As far as he could tell, about everyone lost. The fishing was gone, the forests logged out, the crabbing unpredictable, the town itself too poor to pave some of the streets within the city limits. People who lived in Rosario drove to nearby towns to shop for anything more durable than groceries and beer.
Through all the years, smuggling was the only Rosario industry that had truly thrived. Cigarettes north and marijuana south, a round trip that could net thousands or end in gunfire, prison, or death.
The smuggling was run by the Eastern European immigrants who had been fishermen and smugglers in their homeland. There had been no reason to change a winning combination when they emigrated to America a century or more ago. With each generation or each old-world conflict, their ranks grew. Overseas cousins, second cousins, relations by marriage, and relatives no American bothered to count fled to the New World when the Old World became deadly.
Once, Mac had thought of joining the local smuggling industry. A close friend of his had been Ukrainian, another was Salish Indian, giving him an entre into the closed worlds of Rosario’s immigrant and native communities. Mac had been seventeen and too full of testosterone to put up with the small town of his birth. But after a few smuggling runs, he got smart, left town, and joined the navy.
His best friend died two months later, simply vanished during a smuggling run. Tommy still survived, if anyone called living as a barely functioning alcoholic on the rez survival.
Most of the time Mac thought he’d made the right choice in leaving Rosario and smuggling behind. If he had any doubts, all he had to do was visit Tommy.
Yet Mac couldn’t figure out what he was paying for. He’d got out, Tommy had stayed, and life went on either way. Yet somehow Mac felt guilty, as if whatever life he’d enjoyed had come at Tommy’s expense. It was stupid, but there it was. Guilt for being born white in a time and place where non-whites were considered second class.
The distant flash of headlights in the rearview mirror shook Mac out of his bleak thoughts. There wasn’t much traffic out late on a weeknight. The people who had families to support were asleep. The people with habits to support had either scored or gone home with the shakes. The drinkers were wrapped up in their favorite bar, huddled protectively over their poison of choice. They wouldn’t move until they passed out or the bars closed.
The headlights in the rearview mirror jiggled again as the vehicle went over a rough patch of pavement. The state highway that headed out to the federal freeway always needed repair. Eventually the state highway would get what it needed, after the densely packed voters in Seattle got what they wanted. Simple math and electoral politics.
Mac slowed so he could turn onto Tribal Road without hitting his brakes. No point in making it easier if someone was following him. Since his white guilt had taken him many times to see Tommy, Mac knew the way. He could have driven without headlights, but he didn’t want to run over stray animals or people.
He watched in the rearview mirror as the headlights that had been behind him passed the Tribal Road’s turnoff.
Tribal Road skirted the edge of tidal mudflats for several miles before heading into the scrubby, fourth-growth forest that bordered the tidal zone. The road was in the open until Mac reached the trees. He kept glancing at the rearview and side mirrors.
Brake lights glowed on the highway as a vehicle slowed, then made a U-turn and came back toward Mac. The vehicle turned onto Tribal Road.
He killed his headlights, accelerated hard, and prayed the tribal cops were drinking together. He didn’t lift his foot until he reached the bend in the road. Fifty yards later he turned and coasted onto twin dirt ruts that bored into the scrubby forest. The tires skidded a little in the shallow muck before they bit in. He kept coasting until he saw the old cedar stump. It was twelve feet high and wide enough to hide a truck behind, a leftover from the nineteenth century when big trees were cut off where the trunk finally began to narrow, no matter how high up that was. The fifteen-or twenty-foot-high stump was left behind to rot. With cedar, it took a long time.
He tucked behind the stump, turned the engine off, and yanked on the emergency brake. An instant later he was lowering the window.
A slight breeze. The scent of moldy forest and evergreen and salt. No lights anywhere. No sound but the irregular ticking of the truck’s engine as it cooled.
And the mosquitoes. It took them about ten seconds to realize there was fresh food available.
He heard a vehicle approaching from the direction of the highway. It was still several hundred yards away and closing fast.
Mac got out and eased the door shut behind him. From the dense shadow of the forest, he watched the narrow opening onto Tribal Road that was the only sign the rutted, partially overgrown track existed.
A car flashed by the cramped opening.
And it could be a tired driver returning to the rez after a long day on the water or working at the casino.
As the sound of the speeding car faded, Mac jogged toward Tribal Road, swearing at himself for being paranoid but not about to change. He hesitated in the shadow of the forest just long enough to be certain there wasn’t any traffic heading his way. When he was sure he was alone, he scuffed out the fresh tire marks he had left in the peaty mud when he had turned onto the nameless, overgrown dirt lane. Soon there was no clear sign of his recent passage.
To make doubly certain, he broke off a cedar branch as long as his arm and messed up the tire tracks even more. Then he threw the bough back into the woods and scattered some old forest debris over the lane. He’d just finished when heard a distant engine. He pushed deeper into the forest and waited.
He didn’t wait long.
A car was coming back down Tribal Road, heading for the state highway. The vehicle’s high beams were on and it was moving slowly. A flashlight speared through the open driver’s side window and probed the dark roadside.
The skin on the back of his neck tingled.
Mac was close enough to the road to recognize the body shape of the Jeep when it went by. But no matter how hard his paranoia worked, he couldn’t figure out even a stupid reason for someone to follow him.
Yet there it was as big as life, a white Jeep whose driver was shining a flashlight over every opening along Tribal Road, looking for him.
Mac wasn’t particularly worried about being found. He had been trained in escape and evasion by experts. He could vanish in bare desert at high noon. Nighttime in the forest was easy.
Mosquitoes sung nastily in the darkness.
He resigned himself to being fast food for bloodsuckers.
Headlights and the flashlight flickered through the woods as the prowling car slowly approached. The Jeep stopped at the far end of the tunnel. The beam of the flashlight ran over the shoulder where Mac had brushed away his tracks. As the driver studied the ground, the light twitched back and forth like a hunting cat’s tail.
The driver’s door opened.
Without getting out, the driver bent over and held the light almost parallel to and only inches above the ground. The raking beam of light revealed more details than a light held at ninety degrees to the ground would have.
The light raked over the dirt lane. Mac hoped that he’d done a good enough job cleaning up.
