Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One

by Perry P. Perkins

  Beth Marshall, formerly Elizabeth Beckman, once known to her older brother and a certain sandy-haired friend, as the snipe, stepped back from the door and into the kitchen, where William Beckman stood clutching Pete, his stuffed rabbit, fearfully.

  “It’s okay, Billy,” she murmured, taking his hand and rubbing his back, comfortingly, with the palm of one hand, “it’s all right, I think you scared her as much as she scared you. She’s a friend of Jack’s, that’s all.”

  Bill sniffled, brushing tears from his eyes with the back of one hand. “Heard a noise, sissy, thought it was you…”

  “I know,” she whispered, “but it’s still early, you need to go back to sleep. When you wake up, I’ll make us all French toast, okay?”

  Bill forgot his fears at the mention of his favorite breakfast, “Promise?” he asked.

  “Promise,” Beth replied and led the big man back down the hall to his room.

  After tucking her brother in, and switching on the little Looney-tunes night-light by the door, Beth walked back out into the dining room with a frown.

  “Now what in the world was that all about?” she muttered to the empty room. Who was this strange girl that Jack had, more or less, brought home, and what, exactly, was wrong with her? She bent to pick up the picture frame, which had landed face down on the floor. The glass had cracked in the fall and, as Elizabeth Marshall, aka Beckman, aka The Snipe, set the photo back on top on the old piano, she glanced at the picture and froze.

  “Oh my god,” she whispered, her hands beginning to shake, "Oh sweet Jesus…”

  Now she realized why Cassie’s face had stopped her and sent her mind racing furiously for a connection. Hadn’t she seen those same faces peering out at her from this picture for so many years? The faintest mixture of her brother’s face into that of the young woman he had married, but Beth had never met.

  “Oh Lord,” she prayed again, her knuckles turning white around the edges of the frame, “Cassie…”

  Elizabeth turned, the picture still in her hand and, pausing to grab the blanket that covered the back of the couch, she rushed out into the cold morning, the door of Jack’s apartment slamming closed behind her.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  August 1982.

  Outside the stuffy confines of Long Beach Community Church, tourist season was in full swing. For the last four months the music of the carousel, the roar of go-carts, and the smell of popcorn had wafted, dawn to dusk, through the small window of Pastor Karl Ferguson's office. Those, and the goose-like burble of the crowded sidewalks, which rose and fell like the surf, went unnoticed by the two men seated across the wide, cluttered desk from each other.

  Jack felt old, as if he had aged five decades in as many months. Deep, gray circles bruised the flesh beneath his eyes, and the hand that held a tepid can of soda trembled slightly.

  "So," Karl asked, "How's Bill?"

  Jack took a deep breath, rubbing his free hand across the tight, stress-corded muscles at the back of his neck.

  "He has another surgery next month," Jack replied, "they're hoping it's the last one. The plate they put in seems to have been accepted okay, no infection or anything." Jack sighed. "It looks like he'll just have the scar, maybe lose some sight in the one eye."

  He waved a hand down the left side of his own face and Karl nodded. He'd seen the devastation that Bill Beckman caused himself when he pulled the trigger.

  Sometimes, more often than he would have wanted Jack to know, Karl wondered if it might have been better for everyone in general, and his young assistant especially, if Bill hadn't flinched as the pistol went off, the bullet creasing his frontal lobe and exiting above his left temple to leave a ravaged mess of ruined flesh and bone chips in its wake.

  Despite all the Sheriff's certainties, Bill had, indeed, been breathing when the EMTs had wheeled his blood-soaked gurney through the emergency room doors of Ocean Park Hospital.

  Maybe it would have been better if Paul Bradley had been right. Karl knew that his thoughts went beyond being uncharitable, denying a man the chance to accept his salvation, condemning him to everlasting torment, just for the convenience of those around him.

  Jack wasn't the only one who felt older. Bill's attempted suicide had shaken the church, and there was a whispered undercurrent of questions, accusations, and gossip that would flow, like a dark, noxious river, through Karl's beloved congregation for years to come.

