JUSTIN

His wife, Karen, works as a dietitian for the school districts scattered throughout central Oregon. She spends her days designing new lunch programs for the cafeterias, sitting down with obese diabetics to ask them about their eating habits, and giving PowerPoint presentations to auditoriums full of bored children, telling them about the food pyramid and how they might incorporate it into their lives. At this time she is pregnant with their second child. She drinks orange juice every morning and what seems like gallons of water every day, but no soda or alcohol, not even to sneak a sip from Justin. She stays away from fish and red meat and spends the extra dollar on organic free-range chicken. And so on. Every precaution in the world—and none of it stops from happening what happens next.

Justin comes home from work to find a design of bloody footprints on the floor. He stares at them a long time as if to decipher their message. Only then does he pull out his cell phone. He shut it off earlier in the day so that it wouldn’t go off when he was teaching. It reveals three new voice mails—one from the hospital, the next from his in-laws, the last from his wife.

He finds her in her hospital bed and she seems to have shrunk. Really, she has, her belly caved in, suddenly empty.

She is, she was, five months pregnant. The doctors tell her she has preeclampsia. Essentially her body came to recognize the baby as an allergen and expelled it from her. When she tells Justin this, her voice slurring from the Vicodin, she seems to be looking inward and outward at the same time, lost in dark thoughts in a too-bright room.

When the nurse comes to check Karen’s vitals, she asks if Justin wants to see the baby, a baby girl. He does and doesn’t. When his son, Graham, was born, he had looked so shiny, as if polished by Karen’s insides, a precious gem they clutched to their chests and passed back and forth with the greatest care. That’s how this baby looks, too, only smaller, bluer.

In the weeks that follow, Karen walks around as if bruised. She shrinks from Justin’s touch—his, but lost to him. He finds her often in the office, the office they converted into a nursery. On one side of the room sits a rolltop desk stacked with ungraded papers—and on the other, the varnished pine crib, decorated with Winnie-the-Pooh bumpers and a mobile that plays “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” the song sounding so eerie now, when Karen turns the knob, filling the empty crib and seeping through its slats to echo through the house.

When they finally make love again, five months later, she starts crying and when he asks if he should stop, she says, “What do you think?” A line comes to run down the middle of their bed. Neither of them crosses it.

He can’t remember if they were having problems before. He tries to remember the last time they went on a date—a real date, without their son—white linen, lit candles, wine in goblets, their feet touching beneath the table—and can’t. He tries to remember the last time he bought her jewelry or flowers. He tries to remember the last time she took him in her mouth. He tries to remember the last time they read novels on the couch, their legs intertwined, sharing favorite passages. Years. It’s been years, hasn’t it? So much of his memory is hazy, chunked up by memories of work. He can recall her frequent headaches—her full-throated sighing—her desire to be alone. He remembers putting away laundry, finding an enormous pink dildo shoved to the back of her underwear drawer, and feeling somehow betrayed. Maybe these are only the warts that naturally grow out of a marriage moving forward. Or maybe he and Karen have been in trouble for some time and only now does he notice it. He wants to blame the baby, but maybe the baby has only turned up the volume on what was there all along.

She takes up running. Every morning she pulls on pink shorts and a white tank top and laces her Nike cross-trainers and runs five miles. All the fat she accumulated during her pregnancy melts off to reveal hard-plated muscle that looks like the exoskeleton of something that lives at the bottom of the ocean. Her feet develop thick calluses. Her calves jump when she walks. Her forearms are a lacework of veins. Even her ears look skinny.

Sometimes Justin sees her on his drive to Mountain View High School, where he teaches. Her hair will be pulled back in a ponytail to reveal a red and compacted face. Her teeth, bared in a snarl. She pumps her legs and swings her arms wildly. She looks like a madwoman. He always beeps his horn and waves at her, but she never sees him, lost in the heat and rhythm of her run.

Normally she is gone by the time he showers and dresses and comes down to the kitchen for breakfast. But sometimes they run into each other, as they do this morning, when he finds her standing in front of the sink, looking out the window and drinking a short glass of orange juice. He says, “Hi,” and she says, “Hey.” He asks her if she heard the news, and when she says, “What news?” he tells her.

Last night—on Z-21, the NBC affiliate—the ten o’clock news reported a bear attack at Cline Falls. These girls, two teenage girls from Prineville, left their food and cooking supplies out, rather than washing them and bagging them and hanging them from the highest branch of a juniper tree. In the springtime bears possess a terrible hunger, having slept through the long winter, and this one was no exception. One slash of its claws parted the nylon like a zipper. Their screams didn’t scare it away, only encouraged it, as it fit its jaws around the head of one girl, chewing her, her scalp finally sliding off her skull. The other, in trying to save her friend, was hurled against the canyon wall, then mauled. They played dead or fainted in their pain and after so many minutes the bear abandoned them. Now both are in critical condition at St. Charles Memorial in Bend. “They say they think it’s a grizzly.”

