Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (3 page)

Grace Williams dismissed this with a quick
wave of her hand, “Oh, it’s just a few boxes. The Williams clan has
lived on that farm for eighty years, I can’t imagine the attic will
be going anywhere in the next two or three.”

Then she stepped forward and pulled the girl
close, hugging her fiercely, as Cassie whispered into her ear.

“
Please keep flowers on her
grave, she likes--”

“
Blue carnations, of
course,” Grace answered, tears now flowing down her cheeks, “I love
her almost as much as you do, remember? Now go on, your taxi is
waiting…”

Cassie drew a deep, shuddering breath as she
backed away toward the waiting cab. “I love you, Grace…” she
said.

“
I know,” her pastor’s wife
replied, “make sure you call me as soon as you reach Portland…and
go straight to the college…and stay on campus.”

The young woman laughed through her tears,
“I will, I will…I’ll be fine.”

Then Cassie climbed into the passenger seat
of the taxi and quickly closed the door. She kept her eyes forward
as the car pulled away, heading towards the bus station, and bit
her lip fiercely as the tears ran down her cheeks, clutching
desperately at the folded scrap of paper in her pocket, her
talisman.

She watched through the dusty windshield as they started
though town.

As much as she yearned for escape from the
constant, painful reminders of her mother's death, for the
excitement of college, and most of all for the possibility of
confronting her father, Bowie was still the only home she had ever
known. She etched the images before her into her memory as though
it were the last time she would see them.

Passing the library, which sat like a squat
brick pyramid, Frank turned onto Main Street. From there, Cassie
could see the Yucca Lodge Motel, where she had worked the last
three summers as a room attendant. Mrs. Miller, her supervisor, was
eighty-six now and pretty much just loaded the supply cart each
morning and spent the rest of the day sitting in one of the empty
rooms watching her soap operas and smoking long, thin
cigarettes.

Past the motel, Cassie could see the conical
roof of another Bowie landmark, the teepee tavern. She rolled her
eyes.

Shaped to resemble an Indian
teepee, the tavern’s great beige cone rose above the landscape like
a beacon for the thirsty folk of Bowie. Both signs, in four foot
blazing neon, were currently fired up and blinking the word
Beer
on either side
of the building.

A lone blue mailbox sat beside the Post
Office, available for those who couldn’t stop by between the
convenient hours of ten and two. Cassie pictured Mr. Tolstrom,
Bowie’s postman, sitting in the sorting room, his establishment’s
doors securely locked, casually reading the townsfolk’s magazines
(and the occasional personal letter) before slipping them into the
outgoing bins.

The cab wheezed to a rattling stop as a
flashing bar came down across Main Street and the iron clang of
bells rang painfully in their ears. Frank snorted in disgust and
rolled up the windows to block out as much of the noise as
possible. The small cab grew warm quickly as they waited for the
Union Pacific to make its slow pass through town.

Once the bar lifted and the cab was underway
again, they passed Welker-Scott Memorial Park, its swing-sets and
chain-link backstop lonely and forlorn amid the swath of dry,
russet grass, as dead in winter as it would be in July.

Cassie smiled, and in her minds-eye she saw
herself and her various school chums through the years, swinging
gleefully on the rusty swings, braids flying, their scab-covered
knees bared to the world. Years would pass and find them clustered
together along the fence, whispering and giggling, pointing
proprietary fingers at the boys who played baseball, spit in the
dirt, and strove mightily to pretend that they were blissfully
unaware of their female admirers.

A few years further and they would sit on
the brief spring grasses in small groups of twos and fours, holding
hands with those same boys, heads bent in impassioned whispers. She
smiled again; wondering how many times this cycle had repeated
itself, while the park remained unchanged.

Cassie wiped fresh tears from her burning
cheeks as her only world slipped slowly past her and was gone.

Twenty minutes later, just outside Bowie,
Cassie stepped off the highway and onto a narrow dirt track that
meandered its way across the desert. It skirted the equally small
town of Luzena, and headed toward Willcox, which couldn't even be
considered a small town.

