Winter Tides (4 page)

She stopped again and listened.

For a moment she could hear the footfalls, even though she herself was dead still. They didn’t sound like an echo. They were clear and unhurried, like someone strolling, scuffing their shoes on concrete. The sound was strangely loud, but then almost at once seemed to evaporate, fading away in the fog, and again there was a lingering silence. Still she could see no one, only the pale fog swirling up around the pier railings like languid spirits.

She hurried forward now. There were fifty yards or more between her and the gate, but the Coast Highway with its traffic lights and street lamps was still invisible ahead of her. She could see only the dim railing on either side of the pier, and, on her right, the lifeguard tower looming up again out of the fog, the lamplight glowing on the wide, angled-out windows.

Then she saw something—movement, at the edge of the tower.

She was certain that someone had just that moment stepped out of sight behind it, between the tower and the railing on a little outthrust section of pier. She had got just a glimpse of red—a flannel shirt? A cloth coat? She looked back again, her heart pounding, as she angled toward the opposite railing, ready to run, suppressing the urge to scream.

There—she saw it again: someone standing still, facing her but half hidden by the corner of the wall, just a shadow in the fog that swirled across the pier, the shadow growing more and then less distinct. She felt suddenly dizzy, and she gripped the cold handrail to steady herself, unsure whether it was the fog that obscured the waiting figure, or the fog that made it visible, like a film slide projected on mist. And now it vanished altogether as the ocean breeze momentarily swept the fog clear, and then almost instantly the mists billowed in off the ocean again, and the figure materialized within it, closer now, as if she had stepped forward five or six paces and stopped, waiting for another gust of sea wind to hide it again.

The sound of footsteps resumed, preternaturally loud, as if echoing down a corridor. Anne found herself running through the dreamlike fog, hearing the footsteps behind her louder even than the pounding of her own feet. She swung herself over the railing again, edged her way past the gate, and vaulted the railing back onto the pier where, after a quick backward glance, she headed straight across the Highway, ignoring the red light, not looking back down the empty sidewalk again until she was halfway up the block. A shadow in a doorway impelled her toward the curb, and when she realized that it was a man drinking out of a bottle in a paper bag, she almost sighed with relief. She slowed down now to catch her breath. There were no longer any footsteps. The night was quiet and still, but she hurried on up Main to Orange Street anyway, fumbling for her keys in her jeans pocket. Her hands shook as she unlocked the street door of her apartment, stepped through and locked it behind her, and then ascended the stairs through the empty building toward her flat on the second floor.

T
HE HIGH, RECTANGULAR BUILDING THAT WAS THE EARL
of Gloucester, a theatre props and sets company, was built back in 1927 as a feed and fertilizer warehouse. It took up most of the length of the block near the corner of 6th and Walnut Streets in Huntington Beach, about a hundred yards from the Coast Highway and another hundred yards west from Main Street. Its faded clapboard siding had been painted blue sometime in the 1970s, and the wooden windows were trimmed with white moldings that the ocean air had slowly repainted a shade of lichen gray over the years. At one time a lean-to boardwalk porch had stood along the 6th Street side of the warehouse, but most of it had been torn down and replaced with a more practical concrete loading dock. In front of the business entrance there was still a section of the old porch that ran on back to the end of the building. Two acres of weedy vacant lot separated the warehouse from the highway, and at the top of the lot stood one of the few working oil wells left in the downtown. It was fenced with rusted chain link and sagging barbed wire.

The warehouse itself was a relic of Huntington’s sleepier past, weathered by salt air and wind and shaded by a pair of enormous eucalyptus trees that dropped bark and leaves and seeds onto the roof. Jolene, the Earl’s secretary, had recently computerized the inventory and the books. That and the new loading dock were the company’s concessions to the modern world. The Earl himself, Earl Dalton, still typed his letters on an ancient Royal typewriter that had been used as a prop in Hollywood films before he had bought it at auction. Inside the warehouse the smell of the wet sawdust from unseasoned fir was heavy in the air, along with the smell of dust and resin and the musty hay bales stacked against the warehouse wall near the loading dock.

