The Bully of Order (42 page)

“I need some money.”

“I'll give you what you need.”

“I'm goin back.”

“I was worried you'd say that, so I got us a ride upriver.”

“Just give me some money so I can get out of here.”

“What'll you do when you go back?”

“I don't know. I'll find her.”

“Then what?”

“We'll leave together. We'll go to Alaska.”

He went to stand, and I pulled him down by his shirt. He was pale as spruce dust and sweating. Men were walking by and staring at us. I didn't trust Doris, and wondered if he'd lied about finding us passage. He could've told the law, and they could be on their way.

“C'mon.” I dragged him up to his feet.

“First you want me to sit, now you—”

I hooked an arm around his waist and led him into the street and we mingled with the crowd and I felt safer. I'd worked with a sniper years ago in California that'd told me about a place called the Time Shop and said he could be found there when he wasn't in the woods. I'd told this man, Taylor was his name, what I was running from and he told me that tragedy was the soul's version of gravity, called it the song of the goat. So I remember him.

The shop appeared to be more of a library than a mercantile. It was thick with cigar and cigarette smoke, and men sat at tables with coffee, reading the local periodicals. I found us some chairs and sat Duncan down. When I tried to get us some coffee, the man behind the counter scowled and hitched a thumb at a shoddily painted sign behind him informing patrons that this was not in fact a café: W
E ARE PURVEYORS OF THE WRITTEN WORD AND IF LITERATURE BE PURCHASED COFFEE WILL FLOW, IF NOT, GET FUCKED.
I tossed a newspaper on the counter and asked the angry little seedpod of a man if he knew someone named Taylor, a sniper.

“A what?”

“He cuts logs.”

“So he's a logger. A faller.”

“He shapes them,” I explained.

“Nature does that, sun, water, and time. Sculptors.”

“He shapes them once they've been fell so's they can be moved.”

The seedpod grinned. “I fuckin know that.” He held out his hand for my coins. I paid, and he tossed them into a jar on the counter, pointed at a large copper pot with a brass spigot. N
OT FREE COFFEE
, the sign said.

I took two cups and filled them and went back to the table, and then had to go back for my paper.

“Hey,” the seedpod said. “If he's sitting here, he needs to be reading something.”

“He isn't feeling well.”

The man turned around and searched the bookshelf behind him until he found what he wanted, tossed it on the counter. “One fifty.” It was a medical journal. I had the same book, or used to. I gave him a dime and picked out two more newspapers.

“Taylor won't be coming in today.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Couldn't say. Maybe if you told me who's looking for him, I could get him a message.”

“Tell him the doc from Camp Eight. He'll know who it is.”

We stayed and read the papers and watched as a meeting of anti-public-utility advocates convened a few tables over. They were men mostly my age, missionary-eyed and stiff-necked. Their president used a policeman's billy for a gavel, left it on the table next to his hand while the secretary read over last week's minutes. A sad lot with a sad mission, thinking themselves a tough lot with a tough mission. I wondered if at the bottom of every argument against the rule of law is man's inability to accept kindness, the antithetical strains of loneliness and independence. An airy concept, sure, but looking across the table at Duncan reading his paper, I felt strength in a bond that I thought had been broken long ago. My heart was open to him, as a man stood against a wall and blindfolded is open to rifle fire.

Hours went by, and most everyone left but when the seedpod went to flip the sign and close up shop, Taylor pushed the door open, locked it behind him. He was a gray-haired man with a bushy mustache and a brown suit, wore spectacles.

“Good to see you, Taylor.”

“Doc. Who's this?”

“My son. Duncan.”

“He's a wanted man.”

Duncan leaned back in his chair and looked toward the door.

“I won't turn you in,” Taylor said. “None of my business what you did, but someone told the police chief that you're here. Rumor has it you came in on a fishing boat, and now you're headed upriver to the Snake. There's fifty coppers and who knows how many else looking for you now.”