“There are no grizzlies in Oregon.”

“That’s what the Forest Service guy said, but then this other guy said—”

“I gotta run.” She sets her glass down on the counter with a click. Yellow bits of pulp cling to its inside.

“Okay,” he says and opens the cabinet and pulls a box of Cheerios from the shelf to rattle into a bowl and splash with milk. “Have fun. Watch out for bears.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she says, already running, on her way out the door.

He teaches English. Several years ago a sophomore named Jimmy Westmoreland, after downing a twelve-pack of Budweiser, flipped his Camaro and died. Everyone gathered in the gym the next day. The principal—a leathery-looking man who dyed his hair jet black and kept it styled in an “Elvis”—stood before them all and muttered a few kind words about Jimmy. There was a chair next to him and it had a boom box resting on it. “This one’s for Jimmy,” he said and hit the play button. From the speakers came the drawling voices and disorderly guitar licks of Lynyrd Skynyrd. They sat and listened to “Free Bird.” Eight minutes and twenty-three seconds had never seemed like such a long time.

This is the kind of school they are. Wranglers and Levi’s. F-10s and Firebirds. All of old Bend send their kids here—while the Portland and California refugees, in their tight designer jeans and brightly polished SUVs, end up at the new high school across town. Justin prefers Billy Joel to Skynyrd—and Starbucks to Folgers—and finds himself identifying more with what Bend is becoming than what it once was. He often thinks about applying for a transfer, or maybe even going back to graduate school, maybe teaching at the college level or doing something else entirely.

There was a time when he enjoyed his job greatly. And then something happened. The same thing that happens to many teachers, he expects. The work begins to rub away at your heart. The exhaustion doesn’t come all at once, but steadily, incessantly, like waves wearing away at rock. You get married. You buy a house. You have a kid. And then one day you realize ten, twenty years have passed, and during this time you have grown tired of the low pay, the endless piles of paper, the football players who sit in the back row and cross their arms and seem perpetually amused by everything, a smug smile never leaving their lips.

Sometimes, during the middle of a lecture, he feels strangely distant, separate from himself, as if he is hovering above the classroom, carried there by the drone of his voice. And when from above he looks down on everyone, when he see in their eyes—as he saw in his eyes—a dreamily veiled boredom, it gives him a general feeling of inconsequence, as if nothing he says or does matters.

This morning, during an exam, he glances out the window and sees a gaunt animal, what could be a dog or a coyote, slinking along the edge of the football field. It stays low to the ground, as if it has caught a scent, as if it is stalking something. And then it vanishes into the shadows between the trees. He leans forward and tries to follow it farther, but it is gone, so suddenly he wonders if he imagined it.

The door opens and startles him from his half dream.

The secretary stands there. She is a leggy blonde who spends all day forwarding calls while paging through the latest copy of People or Us Weekly. Today she wears too bright a shade of lipstick that makes her mouth appear like a bleeding gash. “Mr. Caves?” she says. “Your wife is on the phone. She needs to talk to you.”

He looks at his students and his students look at him for a long twenty seconds. Then he says, “I’m in the middle of class. What’s this about?”

She examines her nails as if they were a point of curiosity. “How should I know? I only know it’s an emergency.”

He looks about the room, his stomach like a stone, while digesting this. Dust rises in the sunbeams coming through the windows. The clock clicks its way toward three. Someone in the back row snaps their gum, the noise like a broken branch. “You have five more minutes,” he tells them. “When you finish, lay the test on my desk. Don’t cheat. And remember, for homework tonight, Heart of Darkness, pages fifty through one hundred.”

He makes his way down the hall, to the lounge, certain something has happened to his father. Perhaps a stroke. He feels oddly calm, as if he has been waiting for this phone call all day. But this soon gives way to panic when he brings the phone to his ear and listens to his wife tell him about their son.

“It’s Graham,” she says. “He’s missing.”

She drove to Amity Creek Elementary, where Graham is a sixth grader, to pick him up. But he never emerged from the swarms of backpack-toting children, never met her at the top of the roundabout where she always waited, engine idling. Fifteen minutes passed—then twenty. She cut the ignition and got out of the car and tried to keep her walk steady in its pace as she approached the school, certain there must be a perfectly logical reason for his absence. Probably Graham had misbehaved and was now serving detention, clapping clouds of chalk from erasers or writing “I will not fire spitballs” again and again on a lined tablet of paper.