Working alone in the early morning, Dave Quinn shot one-by-four frames together to build palace walls for a production of
King Lear
that would be staged at the Earl’s own Ocean Theatre next door to the warehouse. Next he would glue polystyrene sheets to these frames, and then a sets artist—who hadn’t started to work yet—would etch the polystyrene and airbrush mossy-looking stones onto it. Then they could move the sections of crenelated castle wall into the theatre itself and fasten them together to build the facade of the Duke of Albany’s palace.

But if the sets artist didn’t appear soon, like today, Dave would have to move most of his set pieces into the shop in back to make room for more immediate work, which was already cluttering up the area in front of the loading dock door. A theatre company out in Westminster was staging
Oklahoma!
, and the Earl’s was delivering set and prop pieces: hay bales and a Doe-C-Doe Wagon, two horses, thirty feet of split rail corral fence, and six barrels big enough for actors to dance on. Dave had built the fence himself. The Earl himself had gotten the barrels from a Kentucky distillery, and they still smelled like whisky and
charcoal. The wagon, a sort of open buckboard, was already gray with weather and age when they’d gotten it out of a Minnesota barn. Dave had replaced half a dozen of its spokes along with the wagon’s seat, sandblasted the new wood, and grayed it with rottenstone and beeswax. The effect was pretty good. You could pick out the new wood if you were looking close and paying attention, but from theater seats the wagon was an authentic period piece.

He set down the power staple gun now, and the air compressor chugged for a moment and then fell silent. He could hear in the distance the low rumble of waves breaking through the concrete pilings of the Huntington Beach Pier. The swell had risen during the night, a late-season north swell with tides high enough to worry beachfront homeowners. In 1988 the old pier had been destroyed by a spectacular wave that had broken across the end of it, over a quarter mile out to sea, dwarfing the pier’s twenty-foot light stanchions and sweeping away the flimsy bait shops and cafes and rest rooms, snapping concrete pilings and wrenching apart iron railings that had withstood countless ocean storms since the pier had been restored and reinforced in 1931. Now, as the end of the century drew near, the newly rebuilt pier, with its angled pilings heavily moored in the sea bottom, was engineered to withstand an even heavier swell….

He walked to the stairs and climbed the wooden steps toward the vast loft that made up the second floor of the Earl of Gloucester. Built on a frame of heavy timbers, the loft occupied maybe a quarter of the open ceiling space in the warehouse, and it was built high enough off the concrete floor to store stage sets and props underneath, including the front section of a Spanish galleon. The ship’s bowsprit and carved mermaid were angled back as if the galleon were tossing on a stormy sea, and the sea itself was attached to the underside of the ship—painted plywood waves mounted on tracks so that the waves moved back and forth, one in front of the other. There was nautical debris stacked around the galleon—open treasure chests, masts, oars, crab and lobster traps, and sections of an old barnacle-encrusted wharf. Fishing nets hung with seashells
and glass floats were strung from the floor joists of the loft above.

The loft itself was mostly offices along a balcony with a wooden railing. The old offices looked like sets themselves, like something off a sound stage—office cubicles from
It’s a Wonderful Life
or
Farewell My Lovely
. The walls were paneled with vertical wooden boards and battens, painted gloss white, and the doors had brass knobs and ripple glass windows. At either end of the balcony there were palm tree tikis standing on top of the railings. They were comical tikis, with long noses and blubbery lips and undersized arms folded across their bellies. One of the tikis wore a garish aloha shirt and a straw hat, and it bent down over the floor below, watching like a sentinel, secured precariously to the post at the end of the balcony by a wide leather belt. Tikis had been the rage in the early sixties, but they’d gone so far out of style by now that they’d nearly disappeared off the fashion map. Earl Dalton, who had established the company in 1951, predicted a tiki comeback and was “displaying the tikis to advantage,” as he put it. The Earl’s had an economy Hawaiian package, with a bamboo bridge, giant clamshells, an outrigger canoe, torches, and a backdrop painted with palm trees and a moonlit ocean—everything you’d need for a luau except the hula dancers and beach sand, both of which could be obtained for a fee. The tikis were a bonus if you rented the whole package.

