Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (4 page)

"This is the Bible in a
nutshell, Baby,"
her mother had
said.
"Love is something we are, not
just something we do. Love Jesus, remember what love is, and try to
be that everyday; everything else will work itself
out."

Cassie couldn’t say how long she sat there, looking down on
Interstate 10. She was still rocking gently as the sun disappeared
and long, purple fingers of night began to stretch across the
desert, her face hidden from the world and her mind enveloped in
memories. Her mother's smell, the touch of her hand on Cassie's
face as she brushed her hair, the strength of her arms as she held
her daughter.

When Cassie's tear-stained face did finally
rise, her cheeks damp and puffy with crying, she was able to take a
deep breath of the cool desert air, the scent of hot asphalt and
bitter junipers mingling in her nostrils. Her heart ached, and she
longed to wake up and have the last week be nothing more than a
terrible nightmare. Wiping her eyes, Cassie shouldered her duffel
bag and resumed her hike in the fading amber glow of sunset.

*

The temperature in the desert drops quickly
with the setting sun. Luckily, for Cassie, there was a great,
glowing, full moon rising, so she could leave her flashlight in her
bag, following the highway in the strange, shadowed monochrome that
washed across the plain as far as she could see. Soon she was
shivering as she buttoned the jacket to the collar and stuffed her
hands deep into the pockets of her jeans. Just as she was debating
pulling more clothes from her bag, Cassie topped a small rise and
saw a broken-down pole barn, slowly collapsing into ruin a dozen
yards north of the highway. Growing up on the outskirts of
civilization, she knew better than to sneak silently up to the
building. Cassie whistled and scuffed her feet as she approached
the sagging door, kicking up a few rocks that bounced noisily off
the side of the nearest wall. This would alert anything on more
than two legs to her presence and, if it hadn't already caught her
scent and done so, it would turn tail at the sound of her
approach.

Either the barn was vacant or whatever had
been living there fled unseen, as the interior was stark and empty
in the beam of Cassie's flashlight. The floor was the same hard
packed dirt as the desert outside; drifts of dust had blown up one
wall from the nightly east wind, partially burying the tumbled
remains of a couple of stalls.

Beneath the rotting wood rails, Cassie found
several long forgotten bales of hay. These she eyed suspiciously,
poking and prodding with a stick until she was satisfied there were
no mice or rats hiding inside.

Taking a small Leatherman multitool from her
pocket, Cassie clipped the brittle twine of the first bale and
began to spread the hay around for a bed to lay her sleeping bag
on.

Gathering another handful of dusty straw and
kicking one of the weathered boards to pieces, she used an old
Zippo lighter that had been her mother's (and, she suspected, her
father's before that) to start a small fire in the center of the
dirt floor, well away from the walls and her bedding. Stars
twinkled brightly through the cracks in the roof, the
weather-beaten timbers having warped and shrunk with time.

Exhausted, Cassie pulled her sleeping bag
from the depths of the duffel and rolled out her bed, lying just
within the circle of warmth, and munched on her meager supply of
granola and venison jerky.

The jerky was a gift from a co-worker of her
mother's, whose husband went deer hunting in Texas each fall. The
salty meat was firm and tough, but tasty and her mother's friend
had sworn that it would keep for a year or more in an airtight
bag.

The meat was filling, but it made her
thirsty. As much as she wanted to cool her throat with the remains
of her second water bottle, she knew that it would doom her to a
dry, miserable morning before she reached Vail, twenty miles short
of Tucson.

So, after taking two small sips, she screwed
the cap on and stowed the bottle back in her bag. She sat, looking
into the tiny fire for a while.

"You take care of yourself, Kiddo. I hope
you find what you're looking for."

Guy's words drifted through her mind. Had he
known what she was planning? If anyone in the world could have
second-guessed her, it would have been Guy Williams, but no, surely
he would have stopped her if he had.

Cassie slipped the small recorder from her
pocket and pressed the record button, watching the tiny red light
pop on as the tape began to roll.

