Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon (18 page)

They thank him but politely decline.

“Well, if you ever change your mind, or find yourself back in Sac-Town with no place to go, you call Harold Payton.” He hands each of them a card.

After parting ways with Harold, they spend eight-hundred dollars on a beater car. They spend twenty bucks on mice and a water dish at a pet store. They buy a drill and they drill some holes into the car’s trunk.

Andrew has the two of them go find a store for some food and beer so he can handle the snakes himself, because at this rate, they’re likely all dead.

“Want some whiskey too?” Jesse asks.

“Naw,” Andrew says. “California is a bunch of tight-asses about drinking and driving. Just grab us some beer.”

Andrew dumps the snakes out of the suitcases into the trunk. He watches them writhe. They have made a recovery. He drops the mice into the trunk and slams it shut.

He thinks maybe someday he’ll write a book on caring for snakes.

He’ll call it
Snakes and Bacon
.

***

The drive from Sacramento, California to Boring, Oregon takes nine hours. It’s a long time to pass in a car, but you can cover that distance in a single stretch, wasting only part of a day.

“Look at all the trees,” Myrtle says. “I have never seen so many trees in my life.”

“Yeah, that’s a lot of fuckin’ firewood,” Jesse says in agreement.

They’re passing through the redwoods in Northern California.

“Once, Texas had this many trees, but they cut them all down,” Andrew says.

“Did it?” Jesse says.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Seems like probably it did.”

“Doesn’t Bigfoot live up here?” Myrtle asks.

Jesse, who’s got a beer raised to his lips, pauses. He looks at his fiancée, smiles. “What do you know about Bigfoot?”

“I know he’s big and hairy, kind of like a human ape, that he kidnaps women and turns out blurry in photographs. And I know he lives in these here woods.”

“Girl sure knows a lot about Bigfoot,” Andrew says.

“It’s that college education of hers,” Jesse says, jokingly, but Myrtle doesn’t take it that way.

“Maybe if you two watched more of the Discovery Channel, you would know more about the world around you,” she says.

“I know about these parts,” Andrew says. “I know a lot about them.”

“Sure you do.”

“Naw, you see, my dad always wanted to fish up here. He used to talk about the salmon runs of the great Pacific Northwest like they was fairy tales. The Columbia, the Willamette, the Snake, the Rogue, the Deschutes, the Nestucca, the Skagit, the Snohomish, all the great rivers of Oregon and Washington. You name it, my father read about it. In fact, once we hit Oregon, I bet you I can name every river we pass.”

“Maybe with road signs,” Jesse says.

“Or a map stapled to your ass,” Myrtle says.

Andrew just smiles to himself, and nostalgia for something he’s never experienced passes through his chest like heartburn. He’s entering the paradise his father always dreamed of but never experienced himself. Now Andrew will finally experience it, settle the demands of a restless ghost, if only he can navigate through the situation at hand.

“Once, in the time of the Indians and dinosaurs,” he says, “so many salmon filled the rivers they didn’t even need bridges. You could cross any river walking on the backs of salmon. When they were hungry, they just set a basket at the water’s edge and soon enough, a salmon would jump into the basket. The forests were full of tasty mushrooms like we’ve never seen. Berry bushes grew like weeds. And bald eagles were everywhere, man. Everywhere. Bald eagles were like their friends. And the bears. So many bears and wolves and deer. Hardly any snakes anywhere. Nothing that could poison you at all, really. And it never got too hot and it never got too cold. Perfect weather all the time. The salmon had some magic in them that made it all happen. An old Indian chief said so. He said that as long as the people loved the salmon and treated them with respect, the salmon would fill the rivers.”

“So what happened?” Myrtle says.

“Lewis and Clark happened.”

“Did Lewis and Clark kill Bigfoot’s family too?”

“Probably, knowing those sumbitches.”

The three of them nod knowingly, as if this is the way things are and must always be.

“Imagine being the last of your kind,” Myrtle says.

“It’d be lonely, for sure,” Jesse says.

“I’m not so sure. I think it might be kind of freeing,” Andrew says. “Like real freedom.”

“I don’t think it’d be lonely or freeing,” Myrtle says. “I think it’d be something else entirely.”

“Like what, baby?” Jesse says.

Before Myrtle can answer, they cross the Oregon border and throw up a little cheer.

“We’re in the home stretch now,” Jesse says. “So you sure everything’s still squared away for the drop-off?”

