The Off Season

by The Off Season (epub)

  Joel-Andrew thought that was a little bit different from San Francisco.

  Obed walked along the edge of the coffin. Obed wanted a closer look.

  “Kune says Starling is interested in Collette.” Joel-Andrew’s gray-green eyes were attentive, and his thoughts tender as he recalled Collette’s verve and vivacity.

  “That missy better dig a foxhole,” Maggie said, “or Starling will have her dancing like he danced the last one.”

  “O Lord,” Joel-Andrew prayed, “Thy will be done. But Lord if it be Thy will, show Your humble servant a way to save Collette.”

  “It’s about to start.” Maggie giggled. “I’ve been waiting since 1913 for a look at what happens next.”

  A stirring of air in the tavern—a flicker of neon lights—a dust kitten rolled past, gave a little hop, mewed.

  “By me sainted mither,” a choked voice said from the coffin, “there’s a cat on me face.”

  Obed startled. Obed bounded, hid behind a pool table. Obed sported two white whiskers.

  The WWI vet turned slowly on his bar stool. The vet was varicose, liver spotted, shades of tan and purple; a good man with a beer glass, and no fool.

  “Frank,” the vet drawled, “you have a new customer.” Then the vet yuk-yukked. “A renewed customer. An undisputed champion of the sauce.” The vet raised his beer glass.

  “Oh, dearie me,” the Irish cop moaned, “to leave a man lie here with dry throat and scratchy eyelids . . .” He blinked, made a feeble motion to sit up. The cop’s cheap wool suit, pressed in one position through many years, breathed crinkly. “I’m safe at Janie’s,” he said with satisfaction. “For I recognize the ceiling.”

  At the bar five drunken fishermen, two snoozled loggers, and two ladies who were no better than they should be turned in unison. Frank’s back still pointed toward the bar as he froze. Frank stared in the mirror, stiffened, stared. His eyes became as round as his tummy. Frank’s beard seemed to grow as the rest of him shrank. For this situation there was no protocol.

  “I figured he was faking,” one logger said to the other. “These Irishers are sneaky.” Both loggers turned to the bar.

  “There’s something to it, I reckon,” one of the drunken fishermen said, “but it ain’t gonna bring sailing weather.” He shoved his empty glass at Frank. “I’d better have another against the time the weather breaks.”

  “He’s right about the weather,” another fisherman said. “And if it breeds no break in weather, what good is it?” The other four fishermen turned back to the bar. Frank drew a beer, trembled. The two ladies headed for the women’s can to put on lipstick.

  “Saints surround me!” the Irish cop yelped. “’Tis a dreary coffin I’m in.” The cop managed to sit up and look about. His square jaw trembled; his pug nose squinched. He rubbed eyes with the back of his fist and yawned. “Maggie, me darlin’,” he whispered, “who did this wretched jest?” The cop saw Joel-Andrew’s clerical collar. “Maggie,” the cop said in amazement, “can this be so? Maggie consorting with an Episcopal?” Then the cop remembered he sat in a coffin. He crossed himself, eyed Joel-Andrew. “I’ve missed me own wake,” he mourned. “What day is it?”

  Frank had a problem. Bad enough to have a live Irishman on the premises, but this Irishman also broke tradition. Between Halloween and Thanksgiving, the pickled cop was always a fixture in the decorations. Frank had not been so disconcerted since the awful time a lady tourist entered the place wearing shorts and halter top. Some things are simply not done in Janie’s Tavern.

  Beneath his beard, Frank’s lower lip quivered. He smoothed his vest, his sleeves, and donned his suit jacket. He arranged the hankie in the pocket. He picked up his pool cue, looked puzzled, laid it down. Large tears appeared in Frank’s eyes. At that moment, Kune came through the doorway.

  “You did this,” Frank whispered hoarsely, and he looked at Kune.

  Kune stood and dripped. He smiled a little, and his teeth showed even and white. His mouth held a hint of excitement. His long blond hair spread from under his watch cap all the way to his belt. Frank touched his pool cue, brushed at a dust mote on his sleeve.

  “The conception which led to your birth was not immaculate,” Kune remarked to Frank. “As a physician, I estimate the whole deal was strained through cheesecloth.”

  Kune seemed fairly happy, which meant he had no bleeding ulcer. “We just had a time jump,” he reported to Maggie. “Three Chinese outside the bank. Gerald investigates.”