Though she knew better. He had never received a detention and likely never would. He was one of those children who took great pleasure in doing exactly as he was told, always saying please and thank you, never speaking out of turn. He favored chinos to jeans and wore his collared shirts tucked into them. Justin wasn’t sure how this had happened, how Graham had become this self-possessed little man, and in fact Justin encouraged him to live a little more adventurously. When Justin was that age, he used to collect frogs along the riverbanks and carry them to the nearest road so that he might throw them high into the air, enjoying the sound and sight of them splatting against pavement. It was horrible, but boys are supposed to do horrible things. It’s in their nature.

But Graham is different. He is the type of boy who prefers books to BB guns, who makes his bed every morning and plays computer games after he finishes his homework and never begs for the candy stacked next to the cash register. Exactly the type of boy, Karen was thinking, who might climb into a car with a stranger if told a convincing lie, not wanting to offend.

She found his teacher, Mrs. Glover, in her classroom, working her way through a stack of math quizzes. And no, she hadn’t seen him, not since the final bell. Together they searched the school grounds and found no trace of him. With every room Karen peered into and found empty, a wind grew stronger inside her, until it felt as though there were a cyclone tearing loose everything she thought was securely nailed down.

She tells Justin this as they drive around Bend, poking their heads into the video arcade, the pizza parlor, the cinema, the library, all the places Graham knows. They have called the police. They have called everyone in his class. Now there is nothing to do but look and wait. They randomly zip up and down the streets of Bend, their heads swinging back and forth as the world flies past the bug-speckled windshield. Karen has her cell phone cradled in her palm. Her mouth incessantly quivers as if only just holding on to a scream. At one point she grabs Justin’s arm and squeezes it, once. He can’t remember the last time she touched him—really intentionally touched him. Her warmth lingers there after she pulls her hand away. “I can’t do this again,” she says.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “Everything is going to be fine.”

Justin is a man with neat hair, parted clean on the right side, cut tight above the ears and along the neck. He brings a hand to it now, tidying it, part of him thinking that as long as every hair stays in its place, everything will be fine.

It is. Someone spots Graham at Lava River Lanes, bowling with a strange old man in a leather-fringe jacket. Within minutes, two squad cars pull up with their lights flashing. The deputies race into the building, past the pool tables and arcade games, through the clouds of cigarette smoke, to lane nine, where they find Justin’s father, who decided on a whim to pick Graham up from school and teach him a thing or two about how to throw a hook ball.

When Justin arrives, his father is waiting for them in the parking lot, leaning against a squad car with his hands in his pockets. “Can’t a man spend an afternoon with his grandson?” he says.

“Of course, Dad. It’s just—”

“Just what?”

He goes on. Talking about how Justin needs to let the boy have some fun this, and how he ought to cut an old man some slack that—and so on—while his hands, big brown things, busily rake through his beard like paws through rotten wood, seeking grubs, worms to eat. Lately he has grown wilder and Justin has become more fearful and hesitant to challenge him.

Karen holds Graham to her chest, pressing him into her with a pained look on her face, as if he were a lost organ she wants to force back inside her.

Through the window comes a rectangle of moonlight, brightening the floor and the bottom of the bed. In the distance he can hear elk calling to each other. Their big booming voices spiral through the air, as if blown from a conch shell. He goes to the window. A cool juniper-scented breeze blows, making the curtains billow around him. In the distance he can see the Cascades. They glow in the moonlight, white-shouldered with snow and bearded with forests that look more black than green against them. In their foothills a small light flares, catching his eye. It vanishes a moment later and he is left to wonder about its origin, so far from the city—with no streetlamps or neon signs anywhere near it—a speck of glass caught in the folds of a vast black cloth.

His wife is awake as well. He can tell from her breathing. She showered before bed, scrubbed her skin pink, and shampooed her hair into a silky blackness. These past few hours, every time she readjusts her body, trying to find a comfortable position, a puff of air carries the smell of her cleanness.

He crawls into bed with her again. She has the sheet tucked over her chest and under her arms. She sighs in a way that means she is about to say something. And then she says it: “That man needs to be put in his place.”

She is referring not only to today but to other days as well. Last week, for instance, when they went out to the cabin for lunch, his father took Graham into the backyard and Karen later found them hunched over a shallow hole, cheering for a scorpion they had pitted against a black widow spider.

“My heart was going a mile a minute,” Karen says and puts her hand there, between her breasts.

“I know.”

“I swear, I almost hit him. I almost slapped him. That man is as careless with other people as he is with his own body.”

