by Joe Derkacht
Episode Six
Up on Old Baldy... Up on Old Baldy… Up on Old Baldy…
The phrase pulsated in my head all night long, an insistent whisper I could not keep out with even a thick feather pillow to clog my ears. Maybe it was something I’d heard all my life. I did know I must’ve taken a look at the mountain most every day I’d ever spent in Driftwood Bay; it couldn’t very well be avoided or ignored, its central peak towering 1,800 feet above the town, with massive shoulders hunkered against Oregon’s oft storm-ridden, fickle skies.
Men wielding sledgehammers and dynamite and driving diesel powered bulldozers for the old CCC had helped carve Highway 101 into its lower rocky slopes during the late 1930’s. At its highest point, the road snaked no more than 600 feet in elevation, the rest of the mountain leaning drunkenly oppressive overhead, threatening to collapse like a house of cards at any moment.
Clearing the highway was a daily routine for county road crews in their orange dump trucks. Lacking cable nets to restrain crumbling stone, rock falls were common. While the idea of a few crushed car roofs and shattered truck windows rattled around my brain, my memory of any fatalities was even vaguer. Evidently Old Baldy was not vengeful, even if its real name did mean “teepee of the Great Spirit” or something like that in the local Indian dialect. The Indians must have thought Old Baldy and the Great Spirit lived in pretty close fellowship with them, since even in their day they had treated it as the home of the deity and at the same time burned off its upper slopes in order to grow onions for trade with other coastal tribes. At least that was the story I remembered hearing from one of my grade school teachers in the 1950’s. Whether the story was true or not was difficult to determine, since the local Indians had vanished from the area by 1910 (my grade school teacher never intimated exactly how) and I never met anyone who actually spoke any of the coastal dialects. Nekahniekan definitely sounded Indian to my boyish imagination. If one needed further corroboration, the mountain was known for its wild onions instead of the old growth forests one might have expected.
I remembered a childhood wish of someday meeting Indians in my explorations of the mountain. I also remembered that besides their onion fields, a few mysterious petroglyphs were the only trace left of them in Driftwood Bay.
Sheer cliffs rising straight out of the Pacific formed Old Baldy’s westerly face. Atop them, Highway 101 offered a series of spectacular vistas. For even more spectacular views, tourists climbed to the mountaintop over switchback tributaries of 101 that were for the most part little more than a stiff hike.
The mountain and I faced each other, two opponents with nothing in common. Actually, from my yard I could barely see the mountain that morning, obscured as it was by fog. Which didn’t keep me from its central truths; it was a gargantuan, immovable mass, while my life (or least its memories) was a moving target; it was immutable, scorning wind, rain, and surf, while I wasn’t sure of anything about myself from day to day. It certainly wasn’t about to come to me, yet, in my condition, regardless of the sense of compulsion that was upon me, I wasn’t about to go to it. I wasn’t strong enough for a walk on the beach, much less a hike up 101 and the mountain’s steep slopes.
Perhaps more than anything else, it was a magnet; thumb out, my back to a deep roadside ditch, I found myself standing on 101, close to a mile from the house Zell told me was mine. A car slowed, a Datsun 510, its white exterior blooming with a widespread acne of rust. The boy driving it might’ve been 16—or 26—his long blond hair and beardless face lending him an air of angelic innocence.
“Goin’ far?” He asked.
“Nekahniekan,” I managed to answer without stuttering, perhaps because the strange conglomeration of syllables, on my tongue, was already more of a stammer than a real word.
“Get in,” he said, pushing open the passenger door. The bucket seat formerly had been covered in black vinyl. Now, exposed springs peeked through tattered gray batting.
“Got some weed to harvest on the old boy,” he offered conversationally, as he began running through the gears, letting the little four-cylinder engine scream before each shift.
I nodded my head. The area’s current natives evidently still used the mountain for growing their favorite crops. I vaguely wondered if he had ever run across any of Old Baldy’s Indians, maybe one or two who’d been hiding out, hadn’t disappeared with the others around 1910?
“A business partner and me, we’re growing it up off the road that goes to the repeater station. You ever been there?”
