by Stephen Bly
Brannon studied the baby-like footprints of raccoons who also dig up clams, some gelled blobs that he presumed to be jelly fish, and some large claw prints. “I think it’s a cougar.”
“Oh dear, how distressing. So much to think about and now this. Do you think it has anything to do with Tom Wiseman?”
“Don’t know. Your pail’s not very full. Can I help?”
“I find the dimple in the sand and then scoop, but the clams rebury themselves so fast. Zip, they’re in their burrow. Somebody told me they’re slower at low temperatures. Maybe it’s too warm. I’m confused now. Where was I digging?”
Brannon pointed to some holes and broken shells.
Lady Fletcher dropped her pail and shovel. “Stuart, another thing. There are rumors flying about. They say that you, in a drunken, violent escapade terrorized the visitors at the Lewis and Clark Exposition. Some say you should have been arrested and incarcerated.”
“Tres Vientos did get out of control, but I wasn’t drunk nor violent.”
“Are you blaming it on your horse? Oh look, here’s another one.”
“I really don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Just keep digging and don’t damage the clam.” She stretched her arms behind her back. “And I saw Mrs. Acorn earlier walking her basset hound. I think she could use your help.”
“Mrs. Acorn could use a lot of help that I’m not prepared to give.”
“Did you know Mrs. Acorn’s brother-in-law was once married to her sister? And then Tally Rebozo married that same sister, except his name was Warren Andale then. Does that seem strange to you?”
“I suppose that’s no stranger than humans eating rubbery, muddy mollusks.”
“You’re not making sense. Don’t you think you should talk to Mrs. Acorn to find out what she knows?”
“Okay, I’ll have tea with her, if you come along.”
“Oh, Stuart, that will mess up the atmosphere. She won’t want a chaperone.”
“But I do.”
“Then I’ll have to invent a reason to tag along.”
“Tell her I do odd things when I eat clams and you have to keep me from one of my spells.” Brannon dug quickly with a sudden motion. He sifted through the sand for the clam, which he dropped in the bucket.
“I most certainly will not. Have you ever even eaten a clam?”
“Never.”
“I will try to keep tea time to a half hour. How’s that?”
“Is Tally Rebozo still married to her sister?”
“I know nothing about Tally Rebozo’s personal affairs.”
Wet sand oozed into Brannon’s duckings as he speared his way across the beach hunting for buried mollusks.
“Stuart, I suppose you’d prefer the sort of wilderness supper that Lewis and Clark partook of… deer cured over a fire pit, whale blubber, boiled elk, marrowbone, roots of all sorts, that sort of thing.”
“Why, yes. They’d get up in the morning and order one of their best hunters to kill something for breakfast. Pow, pow. They’d come back with big ducks.” He poked a stick at a troublesome crab while Harriet washed sand from some shells. Gulls cried protest overhead, speaking up for their rights on this piece of beach. A lone heron watched it all from the loft of his spindly legs.
“Why can’t we eat what we want to eat? Wouldn’t that make everyone happy?”
“To become a social being, you must, at times, do an activity that pleases another, not yourself.”
“I did something that really pleased me. I punched Hawthorne H. Miller in the nose,” Brannon blurted out.
“Did he deserve it?”
“I regretted it soon after.”
“Why?”
“Because he claimed to know something about Tom’s disappearance, but wouldn’t divulge it to a person who punched him.”
“But he did deserve it?”
“It seemed so at the moment.”
Lady Fletcher sighed. “You must admit, you do have a tendency to violence.”
But Miller got his revenge… I think.
When they returned to the hotel Brannon spied a familiar form. A flow of gray beard. Fly-away gray hair. Eyes that darted everywhere at once, but shifted to no one particular.
He tried to avoid Hawthorne H. Miller by stepping past the library, his hat in front of his face.
“Hi, Brannon.” The voice was slower, deeper than Miller’s.
He looked in the direction of the speaker. Burly build. Lop-sided grin. Brown hair streaked with something dull, yet sticky. “Hi, Tiff. See you later.”
