Jeff Brooks is a webmaster, author of junk mail, founding member of the Seattle Writers Collective, and can be reached at mtic@aol.com.



The air itself became our wine--bouyant, sweet, full of promise. We drank it and spoke of History, then we fell back into mats of fragrant bracken. I fashioned gowns from weather-smoothed pebbles and the forest light for us to wear. We called animal noises into the woods, our foreheads dusted with the reddish earth, while green spiders dropped from the trees to march on pinlike feet across our shoulders and arms. At last, we sank into silence and sat in the moss as twilight collected around us and the birdsongs dwindled away.

You said: "The last man ever to walk here was a gatherer from a band of the Snoqualmie Tribe. That was several days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He passed on to a meadow above here to pick berries. He went home by a different way."

* * *

The new highway runs over the top of the hills, a green sign marking the summit: Umtanum Ridge, 4,020 ft. The Old Highway, though, winds through the canyon, skirting the broken basalt cliffs, looking down on the Yakima River, a glittering ribbon below. At every curve, the Old Highway sprouts a garden of knee-high white crosses, each a reminder of somebody who lost contact with the pavement and plunged over the edge. New crosses continue to show up as the old ones turn gray and fall over; it is surprising that this highway could have undone so many.

"Who in hell are all these people?" you asked.

Someone had once told me they're mostly Indians on their way back to the reservation--drunk, lost, whatever.

We rounded a sharp descending curve where the crosses grew thick like a bramble. "Someday I'll take charge of the Washington State Highway Department," you vowed. "I'll get rid of those goddamn useless Golgothas. Instead, I'll pay hyper-realist artists to install scuptures showing the cars at the moment they went over."

And I could see it: three wheels suspended high over the river; a piece of wooden guard-rail flying; a face, eyes round with surprise, showing from a side window.
* * *
"Can you eat it straight off the stalk?" you said, running your fingers over a bulging head of wheat that leaned through the wire fence.

I didn't think you could.

You looked around at the brown hills and the high brown sky of the Palouse. A banner of dust billowed away from a combine on a far hillside. "I thought there was a story in the Bible where Jesus and the Disciples are walking through a field on the Sabbath, and they're eating the wheat. Do you know that one? They get in trouble with the pharisees."

We stripped kernels from the wheat stalks and ground them between our palms, hoping to mill the husks away into the wind, but they only rolled out from between our fingers. We put kernels between our teeth and bit down until the grains cracked; they were as dry as paper and tasted not of bread, but of baked dirt. A truck whined past, whirling chaffy dust into our faces.

"It must be nutritious," you said slowly, picking the wheat from your back teeth with your thumbnail. "Whole civilizations were built on wheat. Weren't they?"

I tossed what was left of my wheat into the air; a curl of wind caught it, and, as if the world had flipped itself upside down and we now clung to its roof, the grains hovered a moment before dropping from sight. You shrugged, and we got back into the car.

* * *
You drove, bent forward over the steering wheel as if you could push ahead and get there sooner. I read a little newspaper I'd picked up in the narthex of a church-converted- into-a-restaurant back in Mountain Home: an A-frame that didn't seem old enough to have fallen into abandonment, yet it smelled of mashed potatoes and gravy, not sacraments and prayer. What had happened to the congregation? Had they been called to migrate across the desert toward a promised land? Now instead of an altar, a salad bar stood across the front of the sanctuary, facing Jerusalem; a waitress in a short brown dress flounced from table to table with no regard to the once-critical issue of aisle placement. There was even a bar off in the Christian Education wing.

I looked up from my newspaper at you, then out at the hills, round as bodies, at gashes of rock that spilled from slopes of dead grass, at barb wire fences so tangled with tumbleweeds they looked like tan hedgerows.

One classified ad, under "Personal," said:
TAKE CHARGE! Make ANYONE your slave! Simple
booklet tells how YOU can be the ABSOLUTE MASTER
over ANYONE ON EARTH.
It gave a P.O. box in Idaho Falls. I wanted to tear the ad out of the paper so we could laugh about it some day, but I left it where it was.

You coughed, and I looked up in time to see a message in large white letters stenciled on the highway:

GUBERIF
BE A
DON'T
Which made you smile for the first time since we'd crossed over the Columbia. You were wondering what kind of person could be converted by such a message, turned away from the urge to send fires raging across the Idaho desert.





Going East

The weather streams in across the ocean; it brings pollution from Japan, so they say.

On the beach you found a tatami mat: a crushed sheaf of straw melting into the sand, tangled with seaweed and gray feathers. "Who threw it in?" you asked, nudging it with your toe back toward the waves.

The wind flung a curtain of rain over us and passed whispering up the bluff above. You picked up the straw and began stripping off bloated strands and dropping them into the wind. "I wish I could unfold this thing," you said. "Maybe somebody used to sleep on it.

"Maybe her dreams linger in the straw. Who knows?" you said, "Who knows?" You held it close to your face and sniffed. A salty muck of organism. "Uck," you said, and pitched it with a loose overhand at the ocean. It landed in the mottled margin of a retreating wave; the water pulled a mantle of sand around it.

The rain began in earnest, pocking the beach with tiny craters. It was time for us to go.
* * *




"An immensely wealthy industrialist," you said, leaning over the concrete railing between piers to look down into the oil-dark water of Puget Sound, "--a wealthy industrialist decided he should hunt out and marry the most desirable woman in the civilized world. So he took out full-page advertisements in all the newspapers:

YOUNG WOMEN
OWN EVERYTHING YOU DREAM OF.
Marry fabulous wealth!
Live in 7 cities!
See Europe!
Jewels! Servants!

Small print at the bottom of the page instructed all hopeful young women to appear at a certain ballroom in a certain hotel--no detail overlooked to enhance their beauty. Their benefactor, he who was to take one of them as a wife, would provide a magnificent feast and watch them from a hidden vantage point (perhaps even disguised as one of them, said one rumor) while the hundreds of young women, charming and lovely beyond imagining sat at long, white tables, tilting their sculpted heads toward one another, issuing low, husky laughs. From each city he chose two or three of the most beautiful, most exquisitely mannered of them and sent them back to his mansion in the country where they lived together in luxury, some two hundred of them, waiting for a decision that would lead to the wedding of the decade. Their days became weeks, and then months. Many of them had left behind jobs, homes, husbands, situations on the chance of marrying the rich industrialist. Eventually, of course, there was trouble. The second loveliest of the young women took care of the most beautiful one by staving in the side of her head with a gold candlestick and pushing her down a marble staircase. Her blood beaded like dew on the cold stone. Our industrialist, naturally, knew exactly what had happened, and promptly married the murderess, sending all the others home without further word. . . ."

A bent, white-haired Vietnamese woman with gold teeth came up beside us, set a bucket of water on the pavement, skewered something red onto a fish hook, dropped her line into the water. She had lived in America for ten years, and she knew two words of English: "big fish." That was enough for her, though, and she came to the waterfront to fish every evening at sunset. "Bee fit," she said to us, smiling, her teeth glinting.

I looked over at you; your eyes had become the color of the bay. I asked you if the industrialist and his wife lived together happily.

You turned your back to the water and watched a bus lumber by, its windows reflecting squares of cold light onto your eyes. "At least not unhappily," you said.

* * *

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