Useless Bay

by M. J. Beaufrand

  I don’t know what I’m going to do with that dog, I say. She’s too timid to be a scent hound. She’s useless.

  He smiles at me. That makes her perfect, doesn’t it?

  I never thought of it that way, I say.

  I hear shouts coming from the background. Timbers groaning. Just out of sight, something massive is straining and about to move.

  The man cranes his head around.

  I have to go soon, Marilyn. I wanted one more chance to see you. I wanted to tell you that you’ve done well. It could have come out a lot worse, you know. Sammy could have lost a lot more than just pieces of his hand. And that poor family . . . they’ll have a hard enough time.

  We worked together, I said.

  And it’s true, so many misguided people, so many mistakes made, but all of us trying to do the right thing. I’m surprised anything turned out right at all.

  Do you really have to leave? I ask him.

  I think of Meredith with her mother, the both of them basking in the shared touch. I yearn for this, a little space carved out of nothing, where we can just sit and be together and listen to the water.

  Tide’s coming in, he says.

  I hear shouting coming from the background.

  Mr. Whidbey! Come now. The keel’s off the sand. We don’t know for how long.

  That’s me, he says, standing up, and I realize he’s more than just tall, he’s a giant. Of course this big, strong man could navigate Deception Pass in only a kayak.

  The troll is back in his wreck. He won’t come crawling out anytime soon. You’ll tell your brothers, won’t you? That I’m proud of them?

  I’ll tell them, I say.

  He nods to me and smiles, then turns his back and walks away. I watch it until there is nothing left but mist.

  It should be a more poignant parting. He’s made it sound as if I’ll never see him again, Mr. Joseph Whidbey of the HMS Discovery, who, if you believe in things that are out of reach, as I do, just might be my father. I should be saddened that all I’ve had with him are a few short moments here and there.

  But I am not. I know I’ll see him again.

  There’s one thing I’ve learned living by the sea.

  The tide always turns.

  Things always come back.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  My husband and I first encountered Useless Bay on Whidbey Island in the mid-1990s. We were both working in the tech industry and wanted some place we could hang our hammock and not think about the massive list of things we had to do Monday through Friday.

  We first started inspecting the property on Useless Bay with a walk on the beach. As it happened, the tide was out, and it looked as if you could walk the twenty nautical miles to the Seattle Space Needle.

  At first I was excited. What treasures would be uncovered? I ran around, searching. A sand dollar here, a moon snail there. And then, for some strange reason, I grew terrified. Who would call me back before the bay flooded with water, drowning me? What was the signal to come back? I had a vivid pen-and-ink picture running around my brain of what it would look like when the waters of the bay took me into the icy waters of the Puget Sound.

  Then I remembered. It wasn’t a nightmare, it was a picture book: The Five Chinese Brothers, by Clare Huchet Bishop. In it, a family of brothers all look alike, but each has a super power of his own. One can stretch his neck, one is immune to fire, and one, the first brother, can open his mouth and swallow the sea.

  It’s this first brother who sparks the story. An active young boy asks the first brother if he can swallow the sea so he can go out and collect treasures. The first brother agrees. But the little boy is naughty and ignores the signs the first brother makes, and he eventually drowns when the first brother can’t hold his breath any longer.

  Saturday and Sunday, year after year for five years, first with just my husband and me, and then with our two children, we searched for treasures on the low tide in Useless Bay. But the tide that overcame us was more of a bubble—a tech bubble, to be exact—and we had to let go of our place on Whidbey Island.

  Enter my sister, Ann, and her two boys, Will and Cole, giant and teenage and blond, who needed a place to stay and were interested in things like the anatomy of spiny dogfish and always tried to outdo each other in everything—especially sports. I had my setting; I had my five tough brothers and sister.

  The mystery is real enough, too. But I’ll leave that to those of you interested enough to Google “dog” and “Ichiro.”

  In the meantime, a giant thank-you to Tamar Brazis, for helping me find the real treasure in the story, and to Steven Chudney for helping me secure it. I owe you both a Voodoo doughnut.

