Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (12 page)

From somewhere off to her left came the
electronic chatter of video games. The attendant, a bored teenager
with long hair and bad skin, handed them their shoes and a
transparent scorecard, then directed them down the concourse to
lane twenty-two. Stepping down into the settee area, they searched
the racks of scuffed house balls until each had found one that fit.
Cassie's first roll hit the left gutter about halfway down the
lane, as did the second ball, and the third.

"You're hooking!" Jack called from the
plastic bench, his two strikes marked clearly on the overhead.

"I beg your pardon?” Cassie asked, frowning
at the far-off pins, as she waited at the ball return.

"Hooking! Hooking!" Jack repeated, "You're
hooking your arm before you release the ball. You want your hand to
come straight up past your ear once you let go!"

Cassie hefted her bowling ball, lining up
her sights with the arrows halfway down the lane, as Jack had shown
her. She took three quick, mincing steps, allowing the ball to drop
from its rest against her chest and swing down past her hip. As she
released the ball, her right hand swung up and past her right ear
and she watched, amazed, as the ball rolled rapidly down the
polished lane and struck the pins. With a resounding crash, all the
pins scattered, save one. The pin in the far right corner spun
drunkenly before righting itself in the middle of the lane. Cassie
spun, her arms raised in victory.

"You were robbed!” Jack roared. Cassie
laughed.

For the next hour and a half, Cassie worked
on her form, under Jack's freely offered tutelage, and brought her
overall score up to a record-breaking sixty-seven.

"Well," she said in her own defense, "It's
record-breaking for me; my last score was zero, and a broken
ankle!"

Jack's own tally hovered in the mid
two-hundreds, causing him finally to admit, somewhat sheepishly,
that he had bowled with a league every week for the last decade.
Cassie decried this as a set-up and insisted that Jack pay penance
at the ice-cream shop next door, which he did.

"Thanks! That was a lot of fun!” Cassie
said, licking peppermint-candy ice cream from her fingers, “you’re
really good at that, how often do you play?"

"Oh, maybe four or five nights a week."

"A
week
?" she asked, eyes
widening, "Whoa!"

"Yeah," he said, sobering, "when you say it
out loud like that, I guess it sounds pretty pathetic. What is it
you youngsters say?"

"
Get a life
?" Cassie
offered.

"That's the one."

"Well," she said, "I still had a great time, so thank
you!"

"Yup," replied Jack, juggling his own
double-scoop cone, "and to think, three straight games and you
didn't break a single bone!"

As they walked back across the parking lot
of the bowling alley, Cassie noticed a black pick-up in the far
corner of the lot. Something seemed strange about the vehicle and
she thought to tell Jack, but he was deep in the middle of a
monologue on the history and origins of bowling. By the time the
sport had reached modern day, she had forgotten all about it.

*

They spent that night in a rented campsite
at Pismo State Park. Cassie insisted that Jack take the van this
time, and that she sleep in the tent. Jack turned in early,
claiming exhaustion from their trip to the bowling alley.

After borrowing a towel, the one item that
she had managed to overlook in her own packing, she walked through
the moonlit park to the bathhouse and treated herself to a long,
hot shower. The tile floor was cool to her bare feet, as Cassie
stood before the mirror, brushing her wet, spiky hair. The cinder
block building reminded her of the rest rooms and showers at the
campground near Bowie where she and her mother had retreated to
when the blistering heat of summer turned their trailer into an
unbearable oven.

The Belanger ladies would pack up their
meager camping supplies; a second-hand tent, two sleeping bags, a
cooler and the pillows off their beds, and set up camp in the shade
of the willows that lined the creek. Kathy would bring the monopoly
board, and they would play long games of financial conquest, taking
a break to toss a Frisbee or play Bocce.

When the heat became too much, the two would
swim in the deep pool where a bend in the stream had been dammed.
This was the same spot where, years before, Kathy had held her baby
to be dedicated. Each night, they would walk across a meadow of
short, brown grass to the shower house and wash away the sweat of
the day. Then, sitting in the cool concrete building, her mother
would comb the tangles from her hair as they made up scary stories
together, and then raced back through the darkness to the lights of
their camp.

