by Lisa Wingate
But for years all I could hear was the place that was special to me when I was a boy – Moses Lake – lapping at the shores of my mind and calling me home. When it came time for me to get out of the Big Bend country for good, I packed up my gear and headed for Moses Lake.
The place was just like I remembered it, which was exactly what I needed it to be. There wasn’t a trace of what’d happened back in the Bend country. Here, there was just the water, the breeze shifting through live oaks, and the boats passing up and down the lake, leaving white-tipped trails that’d close up and go back to perfect inside of a minute. No sign that anything had passed by and disturbed the normal way of things. Moses Lake was a constant place, on the surface. But when I took the job as game warden, I should’ve known better than anybody that sometimes the surface is a pretty illusion.You can’t always tell by looking, what might be brewing underneath.
If the undercurrents were a mystery in Moses Lake, one constant was that old fishermen would be out in their johnboats before sunup and back at the Waterbird by the time the day turned too hot to fish. Today their favorite table was occupied by two of the regulars, Nester Grimland, who was all bones and skin and looked the part of a retired school-bus mechanic, and Burt Lacey, who’d been Nester’s principal at tiny Moses Lake High until he quit education and took up full-time fishing.
“You think that’s a doe or a loose calf?” Nester looked at me and pointed off the edge of the dock, a cup of Sheila’s Waterbird coffee sloshing over his hand, soaking into his shirt cuff and the picnic table. Didn’t matter, because the coffee was cold by then, the sleeve had fish guts on it, like usual, and the table was the same as everything else at the Waterbird Bait and Grocery – old and used to the weather.
Burt squinted through bottle-bottom glasses as thick and cloudy as something that’d been dredged up out of the lake. “Tough to tell from all the way across. It could be one of those emu birds again. Mart, you think that’s a calf or emu over by the Big Boulders?” His leathery, sun-freckled mouth worked the end of that question like it had a nice aftertaste and he was ready for another bite.
“Or a doe,” Nester added in, stroking the thick, gray moustache that gave him the look of an old cowboy, fresh off the range. There wasn’t really any need for me to answer the question. Nester and Burt could keep up their own conversation, like usual. They’d only brought me in because I’d happened to pull up to the dock to run into the Waterbird and get a refill on coffee.
“Reckon why a doe’d be wanderin’ around in the open in broad daylight?”
“An emu would do it. They’re not the most intelligent creatures, for the most part.”
“How many emus you been around, Burt?” Nester winked out the side of his eye, while I finished tying up my boat. You know a place is home when you can be away twenty-five years, and it’s like you never left. Nester and Burt didn’t remember me from the old days – to them, I would’ve been just some scrawny dark-haired kid who came and went during a power plant refitting – but I remembered them like a photograph in my mind. They used to buy us kids cokes, if we could catch them in the store. Other than a few more wrinkles and a little less hair, not much had changed. Same old Nester, with the same old sweat-ringed straw cowboy hat; same old Burt, with the glasses a little thicker and fewer worry lines now that he wasn’t running a school. Same old conversation, except for the bit about the emu. No telling what they were looking at. Most likely neither one of them could see all the way across to the undeveloped side of the lake.
Burt stroked a chin that’d probably get a shave sometime in the next day or two – for sure before Sunday at Lakeshore Community Church. “I had an emu show up in my yard last winter. Trying to get him out my gate was like dealing with the board of education.” Burt leaned back and rubbed his stomach, the buttons over his gut gaping and pulling tight, like fish on a stringer, gasping for air.
Nester pointed toward the lake. “’S comin’ closer. Gonna get down to the water here in a minute’r two. Mart, what do you think that is? You’re the fish-and-game expert.The one with the fannancy uniform and the badge. Ain’t emus in the game warden handbook someplace?”
“Not unless you’re in Australia.” I looked out over the water. Fairly quiet in terms of traffic today, being Monday. Just the sun rippling on the currents, the little thundercloud rumbling in the distance, and a flock of cattle egrets flying by, like seagulls looking for a sea.
There was something moving over on the other shore, coming up one of the park roads, kind of weaving back and forth in the shadows, unsteady. It didn’t walk like a deer, and it wasn’t a calf, either… .
