The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [77]
Family, the oldest argument on earth. Ben gazed across the room at the male half of the one that endured under this roof. "I'm open to ideas that won't put both of us in the doghouse, Dad."
Bill Reinking paused in his roaming of the bookshelves as if he had come to what he was looking for. "If you want to head down to the Medicine Lodge," he said over his shoulder, "I'll cover for you. I'll tell your mother you just remembered you had to cadge some gas coupons, she really can't argue with those."
Ben grinned for the first time that night. "The daughter of a senator up for reelection can't afford to be seen trotting off to a saloon with a soldier, would you say?"
"I would. Don't forget the gas coupons."
7
The Pacific was anything but pacifying as he picked his way along a shore completely foreign to him. To one side of his narrow line of march, giant logs gray as archeological bones had been tossed by storms into an endless pile he could not see over, while just beyond the driftwood barricade the forest came crowding in, thick and bristling as bear hair. On the ocean side, a short distance offshore towered dark contorted seastacks like the Great Wall of China fractured by eternal assault. The tide, thick cream-colored surf changing eerily back to milk as it slid up the beach, seemed particularly determined to hem him in; every step of the way he had to monitor the tide line from the corner of his eye or the hissing white water would flood over his boots. Meanwhile the footing shifted from gentle sand as black-gray as gunpowder one minute to rugged gravel the next and then to roundbacked rocks, without rhyme or reason that he could see. And this is the easy part, Ben reasoned with himself.
He had hiked his full share of the arch of North America, the high hunting country that crisscrossed the Continental Divide back in Montana, but this was his first time to explore any of the other national extremity, the coastal sill where the landmass wrested itself from the sea. Out here in the state of Washington was the American shore at its most remote, dangling like a coarse fringe from the huge cape where the Strait of Juan de Fuca angled into the continent. Its isolation spooked Ben. He'd slogged the beach for three hours from the barely extant salmon fishing village of LaPush without seeing another living soul or even a footprint, and now nearly another hour from the prefabricated military hut where the Coast Guardsman he roused from off-duty sleep told him Prokosch was on patrol somewhere around the next big rocky headland. Somewhere translated to anywhere, Ben discovered as he neared the rugged point of rocks backed by a clay cliff fully a hundred feet high and there still was no least evidence of Prokosch.
"Sig!" he shouted again through cupped hands. "HEY, BUDDY, YOU'VE GOT COMPANY." The Coast Guardsman at the hut had warned him sentry duty here tended to make a person jumpy and it would be a good idea to yell out for Prokosch every so often. The problem with that was, the crash of the surf obliterated all shouts. Checking back at the crescent beach he had just crossed, Ben still saw only the solitary string of his own tracks, no other human sign, and with consummate dread he faced around to the headland. It just doesn't let up. Surf poured onto the outermost ledge of stone with a power he could bodily feel, the spray spewing into the air like a school of geysers. The cliff was too steep and slick to tackle, so the only route lay across jumbled boulders in avalanche repose at the base