Luzena was too close to Bowie and Cassie
wasn't about to risk being seen walking down the highway with her
thumb out when she should be on the three o'clock bus to Tucson.
The chances of being spotted by someone she knew, or worse, someone
Grace knew, were just too high.

Again, she felt a stab of guilt for the lies
she had told to the family that had shown her so much kindness.

Cassie squared her shoulders and tugged the
strap of her duffel bag tighter.

It was done, and she couldn't change it.

She had let Frank the cabbie take her as far
as the bus station, and then waived off his offer to wait with
her.

"My bus is leaving in ten minutes," she had
told him, running for the door, "Go get yourself a fare back to
town!"

"Yeah, right," Frank had laughed as he pulled away.

Once inside the station, Cassie had watched
through the window until the taxi was out of sight, then pulled out
her bus ticket and walked up to the cashier's desk. The attendant
was a graying matron with blue-shadowed eyes and impossibly long
lashes.

"One moment," she had said, as Cassie had
opened her mouth to speak, "I'll be right with you."

The woman made a show of counting through a
thick stack of tickets, then recounting, and finally, with a smirk
playing at the corners of her lips, counting them a third and final
time. With a sigh, she set the stack down and turned to Cassie,
whose own eyes had begun to flash dangerously.

"May I help you?"

"Yes, please," Cassie said, "I need to cash
in my bus ticket."

The woman stared at Cassie with frank
disapproval, studying the girl over the top of her black-framed
reading glasses, before taking the ticket from her with two fingers
as though she suspected that it might be soiled.

"Reason?" she asked.

"No reason," Cassie replied, her eyes
suddenly glazing over and her smile becoming vapid.

"I just need to cash it in, and it's
refundable, that’s what this word here is,” Cassie pointed to the
ticket’s large, red lettering, her voice dripping with sincerity,
“right?"

The impossible lashes blinked once, then
twice; the woman’s scowl deepening the crevasses of her face.

Katherine Belanger had been known to say
that her daughter had a gift for finding the one thing that could
drive a person absolutely crazy.

"It's like she can see
this big invisible button, and Lord help you if you give her reason
to push it."
Kathy would
laugh
, "That girl can make you yank your
hair out, and her smiling that sweet smile the whole
time!"

The ticket attendant at the Bowie Greyhound
station was no exception, and her eyes narrowed dangerously as she
glanced back and forth from the ticket in her hand to Cassie.

"Well," she replied,
"It
is
refundable, yes, but--"

"Great!” Cassie cried, clapping her hands,
"That’s what I want to do, exactly!"

The woman's face was a thundercloud as she
jammed a small key into the desk drawer in front of her and began
savagely counting out fifty-dollar bills. Cassie waited until she
had almost reached two hundred and fifty dollars.

"Oh wait! I'm sorry," she said, with an
insipid giggle, "I needed that in tens and twenties…."

The woman didn't even look up at she stuffed
the fifties back into the drawer and counted out the money, pushing
the stack across the counter and under the window toward the
girl.

"Thanks so much," Cassie gushed, "and have a
great day!"

Turning to go, she heard the
attendant's
Window Closed
sign come slamming down on the counter as the
older woman stormed away. Picking up her duffel bag, Cassie started
across town towards the highway, whistling as she went.

She was still chuckling as she hiked out
past the bluff and turned south, away from Interstate 10 and
towards Buckeye Mill.

Two miles further, the trail ended at an
intersection with a seldom-used dirt road. It was a single lane of
deep ruts, torn up by the fat tires of four-wheel drive trucks,
winding around scruffy junipers and islands of sage. To the west,
the road led far across the desert, disappearing over the next arid
rise. Cassie followed it, sipping sparingly from the first of her
two water bottles. As she hiked, she recorded her thoughts on a
small dictation machine that her mother had bought her for
Christmas.

"Well Kiddo,"
Kathy had said, as Cassie squealed with delight at
the gift
, "A writer has to be able to
put their thoughts down, whenever and wherever they
are."

