His most ideal visions within view but not within reach.
“Now tell them the great irony,” Emily said.
“He kills himself for nothing,” Bill said. “The government bankrupted him by refusing to pay the expedition expenses. But then, three years after he was dead, they called it a simple misunderstanding and paid them.”
“But tell the thing about his assistant,” Emily said. “This’ll make you cry.”
“Oh. Naturally, when Lewis gets the job as Jefferson’s secretary, somebody else gets passed over for it,” he said. “So, when Lewis is later made governor of Louisiana, guess who his assistant is? The guy’s brother!”
Groans and laughter. “And after Lewis’s suicide, it was the assistant’s fault, everyone said, for undermining Lewis and generally making his job a living hell,” Bill said.
Pablo watched him with glittering mistrust in his possibly Cuban American or maybe Argentinian eyes. Life was about who did the best tricks for the women’s pleasure. There wasn’t anything else: if you had that, you had all the marbles.
Russ at last said his good-nights and got in his truck and drove away. Leslie watched him go and said, “I think my heart is broken.”
“I’ll make you forget him,” Jasmine said.
“Man, the values out here are strictly Kennedy-era, aren’t they?” Pablo asked. “Twenty minutes out of town and we’re back in pre-Elvis times.”
The evening was winding down, Rita sitting in Pablo’s lap, Leslie and Jasmine in the grass thigh to thigh, and Bill looking forward to eight hours of drunk, dreamless sleep. “So, anybody see a Native American around here?” Pablo asked. “What’s the story, Bill?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They arrive in a village just after a miracle has occurred: a wildfire has burned straight over a half-breed boy and he’s survived it without even a burn. The old men of the tribe credit his half whiteness with saving him, when actually it’s his quick-thinking mom, who threw a wet buffalo hide over him. I mean, if you want reasons, that could be one.”
“I want to read your book, Bill,” Rita said, just as she and Pablo were getting up. Before he could say anything, Pablo yanked her into a tent. Emily helped him up, then pushed him into theirs.
On the sleeping bag, she wriggled out of her jeans and underwear and threw them in his face. As she leaned back on her elbows, knees together, the triangle of her pubis, Battery of Venus, as Lewis called it, was dimly visible. He reached for the fanny pack, but she stopped him and pulled him to her. “You don’t need that,” she said. Which caused his hardness to suddenly falter, to fade. “Oh, merde. I said the wrong thing again, didn’t I? That’s me, all right,” she said.
“I’m drunk is all,” he said.
“Or not drunk enough. Still reasoning. Lewis never stops reasoning,” she said, then turned over, putting her rump to him, and covered her head with the pillow. He pulled the other sleeping bag over them, over her nakedness, and touched his forehead to her back between her shoulder blades, and thought of Lewis.
As gifted as Lewis was as an explorer, he could be rash and unforgiving as the Old Testament God. When a man deserted, Lewis ordered him run to ground and shot on sight, which the men wouldn’t do, returning him to camp instead. He had a man flogged for saying mutinous things, a private whose name happened to be New-man. As plentiful as game was, they were terrified of starvation, and killed everything in sight, even hawks, ravens, eagles, and swans. They ate coyotes. Early in the journey, unbeknownst to them, the nation’s third vice president called out the first treasury secretary and shot him dead. Odd, all right, and about to get odder.
Trying to sleep next to Emily, he thought about Lewis’s grave, which was located not a hundred yards from where he’d died that night in Tennessee. For a long time, there hadn’t been a marker, just some split rails thrown there to keep the pigs out.
Where Bill was with the book, they’d just passed a creek called l’eau que pleure, or “the water which cries,” and Sergeant Floyd was about to take ill and die. And then Lewis would almost poison himself to death, tasting a mineral sample for purity. They’d pass the grave of Blackbird, a Mahar chief, known for his magical ability to cause his enemies to sicken and die. Of course, the magic was arsenic, which he’d purchased from a trader.
Trying to sleep against Emily, he ran the facts as a sedative, and thought about time, and sitting in meetings at school waiting for someone to make their point. He wanted to hurry everything, but didn’t know why, because there was no hurry, and nothing to get to but that last item on the do-list: get buried.
Before he could work it all out, he was asleep.
7. “…much astonished at my black servant…”
On Tuesday, after signing six kinds of waivers and releases, Bill piled his class onto a short bus. Then they rode a long way downhill, down and down into the woods, and past the zoo, heading for a specially-restored acre of glade wilderness, nature the way the captains saw it, not this confusing jumble of vines and shrubs hijacked from all over the globe. His class wandered over it, slipping on the rain-slick limestone outcrops, the girls in thin sandals with no tread and handmade ponchos.
The one he really felt for was Joaney, pregnant as a beluga, cheeks red as a pomegranate, taking mincing little steps, pausing to hunker down and gasp, glaring at him. Richard followed him close, nodding in disbelief to everything Bill said, like he made it up as he went. Which he did, sort of. And Skyler, his one Asian girl, who was crushing hard on Richard (who was pretty clearly gay), kept laughing at anything the kid said in desperate fuck-me fashion. Bill’s only black kid, T, kept sitting down, looking perplexed at the exertion. But he was a big guy, and climbing a hill was a serious matter for him: he just wanted to know why. He liked to call Bill “Doc” and didn’t turn things in on time, or format them properly. Sometimes he didn’t do the work at all.
In the book last night, Bill had dealt with such incidents as Clark’s slave York almost losing an eye from having sand thrown in it. Why it was thrown, or who threw it, wasn’t mentioned. Lewis said York sometimes frightened the tribes badly by making himself “more terrible” than they wanted him to, growling and rolling his eyes and acting like a wild animal. York told the kids he was a cannibal, saying he used to live exclusively on the flesh of children. They tried to wash the blackness off him by wetting their fingers and rubbing. When they couldn’t, they dubbed him “the Raven’s Son.”
Now, centuries later, York’s experiences in the New World were influencing T’s, and in surprising ways, including what he turned in and what he didn’t.
Lewis stood up on a rock to address the class. “Daniel Boone blazed trails through country like this,” he called out. “And at night, around the fire, he’d read aloud to everyone from Gulliver’s Travels.”
Joaney put up her hand, very cute. “Is that the one with the talking horses?” she asked. “And the giants and the Lilliputians and the Yay-hoos?”
“That’s it,” he said. They took turns standing up on the rock overlooking the Little Blue River, Skyler and her sweet china-doll looks, and pregnant Joaney, and gay Richard, and T.
“At the end of that book, Gulliver makes a terrible discovery,” Bill said. “He realizes he’s not a higher-order creature like the talking horses but the lowest of the low. He’s a Yay-hoo. And when he gets home, he sees how his wife and kids are also Yay-hoos and the sight of them sickens and disgusts him.”
“I think that happened to my dad,” T said.
“Yeah, mine, too,” Joaney said.
“Yours, mine, and ours,” Bill said. “That’s everyone’s father in that story.”
“So izzat what happened to Lewis?” Richard asked.
“Maybe,”