The river meets up with the wide, fat stream of the Columbia. They pass through a burning plain. The fire has spread for miles and walls them in with high flames and black smoke that makes them cough until they vomit.
They portage the canoe around dams. Some are still solid. Some cracked and seeping. And some split wide, gushing a white-collared rush of water. And then one night, to their north, they pass by the Hanford site, the storage center for nuclear waste, which Gawea calls the altar.
“The altar? Why do you call it the altar?”
“It’s just what people call it.”
“Why do they call it that?”
“It works invisibly. It brings good things and bad things. It’s like a god in that way.”
“What good things does it bring?”
She regards him with her nightmare-black eyes. “People like you and me.”
The air feels almost palpable, as if you could pack it with your hands and take a bitter bite. And it burns to breathe, smelling like melted plastic. The throbbing glow of it blots out half the stars in the sky. They paddle swiftly, trying to get past this place as soon as they can, and it is then that dark shapes begin to knife past them and riffle the water. Lewis sees a pale set of eyes staring back from the place where he is about to place his paddle.
In the gorge, along the Columbia, the river is dotted with islands, and all around them stacks of basalt rise like dried-out layer cake. Mount Hood looms in the distance, white hatted with snow and glowing at night. The lap lines of the floodwaters of millennia past stitch the canyon walls. Past The Dalles, at Seven Mile Hill, a vast hillside of huge-headed sunflowers wobble in the wind.
They travel through the day and all the next night, knowing the ocean is near, and before dawn they approach not a town but a city. “This is it,” Lewis says, “isn’t it? This is Astoria.”
It is lit with lights, like a net of stars dropped from the sky, lining the banks and rolling into black, humped hills. Lewis leans into his paddle, urging them forward — when Colter says, “Wait.”
“Wait?” Lewis says. “Wait what?” He feels a hurried need to get there, as if a sudden wind has risen inside him to hurry him these final few miles.
“I say we do this in the morning.”
“Why? We’re here.”
They raise their paddles and the canoe lists sideways.
“Don’t rush into things. I learned that from you. Remember?” He opens and closes his prosthetic claw. “I don’t know what to expect and neither do you. She’s hiding something from us. That much we know.”
“Gawea?” Lewis says.
In the middle of the boat, she is curled into a ball. He says her name again and she says, “I need to think.”
“What do you need to think about?”
“We’re waiting until morning,” Colter says. “This isn’t up for debate. Now, paddle.”
They keep their canoe to the far side of the Columbia, a safe distance. None of them say anything for fear their voices will carry across the water. Gawea tightens her body, hugs her legs to her chest.
A strange smell fills the air, briny, fishy, like the residue on his fingers in the hours after he guts a trout. Lewis hears something ahead of them, the distant growl of what turns out to be waves curling over, the river spilling into the surf, the ocean, the end.
He stops paddling a moment, made dumb by the realization that after all these miles, all these months, so far and so long, his previous life impossibly distant, he has made it. A sense of accomplishment momentarily overwhelms whatever fears and questions bother him. He is in awe of himself and in awe of the ocean. He stills his paddle, transfixed by the sight of it. The chop rolls over. The moon is full and its white reflection smears the roiling water. A whole other universe exists beneath its surface. He can’t see it, but he knows.
The canoe is beginning to wobble, the current confused. The hills around them slump toward the ocean and fall away completely to reveal a fierce white light — flaring and then going dark, flaring and then going dark — like a great eye blinking in the night.
“There!” he says, yelling over the surf. The vision he dreamed, the lighthouse that beckoned him, now realized.
He feels so excited he might dive into the water and splash toward it. He leans into his paddle and realizes the canoe is turning away, steering them toward another section of shore. “You’re going the wrong way.” He twists around. “What are you doing?”
“Keeping us alive,” Colter says and rips his paddle hard against the current. “You don’t need me to tell you what happens to the moth that flies to flame.”
Chapter 53
THEY MAKE A small fire out of driftwood at the base of a cliff, notched in by high walls of chalky orange clay. From here Lewis cannot see the lighthouse, but it doesn’t matter. Even with his eyes closed, the light burns bright in his mind. He hears a whispering, what could be the surf but sounds like his name said softly a thousand times. He feels something almost tidal. Whatever drags the waves to the shore and crashes them against the sand, he feels too.
They try to engage with Gawea, but she refuses to answer their questions, and when Colter grabs her by the wrist, she rips away from him and says, “Don’t touch me.”
Her tone implies this is more than a command — it is a threat — and Colter takes a few steps back with his prosthetic held before him in defense. But Gawea only stares at him long and hard before saying that she has to pee. Then she turns her back on them, walks from the campsite, from the circle of light thrown by the fire, and lets the dark swallow her up.
They wait five minutes and then ten and then twenty — watching the fire dance on the driftwood and listening to the waves boom — before Colter says, “Well then, I suppose it’s time we came up with a plan.”
In a few minutes, Colter says, while they retain the advantage of darkness, they will approach the lighthouse. If they find someone there, or more than someone, they will sneak close and then attack. Not to hurt, though that might be necessary, but to detain. To question and better understand what it is they face. “We go to it before it comes for us.”
Colter opens and closes his claw when he says they cannot risk an alarm sounded. If they find the lighthouse empty, they will return here before the sun rises and then scout their surroundings.
Normally, at the end of the day, after so many hours of hiking or paddling, Lewis has to force his body to move, as if his joints were calcified and his muscles hardened to wintry stones. But he finds it effortless now. His body does not complain. It does not want to rest. It wants to go where it has been beckoned, as if there awaited the end of pain, a solution to pain.
They belt on their holsters. They walk near the water to camouflage their tracks. The beach rounds a corner and the cliff face falls away into a rocky hillside, the lighthouse speared at the top of it. They push through manzanita clusters and a cedar forest and moss-slick rocks and finally enter a moonlit clearing that anchors the lighthouse.
They wait a moment, studying the structure, white columned, black capped. A cone of light pours from it, swooping in circles, cutting through the night.