by David Downie
James went from being stunned to staggered, but he did not have time to speak. “By the way,” she said, “you ever want to trim that mane of yours, let me know, I’ll be happy to do it. Maybe start by plucking the bridge of your nose, and then do your ears and nostrils? I realize they’re part of the disguise, and maybe you aren’t aware of it, but you have beards growing out of them, which may be overdoing it just a tad. It’s not very attractive and must make it hard for you to hear and breathe. I’m guessing you last shaved when your wife passed away less than two years ago, probably about the same time as my Number Three changed his last washer. I have his ashes over there, in that cookie jar on top of the counter.”
James’s incredulous gaze followed the fingers of her raised hand and he saw again the Baker Street sign, the cookie jar nearby it.
“That’s what he wanted, a chocolate chip cookie jar for an urn, he got the idea from that crazy Italian who invented the espresso machine, if you recall, the pope was not amused. I bought an extra big jar, so they can put my ashes in, too, right on top, if they deign to show up and deal with me once I’m Dundee. They did not take to Number Three, no, no, no. I’m talking about my rotten kids, I’m sure you’ve guessed by now. They’re both pushing fifty, and they resemble their fathers, respectively, numbers one and two.”
The landline telephone rang from the office next door just as she was beginning to ask James whether he was an “adept” of Mark Twain and if so, never to speak that demonic name in the presence of the cookie jar. James stood up feeling weak from fatigue and bafflement, but also from unaccustomed laughter. He had been shaken and amused in equal measure by her words. Beverley let the phone ring, then decided to get up and do something about it.
“I know, you have to go back and get to work, that’s what Number Three called his postprandial snore-fests. But I will see you later, after your afternoon walk to the Yono River, at 2:45 P.M. sharpish, which is when you always get back and write your report, is it not? No need to explain, my good sir, I know you’ve got to walk and scribble, same way I’ve got to talk and eat. Do not attempt to object. I have something important to give you. I believe it belongs to you, and you will thank me for my doggedness. Now, don’t forget to move that camper or the Tom Cat will be back like a lion after a deer, or a deer after a rosebud, and watch your step on the beach, someone might take a potshot at you for the hell of it, or for reasons I’m not yet aware of, the ‘yet’ being the operative concept.” She opened the kitchen door to let him out, held up her hand in silent salute, and disappeared into the office singing, “Lordy lord, all right, I’m coming, I’m coming, what’s the rush?”
FOUR
Dipping his long prehensile toes in the swirling purple waters of Five Mile Creek, James felt the habitual tingling of his bare feet from an hour-long walk on cold sand. He also felt an unfamiliar ache in his knees, shoulders, and back. That would be the chainsaw, he reminded himself, and lifting those logs.
From the outside, to people like Beverley, he looked strong and solid, James told himself, but inside, where it counted, he felt the years racking up. Checking his watch, he saw it was 1:25 P.M. Clouds had blown in, momentarily blotting out the sun. The lighthouse at the Headlands was already flashing its semaphore messages to phantom ships. He corrected himself. It wasn’t “already” flashing. The lighthouse never stopped flashing. Way back when, the first time she’d seen it from the windows of the house, his mother had said it was like his heart. If it stopped, life was over.
Calculating again, he estimated he was twenty-five minutes ahead of schedule if he planned on returning by 2:45 P.M. to see what Beverley wanted, and meet her gofer. It wasn’t just the walking and keeping of a diary, as Beverley thought, it was the schedule that kept him sane.
When you have been busy all your life, every day, from before dawn into the night—he told himself in what had become a familiar refrain—your minutes measured by the metronome beat, your sentimental life summed up in your love for your wife of many decades—and your shameful, hidden love for the girl you abandoned all those years ago, before your wife and your career came along—and then one fine day you lose everything, your job and your house and your wife, but not your guilt and remorse, you need something else, a framework, a marching plan, a timetable, to keep you from edging toward self-destruction.
