Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One

by Perry P. Perkins

  *

  The years of abuse were starting to take their toll, and over the winter of 1991, Jack was hospitalized twice for an irregular heartbeat. The doctors gave him the same choices both times, stop drinking or die.

  Bill remained much as he had been since the accident, much as he would forever remain, a child in an aging man's body. Both men grew a bit thicker at the waist and thinner at the hairline, though in contrast to the lines that began to etch Jack's face, Bill's appeared to remain untouched by time. Life seemed as though it would continue, unchanging and unchangeable, until time claimed one or both of them, as it had Karl Ferguson. This was Jack's only real concern during those dark years, when his mind was lucid enough to worry: who would take care of Bill, when his guardian finally drank himself to death?

  One cool June morning, a Saturday, Jack rose at first light.

  After scrambling up some eggs and oysters, a dish known to the locals as Hangtown Fry, he bustled around the house, preparing for their weekly visit to the bookstore.

  Dottie had assured him the latest John Grisham legal thriller would be in that week, and Jack was excited to get the book in his hands.

  After showering, hunting up some clean clothes, and making himself as presentable as possible, Jack loaded Bill into the pickup and they headed into town. First stop was the Coffee Clutch (now owned by some big, nationwide company, but Jack refused to call his little java brewery by any other name) for their weekly mocha. Then they briefly admired the new house of worship that had risen, phoenix-like from the ashes of his former church.

  Though the pastor's name, etched into the hanging wooden sign, was unfamiliar, the building itself was still "Long Beach Community Church.” There was, Jack knew, a marble plaque above the double doors of the new fellowship hall that proclaimed it to be dedicated to the memory of Karl Michael Ferguson.

  Knowing that always seemed to start his Saturday off a little brighter.

  As the pickup rounded the corner onto the sixth street, Jack noticed a police car parked near the staircase leading up to Dottie's little apartment.

  One of the new Long Beach deputies stood beside the cruiser filling out paperwork as they parked. He saw Jack and waved, more than a cursory acknowledgment, but a ‘well there you are, get over here’ gesture. The windows of the shop were dark, and the front door's small cardboard sign, which should have been flipped an hour before, still read closed.

  Jack stepped from the truck and up onto the curb, trying to remember the young officer's name. Brett? Brent? Something like that. The gold nametag above the pressed pocket of his uniform shirt was no help, reading B. Hallworth.

  "Hey Jack." Officer Hallworth greeted him, shaking his hand warmly, "Sheriff Bradley just sent me to go find you, must be ESP or something. I sure wish you'd get a phone out there."

  Jack considered, briefly, telling him that it wasn't anything as esoteric as ESP; Saturday's were just the only mornings that he wasn't too drunk to drive. He dismissed the urge, deciding the humor might be lost on the eager-beaver young cop. Besides, he liked the kid, whatever his name was.

  "That a fact?" he asked, turning and giving Bill a reassuring nod, but motioning for him to stay in the truck.

  "Jack," he said, the grin slipping from his face, "I'm afraid I have some bad news."

  Jack looked up at the tiny, unlit window of the apartment. It didn't take a genius to figure out what the young officer was going to say. Dottie was creeping up on her nineties now, and had never opened the doors of her shop a minute past eight in the morning in all the years that he had known her. The last few months she had seemed to be slowing down a bit. She had asked Jack to help her pick up deliveries with his truck a time or two, and place a few orders on the computer when her eyes hurt. Still, being able to take care of herself and a business, at her age, had lent an air of immortality to the cantankerous old woman, and Jack had never thought of her actually being gone someday. She had waggled a disapproving finger at him, the last time he had asked her about retirement plans, glaring at him over her hipster glasses.

  "You can just pack that talk right back in your ditty-bag, Mister!" She had said, her mouth wrinkling down into a contemptuous frown of disapproval.

  "Some of us still have work to do," she'd glowered, "and I'll tell you this, the only way they’re going to get Dottie Westcott out of here is to carry her out, feet first!”

  Standing on the sidewalk with Officer B. Hallworth, Jack felt a sudden flood of sad relief that he hadn't shown up an hour earlier to see that very thing.

