Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

“Clark!” He tries to move toward her but something invisible grips him, anchors him in place.

“She arrived two days ago by train. I’ve been very happy to make her acquaintance.”

Lewis’s face twists in several directions. He can’t decide how he feels. First an ebullient giddiness. Then a lingering fury. This mellows when he realizes why she is here, how Burr hopes to use her against him. Lewis feels more and more like a marionette tugged by strings, dragged thousands of miles and now asked to dance, shaken when not compliant.

“You see, don’t you?” Burr says gleefully. “You understand? You’ll maybe listen a little better now?”

Lewis thinks about lying, about saying she means nothing to him, but he feels as if an eye is rolling through the corridors of his mind and he must dim the lights and close the doors on it. He removes from his mind any thoughts of Clark. In defense, he focuses all his attention instead on the grain of the wood in the floor, how much it looks like the whorl of a fingerprint. For the moment that is all he knows.

“I understand,” Lewis says and he feels the eye retreat, releasing him. He realizes only then that he is crumpled on the floor, like a boneless pile of clothes.

He reaches into his pocket — his habit from long ago, when he would seek comfort in his snuffbox — and finds not a silver tin but a wooden case. The coffin-shaped one containing the vial. He transferred it there when they left their bags in the cove. He didn’t want to leave it behind, thinking it too valuable and dangerous. How easy it would be to snap its top, shake its contents into the coffee cup beside him. He wonders how much time would pass before Burr began coughing, before his fever spiked. He wonders how long it would take for the infection to work its way through all of Astoria. A viral infection that would wipe away the human infection.

It is then that a thunderclap sounds, though only a few clouds spatter the sky. They all hunker down. A crack runs through the window. A book falls from the shelf. Outside, down the hill, a bloom of fire, a plume of smoke. The aftermath of a bomb. A concrete building crumbles in half, opening its dark, gaping center. The noise of the explosion lengthens as it orbits the town.

Burr has risen from his chair and stands by the window. Lewis can sense his anger, but it is momentarily directed elsewhere. “It’s those goddamned women again,” he says.

Now. Now would be the time. To crack the container, to twist open the vial, to dose his coffee.

Then he hears a crying. The boy stands in the doorway. The boy with the cleft palate and the marbles. His cheeks are wet with tears. He runs to Burr and clings to his leg and the old man pats him and says, “There, there. Nothing to be afraid of. Just some bugs that need to be squashed.”

Boys. Girls. Men and women. The innocent and the terrible alike. If he shook out the specimen and infected Burr, this is what Lewis would be destroying. Then he would indeed be playing God. He will have to find another way.

Outside, with every passing second, the smoke blackens and thickens. Then comes a second explosion, farther away than the first, that jangles the cups on their saucers.

The wrinkles in Burr’s face seem to multiply when he turns from the window. “I’m needed elsewhere. Which will give you some time to think about this,” he says, with a voice with a lot of teeth in it. “Adapt. Or face extinction.”

IT WAS NEVER going to be easy. Gawea knew that. But she thought the trouble would come from hunger and thirst, storms that spit snow, sunlight that scorched, insects that stung and animals that clawed. She thought her flesh would be vulnerable, not her heart.

When they paddled the Columbia, when they followed the final artery of water that would lead them to Astoria, she hoped that she would return in more ways than one — to her home and to her original frame of mind, indifferent to her cargo. She didn’t want to care about Lewis anymore. It was too hard.

The current pulled them and their paddles pulled them and Burr pulled them, and at one point she almost yelled at them to stop, turn back, but by then it was too late. The lights of Astoria glowed in the distance. She could call a snake up from its burrow or a bird down from a branch, but she could not control the guilt and the doubt twisting inside her, and on the beach she decided she could not face Lewis any longer. Before she stole off into the night, she told herself that he would be fine. If he gave in and did as he was told, if he became the old man’s instrument, he would be rewarded. She would not consider the alternative.

Burr made her a promise. If she delivered Lewis to Astoria, he would give her what she has pined for all these years. Family. Her mother. This, she thought, was what she wanted. This would give her the sense of wholeness that has escaped her all her life.

When dawn comes, when she presents herself to Burr, he pets her hair and thanks her and feeds her and questions her and makes good on his promise and directs her up the bald-sculpted hill where clouds pattern the grass with fast-moving shadows. Here the Astoria column rises, with pioneers and trappers painted in a swirling mural along its length, memorializing all those who braved the way west in the hope of a better life.

Its long shadow points to a gazebo. In it she finds her mother waiting on a bench. She forgets all about Lewis then. Her feet whisper in the grass when she approaches and stands a little off to the side until her mother turns to look at her. The last time Gawea saw her, seven years ago, she clutched a baby to her breast and contorted her face in fear when a storm of wasps came pouring in the window. She looks calm now — sad but calm — acknowledging Gawea and then returning her gaze to the ocean. The salt wind blows and knocks her hair — streaked gray — around her head like tentacles. “I never thought I’d see the ocean,” she says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Gawea takes a step closer. “Do you remember me?”

Her mother blinks hard, as if something bothers her eye. “I remember.”

Gawea takes another step closer and another still. “They told you why you’re here? They’ve treated you well? You look well.”

She does. She is deeply tanned and furrowed with wrinkles — and her hands are so callused they appear hooved — but she is freshly bathed, wearing a pine-green dress that matches her eyes. Which makes it all the more unsettling when she takes a deep breath and asks Gawea in a calm, cool voice, “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

It takes her a minute to find any words, and when she does, they’re the obvious ones. “Because I want to be with you. I want us to be a family.”

“I’m sorry, but I have another family now.”

“You were a slave. Now you’re free. I made that happen.”

“They stole me away once. Now they’ve stolen me away again. If I’m free, then let me go back. I have children. I have a home.”

“I’m your child too.”

“Maybe.” Her mother’s eyes, her green eyes, regard her, so different from Gawea’s. She is different. They are different. “But that was a long time ago. And I was another woman. I just want to forget all that. Don’t you understand that it’s easier to forget? It’s harder to remember.” She reaches out a hand for Gawea to take. Its fingernails short, its calluses rough. “You must have people who care for you. Go to them.”

Her mother was different, but Lewis was like her. Gawea was like him. All this time she kept yearning for her mother, when he was more family to her, a brother beyond blood, fused by their abilities. She needed him, and right now — maybe more than ever — he needed her.