The Storm Tribe--Weasel Falls

Ecchols had never been much at understanding the past. But he was good at plain old remembering, maybe too good for his own good. Those who do not learn from history just keep waking up with hangovers and strange women.

It was the same sort of shack that Maria and her family had always occupied, a rough redwood interior unlivened by dirty curtains that covered a pair of eastern windows. Ecchols swam back into life again as light stepped past the grimy fabric, the throbbing at the base of his head a familiar painful pillow. Beside him, round-hipped under a chenille cover, Maria breathed moistly through a tangle of dark hair. There is nothing I don’t remember about this.

"You’re out of your frigging mind,” he told himself aloud. He rolled his skull sideways, but despite this painful flicker of insight, the marbles still didn't rattle in the can. Maria didn't move at the sound of his voice. Ecchols propped himself on the edge of the bed and pulled his white underpants on over scabbed up scratchy ankles. He sighed and got up and went to the window, jerking the view of the outside world open, expunging the night. The van was pulled too far up in Maria’s gravel drive, pressing back an encroachment of berry bramble. Beyond it you could see the last line of hills before the sky escaped to the Nevada flats.

Ecchols turned back and went looking for an ashtray and his slacks. Probably shouldn't leave without his slacks.

"Seen my slacks anywhere." he warned the sleeping Maria. She sat up suddenly in the bed, obviously not as fully armed with skills of recollection as Ecchols.

"Kenny."

"Yeah, it’s me. Morning," he said. There was a heap of clothing on the floor, but it was somebody else's. His slacks had his wallet and his wallet held the fan of Franklins that he always used to figleaf his modesty, waking up strange. Guess dropping a few bills on the table isn’t so appropriate this time. Not that Maria wasn't strange, just a bit too god-damned familiar.

"You feel as weird as I do?" he asked, finding where he had wrapped his slacks into a lumpy pillow and shaking them out.

"I feel sick." Maria put her hand across her sheeted stomach. Her dark eyes squinted at him unevenly from within broken cheeks. She was fat and her hair was stuck together. "Like I did something I shouldn't have."

"Yeah. Me too. I know I did." How much gas did he still have in the van? The Cal-Nev border was only a few dozen miles away. He could head over to Carson City and play some cards, get his ashes hauled there without having to go through the whole guilt program. Or go back to Hayward and give Susan or one of her friends a call.

"Did I give you that box back yet?" At least he could do the one thing. The cedar box with its struck-lightning 'Storm Tribe' inscription was still resting on the table where they had come in.

Beneath the hinged lid were more of Ecchols' hundred-dollar bills, which he quickly pocketed. "Although, if you want money for some reason..."

"I don't need your money, Kenny." Maria pulled the photos from the box. There was a picture of her and her cousin Spencer pulling themselves up naked onto the rocks below Weasel Falls. "Kiddie Porn," Maria remarked, scrutinizing the dots of her prepubescent chest. "Wait until Spencer sees these."

“Spencer still lives here too?” Ecchols had always assumed that Maria’s cousin would be dead by now. Like others you could name.

Maria snickered, an awful sound. “Mr. FatPants. Spencer’s the first mill general manager Central Plywood’s had since your dada died. Kind of like he took over your legacy, if you want to know the truth. You didn’t know about this, Kenny?”

“I had my own life running the shop in Hayward. Darn good life.” Ecchols said. “Never gave that legacy crap a second thought.” Liar. “So. Do you all ever go out to Weasel Falls anymore?” An innocent question.

“Sometimes.”

“See the feather? Do you remember getting it?" Maria had relapsed into sullen silence. “I was the one that boosted you, remember?” She had gone up the alder like a lithe monkey, her narrow legs sliding easily beneath her tight jeans. The feather, a jay’s was a large primary, beautifully shafted with black. “I was the one who saw it there, remember?”

“And I got it for you.” As though that could have been a mistake. The feather, still beautifully interlocked against the passage of time and air, tumescent silver, tipped with blue.

“I’m serious, Maria. That meant more to me than anything.”

“A few of us still go out there.”

“Would you go with me?”

“Maybe sometime. Let’s go get some breakfast.” Maria crammed the four photos into the cedar box with the other papers and set it decisively behind an alarm clock.that continued to blink ‘6:52’.

“That’s not really the right time, is it?” Ecchols asked.

“Maybe sometimes it is.” Maria smirked.

Asher Inn was owned by yuppies now but still served a Denver Omelet. A certain proportion of the diced pepper was celery or something, but it felt good to eat. At least the proprietors would be able to change a hundred. Benefits of civilization. Ecchols sat over the Chronicle, yesterday’s late edition, and checked the mutual funds. Ironclad was down, the tech funds were up. It was that kind of world, these days.

The old hotel sat just as it always had, in the center of town, and the grand dining hall within it was still where every soul in Ecchols Station went to grab breakfast or took their family for a fancy supper. It was early morning, early in the work week and despite its insistence on folded linen, the Inn was very much in cafe mode, busy with the murmurs of its clientele, sawmill workers who lingered over a fourth cup of coffee before groaning to their feet, tickets in hand, and banging through an old style screen door to pickups outside.

"How about you? You need to get down to the plant?" Ecchols asked. It came back to him, men standing shivering in a steel shed in the early morning as the motors were started and the line lurched into gear. "Because I could probably help out, if you need me to."

"Like how? Give me a thou a month like your old man did? No, thanks, Kenny. My cousin's the boss now. I got a front-office job. I'll get in there when I get in there. Besides, any time I want to cash it in, I've got a disability check due me." Maria peeled the foil from a pack of grape jelly and crinkled it inside out over her toast. "That bitch in the bar last night, Carole, remember her? She said she'd be my paralegal. Seems I hurt my back about two years ago. I ain't never going to work a lamination press again. I guess you should be able to identify with that. Disability leave and all."

Ecchols took it all back. It was one thing to swallow your pride and take help when you needed it, or it was offered, it was another to lie to get it. It wasn't fair to the people who really were hurt.