  "When?" he asked softly.

  "Well, barring an autopsy," Hallworth replied, "the guess is around midnight, maybe one o'clock. I'm sorry, Jack."

  There was a long silence, and the young policeman shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Jack felt tears fill his eyes, but he blinked them back, scowling and biting the inside of his cheek until the wave of emotion passed. Dottie was no Karl Ferguson, and her reception into eternity was a much more questionable thing. One more weight, one more burden of guilt, as Jack thought of all the hours he had spent in this little building, talking, laughing, and arguing with her. Maybe he should have been more concerned with Dottie's soul than with her opinion of him.

  Had he ever asked her?

  Even back in those first weeks when he was still a pastor, when he had still felt worthy of raising the subject of salvation with another human being? Had he? He didn't think so, and the burden for the old woman's destiny slowly settled on his tired, but obliging shoulders.

  Officer Hallworth cleared his throat, and the sound brought Jack back to the moment.

  "One of her customer's came by to pick up a book that Ms. Westcott was holding for her," Hallworth said, "when the woman couldn't get an answer from the shop, or at the apartment, she got worried and called us. We found Dottie in her bed; looks like she went peacefully, in her sleep."

  "Well," Jack said, "thank God for that much, I suppose. What did Bradley want me for?"

  "For this," a voice like a bag of broken glass spoke from the upper landing, deep and gravely from a lifetime of cigarettes. "We found this on her desk; it has your name on it."

  Sheriff Paul Bradley descended the staircase, each wooden step creaking beneath his six-foot-six frame, and his broad shoulders brushing the side of the building. The years, if they had any effect at all, had only touched the big man's close-cropped auburn hair and mustache, peppering them with gray. As he reached the sidewalk, he held out a large, mustard colored manila envelope. Jack took it and saw that his name was written plainly in the center, in Dottie Westcott’s firm block script. In the upper corner was stapled a white business card with the name and number of a Vancouver law firm, and the name of an Alan Jarrell, Attorney at Law.

  "What's this?" Jack asked, looking from one cop to the other.

  "Dunno," Bradley replied shortly, "Envelope's sealed, your name’s on it, so I thought it'd be best if you were the one to open it."

  Jack felt somewhat unnerved as he gazed at the envelope, then a thought struck him. "You don't think that I…"

  Sheriff Bradley uttered a short, unpleasant bark of a laugh.

  "Please Jack," he grimaced, "Dottie Westcott was ninety-three years old, and everyone knows that you were the only soul on the planet that she said more than ‘morning’to. I just thought that if she wanted you to have it, it might be important to get it to you before her belongings were dealt with. It's probably a little out of line with police procedure, but you're one of us here and, as long as you dry yourself out before you climb behind the wheel, we'll try to watch out for each other."

  Jack saw Hallworth's eyes widen at his boss's bluntness, but Jack just nodded. Bradley was doing him a favor, in his own way, and, after all, Jack wasthe town drunk. No offense taken.

  "Thanks Paul," he murmured, slipping his thumb beneath the sealed flap and tearing it open. Inside was a single sheet of paper, an ostentatious gold and black masthead named the same law firm that was listed on the
business card.

  Jack was surprised to see the letter was addressed to him.

  It requested that he call the firm, at his earliest convenience, to begin proceedings to transfer title and ownership of the Sand Castle Bookstore, the contents thereof, and the estate of Dorothia Jean Westcott into his name.

  Jack stared at the paper blankly. "I don't…I don't understand…" he stuttered.

  Bradley, who had shamelessly read the letter over Jack's shoulder, smiled. "Well," he said, "I'm no lawyer, but I'd say that you just inherited yourself a bookstore."

  *

  Two nights later, Jack found himself in room 107 of the Budget Inn of Vancouver, gazing down out of his single occupancy window onto the dark flowing expanse of the Columbia River. Bill was safely ensconced in his own room, back in Long Beach, by now. As soon as Dottie's service ended, Jack had pressed the farm supervisor into spending a couple of days baby-sitting (at time and a half), and had left a tearful Bill waving from the porch as he pulled away. Jack realized, on the long drive up the river, that this would be the first night in a decade that he had slept somewhere other than in his own small bedroom in the Beckman farmhouse.

