by Barry Rachin
A set of stairs lead to the upper level, which stood comfortably above most of the surrounding treetops. The door was secured with a thick security bolt. Pearl selected a brass key from a chain fastened to her belt and undid the lock. But for the spitting clouds, from their vantage point they would have been able to see all the way to the Cape Cod Canal and beyond.
“What’s that?” Shawn pointed at a transparent disk fastened to a table in the far corner of the room. A topographical map of the Cape region was laid out across the flat face of the device with two sighting apertures mounted above the map on opposite sides of the ring.
“It’s an Osborne Fire Finder. Rangers use it during the dry summer months to estimate distance to suspected fires so we can call in a smoke report.” Pearl grabbed the circular rim and rotated it back and forth then bent down and squinted into an eyepiece fixed on a vertical rod. “You adjust the rods until you can peek through the nearer sighting hole and view the crosshair as it aligns with the fire. The degrees on the graduated ring tell the exact location.” She stepped aside. “Here, see for yourself.”
Shawn placed his eye up alongside the viewfinder, shifting the sighting mechanism right-to-left along the horizon. “Yeah, I get it. Very clever!” Suddenly the heavens opened up in a torrential downpour. Rain pounded the fire tower roof, pummeling the shingles but the inside remained relatively dry. “What are you doing?”
Pearl was moving around the perimeter of the small room closing the shutters. “A stiff breeze is kicking up from the north over that hillock. It’s blowing the rain at an angle. Got to close things up before we get thoroughly drenched.”
“What about the other visitors?”
“There were only two carloads before you arrived, and I saw them heading for the parking lot when we were out on the water.” She didn’t seem particularly concerned with the weather or much of anything else for that matter.
Five minutes later, they were huddled together on the wooden floor with the relentless rain lashing the fire tower. The room would have been pitch-black but for small chinks in the shutters. “What’s the matter?” Pearl reached out and touched him on the shoulder. Shawn was trembling all over.
“I’m cold, that’s all.”
Always dress in layers during the winter months! He was thinking about the plump, woolen sweater he cavalierly tossed on the back seat of the Audi.
“Get in the sleeping bag,” Pearl barked gruffly.
“What are you talking about?”
“Over there in the far corner. I keep a down-filled sleeping bag for situations like this.” Pearl rose and located the sleeping bag beside the small table with the Osborne Fire Finder, unfurled it in the middle of the room and pulled back the flap. “Get in,” she ordered.
“What about you?” he protested through chattering teeth.
“I’m toasty warm. You’re the one who’s gonna end up with hypothermia.”
Shawn was too cold to argue. He crawled into the sleeping bag and pulled the zipper up tight. “This is so embarrassing!”
“Really?” Through the darkness he could just barely see Peal Singleton’s beautiful-ugly smile – a smile that was half leer, half grimace. Stripping off her heavy jacket, she loosened the zipper and crawled in beside him. “How’s that?”
There was no immediate reply. Five minutes later, he said, “I’m warm now. Actually, it’s too hot.” The rain, which had let up, was still coming down in a fitful pitter-patter. He wasn’t shivering anymore and had regained his composure.
“You’re okay, then?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
He felt her shifting around in the tight confines of the bag to face him. She put a hand on his chest and kissed his cheek. “I had my tubes tied.”
“What?”
“When my mother passed away a few years back, I went to the free clinic and had my fallopian tubes surgically tied off so I wouldn’t get pregnant.” Pearl Singleton had told him about a carrot that didn’t look very much like an edible carrot. She identified six species of wetland ferns that favored different degrees of light and shade. She showed him where the beavers lived and how to operate an Osborne Fire Finder. And now this. Shawn felt her hand caressing his cheek with no great sense of urgency.
*****
Shawn awoke buck naked. Lying next to him in the cozy warmth of the down sleeping bag, Pearl Singleton was also in a similar state of undress. It was six o’clock at night and the sun, which had reemerged after the violent storm, was quickly losing its strength and fading to dusk. “We ought to leave,” Pearl said, “before it gets totally dark.”
