BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) (10 page)

"Drew looked down into the cellar and then
back at Gig. 'He can stand down there while you go get Owen,' he
said. 'That will keep him from trying to run off.' There was no
ladder, you just dropped down five or six feet to the dirt floor
and used a notch in the post to climb out. So Drew stepped away and
waved his gun at Gig, telling him to hop down. Gig didn't argue,
just walked over, sat down on the floor, swung his legs into the
cellar, and lowered hisself down. Didn't even ask to put on some
real shoes.

"The top of Gig's head come up through the
opening, maybe an inch above the level of the floor. Drew stood a
few feet away with his revolver aimed at Gig and told him to stay
right there. Then he turned to me and told me again where to find
you, that you was coming up from Lock 7, and to go quick."

I pull the Colt onto my lap and swivel on my
stool to lean against the aft wall of the cabin, mirroring
Zimmerman's pose on the other side of the drop-leaf table. His eyes
dart toward me as I move, then relax and drift back toward the
opposite wall.

"And that was why you left him there? You
thought he'd be safe because Garrett was standing in the cellar?"
So far Zimmerman's story sounds a lot like the one I heard
twenty-two years ago from Inspector Bullard.

"I couldn't see what else to do," Zimmerman
says. "It seemed like Drew changed our plan, like he decided he
wasn't going to leave without Gig. Maybe he didn't believe the
sheriff would actually come get Gig's fingerprints.

"So I left and ran back along the trail to
the towpath. There's muddy spots and forks joining from both sides,
but going that direction you can't turn wrong. I climbed up that
little rise to the towpath and no one was waiting there. I was
feeling strung tight – things wasn't going the way I expected. I
thought about going back to the cabin, but didn't reckon Drew would
change his mind. I remember thinking maybe he didn't want me
there... maybe he wanted to talk to Gig in private, and my job was
done when Gig opened the door. Or maybe Drew had something else in
mind. But I was getting jittery waiting on the towpath and couldn't
stand still. And your brother said you was coming from Lock 7, so I
took off running downstream."

"Then you must have been invisible," I say,
"because I ran up from Lock 7 to the trailhead and didn't see a
soul."

But as soon as I say that, I remember that
I'd only waited for Drew and Henry at the deserted trailhead for a
matter of seconds. Then I'd continued a few minutes further to the
closed Lovers Lane footbridge before I realized that they weren't
there and turned back. During that spurious detour, Henry could
have popped up out of the woods and run downstream on the
towpath.

Zimmerman leans forward and snares his cup,
tilts back a swig, and smirks at me as he plants both hands on the
table. "Maybe you're the one who was invisible. Maybe you was too
scared to even make it across the canal, and that's why things went
wrong."

Heat flares in my throat but I don't take the
bait. I unbutton the collar of my shirt with one hand and lift the
Colt from my lap with the other.

"Well I'm not scared now." I flick the safety
catch off, on, off again, then let the barrel swing toward
Zimmerman. "And I know my own weaknesses well enough. I don't think
Drew would have died that night if I'd followed him through the
culvert. What I don't know are your weaknesses, or whether you're
telling the truth."

Zimmerman slowly draws back from the table,
and it occurs to me that he might also be armed. His lips curl into
a smile framed by creases and his hands drop onto his lap as he
eases back into position against the wall. I lower the Colt back to
the table with the safety catch off, then prop an elbow alongside
it so that it's still within pivoting reach of my hand.

"Did you go all the way to Lock 7?"

"I did," he says. "But I was expecting to
find you before I got there. When you wasn't at Lock 7, I figured
something had gone wrong. Maybe Drew sent me in the wrong
direction. More likely, I thought, you wasn't coming. Either you
got scared and stayed home or something else happened to you. I
also wondered if Drew was lying to me... maybe he was planning to
shoot Gig and make it look like self-defense, though that seemed
like a stretch with him in Garrett's cabin.

"I was thinking about what to do next, pacing
around on the towpath near the lock. Then a man come running down
the driveway to the locktender's house, which is only twenty paces
away. He banged on the door and someone answered and there was some
excited talk I couldn't make out. But I heared the word 'fire'.
Then the two men and a boy run to the lock and cross over. The men
was carrying a shovel and a bucket and I stepped back toward the
trees as they headed up the towpath.