  He stood, chewing ice from his plastic water glass, and thumbing through the first pages of the Tom Clancy novel he had picked up at the bookstore across the street from the motel.

  He realized, with some sense of irony, as he paid for the mass-market paperback of Jack Ryan's latest cold-war adventure, that by this time tomorrow he would very likely own a half-dozen copies of the book. Still, that was tomorrow, this was tonight, and he needed a thick best-seller to keep his mind off the rows of tiny bottles lined up in the mini-fridgebeside the room's desk. He hadn't even dared to open the refrigerator door, but he could sense them, little vials of sweet oblivion to cool the burning itch that was already forming in his throat.

  Jack swallowed two tiny red Benadryl tablets with the last of his water, hoping the allergy pills would help knock him out. Then he walked across the room and lay down across the double bed, holding the paperback before his eyes, trying to banish the siren song of the mini-bar.

  Jack had an eight-o’clock appointment with Alan Jarrell, at the Smith, Jarrell, and Weinstein offices on Mill Plain Boulevard.

  Mill Plain, the smiling bookstore manager had assured him, scribbling a map on the back of Jack's receipt, would be easy to find. Jack wanted to be clear-eyed and coherent for that meeting, which might just be the most important of his recent life. A hangover was the last thing he needed.

  Finally, somewhere in the middle of Clancy's all-inclusive description of Red Square, Jack slipped off to sleep.

  Once again, he trudged across the burning desert. His parched lips crying out for water, his legs trembling with exhaustion. Pain hammered through his brain like the ringing of an anvil, and he could feel the black, burned skin of his forehead peeling back beneath the brutal heat of the merciless sun, as sweat poured down his back. On and on, one heavy foot achingly following the next until, far ahead, he could see a single shape breaking the wide, monochrome monotony of the wasteland.

  The tree had once been a great spreading oak, but now its branches were withered, blackened and charred by some great fire. It grew in his vision as he plodded onward and soon he began to realize the enormity of the thing, its dark, skeletal branches reaching up and up until they grew blurred and indistinct, disappearing into the pale blue sky. The terrible thirst gnawed at his throat. The tree cast no shadow, despite the blazing sun, and the words of T.S. Eliot sang mockingly in his tortured brain.

  A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

  He wondered briefly, his face burning in the place where the oak’s shadow should have fallen, if this great and terrifying monolith of death had been in the poet’s eye when he penned The Waste Land.

  Then the pack bore down on his bleeding shoulders, driving him to his knees in the white, lifeless sand, and he thought he heard, far away, a thin, piping voice calling his name.

  Jack raised his weary head, blinking against the assault of light and heat, and saw, far up in the dead branches, a small boy, calling his name and waving his hand over his head. His tiny fist clutching something that Jack couldn't, at first, make out.

  Then he knew. It was a balsawood airplane, with bright red stripes down each wing and the blue, painted face of a pilot where the cockpit would be. How high was the boy? Two hundred feet? Three? Bill waved triumphantly, and Jack tried to cry out, to warn him, but he had no voice, just a dry, broken croak of desiccated vocal chords disappearing into the desert wind. He tried to wave his arms but they were too heavy; the pack on his back had doubled, then tripled in weight, flopping him forward onto the blistering sand. The muscles in his back pulled and tore as he strained to rise, to get to his feet before…

  He heard the gunshot, a sharp, metallic crack echoing through the thin hot air, and he screamed, rolling over and looking up into the high branches again. He watched the limp lifeless body of the boy tumbling over and over as it plummeted to the desert floor.

  In his dream, he saw Bill falling for a long, long time, and the sound of the small body, striking the unyielding sand beside him, woke Jack, sweating and gasping.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to the pounding of his heart in the quiet blackness of the hotel room, Jack could feel his hands shaking.