“It’s not the same. I had a breakdown. I’m feeling better,” he said.

Ecchols had never wanted to think of Maria Murillo as a woman, never wanted to have to dick her in the first place. But he had been in love with her most thoroughly, and so his father’s unceasing attentions toward her had forced him into it. She was nineteen, he was twenty-six. The sex turned out fucked up, no understanding between them. Ecchols couldn’t get past his need to talk her out of something by talking her into something, was unable to overcome his rancor at being assigned this fate.

“Nothing primes a young girl like flattery and money,” his dad had instructed Maria, having happened again to admire the texture of her black-brown hair. “And it’s when the flattery is earned that the money comes in,” he’d issued as an aside to his son, Kenny. They had all laughed, and Maria had repulsed the nascent come-on with her self-confident sneer. But about that time Kenny had begun to feel trapped.

“I wrote that part out of my life. I confess,” Ecchols said. “Shoot me. Shoot my dead dad.” How long could a woman hold a fifteen year grudge?

Over Maria’s sweatshirted shoulder he saw the screen door swing and Carole Allen bustle in. She had put on new clothes since he'd left her, wide-hipped black tights with footstraps, a clinging beige sweater that restored her chesty form, a fresh, bone-white neck support. Maria's eyes swiveled to follow Ecchols'. Carole Allen registered their presence immediately, her neck wrenching tight within its brace.. "Anyone here change a hundred?" she called loudly to no one in particular, then sauntered to their table.

"I thought maybe you'd left town already," she said to Ecchols, ignoring Maria. "Your daddy was an early riser, too. No pun intended. Hey, if you find a big old brassiere laying around, it's mine. Mind if I join you?"

"We’re finished," Maria said, crushing her last crust into an egg-yolk smear, her blue eyes hardening. "I guess I must have forgotten to ask something again, eh, Kenny? You and your daddy’s hired girlfriend. That stupid futon bed up at your dad’s, I’ll bet."

“I guess I’m not that far different from the old days,” Ecchols said. For some reason he always ended up like this, between two women. “Or too much different than my dad always was,” he told Maria.

"You do look nice today, Carole," he said, with forced amiability. "Please, sit down.” Really, though. Both of these broads together didn’t add up to more than another hit from the dealer. "There's a twenty-one table with my name on it in Carson City,." he warned them again, and it came to him that by walking away he could accomplish something that old Jack Ecchols could not have done, that his son always knew how to do.

"Honey, you were different,” Carole Allen said ardently, and Ecchols’ eyes swept the lines of her beautiful, falsified figure in remembrance.

“Then I guess this must be revenge, huh, Kenny. You dirt-bagging creep,” Maria said. “Bang both your daddy’s women the same night and to hell with the past.”

“Can’t we all just try to get along?” Ecchols answered back, his eyelid twitching with the hangover and the meanness. “I know you girls were both friends with my dad, too, when you weren’t screwing him. I’m getting over it all—all of it. You’ll get over it too.” Maria scowled as he said the words. But the plain fact was, it had taken Ecchols until about now to forgive his father, and sometime longer to get past another years’ old memory of the girl he had thought of as his half sister with her face in his father’s lap.

“We need to just get along,” repeated Carole Allen, tearily, as if the assertion had suddenly changed its meaning. Maria shrugged involuntarily. A lot of water over weasel falls, maybe.

Ecchols rose and paid the bill with one of his hundreds. He didn’t hear what they had to say to each other, but as he stood beside the antique cash register he looked back and saw that Maria’s dimple-knuckled paw was pressed over Carole Allen’s thin hand. The two of them really deserved each other, he thought.

“Keep the change, if you would, please,” he told the hostess, sliding one of the twenties back across the counter. The woman gave Ecchols an uncomprehending smile, and he touched his finger upright to his lips in a gesture of complicity as he eased past her to the door.

The sawmills that were the other part of Jack Ecchols’ legacy were of sheet steel over massive wooden beam frameworks, and the buildings had been built long, to process the big trees. Ecchols Timber’s first contracts were for bridge trusses, heavy dimensional stuff. Today, Ecchols could see, Central Plywood had studded the old structures with ventilation for its presses and vats. The trees were smaller and the product was more mundane, but the process was the same. He peered eerily through the daylit stars in the van’s windshield that Maria’s assault had left the night before.

It didn’t look like Central Plywood was doing that well. A couple of timber rigs were cranked in waiting for their loads to be forklifted away, but up the line the chippers were idle. There wasn’t that much difference between this operation and horsing steel stock and gas in one end and pumping out fabs the other. Ecchols had gotten rich in his own right fabricating earthquake retrofit kits for CalTrans. Finally, after the money had just gotten ridiculous, he had sold out and retired. Seven million. He could have stayed on in some management capacity, but what was the point? The best decision he had ever made.

There should have been some healing in that, Ecchols thought, but it hadn’t ever come.

“Things are going fine here, though,” Maria's cousin Spencer asserted, after Ecchols had parked by the old brick office building and walked upstairs. As much as he remembered Maria, Ecchols' image of her cousin remained unclear. Spencer had always been a fat kid, a deep poke of a bellybutton in his doughy stomach, and Ecchols struggled to bring together the pudgy adolescent with the adult man who now towered over him, chest barreled out over a braided belt and silver buckle. Spencer was more obviously indian than Maria, short tied pigtails framing his face, a flat, pocked nose. This is the man who is living my legacy? “They had a big layoff here about four years ago when they ran out of material. That was when Central Ply got wise and put me in charge. We’ve been getting by since then,” Spencer said.

“Where’s the wood come from?” Ecchols asked with interest. Obviously not off his eastside acreage. “Just stringers, or does Central Plywood have holdings of its own?”

“Just what they paid out to you for your mama’s timber rights. That land's all stumps and roads now. Not that I have anything against you or your mother." Spencer said ungraciously. These years later he had aged as much gross as Ecchols himself had scrawny, maybe more. Responsibility always took itself out on your body, no matter how and where you took it on. "Why you asking? What brings you back to town? You thinking about taking a whack at running a sawmill? We’re not cutting too many boards these days.”