  Joel-Andrew sat giving thanks to the Lord for the Irishman’s revival, but feeling guilty because Kune took the blame.

  “Bring the poor man a drink,” Maggie said to Frank, and embarked on her own ministry. “Matter of fact, bring several.” Maggie’s scorn washed over Frank like kelp over a clam.

  Maggie looked at the Irish cop. “He’s new around here.” Maggie pointed toward Frank. “He’s bright enough most of the time. This one,” she explained about Joel-Andrew, “is like being around a cherub on a bender.” She pointed to Kune, “And this one is a dose of salts on the hoof.” To Kune she said, “Help the dear man outta the box.” To Joel-Andrew she said, “Wipe Frank’s nose.”

  Frank reached for a glass, dropped it, heard it shatter. Then all that is fine about Frank came to his rescue. Frank’s upper lip stiffened; his eyes became dutiful, even steely. His shoulders squared. True Victorian gentlemen never show themselves disconcerted by a downward turn in fortune. He chose another glass. His hands did not tremble.

  Kune pointed to the Irishman. “From a medical point of view, this is unlikely. Whatever in the world happened?”

  “Time jump,” Maggie said, and she mused; like wind over the tops of tall branches. Maggie’s eyes warned Joel-Andrew from any explanation.

  “That’s reasonable,” Kune said. “For a moment I was afraid it was one of those things I can’t stand to hear about.” Kune assisted the Irish cop from the coffin. The cop staggered as he gained the floor.

  “Unlikely am I,” the Irish cop muttered. “Me man, when I retrieve me strength, we’ll find out who’s unlikely.” The cop was short but muscular. His eyes sparked blue as Collette’s, and his sandy-colored hair tinged with orange . . . tinged with red, rather. He took a seat at Maggie’s table. “It ought to be Sunday, for ’tis Saturday night we celebrated.” He looked about the room, puzzled, having never before seen a jukebox. In the wet street, a Model T puttered past. The cop looked impressed. “It isn’t Sunday,” he said. “Maggie, tell me true . . .”

  “This is gonna be a shock.” Maggie spoke most kindly. “Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years, but you’ve been pickled for sixty. There’s been changes.”

  “Me partner,” the cop asked, “what happened to me partner?” He remembered the skinny and morose cop who was once such a good spitter, the cop who helped escort August Starling home on the fateful night Starling danced with the corpse.

  “He haunts the jail under City Hall,” Maggie explained. “He beats The Sailor to death every Wednesday at exactly 4:00 PM. It’s hard on The Sailor, but it’s harder on your partner.”

  “Poor, dear man,” the cop said. “Can naught be done about it?” The Irish cop downed two quick glasses, lingered over the third. “The news will surely be bad,” he mourned. “Is anybody left from the auld gang?”

  “A few,” Maggie told him, “all of them on their last legs.” Maggie paused. “Except for August Starling.”

  The cop yelled. Swore. Took hasty gulps.

  Maggie looked at Kune and Joel-Andrew. “He is a sensitive man,” she told them, “and his relatives have all moved away except for Collette. You boys can’t help.” To Joel-Andrew she said, “Play us a bit of Gershwin.” To Kune she said, “Take a hike.”

  The Irish cop seemed ready to break into sobs, ready for another try at getting pickled.

  “Old friend,” Maggie said, “Maggie will explain and get you through your grief. This is what’s been happening . . .”

  Beyond the window Kune stepped
into the rain. A time jump arced like chain lightning. The street, momentarily, lay choked with Chinamen.

  Chapter 17

  November Proceeded apace. Werelight lay over ornate uptown houses and played on tumbling waters of the Strait. In that November, the Strait ran turbulent. Tide-fall and tide-rise confused fishermen, because tides did not follow instructions written in the tide tables. Water licked at tops of bulkheads behind The Fisherman’s Café.

  “Because,” as Maggie told a fisherman on one weirdly lit day, “sometimes the wolves sit silent and the moon howls.” Maggie did not explain, and Frank was too busy tending bar to ask.

  Joel-Andrew played violin each afternoon at Janie’s Tavern. His slight figure, clerical collar, sandy hair, and spidery fingers became familiar to happy-hour regulars. Among the riffraff of Point Vestal, Joel-Andrew gained acceptance as quirky but nice.

