The headlights on a truck flare beside him—and he stands in a hurry, spotlighted.
The truck does not seem to see him, rolling from its spot, and he darts out of the way. He calls out to the woman in the red coat, but she does not look his way, digging into her purse and removing a silvery flash of keys. He grabs her then, presses his thumb deeply into the basin of her elbow, and though she frowns, she does not pause. He releases her as she pulls away.
All around him, he now notices, lights glow, a galaxy of light. Stoplights, streetlamps, headlights, billboards, signage over stores and the windows beneath them. The starlit sky above cannot compare.
Lewis wonders if he is caught in a dream, even as he knows he is not. He is perfectly awake and cannot escape or manipulate what surrounds him, slash a hand through it and make it ripple like water. Yet like a dream, he goes along with whatever presents itself, in this case, a black tunnel toward the edge of the parking lot, the only break he can find in this weird-familiar world. A tunnel of trees, all the trunks leaning inward, arched and raftered with branches silvered with snow.
He moves through its darkness and the darkness moves through him. It is comforting. Familiar. Deep. Timeless. He walks the passage, not cold, not at all, despite his bare feet padding the frosted ground. The sound grows louder, more painful, the farther he travels. Instead of a bell it is now a knife in his ear. It warps and solidifies into a word, his name. A voice calls for him. Burr’s. He does not want to go forward but feels pulled there as if down an inhaling throat. A branch scratches his arm. Shadows shift among the trees, pacing him.
At the end of the tunnel a light awaits him—a light that brightens and blackens, brightens and blackens, like a great eye opening and closing. He fears the eye. It makes his breath come faster and yet he can never seem to get enough, as if his chest is leaking, pierced.
And then he is there, at the end, with the eye before him, burning from the top of a lighthouse with the great gray span of the ocean frothing and booming beyond it.
Part IV
Whilst I viewed those mountains, I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the—heretofore conceived—boundless Missouri. But when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific Ocean, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and the party in them, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them. But, as I have always held it little short of criminality to anticipate evils, I will allow it to be a good, comfortable road until I am compelled to believe otherwise.
—The Journals of Lewis and Clark
Chapter 41
TWO WOMEN. Sisters. The Field sisters. Old enough to thread their hair with gray, but how old exactly, they don’t know. They don’t keep a calendar. They keep their hair short, a shaggy cut. Their faces and shoulders are broad. One of them has a mole on her upper lip, and the other doesn’t, and one of them stands six feet tall, the other a little less, but otherwise they could be the same person. Maybe this is why they don’t talk very often. What use are words when you can communicate with a narrow-eyed glance, a pointed finger, a pat on the back.
They go still when asleep. Otherwise, they move quickly and efficiently, when digging clams, when robbing birds’ nests of eggs, when cooking and eating, when mending clothes, when scavenging houses and stores. Right now, in a half-moon bay walled in by cliffs, one of them splits logs with a maul while the other digs a wide, shallow crater in the sand. The ax chucks the wood that is piled into the crater and then set aflame. When it burns, they look to the sky, worried who might see the smoke, comforted by the long-hanging clouds. They stir the fire with a length of rebar, then rake it down to coals and let it cool and collect the charcoal.
They already have the rest of what they need. First the potassium nitrate, deposits of bat guano they scraped from caves and attics. They soaked the gray mud of it in water for a day and then collected the crystals. And then the sulfur they salvaged from the cobwebbed shell of an ag store.
They merge and screen and granulate the ingredients and fill up ten ten-gallon drums that weigh several hundred pounds each. The sisters manage to roll them and heft them into the back of a pickup truck that has been welded and patched with sheets of metal so many times that it appears like many vehicles clapped together. The bed sags with the weight. The tires’ tubes are full of salt water. The engine runs poorly but runs all the same, rebuilt to process biodiesel, the algae the sisters harvest. The key cranks and the engine bellows and lopes and settles into a steady chug punctuated by the occasional rattling pop.
They keep it in first gear. The speedometer is broken, but their speed couldn’t be more than five miles per hour. The pickup breaks down twice on the way to Youngs Bay, and they spend an hour, then another hour, fixing it. One of them hunches over the engine block while the other surveys the road in either direction with a rifle ready.
The road is more an impression than a reality. A place where trees aren’t. The asphalt has ground down to gravel. They drive around the occasional fallen limb and rockslide, but mostly the way is clear.