Mudlark (27 page)

"Mmm. I
am
here."

We twined. The telephone rang. Swearing, Jay fumbled the receiver off the phone and stuck it between
his left ear and shoulder. "Hello. No, but you're giving substance to the term coitus interruptus. All right, I'll stop
talking dirty. Your younger, purer son just took off for Portland with his girlfriend. I think they're going to
cohabit."

It was, I deduced, Jay's mother. I wondered why we hadn't programmed the phone. I flopped back onto
my side of the bed and listened.

"Uh-huh. Yeah. No, he's okay. Really. Healthy as a horse. Come on, Ma. You didn't call about Freddy.
What's happening?"

He listened. Nancy has a nice voice in person. Over the phone she sounded like a hen squawking. Jay
kept her going quite a while with skeptical noises. He scrunched up to a sitting position against the headboard and
began jotting on the notepad we kept by the phone cradle. Finally he went through the farewell ritual and hung up.
He was looking perplexed again. He clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back against them, staring at the
ceiling. Maybe bemused was the right word. I slid over to him again. "What is it?"

"Ah, hmmm."

"Cut that out, Jay. Am I or am I not the wife of your bosom? I promise not to tell anybody anything, but
the suspense is killing me. Put me out of my misery."

"It was just more scuttlebutt on the Hagens."

"Jay!"

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I shouldn't say more."

"Give!" I pummeled his head until he grabbed my hands.

"Well, according to Ma's sources, Donald Hagen is gay."

I sat up. "Gay as in...no kidding?"

"He married Cleo because his father is one of those dolts who imagine homosexuality can be
'cured.'"

"By proximity to a good woman? That's nineteenth century!"

"You may not have noticed, darling, but there are a lot of nineteenth century people running around out
there."

"Is Nancy fantasizing?"

"My mother?" He tweaked me where I am tweakable. "She's not, but her friends may be. They say the
old man threatened to boot his son from the payroll if Donald didn't start flying straight, so Donald looked around
for a cooperative woman. Apparently Cleo drove a hard bargain, but Ma's informants seem to believe Donald and
Cleo got along well enough. They entertained a lot, never squabbled in public, patronized the right charities.
Arrangements like that are not unheard of, Lark."

"You believe the story?"

"Halfway." He nuzzled my neck. "But it shoots holes in my best scenario. I had Donald killing his wife in
a fit of sexual jealousy, and then trying to incriminate Tom every way he could think of. If Ma's buddies are right,
Hagen wasn't jealous of Bob McKay or even of Tom, and the last thing he would have wanted was Cleo's death." He
added with grudging fairness, "That would be doubly true if he and his wife were good friends. It sounds as if they
were."

I said, "I don't want to feel sorry for Donald Hagen."

"Mmm. Me either. The sucker tried to shoot me." Jay was nuzzling my neck. I nuzzled back.

"Keep your eye on the oyster cannery and you'll stay on course." Clara's Gore-tex rainsuit was purple.
Her wide-brimmed rainhat, in a paisley print, flopped with the boat's motion. Clara weighed down the stern of her
rowboat like a Wagnerian soprano.

I squinted past her and put my back into a long, smooth pull. The oars cut the water without splashing.
We were about fifty yards out from the dock, and our progress was not rapid.

Bonnie said, "Are we going to see whales?"

"The south reach of the bay is too shallow. Killer whales nose around once in a while, but they're not
really whales. Dolphins." Clara settled her waterproof sketching kit onto the seat beside her. A large thermos
reposed between her feet.

I envisaged the boat being nudged by a playful killer whale and caught a crab. That is to say, I
mis-stroked and drew a water-spangled arc in the air with one oar. There were crabs in the area, but crabbers caught
them in pots. So I was given to understand. Clara was delivering an amiable lecture on the sea life of Shoalwater
Bay. I rowed.

I had been running all summer, so my legs and lungs were in good shape, but I should have been lifting
weights. My arms ached and my palms smarted through the gloves Clara had made me wear. I rather thought Clara
was going to row back. Or Bonnie. Or Clara and Bonnie in tandem.

The weather was dead calm and misty. Wisps of fog blurred the receding dock and the evergreen copse
behind it. I kept my eyes on the white siding of the cannery. A van load of tourists gawked at us from the pier.