February
11
^th

"I'm spending my first night on the road in
an old barn off Highway 10. Guy and Grace think I caught the bus
and I’m on my way to Portland by now. I feel so bad, lying to them.
I'll have to call them in a couple of days to let them know I'm
okay. I don't know if I have a chance of finding my father, but I
have to try. I have plenty of time before fall term starts. I don't
have much money, but I can dip into my college account if I have
to. I want to look him in the eye; I want him to know what he lost
when he walked away from us. Guy says that healing only comes when
we forgive. That’s probably true, but I don’t feel any forgiveness
for William Beckman. Maybe it’d be better if I don't find him. I
miss Mom. I'm tired of crying; it feels like I cry all the time.
Anyway, I'm sleepy and my fire is dying, I'd better call it a
night."

Before putting the little recorder away,
Cassie slipped the half-used tape from the machine and replaced it
with a tape from her shirt pocket. Penned on the label in red ink
was a small heart; Cassie closed her eyes as her mother’s voice
murmured through the tiny speaker.

“
Trust in the Lord with
all of your heart and lean not unto your own understanding. In all
your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your path. Merry
Christmas, baby.”

Too exhausted to think anymore,
Cassie said a quick mechanical prayer, asking for God's blessing on
the Williams family and safety for herself, then she climbed, fully
dressed, into her sleeping bag.

She pulled the thin, flannel-lined bag up
over her head, zipping it to the top and, with the dry smell of
straw and wood smoke surrounding her, listened to the soft whisper
of the desert wind and fell asleep. She was too exhausted to notice
the dryness of her prayers, or the feeling that when she had spoken
them, they went no further than the ramshackle walls of the
barn.

*

Eleanor Young sighed as she locked the front
doors of the Bowie Greyhound station. Her dogs were barking
something fierce tonight, and even the new orthopedic inserts that
Dr. Manadrell had given her were doing little to ease the throbbing
toothache in her feet.

“
Getting old Elli,” she
sighed, flipping the plastic door shutter from open to closed, and
switching off the neon bus sign and awning lights. She had laundry
to do tonight and a pot roast to get into the oven and, more than
anything, she’d like to forget both and curl up on the couch with a
thick Jean Auel caveman epic, or maybe a hunky action movie and one
of Joe’s beers.

As she passed back around the counter, she
paused to sit a minute, removing her thick-soled shoes and rubbing
her aching arches. Elli Young’s eye caught the creased boarding
slip resting at her station, the word CANCELLED stamped across it
in crimson capitals.

That little snippet hadn’t improved her mood
today either, with her wide eyes and snotty little smile. The old
woman grimaced as she picked up the slip with one hand, the other
still kneading relief into her arthritic extremities.

Cassie
Belanger
, she thought,
where have I heard that name?

Who cares?

Maybe she’d swing
through
Quick Time
Video
on the way home and grab a pizza
and a couple of movies. If Joe didn’t like it, he could fix his own
pot roast. She almost laughed aloud in the empty office. The day
that Joe Young marched his clodhoppers into the kitchen and fixed
himself a meal was the day that they’d buried his old ball and
chain!

Cassie Belanger.

Dropping the ticket back on the worn
counter, Elli picked up the heavy, black receiver of the old rotary
phone and dialed a number from memory, scowling once more as the
young woman’s voice echoed in her memory.

Have a great day!

The line was picked up after two rings.

“
Hello?” A woman’s voice
said.

“
Hello, Gracie?” the older
woman replied, her mind already drifting to a mushroom and
pepperoni pizza and a good ninety minutes of Mel Gibson’s flexing
muscles. Now
that
would be a nice end to a long and lousy day, “it’s Eleanor
Young, down at the bus station.” She glanced over the top of her
glasses at the ticket again, “Say, aren’t you friends with a
‘Belanger’?”