Reaching for my Copenhagen, I grunted an affirmative. Everybody in Driftwood Bay knew the repeater station’s location. His eyes widened as I tamped the can on my knee, removed the lid, and took a pinch for my cheek. He was silent for a long while, perhaps debating with himself what he should say. In the meantime, I determined to enjoy the cold ocean air blowing through the passenger window, which had refused to roll up in spite of a few hard yanks at the handle.
“Man, that stuff is murder,” he said at last, meaning the tobacco, I assumed after a moment’s reflection. “My dad gave me some when I was a kid, made me green as a cucumber. By the way, how far you going? I’m turning off in a sec, you know.”
The main lookout wasn’t much more than a half mile further than his turnoff, which was coming up fast. Preoccupied with my Copenhagen and a sudden rush of memories about my own father, I could do no more than gesture with my chin.
“Right,” he muttered, bypassing his turn as if reading my mind. Although fog lay heavily over the lookout, he slowed at the right point, downshifting quickly to pull a screamingly tight U-turn and momentarily setting the car on two wheels.
I thanked God for a seatbelt. The lookout was wide enough for several cars to park. I opened my door and stepped out.
“Hey, you’re that crazy clock guy aren’t you?” He yelled through the window. At my shrug, he said, “You don’t look all that crazy to me.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You too.”
He waved airily and drove off, flooring the accelerator at just the right time to avoid being overrun by a fully-loaded log truck. Fog never seemed to be much of a deterrent to speed over Old Baldy, I guess because most people just wanted to avoid getting their skulls crushed by falling rock, turning out to be that first fatality everyone would read about in some paper like The Headlight Herald, The Seaside Signal, or even The Oregonian.
Up on Old Baldy.
Though nowhere near the mountain’s peak, which rose little more than sixty or seventy feet higher than its twin, flanking peaks, I was at the roadway’s summit. Instead of white safety rails, a narrow concrete curb and a three-foot wide barrier of native rock separated the roadside from sheer cliffs that fell steeply away to the ocean hundreds of feet below. I remembered the lookout well, especially the narrow spur jutting out beyond the waist-high barrier. How many people had I ever seen standing here or sitting on the stone barrier, as I drove by?
Clambering up for a look over the edge, I felt my breath catch in my throat. Far, far below, long white combers crashed violently into rocky spines that seemed to be pointing accusingly in my direction.
I couldn’t recall ever hearing of any jumpers. Maybe the idea of smashing onto those spines at terminal velocity, or plunging into cold ocean water and being battered ceaselessly against the rocks, wasn’t romantic enough for people who wanted to murder themselves?
I carefully let myself down onto the spur, which seemed far narrower than I remembered, and sat with my back to the barrier. Sheltered from the road, the wind was loud, louder than the sound of the occasional passing car, truck, or eighteen-wheeler, certainly louder than the sound of the distant waves. The fog was lifting rapidly, and to the south miles upon miles of coastline were levitating into view. Seagulls wheeled right and left, shrieking with delight, cavorting upon the air currents like dolphins upon the currents of the ocean.
Not jumpers. Two guys on hang gliders, one after the other. I r
emembered the story, now. Planning on catching thermals that would carry them out to sea a few hundred yards and then allow them to spiral lazily toward Driftwood Bay’s sandy beach, they had pushed off from this very spur. The idea had been beautiful. Hang gliders launched themselves from hills and cliffs every day. But something went tragically wrong. Perhaps the thermals simply didn’t put in an appearance as expected. Perhaps a violent gust of wind caught and smashed them against the cliff, shredding fabric and flesh, before they could sail safely clear?
Then why are you here?
Up on Old Baldy, I mouthed the words to myself. Why was I here? Was it just for the view? Or did I want to feel the cold ocean air tearing at me with its probing fingers, maybe see if I was actually alive? Or had I come to jump, forgetting even the pretense of a hang glider?
White specks moved over the horizon. Eventually, they resolved into two fishing boats working their way south. I wondered what it would be like to be a commercial fisherman, hauling in the long lines, icing fish in the holds below decks, spending nights on the water?
Perhaps I’d already done all that at some point in my life? I had a sudden flashback of salmon skipping along rain-slicked decking, and of a slender blade in my hand as I gutted and cleaned fish, preparing them for stowing in the freezers below.