Standing in front of the mirror, Cassie felt
the ache of loss engulf her. Her mother wouldn't be waiting by the
campfire when she got back, with two freshly cut sticks and a bag
full of marshmallows. She wouldn't join Cassie in round after round
of campfire songs about silly billboards and bears in tennis shoes,
or lie with her on their backs and point out the
constellations.

Her mother was gone. In her mind, Cassie
heard again the squealing tires, the dull thump of a steel bumper
hitting flesh and then, worst of all, the broken cries for help
echoing through the dark, quiet streets. Cries that no one
heard.

She was alone now. As the tears rolled down
her cheeks, Cassie fingered the folded scrap of paper in her pocket
and felt the tiniest spark. If she could find him, track him down
to wherever life had carried him in the last two decades; maybe he
would be different than her mother had remembered.

Time, Cassie knew, could change people,
sometimes mellowing and softening the hardest hearts. Why couldn't
this be true for William Beckman?

Whoever he had been eighteen years ago,
didn’t mean that he had to be that same person now. Cassie
shuddered as she remembered her mother's fevered voice,

"He's not someone you want to know,
Cass."

Looking at her reflection in the harsh white
lights of the shower room, Cassie heard once more the merciless
screech of tires and her eyes narrowed.

Why should she give him a chance?

Why should
he
be happy, after
all the hurt he had inflicted on his wife and daughter? Maybe
she
should
confront him, spitting the truth into his face without mercy,
or maybe she should just forget about finding him and start
building her own life.

Nevertheless, Cassie knew, even as she felt
the anger and resentment churning in her stomach, that she had to
find the truth. She wanted to start her own life clean, with no
questions or doubts. She wanted to be rid of the hurt.

“
Okay, Lord," Cassie whispered, leaning her forehead against
the cool glass of the mirror, her hands clenched into white fists
on either side of the steel sink, "please tell me what you want me
to do. If you want me to find him, tell me what I should say. If
you want me to forgive him, then show me how. I don't want to carry
this around forever."

A sudden picture came to Cassie's mind as
she spoke those words, the grim haunted look on Jack Leland's face,
that expression of hopeless regret that made his jaw tighten and
his eyes go flat.

Then, she saw herself in thirty years, her
hair starting to gray, those same deep lines carving down from the
corners of her eyes and mouth, that same look of bitter loss
shadowing her face.

"Not me," she whispered fiercely to her
reflection, "maybe I'll find him and maybe I won't, and even if I
do and he's the same person he was, at least I can walk away
knowing that I tried. I'm not going to spend my life wondering
about what might have happened; I'm not going to end up like
that!"

She spoke this oath to the empty walls, her
voice echoing with the slow drip of water. Then, pulling on her
boots, she gathered her dirty clothes and walked back to their
campsite. Climbing into her tent, Cassie fell immediately to
sleep.

Late that night, Cassie awoke to a strange
sound outside the tent. Lying very still, she listened, and finally
realized that it was coming from the van. Jack’s voice escaped from
inside, mumbling, rising and falling, silent then crying out
loudly, deep in the clutches of a nightmare. The van squeaked on
its springs with his violent thrashing.

Cassie untangled herself from her sleeping
bag and, just as she found the tent zipper, Jack gave one last
anguished cry and fell silent. By the time Cassie was standing,
barefoot, in the cool moonlight beside the van, he was quiet once
more.

*

Jack was still snoring outrageously when
Cassie rose and quietly rolled up the sleeping bag and tent. Behind
her, the morning sun cast pale-pink spokes through the timbered
campground. Rummaging through the plastic cargo box that Jack had
left on the picnic table the night before, she lifted out the
Coleman burner and the coffeepot. The latter she took over to the
campsite's water faucet, a single gray pipe attached to a wooden
post.

