Y: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

fisherman and amateur
     cartoonist, his left arm useless and disfigured from a horrific motorcycle crash;
     and Harrison and Yula’s home, about fifty feet toward the stream, a small cabin made
     of lodgepole pine, the roof covered on the north side with thick green moss.
    Quinn built the cabin for Yula when Eugene was born—she was only sixteen years old—laid
     sod and a gravel path to connect the two homes, and planted rosebushes and rhododendrons.
     But everything else that surrounds them is wild: giant black cottonwoods and red alder;
     the stream rank with dead chum or shimmering with their silver bodies rushing to spawn;
     six-hundred-year-old Douglas fir. Tourists poke their heads onto the property if they
     get lost or take a wrong turn on a trail, and the neighbor’s dog, Beater, scares the
     shit out of them with his low growl. Beater’s owner runs a grow-op. Their other neighbors,
     Joel and Edwin, have a scrap yard, and their eleven-acre property is covered with
     rusted-out tractors and cars. But who can see it. Out here, who can even see the sky.

    “Yula.” Quinn coughs and shakes his one good arm at my half brother. “Get the kid
     out of my roses.”
    On good days, Quinn and Eugene regard each other as pieces of strange furniture brought
     in by Yula to add further clutter to the house. Eugene likens his grandfather to a
     bookshelf put in front of a window, blocking all light, and Quinn thinks the boy is
     like a footstool pushed carelessly to the center of the room, a booby trap, something
     to trip over and skin one’s knee. Whirling around them like a dishcloth after dust
     is Yula, who serves them soup and wonders why her father and son can’t see each other
     as she sees them.
    Today, Eugene is collecting sow bugs. He scoops four, five, six of them into a mason
     jar with his little hands and shakes them softly. He wears overalls and red gum boots
     and no shirt. His black hair is slicked behind his ears. While Yula pulls up weeds
     and throws them into a pile behind her, Eugene runs to the edge of the property, ducks
     underneath one of the rhododendron bushes, and smears the messy dead flowers into
     the ground with his feet.
    Quinn fiddles with his pipe and looks at the sky. The Snowbirds fly over the two houses,
     headed toward Dallas Road for some civic celebration. The jets are so loud that he
     covers his ears. He taps his foot against the metal rail of the chair, raises his
     good hand, and traces one of the contrails with his finger. A bottle of sleeping pills
     rests in his pocket, a suicide letter addressed to Yula waiting in an envelope on
     his desk.
    My grandfather Quinn. How did he get here? In the early sixties, he hopped a freight
     train west in search of romance and adventure and ended up on a fishing boat, catching
     shellfish, salmon, and halibut off the coast of Vancouver Island. He lived at the
     YMCA in Victoria for a few months and then met my grandmother, a woman named Jo, who
     let him live in an Airstream trailer at the edge of her property, not far from where
     my parents’ pine cabin stands now. Jo and Quinn liked to talk about writing; they
     both liked James Thurber. Quinn’s dream was to publish cartoons in The New Yorker one day. They read to each other in the evenings on the porch. They went for long
     hikes through the forest, and when the trail was wide enough they held hands. Sometimes
     the view of Mount Finlayson was so stunning that it was impossible to have a proper
     conversation. One or both of them would become mesmerized by the landscape and whatever
     point being made was lost. Eventually, Jo sold the Airstream trailer and Quinn moved
     into the house.
    My grandmother Jo was a small woman—barely five feet tall—bone thin with a long, elegant
     neck, her head held slightly forward. She wore her coffee-brown hair cut bluntly at
     the chin, and her heavy-lidded eyes burned with intelligence. She had inherited the
     property years ago and lived