Point Defiance

The trees are orange and yellow tinged, colors spreading sky to street in mid-Autumn, gusts slowly tilting them from top to bottom heavy as the wind thins the leaves. It is Koldok. He is thirteen again, eating a sandwich. His friend Jerod Asch, who is long since dead, sits on the curb, talking shop about baseball in a dirty red baseball cap and blue striped sweatshirt. A gust of wind picks up some leaves, whirling them around his feet, and the air tastes cold and oddly bitter. Steadily the sun breaks open the yellowest leaves, and from the cracks branch dark lines, thickening until they suffocate the vision of Jerod and street, of Erv's Bait & Tackle and the general store, slowly choking out everything but the long branches that reach for him from the sky. His limbs and head become heavy, unable to move as the black trees snag ankles and suck his body into the gulf, swallowing him in winter.

He wakes up in a bathtub immersed in cold water once warm, hands wrinkled like a premonition, the white of some old calluses hanging from the fingertips. Up slowly and looks into the mirror, seeing his father as always, his expression empty. He vomits thin bile into the sink, violently coughing. When he recovers he brings a pink shriveled hand over his eyes, grasping the temples, his other gripping the sink, leaning his weight into the porcelain.

He knows his father's face from the few pictures his mother kept when he was living at home in North Dakota. In most of them he was dressed in uniform, his face hard and set, green eyes forward and piercing. Their similarities are only closer now because he is nearing the age of his father in the photographs. These facts he has lodged someplace, for safe keeping or for no reason at all. One of his first memories is like this: round child's face in the mirror, his mother behind him, lips together, cold as glaciers.

In the bedroom the form of the girl still lays dead still, her face still like play-dough, her lips in a grimace. Remembers as drunk, finding her so with the small blue pills at the side by a hand. He took them to the bathroom and swallowed all those that remained; face trailing in the mirror between door and toilet, poured a bath and entered the black and dreamless warm. He walks to her and holds the wrist for a second, absently sliding a finger down to her cold open palm, frowning. Disengaged, he pastes a smile to her nullish face like a post-it note and with suitcase in hand his mind hits the freeway, northeast and out.

He exits Fairmont Nebraska heading towards I-29, towards the Iowa border to cut north to I-94 and follow the path of the Burlington Northern line that as a child he would watch run behind his house. He is heading in line for Tacoma Washington, as he often does when he leaves without having a specific destination. He has always, in the past, turned aside before getting anywhere close; to work or perhaps old friends, forgotten generally until he is passing through and remembers. With nothing to be done there are diversions. He has known that his father was buried near Seattle since he was young. It was not unlikely that this was the first thing he'd asked when his mother explained to him that his real father had passed away overseas, before he'd been born. Or no, first he'd asked whether his father knew about him, that is, the pregnancy. He had not. She hadn't told him. He didn't know if this was something that bothered him or even should bother him. His response was expressionless.

It's still cold in mid-April. The land is flat as he looks behind. You don't need bearings, air to clean the blood and blacktop to clear the distance, the road signs coast by at a snail's pace, the wheels wobble unsteadily within the painted lines, framed by black brush and trees, lost in the white backdrop. At the diner the syrup's running slow, the waitresses sour and fragile as rotting melons. It feels to him like watching cassettes rewind, or the dream in which nothing occurs but a sandwich and talking to dead friends. The sandwich might be good, but your friends are still dead. Wake up and they're still dead, probably better that way. And it's still colder in the waking gray afternoon. Bitter gusts meet him at the door as he walks towards the car, windows specked with ice.


Close to the southern edge of North Dakota and it's late. After dinner at a truckstop he lies in the long backseat of the car. When he was young his mother and he would take long trips to see family. They would travel at night and he would lie alone in the back seat, the white sheets rolling and rolling, rapping like chains on the metal roof, beads tearing over the rear window he'd stare up through, she'd said you could see the stars from there. His teeth would wear down the skin around the nail until he could taste iron in his mouth, gazing into the beads of light when cars passed by, he wondered if stars were made of rain. Now he lies face up at first, but the lamps from over the gas pumps make red patterns through his eyelids, and in response he finds himself clawing into the crack between backrest and seat. A seatbelt buckle presses into his forehead and in the dark he rests.