Ecchols shook his head. “That's all in the past. I guess you’d say I came back on a spiritual journey.”

"Huh," Spencer said. "Just as long as you don't try to mix it up with mine."

"I can see how that would be bad for you," Ecchols said, and the two of them stood it off. Finally Spencer shrugged and reached for a decanter on a nearby shelf. It was the same place that the old man had always kept his bar.

“I guess I should feel more grateful that you left town when you did,” Spencer allowed, mean-spiritedly. "How have you been, Ken? Want a drink?”

In his eagerness, Ecchols fell for the gambit, but he didn’t care. “As you know, I am retired,” he said mildly.

“A little too early for me, sorry.” Spencer nodded, his expectations fulfilled, replacing the cut-glass stopper. Ecchols bit off half the scotch whiskey in a single mouthful.

“So how did you and the old man get along after I left?” Ecchols began, cherishing the bitter taste, if not the subject. It had been Spencer who had finally called the old man on it. “If I ever fucking hear about you fucking my fucking cousin, Ecchols, or your fucking son doing it, I’ll blow your fucking heads off!” wasn’t that the line, more or less? You would have thought that would be decisive, but you didn’t know Jack Ecchols if you did. Or his son. Within weeks Spencer had whimped, as Maria, her true feelings masked by her self-confident sneer, began matter-of-factly to turn her attention to the needs of the old man, and turned her back on the past, her two friends, the only two other members of the Storm Tribe.

“Like shit, what do you think?” Spencer replied. “He put me in the line of command at the mill, I’ll give him that, but I should have plugged the bastard when I said I was going to.”

“Yeah,” Ecchols said, lighting another of his dad’s memorial Winstons, “I wish you had. What happened after that? Did he help you out at the mill and stuff?”

Spencer’s swarthy, padded face darkened at the thought. “Everything I have now I got on my own. Jack Ecchols never gave me the time of day.”

“Sounds like him,” Ecchols agreed. “And Maria?”

“She got better. She told him to take a flying fuck one night just before you left. Did them both a lot of good."

“I saw Maria when I got to town last night,” Ecchols admitted, probing Spencer for more knowledge. Hadn't she ever told Spencer about him? “I came back to find out about the Storm tribe, Spence. Remember that?”

“Yeah, sure. Maria’s got a guy down in Sacramento trying to get us recognized. So that's what you’re here about. Weird.”

“Not exactly. But while we’re on the subject of it-- this “tribe,” I guess you mean your real family, right? Not us.”

“Plus there are three other families. Maria and that friend of hers say I'm supposed to be the chief. How do you like that?" Spencer wore a small beard. Bristly gray whiskers framed what seemed to Ecchols to be a self-serving smirk.

"I hate it. Sure, you were born indian, but there's no tribe, and you know it. My mom and dad as much as adopted the two of you when you were what, six or seven? The Storm Tribe is just like a club we thought up when we were kids."

"So what? We still should get what's coming to us. I remember the old stories my auntie told me in South Dakota when we was scraping a herd of sheep over the badlands. A lot of stuff was taken from the people."

Spencer snorted, filling Ecchols' glass again with a contemptuous hand, "Huh. You know what I hate? I hate the whole stinking Ecchols family. Huh. You and your pop the most, since you did see fit to fuck my cousin after I specifically told you not to, but I hated your mother, Nora, too. Nooo-raah," he said, his voice parodying Jack Ecchols pained whine so perfectly that Ecchols wanted to slug him. What had his mother ever done to Spencer except give him new clothes and a clean bed, tried to get Maria and him through school? "I wish you could learn not to talk that way," Mom had tried to teach them, over and over. "'Huh' is not a word."

"Whatever you say, 'chief'," Ecchols spit back, reaching for the refill. "You know, Spencer, I don't give a darn how mad you are or how much you hated us. However you say it, you can't turn this lie into the truth. Those three other families don't make the Storm tribe. The only tribe that ever was, was you, me and Maria." He had always felt smug that his mother had not favored the interloper, Spencer, as so obviously his father had favored Maria. And then, when he was nineteen, at perhaps already his most aggrieved state, his mother had suddenly died, cervical cancer, much as a heritage of other pioneer women had before her.

"Huh." Spencer was unconvinced. He stood again and went to the window of his office, looking with silent anger down on the mill yard. Finally, he turned back to Ecchols, his thumb pointing to his waist. "Don't give yourself airs that you're the only one that cares about the old days. You're the coward who split town. I guess it's easier to forget when you're 'retired'. Have another drink." Spencer splayed belly-up in an office chair and regarded Ecchols challengingly. "That's why I still wear this." The silver surface of his big belt buckle had been hammered over the shape of a lightning bolt. The Storm Tribe.

Ecchols shrugged without shame. "I never forgot anything." Spencer didn't realize that alcohol wasn't Ecchols' main problem. He usually always functioned at fairly good capacity when he functioned, and didn't function at all when he didn't. Except for the driving. “Just walked away from it. Then, a while ago, I found out that some things you can’t walk away from.”

"Hit a kid while I was drunk down in Hayward a few years back," he explained softly. "Terrible thing. Didn't kill her, but it broke her leg and her arm. I just looked back in the side-view mirror and saw her flop down in the other lane. Scraped her up a lot too. I'm a dangerous man."

"I expect you left the scene of that accident, too," Spencer remarked unsympathetically.

"No, as a matter of fact, I didn't. Served some time for it, actually. I was at Santa Rita for fourteen months. Cost me a quarter mil. I never did find out who Saint Rita was."

"Huh. I think I might have run. If it happened to me I'd lose the trailer and the boat. Probably end up in Pelican Bay. Then where would my people be?"

His people would be wherever they would be without Spencer putting on the Big Chief Boohoo, Ecchols knew. None of this paternalistic stuff mattered at all. It was no different than electing Bush or Gore Great White Father. Maybe someone would get a few million more to try to buy the Internet for their kids.