  "What about…" Karl continued, "…what about the other thing?"

  Jack set the can down on the corner of the desk with a sigh.

  "His brain?" Jack asked, "Doctor Blanchette keeps saying that it's a miracle he ever regained consciousness, much less his eyesight and speech. He said we should consider it a gift from God that Bill isn't a vegetable, but that we shouldn't hope that he'll ever have more than a six or seven year old’s mentality."

  Karl had glanced up at the sound of raw bitterness in Jack's voice when the younger man spoke of a gift from God.

  He knew, better than anyone, how Jack blamed himself for Bill's actions. The young pastor had tearfully insisted that Bill had somehow known, somehow sensed, Jack's own feelings for Kathy, and had been driven to his terrible deed that stormy night in March, because of that knowledge.

  And, of course, there was the gun.

  The pistol that Jack had inadvertently left on the bookcase shelf, that Bill had found, after waking up alone in the tiny cabin, and carried with him down to the shores of Willapa Bay. Karl knew that Jack blamed himself for all of this, and more. The younger man was plagued with unanswerable questions about Kathy Beckman as well. In the months that had passed, no word had come, no one at the bus station, train station, or taxicab offices had remembered her, or recognized her picture.

  The young woman had simply disappeared into the storms, and the uncertainty of her fate was slowly consuming Jack Leland's soul in an agony of self-loathing and guilt.

  Karl’s voice softened, "Are you sure you want to do this, Jack?"

  For a moment Jack thought his pastor was referring to his decision to accept guardianship of William Beckman, and he closed his eyes, too tired to go another round in thatparticular fight.

  He had told Karl, again and again in the last two months, that if someone didn't take responsibility for Bill, he would end up in an institution somewhere. Some state funded hellhole of an asylum where he would be locked away, only his most basic needs seen to, maybe. A prison for the incompetent, the embarrassing, and the unwanted. Jack knew, somewhere deep inside him, that the knowledge of Bill, existing in a place like that because of him, would quickly drive him mad with guilt.

  Bill had no other family. His sister, Beth, would have liked to help, offered to in fact, when she and her husband Bob had come down to see Bill in the hospital. Jack had seen in one brief glimpse into Robert Marshall's eyes, that Bill wouldn't long be welcome in that home.

  Jack had thanked her, thanked them both, but told them it was important for Bill to be in familiar surroundings for his recovery and rehabilitation.

  And what could be more familiar than the town, and the house that he had grown up in?

  Beth had cried, asking him repeatedly, if he was sure, if he was certain, that he wanted to do this? Jack had told her he was very certain and had put her and her much-relieved husband back on the train, heading east.

  Jack had sat down, in his long hours at the hospital in Seattle, and again here at Long Beach, and worked it out.

  Between the social security that Bill would receive from now on, and the modest income to be had from the oyster farm, they should be able to get by.

  Jack had helped with the sale of a little less than a third of the acreage in June, to pay off the bank, and this year’s harvest was beginning to show a decent return.

  Once the paperwork was complete, he'd move his belongings back up the highway and into the Beckman homestead again. This saved him the pittance of rent he had insisted on paying the Rolf's, since he no longer had time to loo
k after the grounds.

  He had toyed with the idea of cleaning up the old house. Getting it in a condition to sell as one of those bed and breakfasts that were popping up all over the peninsula the last few years. The plan only left one problem, there was just one more spinning plate than Jack could handle. That, he realized, as Karl Ferguson leaned forward and tapped the letter sitting in the middle of the desk was what his pastor's question had been about after all.

  "Are you sure, Jack?" Karl asked again, touching the single sheet of typing paper that held Assistant Pastor Jack Leland's carefully written letter of resignation.

  "Yes," Jack said, around a surprising lump that rose suddenly in his throat, "I'm sure.”

  “I can keep the oyster farm going and take care of Bill, but I can't afford to hire someone to run the farm while I work here, and I can't ask you to pay me what the farm would, to keep my position."

