Shades of Eva (3 page)

The date April 19th, come to find out, held
some significance to Timothy McVeigh. Two years prior, a little
tragedy in Waco, TX happened. It ruffled the feathers, to say the
least, of more than a few anti-government types around the US.
McVeigh was one of them. And there was another reason McVeigh chose
to act that day. April 19th, 1995, a man by the name of Richard
Snell was to be executed.

Snell was a right wing extremist convinced
that the CIA was importing illegal drugs into the US in an effort
to oppress the people.  The white people, that is. He was a
member of the white supremacist group The Covenant, the Sword, and
the Arm of the Lord. He and some of his minions had accrued a
rather impressive stockpile of weaponry said to include ninety-four
long guns, thirty-five sawed-off and heavy machine guns, an
antitank missile, and three and one-half bars of C4 explosives. In
the fall of 1983 Snell was arrested for plotting to blow up the
Murrah Federal Building by launching remotely detonated rockets
from a trailer parked outside of it. Fortunately, the scheme never
came to fruition.

For other acts, Snell was to be put to death
the morning of McVeigh’s bombing. It was said that Snell, who was
able to watch some news coverage of McVeigh’s handiwork before his
execution, was “appalled” by what he saw.

The report of Snell’s reaction surprised me
given Snell’s similar plot back in ’83. But then again, sometimes
plotting the event and witnessing the event are as opposite as
ignorance is to knowing. The idea of a thing, like a metaphor, is
often a poor substitute for the reality it seeks to represent…which
brings me to Jake Meade.

How can I best describe him to you?

The first thing I remember about him was his
size. He stood six feet six inches tall barefoot and weighed in at
three-hundred pounds. He was a might bigger than me on my best day,
and a fright more imposing than any of us in the bar that night. He
was the kind of guy who threw his weight around and made just
enough noise every five minutes to let you know he was still in the
room.

I hated him the first time I laid eyes on
him, lumbering about the grove about like some bull moose, chatting
with whoever came within earshot of his raspy voice when he should
have been working the trees. I had the sense that most men were
probably scared of this big overgrown boy, as were most people who
crossed paths with Meade—our site supervisor included.

Mr. Whitcomb, the chief lumberjack in those
woods, typically left the lone wolf, alpha male types to his
veteran crew, a group of drunken, bushwhacking ax men, men loyal to
the existing pack and the barnyard morality that kept that pack
together. It was a not-so-gentle Darwinism that typically tamed
interlopers like Meade, or banished them altogether—which was what
I had in mind.

Meade was a challenge. He was an insolent
twenty-one-years-old, and he didn’t mind a good fight. He proved
that the first day on the job. He went right to the top of the pack
and broke Dick Herman’s nose with a roundhouse that I could almost
feel, though I was a good two-hundred yards down a hill.

Herman, I’d learned, had said little more to
Meade than get busy, but apparently those weren’t the words Meade
wanted to hear. Three men jumped the rookie and might have adjusted
his attitude right then if it hadn’t been for Trooper Johansen.
Johansen had shown up a few minutes prior to issue a warrant for
one of us when he saw the scuffle break out and saw Herman rolling
down the hillside like a log.

I was a ways down that hill and, as I said,
wasn’t involved, but I heard the commotion and I saw Herman rolling
toward me. By the time I got to him, or he got to me, more
accurately, Herman was out cold. I put a boot on his panting
mid-section to stop his descent, and looked up to the crest of the
hill where Meade was standing, laughing down at us.

When he saw me, he hollered, 'What are you
looking at, you pecker?'

I didn’t answer him. Not right then.

He had the same cocky air about him in the
Den that night.

I was standing bar-side. The tavern was
called the Scorpion’s Den and I was knocking back a few shots of
whiskey. I was also watching a news broadcast on a small TV above
the bar. Some pack of idiots had blown up a government building in
Oklahoma City of all places, killing a bunch of people. It started
my head shaking, and was enough at that moment to keep the whiskey
flowing.

