Cape Disappointment Read Online Free

seven days' growth of beard and wore rumpled jeans and a sweatshirt with food stains all over it, and my hair hadn't been washed in days.
    “Listen,” Snake said, draping an unwelcome arm around the grocer's shoulder. “My friend here's been having a bad week. Maybe you could cut us some slack if the cops show up.” Snake pulled his wallet open and handed the man five one-hundred-dollar bills along with his business card. “You take this and spend whatever it takes to fix all this. If no cops hassle us, I won't show up for my change. How's that sound?”
    “Well …”
    “I thought so.” Before we left the store a boy of about six or seven walked up to Snake and handed him his dentures.
    “Better sterilize your hands, kid,” I said.
    Snake took the teeth and pushed me gently. “Come, Thomas. Let's get out of here before the cavalry arrives.”
    Once we were outside and sitting in Kathy's car, Snake said, “Were you going to kill me?”
    “I hadn't thought that far in advance. Why are you dressed like your brother?”
    “I thought maybe I could pick up some leads if people thought I was him.”
    “You picked up a fat lip.”
    “Thomas, that sort of thing is going to get you in serious trouble. I've never seen you that mad.”
    “I've never
been
that mad. You going to be all right?”
    “Maybe.”

THE WAY I REMEMBER IT, the afternoon light at Cape Disappointment was serene, almost ethereal. A man nearby talked on his cellphone while his wife waited impatiently beside him. I picked up my own phone and made a call, the two of us, strangers, standing side-by-side talking to people who were dozens or hundreds or maybe thousands of miles distant. It occurred to me that the cellphone was the pièce de ré-sistance of public isolationism, enabling us to remove ourselves from the people around us in an instant, which was one reason it had been embraced wholeheartedly by the entire planet.
    As I pushed buttons on the phone, I visually traced the flight of a small plane flying north over the Pacific Ocean along the Washington coast under a low cloud cover. In a few hours the sunset would be brilliant. Already shafts of sunlight were angling from the heavens in spires that hit the ocean. She answered on the first ring, as if she'd been expecting the call, or as if she didn't want anybody else to hear the phone ringing. “Hi, baby,” I said.
    “Hey, big boy.”
    “
You got people around?”
    “Well, sort of.”
    “Can you talk?”
    “I can talk.”
    I could hear a man chattering in the background, then she repliedto him but covered the phone so I couldn't hear. Also in the background were the sounds of traveling, the engines on the jet or whatever. As we spoke, I handed a small digital camera to one of the tourists standing in front of the lighthouse, gesturing for him to snap a picture of me with the ocean in the background. After he'd taken my camera, I moved around so that the plane was framed in the photo over my shoulder: the lighthouse, the plane, the ocean. It was going to make a great joke photo, our vacation together, Kathy in the plane, me a mile away chitchatting with her on the phone.
    It was midafternoon and the sky was a curious amalgam of the soft grays and blues that only the Northwest can produce, and then only in autumn. I was standing on the grass under the little black and white lighthouse at Cape Disappointment and gazing out at the Pacific Ocean, which was a deadly shade of slate today, the water riffled by a light wind. The ocean was close enough to taste, and I could feel its vastness in a manner that made me long for another kind of life. Seattle, where I lived, was buffered on two sides by water, some salt, some fresh, the Puget Sound and Lake Washington, but this lighthouse overlooked the largest body of water on earth, and that put things into perspective.
    It was chilly and I had my jacket zipped to my chin while the man with my camera tried to figure out the mechanism. I explained that