He stirs later to the hard prang of downpour, the white sheets. Through the windows a shadow world moves about in the dim break of day, vague shapes of men and trucks rolling out of the lot to the interstate. He dozes lightly again before doing so himself. The weather has only warmed enough to let the backwash of winter flow into the maelstrom of spring. The rain slows to a cold drizzle by mid-morning. Tiny drops of water distill the cast over sky in bead chains, hanging from the black seams of telephone wires. Absently he looks at them, reminded of some childhood memory. Christmas lights, perhaps.

The car no longer heads north when he leaves; he altered course at the outset almost unconsciously. Remembering her body and for the first time thinking of the possible implications, misunderstandings, he heads south for his mother's home in Kansas. His contact with her has been limited for years. His name at the hotel would be associated and they would want a statement. If anybody were to try reaching him they would look there first; he had no other permanent address, despite his only having been there once since he'd left home. In the rear-view mirror his eyes are reflected in a tired stare, the jaw clenched and teeth ground.

He remembers at age 15 with a bicycle he ran from home. He peddled for days, following the train's wake, eating sandwiches from a duffel bag. The road had stretched into the prairie like the tongue of a giant, the clouds rose up in the sky around the sun like a face. He had pedaled into the great chasm of it's throat and fused with the one-eyed giant - into its depthless and wide craw. Near Montana a couple found him, hungry, running out of money and standing by the road in the rain. He refused to give his name or speak. Once the state came in he was given up to foster care. His mother was deemed unfit and eventually committed herself, two years later. He refused to see her for five years, or just neglected to. He'd had her new address and had gone to her in west Kansas. They had little to say. He wanted to see the grave, but she no longer had the address or even the name of the cemetery. It was 20 years ago how can you expect me to remember that, she'd said, I was barely out of my teens. Like it was somebody else's life.

So he left, went back to migrating between Texas and North Dakota, following the construction season, losing himself in the channels of trailer park homes, motels, and flat endless stretches of highway, with more to be built. There was always more highway to be built.

Early blue-gray of the next morning, he arrives at his mother's home - a small one-story house outside town at the end of a short gravel driveway. The grass shows through the melting snow, long and yellow. She cooks him breakfast. He used to sit in her lap before going to school sometimes in the morning, when he was small enough, before she started drinking. She has messages for him, most recently from a detective in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. When she hands a bundle of mail to him she stares at his hands. The following morning he heads back north through the white sheets, thoughts dissolving into the muddy landscape.


At the coroner's office in Souix Falls: white sheets lit up by fluorescent bulbs, her sterile face on the rack, stiff boards on a gray slab with a blue tint.

After the Nebraskan authorities had decided within reason that it was a suicide the body was moved here, assuming her family would come foward. She was raised 30 miles to the northwest, in Lyons. He'd first met her in some small town in Iowa - the road he remembers working on, state highway 218, towards the east. He'd generally abstained from bars, but that night a large, red-faced man with a laugh like a tire iron insisted on dragging him out for a drink. They'd worked alongside each other for the better part of the day, laying line for the paver. He and the girl had had similar backgrounds. She'd gone back to his hotel room with him, and from then on went with him from one town to the next. Like him she had only her mother, and since leaving home had not returned.

His voice is white and thin against the concrete walls. The rollers whine as the carcass is pushed back, leaving a wall of drawers. The coroner's slow drawl makes the air feel heavy. He finds himself wondering why her family isn't there. It's explained that the mother wouldn't come - there was no other family in the area. He remembers this before they tell him. Overdose on barbiturates, suicide, a few questions, no, no charges are being brought up. No next of kin really, the mother completely disowns her. The state will cremate the body unless you wish to pay for a formal burial. He has no money. He doesn't want the remains. No, no coffee, thank you.

When he dreams again she comes drenched in symbols. Arms thinned out along the crossbeam, belly curved inwards from the ribs, glistening, until reaching the pelvis, forced out again. Thin gaunt and pin-stuck above a gulch womb, hollowed eyes sucking in the light like a martyr or an addict. Between waking and sleeping he remembers his hands following the silent lines of her back, the sigh and sex of her breath, how she would press her face into his chest after, and they would hold each other through the long quiet. He can't remember her eyes then. They only return in the dream.