“We just gotta make a phone call when we get to where we’re going. They’ll tell us a time and where to go from there.”

Myrtle looks beautiful in the back seat.

She’s the last of her kind, for sure.

***

They’re almost out of money again, but it doesn’t matter now. They’re driving into Portland, Oregon. Boring is so close.

“So where’s the drop-off place?” Jesse asks.

“Hey man,” Andrew says, “I ever tell you how much I love strawberries?”

“Yeah, strawberries are pretty good, but how are we supposed to get paid for these snakes?”

“I just love them strawberries.”

“Sounds to me like he’s evading,” Myrtle says to Jesse.

“That’s bullshit. I ain’t evadin’,” Andrew says.

“Then tell us about the plan for these damn reptilians,” Jesse says.

“Fine, if you wanna know so bad. These scientist people, they expect to do the transaction with just one guy. That’s me. Means you two can’t be around when business goes down. The other thing to keep in mind is we might not be getting paid as much.”

“Why the hell not?” Myrtle says.

“We lost a lot of snakes when you got bit back there. Not to mention some have died along the way. We are dealing with what those in the service industry call damaged goods.”

“Shit, he’s right,” Jesse says.

“But riches ain’t all there is to life. There’s love, and there’s uh…” Andrew trails off. “I’m pretty fuckin’ tired.”

“Andrew,” Jesse says.

Andrew says nothing.

“Andrew.”

“Huh?”

“You not gonna fuck us over, are you? You splitting the money with us like we agreed?”

“Yeah, of course. You like my brother. You both’s family. I’d never do anything to hurt family. I just need to sleep, man. I just need to sleep is all.”

Andrew pulls off the freeway. They drive through an industrial district where mattresses, couches, tents, and hovels built out of shopping carts line the streets. They approach a bonfire surrounded by dirty faces. As they come near, the dirty faces look up at them.

“You got any beer?” Andrew says.

A young man in a wheelchair—one festering, infected foot looking like a white mushroom propped up on a milk crate—gestures to a red ice chest. “Help yourself,” he says.

Andrew, Jesse, and Myrtle stand by the fire and drink beer. They shoot the shit with the strangers and are even offered a couple couches to crash on for the night. Everyone’s having a good time, but nobody asks where they’re from, what they’re doing here. Everybody comes from the same place. Everybody ends up in the same place too.

Andrew excuses himself, says he’s going to find a payphone so he can call and make plans for delivering the snakes. He’s gone a good half hour, and upon his return, he appears restless.

Before they sleep, Andrew finally tells them the plan. He says, “In the morning, we drive out to Dodge Park, right on the Sandy River. That’s where we claim our riches.”

Jesse and Myrtle, spooning on a couch, hold each other closer. “We’re so close, baby,” Jesse whispers, and in the dark above their heads, their future kids can be seen playing on the green lawn of their future home.

***

The next morning, they head out for Boring.

They park on the side of a steep mountain road under a dense, rainforest-like canopy of trees. There’s a bridge that spans the river. Beneath the bridge, two fishermen stand thigh-deep in the white-capped water.

“This is exactly how it should be,” Andrew says. “The scientist we’re meeting here will be disguised as a fisherman.”

“How do you know which dude fishing is him?” Myrtle asks.

“I was told I’d know.”

Jesse and Myrtle watch from the car as Andrew takes the two suitcases—repacked with snakes—across the bridge and down to the fishermen. They’re too far away to hear the conversation as Andrew approaches them, but one of the fishermen reels in his line, wades back to shore, and follows Andrew into the woods downriver.

Five or ten minutes pass before the fisherman returns from the woods, but he isn’t toting the suitcases.

He goes back to fishing.

Alone in the forest, Andrew releases the rattlesnakes.

Another five or ten minutes pass before Andrew reemerges, toting the now-empty suitcases. He stomps back up the hill as if he’s pissed off, crosses the bridge.

“What happened?” Jesse asks.

“He wouldn’t take the snakes,” Andrew says.

“Why not?”

“He asked where the rest of them were. I told him we had complications, but then he started pointing out how the snakes were delivered in poor condition. He said they’d be useless to the sick people, and then he refused to pay.”

Jesse and Myrtle are visibly agitated, panicked. Andrew tries to keep them calm, but they’re too far embroiled to listen.

“Fuck this,” Jesse says. “If you won’t take care of this, I’ll do it myself.” And he storms away from the car, toward the bridge.