"I suppose you mean the jobs," he said. No doubt everybody Spencer knew had some dysfunctional job at the mill. Like Maria, who could wander into the office whenever. "Let it go, Spence. You don't owe them anything. You gave them a chance to work. The rest is their problem."

“You’re a shithead Republican, just like your old man, aren’t you?” Spencer tipped his head, smirking at Ecchols again.

"I've gotta take a leak," Ecchols mumbled, and stood up to navigate toward a half-remembered head. When he returned, Maria was there. A safety-yellow hardhat cupped her curled brown hair and registered the pale grey-blue of her eyes. She flinched from Ecchols with a sudden sneer of alarm, then turned her attention to her cousin.

“Where were you last night?” Spencer leaned a hairless slab of a forearm onto the corner of a mahogany desk that had once belonged to Jack Ecchols.

“I stayed at my old place.” Maria nodded at the decanter of scotch. “I told you, I ain’t coming home until you quit that shit. And you better get it together quick. The lawyer called Carole from the mens room at a Shell Station. He’s driving up here with a Tribal Relations Coordinator. They want you to give a desposition.”

“Where’s Carole now?” Spencer asked surily. He splashed the decanter over Ecchols’ empty glass and put back a strong shot.

“She took some stuff out to your trailer. We’ve got to meet her there. They’re never going to buy it with you sitting here in this office. A fat-cat exec working for a lumber company.””

“Who says they have to ‘buy it,’ anyway,” Spencer spoke as though the scotch had been lit on fire. “What’s wrong with what I do. Huh. Don’t I look Indian enough for you?”

Maria blushed, and in Ecchols’ eyes the flush further emphasized her paler, whiter skin. “Trust me on this,” she told Spencer, her cousin, her brother, or her lover. “That’s where they’re meeting us.”

“Thought you might have scrammed already, like you said,” she added, returning her blue eyes finally back to Ecchols.

"Huh." Spencer said, looking between them both.


Chapter 3

“My truck’s busted, Maria said finally. “Some fool’s left the lights on.”

“Fortunately I had to drive today. Somebody didn’t pick me up last night. I’ve got the jeep.”

“Sounds uncomfortable. My van’s right around the corner,” Ecchols said easily, the alcohol oiling his tongue. “Where do you think I should go? Wait, don’t answer that.” What Maria didn’t understand was that the leaving thing was not the main problem. He could be in Reno in two hours, Salt Lake City in ten. Or he might not choose to drive at all. “You guys need a ride?”

“No. You ain’t going. No way.” To Ecchols it was a timeless moment, with an inevitable conclusion.

“Spencer! Yes-way.” Maria spoke, biting her lip. And so as it was, it had always been.

“Thank you, Chief,” Ecchols said.

The trailers were up a draw on the north side, a risky plateau of cess-pools along a tiny creek. Spencer’s double-wide was plunked behind a double-ended dirt driveway midway up a steep hill, not far from Weasel Falls. Barb wire held in a small family of sheep who grazed alongside a full size satellite dish. Ecchols had to admit he liked it.

“Lived here a long time?” he asked.

“Yeah, No,” Spencer and Maria answered simultaneously. Ecchols shook his head. “You guys together or something?”

“No, Yeah,” they said. “We were married,” Maria admitted, “A long time ago. It’s all old news now.”

“Five years ago, but ten years long,” Spencer said flatly.

A small mud room entered into the trailer’s main shag carpeted area. Spencer bumped the door back against the paws of a greeting dog and shouldered in. Maria followed. Ecchols was unprepared for the onslaught of heat and arguing voices

“Auntie, would you please turn that thing off,” Carole Allen was shouting at an elderly woman who reclined in a leather chair facing the TV. It was ‘Survivor.’. “Spencer’s back. Kids, would you please pick up these toys?” The other adults in the room, whose names Ecchols soon learned were George and Gracie, began obediently to shuffle together a collection of plastic dolls, helped by Evie, Maria’s twelve year old daughter.

“I thought you’d left us,” said the woman in the recliner. She held a sixteen ounce Olympia in her right hand, the remaining two half-quarts dangling from their plastic rings in her left. “Hello, Kenny. Want a beer?”

“Lupe,” Ecchols said, realizing he knew her, and suddenly warming. Spencer’s aunt from South Dakota—some distant relative of Maria’s. “I’d love one. How the heck have you been?”

“I thought he had left too,” Carole Allen said, “Listen, I’ve got to get all the booze out of here. Do you guys mind?”

“That guy named Richard wins,” Ecchols said, popping one of the tabs, gesturing at the big screen TV and hooking his little finger through the plastic ring to pull the other can away.

“I know,” Lupe said. “I just like to see my expectations confirmed.”

“Did you guys hear me?” Carole Allen insisted, “We’ve got a situation here. Spencer, I want you to go into the bathroom and shave that thing off. Maria, I’ve got your dress picked out.” Spencer looked sullen, but moved through the room, touching at his chin.

“I keep wishing I could be surprised,” Ecchols told Lupe, “But it never seems to happen that way. Until just now, running into you.” She, of all of them, had changed through age. Lupe had been his parents’ first housekeeper. His mother’s confidante, his own. He guessed he’d supposed she’d be dead, too.

“I was only forty,” Lupe said. “The same age as you are now.” Her hair was thin and crinkled with gray, pulled back into a dispirited topknot. Lines cut her cheeks away from her thin mouth, but her eyes were clear and beautiful.

“I came back to find the Storm Tribe again,” Ecchols said.

“I know—they’re coming. That’s what all this fuss is about.”

“OK, everybody, when they come, I want you all to act naturally, get me, naturally,” Carole Allen babbled, bursting suddenly back into the room.

“She thinks she’s going to be able to turn that bar of hers into a casino,” Lupe told Ecchols. Carole, as expected, freaked.

“Let’s not bring that subject up, Aunty, OK? OK?”