  Tremors ran along his arms and legs, and his thoughts began to wander, once more, to the contents of the little refrigerator. Forcing his mind to find an off-ramp from that dangerous road, Jack switched on the table lamp, blasting the room in harsh white light. Blinking painfully, he opened the bedside table drawer and lifted out the Bible. Bless the faithfulness of the Gideons, he thought, holding the drab little hardbound New Testament in his lap. A long moment passed, then two, and finally, with a sigh, Jack slipped the book back into the drawer.

  You’re giving up on Him, Jack, but He isn’t giving up on you.

  Whatever answers he was looking for, he still wasn't ready to look there.

  God had once trusted him, and he had dropped the ball, he didn't deserve the grace offered in those diaphanous pages.

  The tremors in his arms and legs grew steadily worse, and yet, for the first time since he could remember, Jack refused to answer his body's supplications for alcohol. In a few hours, he would meet with a man who might, finally, shine some small light into the monotonous gloom of his life.

  Jack thought about the bottles, all the whiskey bottles, lined up in that deep wooden drawer in the Beckman cellar. The thousand or more he'd emptied since. He was sickened by the truth of it, the truth that he had gone down those creaking shadowed steps into the mildewed twilight beneath William Beckman's house and he had never come back up again.

  Now though, sitting in a cheap motel room, a folded sheet of paper from a law firm he had never heard of tucked safely into his jacket pocket, something had woken him at last.

  Deep in his tired spirit, something sparked, so unfamiliar that he couldn't even put words to it, and yet he could feel it. Like a faint light in an endless darkness, it called to him, leading him on, pulling him back up the cellar steps, to stumble into the world once more.

  Hope.

  For the first time in so many years, a breath of hope wafted through the stagnant cell of his life and Jack clutched for it, breathing it in desperately.

  "Maybe it's time," he murmured, staring at the beige walls as the hollow, sucking need grew in his chest. A pad of paper and a pen, both bearing the logo of the motel, sat on the cheap, pressboard desk. Shakily, Jack stepped over to take a seat and jotted a quick note to himself, just four words really, Call MartinPeterson -- AA. Then he sat there, in the hard wooden chair, the note grasped in his trembling hand.

  Martin was a recovering alcoholic. Jack knew, from hearing the man's testimony so many years before, that he had been where Jack sat now, and he attended his Alcoholic's Anonymous meet
ings with the same weekly dedication as he did his church. Maybe, just maybe, Martin could help him take a first step.

  Finally, Jack rose and, after drinking three glasses of tepid water from the bathroom tap, he dressed quickly and left his room to wander the motel lobby with his novel, plopping down in one of the overstuffed chairs, and reading until morning.

  He was, if not safely away, at least further removed from temptation, with the note tucked securely into his wallet.

  *

  Ten hours later Jack was back in the pickup, headed West, and hoping to be home by nightfall. His head was spinning from the day’s events as he squinted through the rain splattered windshield and the scintillating headlights of the oncoming cars.

  The Sandcastle Bookstore was his. At least the contentsof the bookstore were, the lease was paid for a full year and, as Mr. Alan Jarrell assured him in his most serious tones (Jack had tried desperately to banish the image of Deputy Dog, as the man’s drooping cheeks waggled back and forth) that if Jack were interested in selling the store at that time, there would be no difficulties in finding an eager buyer.

  Jack, however, was about as likely to sell The Sand Castle as he was to run for president, and had signed each of the forms placed before him until he had lost count and his fingers ached.

  He would show great patience by waiting nearly an entire week before contacting Ocean View Realty and putting the Beckman house and oyster beds up for sale.

  The apartment, all the furniture, and Dottie's somewhat eclectic collection of artwork was his as well. He was pretty sure the local libraries would be happy to accept some of the more sedate watercolors, since most of them were painted by local artists.

  As the truck passed under the amber wash of a streetlight, Jack noticed his hands, as they clutched the wheel before him. Hard and calloused, his palms and fingers were nicked and scarred by the razored edges of unknown thousands of oyster shells, the stripping of thick wet ropes on icy mornings, and too many accidental slips of the oyster knife. They looked, in the wane light, like an old man's hands, gnarled and spider webbed from a lifetime of hard work.