  Jack looked down at the scuffed, wood floor.

  "A year, maybe two, and I'll have the house ready to sell. If my job's still available then, you had better believe I'll come knocking. Until then I'll be as involved as I can, you know that."

  Karl smiled and nodded, but his big heart was heavy.

  The haunted look in Jack's eyes, the bitterness in his voice, and a lifetime of ministry told Karl that Jack might, indeed, return someday, but it wouldn't be in a year or even two. Jack would have a formidable host of personal demons to contend with before he would be ready to accept God's mantle again. What hurt Pastor Ferguson, turning like a knife in his faithful, if weary, soul, was the knowledge that he couldn't do a thing to help his young friend.

  Well, that isn't completely true, he thought, I can pray.

  He could and did, bending his knee and folding his hands each day, speaking grace and mercy into his young friend's life. He would be faithful in his daily supplications over Jack Leland's soul, for a long and rocky decade until he, himself, would at last be called home.

  The two men stood, finally, and shook hands, neither recognizing that Jack's tenure with the church ended almost exactly as it had begun, with a handshake across the big, oak desk on a warm August morning. The bang of the heavy front door echoed down the hallway, sounding to Karl like the closing of a tomb. Jack didn't even notice it as he walked away.

  *

  Bill's paperwork was completed in short order. The gentlemen from the state seemed more than happy, eager even, to let Jack take responsibility for William Beckman. Jack spent his first night back in the old house as the leaves on the big oak tree were turning a deep burnt-umber and making their slow, fluttering migration to the weed-choked lawn. In the early hours of the morning Jack thrashed and moaned in his new bedroom, dreaming.

  He was walking across a wide, hot desert. His mouth caked and dry, his legs trembled with exhaustion. The heat of the midday sun burned against his face and sweat poured from beneath the heavy pack on his back. He trudged on and on, one heavy foot falling in a cloud of alkali dust, wearily followed by the next. There was nothing in sight but the desert, no water, not one shred of merciful shade, only the heat and pain and terrible thirst. Slowly, in the manner of dreams, Jack became convinced that he heard liquid sloshing in the unbearably heavy pack that rubbed at his raw shoulders. Staggering to a halt, nearly swooning in the baking glare of the sun, Jack slipped the pack to the ground. Being a dream, it didn't strike him strange that, though the pack now rested in the burning white sand at his feet, he still felt the unmerciful weight of it bearing down on him.

  Again he heard the tempting, teasing sound of water, coming distinctly from the depths of the pack as, licking cracked and bleeding lips with his parched tongue, Jack noticed buzzards beginning to circle overhead. His fingers fumbled thickly with the knots that held the flap shut and an eternity passed before it was free. Swallowing painfully, he tore open the top of the pack and gagged.

  There, folded impossibly and stuffed into the pack was the body of Bill Beckman. One side of his face was gone, a pulped mass of flesh and bone, crawling with great green and black flies. Blood dribbled from a black hole in his right temple, running a thin rivulet down his cheek and dripping into the depths of the pack. As the maddening buzz of flies filled Jack's ears, he took a horrified step backwards and Bill's eyes opened to stare at him, the left eye bulging grotesquely from the massive internal pressure of the passing bullet. Those staring, distended eyes imprinted themselves on Jack's mind like a boot track in the mud. Slowly, the white heat of the desert overwhelmed him, driving him to his knees, and Bill's head swiveled an impossible two hundred and sixty degrees to follow him to the ground.

  Then that horrible, bulging eye closed slowly, in a ghastly, knowing wink, and Jack woke himself screaming.

  Four weeks later, Bill Beckman came home.

  Jack had moved him into the small bedroom behind the kitchen, as Bill still had some trouble with his balance and the long flight of stairs to the master bedroom could have proven disastrous.

  Along with a small bag of clothing, and a few toiletries, Jack lugged in a heavy bag full of plastic letters, numbers, children's reading books, and several other physical and mental therapy tools. These he scattered across the floor of the living room until he could build a box to keep them in, which he never did. Bill would wander through the room and pick up the ones that caught his fancy and he and Jack would work with those.

