Betwixt Read online

  She nodded. “All right. Call me at five. We’ll figure out what to do then.”

  She lay back down underneath the butterflies and watched the pieces collect.

  CHAPTER 2

  JACOB CLOWES WAS NOT AN UNFEELING MAN, but the eighteen-year-old punk holding the dishwasher’s nozzle irked him. There he was now, thick black hair falling into his eyes, spraying a plate. He worked too slowly. He smoked when Jacob wasn’t in the kitchen. Just then the room smelled of cigarettes. Dishwashers weren’t supposed to care, he knew — Jacob had been a dishwasher once — but this one made his knees watery with anger.

  That goddamned name. Nix. Who the hell had a name like that?

  “Nix!” Jacob yelled over the din of the industrial machine. The boy pretended not to hear him. “Nix Saint-Michael!”

  Nix looked up, then down again.

  Punk. Jacob didn’t like the way Nix worked, eyes half closed, almost asleep, yet walking and waking. Holding the nozzle with one hand, with the other — barely — a ceramic plate you’d think was heavy as plutonium.

  “It’s clean, Nix. The plate is clean.”

  Nothing.

  In the beginning it had been that Nix was late. Now he was on time, but he moved so slowly that they were always running out of soda glasses. So now they were giving refills to save glasses, and Jacob didn’t want to give refills. This wasn’t a goddamned Friday’s, for chrissakes. This was Jacob’s Pizza. This was the oldest New York–style pizza establishment in once-groovily bohemian, now-gentrified Northwest Portland.

  “Am I talking to myself? I believe there is a dishwasher here named Nix Saint-Michael, who I am trying to communicate with. Earth to Nix. We need some goddamned soda glasses!”

  “Pop.”

  Nix spoke too softly for Jacob to hear him over the cranking hum and his thick black hair obscured his eyes, but Jacob could see what his mouth was saying and it pissed him off.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s called pop here,” Nix repeated under his breath. “Never mind. Just give me five, man.”

  “What do you think this is? A fucking old folks’ home?” Jacob ignored the correction. “I don’t have five, Nix. I don’t even have one. I need those soda glasses now.”

  Jacob Clowes was used to punks. He spoke the language, knew that Nix wouldn’t respect him unless he was a bit of an asshole, so he played it that way. He had been a punk himself. A punk kid from Brooklyn who had moved out to Portland in the seventies. He had hated the rich yuppies once they started moving in during the eighties, but the businessman in him — the one whose daughter, Neve, now attended that liberal (but still freakishly expensive) private day school, Penwick, and whose wife, Amanda, a former experimental dancer/macrobiotic cook/Reiki healer who had discovered the joy of expensive wine — depended on Jacob’s Pizza.

  And tonight, like it or not, Jacob’s Pizza depended on Nix.

  Anyway, he kind of liked the kid. He knew Nix squatted up in the park. He knew there were dark scenes in the family, somewhere in Alaska. Nix wore long-sleeved black T-shirts, but Jacob could imagine the places where the boy cut himself. A lot of the kids he had hired over the years were into that kind of thing. He may not have been able to change them, but he helped them, gave them jobs, talked to them after their shifts, gave them rides home. Sometimes he and Amanda had them over for dinner, and some of the girls babysat for Neve a few times when she was a kid.

  There were always the ones that fell through the cracks, though.

  “Hey, punk. I told you to get those glasses through the washer ten fucking minutes ago. What are you doing?”

  Nicholas Saint-Michael did not look up. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. He liked Jacob. Jacob was, in fact, the best boss Nix had ever had since he first started hauling spruce chips for Frank Shadwell back in Sitka when he was nine years old. That was another life, though, and in this one, he knew better.

  Jacob repeated himself. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Nix kept his eyes down. He couldn’t look at Jacob. Physically couldn’t. The man had a light around him so bright Nix had to keep his eyes closed or his back turned whenever his boss was in the room.

  “What is going on?”

  He set the plate down and let go of the handle of the spray nozzle.

  “Man, I can’t do this job anymore.”