“I know, I know.”

“I don’t think you do, Justin. Everything went through my mind then. Everything you can imagine. I was certain he was dead. Our son. Do you know how that made me feel? Like it was happening all over again.” He doesn’t have to ask what she means by it. It has come to define her. She lifts her head off her pillow and then lets it fall again. “I don’t ever want to feel like that again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. Quit apologizing. That’s how you talk to your father.”

“Sorry.”

She rolls on her side to fully face him and he says, “Kidding.” He kisses her on the forehead and keeps his lips there when he says, “I’ll talk to him.”

“Will you really?”

“I will.”

His hand goes to the lip of the sheet and fingers it. Slowly he pulls it down, taking it from her chest, revealing the swell of her breasts, their paleness exaggerated in the moonlight—and her lips pinch a little tighter for every inch he moves it. He wants to roll on top of her and make love with the abandon that sometimes grows out of small moments of anger.

Instead she says, “Please don’t,” and pulls the sheet around her and turns from him.

He thinks of the light off in the woods—flaring and then going dark, like a dying star—and it calls to mind a poem. He and Karen used to have this game they would play. One would speak a line of poetry—and the other would follow it up. The game was born out of their time together in college, when they seemed most in love, constantly hungry for each other. In his apartment, after they made love on his creaky futon, he used to read her poetry as she drifted off to sleep.

Now the game was more a thing of idleness, just two people calling back and forth to each other like birds in a forest. They might be in the kitchen, one of them chopping celery, the other peeling potatoes—or they might be hiking, one turning to observe the other behind on the trail. He took a moment to find the words, how they arranged themselves in a row, and then there they were: “My thoughts are crabbed and sallow / My tears like vinegar / Or the bitter blinking yellow / Of an acetic star.” And if he said them aloud, would she call back to him about the wry-faced pucker of the sour lemon moon—or would she deepen her breathing and feign sleep?

Bobby Fremont is one of those men with money and enthusiasm, which allows him to do with his life whatever he wants. He is always coming or going, never standing still, traveling somewhere Justin has never been, doing something Justin never realized possible. He tells stories, often loudly and with many jabbing hand gestures, about hunting bighorn sheep in Wyoming or summiting Mount Cook in New Zealand or eating some twelve-course French meal that very nearly gave his mouth an orgasm. He is always smiling and has a big laugh that distracts your attention away from his close-set eyes.

Much of the property surrounding Bend, he has at some point owned and developed and sold, to the Inn of the Seventh Mountain, the Bend Athletic Club, Widgi Creek, River’s Edge. He has been married three times—his latest wife one of those types who pencils in her eyebrows and dyes her hair blond to the point of invisibility—and his unstable taste for women seems to match his obsession and then abandonment of property.

Long ago there must have been many like him, particularly in these Western territories. Men, wild and hopeful, who chased after stakes and claims, their eyes always focused on the horizon and whatever goldness glowed there.

It is because of Bobby that Justin and his father find themselves in a side room of the county courthouse, attending an open meeting for the Planning Commission. The windows are thin and tall, admitting only a little sunlight that deadens against the pine-paneled walls. They sit at a long wooden table that runs the length of the room and gives off a glow from the wrought-iron chandelier that hangs above it. A good number of men wearing leather vests and black string ties are crowded around the table, and at its head stands Bobby.

He has a too-tan face that is finely wrinkled around his eyes and mouth. He keeps his white hair a little long and parted in the middle so that it waves out from his forehead. His eyes are a chalky blue and his gaze direct and calculating. Today he wears a collared khaki shirt tucked smartly into his jeans, while around his neck hangs a bolo tie with silver-tipped strings.

Slowly he unrolls the map and when he tries to lay it flat, to smooth it with his hand, it snaps back, curling up again. His lawyer and a few other men, Justin’s father among them, help him set Starbucks coffee cups upon its corners to hold down the paper and make it tense and visible to everyone.

It is a map of the Ochocos, its topographic lines like the swirling patterns of some great and elaborate fingerprint pressed down on it. Sketched onto the map in red pen is the perimeter of an area around twenty miles long and ten wide—and at its heart, the cavity of a canyon with a river curling through it.

Next to the map he unrolls another, this one a magnified version of the red-inked area. From where Justin sits, near the middle of the table, he can barely make out the words that run across its top in black swirling script: Echo Canyon. Here, in this black-and-white rendering, the trees have been logged, the brush cleared, replaced by a lavish development. The choicest lots border the top of the canyon and overlook the golf course and paved biking trails that fill the canyon below them.