The sound of his feet echoed on the wooden floorboards, and he stopped for a moment and stood on the balcony next to the tiki in the shirt. The sound of the ocean was louder now, and he could see through the bank of west-facing windows that the fog was thinner than he had thought. From where he stood he could look out over the rooftops toward the pier, where a long gray wall of water rushed through the pilings, seeming almost to scrape the bottom of the pier before throwing itself forward, the lip of the wave striking the ocean and exploding skyward in a fury of violent white water that surged in a ten-foot wall toward the beach. Dave heard the staccato boom of its breaking then, a crack nearly like thunder….

* * *

L
ESLIE
C
OLLIER AND HIS FIVE-YEAR-OLD GRANDDAUGHTER
Jenny appeared now on the path through the vacant lot. The path led to the Supreme Doughnut Shop, which sat a hundred yards away from the Earl of Gloucester on the edge of the Highway. Collier, an old friend of the Earl’s, rented the two-bedroom bungalow behind the Ocean Theatre. The Earl owned the bungalow and the theater both, and he paid Collier a small salary to keep the theater in operation, even though it hadn’t earned a penny in years. The comedy improv on Friday nights drew a big beach crowd, but that was about it.
King Lear
would play to half an audience, which didn’t matter to the Earl, who could afford Collier’s salary and wrote off the bungalow rental as a business expense. Nothing having to do with money mattered to the Earl. What did matter was that the show went up on schedule, and that the little out-of-time world he had invented on the corner of 6th and Walnut Streets spun along in its course without interruption or complication.

The two of them stopped at the edge of the lot, and Collier, balancing his coffee cup in front of him, did a little sideways shuffle, back and forth like Soupy Sales, the sunlit fog swirling around him. Jenny tried it herself, getting it about half right, and then Collier showed her again. Dave could hear the sound of Jenny’s laughter, and he watched as the two set out again, disappearing beyond the corner of the warehouse.

D
AVE WATCHED AS ANOTHER WAVE SLAMMED THROUGH
the pier, and it occurred to him that no matter how much concrete they poured into holes in the sea bottom, no matter how many engineers calculated figures and assessed the potential energy in a breaking wave, one day a swell would come in out of the Pacific that would sweep it all away like it was nothing at all.

E
DMUND DALTON’S VIDEO CAMERA EQUIPMENT WASN’T
professional quality, but it did the job, and most of his film work was better than the average in the “industry,” as he liked to call it. His artistic sensibilities made up for a lot, and his last film had a couple of subtle touches that he was really very proud of. It was a shame that he couldn’t talk about them to anyone, but he had never found anyone worthy of sharing his secrets. The camera had a wide-angle lens, and it picked up images in a moderately dark room. It stood on its tripod in the corner of what, for a Huntington Beach condo, was a large bedroom. The far wall of the bedroom was blank and white, clear of furniture, pictures, or anything else. The carpeted floor at the empty end of the room was covered with heavy plastic, and the plastic was covered with more carpet. He adjusted the angle of the camera one last time, set the remote control on the night-stand by his bed, and walked up the hall past the bathroom, which doubled as a photo lab for developing black-and-white prints. There was only a single window in the bathroom, which could be blacked out in a moment with a pull-down shade. On the long counter, past the double sinks, sat an enlarger and chemical trays.

The second bedroom, what he liked to call the library, stood at the far end of the hall. There were custom-built wooden shelves along one wall of the room, decorated with crown moldings and turned posts and brass fixtures, the shelves holding books and videocassettes and statuary. The bottom shelf of the unit was six inches off the floor, its bottom edge hidden by molding. He removed a bronze buffalo from one of the bottom shelves now, got his fingers in
behind the shelf, and pushed a hidden spring latch. The back edge of the shelf bumped up so that he could get his hands on it and lift it out of its depression. There was an open area beneath, with a couple of dozen videocassettes lying on edge, all of them encased in plastic boxes, which were slid into bags containing stuffed manila envelopes. He considered the titles, smiling with amusement—
Mary Pop-pins, Pollyana, Pippi Longstocking, Snow White, Cinderella….
Finally he picked out
Pippi Longstocking
, took it out of its case, and plugged it into the VHS machine beneath the big-screen television. He settled down in his chair and sorted through photos from the envelope while the film ran through ten minutes of blank tape.