  Even with his eyes half closed, Nix could see the light, blinding and painful as the sun, around the saggy sides of Jacob’s faded black jeans.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I can’t do this anymore.” He brought his hand to his brow to wipe back a slash of black hair, staring at the water and the soap swirling. Jacob’s reflection shimmered in the sink, but the light wasn’t in the reflection — they didn’t show up there, he’d noticed — and so he spoke to Jacob’s watery mirror image.

  “Man, I just wash the dishes.”

  “Yeah?”

  Nix felt the man come closer, reach over the pool of water, pull the nozzle out of his hand. He let him, though he shrunk back as Jacob’s hand approached.

  “No, Nix. You act like a dishwasher. You assume the pose of a dishwasher. But a dishwasher you are not. A dishwasher would wash the fucking dishes.”

  “Right.” Nix’s eyes stayed on the water. He wanted to meet Jacob’s gaze, show him that he could do it, keep the job, make the owner happy. The dude had tried. Nix knew he had tried.

  He forced himself to look up.

  “I’m just messing you up.”

  “Messing me up?”

  The man’s face had hardened into a mask of disappointment. The wide mouth a ruddy dash; his dark, close-set eyes flat under frizzed black-brown eyebrows. And the fire all around him even brighter now, incinerating.

  The closer they got the more they burned.

  Nix looked away. “I can’t stay.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I can’t stay. I’m bad for you.”

  Again Jacob moved closer and Nix watched a blazing hand approach his shoulder. He jerked away.

  “What’s going on?”

  How could he explain something he himself could not understand?

  “Jacob, man. I’m no good.”

  “Look, if you’re hooked on dust, kid, we can work something —”

  “Naw, naw. That’s not it.”

  These cloaks of light, Nix had seen them before. Lately they had gotten bolder, more violent. That girl up at the squat who got her throat slit, dumped somewhere out toward Bend. The man Nix saw on the Burnside bus, killed in a holdup two weeks later. All those people on the road down from Alaska.

  It had happened to Frank Shadwell before Nix’s mother, Bettina, had done what she’d done. If Nix had stayed in Sitka, it would have happened to Bettina, too. Now the light devoured Jacob, and Nix couldn’t look at him because he was afraid it was his own mind causing the fire.

  He shook his head and spoke to the floor.

  “I gotta go.”

  Jacob sighed. “Go take a break and smoke a cigarette or something and calm down. I’ll cover for you while you’re gone.” He started to move behind the sink to take Nix’s place.

  “Man. I told you. I’m no good.”

  “Nix, take a friggin’ break and come back and do your job.”

  “No.” He let go of the nozzle. The fire diminished. It calmed him, made him more certain that he needed to leave. “I’m just fucking you up.”

  “What?” Jacob asked. “What are you talking about?”

  Nix started to walk out of the kitchen, but stopped. He couldn’t just leave. He owed it to the man. When he finally looked up, Jacob looked confused and sad.

  “You tried, man. You tried.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jacob shook his head. “But suit yourself, Nix.”

  “I think I will.”

  He had to say it. He had to make Jacob think he was a punk kid, an asshole with an attitude. A prick. A tweaker. Someone you didn’t
want around.

  The slice he took on his way out of the kitchen—artichoke hearts and feta, Yuppie’s Delight, Jacob called it—would get him through till tomorrow.

  IN SITKA IT HAD GONE THAT WAY, TOO.

  Nix walked down the sidewalks of Northwest Portland toward the forest that crowned downtown like a shaggy head of hair, and he thought about Alaska. He hadn’t let himself think about home often since he’d left, but in the last few weeks since Jacob had gotten the light, Nix had been thinking about his mother.

  Bettina Saint-Michael had been the prettiest Indian to come out of Sitka’s Mt. Edgecumbe High School since no one knew how long. Or that’s what the white principal had said when he tried to pick her up at the grocery store she worked at after graduation. Bettina wasn’t having any of it. She rang up Principal Harkin’s mayonnaise; his cans of salmon (caught somewhere out in that water she looked at every afternoon while trying to picture what life was like across it); his white bread; his canned green beans; and the bottle of vodka Bettina knew was for Abby Harkin, his drunk wife; and ignored him when he said they should meet for lunch at Koloskov’s Diner on her break to discuss college plans. Bettina knew what Principal Harkin was after and it had nothing to do with her fine Indian mind.