After a time Bobby says, “There it is.” He raps the table with his knuckles and brings his hand under his chin and jogs his eyes across the room, briefly settling his stare on each of the men. He has that special talent of connecting with people, of making everyone in a crowd of listeners feel singled out. “One unbelievable—and I mean truly magnificent—iron-and-timbered lodge, three hundred lots, and the fastest, truest putting greens in all of Oregon.”

Everyone leans forward and glances between the maps as if trying to imagine the asphalt roads, the river-rock driveways, the sand bunkers, and water hazards set on top of all that wildness.

Justin can see in Bobby’s erect posture the gladness to finalize these proceedings, to settle the thousands of decisions and compromises—the rezoning, the development permits, the traffic and environment and water issues—and all the rest of it, all the seemingly endless hassles he has pursued the past few years.

Then the door jerks open. There is a sudden shifting of attention, as everyone turns his head at once to observe Tom Bear Claws, followed by a bald-headed Bend Bulletin reporter clutching a notepad. They find a place at the table and Tom knocks his knuckles against its wood as if asking to be let in. “Sorry we’re late,” he says.

“You’re not late,” Bobby says through a thin smile. “You were never invited.”

“Hey. That hurts my feelings.”

Justin knows Tom. Most do. For the past few years, ever since Justin took over Honors English, he has invited Tom into his classroom as a lecturer for the unit on Native American literature. Justin enjoys his playful cynicism, how he rarely takes anything too seriously. He will drag a stool to the front of the class and settle his bulk onto it and smile at everyone with his broad and craggy face—his skin the color of tobacco—and talk about Coyote and Mouse and Thought Woman and the Great Spirit, the Maker of all things.

Once he kicked off his boot and peeled off his sock and showed the rattlesnake tattooed across the sole of his foot. It gave him the power to sneak up on his enemies without a sound, he said. “So you better keep an eye out.”

Another time he read aloud a poem. He had written it on a yellow legal tablet. He pulled a pair of bifocals from his breast pocket and settled them on the end of his nose and made a barking noise into his fist before reading in a voice that rose and fell and lulled them all into a mystical reverie. Justin doesn’t remember precisely how it went. Something like this: “The light of the forest is red. The night’s wolves run through it and the day’s men recoil from it. Under the dark cover of the trees, things get lost and trapped and eaten. The light of the mind is red, too.”

When Justin later asked if Tom had written the poem himself, he said, “Mostly.”

Justin has never asked but guesses him fifty. His hair is the color of a spent charcoal briquette and he keeps it tied in a braid. Around his neck hangs a leather necklace jeweled with elk teeth, but so does he wear sport coats and drive a BMW and regularly golf at Widgi Creek. Regularly he’s quoted in the paper, the mouthpiece of the Warm Springs Reservation.

He made his money in fishing. Peer into any lake, any river, and along its bottom—like coins in a dirty fountain—you will find bottle caps, the brightest things in the water. The idea came naturally: beer and fishing go hand in hand. Punch two holes on opposite sides of the cap, pinch it into a clam shape, and attach a hook to one end, leader to the other. The shiny spinning color draws the fish to strike.

For a long time after college he worked for the Forest Service, but on the side, he started recycling beer caps from local taverns—the Elusive Trout, Big Dick’s Halfway Inn—selling his lures on the Internet. Then Miller called. Now his six-pack retails for thirty dollars in just about every outdoor store and bait shop in the country. With the money he helped fund Kah-Nee-Ta—the Warm Springs resort and casino—where coins clattered from slots and waterslides spiraled into pools. For several years he has pushed for another resort—an off-reservation site at Cascade Locks, along the Columbia. In ’05, the governor signed off on a tribal–state compact, the first step in establishing a trust for gaming, but since then, nothing has happened, the project tangled up in a web of red tape. There is talk of Tom managing Cascade Locks, but some say talk is all it is.

Talk is what Tom is best at, and Justin observes him with the same bemused pleasure a patron of the local theater might feel when an actor takes on a new role.

His voice has a somber petitioning tone, and beneath the fluorescent lights his face appears shadowed and cut sharply from clay. “My grandfather hunted Echo Canyon. My grandfather’s grandfather, too. For so many families, not just mine, it’s a sacred place. To build there ain’t right.”

Bobby clears his throat and everyone looks at him. On either side of his mouth, from his nose to his chin, runs a deep set of wrinkles, like parentheses that imply he always has something hidden behind what he is saying. “Everything you just mentioned, we need to consider and honor, of course.” He seems to direct this more at the reporter than Tom. “We all appreciate—”

Tom holds up the flat of his hand. “You make it sound like the commission hasn’t made up its mind yet. Give the bullshit a rest. We been talking about this for a year. What’s left to talk about? What’s next? Will there be a swimsuit competition?”

