Earley looked over her shoulder. “No shit. There’s a minus tide at 3:20 this afternoon. Want to roll out to the beach and dig geoducks?”
“Hell yes,” said Reed. “What are geoducks?”
“Clams,” Earley said. “Major clams. The giant sequoia of clamdom.”
“I make a mean chowdah,” said Reed.
“We catch one of these puppies, and you’ve got a pot full. They weigh about ten pounds apiece. And they dig really deep, so there’s just about three tides a year you can go for them.”
“Excellent!”
“I’ve never been to the beach up here,” Zan said.
“Well, you’ve got a date,” said Earley.
“Two dates,” said Reed.
Zan looked from one to the other, then grinned. “Lucky me.”
That was as close as they came to discussing it. Earley didn’t know how, when or why, but it seemed Reed and Zan had agreed he was part of their couple, a “we” of three people. The idea that he could make love to Zan without losing his friendship with Reed seemed too good to be true, but he wasn’t complaining. The three of them got in his pickup and headed due west, towards the ocean.
THIRTEEN
Earley drove towards La Push. Kalaloch and Ruby Beach were closer, but their surf was too rugged for bay-dwelling geoducks. There was a sandspit not far from Rialto Beach that ought to be perfect, and if they struck out, they could walk straight across it and dig razor clams in the breakers. Either way, they’d wind up with a good pot of chowder. Earley had turned up three shovels of varying sizes and outfitted Reed with a scarred pair of gum-boots. Zan would have to make do with industrial Hefty bags over her work boots, duct-taped onto her jeans to stay up.
As soon as they got down the mountain, Reed flipped on the radio; he’d memorized just where the static zone ended. The college station from Olympia was playing the Allman Brothers. “Lord, I was born a ramblin’ man. Tryin’ to make a living and doing the best I can . . .”
Reed whooped and cranked the volume. “It’s the Shake-rat National Anthem!” They all sang along at the top of their lungs. Zan sat in the center, her right arm draped around Reed. She leaned her head against Earley’s shoulder, and a spurt of irrational joy surged through his veins like a drug rush. It was all he could do to keep steering.
How in the world had he gone from the way that he’d felt at the Cedar last night, lower than shoe leather, to this bliss in a few short hours? It wasn’t just sex, although that had been pretty ecstatic; he’d had good sex with Margie, and still felt alone in the world. What buoyed him now was a sense of belonging, a feeling of being a part of some larger design. Earley didn’t know how to define it and he didn’t care. It was enough just to be in this truck, bombing down the coast road with the wind pouring in through the wide-open windows, Zan’s cheek pressed against his warm shoulder and Reed, rocking back and forth, drumming on the truck’s door as he hollered about being born in the back of a Greyhound bus. This is as good as it gets, Earley thought. This is what I’ve been missing.
There was no traffic on the approach road. In the summer, it would have been full of families and old folks in Winnebagos, driving out to pose photos in front of the seastacks. But all they passed now was a family of Quileute Indians packed into a sagging Chevette. Reed waved and they looked at him like he was crazy.
They crested a ridge and caught their first view of an endless horizon. Reed yodeled and whooped. He grabbed hold of the roof and stood up through the window, his whole torso cantilevered out over the road. Earley leaned over Zan and grabbed him by the waistband. “That door’s gonna fall off, you moron!”
“Who needs fuckin’ doors?” Reed hollered. “We’ve got us an ocean!” He leaned out farther over the gravel. Zan grabbed hold of his legs, helping Earley to haul him back into the seat. Reed thumped back down into her lap, slamming against Earley’s arm. Earley swerved wildly and came to a long, screeching stop in the oncoming lane. The air smelled like burnt oil and brake fluid.
Reed grinned like a madman, his face flushed from wind and adrenaline. “You must’ve left your damn brain where the Lord lost his shoes,” Earley drawled, and the others cracked up. Zan kissed the back of Reed’s neck and turned towards Earley, opening her mouth to his.
