by David Downie
TWO
In the dusky undergrowth, James paused to nose the air and clear his mind, relieved the nervous, greenhorn deputy had not carded him or asked more questions. The plaintive sounds of foghorns, wind chimes, and whirligigs in need of oil sucked him into a tunnel of time gone by. Beverley had led him down the rutted highway, across a gravel parking lot, through a seven-foot deer fence, past the ranch-style motel, then under a tangle of low branches to a path covered with fragrant wood chips, leading to the bottom of the property. On the way, she had said there were five cottages and ten acres, though half were overgrown, and two of the cottages were closed until further notice. The land was sliding into Greenwood Gulch on the south side.
The farther west they walked, the louder the surf pounded. The beach was only twenty feet below, when they stopped on the edge of a thicket. A foghorn moaned.
“This way,” she said. “Watch the gopher holes.”
Lying at odd angles inside a large wooden shack, its door open and swinging on a single rusty hinge, were the chainsaw, gardening tools, and a wheelbarrow. The shack and a nearby potting shed edged a clearing that had once been paved but was now puckered and pocked with sea turnip, wild fennel, eucalyptus, and bay laurel seedlings. Piles of lumber and rusting crab pots lay covered by corroded green tarps. A stand of mature blue gum trees rose ghostly and shivering into the mist along an unpaved access road topping the cliffs. Beyond a clump of honey-scented purple buddleia and clotted blue ceanothus, James made out the banisters of a wooden staircase. It was lichen frosted, bleached and sandblasted by the wind. Zigzagging down to the rocks and beach, it ended in knotted clumps of wind-burned, brittle flowering ice plants dangling from the sandy verge. The air smelled of salt and skunk, honey and eucalyptus oil, bay leaf and cypress. James closed his eyes and felt tears welling up.
“The resort’s dock used to be down there,” Beverley said, raising a pink-tipped finger. “One of the former owners had a boat and fished.” Three years ago, a storm had dragged the pier away and washed out the access ramp from the garden. The cliff had collapsed, leaving fence posts suspended by lengths of barbed wire. “There was no point repairing anything,” she added. The land wasn’t likely to stop sliding. No one came with a boat anymore, either. Slickers up from the city didn’t drag boats, and the folks who did didn’t stay at the Eden Seaside Resort & Cottages. “Besides,” Beverley continued, the flow of words unstoppable, “there are no fish around to catch, not even crabs, not since the big spill last winter.”
It was strange how memory played tricks, James reflected. Beverley’s running commentary followed him in and out of the shack, killing all thought while he rousted out the tools he would need to saw the tree. The gophers had gone wild, she said, the skunks and raccoons were engaged in civil war with one another and the feral hogs, and the Japanese creeper with whitish-yellow flowers was choking everything, even the cottage behind the main building, where she lived. She ought to drag out those old animal traps, she added, set them up and get rid of the pests and vermin, but who had the time?
Loading the wheelbarrow with the heavy old yellow chainsaw, a gas tank, and a tool kit, James half listened, remembering the slope of the land as steeper, the rocks on the beach as taller, the white, green-trimmed Beachcomber Motel as bigger and longer and closer to the paved highway. Greenwood Creek had seemed a real river then, not a dry gully half filled by landslides, and Mr. Egmont had moored his varnished wooden fishing boat at the dock at its mouth at the end of a long gently sloping ramp. James didn’t have a clear recollection of all the cottages, but at least two, built in the 1940s or ’50s, must have been around during his adolescent years. One of them, called Sea Breeze, had been here, that was sure. Predictably the trees and shrubs had grown, like the invasive vines cloaking them. Still, he could not have imagined the contours and landscaping changing so much from the days of his youth, subsiding and shrinking like Alice in Wonderland nibbling her magic mushroom. What had it been, thirty-eight years, forty or more?
Beverley insisted he wear goggles and gloves, and would not allow him to start the chainsaw until he had put them on, citing OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. As he bucked the downed cypress, the citrus scent mixed with the smell of burning Castrol from the worn-out, leaking saw. The greasy sawdust rained down and sprayed sideways. Beverley moved to a safe distance, clapping her boneless hands and shouting words of encouragement he could not hear. She watched him in turn adjust and lubricate the chain, wield the long blade, refill the tank, and restart the engine by holding the starter cord and dropping the saw like a yo-yo.