I told him about Doris and how I suspected he'd betrayed me. The seedpod came over and whispered something in Taylor's ear. He rose to his feet and told us to follow him out the back.

“I'm not going with him,” Duncan said.

“They're coming for you,” Taylor said. “They'll be coming through the door any minute.”

I grabbed Duncan by the arm and dragged him after Taylor. The seedpod doffed his hat as we left the shop. The door shut behind us, and we followed Taylor through a series of dimly lit passageways until we came to a large steel door that opened into the alley.

We waited in the alley until a trash hauler came with his mulecart. Taylor talked to the man, and Duncan and I hid among the putrid garbage and were jostled away. Taylor said he'd meet us at the waterfront. The cobblestones made for a miserable ride.

“This is why I wanted to go back,” Duncan said. “I can't hide. I might as well face what I've done.”

“We'll make it out of the city at least. Taylor will get us to the coast. Every day at liberty is a day you weren't hung.”

“I thought you were going east.”

“Not anymore. They'll be looking for us.”

“Nobody's looking for you,” he said to me.

“I'm not leaving you to go it alone.”

“I'd do it to you.”

“And I'd deserve it.”

Rotten apple slime was leaking out of a crate and onto my pants. I crabbed my way over to Duncan and leaned onto the low rail, peeked my head up while I kept my hand on my son's shoulder to keep him down.

“How far?” he asked.

“I can see the water.”

“Good.”

“First time I was in this city, your mother and I went dancing, stayed up until dawn, and had crab legs for breakfast.” One memory triggered another. “I almost bought a hardware store.”

“But you didn't.”

“No, I'd committed to being a doctor already. The thing about lying is that you begin to need it more with every day.”

At the waterfront the trash hauler had us help him throw his cargo into the Willamette.

“They frown on this generally,” the man said. “There's a pit, but you have to pay. Don't see the point in paying for something you get better done for free.”

Steamers went laboriously by, and their wakes sloshed against the trash and crates and scrap lumber and spread it onto the banks.

“Rain'll clear it out,” the trash hauler said, taking a seat on the forerail of the cart. “Taylor said you should wait. I don't know what for or for who, but that's what he said.”

I thanked him, and Duncan turned and held up a hand. We watched the cart wind its way up the low hill and back into the tangle of streets and alleys. Along the bank, sheltered from the wind in the tall grass, we found a dryish place to sit and listened to the mill and ships and the birds.

Taylor found us in the dark and led us to a muddy trail on the bank hidden in the tall grass, and we followed it by feel. We had to creep by several houses and warehouses with bright electric lights, and then we were into a bottomland of shanties, campfires, and derelict boats. Taylor walked faster here and more upright. We rested against the wrecked hull of a riverboat, and Taylor told us that his brother had agreed to take us to the coast with his mule train.

“What then?” Duncan asked.

“I don't know, son. Your father'll find a way to get you south, I guess. He's gotten you this far, hasn't he?”

“I'm not goin south,” Duncan said.

“You go north, you'll have a short trip. There's no hiding. Everyone's looking for you.”

I stood up so we'd keep going. I didn't want to let Duncan run himself down, worrying about what was next, because what was next was the rest of his life. He'd be living one move at a time for decades, or until he died.

Taylor took his hand and pulled him to his feet. We were back on the trail. The wind was blowing upriver, and I was glad we weren't rowing against it. I'd thought about stealing a boat earlier. This was better. Taylor wouldn't betray us. I hoped he wouldn't.

Eventually the trail ran into a plank road, and after a mile or so of walking we came to a stage stop that, judging by the shape of it, had fallen out of use. No one was around. Broken barrels were piled up in a jumble, ready to burn. The hoops were stacked neatly on the listing porch. Seeing the hoops for some reason made me think we could jump a train, maybe not in Portland, because they'd be watching, but somewhere else, maybe Salem or in between here and there.

We heard the lonely sound of the mules echoing down the road long before we could see them. Taylor's brother looked just like him except his hair hadn't gone gray yet. Before we were introduced, the two of them stepped away, and when they came back the man said his name was David, didn't care what we were called, and told us to mount up, Duncan on the penultimate mule, me on the last.