Bobby smiles. It is a smile you aren’t meant to like. He is normally a pleasant man, but Justin once saw him blow up at a backyard barbeque party when he got into a screaming match with a very liberal, very outspoken pediatrician about drilling for oil in Alaska. The fight culminated with Bobby throwing a beer bottle against a fence, leaving behind a starburst of suds and shattered glass. Since then Justin has looked at him differently, always wondering about the anger that simmers just below the smile of his surface.

Right now a muscle in Bobby’s jaw jumps. Then he lays both his hands on the table, on either side of the map, and brings his face close to it. The silver tips of his bolo tie swing back and forth like two tiny wrecking balls, knocking down paper forests, gouging open paper canyons.

“One thing I’ve never liked about this town,” he says in a whisper he wants heard. “All the goddamned Indians.”

Everyone goes still, too afraid or embarrassed to even look at Tom, who makes a noise like he is holding back a sneeze. Then he stands up so quickly he knocks his chair over. His boots crash against the floor. His lips peel back from his teeth. He cocks his arm to strike Bobby. Justin knows what will happen before it happens. There isn’t a day that goes by his father isn’t looking for a fight. He almost says, “Don’t,” but it’s too late: his father is rising now to obstruct Tom, reaching out to seize his fist midair. There is a sound like a baseball falling smartly into the basket of a mitt. Their arms shake with the tension between them. Then Tom gives up. He lets his hand drop and rolls his shoulder like an injured pitcher and stares Justin’s father in the eye. “Shut up, Paul,” he says, though Justin’s father has said nothing.

Bobby regards Tom and puts his hand over his mouth as if to keep from saying something. Then his hand falls away and he smiles tightly and says, “This certainly isn’t helping your cause.”

“Whether we’re nice or not, I already know how they’ll vote. So I might as well not be nice.” Tom lets his shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. “I might as well fuck with you, you know?”

“Look.” Bobby glances at the reporter and says in a voice that tries to communicate his reasonableness, his tolerance, “You realize this is all going to be very natural, very much a tribute to the landscape. An improvement even. And do you have any idea what it will do to property values in Prineville and John Day?” This last part he says to the Planning Commission—and the old men nod their heads and raise their eyebrows and purse their lips.

Tom looks as if he might rush Bobby again to offer another blow to the face. Then his mood seems suddenly to brighten and he sidles toward where Paul still stands with his hands clenched, a few paces from the head of the table. Two of the commissioners lean away as Tom leans between them and peers at the blueprint for a moment. “There’s a trick the timber industry plays. It’s a good trick. They clear-cut thousands of acres of pines and firs, but along the roads they leave the trees real thick to camouflage the baldness. Makes everybody believe those Weyerhaeuser ads when they say, ‘Oregon will never grow out of trees.’ But you climb up a mountain and you take a look down and you know what it looks like? It looks like shit.” He thrusts his chin at the map of the development. “Like shit.”

He turns to the reporter, whose pen hurries across his notepad. “Don’t write that down,” he says. “Write this down. You ready?”

The reporter nods even as he keeps his eyes on the notepad, the words bleeding blackly across it.

“Now I’m going to say some proud Indian nation stuff they can put in the paper. Okay? Here we go.” His voice takes on the timbre of a dream as he tells everyone, “It took fifty years for white people to nearly wipe out the Tasmanians. About the same for the bison. And when you look around at Warm Springs, when you look at the Cree and Sioux and Chippewa and all the rest of us, what you see is the carcass of a once proud Indian nation. And the white establishment continues picking at our bones, chewing up what’s left of us until there’s nothing left of us. That canyon’s what’s left of us. But not for much longer.” He looks at the reporter and his voice returns to its normal tone when he says, “You got that or you need me to say it again?”

The reporter brings his finger and thumb together in the perfect sign.

Bobby checks his watch and then looks to the Planning Commission. They have the dazed look of children who have just suffered through a parental lecture. They have heard all of this before. With respect to Native complaints, Bobby had hired on a group of UO archaeologists for a two-month survey that failed to turn up anything more than a few broken projectile points and a single petroglyph chipped into the basalt wall of the canyon.

In the end, the commission votes in his favor and when Bobby removes the coffee cups from the map, it slowly curls up on itself like a fist.

