by Jim Hallaux
Wind
Without
Rain
Wind
Without
Rain
James Hallaux
Calvin Cahail
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, locations or events is entirely coincidental.
© 2018 by Calvin Cahail & James Hallaux.
All rights reserved. Neither this book or parts thereof may be reproduced in any form without permission.
ISBN: 9781092201711
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to our wives, Mariana and Robbie. For putting up with us through the writing of this book and everything else.
Calvin Cahail
Jim Hallaux
The authors wish to thank the following for allowing us in their establishments for inordinate periods of time with computers, notes, glasses, and coffee cups spread across tables, bars, and counters;
Columbia House, Workers Tavern, 3 Cups Coffee, Coffee Girl, Taps, Zipline Café, Blue Scorcher, Ship Out, Portway Tavern, Golden Star.
Cast of Characters
The Lovers
Merri Sue Morrison
Thomas Thompson
The People’s Army
Peter Aro
Bill Nikula
Joe Lagerstrom
Mr. X – Andre Demico
The Job Corps
Penny, Best Friend
Sally, Good Looking Trouble
Sammi, Roommate
Larry Alred, Counselor
Like clouds and wind without rain is a man who boasts of a gift he does not give.
Proverbs 25:14
City of Astoria
PART ONE
Wind Without Rain
1
1969
Merri Sue had two strong early memories; one a scent and the other a sound.
The scent was buckwheat, creosote, and sage. Early on summer mornings, before the day turned hot, with the window open to let in fresh air, the smell drifted into Merri’s room. If she could only bottle that wonderful aroma of the high Eastern Oregon desert.
The sound ate at her stomach: her parents arguing like summer thunderstorms; Quick to start; angry, harsh words that Merri heard in her room behind the closed door not understanding. Two memories that haunted Merri’s life.
Merri’s father, a nice enough dad and husband at times, held a temper lurking under the surface. He was a man of average height and above average strength. As a small child Merri adored her father. Later she feared him and then hated him. But always, she loved him and always he let her down.
Her father taught Merri how to ride a bike, how to fish, how to ride a horse. She cherished those times with her father. Between these, she experienced any number of violent outbursts. It was always something Mom did or didn’t do. The worst times were when he had been drinking. The temper simmered like a low flame. The alcohol like kerosene. At first, words; demeaning, obscene, hurtful words. The violence came later. Merri hid in her room and waited, praying it would end soon. And sometimes it did. Her father promised her it would not happen again, but it always did. The waiting made it worse.
Merri, only a child, saw and heard all of this on her own. She had friends, but Merri always went to their houses to play, never at her house. Reaching high school, Merri never had dates pick her up at the house, she always met them somewhere else. She didn’t date much; it was just too hard and complicated. Merri immersed herself in school and stayed in her room at home. They were her haven and her prison. Later in life, her grocery store and drive-in jobs were havens.
After graduation, with college being out of the question, Merri did both jobs. She became the major breadwinner for the family. Her mother showed up at her hardware store job too often with swollen dark eyes and bruises. They cut her hours so low that it didn’t make sense for her to continue to go in.
Merri and her Mother had the same talk again and again. It went from a talk to an argument to a shouting match. Always the same.
“Mom, he will kill you. If we don’t get out now, it will happen. Dad will get drunk, he’ll hit you too hard, he doesn’t realize how strong he is when he drinks, how mad he gets. He’ll knock you down; hit your head. However, it happens, on purpose or by accident, he’ll kill you just the same.”
“You don’t understand, child. He gets mad sometimes and loses his temper and does and says things he doesn’t mean. I can take care of myself. Your Dad loves me. You worry about your life. I can take care of myself.”
“You are my life. This is my life. The yelling, the hitting, waiting for the next time. All of it. This is my life and I hate it.”
“Child, child, he loves me, you will see, it will get better.”
But it didn’t.
During this time, Merri did have a boyfriend. Ted was as different from her dad as he could be. He was kind, funny, and slow to anger. Merri loved that the most. Merri always felt safe with Ted. She did not introduce him to either of her parents. He never picked her up at home.
The romance started in the summer and by fall was serious. Merri was the most hopeful she had ever been. A new love, a new life, a way out. When Merri missed her period, it was the first serious problem they had faced.
“We need to decide what to do,” she told him.
“We need to get married. They said at the gas station I’m getting a raise. I can get a second job. We will work this out. I love you.” Those were Ted’s promises.
After not hearing from Ted for a couple of days, Merri called him.
“I’m thinking about what we should do,” he said. “Gonna go on a hunting trip south with the boys. I need time to think.”
Merri’s period came the day after Ted left. When he came back, he took another trip. This one to Reno with the boys. More time to think. When he got back, Merri didn’t care. The summer romance didn’t last through the fall.
Her father had too many jobs to count. Fired for showing up late, drunk, or not showing up at all. Sometimes arguments and fights with coworkers; sometimes with bosses. Her father always said that the next job would be the one, but it never came to be. And the abuse and violence came more and more often.
