a less extravagant room in the same hotel. Another sign of his displeasure with Lomax’s failure to locate the child or the journal, especially after he’d been so confident the matter could be resolved quickly.
Your house will be the least of what you’ll lose, his employer had said. And Lomax shudders now to contemplate what his threat actually portends. If Mr. Holt called in the mortgage on Lomax’s bungalow, his whole family would be tossed out and condemned to the poor-house—an outcome nearly too catastrophic to contemplate.
And now Lavern has requested more grocery money, and Lomax is nearing the end of his stipend and can’t possibly ask Mr. Holt for another. Lomax feels a sudden constriction in his chest and worries that he might weep. He hasn’t done that since his father left. But over the course of his long, pain-ridden life, he’s learned that if one were to give over to weeping, there’d be only tears. Seas of them. And seas of tears will neither complete his task nor secure his family’s safety. Instead he draws a hot bath, which does nothing to ease his back or quell his mental agitation. Angrily, he dresses and leaves his hotel to patrol the sidewalks, eyeing faces, watching for single men with babies, the same mind-numbing task that’s occupied him now for weeks. When the lightning in his spine stalls him out front of a Chinese laundry, he locks eyes with a skinny man clearing the sidewalk of litter with a wood-tined rake. The man flicks his head toward the alley, and in some deep region of his mind, Lomax registers his meaning. He follows him around the corner, where the man holds out his palm. When Lomax passes him some money, the man fetches a small, butcher-wrapped package from the hollow of a nearby drain.
Lomax can’t suffer the miserable march back to his hotel without some relief, so he ducks into another alley, this one next to a flophouse he’s already checked countless times. Not without some shame, Lomax twists the tobacco from the tip of one of his Parliaments and crams into the hole a kernel of the oily opium he’s just bought, an operation learned while watching his father during his rare visits home. Lomax lights it and inhales lily, licorice, and creosote, his every capillary extending its arms for the restoring smoke. He fights against exhalation for as long as possible, while divine chimes peal in his ears and his spine sluices with gratification. This opium is twice as potent as the doctor’s cigars, leading Lomax to wonder whether the drug’s power will only grow the farther west he ventures—which might then be the sole consolation of this so-far disastrous expedition. He finishes the cigarette, his entire body softened like butter in a pan, and the urge to recline overcomes him. He spies some relatively puffy bales of trash and curls into them, his blood purring.
An uncountable duration of time passes before the softened sensation crests and begins to fade. As it does, Lomax opens his eyes to a curious sight: a white cotton bird soaring against the alley’s cloudy sky. Dangling from a wash line in the foul breeze, puffing, contracting, nearly breathing. And despite his initial bewilderment, Harvey Lomax recognizes this bit of cloth for exactly what it is. He ought to. As the father of seven, he’s been changing flannels for what seems like his entire life. And while he’s spotted numerous flannels hung from laundry lines throughout the city, none were outside the window of a skid-row flophouse.
THE RAILWAY COMMAND GROUP
AS THE TRANSPACIFIC steamer Empress of Australia departs from Victoria, Harris takes great care in unpacking his dressing case, arranging his effects, and memorizing his stateroom’s unfamiliar contours. When everything is to his satisfaction, he dons his finest silk jacket and dismisses Baumgartner, who seems surprised and even perhaps a little affronted as he goes off in search of a bridge game. Harris then summons Feeney to accompany him to the steamer’s topmost deck, where he leans at the rail and takes several salty draughts into his lungs. “All right, poet,” he says. “What am I looking at?”
“The Olympic Peninsula, sir,” Feeney replies. “A wall of hemlock, cedar, and the odd madrone. And there’s a fine stand of second-growth fir, all good and straight, but too young to cut. Beneath them is a rocky shore, graded well to drag the logs into the water.”
“Oh, come on, man!” Harris says. “If I want a logger’s