  “Nicholas,” Bettina had said to her only child many years later, “you treat women right, you respect them for what they know, and they will open up to you like flowers in springtime.”

  Bettina had laughed when she said that. She was undoing her hair from work at the cannery, and while she spoke, she ran her fingers through the soft dark-brown strands.

  Nix loved to hear his mother laugh. She started like a bird, little pulses of high cool notes, and ended with her head thrown back, her hands holding her stomach. She would bang the table or the wall or whatever she happened to be next to and tickle her son and nuzzle and kiss him. She smelled like woodsmoke and fish and coffee.

  That time so many years ago Bettina had laughed not because it was funny, but because she had to. Otherwise things would have been too sad. That winter was a long one. It was the first year she stopped putting in a summer garden, the year Daddy Saint-Michael had died and Bettina and Nix were left alone.

  “Did you hear me, son? Treat a woman right and …” She trailed off, fingers still touching her hair.

  Daddy Saint-Michael was Nix’s grandfather, and he loved Bettina and her son more than anything in the world. Nothing was good enough for Bettina. Which somehow made Bettina think that she was not good enough for anything.

  Nix, pudgy, saucer-eyed, was the son of a ghost who passed through Sitka on his way to somewhere else. Bettina didn’t talk about him except to say that he had been her first love, and that he was smart and sad, and that he played Ann Peebles’s “I Can’t Stand the Rain” on Koloskov’s jukebox the summer night they met.

  He figured his father had worked for the mill or the fisheries, seasonal help like everyone else. Which would explain why Bettina always shimmered during the warm months, even in a town that slept for three quarters of the year. He figured he was Aleut, too, from somewhere farther west, because Nix himself was dark haired, dark eyed, full cheeked, and stockier than his mother, had thick hambone muscles when he was eight that he tried to hide under the parkas his mother was always buying him from hippie friends who had made their way to Sitka from California or wherever.

  “Hello, little brother,” they’d say with a straight face.

  “You’re not my brother,” Nix once retorted. Bettina slapped him for that one.

  By that time, the halos (he took to calling them, though only to himself — he never told anyone about the rings he saw) were already starting to appear. On strangers, blurry at first, as if he were losing his sight. Nix even asked Bettina for glasses. They started as a vibration, a slight fuzziness around the edges. He began to look at people, watch them. First the signs were subtle. How that old friend of Bettina’s — his name was Jerry Klein but he went by Raven in Sitka — how Raven had turned silvery before Nix’s eyes before he died of cancer. Then Mary Ives’s little baby, turning blue in her crib. Mary so sad she didn’t have another one and started to stand outside the bar down by the harbor, winter and summer both, bumming menthols, which turned to quarters, which turned to entreaties to take a pretty little Indian home.

  Bettina and Nix moved into Frank Shadwell’s house when Nix turned ten. Shadwell lived out near where the forests started, so Bettina didn’t go into town as much as she used to. Nix worked for Shadwell at his mill; his mother cooked and watched satellite TV, and Shadwell peeled back the mask he had put on and turned into the mean drunk he’d always been.

  He hit Bettina and called her a fat ’skimo whore only when he was drinking, but he was drunk often enough that Bettina didn’t leave the house for fear of showing her old friends her face and neck. Nix’s hatred of the man was clear and cold as a midwinter morning. He knew there was nothing he could do to Frank Shadwell, or for his mother, as long as Bettina stayed. All he could do was stare, his black eyes frozen, and wish his step-father were gone. Sometimes, despite himself, Nix looked at his mother the same way.

  That’s when the light hit Shadwell. So fast and bright, Nix knew it wasn’t a problem with his vision.

  He tried to be good around the house, tried to calm things when Bettina and Shadwell started fighting, but every day the light around his stepfather gathered itself brighter. Then one day, Nix came home from school and Bettina was sitting in the kitchen, Shadwell bloody on the floor. She had shot him at close range, then sat there and waited for her son to come home from school. She said she didn’t know what had made her do it. He wasn’t drunk and hadn’t even tried to hit her, but now he would never do it again. At least that’s what she told the police.