Shawn could smell her body, a sour, musky-sweet odor that affected him like caffeine. “You had words with an older woman who normally works the counter at the diner a few weeks back.”
“Oh, that one.” Her tone was abruptly dismissive.
Shawn reached out and fondled her smallish breasts, but she pushed his hand away. “What was that all about?”
Pearl snaked her calf around his leg pulling his body closer. He could feel the bristly pubic hair scratching his thigh. She leaned forward so that her lips brushed against his ear. “Every morning when I stopped by the diner for breakfast she’d greet me with ‘Good morning, Heathcliff!’, ‘How’s Miss Heathcliff doing today?’ or some similar, smart-alecky wisecrack.
“I wasn’t familiar with the Victorian writer, Emily Bronte, but an elderly lady behind the reference desk over at the public library got me a copy of Wuthering Heights from the stacks. I went home and read it from cover to cover.” She paused to collect her thoughts. A frosty stream of air puffed from her lips like cigarette smoke when she said, “I hadn’t cried since my mother passed away three years ago last August, but I lay on my bed and wept like a baby thinking what a dirty bit of nastiness that waitress laid on me.
“The next time I stopped by Ryan’s Diner for breakfast, I held off until I was ready to pay the check. Then I told that woman in a saccharine-sweet, little-girl voice that we have three distinct species of pine siskins living in the Pemberton Nature Reserve. Each bird feeds off a different variety of pine tree and their beaks are shaped differently to extract seeds from the cones.
“I told her that I recently found a full-grown siskin with a broken wing curled up under a tree. The accident must have just happened, because the injured bird was still warm and bright eyed.” Pearl ran a tongue over her top lip. “The bird was defenseless against predators and the frigid temperatures. Either way it was going to die a miserable death so, to put the injured bird out of its misery, I grabbed it up in both hands and snapped its neck, twisting in opposite directions.” Pearl nuzzled his ear with her lips. “I told the wise-ass waitress at Ryan’s Diner that the next time she made another Heathcliff crack I was going to come around her side of the counter and wring her scrawny neck just like the pine siskin.”
Retribution. That’s what Pearl handed Trudy. It was just another word for payback – a fair and impartial reckoning of accounts. Trudy thought she could mock the woman with her malicious banter, but the spunky blonde – in typical Heathcliff fashion - gave as good as she got.
Pearl crawled out of the sleeping bag, ran nimbly about collecting her clothes and dressing as quickly as she could. She didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed. When they were both dressed, they left the tower and headed back in the direction of the parking area. “I want to see you again,” Shawn said when they reached the walkway leading out onto the water. The temperature was brisk but dry and, without the gnawing, bone-chilling dampness, the cold no longer bothered him in the least.
“What happened up in the fire tower was something to be cherished, but you shouldn’t go reading anything more into it.”
“Why did you get you tubes tied?” Shawn demanded softly.
The brim of her hat was pulled down over Pearl’s hazel-flecked eyes. “I had a lousy life... wouldn’t wish that wretchedness on my worst enemy.” She smiled bleakly. “Maybe that scummy wisecracking waitress, but no on
e else.”
“I want to see you again,” he repeated. “We could do something normal… Catch a movie or go out to eat.”
“Do something normal,” she picked up on the first part of his remark. “I don’t know that I’m a terribly normal person.” Lifting up on her toes she bussed his cheek. “Get in your car before we freeze to death. I’ll follow you out to the main road.”
Ten minutes later Shawn pulled up to the gas pumps at a Dairy Mart. In the store he handed the clerk a twenty dollar bill. “Pump three.” When the tank was full, he climbed back in the car and dialed a number on his cell phone.
“Where exactly are you?” His father spoke in a controlled monotone. Shawn could hear his mother sobbing loudly in the background.
“I’m still down the Cape. Be home in half an hour.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m perfectly fine.”
“You went to a nature preserve?”
“That’s right?”
“Where else did you go?”
“Nowhere.”