  During long winter evenings in The Parsonage, Joel-Andrew made subtle suggestions to Kune about the validity of angels, of grace, of the peace which passes all understanding. Kune said that anything fascinating to a Baptist must have something wrong with it.

  “Don’t get your funk confused with ‘funky,’” Joel-Andrew told him. “Even Baptists have moments.” Joel-Andrew knew that if he opened enough interesting issues, enough possible visions, Kune’s brain would jump into overdrive.

  Samuel still rode circuit. He preached to Indians.

  “We never see Samuel at his best,” Joel-Andrew told Kune. “If we were on circuit, we would learn something.” Joel-Andrew thought the missionary business not unlike the medical business; but in the missionary business, one hoped for permanent results.

  Obed offered neither help nor hindrance. Obed was partly distracted by his shack job, partly because he studied Chinese.

  Meanwhile, Maggie and the Irish cop spent long days in Janie’s Tavern. The Irish cop turned into an interesting fellow—albeit fond of the old sauce—but an embarrassment to his granddaughter Collette. She did not call on him.

  Then our town policeman Gerald, and the Irish cop, spent time together. The cop began wearing Hawaiian shirts with purple flowers.

  The newspaper reported the return of August Starling and the Irish cop as extended time jumps. It seemed the only possible explanation.

  As November proceeded, it became obvious that the Irish cop and August Starling agreed on only two points. They each despised the other, and each did not appreciate all changes the twentieth century had brought to Point Vestal.

  August Starling stood shocked and displeased by the absence of cathouses, and the corresponding presence of generous ladies no better than they should be. “Because,” as he explained at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, “the purity of Point Vestal women is the purity of the unblemished sun, the holy robes of their chastity shining fair light on those strong endeavors rising from our masculine and noble nature.”

  August Starling felt shocked and displeased because no Chinaman came anywhere near Point Vestal during the twentieth century. Plus, the IWW and the labor movement made him livid.

  August Starling liked the new pavement. He liked the 307-step staircase. He thought well of automobiles, telephones, radar, speedboats and smuggling; but he struggled emotionally with the roughshod feminism of the Suffragettes . . . “clacking females subverting fair womanhood.” Coeducation made him ill, though he admired cheerleaders. He shivered and tsked about the Miss America contest, was titillated by television commercials displaying crotches and armpits.

  August Starling could be found simpering on the sidewalk outside Collette’s antique store for a few minutes every day, but he also stayed busy. During the third and fourth week of November, Starling disappeared in the direction of Seattle.

  “We can only hope,” Kune said, “while Starling is checking out drugs, child porn, auto theft, and credit card fraud; we can only hope the mob kills him.”

  “We can only hope,” Joel-Andrew replied with kindness, “that he will become astounded. He will look at depravity and do a one-eighty.”

  “And bears don’t whistle,” Kune quoted Collette, “’cause bears have got gruff snuffs.”

  Joel-Andrew remained serene. “I’ve seen some pretty hard cases turn it around. I’m not asking Starling be perfect. I would like to see him get at least as straight as the Irishman.”

  The Irishman was enchanted with ladies who were no better than they should be. He thought birth control a grand thing, though he looked over his shoulder toward Rome when the subject arose. He felt overjoyed that civilization had pushed wild cougars back into the Olympic Mountains. “For, they used to steal sheep, cattle, wee lads and lasses.”

  The Irishman abhorred Mikey Daniels’s milk truck, “for it has none of the warmth of a cow,” but spoke favorably of jukeboxes with Dennis Day records, of backhoes and bulldozers, dump trucks, forklifts . . . “Anything,” he confided to Maggie, “that shoves the Irish into a higher line of endeavor.” The Irishman enjoyed polyester shirts, electric beer signs—“’tis a fairyland, they are”—and was overjoyed because the street lay free of horses. “Nasty beasts. Just dumb enough to do what you say, just smart enough to resent it. And, oh, Maggie, do you recall the stink of the creatures?” The Irish cop could wax poetic about horse poop, street cleaners mostly Irish, and horse bite suffered by Irish hostlers.

  And during November, werelight cast yellowish and grayish and bluish shadows in places where no objects existed to cause a shadow. Light curled thin and spooky. The newspaper reported an increased incidence of time jumps.