“Let me show you around,” Lupe said, turning off ‘Survivor’ as she got to her feet. She had on a pair of royal blue tights, a nice little ass, and a sweater patterned with horses. She brushed next to Ecchols and leaned across a fold leafed diningroom table, tucking empty beer cans into the crook of her arm. “Grab a couple of these, would you? I’ll show you the kitchen, first.”

Ecchols had his second spare bottle from the van and he put the bottle under his arm and set his full beer down beside the unopened one to make room for the empties. Lupe led them down a short hallway, to the sound of Carole’s incessant voice, going “Can somebody pick up these newspapers?”

The kitchen was grimy and yellow, but it had a large garbage can and no dirty dishes. Ecchols dumped the cans in and set his bottle on a counter, scanning the cupboards for a glass. “How about a little toast to my mother’s memory?” he asked Lupe.

“Sure. Someone has to.” Lupe turned the label on the bottle. “Bourbon, huh? Spencer drinks scotch.”

“Nigger rich, I guess.” Ecchols said. He jerked the wax seal off the bottle and stopped as he sensed Lupe looking at him.

“I hardly think you should be speaking that way about him,” Lupe said. “He’s your brother. He’s everything you are, or should be. I think the two of you should get to know each other better.”

“Oh, we are. So, Lupe. Que pasa?”

“You know I never speak Mexican.” They smiled at the joke and held the small glasses Ecchols had filled up to each other. “Not much. The years go by. The town doesn’t change. The plant keeps scraping by, just like when your dada ran it. The only thing that’s gotten better is more TV channels. To Nora.”

Ecchols wiped his lips. “But Spencer seems to be doing OK.”

“Oh, sure. He draws a big old salary from Central Plywood. Except for it ruining his health, he’s doing great. It’s the plant that’s not so good. Everybody here works there, you know.”

“Maria, too, I hear.”

“Hell, I worked there for six years myself. But I got some government money coming now.” Lupe’s cheeks crinkled. She raised the whisky to her mouth and shook back a dainty bite.

“Let me guess. The bartender.” Lupe nodded, taking a healthier drink.

“Of course I knew about yourself and Maria, because Maria tells me everything. That was rough. I can’t say I blame you for getting the hell out of Dodge.”

Ecchols turned embarassedly from her penetrating eyes. “Thanks,” he said. “I guess it was what it was. Or at least that’s what I keep trying to convince folks of. What’s out here?” A sliding door led to a small deck and a triangle of land.

“It’s Maria’s feeding station.” Brightly colored fiesta-ware plates had been placed on every surface of the redwood deck, each glopped with crusted food. At least six cats looked up at the interruption, and at least six did not.

“Jesus,” Ecchols said, revolted, “I like cats, but…”

“They’re coming,” Carole Allen recited, spinning swiftly in the entrance to the kitchen, her cell phone pressed symbolically to her face. “I guess we should get back in there,” Ecchols said, tipping the bottle to refill Lupe’s glass. In a few seconds they heard the sound of gears as a small car clawed its way into the steep driveway.

Chapter 4

The two dogs surged against the door of the trailer, barking deafeningly. Ecchols shuffled into the main room, following Lupe's blue clad rear. Spencer shouldered the animals aside. "Hello, I'm Spencer Murillo. Welcome to our home." He extended his large hand to the man in the suit who stood outside.

The couple drinks had sharpened Ecchols' eyes and put a point on his pecker. He was the first to see the trim figure of the woman behind the lawyer. She wore a light, fawn-color jacket, matching shoes. Ecchols met her inquisitive look with a not unfriendly nod.

"I'm Annette Bearpaw," she announced proudly, ducking into the room while Spencer was still shaking the man's hand. "I'm a member of the Karuk people's Council and representing the State of California as a new claims judge."

"Here's to you all, then." Ecchols thought, raising his glass to this pretty lady, "And to the State of California." He dragged a salute from some deep portion of his memory: "Nee-sit-to!"

Annette Bearpaw looked at him strangely, and Ecchols smiled behind his glass. "And you would be...?" she asked.

"Friend of the family." Ecchols surveyed the group assembled, Maria, Lupe, Spencer, the kid, and the other couple. Carole Allen scowled at him, standing in a short leather jacket with beaded fringes that hung from her full chest. As though she thought that this were the way that Native Americans were supposed to dress. Or people who hung out with Native Americans. If it hadn't been for the booze it wouldn't have been funny.

"Nee-sit-to, Annette," Maria spoke up, bumping her hip on the recliner as she stepped forward to take the inspector's hand. "On behalf of the Storm Tribe and our friends, welcome." Carole had done a better job on Maria than she had for herself. Ecchols had to admit she looked fresh, a nice pink dress that deepened the color of her skin, her dark hair brushed back. Maria swiveled her head, brown eyes searching for the other woman.

"Ha," Ecchols snorted. "Can't see a darn thing, can you?" Because the two women had exchanged eye color, Maria now nearly blind behind brown contact lenses, Carole Allen watery-eyed without them.

"Shut up, Kenny," Maria said. "Ken's visiting from the Bay Area," she told the state inspector.

"Pleased to meet you, Ken," Annette Bearpaw said, extending a hand with a large-stoned wedding ring at Ecchols. As if that mattered to him. "How are you?"

"I've been worse, thank you," Ecchols said. The bourbon had helped quite a bit. He held on to the woman's warm hand for a moment. Cute. She had a small mouth, lipped with red-orange.

"What's the drill, then?" He asked. "What do these guys have to prove?"

"I can answer that, if you don't mind, Annette," the woman's companion finally spoke. "I'm Gary Crandall, the attorney for the Storm Tribe." The lawyer spoke the name without irony or hesitation. "Normally the main criterion is continuous habitation. In this case, in view of the special circumstances, the State has agreed to consider waiving that requirement."

Ecchols knew this fellow too, he realized. Crandall had to be Dad's lawyer, the one who had handled the estate. The couple of phone calls he'd had with the guy hadn't set the picture right. Gary Crandall was a harried young man in a white shirt. Nervous tension had drawn his shoulders up tight against his neck. Something was wrong with his teeth, and his mouth stuck forward as though to bite.