"Why didn't you run back to the trailhead
with them?"

"At that point my head was filling up with
black visions. Something awful must be happening at Gig's cabin,
but I couldn't think it through. When I turned my feet in that
direction I couldn't take a step. I heared voices, then saw more
people running down the hill toward the lockhouse. It seemed like
going back there would ruin my life."

"I crossed the lock, climbed the hill up
toward Conduit Road, and kept going. Out to River Road and headed
west. Slept that night in an old stable near Tobytown, then back
down to the towpath and out to Point of Rocks the next day. I
caught a ride on the B&O, and from there it was just one
railyard after another all the way to California."

Chapter 10

I stare into my cup and the last finger of
whiskey stings my eyes, so I knock it back and inhale the warmth of
the cabin. The room seems to swim a little. Zimmerman is leaning
against the aft wall with his eyes closed, lost in reverie or
asleep. Maybe it's the heroin. I slap my empty cup down on the
table and he opens his eyes.

"Your story sounds just like Inspector
Bullard's explanation back then. Maybe that's the way it happened,
or maybe Drew was wrong about you. Maybe you and Garrett figured
out how to get Drew off his back. You played along with the
fingerprinting idea, but your real plan was to make Drew an armed
intruder. Then Garrett could shoot him in self-defense."

"Well if that was the plan, I guess it didn't
work out so well for Gig."

No it didn't, and that's the main reason this
interpretation seems wrong. When he reappeared in Cabin John in
1902, Garrett had spent the previous eight years in mining camps in
Colorado, Juneau, the Yukon, and Nome. He'd become comfortable –
some said rich – operating in frontier conditions alongside
strong-willed characters with guns. By comparison, Drew was a choir
boy. So it's hard to believe that if he knew in advance Henry was
bringing Drew to his cabin, Garrett would have ended up shot and
immolated in his own wood cellar.

So maybe Bullard got it right, and Zimmerman
is telling the truth.

"Okay, Henry. You ran down to Lock 7 and then
panicked when you realized something must have gone wrong at the
cabin. You saw people running up the towpath and you went the
opposite direction. The next day you hopped a train, and you kept
going all the way to California. Why? You wouldn't have been blamed
for Drew and Garrett shooting each other. What were you running
from?"

I look over at Zimmerman and his brow furrows
as his eyes sink deeper into the wrinkled flesh surrounding
them.

"Calamity," he says softly after a moment.
"It was going to swallow me up if I stayed. Like them clouds of
mosquitoes in the Yukon that turn the sky black in summer. If you
don't outrun 'em you bleed to death."

"Calamity? Without going back to the cabin,
you couldn't have known for sure what had happened there. Gig
Garrett might as well have been your brother – you just said the
two of you were still friends that night, and that was why he
opened the door. But you fled west and never looked back. What if
Garrett had only been hurt and needed your help? What if the police
had needed you to confirm his story, or Drew's?"

Zimmerman shakes his head and his eyes turn a
darker shade of blue as they narrow. "When I realized your brother
wasn't going to back down, I knew it was over for Gig," he says.
"There was nothing I could do for him. I seen it coming a long
time."

"Seen what coming?"

"The end of the road. He was heading to a
place where what was happening around him didn't matter no more.
Friends, family... chances to buy or sell, things to build or fix.
All that mattered was what was going on inside his head. I saw it
clear when I met up with him in Nome, in August of 1900. A year
after we split up in Rampart. But after that I could look back and
see signs from earlier. Dawson during the summer of '98. Circle
City in '96, and what I heared about his days there. And before
that Jessie, down at Widewater in '94."

"Do you still think he killed her?"

Zimmerman stares at me without answering,
then blinks, and his eyes wash back to pale blue as if the tide
behind them has gone out. He nods, almost imperceptibly.

"There's a part of him that done it," he says
softly. "But not for the reason anyone thinks."

"You mean not because he couldn't stand
losing Jessie to Drew?"

Zimmerman nods again and twists away from me,
planting his back against the wall.

"I growed up with Gig Garrett. I was nineteen
and he was twenty when Jessie died, but I don't think I really
knowed him then. Me or anyone else. I started to see another side
of Gig after I joined up with him in Dawson."