  Thanks to the cupcake writing crew, Martha Brockenbrough, Jen Longo, and Jet Harrington for keeping me on track with advice, sugar, and caffeine.

  Another giant thank you to Peggy King Anderson for being an incredible first reader.

  Sofia and Rich Beaufrand were incredible brainstormers.

  And Mavis? We love you even though you were half-trained by a murdered man.

  Hope you enjoyed Useless Bay by M.J. Beaufrand! Keep reading for a preview of The Rise and Fall of the Gallivanters.

  ON THE LAST DAY OF SEVENTH GRADE, our drama teacher, Mr. Piper, decided to make us play Mafia. It was one of those wasted days that happen at the end of every school year. We’d finished our work, our grades had been sent to our parents, and we were all hopped up on cake and vacation.

  Normally we liked Mr. Piper, even though he wore Jesus sandals in the middle of winter so the middle school auditorium always smelled like foot fungus. He used to preach about Movement, which meant us bouncing off the walls while he played bongos. “That’s it!” he would tell us. “Be the snowflake!”

  But that last day of class, in a weird turnabout, when our brains were already in Johnson Creek, or Cannon Beach, or just Out of Here, Mr. Piper decided to impose classroom structure on us in the form of Mafia.

  If you haven’t played before, it may sound cool, but it’s actually kind of stupid. Everyone has to lie down on the floor in a circle and close their eyes. Then the teacher taps someone to be the hit man and someone to be the angel. He says, “Mafia, awake!” Then the hit man sits up and opens his eyes, and points to the person they want to kill. That’s all they do. Sit up and point. And boom! The guy’s dead.

  Ah, but there’s redemption. The hit man lies back down, then the teacher says, “Angel, awake! Who do you want to save?” Then they sit up and open their eyes, and if they point to the same person the hit man pointed to, then the victim gets to live. The hit man and angel keep going until everyone is dead. In between hits, when everyone has their eyes closed, Mr. Piper will announce which of us has been “saved” and which of us has been “killed,” so everyone can try to figure out who the angel and the hit man are. Then the real fun begins. Everyone tries to imagine how they died.

  None of us had actually watched someone’s life drip away, or be shot away, so it was more about drowning in vats of lemon Jell-O, or being trampled in a herd of stampeding nutrias.

  I didn’t realize until later how freaky it was that everyone wanted to die.

  Dying was the fun part.

  I was the first one to get the tap. I didn’t even need to ask if I was the angel or the hit man. I knew. Even then I had a reputation.

  When Mr. Piper said, “Mafia, awake!” I pointed my finger across the circle of kids lying around, some smart-asses with their arms crossed over their chests like cadavers. I cocked my finger like a gun straight at Crock, who even then was kind of obnoxious. Then I lay back down.

  After that it was someone else’s turn. I heard Mr. Piper say, “Angel, awake! Who do you want to save?”

  As I lay back with my eyes closed, someone else sat up and tried to undo my damage.

  My turn again. Again and again I sat up and pointed. Again and again someone tried to save everyone else.

  There were thirty kids in the class. Number twenty-seven I poin
ted to was Jaime, and number twenty-eight was Sonia. I didn’t even point to the one Mr. Piper had chosen as the angel, because I knew without looking who it was.

  When the bell for the end of class rang, everyone sat up and opened their eyes. Well? they wondered. They didn’t need to ask who the hit man was. But the question was, when do we get to guess how everyone died?

  Mr. Piper gaped at me, and at my best friend, Evan. No one had ever gotten three for three, let alone twenty-six for twenty-eight. “It’s uncanny,” he said. “You two must share some kind of cosmic connection.” The only two we’d mixed up, it seemed, were Sonia Krajicek and Jaime Deleuze.

  Ev and I talked it through on the bus home—not about the ones we’d gotten right, but the ones we’d gotten wrong. Evan thought Jaime was the last one I’d want to kill because (a) she was the first girl in our class to develop a rack (and believe me, it was a good one), and (b) he didn’t think she could handle being dead. He was right about that. She was always running off crying to the bathroom because some boy had teased her about her hair or her clothes, when really they only wanted a grope. Yeah, try explaining that to a twelve-year-old girl. It’s not about you. It’s about your boobs.