“You must have been a woodsman,” she enthused, all trace of irony gone, “I have never seen the like of it, you are as good with that saw as my husband was, I swear to god. I sure wouldn’t want to cross saw blades with you, Paul Bunyan, you’d make mincemeat out of any murderer.”
James did not care for sugar but devoured three sickly sweet cinnamon rolls and drank two mugs of strong black coffee, perching on the thick, scarred trunk of the cypress and staring out to sea, where a silvery glint caught his eye. Was it the shopping cart again, he wondered lazily, or some other stainless-steel relic rocked by the waves?
Prickly with sweat and sawdust, badger eyed from the goggles, his arms and lower back aching as they had not in years, he watched the glinting ocean and waited placidly for Beverley to return from town with more gas and two-stroke oil. The McCulloch was an amazing piece of machinery, he mused, speculating about the object that had caused the saw blade to sparkle and jam as he cut the cypress’s roots. Remembering the ghoulish lore about the graveyard that once covered the site where the motel now stood, James fell to thinking about the times he had sat in the shade of the cypress those many years ago, happy to be alone, away from his parents. The foghorn mewling and the whirligigs spinning, he could not help shaking his head and smiling. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt something akin to contentment, even happiness.
By mid-morning, James had cut and hauled the top ten feet of the fallen tree out of the seaside parking lot through the gap, and assembled enough fir planks, a hammer, and a box of nails from the shed, to patch the broken section of fence and prop it up.
“That ought to hold for now,” he said, surprised to hear the satisfaction in his voice. “What time does your gardener show up? I’ll give him a hand with the stump and the fence if you like.”
“My what?” Beverley asked. “Taz? He’s no gardener.” She guffawed. “He doesn’t know the difference between a macrocarpa and a chinook. You come back over later and meet him, will you,” she urged, “show him how to use that saw.”
“It’s nearly as old as I am,” he said, easing the McCulloch, its engine still hot, into the wheelbarrow, then starting downhill past the cottages before she could deflect him. “You ought to take it in and get it rebuilt.” He felt his eyes tingling again but refused to believe the discovery of the worn-out chainsaw, and the presence of the Sea Breeze cottage and cypress tree, could move him so deeply when he had rarely wept in adulthood.
“It came with the property,” Beverley gasped, catching her breath as she trotted after him. “Like all those darned rusted crab pots and traps and other junk I can’t seem to get rid of. Taz will have to take them to the dump one day, when he gets his driver’s license.”
Taz was her stopgap gofer, she explained as they raced toward the shack. He was a teenager paid by the hour to do the heavy lifting, the grandson of a friend of hers. Taz was a good kid despite his strange looks, she said, a polite kid, but he was all thumbs—thumbs hypertrophied from chronic overuse of handheld electronic devices, and Taz didn’t have a license or learner’s permit yet, so his usefulness was limited. Luis, the former gardener and handyman, was no longer in her employ, and neither for that matter was Luis’s wife, Imelda, the maid, who had also been deported. Despite the unemployment rate in Carverville, Beverley had not found anyone reliable to replace them.
“I called hi
m Mow, and I called her Blow,” she said, short of breath, “and man did they work, the lawn was perfect and the rooms neat as a pin. Good people, I’m telling you. Their kids still live in town, in that little pink house near the bypass. They’re American citizens.”
Muttering something about needing a shower and a shave and maybe a sandwich and a nap, though it was only eleven in the morning, James suddenly felt trapped. He hurriedly followed his footsteps back toward the parking lot with Beverley puffing behind.
“Oh no, sir,” she called out, catching up when he took a wrong turn into a grove of flowering maple trees. “Now you’re going to have some of my fine home cooking. You can’t scamper to your camper and eat a cold lunch.”
Despite himself, James laughed at the silly lilt of her words. “I’ve got to,” he began to say.