I looked down at my hands. Why the sudden memories of working with lines and knives and fish, when I couldn’t remember using my hands to build Grandfather clocks? Nothing about saws or sanders or any other of the tools necessary to woodworking came to mind. The neat little shop Zell had shown me was a complete blank, as was the house.
Had I ever done the things she told me? Ever been married to the woman in the pictures on my bedroom bureau? Or was it all fiction, a story concocted for some mysterious purpose unknown to me?
If I’d once been a fisherman, maybe I could be one again? Though it was all vague, I remembered Astoria’s docks and the bristling masts of its fishing fleet. If I closed my eyes, I could almost make out the names of some of the boats. Shadowy figures tousled my hair. I heard a smattering of some language unintelligible to me.
I opened my eyes, all of a sudden remembering the name of a boat and her skipper, my grandfather. The strange language was Suomi, better known to some as Finnish. While my grandfather always spoke English ashore, onboard he reverted to the mother tongue except when conversing over the ship’s radio. Like my mother and father, he was long dead. But now I at least knew the source of my fishing memories.
Somehow, I doubted I’d ever cared much for fishing, especially for spending days at sea, far from land. Staring out at the two boats, I experienced a sense of unease, as if I were on deck and could feel each roller tossing me up and dropping out from beneath me.
Still, with the blood of generations of fishermen running through my veins, I doubted I ever suffered from seasickness. At the same time, I figured my experiences on the open ocean were probably never pleasant ones. Why else would I turn to woodworking?
Your father.
Yes, that was probably it, plus the simple act of creation, coupled with the satisfaction of crafting something beautiful with my own hands. Which brought me back to the questions facing me. How was I to earn a living, when I couldn’t remember how to do even the simplest tasks that I imagined must be involved in the work I’d once done?
Your books, stupid. Your books.
I stiffened, recognizing the same voices I’d heard in Zell’s living room. Were they my imagination? Or were they simply the wind whispering in my ears? How did they know things I hadn’t told anyone else?
I had taken a few of the books from the shelves in my living room, opened them on the kitchen table, discovered pictures of fine furniture and cabinetry and accompanying drawings which I felt surely had something to do with how to build them. My problem was that I could no longer read. Nothing at all of the strange alphabet trailing across the pages made sense to me or cast the least ray of light upon my brain. Nor could I make heads or tails of the drawings. I hadn’t told even Zell, though she would figure it out soon enough.
Maybe I could return to fishing, learn it again if I’d ever known it before; fishing wouldn’t take years of study, practice, and sure hands. I lifted my right hand. It trembled before my eyes. I lifted the left. In a second or two, it jerked with painful spasms. As I’d slowly recovered my strength over the last few days, the spasms, at first noticeable as occasional, mild twitches, had begun to grow in intensity. If the spasms were permanent, I would never build another Grandfather clock.
Fool! You may as well throw yourself off the cliff right now! You stutter, you stammer, you spazz out, your mind is gone. What else is next? You’re more worthless every day!
“What is that, Daddy?” A young girl’s voice asked. I sensed, rather than saw, two people standing on the stone barrier behind my head, the first sightseers of the day.
“Doesn’t look like any whale I ever heard of,” a man’s voice answered.
I glanced up, saw him raise binoculars to his eyes. He adjusted the focus and squinted at the same time.
“Since when do they have long necks?”
I jerked to my feet, straining my eyes in the same direction. Long necks?
“Aw, nuts,” the man said, obviously deflated. “Just my crazy imagination, I guess.”
For a second, I thought I’d seen it, too, a black silhouette with an impossibly long neck. Then the sight faded, replaced with disporting whales.
“They call it breaching,” the girl said. “Isn’t that right, Mister?”
I nodded. It seemed like a big word for a little girl to use, especially a five or six year old, but “breaching” was the word I remembered for their spectacular leaps from the water.
We were definitely looking at a pod of whales, even if at first I’d thought they were something else. My eyes had been playing tricks on me. Our eyes.
I heard car doors slam, and an engine starting. The man and girl drove away. Our eyes? I wondered. What had we really seen?