***

In the summer of 1897, when I was thirteen,
my father showed me a headline in the Washington Post that declared
"Alaska an Eldorado!" I hadn't read Candide or Edgar Allan Poe's
poem, so he had to explain that El Dorado was a mythical lost city
of gold. That captured my imagination. Especially when it was
juxtaposed with Alaska, with its mountains and glaciers and
midnight sun. To me Alaska already sounded like one of the most
exotic places on earth, and now it was also the land of endless
gold fields?

For the rest of the year, there were articles
in the newspaper every month about the stateside frenzy triggered
by the discovery of unfathomable riches on the Klondike River. The
word Klondike was quickly mastered by restless men from Montana to
Manhattan to Maine. Like many others, I learned that the Klondike
is a lesser tributary of the mighty Yukon, and that the Yukon River
is as important to Alaska as the Mississippi River is to the
midwest. But while it spends most of its two thousand miles curving
northwest and southwest through the heart of Alaska, the Yukon
gathers itself in Canada, and the Klondike gold fields were
entirely on Canadian soil.

I was too young to join the stampeders in
their twenties and thirties who set out for the Klondike, turning
their backs on occupations that would never make them rich. But
that didn't keep me from imagining the pilgrimage. And when I left
home five years later, first for college in Austin and from there
toward a very different treasure in New Mexico, I realized that my
departure was at least partly inspired by stories I had read about
the Klondike gold rush.

And now Zimmerman has mentioned Dawson, the
town that sprouted where the Klondike entered the Yukon, and
offered his gold-rush days with Garrett as a prism that might
distill a coherent view of the dead man's motives. Or maybe, it
occurs to me, Zimmerman will inadvertently confess his own. I pluck
the Colt from the table, point the barrel toward the ceiling and
flip the safety catch back on, then lower the pistol to my lap.

"I don't have a curfew tonight," I say. "Tell
me what happened up there."

***

"June '97," Zimmerman says, turning toward me
after a long pause. "Two ships come into San Francisco and Seattle,
and a posse of ragged miners walk off with three tons of Klondike
gold. It was like red meat to hungry dogs, and the rush was on." He
gets up, snares both of our cups with a gesture that seems
incongruously quick, and pours whiskey into them from the cask on
the counter.

"Maybe a hundred thousand men stampeding from
the states and Canada. Just as many more from everywhere else –
England, Norway, Russia, Australia, Greece." He hands me a cup and
settles onto his stool, back against the wall. "Almost all was
tenderfoots that never worked a prospect, probably never held a
pan. But it didn't matter – they dropped what they was doing to
head for the gold fields." His mouth cracks into a crooked grin and
his voice turns momentarily wheezy. "As if that's what it was –
gold fields.

"Some people was going to pull wagons. Others
had bicycles. When they got to the Klondike they was going to
shovel up nuggets off the ground until they was rich, then drive
their buggies home while they counted their money.

"But it don't matter where you start from,
the Klondike is months away, past country that killed or crippled
scores of men. Thousands of horses was dragged up those trails and
I don't think a single one survived. The snow on Chilkoot Pass is
too steep even for dogs. If you wanted a sled team, you had to
carry them over one by one on your back.

"Some greenhorns thought they could skip the
passes and dogsled straight across the glaciers. But if you didn't
have goggles you went snow-blind, and the pain drove you mad. Even
with goggles you couldn't make out thin layers of snow that was
covering cracks three hundred feet deep. If the sled broke through,
it would drag the dogs in with it, howling and scrambling. You
couldn't cut their traces in time. They'd fall into a river of
glacier water that was too far down in the blackness to see. If you
was on the sled, you go with 'em.

"Others believed what them outfitters and
their pamphlets said: you could stroll into the Yukon basin from
the southeast on stock trails that was well marked... reach the
Klondike in ninety days. Some was crazy enough to start from
Edmonton, which is twelve hundred miles away if you're a crow –
twice as far if you have legs. Most of them was bled dry by
mosquitoes or lost everything bushwhacking deadfall and swamp. Some
starved in miserable cabins they built when winter came. Others
watched their teeth fall out and their skin turn to clay while they
died slow from scurvy."