I watched it for a minute. Too big for a coyote, too clumsy to be a horse some camper had lost in the state park. Hard to tell, but it looked like it was walking on two legs, kind of stooped forward. Could be an emu, maybe injured or old. After the bottom fell out of the emu and ostrich breeders’ market, ranchers had started turning their leftover birds loose. The economic climate being what it was, feral animals wandering the state park were a growing problem.
“Can’t tell from here,” I said finally and headed up the dock toward the store, where I could get a better view.
Sheila, the old hippie chick who ran the Waterbird now, had walked partway down the stairs that led up to the store. “You boys hush up and leave Mart alone,” she hollered from halfway down. “Y’all are gonna drive him so crazy, he’ll pack up and go back where he came from. Morning, Martin.” She added a little smirk with Martin. The badge on my shirt had the real, full name, that’d only been used by schoolteachers or when I was in trouble with my mama. I’d been Mart ever since I graduated from high school. “C’mon up to the store. There’s fresh coffee on – looks like you could use your thermos refilled.” She motioned to the container under my arm. “Melicha just fixed some of her homemade gorditas. I had her make some with turkey burger and tofu instead of all that fatty stuff. They’re good. Better get one before they all sell out.”
“Yeah, that’s all right. The coffee’s enough.” The way folks told it, the food at the Waterbird had always been good – man-food that was down-home, buttermilk battered, dripping in grease, sprinkled with salt, and doused in gravy. Back in the day, the old fella everyone called Pop Dorsey had a couple Mennonite ladies working in the kitchen, and they could cook up a double-meat cheeseburger basket that’d make a lumberjack blush.
Now Dorsey was in a wheelchair after a stroke, and his daughter, Sheila, had moved home to take over the store and poor old Dorsey’s life. She’d just about ruined the eating at the Waterbird. Gorditas were supposed to be made with lard and filled with pan-fried potatoes and big chunks of meat with the fat still on. Stuff you could sink your teeth into, guaranteed to go right to your arteries and stay there. Now only the out-of-towners could buy the good chow, and Sheila pushed tofu on all the regulars.
“Don’t do it, Mart,” Burt called after me. “You’ll have an aftertaste from now until midnight.”
Sheila rammed her hands onto her hips. “For heaven’s sake, Burt. You can’t even tell it’s soy. It’s flavored up just like meat.”
Burt tipped his head back and gave her a google-eyed squint through his glasses. “They had fishing flies like mine in A River Runs Through It. Doesn’t make me Robert Redford.”
Nester grunted. “This coffee’s decaf, too, ain’t it?”
Sheila tossed her salt-and-pepper ponytail with a look I remembered from our few months here when I was a kid. She hadn’t changed all that much. I had, of course, which was why nobody in Moses Lake connected me with the band of dark-haired barefoot boys who’d hung around the Waterbird looking for free cokes. All four of us boys got my daddy’s gift for blarney right along with his Irish green eyes, so we were pretty good at talking our way into things. Even back in the day, we couldn’t pull the wool over Sheila’s eyes, though. If she caught us hanging around hoping to talk her daddy into giving us penny candy, she chased us off. “Well, FYI, Nester, Maudie called and sai
d not to give you any coffee. Said you just about sent the blood pressure monitor through the roof yesterday.”
“Ffff!” Spit flew out in a cloud that glittered in the afternoon light. “I’m gonna take my business someplace else, and …”
The bell rang upstairs, cutting off the coffee war before I had to bring out the handcuffs to keep the peace. “Looks like you’ve got a customer, Sheila,” Burt grabbed his cup and scooted to the end of the bench, craning to see up the hill.
Sheila started toward the store again.“C’mon upstairs, Mart. I’ll fix your thermos with the real stuff.”
“She ain’t worried about his blood pressure,” Nester grumbled, then surveyed the lake. “That emu still over there? Hey, look’a there. Ain’t that old Len Barnes workin’ trotlines over by the Big Boulders? Whatever that critter was, it probably got a whiff of Len and ran off… .”
We headed upstairs while the conversation turned to Len Barnes and trotlines. Sheila rubbed her eyebrows, the wind catching the sleeves of her shirt; a strange scarf-like thing that looked like a leftover from Woodstock. “Man, if I ever get to where I can’t find anything better to do than sit around critiquing the coffee and talking about trotlines, just shoot me, all right?”
