Visitor from the East

“Oh, hell,” Bill Williamson said when the alarm clock assassinated a particularly juicy dirty dream. Cussing at it didn’t make it shut up. Resigned that the dream was dead — he’d never be so limber in real life — the governor of the state of Jefferson hit the top of the clock with a massive fist. He got the OFF button and didn’t break the clock, though not from lack of effort.

Yawning, he sat up in bed. “So early?” his wife muttered.

“Sorry, Louise,” Bill said. “But I’ve got to get to the coast to greet the visitor, and Yreka ain’t exactly coastal.”

He lumbered into the bathroom and did what needed doing in there, then pulled a pair of shorts up over the thick, reddish hair on his legs. His wallet sat in one pocket; his keys clinked in the other. Out he went, to grab some breakfast before he hit the road.

Ceilings in the Governor’s Mansion were thirteen feet tall. Doorways were ten feet high. Bill, at nine-two, didn’t need to worry about ducking or bashing his head every time he went through one. Charlie “Bigfoot” Lewis, the second Governor of Jefferson — and the one who built the mansion during Coolidge prosperity — had been a sasquatch himself, and ran it up on a scale that suited his own comfort. Too big for humans, he’d figured, was easier to deal with than too small for his own folk. Bill blessed him for that.

“Here you go, Governor,” the steward said when he walked into the dining room. “Coffee’s hot, and breakfast’ll be up in a minute.”

“Thanks, Ray.” Bill drank coffee by the quart mug. He was halfway down his first cup when Ray brought him eight fried eggs, a pound of bacon, and a dozen slices of wheat toast. As he plowed through the food, he hoped he wouldn’t get hungry while he was driving.

The Stars and Stripes and the state flag of Jefferson flew in front of the mansion. Jefferson’s banner was green, with the state seal centered on the field: a gold pan with two X’s that symbolized the double crosses northern California and southern Oregon had got from Sacramento and Salem till they formed their own state in 1919. After World War I, self-determination was all the rage in Europe, and they’d run with it here, too. That neither Sacramento nor Salem was exactly sorry to see the seceders go hadn’t hurt.

Below the flagpole sat the Governor’s car: a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado he fondly called “the Mighty Mo.” The Detroit behemoth wasn’t quite the size of a battleship, but it came close. It was five years old now, getting long in the tooth, but he kept it anyway. Since the Arab oil crisis, cars had shrunk like wool washed hot. For someone Bill’s size, they’d gone from dubious to impossible. The Mighty Mo got next to no mileage, of course, and gas was six bits a gallon. Bill didn’t care. If the state wouldn’t pay, he would.

He slid into the left rear seat: the driver’s seat, with a long, long shaft for the steering wheel. The ignition was on the column, not on the dash. A good thing, too, he thought, starting the car.

Like the Governor’s mansion, the Capitol had gone up before the Depression hit. Wings and colonnades and gilded dome showed off Jefferson’s wealth, or maybe delusions of grandeur. The government office building next door? A square WPA block, as ugly as it was functional. The miracle was that it had got built at all.

Barbara Rasmussen waited in front of the office building. The Governor’s publicist was highly functional, too, but far from ugly: a shapely blonde with big blue eyes. To use Jimmy Carter’s immortal and immoral phrase, Bill had looked on her with lust in his heart a time or two. He was married, but he wasn’t blind. Sasquatches and little people had been getting it on since long before blondes came to Jefferson — not all the time, but every so often. Some stories said one of Bill’s great-grandmothers was a little person. He didn’t know if that was true, or care.

Barbara got into the right — and only — front seat. “Morning, Governor,” she said. “Early enough for you?”

“Oh, pretty much,” he answered, miming a yawn. She laughed. He sometimes wondered if she was interested in a roll in the hay with him. Some little women (not at all in the Louisa May Alcott sense of the words) hopefully looked for sasquatch men to be big all over. They were seldom disappointed in that. Other ways? Men were men and women were women, big or small. Sometimes they clicked, sometimes they didn’t.

