Big Dreams Read Online Free

three years later in a battle with some Comancheson the Santa Fe Trail. His associates in Saint Louis mourned his loss and honored him with a hyperbolic eulogy in the
Illinois Monthly Magazine
.
    “And though he fell under the spears of savages,” it said, “and his body has glutted the prairie wolf, and none can tell where his bones are bleaching, he must not be forgotten.”
    An evening mist, cool and damp, settled onto my skin. The mist, the smoky sky, the spiraling trees, the spooky quiet—they were a signature of the Far North, its essential elements. While gulls whirled and piped, I watched a blood-red sun sink into the ocean and saw two dusky shapes at the river’s edge, a teenage girl with a ponytail and a young man who was being enterprising.
    “You’re going to be something when you grow up,” he told her in a syrupy voice.
    “I already am grown up,” she said.
    “No, you’re not. You’re already just pretty.”
    She could have been tiptoeing on a log. I imagined all the girls on all the beaches in California who were trying to keep their balance as the sun went down.
    S MITH R IVER TOWN WAS A SPECK in the enormous greenery of the Far North, a relic of the nineteenth century. Two roads converged at the town’s center before running by some shops and winding past dilapidated migrant shacks into open country. The buildings on Fred Haight Drive, the main street, were old and shabby and in need of paint. They looked much as they must have when settlers had hammered together Smith River in the 1850s, chopping down ferns that were sometimes knotted and tangled to a height of ten feet.
    Nothing much was happening on the morning I stopped to visit. I found a transients’ hotel, a video store, and, unbelievably, a tanning parlor that was defunct and shuttered, its radiant appliances collecting dust. Who would ever pay for a tan in Smith River? I wondered. Farmers got brown by working outdoors in the fields. The parlorwas like a seed that had blown up from Beverly Hills and had failed to germinate, withering and dying in alien soil.
    Dust had collected elsewhere in town, as well. Smith River seemed to be in the process of dismantling itself. At Hollie’s Market, fixtures were ripped from the walls, and the shelves were toppled. Goods of every kind were tossed randomly into shopping carts, aspirin bottles mingling with candybars and bottles of Pepto-Bismol.
    Mrs. Hollie, a short, dark-haired woman, was counting greeting cards at a check-out stand, scratching numbers on a brown paper bag. I bought a bag of peanuts, her only customer.
    “Are you about to open or about to close?” I asked.
    “We’re closing,” she said. “It’s been twenty-five years!”
    “So you’ve had enough?”
    “Enough? Why,
yes!
”
    Mr. Hollie joined us from the rear of the market. He wore a John Deere tractor cap and had a friendly, ruddy, country face. In his manner, I saw another old-fashioned thing, a gentlemanly urge to be around while a stranger was talking with his wife. We chatted about blameless subjects, about how the lily bulb growers were pushing out the last dairy farms and how 120 inches of rain might fall in Smith River during a wet winter.
    “Will you be moving on?” I wanted to know.
    Mrs. Hollie was a native of the town. She wouldn’t consider leaving. “It’s too late to start over in a new place,” she said.
    Mr. Hollie laughed and said, “We’d be getting a pretty late start.”
    Some Indian men were lounging on the front steps of an old house not far from the market. They fell silent and turned to stare when I drove by. They did the same thing to other cars, but if an Indian driver passed, usually in a scruffy pickup or an antique V-8 sedan, they would raise their arms to wave. It was as if an Indian driver afforded them some relief from an ongoing monotony that only they could feel. They were acknowledging the presence of an Indian world that was ordinarily concealed within the white one.
    The men