  Of the Bill that Jack had known, good and bad, there was no longer any real resemblance. Oh, certainly, the features were the same, give or take the odd bulge or scar, but the hard, wary look was gone. That sharp, intelligent glint was absent in his eyes, and his face had settled into a soft, questioning expression, hanging from his skull, thick and rubbery, ready to laugh or cry.

  In his face, it was clear what Bill had become...a six-foot, two-inch child.

  He was weak, at first, on his right side, but that passed soon enough, though Bill would favor that side and use his left hand (though he'd been right-handed before the accident) for the rest of his life. The doctors had warned Jack that Bill could suffer from seizures, but he'd had yet to have one and the danger of them lessened as the weeks went by.

  The bullet had passed within millimeters of his optic nerve but, amazingly, there was no visual impairment.

  There had been some residual damage to the muscle tissue around the eye, which caused the eyeball to bulge slightly in its socket, and gave that eye a tendency to wander.

  Jack would sit with him, most evenings, amid the educational clutter of the living room floor, and they would sound out the alphabet together, or count painstakingly from one to one hundred.

  By winter, Bill was speaking in full sentences, albeit the faltering and wandering sentences of a youngster, helping Jack work on the house, scraping paint and clearing the weed-covered grounds.

  Still, Bill was a full-grown man, and could be a dangerous responsibility on those rare times that he threw a tantrum.

  After replacing a second window in a month, Jack and Bill took the bus to Seattle and came home with a new prescription in hand. The tantrums ceased almost immediately.

  *

  One evening, during that first winter, after an especially long and difficult day with Bill, Jack had finally gotten him to bed and was cleaning up the mess the former had made of his dinner, having spread it across the far reaches of the dining room.

  Exhausted, defeated, and angry, Jack gathered the dishes and flung them in the general direction of the kitchen sink, taking some perverse satisfaction in the sound of shattering china from that direction. He knew he'd have a bigger mess to deal with later, but he didn't really care. Flopping onto the couch, he sat fuming for an hour, reading the same paragraph of the same book over and over, until he finally rose and started searching the house for some gloves to clean up his owntantrum.

  Gloves, he mused darkly, were one of those many household items that seem to be in every drawer. They were always in the way, when searching for a pen, or scissors, or something else, but just you t
ry to find one pair of gloves when you need them.

  Finally, he stumped down the creaking stairs into the dank, cobwebbed cavern of the cellar. A waist-high workbench sat against one long wall, the width of the house. It was a relic of grandfather Beckman's workshop, and liable to outlive this house and the one to follow. The legs were built from huge, black railroad ties and two-by-fours covered in thick plywood made up the much-pitted surface.

  Great, heavy drawers were built into the table at knee level, and it was here that Jack went searching.

  What he found, instead, there in the moldering gloom, was Bill Beckman's hidden treasure; the one thing that young William had found worthy to invest his hard-earned and much-needed income on. After prying open the last of the deep, creaking drawers, Jack found that half of the three-foot by six-foot interior had been filled with dusty, unopened whiskey bottles.

  There must have been fifty bottles in there, all with the same familiar black label, all filled to the narrow neck with the same dark amber liquid.

  Jack held the first bottle in his hand a long while, gazing down at it as he stood in the dim light of the naked bulb, surrounded by the forgotten, rotting treasures of the dead.

  In his mind’s eye, he could see Bill, on his increasingly frequent trips to the liquor store, buying two bottles at a time.

  Always two.

  The first for his instant gratification, the second to store up against the threat of the unknown; against that day when there might not be even a handful of wrinkled dollars, smelling of sweat and brine, to buy relief for the dry, screeching demon in his throat.

  Minutes passed, five, then ten, and still Jack stood there, unblinking, a great thousand-yard stare on his face as he gazed into the tawny depths of the bottle. Then, with a defiant, agonized growl, he ripped the plastic cap from the bottle.