They heard the breakers before they could see them. A jumble of driftlogs was heaped at the edge of the parking lot. Seagulls and arctic terns flapped and squawked overhead, and the wind smelled like seaweed. Earley pulled on his waders and turned towards Zan, who was eyeing the black plastic bags with distrust.
“Are you sure these’ll work?”
“So long as they don’t fall down.” Earley picked up his thick roll of duct tape as Zan slid one leg into a bag. Then he knelt at her feet and gathered the plastic around her leg, unrolling a spiral of tape as he worked his way upwards. Her thighs were strong, muscled and meaty like haunches.
“I think you should know I’m enjoying this.” Zan’s voice sounded throaty.
“You and me both,” he said, rolling the tape between her upper thighs, where the denim was worn thin as tissue. Reed came around the side of the truck, wearing Earley’s big boots. He watched for a moment, suppressing a frown, then reached into the back for the buckets and shovels.
When Zan’s legs were both wrapped, they set off for the beach. Earley dropped back to let Reed walk beside her. He was feeling this out step by step; taking turns seemed the right thing to do. As they crested the tangle of weather-bleached logs, the sound of the breakers got suddenly louder.
There it was: the Pacific. A couple of steep, jagged seastacks loomed up from the shallows. Reed stopped in his tracks and said, “Whoa.”
Earley could second that emotion. He hadn’t grown up around ocean—the Atlantic was less than an hour from his door, but he’d seen it just once, on a drunken joyride halfway through high school—and he still got a feeling of awe every time he looked out at that massive expanse. It made him feel puny and grand all at once, the same way he felt when he looked at the Milky Way, or Mount Olympus. Reverent. That was the word for it. Something that he’d never felt in a church, not in all those years he’d been dragged by his mother, who hated it too, or his Gramma Mulvaney, who’d swayed with the Power and spoken in tongues.
“Like a Chinese painting,” said Reed, gazing out at the mist-shrouded seastacks, and Earley realized where he’d first seen those improbably vertical, tree-capped silhouettes: on the wall of the Happy Panda in Waycross.
The tide was way out, exposing a long strand of pebbly, dark sand. There were a couple of clamdiggers way down the beach, at the waterline. Reed started towards them, but Earley shook his head. “They’re digging for razors,” he said. “We’re after the big game.” He nodded his head towards the wide, brackish bay where a flatwater creek emptied into the ocean.
“What are these mega-clams called again?”
Earley sounded it out for him. “Gooey-ducks. And if you think the name is weird, wait till you see them.”
The beach was rough going. They clambered over driftlogs and boulders with highwater stripes of popweed and barnacles. The packed sand was littered with crab shells and waxy, wrist-thick whips of bull kelp. Gulls dropped shells onto rocks and dove after them, wheeling and shrieking and stealing each other’s meat. Earley carried his poacher’s spade over one shoulder, with a bucket dangling down like a hobo’s bindle. Reed did the same with his long-handled shovel. Zan lagged a little, shifting her camp spade from hand to hand and complaining the bags on her feet were too slippery. Earley offered his arm, but she shrugged him off. “I’m not Rapunzel.”
They reached the bay side at last. Earley walked along the wet muck at the edge of the tide flat, patient and slow as a heron. “What are you looking for?” Reed asked.
“The right place to dig.”
“Well, I know that. How will you know when it’s—”
He broke off midsentence as Earley waded into a thicket of eelgrass and bent down to pick up a white, e
mpty shell, twice the size of his hand.
“Holy shit!” said Reed.
Earley smiled. “That’s nothing,” he said, handing over the shell. “Picture this with a fourteen-inch neck sticking out.”
“No way,” said Zan.
“Seeing is believing,” said Earley.
They fanned out and searched through the eelgrass for tell-tale pocks in the sand. “Is this one?” Zan asked. Earley shook his head.
“Bigger.” He found one himself and began to dig.
The other two followed suit. Zan bent down over a likely pock, scrabbling away with her camp spade. “Wish I had my hoedad,” she said. “I could move this crap.”