So now he has long since passed Fargo, west through North Dakota. Past his hometown of Koldok. Past Jamestown and Windsor, Bismarck and the silver shunt of the Missouri and then Mandan. There is the urge to catch up to something, and there is the feeling of having nothing really to catch up to. Unable to remember the names of friends that live along the way, only as the towns and road were seven years ago, how far apart they seemed. He'd considered stealing a car, turning thief, but never did. There was nothing he needed so much that there was a reason to steal. He spent the time instead remembering stories his grandfather had told him about his father, when he was quite young, and he would run them over and over in his head. All the time, details of his heritage would drop away from him like an eroding cliff; the profile growing clearer and clearer where the portrait became chipped or water stained. When he eventually crosses the continental divide it passes by like radio static, the white sheets rolling and rolling.

Nights he parks along the highway, the dash lights casting his face in a greenish hue against the windshield and she comes to him, orange pale, talking once again about the elephant children. She'd talked of them during dreams or nightmares, it was unclear which, just as unclear as the sobs or laughter that followed when she awoke. He would wonder if it were possible to wake from a dream laughing.

When the storms finally lift he is in western Montana. It's bright and clear as he drives across the plains to the foothills. In the distance the dolomite columns pass by at a standstill, above them the blue cut, the ragged grass edges around snaking water chains. The hills to be climbed ahead. He rolls beside the rail's edge and under the wires. As the day wears on the landscape dries, and manure stained dust hangs in the sunlight like a curtain, edge to edge. Passing cars glint in the chrome tilt of the sun.

He winds his way up into the mountains as night falls. Eventually stopping, he gets out and lights a cigarette, resting his back against the cool rock-face, breathing deeply. Taking in the sky, he remembers asking his grandfather the question as a boy, as they walked in the early evening along the blacktop, rows of wheat for miles. Stars? Well - face stretching into a pout, chin thrust - stars are the souls of the saints Jesus set in the sky to watch over us. The man kneeled slowly to boy level and pointed up. See that bright one there, Quinten? That's St Joseph, patron of the carpenter, my favorite. And the dim one to its right, see? That's St. Bede, the poet.

Is my father up there? The man turned to look the boy in the eyes, and then recalled Bede's song to him, that he had memorized, from where?

And suicides, what of them? Here the stars were more profuse even than he remembered on his grandfather's farm; like dust, room for everyone then, the dead and the living. He slides down across the coarse rock to the ground, his body trembling between heaves, like the small waves that ride the tops of ocean swells.

In Tacoma, after driving down from the mountains alongside the Yakima river, south through Seattle and Renton, he'd gone from one church to the next, looking over grave registries and old files. Few of them had organized their records but for the past decade or two's plots, the rest of the information was often scored down at jarring intervals in the midst of tangled webs of papers and documents, usually created by volunteers who were facing their own death beds and wanted their surviving loved ones and later their ancestors to be able to discern their grave from out of the multitude. Weather and vandalism often stripped grave markers of legible carving, making plot diagrams sometimes necessary if there was no family that wished to purchase new markers for the dead. This was becoming a more standard practice at the outset of digging new plots as time went on.

After multiple dead ends he'd finally found the name and address of the grave, in the basement of the Tacoma Episcopal Center that stands across Starr Street from St. Peter's Episcopal. The town's first church, built in 1873 - a small Carpenter Gothic with a tall gangly stump of cedar supporting its belfry. In 1953 the Woman's League and Bridge Club had saved the small and rundown building from urbanization and bulldozing in one of Tacoma's first acts of historical preservation, what would later become a corner stone of the Tacoma Historical Districts. This all told to him by a pottering gray-haired woman as she'd helped him dig through their folders. Having the date of death made things relatively easy. The grave was near Point Defiance Park, in a special plot reserved for the city's veterans.

The day is overcast as he walks out towards the cemetery, the sea smells strongly in the air, and though he's lived all his life in the midwest it seems as though the ocean were reaching out to welcome him, bracing and warm. It makes him feel at home. The yard is set on top of a small hill, surrounded by cast iron fence, the trees barren and much of the ground still buried in snow. His green eyes pierce the gray overcast sky of the Pacific as he passes through the black gates.

He looks down at the diagram he's drawn and walks to where he expects the stone to be. It's closer to the grove and so the snow is deeper there. After breaking the crusty top layer of ice up with his foot he shovels the snow out with his hands. He finds one marker, and after a good deal of digging around another, then having found the line of the graves he goes down it, moving the snow away from the markers one by one. Three stones in he finds it, marked simply 2nd Lt. Quinten Howell Sr., 1948-1970, mouth moving silently around the syllables of the inscription as it becomes legible, cold fingers tracing over the rough troughs of his name.