Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (37 page)

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
Martin
Peterson --
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 meetings 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
contents
of 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.

Jack thought that maybe, just maybe, those
hands had seen their fair share of sand and saltwater. Maybe it was
time to slip behind a desk and relax in a warm office, sheltered
from the fury of the weather, his most backbreaking
responsibilities being unloading an occasional box of paperbacks
from the bed of the pickup.

It was more than the work, though, Jack
knew, more than ownership and security.

It was the worn leather recliner across from
the sales counter, the coffee from the stained pot in the cluttered
office. The bookstore was the home he had never found in the decade
he had slept within the walls of the Beckman house. The little
apartment above the store had echoed nearly every happy moment,
every bit of laughter that he had experienced over the last ten
years.

The road before him blurred again, as much
from the tears that welled and slipped down his cheeks, as from the
pounding rain outside.

Most of all, he knew, it was Dottie. That
sharp-tongued, eccentric old woman who had been his only real
friend for longer than he wanted to think about.

The bookstore would remain, he would see to
that, and the little apartment would always keep some small part of
Dottie Westcott’s spirit for as long as Jack lived there.

But he would never again
knock on that thin wooden door and have her yell from the kitchen
that, for Pete's sake
he
knew
where the key was. He’d never again
barbecue hamburgers on the tiny landing in the freezing dead of
winter, never again have her reach over and squeeze his hand with
all of her surprising strength, her eyes glittering through emerald
lenses. Thanking him wordlessly for keeping the loneliness, that
slavering hound of the old and forgotten, from her door.

Jack saw a rest stop ahead and pulled the
truck into the slow lane, slipping beneath the dripping pines, to
stop between the faded yellow lines at the farthest edge of the
parking lot. There he turned off the engine and buried his face in
his hands. His shoulders shook as great silent sobs wracked his
frame, the windows of the cab slowly fogging over from the heat of
his grief. He wept for all that the eccentric old woman had become
to him and for all the things that he had never told her.

At forty-two years old, Jack Leland, former
pastor, part-time oysterman, and full-blown alcoholic, felt like an
orphan once again.

A chill north wind whipped fine sand, in
creeping fog-like tendrils, up the moonlit beach. The storm clouds
had finally parted to allow the wane rays of the moon to blanket
the wet shoreline.

Cassie huddled in the lee of a huge
driftwood stump, its gray web of weathered roots casting long, thin
shadows across the sand, like a thousand gnarled fingers. She was
cold. The sweating, sobbing race down to the beach had warmed her,
but now the icy teeth of the coast wind bit deep. She shivered
miserably, wrapping her arms around her knees and leaned deeper
into the scant protection of the tidal refuse.

She had no idea how long she had sat there,
the cold creeping into her bones, the sickness slowly ebbing from
her belly. She felt faded and thin, diminished, like evening
sunlight through a dusty pane of glass. Looking out over the
crashing waves, Cassie wiped the last of her tears from the sand
gritted corners of her eyes.

She had found her father, and she knew, finally, that all the
ranting, raging, and spite-filled words that she might spit in his
face would profit her nothing. Whatever small, mean part of her
that had yearned toward revenge, for her, and for her dead mother,
would never have the satisfaction of seeing her pain and
hopelessness reflected in the eyes of the man who had fathered her.
Cassie sighed, remembering the dull expression, the blank,
uncomprehending eyes, and the fading pink scar running from his
temple.

She understood that whatever reprisal she
had hoped for had been stolen by the devastating injury that had
snatched away William Beckman and left that frightened, rambling
child in his place. Cassie felt cheated. Cheated, robbed and, more
than anything, ashamed.

She could hear Guy William's reproachful
voice, far in the back of her mind, reminding her that, as Paul had
told the Romans, vengeance was the Lord's. All the lessons she had
learned, in church and at home, about grace and mercy and
forgiveness, she had set them all aside in hopes of wounding her
father the way he had wounded them. Instead, she had hurt people
that she loved, and put her own life in danger, for the chance to
dole out the judgment that God, in His grace, did not dole out on
her.

"I'm sorry," she whispered to the shadowed
waves, to Jack, and Guy, her mother and, mostly, to God. "I'm so
sorry."

"Well," a voice spoke up just behind her,
"Sorry or not, you better take this blanket, or you're going to
freeze to death out here!"

Cassie was too cold, too emotionally
exhausted to shriek, a quick hiccup of surprise was the best she
could manage as she turned to see Elizabeth Marshall silhouetted in
the moonlight.

Cassie hung her head in embarrassment.

"Sorry if I freaked you out," she said, "I
didn't mean to dash like that, my feet just wouldn't stop."

The dark outline stood for a long still
moment, as though considering her apology. Then she stepped around
the snarl of roots and sat down beside Cassie in the sand, shifting
her weight until she found a comfortable seat, and spreading a
thick wool blanket over the both of them.