morning.
Traffic was reaching its rush-hour peak, a freeway horror show that made 1-25 in Denver seem like a solo flight. But the sun was shining: the city sparkled like a crown jewel in a setting of lakes and mountains, and there wasn’t a speck of pollution in the air. I felt better than I had in days, better by far than a confirmed fuckup had any right to feel. Damned if this wasn’t the first day of the rest of my life. Good things lay off in the distance, waiting to be discovered; I could feel the potential as I crawled off the exchange at Interstates 90 and 5. It was so strong that even having to fight traffic all the way downtown and back again couldn’t sour the moment.
By the time I picked up Amy and we got her kids dropped off at day care, it was after eight o’clock. She caught my upbeat mood and we crept back along the freeway with hopeful hearts. She had been enchanted by her night in the hotel: when you’re young and poor and the best thing you’ve ever slept in was a $20 room by the railroad tracks, the Hilton must seem like Buckingham Palace. We chatted our way into Issaquah, ate breakfast in the same Denny’s where Eleanor and I had eaten a lifetime ago, and made the final run into North Bend a few minutes shy of nine o’clock.
It was the first time I’d had a good look at the town: I had only been here at night, in a misty rain, or on the fly. Now I saw what Grayson had seen when he’d first stepped off here in 1947: a land of swirling mists and magnificent vistas and above it all that incredible mountain, looming like a sleeping giant. As a rule mountains do not impress me much: I grew up in Colorado, and I had seen many that were higher, deeper, bigger in every way. But I’d never seen one that so dominated its landscape, that commanded without being majestic. It pulled at you like a vast black whirlpool: it stood alone over the town and denned it. “Impressive, isn’t it?” Amy said. “Mamma came here as a child in 1942 and never wanted to go anywhere else. She told me once that she got here when they were tearing up the streets for the new highway and the town was nothing but mud. But right from the start, she wanted to live her life here.”
“It’s the mountain. It gets a grip on you.”
“People say there’s an Indian in the mountain. If you look on a clear day, like today, you’re supposed to be able to see his face. The knee’s about halfway down. I never could do that, though. Can’t see diddly.”
The sister towns, North Bend and Snoqualmie, were connected by narrow back roads. We came into Snoqualmie past the high school, Mount Success, which Amy followed with her eyes as we circled around it.
“My whole history’s tied up in that stupid building,” she said sadly.
“Amy, you haven’t lived long enough to make a statement like that. Your history’s hiding out there somewhere, in the next century.”
She smiled. “You’re a good guy, aren’t you, Mr. Janeway?”
“Just one who’s lived a fair piece of his own history…enough to wish for a little of it back.”
She gave the high school a last lingering look. “In the ninth grade they gave us an IQ test. I got one twenty-eight, which surprised a few people. For a week or so I thought I was hot stuff. I asked Eleanor how she’d done, but she kinda blew it off and said not very good. I found out about a year later, when Crystal let it slip one day.”
She directed me along a road to the left.
“Her score,” she said, emphasizing each digit, “was one…eighty…six.”
She laughed. “She’s a genius, sealed and certified.”
Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
Amy, suddenly moved to tears, said, “God, I love her.”
Snoqualmie was just a few blocks of businesses, two bars, stores, a laundry, a Realtor, and a bowling alley. Many of the shops were named for the mountain: There was Mt. Si Hardware, Mt. Si Video, and the Mt. Si Country Store, which had a sign in the window that said this family supported by timber dollars . Begone, spotted owl: never mind what your habits are, you’ll have to find another place to have your habits. We were on the town’s main drag, looking for a gas station. The street was called Railroad Avenue: it skirted the train tracks, with an old-time railroad station (was this where Moon had stepped out all those years ago and been drawn by Grayson into his new life?) and a historic log pavilion that boasted a log the size of a house perched on a flatbed. As if on cue, Amy said, “There’s Archie’s place,” and I saw a dark shop with the letters the vista printing company painted on glass and under it, in smaller letters, the snoqualmie weekly mail . He put out a newspaper, I remembered. I got a glimpse of him through the glass, talking to someone I couldn’t see. Again I thought of a timber wolf, lean and wiry, and I had the feeling he’d be a good man to know, if I ever had the time.
I stopped at the Mt. Si Sixty-six. Amy filled the tank while I checked in with Denver from a pay phone.
Millie answered at my store. She had been worried, she said: the Seattle police had been calling. Business was lousy, she said. On the other hand, there was an appraisal job in the works, almost twenty thousand books, a job that could run weeks at $50 an hour. But they needed me to start next week.
I told her to give them my regrets and refer the job to Don at Willow Creek Books. If the cops called back, ask for Quintana and tell him I’d buy him a pitcher at his favorite watering hole when this was all over.
We backtracked through town. If Quintana doesn’t get me, the poorhouse will, I thought.
Selena Harper had lived just outside town. “There’s a helluva waterfall a few miles that way,” Amy said. “Supposed to be half again higher than Niagara.” But we weren’t on a sight-seeing trip and she turned me off on one of those narrow blacktops running west. I saw a marker that said se 80th: we hung a left, then another, and doubled back