“This is what they do.” Old fishermen were pretty much the same everywhere – they talked, they fished, and they talked about fish. It’s one of those universal rules.
At the store, the door on the back porch was flapping in the breeze, in need of a few screws and a latch. I grabbed it, thinking that if I got a little time after work one day, I’d come fix the thing. In the little cabin I’d rented on Holly Hill, evenings set in too quiet and too soon. Staying busy helped. “Go on, look after your customer. I can take care of my own coffee.”
“I’ve got it.” Sheila grabbed the thermos, which was typical of her. She complained about having to take care of everybody, but then she took care of everybody.
By the time we crossed the screen porch and went into the store, Pop Dorsey was halfway out of his wheelchair, trying to get chicken tenders from the hot case for a customer. Sheila set down my coffee thermos and took the tongs. “I got it, Pop.”
The customer, a woman trailing two little kids in swimsuits, gave the warmer an embarrassed look and turned away, taking in the patchwork of stuffed wildlife, wood-burned plaques, and graffiti on the back wall, where anyone with words of wisdom and a Sharpie pen was welcome to leave behind a thought for future customers. Some people signed their quotes and told a little about themselves, and some didn’t. Pop Dorsey kept an eye on the wall from his cash register, and for most of those sayings, he could tell you who wrote the words, and when, and why.
“Sorry for the bother,” the woman said, turning back to the hot case as her kids headed over to check out the wall of wisdom.
Pop Dorsey snorted. “Ain’t any bother.” He started down the counter to the cash register. “Here, I’ll ring you up.”
“Don’t worry, Pop. I’ll do it as soon as I get the chicken boxed.” Sheila rushed through closing the container, then wiped her fingers on a towel and skittered off to the cash register.
Dorsey threw his hands up and sank into his wheelchair. “Guess I’ll just go count the minnows in the bait tank. Mart, you need somethin’?”
“Coffee,” I said, and pointed at the thermos. I could’ve gotten the coffee myself, but that wasn’t the point.
Dorsey gave the thermos a mouth-down look. “S’pose you can handle it yerself?” There was a cloud in his eye that put me in his chair for a minute. It wasn’t right that a man who’d always helped the lakeside kids patch leaky inner tubes and untangle backlashed fishing reels should end up like this. But then, you could go crazy waiting for right to show up in the world. If there was logic in the way things worked, I hadn’t found it. Lightning could strike anytime, and in the space of a heartbeat, your plans were gone in smoke. All you could do was try to make sense of the ashes, and sometimes you couldn’t even do that.
I leaned over the counter, like I didn’t want Sheila to hear. “Don’t know which pot’s the real stuff and which one’s decaf, Pop.You better help me out. I want the real thing.”
Dorsey brightened and reached for the thermos. “I’ll get it. You don’t want that stuff out there by the soda fountain. I know where the real coffee’s hid.”
“Sounds good.” I followed him over to the warmers behind the café counter. Melicha was singing back in the kitchen, which probably meant that whatever she was cooking right now didn’t have soy in it. “How come you’re not down at the lake with the boys?” I glanced out the picture window along the store’s back wall. The docksiders had moved off to one of the boathouses, where they were checking out someone’s catch and pointing at the storm across the hills.
Dorsey’s mouth made a round line that matched his shoulders. “Too hard to get the chair down the hill, and Sheila’s worried I’ll roll off the edge of the dock into the water. I tried to tell her I’m not some helpless ol’ cripple. Even if I did fall in, I can stand up in the water just fine – it floats me. But she’s too hardheaded to hear anything.”
“Water’s good therapy.” I took in the hill down to the lake, the stairs, the dock. With a little work and some ramps, the place could be fitted up to get a wheelchair down there… .
“Yeah, well, tell Sheila that. She won’t let me anyplace near the shore. Fella can’t fish, he might as well pull up the sod blanket, if you ask me.” Pop balanced the thermos on the counter, worked to take off the lid, and lifted the coffeepot in a shaky arc. Good thing Sheila was busy at the cash register or she would’ve done that for him, too.