He quickened his pace but Argentiferous Jones blocked his path.
“We’re setting up your books here,” Jones informed him. “Mr. Miller’s going to let me sign the stories that have me in them. He’s payin’ me a nickel for every dozen books that get bought.”
Brannon kept his back to Miller. “That’s real funny. He’s never offered to pay for my signature. Why, I could be a rich man by now, retire and go buy me a ranch in Arizona.”
“Is that right? Hey, maybe I’ll do the same. This fame and fortune ain’t so bad.”
“Perhaps you’ll be tempted to go straight and leave your life of crime.”
“Yeah.” His eyes were ringed with doubt.
Brannon caught up with Lady Fletcher as she handed the razor clams to the kitchen staff. Heading back to the benches in front of the hotel, she pulled out and read a postcard from Brannon’s Triple B Ranch: “Baby Jenner has a rash all over. Edwin does too, even on his neck. Everett’s is even worse, even in his ears. We had fried chicken, mashed potatoes and corn pudding for supper. What did you eat? Love, Elizabeth.”
Brannon enjoyed the vision of his Arizona family.
“Tonight you’ll have quite the meal to tell Elizabeth about, won’t you?”
“Do you remember that time that you, Edwin and I got caught in the Yavapai Desert with no water and supplies? I fear that was only slightly more treacherous than what I’m about to face tonight.”
“Stuart, you only promised to eat one clam.”
“What I do to please a woman.”
Harriet put on her serious face. “You should have married Victoria Pacifica.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You need a purpose in life, out of the same old routine existence of ridding the world of its evils.”
“I have a purpose… my ranch, Littlefoot and his family.”
“You need another goal and someone to push you to achieve it.” Her intent stare forced him to let that sink in. “By the way, your Victoria called and wanted to talk to you. I told her you were sleeping on the beach. I did not inform her you had three women in your hotel room.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“She is at the ranch helping Jannette with the sick kids.”
“That’s great to know. Makes me feel everything’s all right there, like bein’ in two places at once.”
“Exactly. You need to make that a permanent situation. How is Victoria?”
Brannon looked over in surprise. “Didn’t you ask her? She was fine, as of the last time I saw her.”
“Which was when?”
“She had a hard winter. Got sick and couldn’t take care of her families on the hacienda in Magdalena. She called me to come. I spent a few weeks helping out. She was very tired and required rest. Then, L.F. needed me back at the ranch.”
“Ah,” she said. “Well, in the absence of any other women around here to push you to try new things, I will take on that role. You promised me to try a clam.”
“You mean, if I eat one clam, I could be immortalized in Lady Harriet Reed-Fletcher’s mind forever?”
“Maybe.”
“I can’t take that risky a chance. The odds are against me.”
“But here’s your goal. Eat a clam. Support an orphan. Solve a mystery for the President of the United States. Then go home and sit the rest of your days on the front porch of your Arizona ranch.”
Lord Fletcher arrived with a brisk smile and hearty mood. “Ah, I smell clams in the place. What a feast awaits us, eh, Stuart? Quite jolly.”
Brannon didn’t need to answer because Keaton Tanglewood rode up with a gray mustang.
“I bet you caught and trained that one yourself,” Brannon said of the horse.
Tanglewood patted the horse’s head. “We might have found your friend.”
“Where?”
“On the beach, a couple miles south. Come on, jump up.”
Brannon straddled behind Tanglewood as they galloped across the sand, over the twists of driftwood and sprawls of jelly-like seaweed. Seagulls sailed up and squawked as they tore through their landing.
Tanglewood tried to converse as the horse scattered sand. He pointed to the lighthouse. “A legend tells of an underwater tunnel from Tillamook Head underneath the ocean to inside Tillamook Rock, where only supernatural beings can go.”
I wonder from what true event that story evolved?
On the beach front of Seaside, in the shadow of Tillamook Head, a monster fish slumped in silence.
“It’s a whale,” Brannon hollered, trying to catch his breath. “A dead one,” he surmised as he got closer.