It was nine o’clock on a rainy Washington
evening, a typical night in the Pacific Northwest. Scotty, the
barkeep, was just finishing inventory and chatting with me about
the news. He was also flashing sideways glances toward the Poker
table where Meade was sitting. Meade was new to the Den and losing
his ass at cards to Ray Spence, Purnell Pritchett, and Louis
Ogelthorpe, fellow lumberjacks who weren’t involved in the
altercation earlier in the day, but were well aware of it. They
were happily taking turns taking Meade’s money, and Meade wasn’t
happy.

The Scorpion’s Den had been one of my many
drop-ins in Neah Bay since I’d called this latest town home. That
had been about one year—and that was a pretty long call for a
drifter like me. That year was coming to an end, though. It felt
like time to move on, and move on was what I was intending to
do.

The Den wasn’t my favorite tavern. It was
small, out of the way and sort of back woods, but Scotty’s Saturday
night cook made a buffalo steak burger worth the extra fifteen
miles on the truck. And of course the whiskey was good.

By eleven-thirty, most of the patrons had
left the place. Scotty still had his eye on Meade, however, because
the more Meade lost at cards the louder he got, and the louder he
got the more customers Scotty lost. Meade had been complaining all
night. The music is too old! Someone is stacking the deck! The
drinks are too warm, and the ladies too scarce!

I just shook my head again, which this time
was more of a head shake at my existence than at Meade or at the
television, which was now displaying the charred remains of the
Murrah Federal Building and the anguished faces of several
traumatized onlookers.

I was cursing many things that night:
Meade’s attitude, terrorism in general, and beyond all that I was
cursing the little boy I once was for entering that damnable
toolshed. It was there in that shed, I was remembering, staring
deep into, and beyond my half-empty whiskey glass, where I had my
first drink at the age of five, and there, that same year, where
Mom killed a man. Had I never entered that shed maybe Mom would
still be alive, still sane, still willing to hug the insolent
little boy I used to be, and maybe I wouldn’t be a drunk 2500 miles
from home.

Between Meade’s periodic outbursts and my
slow, uneasy sips of Jameson, I was cursing something else that
night. I was cursing the man that little boy had become—a vagabond,
a drifter at best—a wanderer with no ties to the past and no
intention of forming any. It was the eve of riding the rails
again—to drifting away—and the eve of those days always left me
with a feeling about as empty as the glass in my hand.

I nodded to Scotty. He did the honors and
poured me another one.

I had set my sites on the sunny hills
of southern California. At least there’d be some warmth in my
future to go along with the emptiness. No reason in particular I
chose south, except the coin I’d tossed earlier landed tails, and
SoCal just happened to be the tails side of that coin. I’d pay off
what rent was owed on the cabin, donate the battered Ford half-ton
I drove to the next drifter who came along, and work my way to the
rail yard. I’d toss my knapsack into an empty car like the good
hobo I was and say goodbye to Neah Bay, au revoir to the gloomy
weather, and adios to the trees.

Wandering had been a pattern of mine, a
habit about as unbreakable as drinking, and one I couldn’t see
breaking—at least not right then—not standing there listening to
Meade complain.

I can see that now, that pattern of
wandering, having tasted sobriety and the cool land of mourning,
which until Amelia Hawkins entered my life and River Bluff had the
full span of its Asylum tentacles wrapped tight around me, was but
a dream. As addiction and sobriety are two sides of the same coin,
so is grief and mourning. Grief is perpetual, a land of suffering
where one broods, a hell of hopeless wandering where loss is
subject to anger and bargaining and denial. That’s exactly where I
was in Neah Bay—just as I was in all those coin tossed towns—stuck
in a land of grief.

Ogelthorpe won another hand of cards and
slapped his leg in hilarity. Meade slammed his cards down. I
glanced at Ogelthorpe who was looking my way and smiling like a
toddler who’d just goaded his mother into yelling at him.

“Ought to join us,” Ogelthorpe hollered to
me. “Easy pickins' tonight at the round table, Mark!” Again he
slapped his leg.

I could see Meade fuming. He looked to me
just as he had when Dick Herman was rolling down the hill. Again he
asked me, “What are you looking at you pecker?”

Again I didn’t answer him. I slammed the
remainder of my drink, shook my head, and motioned Scotty back
over. He splashed a bit more Jameson in my glass and cracked a
nervous smile.