Merri came home from work at the grocery; her mother made scrambled eggs and bacon for her dinner before she left for work at the drive-in. Merri was in her room, changing into her drive-in uniform when she heard the slap and a sickening thud.
“Listen, you bitch…” and everything changed. Merri didn’t need to know what he said next. She bounded to the kitchen. Her father, drunk, stood over her mother in front of the stove. Her mother slumped forward, head hung low, hands resting on her knees, trying to stand, leaning hard against the refrigerator.
Merri grabbed the hot cast-iron frying pan ignoring the heat of the handle searing her palm. She felt the pan connect with her father’s head; indent the skull, high on his forehead. As he went down, she hit him again, harder, on the back of his head. He was on the floor now. Smaller. Diminished.
Blood pooled around him.
“Mom, we need to go now.”
“I can’t, Merri.” She looked into Merri’s eyes, torn. “You know I can’t.”
“Mom, he’s never going to change. Can’t you see that?”
“He just needs to find a job. Get settled again. Things’ll get better. He’s promised me.”
“And that’s gotten you where Mom?” Merri touched a compassionate hand to her mom’s face. “I have to go.”
Merri had heard the same argument many times. But this was the last time.
Merri took her cardboard suitca
se out of the closet, threw in clothes without much thought, and grabbed the money she had stashed in a cigar box under her bed. She put her jacket on and headed for the front door.
“I’m leaving now.”
Her mother knelt over her father trying to stop the blood with a dishrag, her hands drenched in blood.
Merri was at the door.
“Wait, Merri.”
Merri’s mother didn’t say more. Crying by her husband.
Merri looked back through the cracked front window, where no curtain hung, at her Mother. She had made her decision and Merri Sue had made hers.
2
Ajunior high school counselor in Astoria referred to Tom as a ‘high functioning screw up’. His parents, a grade school teacher and a high school vice principal, were shocked to hear this description of their only son and said so. But they secretly believed it.
It wasn’t that people didn’t like Tom or that he wasn’t bright enough. It was just that given a choice of three paths; the right way, the easy way, or the absolutely, positively wrong way; Tom always started in the middle and inevitably worked his way to the wrong.
In grade school it had been taunting girls; the occasional black eye was given & received; the many timeouts at home and at school. From there it got worse. Each year, Tom’s grades, not great to begin with, continued to go south. Tom wasn’t just ‘not living up to his ability’; he didn’t even try. By high school, which he attended sporadically, his parents became desperate. Still loved him, but everything they tried failed.
About this time, alcohol and drugs came into play. Tom didn’t like school, hated sports, and wasn’t much interested in girls and not much interest was shown to him by girls. Drugs and liquor; that was something Tom could get behind in a big way.
He started to hang with a ‘bad crowd.’ Not a terribly bright or ambitious crowd, but interested in drugs and booze, the same two things Tom was interested in. Getting drugs wasn’t so hard, but getting booze seemed to always be a bit of a hassle. Sometimes they could find an adult to buy the booze, prompted either by money or an invitation to share. Other times they would steal their parent’s liquor, drink half, then fill it back to the top with water and replace the bottle in the liquor cabinet. Surprisingly, this worked.
But then Tom’s crew decided to stop with the small-time scores and go straight to the source, the Oregon State Liquor Store on Marine Drive, in Astoria.
This was to be Tom’s first brush with serious crime, although that wasn’t really considered. It was just a natural extension of the path he was on. His school chums, Bill & Pete, were on board for this hastily conceived plan.
It wasn’t exactly ‘breaking & entering’ because there was no entering. Tom and his two friends, armed with a claw hammer and a large rubber mallet, could not conquer the metal clad door but did pound on it long enough to trigger the silent alarm. This brought the police, who found three youths, two of them running away. The one that remained, his arms dead tired, ears ringing; appeared to be waiting to be arrested. A night in city lockup took the fun out of the enterprise.
Now things got very serious, very fast. Tom’s parents had had enough. The wrecked car, the three speeding tickets, expulsions from grade school, junior & senior high schools, a rarely achieved trifecta. It was all too much.
A hasty meeting with a friendly Astoria judge was quietly arranged. The judge was a family friend who had known Tom since birth and was now seriously concerned and seriously pissed at him. He chose his words carefully.
“Tom, you have three choices; keep doing what you’re doing, and I’ll be seeing you again real soon. First, I’ll be sending you for another stay in the city lockup. Then you’ll graduate to the county jail and then for sure on to State prison. Think of it as dumb, dumber and then just plain stupid.”
“On the other hand, there is a new federal program, called the Job Corps right here in Astoria. They just started at Tongue Point; in fact, this is only the second Job Corps site in the nation. It is exactly what a person like you needs,” said the judge. He ticked off the benefits on his fingers. “A kick in the butt, a direction in how to behave like a serious person, a high school diploma, a trade, and a job when you get out. All of this in a year and a half.
