by Jack Cady
“I’m now driving,” the drunk explained. “. . . a little Japanese rental thing with vinyl seats for God’s sake . . .” He looked at Lee, at Lee’s eyefolds. “The Japanese are a great people.”
“The Japanese are assholes,” Lee told him. “And you’re taking a cab, if we have to club you to get the car keys.”
“I got to quit drinking,” the pool-playing driver complained. “I thought we were talking about women.”
“You were,” the bartender told him. “He wasn’t.” The bartender looked the guy over; gray suit, school tie to a school he likely never attended, high-priced haircut. “For a number of reasons,” the bartender told him, “you may be drinking in the wrong bar. Who, may I ask, is Pinky?” The bartender moved to the phone behind the bar and punched in the number of a cab company.
The guy made it to a barstool, planked his rear, and leaned on the bar. He fished in his pocket for car keys. “Some of my best friends are Japanese.” He put the keys on the bar.
“Pinky,” Lee said. “You have a friend named Pinky.”
“Had,” the guy said, and almost yelled. “Had, had, had! Until he got his stupid self drowned.” The guy teetered on the barstool, and spoke in what amounted to shorthand. “. . . big golf weekend up north . . . business deal . . . lots and lots of real estate . . . big hairy emergency at the office . . . caught a quick flight back in a puddle jumper . . . big hush hush . . . Pinky follows with the car and golf clubs. Splash. Bye bye Pinky.” The guy weaved, which is not that hard to do on a barstool. “Bastard was a liability from the get-go.”
“This is interesting,” Lee said to the other guys. “I never saw crap stacked so high it could wear a suit.”
Petey, his hustle busted, as surely as he busted the rack of balls, almost indifferently ran the table. He banked the eight ball with no real satisfaction and picked up the driver’s twenty. “I reckon it’s time to travel.” He looked at the driver. “Unless you’re still hot and want healing.”
“Forget it,” the driver said. “And thanks. I needed the practice.” A very cool head, that driver.
Petey turned to the drunk, maybe because “Petey” and “Pinky” sound similar. “You attend the funeral?”
“Dead people shouldn’t look that calm,” the drunk said. “Like all the meanness had been sucked out of him.”
“Was he as nasty as you?” The bartender pretended interest. “Because perhaps we’ve discovered a cure.”
“He was vice president of a mortgage company.” Then the drunk realized he’d been insulted. “Suppose it was your car?”
“If it were my car,” the bartender told him, “and we’re talking authentic Jaguar here, I would erect a shrine in their mutual memory.”
“There must be something to all that bull about accidents,” Petey said. “I reckon I’d better get on home.” Then he paused. “You think somebody’s gone ugly?”
“Something isn’t square,” the bartender said. “I’m thinking about the problem. When I figure it out I’ll send word.”
“Avoid hustlers,” Lee told Petey, as Petey headed for the door. “I worry about you kids.”
The Complications of Love
On sunny days the Canal glosses over with a sheen of darkest green, and islands in the flooded landscape rise like wet clumps of moss above the darkness. The Canal covers all sorts of things acquired from the land: automobiles, boats, ships, tools, beer bottles, drowned kittens, corpses, crashed airplanes, sunken buoys, stolen electronics, wedding rings cast by the divorced and depressed, incriminating evidence, pistols, shotguns, rifles, hypodermics, butcher knives, as well as great numbers of other byproducts of the greatest civilization ever seen in all the history of the universe.
In the Canal’s depths, and they are deep, tumble more wrecks than we know. On the surface fishing boats cluster near tidal beaches where salmon runs grow thinner with each passing year, and where, in their seasons, shrimp and crabs and bottom fish are dragged flopping and gasping to the surface.
On dark days the Canal seems more itself. Waters ruffle before the wind, and breakers pound against the Hood Canal Bridge, against the shores, against the islands. Ships come down the Canal, Coast Guard icebreakers, Navy frigates, and atomic powered submarines. The Navy tells us a single sub carries more firepower than has been discharged by all the navies in all of history. Hard to believe, and sort of meaningless. Any boy on a schoolyard can tell you that it ain’t how much you swing, but where do you hit?