“New blood has to be mad at something,”
Scotty said, whispering just a bit. “Or somebody. Now don’t go
getting all crazy, Mark. That guy’s a good half a foot taller than
you are, and I don’t need any drama in here tonight.”

Ogelthorpe, and now Scotty, had just called
me by one of my many aliases to that point. This one—the Neah Bay
alias—was Mark Engram, an alias not taken because of any criminal
wrong-doing, but for shame and for spite I suppose. Anyone who’s
ever wanted to be someone else or to break loose from a troubled
past understands that sort of a need to sever. It’s a cruel son who
can do such a thing to his father’s name. Not every son is able to
make that sort of break, but cruelty begets cruelty. I think that’s
in the Bible somewhere. 

“So, what’s ailing you?” Scotty asked me.
“Why aren’t you over there taking some of Meade’s money? That ought
to be you sitting there.”

All I could muster in response was a
reference to a proverb I once heard. “What’s the saying; that old
proverb about cutting things off? You know, the one about the right
eye offending you?”

“Plucketh it out!” Scotty said, winking at
me as he finished the verse in Old English intonation. Then he
turned curiously toward Meade as if his answer had something to do
with the card game that was getting louder by the minute. And I
suppose it did.

I nodded and raised my glass, gesturing a
toast, this one to Scotty, this time to plucking things out.
“Here’s to blindness,” I said.

Scotty reluctantly mimicked the gesture, and
I drank.

“So what needs plucking out in that life of
yours besides that melancholy personality?” Scotty shot a grin my
way that took some of the sting out his question.

I thought for a minute about what part of
that to respond to: the dull personality part or the thrust of
Scotty’s question—why the long face? It was a question that had a
very obvious answer to me. “The past,” I said. “The past needs
plucking out, Scotty.”

“The past?” he echoed, probably not
expecting so abstract a reply from a man who’d just killed a half
of a fifth of whiskey in about an hour.

“Yeah, the past,” I said. “What if your
problem is your past? Can you just cut that out somehow? Just pluck
it out and somehow forget it?”

I knew it was the type of question a drunk
might ask his bartender on a rainy night in the mountains around
midnight, but its absurdity didn’t prevent me from asking it.
Scotty just took it in earnest as he did all those types of
questions.

“The past is up here,” he said, putting an
index finger to his head. “You can’t amputate a past, but you can
get a lobotomy. That will erase a lot of memories.”

Scotty had my attention when he said the
word lobotomy. Said it as if he were talking about getting a wart
removed or something, as if I could show up at some clinic and walk
out lobotomized and all a sudden carefree. I knew that wasn’t the
case. Mom had one—a lobotomy that is—and it didn’t erase her past.
It nearly destroyed her memory, but it didn’t erase anything.
Memories linger like words on the tip of the tongue. They exist
like marrow in your bones and they don’t disappear despite how
severely you’ve been cut, and they live on in your dreams. That’s
how the past haunted her. It showed up in her dreams. That’s how it
showed up to me sometimes.

“Engram, what exactly is bothering you?”
Scotty pressed. “I’m not used to seeing you moping around like
this. Is it this crap with the OKC bombing?”

I shook my head. “Are you happy?” I replied,
answering his question with a question of my own. Scotty gave me a
look of misunderstanding. “I mean, are you happy tending bar way
out here?”

Scotty was nodding. “I grew up here. I have
a good life. Wife treats me good. Two kids all grown. Meet a lot of
interesting characters, and I still have my health. A man can’t ask
for much more, except maybe for fewer loudmouth customers.” Scotty
tilted his head toward the Poker table as another two customers
left the Den.

“So there’s nothing you want to do over
again?” I said, turning away from the carnage on TV to watch the
next hand between Meade and the boys. 

Scotty didn’t answer me. Instead he asked,
“When’s the last time you were happy, Mark?”

I had to think about that for a minute. All
that came to mind was whiskey and whores. It’s like a drunk to
confuse happiness with pleasure I suppose. I thought for a minute
about the high I’d found in a good drink, or the post-orgasmic
euphoria of occasional nights in the brothel, highs I’d describe as
mechanical at best that had about as much to do with happiness as
eating a good hot meal. I thought about the countless bar fights
I’d engaged in, which were sometimes fun, sometimes not—but fun
didn’t imply happiness either.