"Sure," Ecchols responded sarcastically, "Might as well waive it. Since none of them has been here more than twenty years."

"That's wrong, though, Kenny." Lupe said quietly. "All my family lived around Ecchols Station or whatever it was called back then. Maria was born in town. It was only that me and Spencer moved here from Windriver back in the seventies."

Crandall protruding mouth nipped dourly. "You've probably don't live where you grew up, either, sir. I think what my clients' claim is based on fundamentally is spirit," he said.

"The People do move from place to place," Annette Bearpaw said. "But there's still a need to establish tenancy. One of the things I need to put in my report is evidence of ownership."

"We own what we own," Spencer put in defensively. "Just like everybody else."

"Just the trailer here and the Golden State Social Club up on the highway," Maria added. "The papers are all fixed up."

"Well, see now, Gary, this is still a big problem for me," Annette Bearpaw said. "I can't put in my report that I think they should turn a trailer plot and a bar into Indian homelands. They'll laugh me out of the office."

"That's why I wanted to you to come up here with me to meet these folks, Madam Councilperson. It's our position that an indigenous population was found throughout the area now known as Ecchols Station and the Wilson Rancheria long before Gold Rush times. To some degree, we would argue that the members of the Storm Tribe today have been similarly dispossessed."

"Oh, Bull," Ecchols burst out angrily, gulping the rest of the bourbon and slapping the empty glass down on the table. Everyone turned and looked at him. "There must be twenty thousand people living in those two places. What are you going to do? Give all that land back to this so-called tribe?"

The lawyer pushed his face forward into what Ecchols interpreted as a smirk. "No, not at all. Only the little section known as 'Weasel Falls.'"

Ecchols fought the sudden impulse to retreat to the kitchen. Then what did owning a thing or a place really mean? He stared Crandall down hatefully. Evidently the guy didn't have any idea he was talking to the man who owned that property. You're supposed to be working for me, buddy. And what Crandall couldn't know either was that Ecchols wasn't afraid of the law or of lawyers, even though they might have stuck it to him fairly bad in the past.

"The owners of that land might have something to say about this plan of yours," he warned the lawyer, his voice shaky. Where the heck were his cigarettes?

"The last I heard, the guy who owns the Wilson tract was in jail. It shouldn't be hard to get a judgement."

Spencer stepped menacingly toward Maria and stopped in well-practiced frustration. It was the same old thing again. Whatever sense of the way things should be that Maria could come up with was what she would do. "Ken, this wasn't my idea. I didn't know anything about it. All I ever said was that the falls is a special place to us."

"Mrs. Bearpaw, it would be our honor if the two of you can attend our Storm Tribe bigtime at the Weasel Falls meeting house this afternoon," Carole Allen interrupted. "There will be a Healing. We can discuss these things further then."

"Can I take your jacket, ma'am?" Lupe inquired, glancing over at Ecchols with obvious sympathy but some amusement at his distress. "Need another beer, Kenny?" Lupe retrieved the tall Oly Ecchols had set down earlier and pushed it back to him. He felt his emotions calm as he accepted the cool, bullet-shaped can.

"Ma'am?" Ecchols echoed Lupe, holding the can tip-fingered so that Annette Bearpaw could see the label. She wore a lacy orange blouse, open at the collar, exposing a beaded choker with a bear claw hanging beneath it. "Something to drink?" Politeness always pays. That was what mom had tried to teach them. The bottle back in the kitchen was still half full.

"Thank you," Annette Bearpaw said, and Ecchols popped the tab, being careful to point the opening away from the woman, but somehow the spray still got her. "I'd be very pleased to attend. NO. I do NOT want a beer. Would you please leave me alone?"

"Sorry," he stammered, "I thought you did." He looked away in confusion, sucking the pool of golden foam from the top of the sixteen ouncer so that it wouldn't spill all over.

Ecchols thought back to the last time he had seen Weasel Falls, still a fair size creek in late spring. It slid over an abrupt slope, combing icy ripples through iridescent underwater plants. The waters careened down in those days from the tops of the Western Cedar to their roots--those old growth trees would be gone now, pieces of someone's deck or bench. Ask yourself why you would do that, anyway. It wasn't the same as cutting them yourself, but it wasn't that darn much different.

"Part and parcel," he mumbled to himself.

"What?" Annette Bearpaw inquired. He peeked down at her dumbly. She shouldn't be expected to understand the kind of choice he had made. Choice? There hadn't been any thought to it. Just reaction.

"That's my other concern," the bureaucrat said. "This bar. Gary and I stopped by it on the way into town. 'The Golden State,' isn't it? That's a good one. I have to think about the image of the Peoples."

"We're taking care of that," Carole Allen said. "We're going to go upscale--turn it into a family place."

"That's right," Maria said. "We're going to change that name--'The Golden Dollar'. A Sacajawea idea, you know, like the new coin."

"Huh," Spencer spun and speared his former wife with a glare she couldn't see. "I get it. The kind of place where a woman can take her whole family while she gets sloshed and pisses away her paycheck, instead of just doing it by herself. Swell."

"Like Ms. Bearpaw says," Gary Crandall observed, "We've got to be concerned about appearances here."

"I don't," Ecchols said flatly. "Anyone else want a drink?"

* * *

"You were always good at putting things together, Kenny," Maria said, "Like all these fences you put up. Most of them are still standing." She pointed at a jackdaw fence Ecchols had built in their senior year, deadfallen cedar branches notched with a chainsaw and fitted together in a scaly barked braid.

"Wasn't I," Ecchols agreed, nudging one of the twisted members that had fallen and stepping over the fence.

"He's like that guy on the TV show I was watching, 'Survivor'," Lupe said. "Richard, the one that won. He thinks getting that million dollars means he won."

Ecchols smiled with tight lips at the thought of it. Whatever else she thought surviving meant. At least he had the million bucks.