═
By the time Petey pulled onto the gravel lot at Beer and Bait, the westering sun stood smack dab on the mountaintops. On the last day of July that means a little after eight PM. Cars and pickups filled the lot, and from inside came the lonesome sound of guitars. The tape deck in the bar broadcast a country singer mourning loss; and perhaps the loss was a Cadillac, or maybe only a lover. Petey sat in his Plymouth, listened to imitation sorrow from the tape deck, and became aware that he had changed. For years, having made his living in the presence of fiddles that sounded like scalded cats, he did not even hear bar music. Now, though, he wished for nothing but silence, Bertha, and his dog. Petey asked himself if it was time to settle down, buy a little store or something, and pull a few hustles on the side. In other days such an idea would fill him with revulsion. Now the idea seemed almost smart. He told himself he was going through a phase. The road takes something out of a man.
Across the lot, two figures sat on the hood of a pick up as they soaked up last rays of sunlight. One appeared to be a fisherman, and the other bulked too big to be anyone but Sugar Bear. Petey climbed from the Plymouth and trudged toward them. He figured Sugar Bear would catch him up on the news and the fisherman would try, although fishermen are definitely at a disadvantage:
Fishermen, like hustlers, are often away for a month at a pop. While they are away news gets elaborated. While there’s not much time for talk on a fishing boat, there’s plenty of time for folks to misinform poor fishermen when the boat hails into port. Then, of course, the fishermen have to revise everything by asking quest ions. A new round of embroidered news lies waiting to greet the next returning boat. After a few boats arrive, the stories get as confused as trail mix. When blank spaces appear in a story, even an honest fisherman has to make things up.
This fisherman turned out to be the thoughtful one, and he scooched over to make a spot on the hood of the truck. “Petey,” the fisherman said, “do I just keep missing you, or the other way around?” The fisherman had been ashore for a while. His hair shone clean and he did not smell all that bad.
“I been to the big city,” Petey told him. “I’m glad nobody’s revoked your bail.” Petey eased up onto the hood, looked across the fisherman to Sugar Bear, and realized he’d screwed up with his crack about bail. “Things steady out your way?”
“The usual,” Sugar Bear said, but didn’t sound like he meant it. He looked at the last sunlight like a man headed for eternal darkness. His huge shoulders slumped. His hair, furry and curly, brown and thick, fluffed over his ears. His beard curled beneath a furry mustache, and his brown eyes filled with sorrow. He watched the sunlight like a man who sees it for the last time.
“You’re a smart guy,” the fisherman said to Petey. “We were just discussing women.”
“Actually, not exactly women,” Sugar Bear said. “It’s more like a what-the-hell-do-I-do-next discussion.”
“Because Sugar Bear has a thing for Annie,” the fisherman explained.
“And Sugar Bear is headed for jail sure as a bear craps in the woods.” Sugar Bear squinched up his face, which meant that a lot of hair moved around and his eyes blinked. “Suppose I tell her,” he said, “and suppose she likes me, which maybe that could happen, but maybe not. Then, when I make the slammer, she’s left behind. That wouldn’t be right. Everybody knows that. Hell, I know that.”
“I wouldn’t own your conscience if they gave me a winning lottery ticket,” the fisherman told him. “I wouldn’t keep your conscience unless I
owned thirty damn churches.”
“Even if somebody gets shouting-drunk, and blabs, the cops would only have a b.s. story,” Petey said. “The cops don’t know the dead guy and the car are there. You’re hustling yourself.”
“You did that punk a favor,” the fisherman told Sugar Bear. “He didn’t suffer. You saved a fishing boat some trouble. The guy was a goner no matter how you slice it.”
“The cops will find the car,” Sugar Bear told Petey. “You ain’t been here. The cops got divers pulling out wrecks. They’re going through that water like you run tranny fluid through a strainer.” Music moaned through the open doorway of Beer and Bait, something about love letters stashed behind a commode. “Besides,” Sugar Bear said, “that’s not exactly the problem. I got to live with this.”