In the bag on her back, Cassie had a case of
twenty miniature cassettes that fit the recorder, as well as two
spare sets of batteries. Five of the thirty-minute tapes were
already filled with ramblings about school and leaving home. She
knew she would have to put down her thoughts and feelings about her
mother's death, but it was still too soon for that. She hoped to
get some good material on her trip west; who knew what might come
of it?

Several hours later, the rutted track ended at the steep
shouldered edge of Interstate 10. Cassie scooted down the dusty
embankment and squinted at the sign fifty yards up the
highway.

Bowie, 20 Miles.

She had come out four miles short of
Willcox, still a little too close to home for her taste. Nothing to
do about it now but keep walking and try to make herself scarce
when traffic came along. Cassie had looked at her Arizona map and
decided that once she neared Benson, fifty miles to the west, she
should be safe from the chance of any accidental sighting by a nosy
neighbor. Sixty miles was the far-off big city for most of the
residents of her little town. The traffic on the Interstate was
light, in fact, it was nearly nonexistent, and Cassie smirked into
her recorder,

"That's right folks," she said, "Be sure to
watch out for the rush-hour traffic to the thriving metropolis of
Bowie!"

Occasionally a lone pickup would come
barreling across the flats, headed for Willcox or Tucson, but they
were no great threat. The thin air and flat terrain made for
wonderful acoustics, and Cassie had plenty of warning to scramble
off the shoulder of the highway and duck behind the nearest cluster
of juniper trees. The heat of the day began to fade as the sun
turned orange on the western horizon, and Cassie tugged a worn
denim jacket from her bag and slipped it on. She was suddenly
overwhelmed with memories. She had begged for this jacket as it
hung in her mother's closet.

The copper buttons were tarnished and the
hems and cuffs were beginning to fray. The scent of her mother's
perfume still lingered and the memories broke loose within her.
Cassie climbed, sobbing, to the top of the embankment and sat, legs
dangling over the precipice. There she buried her face in her
folded arms and breathed in the faint smell of roses that had been
a small part of the mother she had lost.

*

The funeral had been held at the Sunset
Chapel, across the street from Bowie's high school. Built in the
early 1930's, the chapel had seen better days. The pitted
rose-colored stucco walls were beginning to crumble at the corners.
Equally worn, but meticulously clean, the interior’s faded beige
carpets were permeated with the scents of flowers and wood polish.
Cassie had been escorted to the family room, alongside the chapel
itself, and from there, she could see the casket that held her
mother's body. Covered in fine blue fabric and edged in gleaming
dark cherry, it rested on the draped bier, and beside it stood a
small oak table topped with a dozen blue carnations and a framed
picture of Katherine Belanger. Soon the casket would lie in the
shadow of the small marker that would identify to all that
Katherine Belanger had been Cassie's beloved mother. Guy and Grace
had insisted on paying for the marker and having it in place as
soon as possible following the service, knowing that Cassie
couldn't afford to. She had thanked them tearfully, insisting amid
their protests that she would pay them back. Grace Williams had sat
beside her in the small curtained area, squeezing her hand as Guy
had stepped up to the podium and opened his Bible.

"Katherine Belanger," he began, "if she were
here, would thank each of you for your presence today to celebrate
her graduation into glorious everlasting life. I've known Kathy for
many years, and as I prayed about what I would share today, the
word that kept coming to my mind, was love." Guy slipped his
reading glasses on and bent slightly to read from the Bible.

"So, I thought we'd start
today by defining love. In his letter to the Corinthians,
Paul tells us that
love is
patient…"

Guy had continued to speak, giving each
definition of love, followed by an example from Katherine
Belanger's life, but Cassie heard little of it, and barely felt
Grace's rhythmic squeezing of her hand. In her mind, she was ten
years old again, and she and her mother were sitting in the shade
of the willows, along the edge of the river. Kathy was reading to
her daughter from that same letter to the headstrong people of
Corinth.