  Nix sat on a chair beside his mother and listened to her confess. He had wanted to scream that it was his fault. He had wanted to take the blame. He didn’t. Nor did he take her hand and tell her that they should run away, like a good son should have, for when he looked at her, he saw the thinnest sliver of light outline his mother’s slack shoulders, the ends of her soft fine hair.

  He left town on a Greyhound the next day. He was fifteen years old and had once been to Anchorage for the wedding of one of Bettina’s high school friends, but other than that, hadn’t been off the island where he was born.

  Thousands of miles and Nix didn’t know how many buses later he made it to Portland. He stopped in Vancouver; Canadian immigration hassled him and he had to leave. Seattle was too expensive, and he felt more alone there because of all the kids from U. Dub. He didn’t know how to do anything besides work in a mill, but because of Shadwell he hated cutting down trees. Though he’d liked school and had been a pretty good student in Sitka, he was a runaway, and getting into the system would mean he’d be sent back up to Anchorage, where his uncles and aunts lived, to watch the people he loved die.

  So he wandered. When he didn’t know anyone, he didn’t care what light they carried. He watched them on buses and in diners, in urinals and on the sides of roads. Bright ones, pale ones, lights strong as streetlamps and soft as match flame. Sometimes he stuck around so he could figure out how long it took for them to die — a few months, sometimes as little as a week or two. He learned to gauge the time based on the brightness and activity of the light. At first, when the light was thin, he thought it meant maybe — as in, maybe the wisecracking woman in the vintage mauve sundress and combat boots who worked at the Vancouver hostel had a curable kind of cancer, or maybe the old dude at Elliott Bay Book Company would quit smoking. But it only meant the end was further away; the cancer would take a year to metastasize; the debilitating — and fatal — stroke would come in many months. He’d memorize their faces or their names and then look in the paper for them. But even that made him love them in a way, so he’d leave.

  He fell for a girl in Seattle. She worked at a flower stand, sold sweetpeas from her garden, and she never had the light around her, but someday Nix figured she wo
uld, so he stopped coming around. He moved and moved again, selling newspapers, dish washing, cleaning bathrooms and offices, delivering drugs — so many lights then — hawking fish, picking berries and apples, and, yes, cutting trees. He even drove an illegal migrant-worker van for a while. He didn’t know where the visions came from, but he didn’t question them either. Daddy Saint-Michael had once talked about people with the gift; Nix just figured he was one of them.

  It felt more like a curse, anyway, but he was used to good things turning bad.

  By the time he got to Portland he was tired. He’d been on the road for two years. He was seventeen and he had gotten taller, his wide cheeks sunken from scrounging for food day after day, and walking, always walking. He hadn’t decided to stay, exactly; he was just too exhausted to leave.

  There was something holding him in Portland. Something he didn’t understand about the mountains that floated in the distance like faraway islands and the forests just at the edge of downtown, as if another world were on the other side of that blue-gray Oregon sky. He found a group of kids to sleep with in the park. They put up tents and moved around to avoid the cops. Things were clean — the people he was with were good — and no one had the light. No one close to him anyway. He got a job washing dishes at Jacob’s: steady work, free food. He started to save money, even bought a book to study for the GED, which he read at night in his tent while the rest of the squat talked about politics and how they were going to hitchhike to Seattle or DC for the next protest. People played music and talked; Nix wrote letters to Bettina, knowing only his uncle in Anchorage would get them, but still feeling the need to let someone know he was alive. He even made a friend down at Jacob’s, a straight dude, captain-of-the-soccer-team type who’d been delivering pizza there since he was in ninth grade. His name was K.A. D’Amici, and Nix hung out with him once or twice a week. He liked K.A.’s style, his honesty. He was planning to see him that night, the night he quit.

  When the girl at the squat got her throat slit, and Jacob got marked, Nix had been in Portland a little under a year. He had just bought a SpongeBob sleeping bag from Goodwill and had started to feel something like safe. But then, a roll or two of dust every other week helped with that.