Twenty-one
“Perhaps someone dumped your friend in the ocean, to let the big fish take care of him,” Tanglewood said.
An excited crowd gathered around. Tanglewood introduced his Uncle Grant to Brannon, a man with deep-set eyes and prominent forehead ridged with thick, dark eyebrows, the one in charge of the team of family and friends. A brisk wind wailed against the gawkers, making it difficult for them to look or Brannon to investigate. Brannon guessed the beached gray whale to be about twenty-five or thirty feet long, part of it stretched in the ocean. Swimmers stood in waist-deep water near the tail.
“It was alive for about an hour, but they couldn’t save him. Now they’re going to render the blubber and that can’t be done in a day, even with the crew that volunteered.”
“Why did it come up here?”
“Maybe a stomach ache,” Tanglewood suggested. “Like what happened to Jonah’s big fish.”
Hope the ladies don’t hear that.
“It won’t be eaten. It can make you sick. It’s for oil. But my Uncle Grant, Uncle Miles, Uncle Stirling and their helpers will take care of it the old way. Get the leather gloves. Use the fish forks and big knives. While it’s still fresh, they’ll cut off tons of blubber in huge chunks and render it by placing it in large wooden bowls or troughs and piling hot stones on top. Or they could boil the blubber in kettles over a fire. It will stink out here something awful.”
“It already does.”
“You just wait. Clothes, the air, everything around, for days, even longer.”
Brannon studied the huge mammal, the eyes, dorsal and hump. “I still can’t figure the why of stranding itself. There’s the whole ocean to live in.”
“Perhaps something scared him. Or sickness. Maybe he hunted too close to shore or got his directions wrong. He could have crashed into something, against the rocks or a ship. I like to think of it as a gift from the creator, to provide us oil.”
“Hmmm… I guess we’ll never know.”
“My uncles will tell you what they discover.”
“What do you mean?”
“In his stomach… if there is a man’s body inside… before the seagulls get to it. Or he could still be alive.”
“Has that ever happened? I mean, besides Jonah.”
“Sure. One time men in a harpoon boat speared a whale. The boat capsized and dumped the men in the ocean. One of them drowned. The other couldn’t be found. When they carved up the whale, they got to the stomach and noticed something large. Inside they found a man, alive, but unconscious. After a few weeks he recuperated enough to work again. It is well known.”
Brannon was glad to twist away from the sight of the beached whale when someone yelled his name.
When Brannon turned, Wax Lanigan snapped a picture with his portable Kodak Brownie. He spotted Hawthorne Miller a few yards away wearing a Spanish cloak and Panama hat and his huge tripod spread out on the sand.
“That’s incredible,” Miller said. “Let me look at that.” Lanigan handed the camera to him.
Laira Ashley Fletcher rode up in a charcoal sidesaddle frock with Amble the white Arabian, Darcy close behind in a butternut gray dress trimmed with gold braid.
Amble kicked sand high as Laira reined her near Brannon, causing him to rub his eyes and spit out grit.
“That’s my first time to try the American way… sidesaddle. So novel. Liberating. But it does take practice to keep control of the horse.”
Tanglewood’s uncles were already stripping the dark skin with large knives, revealing white and pink flesh underneath.
“Oh, twee, I thought it was alive,” Laira Fletcher complained. “I want to see a whale that’s going back in the ocean to swim and jump and shoot water out his blowhole.”
Darcy Lazzard rode in behind her on a dun mare, flopping around the back with a grimace. She reached her foot out to regain the stirrup and tried to get down. The mare swung around and tossed her into some seaweed. Brannon reached to help her up as he heard Laira Fletcher chat with Tanglewood.
“Don’t you have a kayak or canoe that could take us out into the sea to watch the whales?” she begged.
“I have one, but it must be the right timing… and safe.”
Brannon didn’t hear the rest of Tanglewood’s reply because his Uncle Grant nudged Brannon’s arm and whispered, “Do you think maybe your friend is in the whale’s belly?” He jumped back up on top of the whale.