“You’ve got to follow me,” Beverley interrupted. She held her string of pearls with the fingers of both hands and shook her head with what seemed to James perilous vigor. No one had checked in to the resort that morning, she said, and no one had reserved a room for the night. This was the lowest of the low season. She’d made French beef stew with carrots, and there was steamed rice and a couple bottles of cold beer in the fridge if he wanted, or else a jug of white wine.
Staring at her through his bushy eyebrows, James wondered aloud why she wasn’t wary of inviting him in. “Look at me,” he blurted out. “I might be a madman or a murderer.”
“Yes, and I might be Salome and dance around, then cut off your head.” She laughed. “No, I am not afraid of you, Monsieur Bunyan, au contraire, as they say in Paris, you might be an asset, especially if armed, and later I will tell you why.”
Puzzled, and reeling from the physical workout, the sugary cinnamon rolls, and the overdose of caffeine, a wave of fatigue, curiosity, and loneliness struck him. He did not have the strength to resist, so he followed Beverley out of the woods and across the patchy lawn, past the tuneful wind chimes hanging from the back porch. They entered a small overheated office. It was tiled in pink and white, he noticed. The curtains were mauve and studded with eights and nines of clubs, matching the pattern and color of Beverley’s stretch pants.
THREE
Go on in and have a hot shower while I pop lunch in the microwave,” Beverley commanded. “How can you take a proper shower in that camper of yours? Maybe that’s why you look like Rasputin and smell like a raccoon.”
James was getting used to her style. “Thank you, I won’t,” he objected. “I wouldn’t want to put these dirty clothes back on after a shower.”
Pursing her lips while pinching her pearls, she appraised him. “You don’t have to put anything back on if you don’t want to, my good man. I am not being indecent. I can give you a giant gym outfit my husband used to wear. I called him the White Rhino, not for that famous play whose author’s name escapes me but for his anatomy, because he was an XXXL, and though you’re as skinny as a pike and as furry as a bear, you’re awfully tall, so I think you might just fill his clothes out.”
She bustled into a laundry room, reappearing with the outfit and a fluffy mauve towel. “Feel free. Use that bathroom down the hall, the door on the left, with the nine of clubs on it. The door on the right with the eight of clubs is the gun room and it’s locked up tight, believe me. Sometimes I called the Rhino the Great White Hunter. He liked that. He had seventeen guns, I’ll tell you why down the road apiece.”
She watched James stoop to untie his boots, muttering again, this time about mud and wood chips and tar from the beach.
“You don’t have to take those off,” she said, shooing him along, “I’ll sweep up afterward, if I need to. Now go on and make yourself presentable.”
“You can’t sweep up tar,” he objected.
“No tar on your boots.” She laughed. “They were tied around your neck and they’re brand-new. Believe me, I already looked before I spoke.”
James knew she was right, yet he hesitated before clomping down the hallway, his boots untied and halfway off. Closing the bathroom door behind him, he shook his head, surprised by Beverley’s manner and apparent fearlessness. It was an act of courage or recklessness to be so trusting and outspoken, especially when so many constitutional rights had been suspended across the land.
He was even more surprised to find himself inside the old Beachcomber Motel after nearly forty years. Surely that was a good thing, part of the process of closure? Or was it redemption he sought? He still wasn’t sure. Maybe he was flattering himself and intellectualizing. Maybe he was plain old nostalgic and hoping against the odds that he’d find her here, or at least discover where she had gone. Maybe the ugly truth was that guilt had eaten at him for his entire adult life, guilt and wounded pride, ever since the day he’d left Carverville, and left her behind.
When he’d figured out some way to get back into the old house on the bluff, and the old mill grounds, and the old lighthouse, maybe then he would understand why he’d come back.
“Old, old, old,” he groaned, chiding himself. Everything in his life was old now, even the adjectives he used.
Stripping naked in the spartan, pink-tiled bathroom, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and was taken aback by his twisted mop of matted hair, his wild-man beard, and the paleness of his flesh. His ribs rose out of what had been a washboard stomach. Though still strong, his muscles had shrunk, and his skin sagged. People had called him Bean Pole when he was young, or Slim, or Bones, but no one other than Beverley had ever called him a pike. He wasn’t sure he liked it. Pikes made him think of battle axes and heads on pikes, or bony, aggressive fish, or pikers. He was many things, most of them pernicious, perverse, or downright dangerous if you believed the fake news stories that had circulated about him. But no one, not even the Russian trolls who’d helped bring him down, had ever accused him of being a tightwad and piker.