After sawing the cypress and drinking two large bottles of beer over lunch, James had returned to the sterile stuffiness of the RV intending to add a journal entry for the morning. Stretching out, he had fallen into a comatose sleep, a snore-fest, as Beverley described it, waking refreshed just fifteen minutes later, in time for his afternoon walk south to the mouth of the Yono River. Rebelling at the notion of predictability, he decided to walk north again instead, repeating his morning walk. How would Sherlock account for that? he wondered. Moving the RV to the far side of the parking lot, by the garbage cans, to keep the deputy happy, then silently tying Number Three’s yellow sweat suit to the motel’s office door, he had stolen stealthily back through the parking lot and hit the beach, barefoot, almost running, making record time.
Now, with burgeoning black clouds swirling behind Big Mountain, and the winter sun battling the fog in Five Mile Valley, he could barely make out the gingerbread contours of the towering Victorian mansion poised on the bluff on the creek’s north side, rising out of thick river mist. Below it on the beach, three pale crisscrossing concrete buttresses the length of telephone poles had been erected to keep the cliff from crumbling. For how much longer? he wondered. The backyard of the old house was already half gone.
A foghorn moaned. Marine diesels roared in the distance, probably tenders to the oil ships docked offshore, he reasoned, given the lack of local fishing activity, unless he was wrong, and it was a helicopter he was hearing.
Watching as lights snapped on, first in an upstairs bedroom in the fog-wrapped house, then in the main stairwell and the living room, James imagined the unknown occupant navigating in the dusky afternoon twilight of the mansion, flipping other light switches. Counting to five, military-style, as his father had taught him, he watched the silhouette move from one-one-thousand to two-one-thousand, the kitchen and side porch lights coming on in rapid succession.
Was the bench seat still there, fronting the bow window, and did children still thrill when lifting the trapdoor and hiding their toys underneath? Where he and his teenage friends had made out in candlelit secrecy, in the closet under the basement stairs, had new generations also swept aside the mothballs, and killed the black widow spiders, and scattered the floor with their clothes and half-naked bodies?
Closing his eyes and hearing the foghorn’s moan, James could smell the mothballs and the loamy, sweet, fresh-caught coho scent of her on his fingers, her adolescent moans merging now with the moans of the sea and surf and foghorn. Madeleine. Damn you, Maggie! Will you never leave me be?
Wrestling himself away from her shadow, his mind’s eye focused again on the inside of the mansion. He saw the brass light switches high on the varnished paneling, the round screen of the black-and-white TV set built into a tall wooden cabinet, his parents’ overstuffed armchairs, and the heavy carved furniture, the beaten tin ceiling, and baby-blue paint. What color were the walls now, and who were the new owners or renters? Would they let him in to look around, for old time’s sake? What would they think when he asked to visit the attic?
Wading farther into Five Mile Creek, he felt the numbing water reach his knees and moisten the rolled tops of his jeans. Years of drought had reduced the flow, but the springs at Narrow Rocks on Big Mountain clearly had not run dry. Could fish still swim up to the hatchery, he asked himself, or had all his father’s hard work restoring the riverbed gone to waste? An instinctive understanding of why this had always been sacred territory to the Yono, and why they had been willing to die to protect it, filled him with somber thoughts in the cold, wet silence.
That silence was slivered by the sudden silvery cry of seagulls swirling up from the
driftwood and circling overhead.
Hidden by boulders, the swimming hole they had called the rock pool was another hundred feet or so upstream. Legend had it a bear created the pool so a Yono chief’s daughter could bathe in it safe from the sea—but not from the white man.
The ford of Five Mile Creek was halfway down to the tide line from where he stood, shivering, at one with the water, sky, and fog. In this season, before the putative winter rains, he could probably still wade across without getting the crotch of his swimsuit wet. But he was no longer that teenager wearing a swimsuit, and he dared not ford Five Mile and knock on the wide oaken door of the old house, not yet.
A trail ran along the creek’s meandering south bank inland, mounting slowly like a fish ladder, disappearing under outstretched fir and beech branches as it curved and rose past the hatchery toward Narrow Rocks, he recalled, tempted to boot up and follow it now.