“Another way is the Marine Corp. The Corp is not at all interested in a serious screw-up or in bright people doing stupid things. So, it would be tough to get you in but maybe, just maybe, I could pull some strings.
“Just remember that in the Corp the penalty for screwing up is immediate and pretty damn harsh.”
Tom chose the Job Corps.
3
Even after living for 20 years in this small eastern Oregon town, Merri didn’t have many places to go.
The adrenaline wore off. The vicious burn unbearable.
Miss Silver thought she heard a knock at the door. There it was again; soft almost muffled.
“Why, hi Merri... Merri what’s wrong?”
“I’m hurt.”
Miss Silver had been Merri’s 6th-grade teacher and this pupil, now a grown woman, stood barely upright at her front door. In one hand a battered suitcase, the other hand wrapped in a dirty handkerchief. Merri stark white, trembling, going into shock.
“I don’t know where to go.”
Miss Silver got Merri in the car and, on the way to the hospital, heard what happened. On her own Miss Silver, at the admission desk, said Merri had a kitchen accident. Merri caught the lie and accepted it.
Merri was in the ER for a good while. She emerged, highly medicated, with a thickly bandaged hand. Miss Silver got her back in the car, back to her house and into the guest bed.
The doctor said there would be a scar, which proved true. Twenty-five years later, Merri Sue’s first grandchild asked;
‘Grandma, how did you hurt your hand?’
Merri said, ‘you be careful with hot pans in the kitchen, honey.’
The grandchild followed that advice for the rest of her life.
In the morning, Miss Silver called the school to say she wouldn’t be coming in for a few days. The vice-principal, a former pupil, said, “How on earth will I get a substitute on such short notice.”
Miss Silver, drawing on her 30 years of experience teaching 6th grade and dealing with little piss-ants like this one replied;
“I don’t know, but you’d better stop whining and get on it, right quick.”
Merri Sue stayed with Miss Silver for a week. She improved, but the hand still hurt. Meds took the edge off. Miraculously, the police did not show up at the door, although both women feared it would happen. Miss Silver found out through a deputy sheriff, another former student, that Merri’s father had gone into the hospital in the next town and said drunk, he had a fall in the kitchen. His story; he hit his forehead on the stove and the back of his head when he hit the floor. He was released after four days with a bill that would never be paid.
After much discussion, Miss Silver and Merri came up with a plan for Merri’s future. Miss Silver called the high school counselor who had told her about a new federal program called the Job Corps, on the coast in Astoria. After some intense lobbying by the counselor and high school principal, both former students of Miss Silver, Merri was accepted at the Job Corps and would begin in a month. Miss Silver found Merri a job in Portland until then with another former student, who needed help with her unruly 8-year-old twins.
Miss Silver paid for Merri’s hospital bill. But Merri would need clothes, a better jacket, shoes, and money for her time at the Job Corps. All beyond Miss Silver’s budget. The next Sunday at the church she had attended for 50 years, Miss Silver addressed the congregation with the problem and the need. Naming no names (but it was a small town, everybody knew) she asked a special offering to be made. The offering tray was sent around and returned to Miss Silver, who after a quick count, said the tray would be sent around again and she wanted people to give like they meant it this time. If she had to send it around the third time, there would be hell to pa
y. She said it loud and clear, in a teacher’s voice;
“Literally, hell to pay.”
4
The bus ride from eastern Oregon to Portland, dreary and long at first, turned beautiful. Merri knew the dry, burnt-out look of the high desert in Eastern Oregon, but Portland was different. Everything green. Pristine.
People talked about how much it rained in Portland. But that wasn’t the case this summer. The whole season was golden. Cool in the early mornings, sometimes a little cloudy, then in the afternoon, glorious sunshine. The sky, the trees, Mt. Hood in the distance. All of it beautiful.
Merri liked the Clintons the family she worked for and loved the twins. They were a bit of trouble at first, but Merri won them over. The boys minded Merri Sue but didn’t mind their parents. On Saturday, Merri’s day off, and the parents in charge, the twins turned into a couple of wild Indians until Merri came back.
What Merri enjoyed most about her new living conditions was being someplace normal & calm. The twin’s antics wore down their parents, but not Merri. She was a natural with kids. She had her own room, but it wasn’t where she spent a lot of time.
Merri ate with the family, and after the first week, did most of the cooking. In the morning, Merri got the kids up, dressed them, made breakfast and their lunches, and walked them to school. The parents, who both worked, were a bit frantic when Merri first arrived. With her help, they calmed down and now enjoyed their time with the twins and Merri.
Merri spent the days grocery shopping, cleaning, cooking, and a little exploration of Portland. She loved downtown; the hustle and bustle, the tall buildings, beautiful store windows filled with wonderful clothes.