Cassie filled the pot,
swirling the contents around and then, dumping the water onto the
gravel-filled grave at the base of the pipe, she filled it again.
This she carried back to the table and, lighting the stove with her
Zippo, put the coffee on to heat. Cassie then filled the dented tin
percolator from a baggie of coffee grounds.
Jack's special blend
he had
called it the morning before, enlightening Cassie to the joy of
specialty coffees. Cassie's own java experiences had been more in
the arena of instant crystals, and Jack had rolled his eyes at
this, commenting again on his concerns for the future of western
civilization. Cassie had admitted, partially in hopes of avoiding
further diatribes, that his personal recipe was
far
better than she was used
to.

Once the coffee began gurgling over the tiny
blue flame of the stove, Cassie dug into her duffel bag for the
surprise. The day before, when they had stopped, briefly, for a
rest room break, Cassie had remembered seeing an old skillet in the
big camp box, and had bought a package of bacon and half a dozen
big, brown farm eggs. These she had carefully stashed in her duffel
bag before Jack returned to the van.

Sparrows had gathered, twittering, in the
nearby oaks when she surmised the coffee had steeped long enough.
Cassie removed the pot from the flame and replaced it with the iron
skillet. Into this, she laid several thick strips of bacon, which
sizzled and popped on the heated surface. While the bacon cooked,
Cassie dug deeper into the supplies and pulled out two tin plates,
a spatula, salt and pepper, and a bag full of plastic-ware. She
turned the bacon with the point of the buck knife that Jack had
given her, and was lining one of the tin plates with napkins when
she heard the sliding door of the van creak open behind her.

"Now what in the world is all this nonsense?" Jack yawned,
rubbing sleep from his eyes and blinking owlishly at her as he
pulled on his shoes.

"I thought maybe,” Cassie retorted, “just
maybe, you wouldn't be such an old grouch in the mornings if you
had a decent breakfast!"

She placed the crisp cooked bacon on the
plate and cracked two eggs into the sizzling fat. These she dusted
with salt and pepper before pouring a cup of the thick black coffee
into a cup and handing it to Jack.

"One word," she warned, "about what a great
little wife I'll make someday, and you're wearing breakfast!"

"I guess I'm not in much of a position to
argue," Jack said, accepting the steaming mug and breathing in the
aroma with a sigh of appreciation.

"You just make sure you don't put any soap
in that skillet,” he muttered. “It took me forever to get it
seasoned just right!"

"What do you mean,
seasoned
?"

Jack sighed again.

"Cast iron," he began, "is
porous. That means the surface of the metal is pitted with
thousands and thousands of tiny holes. You have to heat oil in a
new pan to fill all of these holes so food won't stick to the
surface and the pan won't rust. This is called
seasoning
the iron.

Okay," said Cassie, "that makes sense I
suppose…"

"Thanks," Jack replied dryly, "now the
reason you don't want to use soap on cast iron is that it will pull
the oil out of all those little holes and leave soap behind. Then,
not only does your food stick, and your pan rust, but until you
season it again, your food is going to taste like the soap that’s
caught in the pores."

While Jack was teaching her the finer points
of camp cookery, Cassie noticed a chunky squirrel, drawn by the
smell of food, which had scampered down a nearby tree trunk and
stood, nose twitching at the edge of their camp. Breaking off a
small piece of the bacon, she tossed into onto the grass near the
creature and watched, delighted, as he dashed over and stuffed the
morsel into his cheeks, spinning and racing back up the tree with
his treat.

"You haven't heard a word I've said,"
accused Jack, waving a finger in her direction, "have you?"

"I heard every word," she replied airily,
"not that it matters anyway, I'm not the one who'll be doing the
dishes.” Jack had no response to that, but chuckled as Cassie
handed him a plate.

“
So,” he said, chewing on
the last of his bacon, “tell me something about
Oysterville.”

Cassie took a gulp of her coffee.

“
Well,” she began, “Did you
know that Oysterville was originally called Shoalwater
Bay?”