His father never took Justin to Hawaii or Disneyland or Mount Rushmore. Instead, he would load up the bed of his pickup with camping gear and they would drive to Christmas Valley or the Umpqua River or the Malheur Preserve, some still-wild place where they would hike dry-mouthed across a desert flat or fish a snake-shaped river or scour the forest floor for mushrooms to cook. It was in Echo Canyon—high in the Ochoco Mountains, among the big pines and bear grass meadows—that they hunted every November. Though Justin hasn’t been there in years, he feels a strong connection to its woods, as does his father.

Which was why, a year ago, when Bobby tried to contract Justin’s father’s company—the Paul Caves Hand Hewn Log Cabin Company—his father said, “Yes,” but with a red line of frustration underlining his voice.

Justin first learned about this in his father’s backyard, where with a longbow his father shot arrow after arrow into a polyurethane buck he had arranged where the lawn met the woods, twenty yards away. He wore a leather quiver on his back. It was crowded with arrows carved from a Norway pine he imported from a Baltic Sea forest, where the cold stern weather made for slower growth and splendid spiny wood, or so he said. He fletched them with red cock feathers.

In a fluid series of motions he reached behind him to pluck an arrow, fitting its hardwood notch onto the bowstring, drawing tight and firing without hesitation, again and again, the arrows all hissing across the mowed space of lawn to find their target with a satisfying series of whizzes and thunks. For a big man, whose hands were so leathery and broad they looked like tools, he could move quickly and with a kind of grace.

Justin cannot remember where his mother was during this. possibly in the kitchen, doing dishes. Or maybe at the table, carefully cutting her asparagus into bite-size pieces. When he thinks of her he often thinks of her through the window of his father. She remains indistinct in many of his memories, backgrounded by his father’s loudness, his hairy massiveness.

Justin said, “You don’t have to do it, you know.”

His father loosed another arrow, this one missing its target, rattling off a pine tree as it entered the woods. He sighed his frustration and lowered his bow and plucked at the string as if seeking out the first note of a sad song. “And then what? Then another company gets it and the job gets done anyway. The other guy gets money in the bank, gets his name out there, gets the call the next time a job comes up. And where does that leave me? You don’t know politics.” He withdrew another arrow from his quiver and examined its broadhead. The metal caught the sun and a thin gleam played across his face. “You think I want to see that nice country ripped up?”

“There’s a lot of nice country out there. We can find another canyon.”

“Is that how you feel?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I don’t know,” he said, parroting Justin in a singsong voice, then again, “I don’t know.” He pointed the arrow at Justin, bringing its razor point within an inch of his chest. “You should get that tattooed across your heart. I don’t know. No, you don’t know. You don’t know much at all.”

Paul is not the sort of father who goes to church and plays golf and whistles Christmas songs year-round. He is the kind of father who enjoys saying things like, “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” and “Knowing you could die tomorrow, don’t buy any green bananas.” He smells like motor oil. His huge hands seem capable of tearing phone books in half and uprooting trees with a tug. His fingernails always carry dirt and bruises beneath them. He often keeps a sandwich in his pocket and withdraws it intermittently for a bite. His idea of a good time is to go price pistols at Bi-Mart.

Paul doesn’t need to work so hard. Business is good. Justin knows this because he has taken care of the company paperwork since college. His father could easily hire more men, could spend his days sipping coffee and negotiating contracts and letting his hands go soft, but if his name appears on the letterhead, he ought to be the one dangling from a thirty-foot ladder, driving home the first and final nail—or so he insists. It’s a general-on-the-front-lines sort of mentality.

And so right alongside his crew he pilots the cement truck and lays a concrete foundation. He uses broadaxes and table saws to hew down logs on all four sides until they are square. He chisels notches. He cuts lap joints. He uses an auger to bore holes.

For him, every day is a mechanical storm of chain saws snarling and sandpaper sizzling and hammers cracking. Sawdust hangs in heavy clouds. When Justin was a boy, his father would sometimes take him along. Justin would spend the day uselessly hammering nails into planks of wood, darting in and out of doorways, and climbing onto the roof and imagining the cabin as his own. He remembers everything smelling like the memory of a sawmill. He remembers watching his father as he worked, shirtless, sometimes with steam rising off his body in the cold mountain air.

His father lays floors. He stacks walls, cutting dovetail notches for the corners. He cuts the rafters, he cuts the joists. He bolts down a steel roof to shrug off the snow. He cuts out the windows and the doors, and his blacksmith digs a hole and fills it with pinewood and burns it down to an orange bed of coals and sets up his forge to bang out some wrought-iron hinges, doorknobs, banisters. Then comes the paneling, the chinking, the sanding, the varnishing, the caulking, the masonry, the plumbing and electricity.

And Paul does all this while maintaining a mostly meat diet and drinking his way through a six-pack almost every evening. To Justin, the heart attack comes as no surprise.