  But I countered with Sonia: Had Ev seen the way she moved, those legs sprouting up long and sexy? The way she flicked her black hair over her shoulders when she was studying her algebra book? The way she’d look at me with those soft brown eyes when she told me to fuck off? No, Sonia was the cool one. Sonia was the last one I’d ever kill.

  That was years ago, before Ev had his appendix out. Before my father left, and then came back. Before we became the Gallivanters. Before Ziggy entered our lives suddenly and deserted us just as quick.

  After everything was over, and only three of the four of us walked away, I kept remembering that day in seventh grade, and realized that Ev and I had been asking each other the wrong questions. It wasn’t, who would we want to save last? It was, who would we want to save at all?

  Every day since, I’ve wished that Mr. Piper had chosen me for something else.

  Now, every night before I go to sleep, I feel a tap on my shoulder. But this time my role is different. He doesn’t call me hit man. He whispers, “Angel, awake! Who do you want to save?”

  This time I know what I have to do to make things right. Night after night, I try to call him back. Night after night, I shake the blankets off, sit up, and point.

  “NO, NOAH. ALIENS DID NOT EAT YOUR GREMLIN.”

  It was two o’clock in the morning and we couldn’t find my beloved car, Ginny the Gremlin, pale blue on the outside with a burgundy and brown herringbone interior. Getting behind the wheel was like biting into something that looked chalky and boring, like Maalox, and discovering it gushed sweetness, like chocolate and cherries.

  It was just Ev, Crock, and me. We’d been kicked out of the Satyricon a whole hour before and had spent our time threading the downtown streets trying to find my car. Finally I threw up my hands and said that maybe aliens had eaten her. Because that was the only explanation. It was 1984 and everyone knew an alien invasion would happen at any time, and that when they overran us, they would be wearing silver jumpsuits, permed hair, and jungle-cat eye shadow.

  Crock and Ev and I joked about it all the time, but right now Ev didn’t think it was so funny. And who could blame him? We were stranded and out of ideas, and by the looks of it he had another migraine coming on.

  He was leaning against a beige brick wall of the PfefferBrau Haus, his rainbow dreads falling around his shoulders. His face was scrunched tight and he was pinching his nose. He used to say he could feel those headaches before they hit, they were like a halo of pain. That was when he was supposed to catch it, when it was just a halo. Not later, when his head felt like someone had pinched it in a vise and screwed it up tight.

  I had to get him out of there soon.

  We really needed my car.

  The only thing we could agree on was that we’d parked it next to a dumpster by the PfefferBrau Haus, but here was the problem: The PfefferBrau Haus took up multiple city blocks, and the brewery wasn’t exactly square. It had alleys. It had grain chutes. It had skybridges. It had railroad tracks (railroad tracks!) with no trains. It had multiple corners with multiple dumpsters, and that nasty smell like someone was cooking cereal in tomato soup.

  “Let’s circle around one more time. Maybe we left it on the other side of the brewery.”

  “Please don’t say ‘brew,’” Crock contributed from the curb, where he was unhelpfully sitting, head between his knees, waiting for Ev and me to solve the problem of how we were going to get twelve miles home to Gresham.

  I hated Crock so much at that moment. Bad enough that, thanks to a passable fake ID, he’d been in the bar shotgunning microbrews, leaving Ev and me stranded in the mosh pit, and that he borrowed my “I Have Seen the Abyss and Went to Denny’s” button without asking and was wearing it now, flecked with spew.

  But honestly: Couldn’t he have made an effort? As it was, that drunk homeless guy in the tinfoil hat was more helpful. At least he had raised his head when we asked him about my Gremlin, and muttered something about monstrous evil lurking in the bowels of the city, blah blah blah. You know, the whole end-is-nigh crap.

  “Maybe we’re remembering the sign wrong. Maybe we left it in front of the plasma center?” Ev asked. His voice came out all wrong, like a grunt. We all donated plasma. It was like donating blood, only for cash. Not much cash, though. Just enough for the latest Ramones album.