Opening the hot water tap, he waited until the steam started to rise, then fed in a small stream of cold water, and stepped underneath. Beverley was right. Ever since he had leased the RV in New York, he had limited himself to quick showers, to save water and avoid having to refill the tanks. He knew the drill everywhere in the West was to wet yourself, turn off the shower, scrub then rinse. It was joyless, a reality check. The drought was into its eighth season, they said, though it seemed more like ten or fifteen seasons to him, coinciding with the dawn of the “new” era. It was the “new normal,” an expression he had come to loathe. If normality was drought, then drought meant nothing, just as truth, freedom, and the rule of law meant nothing anymore.
But he could not bring himself to turn off the steaming hot stream. He had forgotten what a pleasure a shower could be. Rinsing the sawdust from his hair and beard, he lathered up again using a different bottle of shampoo, realizing too late it was strawberry scented. Like the noise and the smell of the chainsaw, the strawberry scent took him back to the 1970s. He knew why, recalling the Sea Breeze cottage, her scent, and the strawberry-blond color of her hair. “Maggie,” he muttered, groaning again, then forced himself to stop thinking of her. It was her fault as much as his, her fault more than his. But what did fault matter after all these years, these decades and lifetimes separating them?
Fishing deeper for happier memories, he came up with the image of a mild, white-haired man in the motel’s sloping garden, Mr. Egmont, showing him how to prune the roses. “Count down four knots from the hip and snip clear through at a forty-five-degree angle,” Egmont had said, standing behind, his arms around James’s adolescent shoulders, guiding James’s eyes and fingers. “Remove the cross branches like this, to make a bowl . . .”
Egmont had no son of his own. He had no wife, either. He drove a white Lincoln Continental, and the Beachcomber Motel was painted white with green trim, surrounded by an expanse of white gravel and green lawn, like a golf course, reaching down to the creek and the beach.
James had been fourteen, or had he just turned fifteen, when his family had relocated to Carverville? Richard Nixo
n was president, a man had walked on the moon, and flags and draft cards were burning in Berkeley, Chicago, Boston, and New York. All four were cities James had seen, albeit briefly as his family migrated west following his cantankerous father’s postings. He had soon discovered the only things the locals were likely to set alight in Carverville were backyard barbecues, beach bonfires, and campfires on Big Mountain, where the giant firs reached two hundred feet into the crystalline cloudless sky.
Insisting they stay at the Pink Flamingo Motel on the strip in downtown Carverville, his mother, in a permafrost of sadness, had made a face when his father had chosen the Beachcomber instead, precisely because it was isolated, impractical, and old-fashioned. They had lived in Sea Breeze for three or four weeks, waiting for the painting to be finished and the furniture to arrive at the house they had purchased on Five Mile Creek. That was another thing his mother had resented. The house was too big to heat and too far out of town—exactly five miles north of the Yono River and the town’s old fishing harbor—for James to walk to it from Carverville High. But it was convenient to his father’s new job at the Wildlife & Fish Department’s headquarters.
During those first weeks at the Beachcomber, Mr. Egmont had taught James to prune and graft, transplant trees, and use a chainsaw, the same yellow chainsaw he had found in the shack. It seemed inconceivable. How could it have survived? Egmont had even let him drive the Lincoln around the parking lot and pilot the handsome old wooden powerboat when they went out before dawn to drop crab pots. Egmont had been a hands-on man, a believer in physical proximity. Nowadays he would probably be charged with pedophilia, James reflected, though in truth he had never done anything lewd, limiting himself to the occasional paternal touch or avuncular caress, the only warm gestures or acts of physical closeness James had known in the arctic of his youth. In reality, “old” Mr. Egmont and his white or gray hair had probably been in his fifties, younger than James was now. He could still be alive but if so, where? If dead, where was his grave? James wondered.
