West of Here by Jonathan Evison Read Free Book Online Page A

Hoko leading, only to find that she was following, stopping, only to find that he had already stopped, and when she arrived back at the fire, she found him there, squatting on his haunches, his lips silently at work.
    Other times, his wanderings did not take him so far. Hoko would find him in the yard behind the Olympic Hotel, standing on a log, with his head tilted sideways and one eye covered, or pacing the dock with uneven strides, counting the planks and stepping over cracks. Sometimes she found him tracing circles in shallow water with a stick, or picking up stones along the strait, only to reorient them on the shoreline. But more often than not as of late, she found him shadowing one white man or another through town.
    On the third day of Thomas’s absence, Hoko lost her appetite. Late that evening, when the snow began to fall in earnest, gathering in drifts along the low bank of Hollywood Beach, she cursed herself, and cursed Thomas, and left the fire in search of him.
    Front Street was only shadows and a pale orange flicker burning behind curtained windows as Hoko skirted the creek and ducked beneath the boardwalk calling for Thomas among the jumble of pilings. She could feel the thrum of life up the street in the darkness from the Belvedere, where white men gathered at all hours without occasion. As the buzz of activity grew nearer, her thoughts grew fainter. She passedtwo white men leaning in the doorway, speaking gruffly in low tones. When she felt their gaze upon her, she was a stranger to herself.
    She crossed the stumped and rutty hogback in the snow. Beyond the hulking boat shed, the Pioneer Theater was bathed in the glow of a large bonfire, ringed with the sawtooth shadows of a dozen people hunkered around it. From down the path, Hoko could discern the uneven cascade of their voices woven with laughter, and the popping of the fire. The little theater was still emptying its restless cargo into the street as Hoko approached. Women were fastening their bonnets, and men were unpocketing their pipes, and children were catching snowflakes on their tongues in a swathe of yellow light.
    When Hoko passed through their midst, all but the children paused in their tracks and stopped laughing, and no man tipped his hat. Cutting back along the Hollywood shore, she found the canoes pulled further upbeach than usual. The snow was not sticking on the shoreline, though it was accumulating in the wooden boats. An icy wind was knifing off the strait, and the fires burned slantwise with the force of each gust. Hoko could feel the rumble of the tide beneath her step, as she scanned the perimeter of each fire for Thomas, with no success.
    She came upon Abe Charles squatting alone by his fire. As always, he was dressed like a white: laced leather boots and a wide-brimmed hat, a shirt of Scotch wool, and a buckskin jacket. He had a pipe in his pocket, and a rifle at his side.
    “I’m looking for my boy,” said Hoko.
    Abe spit into the fire and it hissed. He looked up at the swirling snow. “The spirits are running about,” he observed.
    No matter how Abe cultivated his whiteness outwardly, he was still hopelessly Indian in his superstitions, a fact Hoko registered with impatience. “Have you seen him?”
    “Maybe he’s chasing them.”
    “Have you
seen
him?”
    “No. But I saw your father, and I thought I saw a ghost.”
    Without comment, Hoko left Abe squatting by the fire and continuedwest. She could feel his sad eyes on her back as she trudged along the strait crunching clam shells. When she reached the mouth of the Elwha, she hiked upriver along the rocky bank the short distance to her father’s home, a weather-beaten structure, part cabin, part shack, sagging beneath the weight of its roof. There was a time when the boy’s wanderings brought him regularly to his grandfather’s, where the boy would keep silent company with the old man, seated on the porch for hours, watching the tree line undulate, and listening to