doesn’t mean they were queers,” Skyler, his one Asian girl, said.
“Oh yes it does,” Richard said.
Lewis felt himself starting a bad sweat, shirt soaked through to his jacket, cold rivulets running on his skin. “Finish reading the chapter,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Then down the hallway, long and empty and lined with steel lockers, and he turned in at the door marked boys with bumpy green glass in the door, a room lit by transom windows. Cool, tiled sanctuary with pissoirs on the wall, floor done in squares of yellow Italian marble. He turned his wedding band on his finger. To wash his hands, he twisted a handle, which produced water. Someone else came in, wearing a tag that said “Hildebrandt, Psychology,” a balding guy with glasses, whom Lewis seemed to recall liking. And not being liked in return. The guy urinated with a heavy long sound and Lewis bumped out of that dripping place with the writing crammed into the mortar lines between tiles.
Looking for a window, he went up a stairway and gazed out on a little village, a church steeple, some small houses and brick storefronts. And, moving briskly by, curious vehicles with no visible means of locomotion. His ring was burning, so he teased and moved it with his thumb. It could be anyplace, Virginia, St. Louis, Georgia, Washington. He tried to breeze back in casually, but his class wasn’t having it. “Well, did you make it?” Joaney asked.
“His pants are dry,” Skyler said. “Close call, though, definitely.”
Sometimes he wasn’t sure what to do for his kids. He learned their names and then simply stayed with them, stuck it out for as long as required. They had a restless wish to go, to be gone, to keep going. Joaney had a special power in the room, and was its queen. “Are we doing anything today?” she asked. The last thing he could remember . . . He gazed hastily at his arms. There’d been cuts, slashes. He touched his breast-bone and temple. He was thirty-five. No, he was forty-five. As a boy, he’d leapt into the air and landed, saying, “If the world turns, then why did I come down in the same place?” But no, wrong again. The explorer Lewis did that, not him. He felt a heartsickness, a homesickness, like during that terrible winter, when he was freezing and starving on a barbaric, desolate coast. Except he hadn’t. That was that other Lewis again. By the light in the windows, it was just now September. Hugely with child, Joaney blinked at him. “What was I saying?” he asked her.
“You were saying how Jefferson sent him because he couldn’t find anyone actually qualified who’d be stupid enough to go,” she said.
“Jefferson had half-white bastards all over the place,” Richard said.
“Tom’s wife had died. It totally crushed him,” Lewis said. “I’m not sure we can understand it now. Your heart was a crypt by the time you were thirty-five, already full up with dead parents and spouses and children and siblings.” Only Joaney and T, for Tremaine, nodded their heads. Lewis saw that he’d written the names of several of Lewis’s hopeless conquests on the board, “girls of the neighborhood” he’d tried to court and marry.
“What about Sacagawea?” Joaney asked.
“Her name meant ‘bird-woman’ in Hidatsa, the tribe that stole her away from her family,” he said. “In Shoshoni, it meant ‘boat-launcher.’ Like Helen, she’d apparently launched a lot of boats.”
At eye level, when he turned, was suddenly a map of North America, and some wag had pasted a little arrow pointing to his town: you are here. Good to know. He was right where the Kanza or Kaw met the Missouri, smack in Osage territory.
So where were the native faces? He couldn’t find even one. And the fierce eyes looking back warned him to be careful of what he wanted to know, how badly he needed to find out.
“Why’d he do it?” Joaney asked.
Skyler had jewels sparkling in the side of her nose, and both earlobes, and an eyebrow. Under the clock was a very good copy of Clark’s map of the Missouri, its course and tributaries. Mozart suddenly started to play, but it was hollow, false and tinny. Richard dug hastily into his bag and brought up a little device. Lewis snatched it, and faces turned eagerly to see what sport he’d make of Richard. He shook the thing. He pressed its numbered face, making it squawk and object like a parrot. “Jesus, take it easy!” Richard said, grabbing it.
Joaney’s eyes, like the Mona Lisa’s, followed him everywhere, head turning on the long, elegant stalk of her neck. “The Bible, if one counts all the begats in Genesis, dates creation at 4004 b.c.,” he said. “That’s the kind of pre-Darwinian era Lewis lived in. The world was still young. Everything was fairly new, from the Republic on down. Even if you’d made bad mistakes, it wasn’t too late to fix them. The trouble was, somebody was going to rush past you and grab up everything good, if you didn’t hurry.”
“Just answer the question,” T, for Tremaine, demanded, his only black kid.
This must’ve been what Jefferson meant when he said, “History will not be kind to us.” T asked the question as a command, but now his lip slightly quivered, as if his whole being trembled before the answer.
“He was way in debt,” Richard said.
“He drank like a fish. He ate opium pills like they were TicTacs,” Skyler said.
Lewis was dizzy, and dropped suddenly into the chair he’d apparently placed there for the purpose. He might be sick. His color, he assumed, was not good. “What can I offer except facts?” he said. “Born the same year as the Boston Tea Party, at age five he lost his father, who caught pneumonia one night in the rain, dodging a British patrol. Not much education. Passenger pigeons are extinct now, but their migrations once blotted out the sun. The family motto was Omne solum forti patria est, which means ‘It is best to die for one’s country.’ Or it might mean ‘To a brave man, all earth is his country.’ On his mother’s side, the motto was Force and counsel, but they were Welsh. Jefferson called Lewis’s grandfather the most sensible man he ever knew. Lewis shot a bull at full charge at age nine. He was head of a household at thirteen, with two thousand acres and twenty-eight slaves. He learned herbal medicine from his mom.”
For some reason, Bill now got out his wallet, taking out the first item, a likeness of himself on a card with a bunch of numbers. “Everyone was related to everyone else. For example, Sergeant Floyd, the only one who died, was Clark’s cousin. Lewis was related to Jefferson. The Randolphs, Hearsts, and Lewises all intermixed bloodlines too often, and it was blamed for the many suicides in the family. Robert Penn Warren wrote a poem about Lilburne Lewis, who chopped up one of his slaves with an ax, then killed himself. Is this helping?” he asked. “Is this what you want to know?”
They nodded, waiting for more. Just in time, the bell rang. He didn’t think he could stand, so he simply sat smiling and nodding as they filed out. “Don’t forget the field trip!” he said.
Alone, with his picture in his hand, he knew he hadn’t really answered their questions, not the big ones anyway. He felt that familiar lightness in his throat, craving for the cigarette, which he hated and loved and wanted and needed. It kept something down that was trying to bubble up in him, riot in him. The cigarette held it at the bottom of his throat.
He felt as alive as ever in his life, sitting there, but must’ve gotten up too quickly, because he saw darkness, then met the floor with a painless crash, thinking, Oh, a header! A face plant, a canvas nap.
Bill was helped up the steps and in the front door with Emily’s arm around him, having left the ER after a CAT scan for