The Yono Headlands, where the mill had been, were another two miles north. Maybe tomorrow or the next day he would feel up to walking there. In the abstract, he was prepared to face reality, to scramble up the cliffs and hang onto the fencing and stare into a dead, ruined world. For years, when he lived in the city and moved around the country climbing the professional ladder, he had quietly followed developments at the Headlands, often as reported by dissident voices whose blogs and websites periodically disappeared. Even before the Internet, he had read in the newspapers about the protests in the woods east of Carverville, and the plant closure at the Headlands, the end, first, of the big-tree mill, then the small-tree mill, then the chipboard and plywood production lines.
The promontory northwest of town had belonged to the mill’s owners for over a hundred years. There were no on/off switches there. Everything ran 24/7 and the town prospered. Surrounded by eight-foot fences topped with razor wire, a kingdom with armed guards at the entry and exit gates, this had been the Carvers’ Oz. Everyone, in what had long ago become a company town, had feared and respected and sometimes loved and admired the Carver clan since the arrival of Samuel J. Carver Sr., in 1868, and the incorporation and naming of Carverville a few years later. They were stern but fair masters, the local hagiographies claimed. The forests for fifty miles around were carefully if unsentimentally managed, the harvests limited to replacement value. Then Washington-Pacific Corporation had quietly bought out the family, whose bored heirs had migrated to the city, losing interest in the unglamorous, over-mature industry of their forebears. The junk bond collapse had hit, the company’s timber resources were clear-cut, and the denuded coastal lots parceled off to real estate developers. That was when the clashes between law enforcement and demonstrators began, when a protest organizer’s car had blown up, and the first disappearances were reported. Carverville’s death sentence had been pronounced when the Downburst had hit nationwide in the late twenty-teens. It was the worst downturn since the Great Depression, much worse than the Great Recession of 2008. The rest was, as the locals he’d talked to said, not history but mystery, a small-town tragedy few beyond the county would ever hear of or care about. Other parts of the country had rust belts. Here, people said, was the sawdust belt.
Chilled by the rushing water, James turned to leave. He was surprised to see a jogger appear from nowhere, out of the mist on the far bank of Five Mile Creek running north, disappearing again into the fog. It had a sulfurous tang, like rotten boiled eggs. The refinery at the pipeline terminus, twenty miles north, must be coming on tap, he told himself, or they were flaring more gas than usual on the offshore derricks. Maybe that’s what would revive Carverville—petrochemicals and gas, the bountiful accursed blessing of what had been, when he was growing up, a pristine wilderness, a “lost” coastline.
Weighed down with leaden reflections, he began the three-mile walk back to the parking lot and Beverley. Chasing dark premonitions away, James forced himself to smile, admiring the way the winter sun turned ribbons of fog into glowworms, and though he hated to admit it to himself, he was glad to have something to do for the rest of the day. After seeing Beverley, he might ride his bike into town, run some errands, and do a load of laundry. He could have a cappuccino and a bear claw at the old diner, a holdover from his youth, and read The Carverville Lighthouse, the town’s heirloom newspaper. He might even stay out and dine at the old deli down on Bank Street or, god forbid, have a drink at old Mulligan’s.
Old, old, heirloom, old . . . Here I go again. He stopped himself and shook his shaggy head. He was getting old not only in body but in spirit, and she would be an old lady if she were alive, if he could find her.
What perplexed him most as he marched along, watching the breakers hitting the beach, was the desire he felt to get back to the garden of the Eden Resort, as Beverley had requested or, rather, had commanded. Disquieting, Beverley, the unlikely Laughing Tater, with dyed orange-red hair, reminded him of someone, but he could not think of whom. James was sure he had not met her before, not in town and not in any of the cities they had shared. Tom, the sheriff’s deputy, had said she was an out of towner. Surely in her nonstop recitatives she would have mentioned it if she had grown up or lived in Carverville, as he had decades ago. What was the real backstory on her?
He also could not help wondering how she had guessed so many things about him, right down to his childless marriage, Amy’s death, and his professional life as a lawyer and judge. Perry Mason? He wished. Her knowledge seemed uncanny. Nothing on the outside of the RV gave away his identity, and she had not been inside it. Or had she? Sometimes he forgot to lock up the vehicle, or left it unlocked so as not to have to carry keys. He hated carrying things, especially keys. The lease for the RV was in the name of a business partner in New York, not his own. He had always paid in cash in the stores and restaurants in town to avoid anyone noticing his name on a credit card, not that he had anything to hide now that they had defanged him.