Now the booze was plucking at his melancholy again. He felt his shoulders fall as they passed through golden filtered light from above. There had never been a time when that aspect of God had not turned his heart, until now. He could never win this again, or easily release it.

"I..." he said, and stopped. They looked at him strangely. Ecchols realized he had been crying and turned away. "I forgot something. Maria, did you happen to bring that box?"

"I'm sorry, Kenny. I left it in your van. I don't live at the trailer no more."

"I'll catch up." Ecchols spun and began to hike back the path.

"The hell you don't," he heard Spencer swear as he went away, "If you think you can just run off and leave Jessica and me."

"Lupe can take care of things. She always has."

And, as he scrabbled up the deer trail that had brought them down, he heard Lupe's thin voice come after, suddenly sharp as his mother's --"You two quit fighting for once. Carole will be bringing them up the road any minute. Spencer, you must know by now that she's going to live where she thinks she has to. And Maria, I'm only feeding them cats of yours until they're big enough to skin out."

Ecchols' chest was hurting again, but he only had to stop a few times on the climb to the top. He stood gasping, hands on uneven knees, his vision streaked with light, and then staggered the rest of the way up the ridge line to the Murillo trailer. The cats scattered as he clambered over the back side of the deck.

It wasn't the box, of course, so much as his third backup bottle. Privileges of having that million bucks. A couple, three more million and you could keep even more in your private reserve. He bumped his crooked way through the back door and out the front to his van. But he tucked the keepsake under his arm as soon as he had pressed back the velcro spare tire cover and opened the new bottle.

Why couldn't Maria leave it alone? If it were a few acres for her and her kids, that would be one thing. He tapped a long finger on the lid of the cedar box. In it, he knew, the deeds and conveyances lay beneath the photos. But the woman was as screwed up as she always had been.

Splay-legged on the floor of the van, Ecchols let the darkness and the contents of the box take his thoughts back in time.

"I don't care about that kid stuff any more. Kenny, if you want to get drunk with your buddies down at the falls, that's fine. Some of us grew out of that a while back." A flash of bouncing up the old logging grade, a keg of Oly in the back of the jeep. Maybe it had been even before the old man had started leaning on her that Maria had begun to change. Another flash--Ken Ecchols soaked through by winter rain, tripped by a log or something, his chin chopping down on a fallen tree as he pinwheeled into the soaking underbrush.

"Ahh. Shit." He said out loud. The van was dry and dark and silent.

He was only out for a few minutes. In a little while he remembered, patting his shirtpocket for a cigarette. Another Winston. The symbolism was getting old.

Ecchols took another nip and then screwed the top on decisively. He slid the door back open and lurched out. In the sky, an afternoon moon floated. He hadn't been this drunk and out in the daylight for a long time. It took a while to figure out the gate again.

She should have been happy to live in a place like this, Ecchols thought as he came back into the Murillos' front room. And it revealed her, he realized, hanging perilously to a turned wooden upright just inside the door of the trailer. The walls were paneled in pink cedar, masculine except for the color, leather-laced lampshades that cast curved images of animals across them. Woven cotton cloths covered the tables. The room shows signs of Spencer too--guns in a case, a mound of paperwork heaped beside a computer table. He sighed. Maria was somehow never satisfied with things the way they were.

Ecchols swiveled back through the kitchen and out onto the deck before a sudden attack of the spins knocked him down. He urped-up fairly delicately over the mossy railing but slid a hip across a viscous glop of cat food, contemplating his besmirched slacks in the moment of clarity that the first puke provides. Damn!

Ecchols' eyes flicked to follow the movement of a reluctantly disturbed cat, and then beyond, to another grey shape.

He went to his knees, his chin still upturned in contemplation of the feeding animal. It stood about twenty feet away, humping strangely as it choked the cats meats down, perhaps the very embodiment of the spirit of weasel falls. Ecchols quavered at the electro-static discharge that ruffled its long neck.

Strange that he should think of Maria like now, because this was so obviously Spencer's beast. It turned toward him, a paw outreached, as though offering him a second portion. It gloated at him--tiny teeth exposed by a sly neurotic grin.

He remembered how she had been before life forced her hand. Moist lips. Ecchold wiped his grungy mouth on his sleeve. In that very spot on the ridge, in his old Mercury, looking inside, not out into the world.

Ecchols' head fell suddenly from his neck and he caught it with a jerk. Maria would never have wanted it this way. First, this strange co-dependency with Pop, which evidently had kept on going all these years. Could that have actually been love? Then marrying Spencer, who had to weigh two-seventy, two-eighty pounds. Ecchols found a knot of bitterness in his heart. The old Spenceroo was a bumbler. Anyone could see he didn't know how to run a lumber company, couldn't run his own life at all. He thought about being with her all these years, what that had been like. He would have been a bumbling fool there too and she would have responded with a kid or two, discover distance within the closeness.

Maria had aged well, he realized, compared to us, when you took it all into account. Heavy herself, but she hadn't had the benefit of an alcohol only diet, like some people. Her thick hair.

He raised his vision from the redwood deck. The totem animal beckoned to him. The journey had begun.

Ecchols lurched to his feet with the idea that he should try to capture the feeding weasel, but the spins bore him down again in a clatter of plates. "Come on, boy," Ecchols wheedled, trying to pat his palm on the deck.

He realized that he would not be able to make it back down the path without breaking his neck. He would have to drive the van. "Fine. You win," he told the weasel spirit, feeling that he had said something wise but unable to tell what it was. The animal looked briefly toward him, then turned back to its food with dismissive contempt. "Come on, kitty."

He needed a shower. Inside the trailer Ecchols looked in the mirror at himself. His face seemed blank, staring, emotionless, smeared with the same stomach juice that crusted the inside of his mouth. He climbed into the shower stall without undressing, turned the water on as hot as it would go, lathered his slacks and shirt down with more of Maria's weird oatmeal soap.