"I wonder if the folks in the Enclave are watching us?" Bonnie piped from behind me. She had draped
herself over the prow like a figurehead. We had loaded our pails and waders into her end. I was straddling the long
handles of the two clam shovels. I felt Bonnie wriggle. "That house on the point has a widow's walk."

"They'd have to use binoculars," Clara gave a flip with her left hand. "The Enclave's way over there to
the north."

My oars dug below the placid surface of the water, and the boat inched onward.

Clara spent a lot of time telling us about oysters, though none of the oyster beds was open to the public.
Over-harvesting and disease had destroyed the tiny native oysters in the 1920s. The larger, less succulent type now
harvested was a Japanese import. Tom's oyster bed lay around the point of the island on the east side. Clara lit a
cigarette and waved it grandly north and east. I glanced over my shoulder, but the island was still a blue blur in the
distance.

Then she launched into a dark history of ghost shrimp. It seemed they were not good for oysters. Their
numbers were increasing.

Once in a while Bonnie tossed in a question. Clara talked on. I think she was lecturing because she
didn't want to brood about Matt and Lottie. After ten minutes of steady pulling, I lost myself in the rhythm and
stopped my mental grumbling.

We were alone on the gleaming sheet of water. As the peninsula began to recede, a thin mist gave it the
insubstantial beauty of a Japanese painting. Colors grew subtler. Gray shafts of sunlight touched little clearings and
their undistinguished houses with mystery. The northern hook, the Enclave, was lost in mist. As I watched, the
ferry slid into distant view, bound for the far shore and civilization. Coho Island lay about a third of the distance
across the narrow southern neck of the bay. The ferry headed northeast, across the widest part.

"Angle a few degrees to your right, Lark." Clara interrupted a commentary on the blue heron. "Yes,
you're okay now. Almost halfway there."

Halfway? I felt as if I had been rowing for hours. I gripped the oars and pulled.

"Want me to spell you?" Bonnie wriggled. So did the boat.

"Not yet." I wasn't into lengthy utterances. After a few strokes I caught the rhythm again and rowed on
smoothly. The mist was lifting. As the light shifted, the wooded ridge behind the now-distant cannery changed
color. "I can see why you like to paint it, Clara."

Clara twisted and looked back. "Oh, yes, it's different every time."

"Rouen Cathedral?" I bent and pulled.

Clara smiled. "That's a subject for oils. This is pure watercolor. You have a good eye."

"Thanks." Bend, pull.

"Do you paint?"

"I'm just a looker. I tried a sketching class once."

Bonnie said, "When I got tired of the singles scene in Santa Monica, I started taking night classes, a
different subject every semester, in order to scope out the student body. I took a life drawing class. All the students
were women. Even the model was a woman."

"Pity." My back gave a definite twinge. I knew I would be bent like a crone the next day. And I still
hadn't dug a clam.

"I enjoyed the class, but I wasn't any good," Bonnie went on. "As an artist, I'm definitely a wordsmith. I
had better luck with economics."

Clara cupped her hands around her lighter and exhaled a stream of blue smoke. "With the subject or
your classmates?"

Bonnie gave a reminiscent snort. "Both. Hey, watch it!"

The boat grounded and slid sideways. I straightened and rested the oars. When I turned around I saw
we were still at least twenty yards offshore.

"Shoal," Clara said, rocking to port. "They shift." The boat wallowed free. Smoke curled around her head
like a wonky wreath.

I rubbed my back. "Can you do a little depth analysis there, Bonnie? I don't need a herniated disc. Sound
the bottom or something."

Clara was groping in the slosh at the edge of the crude decking with her free hand. She pulled up a
damp yardstick and leaned forward, passing the dripping thing over my shoulder. Clearly the situation was not
unprecedented.

"Shove off a little with the left oar, Lark, and Bonnie can guide you along the rim of the sandbank. The
tide's farther out than I anticipated." Clara wiped her hand on her purple pants.

"Is that a problem?"

"No. But we do want to ease in closer to the shore."

After perhaps fifteen minutes of gingerly maneuvering, we nosed around the leading edge of the shoal.
Between it and the slope of beach ran a temporary channel. Clara decided I should row us aground on the island
side. Bonnie would then leap overboard in her waders and pull the lightened boat farther up on the sand. I would
repeat the process. I thought it likely the boat would upend, bow over stern, the moment Bonnie deprived us of her
weight.