Taylor wasn't coming with us. He patted me on the leg and said safe travels and walked off the way we came. The trail disappeared into a wall of fern. The mules knew where they were going, and it wasn't long before I was nodding off. I'd never ridden a mule, but I found the ride preferable to horseback.

H
e chucked the fence
posts out of the way. The snow had melted, and the ground beneath was freshly turned. He paced out where he thought the body was and took up a shovel with a cracked handle and began to dig.

He had to hook a horse to the body, hug it to get the rope underneath, to get it out of the mud, and when it came, it made an awful sucking sound. He prayed that they would kill Duncan, but he took it back instantly and prayed for his salvation, for his freedom.

Hank Bellhouse and the McCandlisses arrived in the afternoon while Jonas was digging the new grave under the last tree on the high ground. Bellhouse passed over his father's shotgun.

“Where'd you get this?”

“The boy left it at my place, after he did that.” Bellhouse nodded at the corpse. The blankets were stained black and muddy, and even through them it was obvious that Matius's head was crushed or gone altogether.

Jonas laid the gun across his father's body. “What'd you want?”

“You need help digging?” Bellhouse asked.

“No.”

“Joseph, go find us some shovels in the barn.”

“I said I don't want help.”

“You'll get it anyway.” Bellhouse took off his coat and carefully set a fine Jules Jurgensen pocketwatch on top of it, coiled the chain around it like a sleeping snake. Joseph caught his brother's attention when he saw the watch, and they both smiled.

With four of them digging, they made the hole deep and wide. Bellhouse kicked the McCandlisses out, and it was him and Jonas left.

“No idea where he is?” Bellhouse asked.

“I don't have a clue.”

“Don't you want to hunt him for this? For what he did here.”

Jonas climbed from the grave and perched there on his knees, catching his breath. “You can leave me to bury him now.”

“I'll put you in that hole with him, you don't tell me where that little son of a bitch has gotten to.”

“Chacartegui'll catch him first,” Jonas said.

“Chacartegui's dead, and it was Duncan that did it. Shot my man Tartan full of holes too.”

“Well, he's left the Harbor then—if he has any sense, he has.”

“Where would he go?”

“I don't know. I don't care. Y'all can get the fuck outta here, won't bother me at all.”

“Sorry for yer loss,” Ben said.

Jonas didn't say anything as they mounted up and left, and when they were gone he held his palms flat to the mud. Had the thought: At least the ground hadn't froze. If Duncan did kill Chacartegui, he was gone. He was dead. Jonas had been dead once, and he'd come back. From one side to the other; he'd been in the open before. His father had taken him on a journey, now look at him.

J
onas stood on the
dock and surveyed the western shore. The piledrivers and wharf carpenters were small and busy above the muddy and white-capped water of the Willamette. Buildings had sprouted in their wake like morels in a burn.
Puttin a skirt on her
, he'd heard said. This was February, when warmth and blue skies were mythical, like the Cyclops or Medusa, and Jonas had ceased to believe in a rain-free future. He'd resigned himself to the gray drizzle, and when it finally and suddenly subsided, it left him feeling a little abandoned. The gods had stopped warring and returned to the mountain. There was peace, but still; he'd been abandoned.

When he got home Mary was on the porch, surrounded by steaming raw lumber and mud. She lifted her hand to wave, and her face broke into a free and uneven smile. And with that the final tightness from the day's shift drained from Jonas's body, and he walked loosely. It was as if he'd been swimming a broad river and was tired and needed the shore and almost couldn't make it, couldn't go on, and then he let himself sink and tested the depth and unbelievably his feet touched. He was done. She set down her book and stood to hug him.

“Your father was here,” she said.

“When?”

“A few hours ago. He's very skinny.”

“He's always skinny.”

“He's skinnier than I've ever seen him. And he's grown a beard. He left you something.”