None of which mattered right now. His size thirty-two right foot swung from brake to gas. Away the Mighty Mo went. He drove south on Jefferson State Highway 3 to the 299, then west toward the coast. What Jefferson called state highways would have been narrow, twisty, no-account two-lane blacktop roads anywhere else. That was partly because the state hadn’t really bounced back after Hoover’s name became a swear word, partly because the terrain was so rugged.

From Yreka to Eureka was just over 200 miles: three hours on an uncrowded freeway, assuming there was any such animal. Setting out just after six, Bill pulled into Eureka just before eleven. The overturned logging truck sure didn’t help. The ship he was supposed to meet was due in at eleven-thirty. That cut it closer than he liked.

His back crunched when he unfolded himself from the Eldorado. A car that big wasn’t meant for those roads, but he didn’t fit into anything smaller. “Hey, Gov!” somebody called. Bill waved a broad-palmed hand. Sasquatch or little person, no pol could ignore constituents.

A few reporters and a couple of camera crews waited at the base of the pier where the Heiwa Maru would dock. Its arrival would be news here and in Yreka and Redding and Ashland and Port Orford and the rest of Jefferson. Maybe one of these birds was an AP stringer, in which case the story might go farther. But the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate just stood idly, some smoking cigarettes. “What’s happening?” Bill called.

“Not a damn thing,” a Eureka newspaperman answered. “Harbormaster says the ship’s running an hour late.” He sounded disgusted.

Bill was delighted. “In that case, we’ve got time for lunch. C’mon, Barbara. Let’s hit Freaky Willie’s.”

The diner was only a block from the harbor. BIGGEST SHAKES IN TOWN, a sign painted on the window bragged, next to a picture of a sasquatch doing a swan dive into a strawberry milkshake. Bill didn’t think he’d want to try that. He’d never get the goo out of his pelt afterwards. But the food was good and abundant and cheap, all of which mattered even if he was on state business and putting it on the taxpayer’s tab.

He inhaled three Ginormous Burgers and half a farm’s worth of fries, along with two of those big shakes (chocolate). Barbara ate, well, rather less.

Another citizen greeted him as he came out. Bill’s hand didn’t quite engulf the other man’s when they shook. Haystack Thornton was a little man, but a big little man, close to seven feet tall and wide in proportion. He might have been part sasquatch himself. His bushy russet beard rose high on his cheeks, while his hairline came down almost to his eyebrows. He wore bib overalls and a Pendleton underneath; Eureka had to be twenty-five degrees cooler than Yreka.

“Just wanted to tell you thanks for all you’ve done and for all you haven’t done, Governor,” he said. “Me and my friends appreciate it, believe me.”

“No worries, man,” Bill said. Haystack Thornton and his friends were the leading growers of some highly unofficial crops around Eureka. Jefferson looked the other way, and wouldn’t help the Feds when they didn’t. Do your own thing had been a way of life here long before the hippies found it. Besides, Bill thought smoking marijuana was more fun than drinking beer, though nothing was wrong with beer, either.

Thornton ambled into Freaky Willie’s. Bill and Barbara went back to the harbor. Sure enough, the Heiwa Maru — Japanese for Peace Ship — had come into Humboldt Bay. A pavilion of saffron cloth stood on the deck before the bridge. Good thing it’s August, Bill thought. I wouldn’t want to cross the Pacific under canvas in January.

Snorting tugs nudged the Heiwa Maru into place. Lines snaked out from the ship. Longshoremen secured them to bollards. Down came the gangplank. Bill, Barbara, and the reporters and cameramen strode down the pier to meet the ship and its important passenger.

“Permission to come aboard?” the governor called to the Japanese skipper at the far end of the gangplank.

“Permission granted,” the man said in good English. He added, “Have no fear, sir. It will bear your weight.”

“I expected it would.” Onto the Heiwa Maru Bill went. The skipper bowed. Bill bowed back. As he straightened, a Japanese sailor snapped a photo of him.

Bill walked toward the pavilion. The saffron cloth on one side folded back and the Yeti Lama came out to greet him. “Hello, Governor Williamson,” the holy man said, his English more hesitant than the skipper’s. He wore a loincloth and cape of scarlet silk to show his rank. Two other yetis, both in saffron loincloths and capes, followed him. So did two saffron-robed human monks. The big folk never could have used ordinary cabins.

