death of a child could never be a tragedy.”
The wine had loosened his tongue, and his voice was ringing clearly against the iron dome of the dark sky. He’d forgotten he wasn’t in class. He’d actually been trying to say something about Lewis, but doing it drunkenly. Facts rose up in his head, joining with other facts, making exciting new designs for the book or pointless ones: The French engagés were used to six meals a day, and found two meals barbaric; on the very first day, they passed a creek named for a Spaniard who’d killed himself at its mouth.
He finally answered Rita. “But it’s not me saying these things. It was Poe who said that art, in order to be art, has to be beyond such things. Amoral.”
“Dope fiend,” Jasmine said. “Sour little man.”
“I liked his one story,” Russ said, “about the heart trapped under the floor while it’s still beating.” So now the hired help, least among them, had come to Bill’s aid.
“Look, never mind,” Bill said. “I’m just a history teacher.”
“I want to read your book,” Pablo said, “even though you just gave away the freaking ending!”
Bill shrugged, smiling, with that dark and familiar feeling, of nothing being any use. What good was a thing if it made people awkwardly quiet, if it caused them to suspect you had no heart? Why open your mouth if it only caused people to more carefully watch you?
“Bill, read us something,” Emily said, “from the journals.”
His copy of the journals did happen to be on top of his pack, full of Post-Its, swollen up to twice its size. He read the entry for Lewis’s thirty-first birthday, in which he chided himself for living selfishly thus far in life and resolved to live for humanity from then on.
“Poor guy,” Jasmine said. “Nowadays, we just join the Peace Corps.”
“And at thirty-five, we come crawling back to our desk jobs, and thank God on our knees for flushing toilets,” Pablo said.
Bill held the book. The expedition truly got under way in May 1804, with three cheers from the small party on shore at St. Charles, Missouri. They soon met Daniel Boone, then turned north along with the river just west of what’d become Independence. Mormon holy land. Harry Truman’s birthplace. They just missed a detachment of Spanish troops sent up from Santa Fe to intercept them. But the really weird part was who’d sent it: one General James Wilkinson, chief of the U.S. armed forces and Spanish spy known as Agent 13. He’d later be linked to a plot by Aaron Burr, Tom’s vice president, to divide the union, seize the western U.S. and Mexico, and set himself up as emperor of a new nation called Burrania, with his daughter Theodosia by his side. And if anything about this filial tie seemed improper, then that explained the “despicable opinion” Alexander Hamilton voiced about Burr, and why Burr called Hamilton out in July 1804 and killed him.
It was all kind of crazy, how it all intersected, with Lewis in there somewhere, too, corresponding with Theo within a month of his death.
Bill read aloud from a part where Lewis went out hunting, a day he got chased by a grizzly, almost pounced on by a lynx, and charged by three buffalo, all within an hour’s time. Which rattled Lewis so, he thought it must be an enchantment or a dream. It read uncannily like Dante’s encounter with the lion, the leopard, and the starving she-wolf in The Inferno.
“Would we like this guy?” Pablo asked. “Would we invite him to pull up a stump?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “A friend of his said he was stiff, bowlegged, without grace, and that he reminded you of Napoleon.”
“Sounds like my ex,” Leslie said ruefully, blinking at the fire.
“Sounds like everybody’s ex,” Rita said.
“I’ve got more about Lewis and the Virginians, from various sources,” he said. “Washington Irving wrote a story in which he called them—let’s see here—‘a pack of lazy, louting, dram-drinking, cock-fighting, horse-racing, slave-driving, tavern-haunting, sabbath-breaking, mulatto-breeding upstarts.’”
By now, the dark had come down all the way, like a lid, and they were fully lubricated. Russ watched the fire, and them—Bill noted—in wonder edging toward alarm. His job forced him to rub up against a white-collar world that scared and disgusted him by turns, and would send him right into forestry. “I thought they were heroes,” Russ said. “I mean, that’s what I was taught.”
“How come he never married?” Rita asked. By now, she was looking fairly gorgeous in the firelight. And just why did women have to be so beautiful? Why did the desire for them not only not diminish with time but actually get worse and worse? In fact, it hurt so much, sometimes you wanted to hurt them back. Meanwhile, Emily lay on him. But was clearly thinking of Henry, her worries only blunted by the wine. And Bill didn’t know a single trick or joke or caress to snap her out of it.
“Maybe he seemed doomed,” he said. “He had his chances, but maybe he scared them all away.”
“I don’t buy that,” Jasmine said. “Doomed is sexy as hell. Doomed means you won’t hang around and get fat and boring.”
He nodded. It certainly was a mystery, not unlike the New World itself.
They passed a bluff that burned perpetually, eternally, 24–7, and stank of sulfur and brimstone. And long stretches of grass so finely manicured, you could play ninepins on them, like the little men in that Washington Irving story. Enormous flocks of white cranes flew high above. They knew so little about how the world worked, they were relieved to see storm fronts moving west to east, just as they did in Virginia. They were alive at a time when there were migrations of green and yellow parrots so vast that, flying at sixty miles an hour, it might take two full days for a flock to pass overhead.
“Tell us something shocking,” Rita said. “Something we wouldn’t know.”
“Lewis had a servant named Pernier with him when he died. That guy killed himself, too, about six months later,” Bill said. “He did it in the snow outside the White House. With laudanum.” He had to be careful now and hold himself back or he was going to fall into her eyes. But you always wanted a Rita, or a Diane, or a Laura. And you simply went on and on wanting her, and she probably didn’t exist. Probably. Even when you thought you’d found her, as soon as you married her, she ceased to be. That thing about her died.
About twenty years after the expedition, as Clark was fading, he received a visitor, America’s most elegant pen, Washington Irving, who’d fled to London, away from the terrible reviews of his books, where he gave up storytelling for history. There, he’d come very close to a fling with the widow of the poet Percy Shelley, but was scared off by something in her eyes, her gaze. He wanted to write a “Where are they now?” about the expedition, and to find out why so many were dead so young, why Lewis had killed himself, & etc.
Which brought up other strange intersections, that Irving sat at Burr’s defense table during his 1807 trial for treason as his legal counsel, and saw many noteworthies there, including General Wilkinson, Lewis, and Theodosia Burr. And in fact, Lewis and Theodosia were seen dining together in the evening, and going out riding in the afternoon. So they all kept turning up together.
Probably, Clark told Irving about the strange artillery they’d heard in the Black Hills, like a six-pounder firing at a distance of three miles. And maybe Irving remarked about Rip Van Winkle hearing just such a sound in the Catskills before meeting those grim, silent little men. Which may have reminded Clark of Spirit Mound in South Dakota, where he’d gone to see some fabled little men or devils, eighteen inches high with grotesque enormous heads, and blowguns that killed at great distances.
“What else? Anything else?” Rita asked.
“Always something else,” he said to her. “A guy named Peter shoots Lewis while they’re out hunting together and then denies repeatedly that he recognized Lewis was his target.”
“There it