“Hey, Mart,” she said when she finished with the customers. Dorsey jumped like he’d been caught at something. Coffee sloshed over the rim of the thermos and ran in streams onto the counter. “There isn’t some new campground down below Eagle Eye Bridge … over by the Big Boulders, is there?”
Dorsey capped the thermos, slid it over the counter, and pulled out a hankie to sop up the mess.“There you go, son. Hot coffee. On the house.” Cutting a glance over his shoulder, he frowned at Sheila, who was training binoculars out the window – the cheap kind of pocket glasses you’d pick up at the Moses Lake variety store in a blister pack. With so many bird watchers around the area, I would’ve thought she’d have a decent set.
I walked closer to the windows, and Dorsey scooted his wheelchair along behind me. “Over there by the Big Boulders? Nah, there’s no way to get there, other than from the water – unless you know those old logging roads or you climb down the cliffs. Why?”
Sheila lowered the binoculars, shaking her head. “I just had the strangest feeling. Something caught the corner of my eye when I was counting out the change, so I grabbed the binoculars. For just a sec, I swear I saw a little girl over there. A little girl in a brown dress, running along the shore, but when I tried to focus in, she was gone. There’s nobody in the area but old Len, checking his trotlines.” She looked at me and rubbed her hands up and down her arms, like the room had a chill in it all of a sudden.
Dorsey lifted his baseball cap, scratching his forehead with the knob of his wrist. “Not much chance Len’d have a little girl with him. Not much chance he’d have anybody, for that matter. Anybody within fifteen feet of Len wouldn’t stay there long, I’ll guar-own-tee. The smell would drive ’em off, for sure. Maybe it was the Wailing Woman you saw. Maybe she’s out walkin’ around in the daytime.”
“Oh, Daddy, for heaven’s sake, no ghost stories.” Sheila scanned the southeast end of the lake, where the water circled a little island, narrowed under Eagle Eye Bridge and wound up the river channel. “Mart, I know I saw someone, though …”
Hooking his hands over the window ledge, Dorsey pulled himself to his feet. “I don’t see anythin’.”
“Len’s already gone upriver. Careful, Daddy. You’ll fall.” She moved around the counter to slip a hand under Dorsey’s elbow, and he shrugged it off, turning toward the deep water by the d
am.
“Oh, hang, Mart. You better grab that thermos and go. Looks like you got a boatful of joyriders headin’ for the Scissortail.”
Snagging my thermos, I started out the back door. There was something about the Scissortail that brought in idiots like June bugs to a porch light. Hard to say what it was, but if there was a yay-hoo anywhere on the lake who was either too young or too sauced up to think his way out of a paper bag, he’d eventually get the idea to ignore the shallow-water signs, go around the warning buoys, and try to thread the needle between the two spikes of rock that rose out of the water like the feathers of a scissortail flycatcher. Couple that with the bird watchers looking for bald eagle nests, daredevils climbing the Scissortail to jump off into the water, and kids on party barges – and those two spikes of limestone amounted to a constant headache. I was out there at least six times a day, trying to keep some loser from ending up in a wheelchair or dead from pure stupidity.
I know every bird in the mountains,
and the creatures of the field are mine.
– Psalm 50:11
(Left on the wall of wisdom
by a missionary on a bicycle)
Chapter 3
Andrea Henderson
No determination exists under heaven like that of a woman afraid she’ll be stranded in the woods when darkness comes. I was alone again, having successfully frightened away the creepy man in the pickup by pulling out my cell phone and pretending to talk to someone. After a few seconds of nodding and talking, I’d waved and yelled, “Never mind! A sheriff ’s car is coming. They’ll be here any minute. Thanks, anyway!” But as more time passed, my sense of doom grew. I’d even tried walking to the top of the nearest hill to look for any hint of civilization. There was none.
I was having no luck with outgoing cell calls, and no more vehicles had passed. No one would come looking for me until this evening, when my son finally determined that something was wrong. If Dustin called my office at that point, the place would be closed, and no one would listen to phone messages until morning. Dustin wouldn’t have a clue where my schedule had taken me today, or where to send the cavalry, in the form of my parents or my sister, Megan, and brother-in-law, Oswaldo. So, one way or another, I had to rescue myself.