“You ought to talk to Annie,” Petey told him. “It looks like she has a stake.”
“Annie talks to bugs,” Sugar Bear said, as if he were explaining something.
“In other words,” the fisherman said thoughtfully, “we’re talking about you having a case of the hots. I figured we talked long term.” He made a motion to slide off the hood of the pickup, then decided to wait for an answer. On the Canal the first suggestion of mist hovered on the surface.
“You don’t get it,” Sugar Bear told him. “I like it that she talks to bugs. I like it that she’s a nut. That stuff don’t bother me. It’s actually kind of cute.”
“Long term?”
“Sure, long term. But girls who talk to bugs must be conning themselves, because you sure can’t con a bug. If I ask her, she’ll maybe con herself. Then I get busted . . .”
“I been missing my dog,” Petey said. “Is he okay?”
“What the hell does that mean?” Sugar Bear seemed ready to apologize, or fight, or run and hide.
“You can’t predict what will happen ten minutes from now,” Petey told him. “You’re trying to arrange her whole life, and your whole life forever. And I thought I could hustle.”
The fisherman slid off the hood of the truck. “Get off your back pockets and propose, or take her to a movie, or something.” Music from Beer and Bait sobbed, lonesome as a lost man in a desert, sitting beside his dying horse.
“I’m feeling sort of fatalistic.”
“I’m not sure,” the fisherman said thoughtfully, “that Annie’s the biggest kid in these parts. And you, a full-grown man.”
The three men watched the forest go dark, while at their backs a little light still lay across the Canal; light reflected from high clouds, and from trees and buildings on the far side. A couple of outboards piddled along like moving specks, but the surface of the Canal lay otherwise deserted and calm. Sugar Bear slid from the hood of the pickup, seemed uncertain whether to go inside Beer and Bait, or head for home. Petey slid down to stand beside him. “I really do miss my dog,” he said to Sugar Bear. To the fisherman he said, “You comin’ in?”
“I’ll be there directly,” the fisherman told him. The fisherman watched as Petey and Sugar Bear trudged across the lot, and the fisherman thought neither one looked like a man with a happy thirst. If he had to choose a word to describe them, he thought, that word would be “beleaguered.”
And no doubt the fisherman felt beleaguered as well. As Petey and Sugar Bear disappeared through the open doorway of Beer and Bait, and as the music changed to twanging sobs because some guy’s lady ran off in some other guy’s Peterbilt, the fisherman walked to the side of Beer and Bait, hesitated, then moved slowly to the bank of the Canal.
Perhaps he only came to watch the show, as water humped and carried on. It may be he wondered why the thing that humped out there never bothered with anything on the surface, and he surely wondered why it did not bother police divers. As darkness slowly descended over the face of the Canal, the fisherman, accustomed to deep water, and accustomed to not thinking of their depths—because sailors don’t—surprised himself by thoughts of coldness, darkness; the eternal night lying at the bottom of the Canal.
He shivered, but not with cold or fear. He knew about cold, having spent a good deal of his life offshore. He knew about fear, because there are things that happen offshore so scary that no witchery on the Canal could equal them. In his day, the fisherman’s long lines had brought from the depths colorful creatures, gasping and strange. The lines snagged an occasional carcass, sea lion, or seal, or other things. Since much of this happened in mist, and since mist is ghostly, the fisherman (like most of his clan) had seen many-a-thing walking across the water, some of those things vaguely human. A little problem like water humping on the Canal would not occupy this fisherman for long.
Something bothered him, though. It may be . . . it just might be, that although Annie scared him, this fisherman also had a thing for Annie. It might be that the studly talk that goes on aboard boats or in bars does not actually tell much about the boldness of the average guy; although, of course, this fisherman thought of himself as higher-than-average.
And so he probably asked himself why, if weird things of the sea did not scare him, and the thing in the Canal did not scare him, how come a pretty girl had him tied in fearful knots?
Because, he told himself, the whole deal was hopeless. Even if he had a “sort of a thing” for Annie, he somehow knew Annie was infatuated with Sugar Bear. Besides, the fisherman told himself, he was probably too old for her, anyway. Still, the whole deal made him about as sad as a cynical guy can allow himself to get.