What are you waiting for?
The same old voice. I was growing weary of it. As I climbed back over the stone barrier, a black and white SUV pulled up to the concrete curb. The door opened. Chief Blackie stepped out.
“Well lookie who we have here. I got a call we might have a jumper, and here it’s you. You coming peaceably, or do I have to cuff you and throw you in the back seat?”
I went to the front passenger door and got in.
He was fuming, as we drove south on 101. I expected him to bypass Driftwood Bay, continue on toward the county seat, where he would throw me in county lockup. I had visions of a long trip back to Salem, flashbacks of a blonde woman leaning close and slapping my face, and a bespectacled man attaching electrodes to my temples.
Instead, Blackie turned off 101 and drove down Driftwood Bay’s Main Street. Following the usual turns, he parked in front of Zell’s house.
“C’mon,” he said, gesturing with his head for me to get out. He swung open the white picket gate and preceded me up the neatly groomed, stone-paved walk to Zell’s front door. Her kitchen table looked out on the yard, its lawn lush with green, the flower beds bursting with colorful alyssum, Gerbera daisies, mums, and dahlias. She was up and out of her chair before he could rap his knuckles against the door.
“I suppose you want coffee,” she said, swinging the door wide and flashing us a smile, expecting us to come in.
Blackie scowled at her retreating back and again gestured toward me with his head. I shrugged, stepping inside, and he shut the door behind us. Zell was pulling cups and saucers from her cupboard. Her own cup and saucer and a matching stoneware cream and sugar set were already on the table. Blackie pulled out chairs for both of us and I settled into the middle chair, affording myself the best view of the yard and street. I could perhaps admire the scenery even if they had to talk over me, or around or through me.
“No c
ookies?” Blackie asked, as she set the steaming cups in front of us. Clucking to herself, she turned back to the counter and lifted the roof from the Swiss-chalet cookie jar.
Lips set in a tight, thin line, Blackie stirred sugar and cream into his coffee with great deliberation. Perhaps his method of “counting to ten?” He broke a sugar cookie in half, dipped it into his coffee, and began munching on it before speaking.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was here?”
Sipping placidly at her coffee, she studiously avoided his gaze, instead looking out the window as if she hadn’t heard, though we both knew she had. The table was small and she wasn’t deaf; all three of us sat with our knees nearly touching.
Any outside observer might have thought we were simply enjoying a few moments of bird watching; robins pecked at the lawn, stellar jays supervised from the fence, a tribe of black-capped chickadees hopped like fleas in the slender branches of one of Zell’s larger shrubs.
“I know you knew he was here,” Blackie said. After a moment’s contemplation, his eyes gleamed with inner realization. “In fact, I bet he was right here in your house, maybe in your spare bedroom, when I came looking for him the other day.”
For just one brief moment, her eyes darted in his direction. I could feel the electricity in the air. The gleam in his eyes spilled over into a triumphant grin.
“I knew it!” He said, thumping the table top with the flat of his hand, noisily rattling the stoneware and utensils.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. After the initial shock, Zell absorbed it all like she’d anticipated this very thing. If she expected him to take us both to county lockup, she didn’t seem worried. Her hand was as steady as a rock, as she took another sip of coffee.
“You’re supposed to be a Christian,” he said accusingly. “You lied to me. You even dropped your cup when I told you where he’d been! My god, you coulda won an Oscar.”
Merriment played briefly at the corners of her mouth. Dropping any hint of pretense, she let her shoulders droop comfortably and relaxed against the back of the padded kitchen chair. Now that he had the goods on her, she didn’t seem to care.
“You and my wife, both claiming to be good Christians,” he said disgustedly. “Yet you lie to me.”
I had a sudden flash of his wife’s face. She was some sort of shirttail relative to Zell. Together, they often drove the thirty-plus miles to one of Seaside’s Lutheran churches. She didn’t seem to be the type to lie. Then again, appearances could be deceiving and my memory wasn’t all that good. Or maybe he simply meant she and Zell were both Christians, not that his wife lied to him, too?
Quietly looking out the window, she said, “I’ll lie to the Nazis every time. You remember that, Blackie.”