“Did you find some trace of him in the whale?” Brannon hollered.
Uncle Grant pounded his chest and laughed. “Keaton will show you what we did find,” Uncle Grant yelled down.
The wave of odors began to sicken Brannon. He ran back to Tanglewood with a bandana over his nose.
“Uncle Stuart, there you are,” Laira called out. “You must come see the baby when you’re through looking at this old, smelly dead whale. It’s a cria. That’s what a baby llama is called, Darcy told me.”
“Thanks for the information and invite. Will you please remind Darcy that she has something of mine to return?”
“Remind her yourself. She’s right over… oh, she’s gone. There she is, way down the beach with those fellows who helped keep her llama from drowning. I like being her friend. She knows lots of boys.”
Brannon meant to go speak to Hawthorne Miller, maybe to apologize for his earlier behavior, mostly to ask him about Tom Wiseman. However, by now the man, his wagon and equipment were gone.
“We don’t really expect to find a body in the whale. I’ve got something else to show you,” Tanglewood said. “Down the beach.” He pointed south towards Tillamook Head and led the horse about a half mile further.
Brannon shouted when he spied a large gray wolf that looked ready to pounce on the horse or them. Tanglewood caught the wolf in his arms to pet him. When Brannon got close, the beast growled and gnashed his teeth.
“Quiet, Pooch,” Tanglewood commanded. “He’s part-dog, but still pretty wild. We think he’s been guarding his master.”
“He should be tethered,” Brannon cautioned. The horse whinnied in agreement. He now recognized a canoe braced on top of four upright split timbers sunk a few feet in the ground.
“We often bury our dead in their canoes with the personal belongings they might need in the next life. This capsized canoe washed up with a body this morning, about the time of the beached whale.”
Tanglewood picked up some pieces of driftwood. “Could be parts of a ship.”
Brannon turned the rough, spiky wood and tried to imagine the origin.
“There were lots of survivors of shipwrecks who made it to these shores,” Tanglewood explained. “As did my own father. This coast can be treacherous for ships. The rocks and waves can beat them to slivers. It’s hard to imagine the powerful push of
large amounts of water, whether in a river or an ocean. That’s why the lighthouse is so needed, although it’s treacherous to navigate and expensive to maintain.”
Brannon imagined the ghosts of sailors and ship skeletons up and down the Pacific coast, each with their tales of adventure and horror.
Tanglewood pulled away the canoe. “Too light. Big hole ripped in the bottom. It sank.” Underneath was a corpse, a torso that had been in water a long time. “We could not move it nor report it. We are blamed for many things.”
Brannon turned the body over. He didn’t recognize the man. The main thing, it wasn’t Tom. “It’s not the man I’m looking for. Take me to Seaside. I’ll report this to the authorities for you.”
The guests that evening arrived by carriage, boat, motorcar and horse and buggy for Lady Fletcher’s dress up affair. Brannon found Lady Fletcher and Wax Lanigan in a deep discussion about employee wages.
Lanigan plied his best smile, which seemed on the wily side to Brannon. “One of the reasons I came to Portland was to help protest that Portland contractors hired out-of-state workers to build the Lewis and Clark Exposition. We talked about a labor boycott of the event. We did do some strikes. We won a summer wage increase of two dollars, from eight dollars to ten dollars a week during the Exposition.”
Lanigan sent Brannon a half-hearted greeting, which he ignored.
“When they refused point blank to carry out an order during the busiest time of day,” Lady Fletcher observed.
“The proprietor graciously complied.”
“I’m not sure I’m inclined to be that gracious, but I might have to. The waiters and other help insist that since so many celebrities are coming to town, they deserve to be paid more. It’s kind of a reverse snobbism, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps they presume that celebrities can pay more.” Lanigan peered over at Brannon.
“I’d have to rob a stagecoach to afford everyone’s salary,” Brannon interjected.
“But it’s not the celebrities who are paying them. The hotel management and I are.”
“Ah, the trials of management.” Lanigan strolled away.