*

After a long and restless night, Cassie woke
up to a chilly gray morning. Sometime before dawn, heavy dew had
fallen, descending through the gaps in the barn roof and seeping
through cracks in the walls. She lay still for a few moments,
looking out through the sagging barn door. The building had been
abandoned longer than she had thought when she’d stumbled across it
the night before. The roof and east wall were just a skeleton of
thin sticks, cracked and gray with age, and Cassie could see
scarlet holes in the boards where the old iron nails had long since
rusted away.

Cassie shivered as she climbed from her damp
bedroll and, with shaking fingers, pulled dry straw from the middle
of the remaining bale to start a fire. Luckily, she had tossed her
duffel bag into the corner and covered several shattered pieces of
board, which had stayed dry enough to light. Returning the battered
Zippo to her pocket Cassie hunched low over her work, rubbing
circulation into her arms and legs, as tiny flames licked at the
dry straw and wood. She fanned the flames with her hands, as it fed
and smoked, until a small fire was snapping cheerfully at her
feet.

After a sip or two of her dwindling water
supply, and a handful of granola, Cassie rolled up her clammy
sleeping bag, promising herself that she would let it air-dry after
the sun was fully up. She ran her fingers through her short dark
hair, wincing at the tangles, and brushed away the larger pieces of
hay that clung to her clothes.

"Well," she said to the sagging walls, "I
must be a real beauty this morning!"

Without running water, her
soap and toiletries were useless. She packed them back up and made
a mental note to find a gas station up the road with a rest room
for her morning
ablutions
. For the moment,
she settled for a quick and merciless brushing of her tangled black
locks.

Half an hour later, she still wasn't warm,
but at least she had stopped shivering.

Pulling her bag onto her shoulders, Cassie
crushed her fire, kicking sand over the smoking remains. Then,
squeezing out through the broken door, she hiked back to the
highway, breathing deeply the cool morning air. The sun was just
peeking over the edge of a gray-blue cloudless sky, promising
another hot day.

Following the highway, which was all but
deserted at this hour of the morning, Cassie turned west again,
crossing the featureless plain in a mile-eating gait that warmed
her quickly. Her watch read eight o'clock when the sun and the
hiking had been enough that she stopped to remove her jacket.

She considered unrolling her sleeping bag to
dry, but decided to wait until she was tired enough to need the
rest.

*

By ten, Cassie had skirted the town of
Willcox. Finding her way back to Interstate 10, she topped a rise
and saw, a half-mile up the road, a small gas station and grocery
store. Stepping off the highway and behind a cluster of brush, she
unlaced one of her hiking boots. From the back of the boot, just
above her heel, she removed a plastic sandwich bag filled with
cash. Cassie had read a story in junior high about an old hobo who
befriended a young boy while riding the rails. The hobo, wise to
life on the road, told the boy to always split up his money,
keeping a few dollars in his pocket and the balance divided and
hidden in his shoes. This way, if robbed, chances were that you
wouldn’t lose all your money. This had seemed like sound reasoning
to Cassie, as well as adding a little spice to the adventure. Now,
however, after removing a ten-dollar bill and replacing her insole,
she felt a little foolish, teetering as she laced up her boot,
hiding behind a bush in the middle of the empty desert.

With cash in her pocket, Cassie hiked to the
little market where she bought a loaf of bread, a package of
bologna, and a couple of candy bars. She stopped at the hotdog bar
and slipped a handful of mustard packets into the pocket of her
shirt. The cashier didn't notice. After she had paid for her
groceries, the old man behind the counter directed her around to
the back of the store for a water hose to refill her bottles. There
was no rest room.

"Employees only," the manager had grunted in reply to her
question, still not looking up from his fishing
magazine.

Cassie used the hose to wash her face and
arms, letting the cool stream flow over the back of her neck until
she felt refreshed. The rivulets of water were already disappearing
into the parched soil when she coiled the hose back up and,
munching on a thick sandwich, started back toward the road. Cassie
had worried the cashier might ask her who she was or where she was
headed, but he hadn't. She felt secure that he wasn't a very
gregarious fellow and that her passing would be quickly
forgotten.