“So you’ve been in the forest communing with nature since ten o’clock this morning?” His father sounded more confused than angry.
“I got caught in the rainstorm and had to take shelter.”
“Your mother wanted to call the police and file a missing person’s report, but I talked her out of that.” There was a tense pause. “We will need to talk when you get home.” Mr. Mariano hung up the phone.
Well, that went relatively well! Shawn blew out his cheeks, massaged his face with his hands and went back in the store. A dozen hot dogs were rotating in slow motion on a self-serve electric grill near the soda dispenser. “How much are the jumbo, all-beef franks?”
“Two bucks each,” the clerk replied. He looked sleepy, bored as hell.
Shawn bought a drink and a hot dog which he slathered with mustard and relish. Wolfing it down in less than a minute, he bought another. The dark-haired youth behind the countered watched him eat with sleepy disinterest. “How’s your day going?”
Shawn washed the spicy meat down with a gulp of cherry Coke. “Actually, pretty good.” He wasn’t about to tell the fellow that he had just made love in a fire tower three miles down the road. It didn’t seem appropriate. “How about you?”
“I’m off-duty in twenty minutes.” The youth tossed a crumpled lottery ticket into the trash. “Quite a rainstorm we had earlier today.”
“Yeah, that was a doozy!” Back in the car, Shawn flicked the heater on high. The sign for Interstate 195 West loomed directly ahead as he depressed the directional.
*****
A medley of comforting odors percolated through the small restaurant when Pearl Singleton wandered into Ryan’s Diner and plopped down on a stool at the counter. The sugary scent of hickory-smoked bacon bubbling on the grill merged with that of glistening maple syrup slathered over stacks of silver dollar pancakes. The paprika, caramelized onions, thyme, rosemary and basil emanating from the home fries and specialty omelets steaming on the grill hung in the air like a viscous, redolent fog. The forest ranger in the pea-green uniform placed her broad-brimmed hat on the stool next to her but thought better of it and balanced it on the topmost peg of the mahogany coat rack over by the pastry display.
Shawn Mariano approached. “Coffee?” She nodded once. He filled a mug and placed it on the counter. “Eggs over easy, home fries and whole wheat toast?” She responded in the affirmative with another head shake plus an unintelligible grunt.
He poured a small tumbler of ice water and pushed it alongside the place setting. “I’m in love with you,” he announced bleakly.
“What’d you say?” She never even bothered to raise her head.
“Let me place your order.” The boy went off to the kitchen. When he came back, he said, “It doesn’t matter to me that you can’t have children. Couples can always adopt.”
“Oh, Gawd!” she moaned.
“I want to see you again, but a real date this time. We could catch a movie or go out to a restaurant like normal people.”
“You already dropped that line on me down in Pemberton when we were getting ready to go our separate ways.” She laughed abrasively making an obscene snorting noise through her nose. “You’re a senior in high school, and I’m old enough to be your freakin’ mother.”
Shawn pointed in the direction of the kitchen where the short-order chef was cooking up the breakfasts. “Hugh says he went to high school with you, and he’s only six years older than me.” “My mother wants to meet you,” he said shifting gears.
Pearl put her fork down and stared at the yolk bleeding out onto the plate. “And why would that be?”
“I told my parents about us when I got home.”
“There is no us, Shawn,” she spoke purposefully weighing each word like a heavy stone. “You’re delusional.”
“What happened last week in the fire tower was a figment of my imagination?”
“You can’t blame me,” she bristled, “for acts of God and natural disasters.”
He went to retrieve the coffee pot and warmed her cup. “Did you see what just happened a moment ago?” Pearl stared at him dully. “You called me by my name. You said, ‘There is no us, Shawn’.”
There were tears in his eyes. “That’s the first time,” he blubbered, “you ever spoke my name.”
When the boy was gone, an older gent with a poorly-constructed set of false teeth and grizzled beard leaned across the counter. The man shook a gnarled finger menacingly at Pearl. “I don’t know what you did to that poor boy, but you got to be one sadistic son-of-a-bitch!”