Myrtle remains by the car, biting her knuckles.

Andrew chases after Jesse, steps in front of him to block his path on the midway point of the bridge, with the clear river running beneath and moss-covered trees jutting up like spikes all around.

Andrew lays his hands on Jesse’s shoulders, looks the best friend he ever had straight in the eye.

“Let me go, Andrew. That man owes us. It’s our right to take what’s ours.”

“Listen,” Andrew says, and he realizes they’ve reached the end. There’s nowhere else to go from here. No desert to return to either. And so he spills forth a confession. “There are no medicinal snakes.”

“Bullshit. Of course there are. We took ’em all this way. We were gonna sell them for a million dollars.”

“There’s no such thing, Jesse. I made them up. I collected those snakes myself. Like you said when we were robbing that bank, they look just like regular old diamondbacks. That’s because they are. And now they’re loose in these woods. The ones that survived, at least.”

Jesse throws a wild, emotion-fueled punch, but Andrew is unprepared and takes it in the nose. There’s a crunch and then iron and wetness, a blossoming of something that should be pain but isn’t. It’s only heartbreak, an explosion inside both of them, as they tangle muscular arm in muscular arm, scars rubbing against scars, teeth grinding, feet twisted.

Myrtle is crying and the fisherman who’d gone into the woods drops his pole and runs up toward the bridge to stop the fight but as he’s running up there Jesse pulls out a gun and turns to shoot the person who’s pulling on his back, trying to tear him away from Andrew, but the person clawing at his back isn’t the fisherman. It’s Myrtle.

Jesse shoots her, not seeing until the trigger’s pulled, and the look of surprise on her face as she falls dead is the look of defeat. And the fisherman backs away, so Jesse shoots him too. And Jesse drops the gun and collapses in a heap beside Myrtle, cradling her, crying. And this is when Andrew peels his bloody skull off the concrete and scoops up Jesse’s discarded gun. And he walks up to Jesse, puts the gun to his head, and finishes him.

Andrew looks over the side of the bridge and the second fisherman who’d been down there is gone, so he hurries down and finds the man cowering under the bridge and he puts a bullet in his head too.

One of the men has caught a nice steelhead. The fish floats dead in the shallows, a green nylon stringer tied through its jaw. Andrew takes the steelhead and hurries back to the car. He drives away from Dodge Park. He drives straight through Boring, past the swampland and the dogs that chase his car. He passes a police cruiser on the narrow road that winds through farm and forest, but the sirens aren’t blaring and anyway he’ll soon be gone. Of course they’ll find the bodies, but the cop seems in no rush to get there. Probably thinks some fisherman or dumbass kid was just out target shooting by the river. Tell them to knock it off and move on to the next call. Poor bastard has no way to predict the nightmare that awaits him.

Andrew ditches the car near a rundown apartment project on SE 82
^nd
with the doors unlocked and the windows rolled down. He breaks his own rule and sells the rest of their guns to a pawn shop for fifty bucks, then checks into a roach motel run by a senile Chinese man for two nights.

He turns on the news, and they sure have made it. Every cop in Texas is looking for Jesse and Myrtle, after the squad car was found at their burnt-down farmhouse. The catfish farm massacre has been discovered too, and cops suspect it’s all linked up to the bank robbery that shortly thereafter ensued, and the rocket launcher found in the back of an ice cream truck at a rest stop further on up the road. In addition to Texas, authorities in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California are on the lookout for Jesse and Myrtle. Oregon’s not in on it yet, and by some miracle of the lord, there’s no mention of a third suspect. Andrew tries not to think about the implications of that. But it won’t be long before the Texas boys get wind of Jesse and Myrtle’s bodies being found in Boring, at which point the Oregon police will be out in droves. Unless they bill it as a murder-suicide. Unlikely, but Andrew can hope.

He flips through the channels until eventually settling on a preseason game between the Houston Oilers and Seattle Seahawks. Steve McNair is a promising rookie and Oilers fans have high hopes that he can lead their team to glory, but Andrew just doesn’t know how he feels about a quarterback who tucks the ball under his arm and runs so often. Andrew believes in pocket passers. He hates the goddamn Dolphins, but Dan Marino, he’s what a quarterback ought to be. Nonetheless, Andrew roots for the Oilers because they’re his team, and if the coaches believe McNair is the man, well, shoot, Andrew believes it too.