Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(95)

“What about a high place,” said Lewis. “With a view of the whole valley.” He reached across the table and ran his finger across the orchards. “Something in this neighborhood?”

“Actually,” said June, and circled an area where the elevation lines diverged from the high surrounding ridges. “There’s a flat spot on this little rocky outcrop, maybe a hundred feet up.” She put in a dark zigzag on one side, then a dot. “The trail is here. My dad built a wildlife blind there, just a few posts and a tin roof for shade. He used to bring his birding scope and watch the raptors.” She smiled shyly. “I used to go there by myself and watch the men work.”

Lewis tapped the outcrop with one manicured fingernail. “That’s my spot.”

Peter looked at him. “You might not be the only guy with that idea.”

Lewis smiled his tilted smile. “And I feel real bad about that. I surely do.”

? ? ?

THEY DROPPED LEWIS at a narrow trailhead ten miles past White Salmon. In his camouflage jacket and pack, he was almost invisible. He’d already sighted in the rifle. It was mid-afternoon.

“See you on the other side,” said Peter.

“You won’t see me,” said Lewis, “but I’ll be there. Don’t use the radio ’less you have to.”

They backtracked to White Salmon to cross the wide Columbia River into Oregon at the green steel Hood River Bridge, where the winds howled down the gorge and kite surfers in wetsuits were catching big air despite the cool spring day. Then east to a mini-storage place outside Portland, where Lewis had parked Peter’s truck. It was a dark green 1968 Chevy C20 pickup, a barn find that he had restored in his time between deployments. The tall mahogany cargo box on the back contained most of his worldly possessions. Leaving the lot, it felt good to be back on the big bench seat where he’d logged so many miles, feeling the rumble of the engine like his own heartbeat.

They abandoned the vanilla van on the street a mile away, the keys under the floor mat, then called the rental company to pick it up. Peter’s leg no longer ached and seemed to be improving, but the truck’s heavy clutch was stiff under the medical boot, so June took the first turn at the wheel. Peter tried not to show his concern about how she’d handle the old pickup, but June shifted through the gears like she was born to it.

Palming the wheel through the turns, she told him how she’d taught herself to drive stick at thirteen. Shredding the clutch of an ancient one-ton Dodge with dual rear wheels and a dump bed. Wooden blocks strapped to the pedals with old bicycle tubes too shredded to patch. “But it got me down the highway to the ski hill,” she said. “My first escape from my dad’s. After that, I could drive pretty much anything.”

Her comment hung there between them for a moment. Peter finally said, “You want to tell me about it, growing up there?”

“It wasn’t awful.” She was working her way back toward the freeway, trying to get across Portland and out of town. She shrugged. “In some ways it was great. I had free run of this beautiful little valley, maybe five square miles of half-developed farm and orchard and river. Steep ridges like walls around us, with cedars and hemlocks rising on the slopes until the dirt stopped sticking to the stone. My mom homeschooled me because the Yeti didn’t want us to go anywhere, so mostly I climbed trees and rocks, played in the river, chased frogs, taught myself to ski. Pretty much anything I wanted. Sometimes on Sunday I’d get to go for a hike with the Yeti.”

“What kind of dad was he?”

“The Yeti?” She snorted. “Mostly, he wasn’t there. Before my mom left, I did my schoolwork in her office while she did her research, then we’d do something outside. The Yeti was in his workshop from breakfast until dinner, sometimes until after bedtime. It was a big treat for me to get to bring him supper, and he’d sit and talk to me while he ate, ask about my day. I’d try to get him to tell me about his day, but even then he was secretive. I was eight or nine years old, who the fuck was I going to tell? Sometimes I think that’s why I became a journalist, all those years trying to dig into my dad’s hidden life.”

“And after your mom left?”

She sighed. “The Yeti was always kind of a cipher,” she said. “Always in his head. But after she left, he just got more, I don’t know, more abstract. His mind so deeply inside whatever he was working on, he’d put on the kettle for tea and stand there thinking while the kettle whistled until it boiled dry.”

She reached the freeway and ran the truck up into third gear, the big engine revving high as she merged into the heavy late-afternoon traffic and worked her way through the Portland interchanges. When she hit 84, she found the left lane and shifted into fourth behind a big two-trailer semi that was really moving. The pickup rocked in its wake, but June was busy remembering.

“He’d get really angry if I interrupted him while he was in his head. And I was a kid, right? That’s pretty much what kids do, interrupt their parents. You saw him on the floatplane dock. He never hit me, but he was huge. And when he got angry, he seemed to get even bigger. He was terrifying.”

The big two-trailer semi slowed behind a line of cars, and June closed the distance behind it, drafting in its slipstream. It made Peter nervous, but he knew she was a good driver and he wanted her to keep talking.

“When I think of him like that, all wrapped up in his rage, I can absolutely believe that he had my mom killed. Over a fucking idea, because that’s all an algorithm is, really, an organized idea. And he’d never apologize, not really, but eventually he’d find me, wherever I’d fled to, and sit beside me and quietly talk about how dangerous the world was, how he was doing everything he could to protect me. I just don’t understand how he could be both of those people, so angry and so protective, at the same time.”