He took it as matter-of-factly as she had stated it.
“I seem to remember something in the Ten Commandments against lying, and all liars going to hell.”
Unable to restrain a grin, she set her coffee on the table and playfully ran a finger around the lip of the cup.
“That’s what you get,” she said, “for just reading snippets of the Bible or letting someone else tell you what it says without studying it for yourself.”
His eyebrows arched questioningly.
“Plenty of places in the Bible tell where they were willing to lie to the Nazis. You would know that if you read it.”
“Enough with the Nazis, Zell,” he said, setting his coffee cup down hard. “You know I have a duty to uphold the law.”
“I hope you’re proud of yourself, arresting a white-haired old lady for helping out a persecuted neighbor.” She held out her wrists, awaiting the handcuffs.
He shook his head, his eyes popping more than usual and his lips pulling back from his teeth in a rabbitty scowl, before taking another bite of cookie.
“I won’t be arresting anyone in this house today.”
“Why not?” She asked in an aggrieved tone of voice.
“I heard from the county sheriff’s office last night. The attempted rape charges have been dropped. Seems there’s no real evidence, and someone has come forward, contradicting the other witnesses.”
Taking a last gulp of coffee, he stood slowly.
“And—?” She asked.
“They dumped him in the loony bin because he was in Salem and had some kind of fit on the street. When SPD checked his pockets, they found a name and phone number.”
“Yes?” Zell said, her eyes suspicious.
“It’s not like they’d automatically know he and Kit were getting a divorce, Zell. She evidently told them he was psychotic and in desperate need of help.”
“I knew it!” She exclaimed.
He looked pitiably down at me, and wiped his mouth on a napkin.
“Sorry, Jack. With your history, I’d have to call it an honest mistake.”
My history? I nodded mutely at him. The fits I remembered were from the electric shocks they’d applied to my head, the memory of the terror, of facing the abyss, the palpable loss of my self.
“It’d help if you didn’t look crazy, you know, Jack.”
I didn’t attempt a rejoinder. He winked one eye at me before going to the door.
“One more thing,” he said.
“What?” Zell asked.
“It’s nothing to worry about, but I’ll probably have to take Jack to county lockup for a few days.”
“Why?” Zell demanded, rising from her seat. “You said you weren’t here to arrest anyone!”
Smirking, he said, “I lied, Zell, just like a good Nazi, right?”
Before she could interrupt, he held up one hand, gesturing her to be silent. “Protective custody, standard in cases like his. The State requires a hearing to determine his mental capacity. They’ll want to verify he’s not a danger to himself or to anyone else.”
Deflated, Zell dropped back into her chair. “You can’t do something, Blackie? See if they’ll let him stay here with me?”
He paused for a long moment. Screwed up his face in a frown. “I can try. I’m not guaranteeing anything.” He winked at me again, before letting himself out the door. He had one last parting shot.
“And oh yeah, in case you can’t tell it, Zell, I’m sick of your Nazis already. That was a long time ago.”
Struggling for words, in the end she said nothing, and by that time Blackie had closed the door and sauntered out to his black and white. We remained seated, me trembling under a cloud of doom, and her quivering with what looked like a mixture of anger and grief. After a few minutes, I was still trembling. She banished her quivering by fetching herself a few more cookies.
“What do you think he’s doing?” She asked. Blackie, she meant; he was still parked at the curb. If I was lucky he’d stroked out and I wouldn’t have to go to lockup as threatened. I saw movement through the 4x4’s window. Good luck had never been my strong suit.
Thirty minutes later the door of the black and white swung open. He sauntered back up the walkway and stuck his head inside her door without knocking. I swiveled to meet his gaze. His eyes were on Zell.
“The Reich has agreed to your proposal, Frau Zelig. Herr Raventhorst’s hearing will be the day after tomorrow.” To me, he said, “You off yourself or anybody else in the meantime, I’m coming after you. Capiche?”
I nodded mutely. Behind his flip façade, he was dead serious. A terrifying vision of Monte Python’s flying bunny rabbit came to mind. I didn’t allow myself to grin until he reached his truck. The trembling resumed as he drove away. The day after tomorrow was a long time. Anything could happen before then.