The Yeti Lama was someone Bill could look up to — literally. He overtopped the Governor by six inches. Anyone seeing them side by side could tell they were of the same kind but different races. In little-people terms, they might have been Mongol and Swede. The yeti’s pelt was browner than the sasquatch’s; he had broader cheekbones and lower brow ridges.

“Welcome, your Holiness,” Bill said. “Welcome to America. Welcome to Jefferson.”

“I thank you so much.” The Yeti Lama bowed and held his hands in front of himself with palms pressed together. Bill imitated the gesture. The newcomer looked to be in his mid-forties, near the Governor’s age. Along with many pious members of his folk, he’d fled into exile when the Chinese invaded his mountainous Tibetan homeland twenty years before.

One reason more reporters weren’t here was that Washington and Beijing had been thick as thieves since Nixon went to China. To the State Department, the Yeti Lama was just another tourist. Bill had all sorts of reasons for feeling otherwise.

A newshound who worked for a paper in Redding called, “Your Holiness, can you tell us why you came to Jefferson in particular?”

“Oh, yes. It is my pleasure.” The Yeti Lama’s English wasn’t perfect, but he used what he had. “Jefferson in all the world is where I most feel a sense of, ah, communing—”

“Of community, you mean, sir?” Bill said helpfully.

The Yeti Lama smiled. His teeth were large and broad. One bore a gold crown. “I thank you. Yes, that is the word. A sense of community. You have in Jefferson mountains, and I of course grew up in mountains. Yours are small, but that is a trifle.”

“We think they’re pretty good-sized.” Bill waved east, toward the Klamath Mountains serrating the horizon.

“I hear many have trees all the way up to top.” The Yeti Lama smiled again, mischievously now. “Next to the Himalayas, that makes them foothills. Is right word, foothills?”

“Foothills is the word, yeah. You’ve got me there,” Bill allowed.

“But this is not important,” the Yeti Lama said. “It is only land. People on land, they are what matters. You here in America, you here in Jefferson especially, you set example for the world. Here you have small folk and large, living together in happiness and harmony. Here you have one of a large race, chosen peacefully, freely, by large and small to lead all. Not like this in land I come from. Chinese call us xueren — snowmen.” His heavy features twisted in sorrow, or perhaps anger. “They treat us abominable — ah, abominably.”

“I’m not even Jefferson’s first sasquatch Governor, either,” Bill said. State pride counted. The less said about earlier times, when this land was squabbled over by Russia and Spain, then split between California and Oregon, the better. But little people with guns hadn’t hunted sasquatches for the fun of it in more than a hundred years. That was progress, any way you looked at it. Sasquatches had guns of their own now, too.

And, when you thought about what China was doing to yetis and Tibetans alike, Jefferson had to look like heaven on earth by comparison. No wonder the Yeti Lama wanted to call here.

Barbara said, “Can we all get together for pictures to show this harmony?” She turned to the Heiwa Maru’s skipper. “Captain, please join us with some of your men. Everyone gets along in Jefferson.”

“That’s right,” Bill said. “Next month I’m going up to Port Orford to visit a businessman there. He moved to Jefferson from Japan more than fifteen years ago.”

The captain spoke in Japanese. He and three sailors joined the Yeti Lama, his retinue, the sasquatch Governor, and the blond publicist. Barbara was taller than any of the crewmen from the Heiwa Maru or the human Buddhist monks, but even she barely came up to Bill’s chest.

Well, that was the point of this exercise, wasn’t it? Sure it was. Big people and little people could all get along together. Different kinds of big people could, too. And so could different kinds of little people, even if their countries had fought a ferocious war only half a lifetime earlier.

The skipper’s wrinkles and bald spot said he was old enough to have fought for Japan against the USA. But, again, even if he had, so what? He was here in Jefferson in charge of the Peace Ship. He’d brought the Yeti Lama, one of the greatest peace symbols in the whole world (except perhaps China). That was what counted.

“Smile, everybody!” a cameraman called. Everybody did.