West of Here by Jonathan Evison Page A

be worried.”
    Thomas tilted his head and covered his eyes. When he uncovered them, George was still there.
    “Have you eaten?”
    Thomas cast his eyes down at his feet, and his lips began silently working on his words.
    “Come. I’ve got something for you.”
    Thomas followed him to the cabin door, but would go no further. On one occasion Thomas had entered the cabin, when he’d followed a pair of enormous curly-haired white men upriver. Thomas had not liked the smell of George’s place, or the fleas. Everything was too close together. It was dark, not night dark, but day dark.
    “Yes. Okay. I’ll bring it out. Go. Sit in the canoe.”
    But when George reemerged with the sourdough and jam, he found the boy exactly where he left him, except part of the boy was no longerthere. His eyes were far away. He began to quake as though a cold hand were squeezing his insides, and his teeth began to knock, and his eyes looked ready to burst from their sockets. Suddenly, he jerked once, as though struck by a bolt of lightning, and went perfectly still.
    George was not alarmed. In fact, he took the shaking as a good sign. “I brought bread. Jam,” he said. “Come to the canoe.”
    Thomas did not budge.
    “Okay, here. We’ll eat here.” George brushed snow from the stump of a maple and sat down with the bread and the jam. Thomas stood in place, accepting a hunk of bread when George extended it but refusing the jam.
    Thomas ate in silence and avoided looking at George’s teeth. But he listened to the old man intently throughout the meal, and he enjoyed how, after a while, George made it a conversation all by himself. Sometimes there were words Thomas had not heard before. He put his lips silently to work on these words.
    George talked like a white man. That is, he talked a lot. More than his grandfather, even. Thomas believed that this was because George was lonely, not because he did not like silence. It was said that George had once had a wife, a young Squaxin woman, and that he’d lost her to smallpox. It was also said that he’d lost her to the bottle. It seemed she was the only thing about which George did not speak.
    Not only did George talk a lot, but Thomas also found George unique among Indians in that he’d lost his taste for salmon. He refused, in fact, to eat it. Not chinook, not coho, not silver, not even blueback from the Quinault. Niether smoked, filleted, nor slathered in whiskey.
    “The river is choked with salmon of every variety,” George complained. “I can hardly pole my canoe through them. I’ve been here many winters, and what do you think I ate all those winters? Yes, that’s right. I ate salmon. And more salmon. I have prepared this fish in a thousand ways, and it always tastes the same. I am done eating salmon. Trout, I will eat, fried in a pan. But not salmon. I will not even grease my saw with salmon oil. I’m finding that I like sourdoughbread, though. The bread sticks to the inside of my stomach and I like that. It smells funny, but that’s okay.”
    Thomas smelled the bread and found that he rather liked the smell, sharp but smoky, not smoky like the Belvedere, but outdoor smoky. He liked that it tasted almost like it smelled, but not exactly. And indeed, the bread really did stick to the inside of your belly, and Thomas liked that, too. He wondered why anyone would put jam on it.
    “Your time is drawing closer,” said the old man. “You must know that. You must keep clean for your tamanamis, so you have no smell. You will get sick when he comes for you.”
    The boy was poking holes in the melting snow with his toe. His lips were not moving. His eyes were no longer far away. George could feel the invisible storm gathering inside the boy. Someday it would gather enough strength to unleash itself. And George believed it would come out like a dream-song for all the Siwash to hear.
    “More sourdough?”
    Thomas nodded without looking up from his feet. George tore off a hunk of bread and