Jamie spat on his handkerchief and dabbed at his scalp and cheek as he walked. The already dingy cotton came away smeared with soot and blood.
Ranks of apartments and offices and houses and churches marched up the hills, but he turned down toward the waterfront. When he’d decided to leave Missoula for the summer, the Pacific had drawn him irresistibly, and finally here it was, oily gray, hectored by gulls. Ships and boats crowded the piers. On a semblance of a beach, crunchy with broken shells and ripe with rotting seaweed, he wet the handkerchief and wiped at his face, wincing at the sting of salt. He’d wanted no part of what was happening with Marian and Barclay Macqueen, and he’d gotten so tired of worrying about Wallace, so fed up with his way of trying to conceal his drunkenness by speaking and moving with a careful, childish hauteur.
Jamie couldn’t even escape into his friendship with Caleb. Marian had changed that, too. Neither she nor Caleb had ever made any allusion to their trysts, but Jamie knew they’d happened, knew they’d stopped. In some ways, he had always been the least necessary vertex of their triangle, but, in at least one way, he’d been essential: Marian and Caleb needed a buffer to convince themselves they weren’t a pair. Not that he thought they were—or should be—a proper couple. No. But the wildness that had rooted in all of them as children had grown thickety and riotous between Marian and Caleb, as barbed as blackberry shrubs, hopelessly entangling. They were a pair, as some things naturally and undeniably were, and once a pair was established, everything outside it （himself, for example） became inevitably and inherently extraneous. He and Marian were a pair, too, of course, but the bond of their twinness was so fundamental it could almost be disregarded. Or at least Marian seemed to think so.
Turning uphill （everywhere seemed to be uphill）， he walked for hours, stopping men in work clothes to ask if they knew of any boardinghouses, knocking at doors until he found somewhere cheap enough that would have him, dried blood and all.
“Do you know where I could find work?” he asked the proprietress after she’d shown him his closet-like room, its small window almost opaque with dirt.
“Not much work for the finding.”
This turned out to be unequivocally true. There were simply too many people looking for work, droves of grim men with grim stories about lost homes and farms, usually with families to support. He’d had an idea he could get hired at the docks or on the fishing boats that was underlaid with the queasy, barely acknowledged hope he might turn up a clue about his father, might even, by some miracle, stumble upon him. But although he was tall and strong for his age, he was not as tall and strong as most men haunting the waterfront and not as desperate, certainly not aggressive enough to push to the front of the crowd when a boss came looking for hands.
He looked into the faces of men coming off ships, waiting for some burst of recognition. （Had the ocean’s gravity really been what pulled him west? Or had it been the tidal pull of his father?） He bought a coffee in a dockside café and asked tentatively if anyone knew Addison Graves. No one did, though one meat-faced man wondered aloud why he knew the name, then snapped his fingers and said, “Captain Cowardice!”
After a few days Jamie gave up the docks. His fantasy of finding his father seemed foolish once he’d absorbed the scale of the city, the multitude of ships. There was no reason to assume he would recognize Addison or that Addison was even alive. And if he was, why shouldn’t he be living in Tahiti or Cape Town? Or even Tacoma, which was only thirty miles away but might as well be the moon?
One day Jamie took the ferry north to Port Angeles. From the railing, he watched the prow peel back the water to its white pith. What if he were to sign on to a ship, write to Marian and Wallace from China or Australia? Had his father felt the same sense of possibility? Or was it temptation? The temptation of becoming an absence. On a ship, he could do nothing to keep Marian from Barclay, nothing to stop Wallace from running up debts. On land, he couldn’t do much, either, but he was dogged by the obligation to try. At sea, perhaps his sense of obligation would stretch thin enough to snap.
But, on the return journey, the wind was cold and the water choppy and dark, and he imagined being lost at sea somewhere far away, how Marian would never know what had happened. He couldn’t abandon her. True, she would likely abandon him one day soon, but he would rather endure that loss than inflict it.
He tried several canneries, but there were no jobs. He tried a steelworks, a lumberyard, a produce market. Nothing. Every night he counted his dwindling money, saved from the sales of his watercolors and stolen, just a little bit, from Marian. Every night he calculated how much longer he could stay.