  I shook my head. There was no mistaking the Pfeffer-Brau Haus. And then there was its history. I’m not a superstitious guy, but the only reason I’d parked here was that no one else wanted to. It was as though what happened to Sherell Wexler was contagious, even though that’s stupid. After all, you can’t catch a case of having your throat slit and being shoved into a vat of porter, can you?

  This place creeped all of us out. All the more reason to forget about the piece of paper in my pocket.

  I slipped my hand in to make sure it was still there. And it was. I knew without looking it was the color of beer froth and blood. I had the writing on it memorized, having folded it and unfolded it a million times in the club bathroom, to the beat of synthesizers and drum machines cranking out a rhythm that, whatever it was, wasn’t music.

  Ev bent over. He had a bad case of grow-out. Under the dreadlocks was a layer of baby-fine blond hair. They were impressive dreads, long and dyed all the colors of the rainbow. Our senior class at Gresham High had voted him Most Unique—a title I clearly deserved—just because he had better hair than any white guy living or dead.

  He said, “Listen, I know how much you love your car, man—”

  “Ginny. Her name is Ginny.”

  “—but I think we should call your sister. Just for tonight. We’ll look for your car in the morning.”

  He was right. It was the middle of the night and we were stranded in the warehouse district of northwest Portland. The buses had stopped running hours ago. We didn’t have enough cash for a cab to Gresham.

  We were screwed.

  That was when Ev’s eyes squeezed shut in pain. He slammed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and doubled over. You would think I would be used to that by now, since Ev’s suffered from migraines since puberty, but I’d never seen him like this. He was writhing on the sidewalk, rolling right on the black spots of old gum and cigarette butts.

  I rushed over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “You okay, Ev? You pack your meds?”

  “DOES IT LOOK LIKE I BROUGHT A PURSE?” he barked. “Shit!”

  I remember thinking, Oh god. This isn’t a migraine. Something else is going on—when he appeared, the guy who was about to change all our lives.

  He came out of the brewery shadows, walking loose-limbed and easy.

  The hair was what I noticed first. It was egg-yolk yellow and poufy and high. He looked in our direction without seeming to really see us. He was wearing a loose blue
shirt under a yellow thousand-dollar jacket, and he exuded cool.

  Could it be . . . ? He looked a lot like David Bowie. And we would know, because Ev won a look-alike contest that netted him a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate to Jojo’s Records. This was years ago, in his pre-dread days, when all his hair was still blond and baby fine.

  Behind me, Evan groaned. I propped him up against a wall, but he slid down it, his eyes practically rolling back into his brain.

  And Crock? Crock still had his head between his knees. So I was the only one who saw the guy. And real thing or wannabe, he was here, he wasn’t vomiting into a storm drain, and his eyes weren’t yellow and unfocused, like the drunk in the tinfoil hat. We needed help and we needed it now.

  I went right up to the guy in the thousand-dollar suit. Even his eyes were freaky and mismatched, like the real Bowie’s. One of them was all pupil.

  “Hey, mister,” I said. “Can you help us out? My friend here is sick and we can’t find my car. Have you seen it? It’s a ’78 Gremlin. Maalox colored.”

  Bowie casually lit a cigarette, crooked a finger that meant Follow me, and disappeared back into the shadows.

  I still don’t know why I followed him. What kind of idiot was I, following a strange man into a brewery where they brewed teenage girls? I could’ve been jumped. I could’ve gotten my throat cut, my punk ass cooked. Following that guy was dangerously stupid.

  I knew all this, but Evan needed help. Without my car, I couldn’t get him home.

  I took my first step into the darkness. Then another. And another, sure I was about to bonk into a brick wall. But I didn’t, because there was no wall where Bowie had disappeared. There was open air, a space wider than my arm span. It had been camouflaged in the shadows.

  Two steps later, my whole body slammed into something huge and metallic that smelled like garbage and had a hollow ring to it.

  Another dumpster.

  I felt along its sides, and when it ended, my knees rammed into something just as metallic, only pointier. The grille of my car.