, and for the logging
trucks that sped too fast for their own good. At one point the road widened to
include a strip of parking lot at the shoulder. Big Mama pulled over.

"Get out here a minute," she said. "You ever
see this?" she asked. Jackson nodded, but I shook my head. I could hear the roar
as we walked closer to the cliff's edge. Over it, I could see an

346

enormous thundering waterfall with a lodge
perched at the top. Looking down, I saw dots of people, hiking toward the misty
bath at the bottom.

"Snoqualmie Falls," Big Mama said. She had to
speak loudly to be heard over the rumble. Sprays of tiny water droplets rose up
and wet my face. "Hundred feet higher than Niagara, though don't tell anyone.
They can have the tourists, thank you."

We walked back to the car. The breezy ride and
mist from the falls had turned Jackson's scraggly hair into Rastafarian
ringlets. I smiled at him, and he grinned back. Home seemed far away. I felt
like a kid on a field trip; that surge of happiness and energy at leaving school
behind and forgotten for the day.

"Steelhead in there," Big Mama said, her voice
quiet now that we were back in the car. "Tribes met for council by this
riverbank.
Snoqualm
means 'moon.' White folks called them the 'Moon
People.'" Big Mama pulled a wide arc of seat belt over herself and started the
Volkswagen again.

A few more blowy, freezing minutes down a
forested road and we were at the start of a dirt path closed to cars by a link
of chain.

"I have the privilege of running this place,
but it's really nature that's in charge," Big Mama said, and got out of the car.
I watched the back

347

of her lumber over to unhook the latch. The
pockets of her flannel shirt looked wide enough to carry a picnic lunch, and her
huge work jeans (bought in the men's department, she had complained) had to be
rolled at the cuff.

"This is a homemade hatchery, funded with
private donations, so don't expect all the fancy billboards and cement
walkways," Big Mama said. We walked behind Big Mama, whose breathing was heavy
but pace quick as she headed toward a small cabin built on the banks of the
Snoqualmie River. Contraptions that looked like rows of low workbenches stuck up
from the water, as did a trio of high, neck-breaking platforms. I hoped Big Mama
didn't have to get up on those.

"Here, we worry. Only one or two of every
thousand salmon survive the journey back. That is, of the ones that even get out
of the gate. You got overfishing"--Big Mama counted off on her fingers--"you got
dams, you got natural predators. And sure, you can grow some extras in a cement
pool and give them chicken feed, but real baby salmon don't eat pellets. So here
we aim to increase the salmon populations, but we do it their way, in their
place."

She surveyed her surroundings, looked over the
river. "Sure, you can take Mother Nature's arm and force it behind her back, you
can use your science or what have you to make it go the

348

way you want it to go. But we are talking about
a creature with the most ancient of instincts. You mess with that, you don't
listen,
then you'd better not sit and wonder why you yourself can't find
your own way home. Come here," she said.

But before we could follow her to the edge of
the river, a guy dressed like Big Mama in flannel and jeans came out of the
cabin.

"I thought you called in sick," he said to Big
Mama.

"I've got visitors," she said.

The guy had a long ponytail and small glasses.
I realized I knew him. He realized the same. "Hey" he said, pointing finger at
me. "I know you."

I held up my palm, which still had the trace
markings of the map he'd made for me to Black Nugget Road from the used
book-and-record store. "He helped me find the way to your place," I told Big
Mama.

"How about that," she said. "Tom Stone, these
are my friends Jordan and Jackson."

"Pleased," he said. "I work at that other place
so I can eat. Only the boss makes enough around here to live lavish."

"Ha," Big Mama said.

"I'd have warned you not to ride in her car,
but it looks like you did already," he said.

"Never mind, you," Big Mama said.
"Tom

349

takes his bike. Up that road we came? Imagine
this big ass on a bike." She slapped her hips.

Jackson laughed. "What are you laughing at?"
she said. And then to Tom, "I wanted to show them the chums. You want to come
with us?"

"I've got to count in"--he checked his
watch--"Six minutes."

"Okay then," Big Mama said. Tom waved good-bye,
then took a clipboard from where it hung from a nail on the cabin wall. "For
five minutes every half hour someone counts the chums coming through," Big Mama
said. "You'll go calling us primitive if I don't tell you we also count with
sonar. But there is nothing like the eyes God gave you. You get good at it,
too."

We followed her down a path near the river;
behind us I could see Tom climb the plywood steps of the platform, clipboard
under his arm. Big Mama eased sideways down a slope where the river curved to a
quiet inlet.

"There," she said.

I had never seen so many fish in one place.
They were about a foot long and a deep red. They huddled together in thick
groups or swam against the current, broad tails flapping, sometimes raising
themselves and landing with a slap against the surface of the water.

I knew their story. I knew that they had
finally returned after a ten-thousand-mile

350

journey. Seeing them there, knowing that they
had nearly done it, filled me with awe and joy. I know it sounds corny, but it
was true. The wonder of it made me take Big Mama's hand.

"This is where they were born," Big Mama
said.

"They look tired," I said. They did. The color
they had earned from their ocean trek, a deep red, seemed to seep from
them.

Jackson leaned over the riverbank, hands in the
pockets of his jeans. "The scales are rotting," he said.

"Scales are being absorbed. To finish the trip.
Four years in the ocean, and now they have only enough energy to get back home
to spawn and die," Big Mama said. She released my hand. "They left here no
bigger than my finger." She held it up. "And these are the ones that made it. So
spent, they don't even eat. Don't even eat. Now, that
must
be tired." She
laughed. Took my hand again. "But they're hurrying. Can you see it?"

You could. I found myself leaning forward. I
wanted to help with the physical strain I almost felt myself as I watched the
efforts of their ragged bodies.

"They've left home and had their adventure,"
Big Mama said. "But now it's time to go back and finish. This is where they're
supposed to be. They know that home is the best place to

351

love and die. And they gotta be strong to get
there." She squeezed her big palm to mine.

"How do they know they're supposed to be here?"
I asked.
"This
stream?"

I had heard it all before, sitting on the end
of Big Mama's bed in her room at my mother's house years ago. And she had told
me the story countless times again over the phone, and in her broad handwriting
in the letters she sent. Still, watching the fish fight with their last
strength, I was caught up. It was almost unbelievable that after a
ten-thousand-mile adventure they were back.