you’re in trouble, you’ll shove anything in your mouth you can, even poison. Anything to get some relief.”
They all stood observing that truth from above the yellow-and-green woods, the brown, curling road and the trickly, shiny creek.
“Who died?” T asked. Did he mean, why was everyone so sad all of a sudden? Joaney looked awfully blond, and curly-headed, and had her prenatal glow, like she was being shot through a Vaselined lens. He worried he was in love with her. Or maybe with Rita, from the float trip.
“Floyd’s the only one who died,” Lewis said. “Though possibly two others during the winter of 1803. Over half were dead by 1832. Sacagawea only survived six more years, Lewis only three.”
“He poisoned himself?” Skyler said, turning Vietnamese eyes on his, her looks a legacy of French colonialism, and the twenty-year American nightmare, domino theory, & etc.
“That was earlier,” Lewis said. “He stuck some cobalt in his mouth on the trail, and it almost killed him.”
“He’s trying to do himself all the way, isn’t he?” T said. “Right? Right from the start.” He was peering toward the cataract below, and the riffles downstream.
“Maybe so. He and his horse are constantly rolling over cliffs. He’s shot at three times and hit once. A grizzly tries to eat him. In a way, even agreeing to go was suicide,” Bill said.
“He’s like some kinda circus geek,” Skyler said. “He’ll eat anything. Nothing disgusts him, not even syphilis sores.”
“What’s with the feathers?” T asked, slinging a stone, whipping it sidearm. Bill could only shrug.
“I think the whole thing is a crack-up,” Richard said. “Lewis tells the tribes the whites have possession of their country, and they totally ignore him.”
“Jefferson called the tribes his red children,” Bill said.
“Right. The great white father routine,” T said.
They moved on to the zoo, so he could show them a California condor, largest American bird. The men had shot one on the beach with a wingspan of nine and a half feet. But when they got to the cage, Bill couldn’t return the bird’s mortified, sidelong gaze; it reminded him too much of the old man’s dead eye in Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart.”
Joaney held the small of her back, and they passed the big cats, monkey island, the sea-lion tank, and the African veldt. “They were told to expect mastodons and saber-toothed tigers,” he said. “They believed in Manifest Destiny, and Providence, and a river running east to west across the continent.”
“It’s called magical thinking,” Skyler said. “Little kids grow out of it by about fifth grade.”
They ate lunch at a corn-dog stand, and Bill wound up with Joaney at his table. No longer a child, she had to sit with the grown-ups, and was picking all the breading off her corn dog and eating only that, dipped in mustard.
“I’m gonna quit after,” she said. “Everyone says they’ll have the baby and come back, but it’s a lie. You can’t come back.”
“What’ll you do?” he asked.
“Do? What’ll I do? That’s real funny, Mr. Lewis. I won’t do anything. I’ll be somebody’s mother. I’ll live in my gramma’s old house. I’ll get some crap job.”
When he didn’t reply, she said, “I don’t need a man. I’m very independent.”
“I’m sure you are,” he said. The clouds crossed the sky rapidly now, tinged in soft circusy colors, tumbling over each other like masses of pink and blue cotton candy. Richard sat with Skyler, and had her bent over his lap like she was giving him head, while he probed her scalp and she squealed and winced.
Joaney, looking around, said, “This place is kind of crummy, isn’t it? It’s sort of had it.”
“It was nice when I was a kid,” Lewis said.
“When was that?” She laughed, winking at him. She was putting on a brave face, and he suddenly knew she wasn’t still in school for his class, but for the company. It was sort of shocking, like learning the head cheerleader has a morbid fear of crowds. He got up to see about Skyler and Richard. Richard pulled back her hair with some delight to show the swelling on her neck, a grotesque lump red as a little sun, stuck full of hairs like darts.
“Somebody do something,” Skyler said. “Can’t you see I’m diseased!”
Before Bill could say anything, Richard had taken out his pocketknife and stabbed the “ugly imposthume,” to use the nineteenth-century term. Skyler jerked, but T had come over to help hold her, pinning her arms to her thighs. The gory contents drained into Bill’s napkin. It bled some, then wept a clear serum. “Ugh. Aren’t you grossed out?” Skyler asked.
“I guess not,” he said.
Then they all got back on the bus, his class, skinny kids and tall ones, or heavyweights. Some were distraught-looking, or expressionless, clear-skinned or acne-ridden to an almost desperate state. He looked right past the healthy ones, seeing only the distressed, terrorized, and despairing. And recalled the Indian women Lewis had seen, so far gone with syphilis they’d passed into a state beyond suffering, nearly divine. The captains saw other strange sights: a couple of boulders that were in fact a pair of star-crossed lovers turned to stone by the gods, so they might always be together, their faithful dog by their side. When grieving, many of the people cut off fingers and toes, or ran arrows through their arms.
Also, in a particular lake dwelled a monstrous amphibian with horns like a cow’s—which Lewis never actually saw. Nor did he see the snake reported to gobble like a turkey, or the band of murderous little men, eighteen inches high, with blowguns and gigantic heads.
In the seat ahead, Skyler kept fingering the new hole in her head. T sat next to her, massive, immovable, refusing to cooperate until he heard a good reason why. As for Clark’s slave, York, he’d asked to be freed after the expedition, or at least to be near his wife. Clark refused at first, then tried beating him, then finally hired him out for hard labor. Though Clark at last relented, with urging from Lewis, who couldn’t bear to see a loving husband denied the comforts of marriage.
The bus now hugged the river, which looked exactly the way the captains had seen it, except for billboards, bridges, city skyline, power plants, barges, levees, dredgers, and a little airport with planes leaping off the end of the runway and banking hard right, heading west. And the river had a deep V-shaped channel now, so it couldn’t spread and wander five miles wide and three feet deep anymore. “Lo,” he said to the class, “the major artery of a teeming nation.” But it wasn’t really true; rivers hardly mattered now. And the fabled Northwest Passage, found at last by Amundsen in 1904, was utterly impractical thanks to the Panama Canal.
Lewis knew it, too, and long before they’d reached the Pacific: there was no all-water route, no great river stretching shore to dazzled shore. He noted it matter-of-factly, just the same way he wrote, “Shields killed first buffalo,” on the 3rd of August, 1804.
“So what about Sacagawea?” Joaney asked. “What’s her deal?”
“Stolen from the Shoshoni by the Hidatsa in an attack in which her family was slaughtered. Or, taken from the Hidatsa by the Shoshoni, then later stolen back. And eventually purchased by a Touissant Char-bonneau, French guide and interpreter,” he said.
“I bet they raped the crap out of her,” Skyler said. “You know they did! Why else do you take somebody?”
“Then you had to cook and clean for the asshole who stole you and raped you,” Joaney said.
“Sounds like my mother’s life,” Skyler said.
Joaney shifted her big stomach using both hands, like it was a big rock she was stuck under.
“Hey, why’d the Indians have