Pulling the clumsy rubber waders over our wool socks took a while. Tom had lent us a rubberized bag
for our tennies, fortunately. After some awkward wobbling and rocking, Bonnie managed to slide over the edge.
She landed in about a foot of water which a sneaker wave augmented, but she hung on as she scrambled to higher
sand. Then she pulled and I rowed.

We advanced about half a boat length on the next mild wave. I made my way forward, having shipped
the oars, and, as the next wavelet receded, I flung one leg over the side onto hard-packed sand. The prow rose
considerably with Clara's weight on the stern. Bonnie and I pulled hard with the next little surge, and the rowboat
grounded.

Clara stood, with hardly a wobble, tucked her sketching gear under one arm, picked her way forward
with surprising agility, and stepped down onto nearly dry sand. She was wearing calf-high purple boots the exact
hue of her rain suit. She beamed at us. "There. Nothing to it!"

Bonnie and I looked at each other. It crossed my mind that Clara was putting us through some local
initiation rite, like submarine races or snipe hunting. The clams were probably mythical.

While Bonnie and I lugged the boat up onto the beach and removed our pails and shovels, Clara strolled
toward the salal and huckleberry bushes that rimmed the wooded island. She had taken a small folding camp stool
from her pack and was sitting on it, high and dry, by the time Bonnie and I joined her. She began to rummage in the
pack.

"What do we do now?" Bonnie put my question into words.

Clara was rigging an ingenious easel with telescoping legs. "Oh, dear, I forgot my thermos."

"I'll get it." I slogged back to the boat, grabbed the thermos and the waterproof bag that held our
sneakers and, Tom's suggestion, a change of socks apiece. I also tugged the boat a foot or two higher on the sand.
The tide was still going out.

"Good girl." Clara gave me a big smile and took her thermos from me. "Coffee?"

I set the bag on the sand beside her. "You brought three cups?"

"Certainly." I expected her to unscrew the lid and reveal a series of cups, each inside the other like a
Gorbachev doll, but she reached into her pack and pulled out a stack of cardboard hot cups instead. "I always come
well supplied."

The coffee was laced with brandy. When I had warmed my hands and my innards with Clara's brew, I
began to feel my hostility leak away. "So where are the famous steamer clams?"

"That depends. Do you want softshells, cockles, little-necks, or quahogs? You might luck out and find
horse clams and geoducks today, because of the minus tide, but that's only if you don't mind a good wallow in the
mud."

"Mud?" The sand beneath our boots was clean and pale gray.

"I like this stretch of beach. The view of the dock and cannery is ideal." Clara took a last sip of coffee and
gestured southward with the inevitable cigarette. "The best softshell clam bed lies about a quarter of a mile down
there, around that grove of pines. The sand gives way to a mixture of gravel and mud. You can't miss it."

"Ew," Bonnie said. "Mud."

"Just beyond the mudflat, there's a gravelly sand beach that's supposed to be pretty good for cockles. I
was teasing you about geoducks and horse clams. There aren't many little-necks or quahogs around here either.
They do better along the Hood Canal and in Puget Sound. God knows why, considering the pollution. This is a
relatively clean estuary, so far. Your best bet is the softshell. It likes mud--" When Bonnie let out another Valley Girl
"ew," Clara relented. "People have been known to find soft-shells in the sand and gravel area, too."

"Let it be mud." I reminded myself that I did not like clams. If Bonnie got her fill of mud right off the bat,
we could be home by three-thirty. "What do we look for?"

"An oblong dent in the mud, about three-fourths of an inch long. It's hard to see sometimes. When you
find sign, dig a bit to one side so you don't smash the shells."

"How deep do we have to dig?"

"Cockles are really shallow--one to three inches usually. Soft-shells lie deeper. Half a foot to a foot and a
half. If you find a big concentration, dig a trench and pull them out as soon as you see them. They don't burrow, so
you won't have to chase them the way you do geoducks."

Chasing clams sounded like a barrel of fun. "What's the limit?"

"Forty apiece of the softshells, and twenty five cockles."