  “Ghosts are skittish,” Kune confided to Joel-Andrew. “I spoke to Bev only this afternoon. She feels the same.” The two men enjoyed a relaxed evening in the basement. Obed visited his kitty-poo on Monroe Street. The all-seeing tower was first to see the ’39 LaSalle pulling off the roadway. Gerald and the Irish cop stepped from the La Salle.

  “Bev is smart,” Joel-Andrew admitted, before he heard footsteps above him. “We should invite Bev and Samuel to one of our evenings.”

  “Not Samuel,” Kune noted. “You’ll remember The Parsonage gave Samuel the old heave-ho.” Kune’s yellow eyes widened. “Someone is walking around upstairs.”

  When Gerald and the Irish cop entered the basement, Joel-Andrew resigned himself to bad news. He figured a bust, or else Obed made the slammer, maybe the hospital. Then Joel-Andrew saw trouble creasing Gerald’s brow, and Joel-Andrew’s heart went out to him.

  “Ghosts are popping like popcorn,” Gerald said. For a moment he blew his control, and flickered. Gerald shoved his cop’s hat to the back of his head. He sat on the stairway beside the Irishman. “Boys,” Gerald said, “there’s stuff going on in town like you don’t even see in a picture show.” Gerald’s face was hawkish, thin, a little lantern jawed. His grayish eyes were steely.

  “You want to put August Starling on ice,” Kune said, “and you’re dead-ended. Starling’s pulled a fast one, and you’re trying to rake up a charge. You figure I can help.”

  “Kune is a diagnostician,” Gerald explained to the Irish cop. “He reads situations, not minds.”

  A couple of mice peered from behind a sofa, discovered Obed’s absence, trotted to the middle of the room. They cuddled against Joel-Andrew’s left sandal. Joel-Andrew leaned forward, absentmindedly rubbed them behind the ears.

  “I ain’t even going to try to explain the preacher,” Gerald told the Irish cop. “His rap sheet says he’s from Rhode Island.”

  “The more facts, the better the diagnosis.” Kune looked pretty happy, which meant he did not suffer from elephantiasis. “What is Starling doing?”

  “A couple of trucks are on a back road,” Gerald said, “loaded with enough stuff to build a brewery—only it ain’t brewery stuff. It’s test tubes and chemical business. It’s stuff for building August Starling’s new pharmaceutical company.”

  Kune looked reflective, remembering his association with prescriptions. “It is a protected field,” he told Gerald, “and Starling will not be allowed in. I
f Starling manufactures drugs, the drug companies will ice him for you.”

  “Plus a South American yacht carrying two speedboats moored in the boat basin. Eight or ten Cubans aboard,” Gerald said, “but I can eat that many Cubans for breakfast.”

  “If Starling deals drugs on that level, the Cubans will ice him.”

  “Plus we’ve got two narcs in town,” Gerald said. He eyed Joel-Andrew suspiciously. “Maybe three.”

  Joel-Andrew felt vaguely misunderstood.

  “We needn’t sweat that,” Kune said, “because narcs are like the CIA. Meaningless, more or less.”

  Joel-Andrew saw Gerald’s problem. Something awful threatened Point Vestal. August Starling imported the ways and values of Seattle. Metaphorically speaking, Mohammed was not going to the mountain, the mountain was coming to Mohammed.

  “This is not a prophecy, only a prediction,” Joel-Andrew told Gerald. “We may soon see a change in ideas about smuggling.” Joel-Andrew rubbed the ears of the mice.

  “Six Sicilians checked into the hotel,” Gerald said. “They’re armed with automatic weapons and drive a limo. They have two women. One woman is a stockbroker, the other talks real estate.” Gerald’s eyes pleaded for understanding. “Mind you,” he said, “six men with machine guns are no problem. I can root ’em out easy as parsnips.”

  The Irish cop watched Joel-Andrew, watched Gerald, watched Kune. The Irish cop knew little about real estate and the stock market.

  “Worst of all,” Gerald said, “and only the Lord knows what to do with this one—there’s another truck”—Gerald’s voice broke—“and it’s loaded with . . . it’s loaded . . . it’s . . .” Gerald’s voice cracked like flaked ice.

  Kune’s yellow eyes reflected terror, a man knowing he would hear an ultimate horror, a blow so cruel it would swizzle the soul.

  “. . . and it’s filled with stainless-steel kitchen stuff and a sign saying ‘burgers’ . . .” Gerald interrupted himself with a sound suspiciously like a sob.