* * *

The house was round, a sunken circle edged with tall hewn planks that slanted inward, the same kind of boards nailed into a shallow cone of a roof. Ecchols felt like he could remember every single stick of it, from a happier time, a framing axe and a keg of sixteen penny nails. Uphill, another project, a stone cistern that bubbled over with runoff from Weasel Falls, a thirty foot high rivulet visible through a screen of cedar trunks. He had sold all of the rights, not just some of them. None of this ought to be here.

Ecchols stomped the accelerator down, engine raging as it wound up to its limits. The van leaped the last hill and straightened out for a moment before it skidded in the swampy ground and ran like a toy out of control. He hadn’t seen the tree for the forest until it was too late. The roughened rose-pink cedar bark was the last thing he saw before his head hit the windshield.

“He’s as drunk as a skunk!” Ecchols heard Carole Allen say from some distance above him, some long time later. As if all skunks were even drinkers or some skunks didn't drink more than others. They happened to be the same words the woman in Hayward had pronounced three years before, Ecchols sagging out against his seat belt, trying to kick free, after the townies had ripped open the door of the van.

“What the heck is it to you?” he moaned. It had been the last time he had ever put on a seat belt. The men had jounced him boneless in the driver’s seat, held captive by the restraining strap. This time, the van’s airbag had saved his skull, but still pinned him in place.

“Kenny!” Maria wailed. She came up into the van and held his face in her warm palms, brushing her mouth against his wounded forehead.

“You little fuck!” Spencer’s rough hands ripped Maria away from him, pried him free. “Jesus, are you all right? If you can’t kill everything around you you try to kill yourself—is that it?”

“Nuhh,” Ecchols replied. It was just that he couldn’t see. His vision was just beginning to swirl into place. “I’ll be okay.” The airbag was beginning to fart flat as he fought it with his elbows.

“Thanks.” He told Spencer, dropping to his knees in the mud outside the ruined van. They all stood around him, then, stepping uncertainly in the watery muck, with what he knew had to be pity. A half a dozen pair of feet.

The trees would survive the attack of his van, even the one he had hit. It was like Dad had always said, the trees would always be there. “How did you hide this for so long?” he heard himself ask.

“Huh. That was easy,” he heard Spencer say, with what had to be pride. “No one had to come here. You neither.”

Ecchols let himself be helped to the door of the roundhouse and inside, a step downward to the dirt floor. It was the tribal lady on his left, Crandall the lawyer on his right. “Stop.” he said. Who were they to bring him here. Maria.

She was there, though. “Bring him over here.” He inhaled the smell of an old couch, sank back in it like he was home.

“There wasn’t any really any need to log out this draw, Ken,” Spencer continued. “Steep and it’s low-yield. I just let nature take its course over on the other side of town and let nature take its course over here.”

“Don’t apologize, for God’s sake, Spencer. Kenny’s not any different than his old man was.” Maria told her husband scornfully. “You thought you were being clever hiding this place from Central Plywood, all these years, but you were just fooling yourself. Kenny knows—right, Kenny? It’s who owns a thing that counts, not who controls it.” Ecchols felt her fingers dig in under his gut, undoing the catch of his swamp-soaked slacks. She pulled his pants down over his shoes and away.

“Are you really, I mean, you’re not Ken Ecchols, are you?” the lawyer, Crandall, asked. Ecchols looked up blearily, sitting on the old couch in torn blue Calvin Klein briefs

“Kind of a conflict of your interests, isn’t it, Crandall?” His skinny naked legs again. If there was one thing that all his drinking had taught him it was that there was no embarrassment greater than which another one could be conceived. Ecchols wriggled his feet and Maria unlaced his shoes and pulled them off.

“Thanks, dear,” he mumbled in unconscious imitation of his father, and Maria immediately flung the pair of heavy Nikes in his face. “Fuck you, Ecchols!” she spit out.

“Ahh, leave me the heck alone.”

On the inside the roundhouse was rectangular, four posts set in the middle of a dug out floor, four peeled beams, an asterisk of rafters. Ecchols let go and let himself fill in the space above. It was nice to know you could build a house like this, though. Maria loomed above him and withdrew.

“Carole, do you want to begin?” His eyes came down. Carole stood, in her fringed jacket, between Annette BearPaw and Crandall, the two outsiders.

“Sure. Annette BearPaw, of the Karuk tribe, welcome to our tribal roundhouse. This building has been in place since 1982, when it was rebuilt from the original, which was burned.” Not completely wrong, Ecchols realized. He had studied the photos of the building down at Murphys, milled all the material himself. Yeah. Carole looked good, too. Those knockers.

To the side, Spencer spoke to Lupe quietly, bitter. “What do you guys want from me? I’ve been lying long enough about this.”

“Hush, Spencer. Let Maria and Carole talk for us.”

“Go back home and call everyone up and let them know I lied to them, Lupe. Huh. It was just old Spence putting on airs.”

Ecchols wondered whether the van was too crushed to retrieve his last spare bottle. Everyone here seemed like they could use a drink.

“See if you can find that bottle of whiskey of mine, would you, Spencer? It should be right inside the driver’s door.”

Spencer looked at him with serious eyes, then turned and ducked his big body up and out the door. Took one to know one.

“Yeah,” Ecchols mused. “I could call in the trucks and saws tomorrow, Maria. Think that will make any one here happy?” He was just taking a piss. She was always so easy to rile.

This time, for once, Maria didn’t respond to his jibe, and Ecchols felt inexplicably hollowed. Instead, she turned from him and clasped both of Annette BearPaw’s hands in her own.

“Honey, this is what we mean. It’s just like it always has been, since the land was taken from the people back in gold rush days. Corporations. Owners.”

“Exactly!” Gary Crandall agreed. “As you know, there’s a lot of case law about intermediate habitation, but here things are simple—In 1923 Morris Mom’s maiden name bought ten sections of forested property from the Burlington Northern Railroad, which had been deeded it pending successful operation of their feeder service. While she lived Mrs. Ecchols’ properties were managed by her husband, Jack—when she died, ownership went to her son rather than her spouse. Except for ownership by this family, these lands have always been under self-rule.