Once upon a time, he might have thought himself paranoid for behaving and thinking this way. But he knew he wasn’t paranoid. It wasn’t him, it was the world that had changed. Certain people, in certain places, had been out to get him, and he knew how far they could reach. Did they know he was here? He remembered the deputy’s words: “If we knew, they’d be behind bars . . .”
With the wind kicking up, the waves, already high, slammed down on the long straight beach, flinging flotsam, jetsam, and detritus up the foam-specked sand, sometimes reaching the saw grass, beach bur, and ice plants cloaking the dunes. Avoiding the glistening balls of sticky black tar washed in from the derricks, James picked a swerving path between tangled tentacles of kelp, bone-like driftwood, puckering plastic, and algae-bearded Styrofoam, his usual pace slowed by the loose sand and extra mileage. Logs, some of them twenty or thirty feet long, some with branches and root balls still attached, lolled like dying whales pushed up the beach by successive sets of waves.
Storm season, the deputy had said, that was an additional danger.
Scanning the strand as he went, he noticed the dead feral hog was gone, and so was the crushed shopping cart, both dragged back out to sea.
By the time he came in sight of the trail up the cliffs, he had resolved for the third or fourth time to get whatever it was from Beverley, ride his bike into town, take care of his chores, and then maybe, depending on how he felt, drop by the Eden Resort the next morning to lend a hand with the stump and the fence. He was tired and sore and had had plenty of company for one day.
Stooping to pick up a pile of spent gun cartridges lying in the sand, he dropped them one by one into the right-hand pocket of his windbreaker, hearing them tinkle against the ones he had collected that morning. Why had Beverley been watching him? How did she know so much? And who had shot at his RV? A stray bullet, he told himself, it must have been a bunch of teenagers partying on the beach.
His boots swinging from around his neck, his hands clasped behind his back, he made his way across the final stretch of sand and rock and began to climb the ravine. The experiment was proving inconclusive,
he said to himself, trying to frame a logical argument and remain dispassionate. It was nearly always a mistake to go back, anywhere, especially after an absence of so many years, and especially now, with the county under lockdown, one of the worst places in the entire country for law enforcement abuses. Fleeing abroad had made the most sense. But they had made it impossible for him to renew his passport. In a hurry to leave the city, and unsure where to turn, he had flown to New York, then spent eight months meandering state to state in the RV, looking for a place to love, driven by an unknown force farther and farther north by northwest, into his past. He knew he should pull out the blocks again, now, this afternoon, and go somewhere else, before it was too late. Yet he felt compelled to stay, to continue exploring the coast and interior, trying to find what remained, what had become of the places and people of his youth, and what had become of her.
Yes, he confessed to himself for the umpteenth time since his return to Carverville, thinking of the priests and psychologists he’d spoken to over the years. Yes, I admit it, she is the real reason. She is the magnet drawing my compass needle.
Counting the seventeen treads of the wooden stairs as he marched up the cliff to the parking lot, James reached out and parted the saw grass masking the edge of the bluff, glancing up as he went. Waiting at the top were a pair of windblown, backlit forms. Had the deputy come back with reinforcements? he wondered. Drawing nearer and shading his eyes, he saw that one of the silhouettes looked like a large mauve-and-pink avocado. It was flanked by a towering bread stick wrapped in a flapping tablecloth. “Strange,” he muttered to himself, he had eaten hearty at lunch. “But hunger must be getting the better of me.” Recognizing Beverley, he guessed the bread stick in baggy overalls was her helper, Taz.
Slung around the boy’s long slender neck were a pair of orange safety earmuffs, the kind worn by construction workers. Thin wires dangled from his prominent earlobes and a goofy expression animated his coppery, rubberized face. The boy had blue eyes the color of his own, of swimming pools in La La Land on a cloudless summer day. His long eyelashes were the lashes of a camel or a llama.