He turned toward Beer and Bait, while at his back, water began to hump and spread. He figured everything was working out about the way it should. Annie was almost surely a stay-at-home type, and would rather hang around boilerplate in a warm shop, than sit in a small house waiting for a man who made his living at sea.
Annie
During the first two weeks of August a heat wave descended. Temperatures of eighty degrees cooked the forest, and while eighty is thought mild in many places, we’re not acclimated. Around here, summer visitors from the midwest usually wear sweaters, talk polite, and shake their heads in private. Sixty-five degrees and drizzling is considered ideal.
Heat brings dryness. Moss on roofs turns from green to black, and shrinks into little patches. Dust gathers golden on windshields because people aren’t in the habit of washing them. As hot day follows hot day, steam from the forest diminishes. Conifers take a grayish, sick look, and leaves of maple and alder show patches of yellow. Trees do not drop leaves until October, but drought speeds them up. When Annie walked in the forest, as she often did in August, the mat of needles from fir and pine no longer felt spongy.
She watched from behind the cover of trees like a small girl playing hide-and-seek. Police patrolled the road. One cop—who looked like a movie actor dressed up to play a cop—seemed to run the show. This cop cruised the road until divers found another wreck. Then he hustled in more cops and a crane. The cops closed one lane and shuffled traffic past in the other. Cars backed up, drivers sweating and disgusted. Little kids, who couldn’t hold it any longer, had to make quick dashes into the forest. People were kept from work, or from errands. The amount of cussing that went on would peel the paint off a steeple.
In the midst of it, Annie felt unsettled. She did not know that Petey thought of himself as going through a phase, but she knew she was. Vague thoughts never bothered Annie. Vague emotions did. Vague dreams made her scared. She felt, somehow, that life passed her by. She felt aimless, adrift, and with nebulous hankering to be of use to the world.
True, she battled satellites. The things flew overhead with never a by-your-leave. They interrupted the natural flow of the heavens, so when you first looked up and thought you had discovered a new star, it was only a peeping piece of tin.
Since leaving high school, and retiring in the woods, to the relief of her well-to-do family that lived in the housing project, Annie could look back on a few years of accomplishment. Certain herbs in the forest needed weeding to survive. When baby birds awkwardly left their nests in the spring som
eone needed to keep an eye on them, because housecats roamed the forest. Annie cast enchantments on submarines, and the enchantments worked since the subs always returned to base without discharging missiles. And sometimes, when no one was around to see, Annie arranged leaves and sticks and ferns in small displays, like artworks in a closed museum: for art is necessary even if not understood, and especially necessary if no one knows to look.
That Annie possesses talent cannot be denied. It is her loss, and ours, that her talent was never liberated through training. The talent came through the genes of a Greek grandmother, who, when Annie was a little girl, talked to trees. The trees always answered, and held odd, tree-like opinions; but Annie never really learned the language.
Annie was vaguely aware, in early August, that if she wanted a man, she could have her pick from half the unmarried guys in the neighborhood, and ninety percent of the married ones. The problem was not getting a man, but getting the right man; and the right one was Sugar Bear. In her imagination she saw herself in Sugar Bear’s kitchen which she knew well, and which would now be their’s. She saw herself weeding the garden, or sitting in the warm shop while Sugar Bear worked. Sometimes an occupied cradle sat near by. At other times she thrilled with the thought of the two of them hiking to the crest of a high ridge, and looking onto the Canal while feeling alive and free.
These imaginings had something to do with being of use to the world. Annie would not be the first young person to become flustered because life refused to take a proper shape. Annie didn’t know that. Perhaps it’s just as well. Had she known, she might have tried to help.
She was aware Sugar Bear liked her, sort of. She just couldn’t tell how much. She also knew Sugar Bear worried, and that the dead guy no doubt walked through Sugar Bear’s dreams. Annie may have been a kid, and accustomed to nebulous thoughts, but Annie can never be thought of as dumb. It seemed wrong that a good man should be in danger, just because the world spat forth a guy who should have gone out with the garbage.