His father later tells him what it felt like. He says a belt seemed to tighten around his chest and the world darkened abruptly. He ran slantingly and stumbled with a half-fascinated terror at what was happening to him, at the way his body seemed at once to constrict and expand. When his legs gave out beneath him and he pitched forward, he tried to stop his fall with his arm but it had gone numb and he crashed to the ground unguarded and opened up a gash in his forehead.

This happens in late spring—a few months after the meeting with the Planning Commission—when Justin moves through the electronic double doors and into the emergency room at St. Charles Memorial. The air smells of disinfectant and tapioca and old fruit. When the doors whir closed behind him, the noise of traffic falls away, replaced by hushed voices and gurney wheels and heart monitors and Muzak pouring softly from the sound system. In the waiting area, people lie sprawled out in chairs with dazed looks on their faces as if they have been dropped from a great height.

At the reception desk, the nurse takes a long time in acknowledging Justin, finally raising her eyes from her clipboard when he clears his throat. “You hurt?” she says. “Or you here to see somebody who’s hurt?”

“Do I look hurt?”

She gives him a bitchy half smile and says, “Name?”

“You want mine or his?”

“His name.”

Outside, somewhere far off, a siren wails. He tells her his name and she taps a few keys at a computer terminal and directs him down a long buttermilk-colored hall lined with stainless steel tables on wheels. He hurries there and the noise of the siren follows him, growing louder, rippling through the town, through the concrete and the metal and the glass like a quick breeze over water, to settle on him with shocking volume. He passes a doctor with a brown mustache. The doctor moves at a quick trot toward the emergency room and whistles along with the ambulance, as if summoning it.

When he visited the hospital for his wife, he felt fear. When he visits for his father, he feels hate. He hates this place that keeps trying to take people from him. He wants to splash black paint all over the too-white walls. He wants to rip out the throat of an orderly who pushes a gurney one way, then the next, as he tries to get past him.

And then, just like that, the siren stops, as Justin arrives at room 343.

He pokes his head in the door, and just as he is about to withdraw it and continue on, the man on the bed raises his hand in greeting. “Dad?” Justin says, hesitating in the doorway. “I didn’t recognize you.”

His father does not look like his father. He looks like a pear that has begun to darken and collapse. Upon Justin’s entrance he picks up the remote control and turns off the TV and then immediately turns it on again. It hangs from the ceiling corner and shows on its screen a weatherman standing on a Florida beach with twenty-foot waves crashing behind him.

At a wedding, Justin once heard Bobby Fremont tease his father, saying he looked like a beast trapped in a double-breasted suit. And this seems especially true now—hairy and brown-skinned and so large every corner of him hangs off the bed—the vision of him offset by all that antiseptic whiteness. Once, when Justin and his father stood side by side, his mother pointed out that they were the same height. It was true, but Justin never believed her. It has something to do with his father’s build—so much broader than his own—but even more to do with his personality, which even now seems barbed to a gleaming point.

Above his bed hangs a black-and-white photograph of a dead juniper tree. Its trunk appears twisted, each bare branch straining up toward the sky.

“Where’s Mom?” Justin asks.

“I told them to call you. I didn’t want to worry her.”

It is hard for Justin to look at him. His eyes are ringed by heavy shadows. His nose has a pinched look to it. His lip trembles a little when he speaks, as if he needs to cry but won’t allow it. He turns his head from Justin and looks out the window where the sun is setting. Justin watches his face change from red to pale in the fading light, as if, having colored with embarrassment, he has composed himself.

A few minutes later a doctor enters the room. He has a domed forehead and silver hair and wears a white lab coat with an assortment of pens in the breast pocket. He withdraws one of them now and holds it like a weapon. “How do you feel?”

“I feel great.” Paul claps his hands together. “Ready to go home.”

“That won’t be happening anytime soon, I’m afraid.”

“Says who?”

“Me. You’ll need to spend the next few days with us.”

“But I need to get back to work.”

“You’ll have to take some time off.”

“Quiet.” He says it like a curse. “I’ll do no such thing.”

“You will.”

A conflict plays across his features and he heaves a great sigh.

An hour later Justin’s mother arrives, crying out from the doorway and knocking over his IV as she rushes to his bedside. “I’m fine,” he says. “The doctor said I’m fine. He said I’ll be up and out of here in no time.”

Justin says, “Let’s hope anyway.”

His father holds up his hand, its index and middle fingers twined, and then the hand continues upward to his forehead, touching the bandage. For the next three weeks the bruises will linger there, eventually shriveling into a red pucker that he will often finger and remark that he can feel his heart beating along it.