Reed swung his shovel up, strumming it like a guitar. “If I had a hoedad, I’d hoe it in the mo-or-ning . . .”
“Very funny,” she said, flipping up more wet sand.
Reed put down his shovel and started to dig again. “How far down do we go?”
“Two, three feet,” Earley answered. His own hole was that deep already, with no sign of clams. He moved to a new spot and started again. So did Reed, and then Zan. They dug till their arms got tired, moving crabwise along the spit, leaving a long chain of empty holes. Zan put her shovel down first.
“This is like treeplanting, minus the trees.”
“Clamdigging minus the clams,” said Reed.
“They’re down there,” said Earley.
“Yeah, right,” said Reed. “This is some P.T. Barnum–style hoax of yours, Earley. We’re digging for Bigfoot.”
“You know what they say about big feet,” said Zan, stretching out on a log. “Wake me up if you find any fourteen-inch necks.”
Earley was irritated, not so much at their jokes, but the two of them ganging up. He kept right on digging. “Give up if you want,” he said. “I’m eating chowder tonight.”
“Do they sell cups at the Cedar Bar Lounge?” said Reed.
Earley dug faster. The sand under his shovel had spurted. “I’m on one,” he said. Water refilled the hole as he scooped out the heavy wet sand. He could see the black neck tip, the wrinkled tan meat. He jammed the blade of his poachers spade down alongside it and rocked on the handle hard, heaving the geoduck upwards. Then he grabbed the thick shell in both hands and turned to face Zan and Reed, hefting it up to his crotch. The neck dangled down like a porn star’s cock.
“Jesus Christ,” said Reed, staring.
Zan cracked up. “It’s bigger than yours!”
Earley waggled the clam back and forth so the neck swayed and bounced. “It’s not the meat,” he said, “it’s the motion of the ocean.” He added a bump and grind. “Who wants to touch it?”
“I’m getting my own,” said Reed, fetching his shovel.
“Me too,” said Zan.
The temptation to say “I told you so” was overwhelming, but Earley resisted. He scooped up a bucket of seawater and set his clam in it to rinse off the sand. All three of them dug for another half hour without turning up any more geoducks. The sun had dipped low in the sky and the tide was beginning to come back in. Earley suggested they move to the surf and dig razors. “They taste better anyway.”
“You go,” said Reed. “I’m going to get one of these suckers.”
Earley looked over at Zan. “I could do surf,” she said, meeting his eyes. This was just what he’d hoped for: finally, a chance to be with her alone. He nodded, feeling the roof of his mouth go dry.
“Meet us back at the truck before dark,” she told Reed, and kissed him. Earley picked up his bucket and both of their shovels. They set off across the spit, casting long shadows over the pebble-strewn sand. Zan walked fast, trying to put some distance between them and Reed, Earley figured, or hoped. He wondered what she must be thinking right now. Women mystified him at the simplest of times, and nothing about this was simple. He slung his spade up on one shoulder and loped after Zan, grateful that she wasn’t asking for small talk.
The sun was red-orange and the clouds were beginning to glow from behind. A couple of shearwaters skittered over the wave tips, veering around the tall seastacks. The gray waves licked at their tide stripes. The wind off the ocean picked up and Zan shivered, wrapping her jacket tighter around herself. Earley would have offered his wool shirt, but he didn’t want to be told that she wasn’t Snow White. Southern girls went for that gentleman stuff, but Zan was a different breed. It wasn’t some Women’s Lib thing she was trying out, either. The need to prove that she could fend for herself ran much deeper than that; it was fierce and defiant, and made Earley long to protect her. An instinct he’d have to suppress, or she’d kick his butt.
Where had she come from, this woman who walked just ahead of him, keeping a maddening distance? She seemed to skim over the sand dunes, while Earley sank deeper with every step. He wanted to close up the distance between them, to learn all her secrets and tell her his own. The strength of his longing amazed him. He didn’t know where to begin.
“There’s a fishing boat out there,” he said, squinting at the horizon. Against the bright disc of the sun, he could make out the dark silhouette of a gillnet rig between the red running lights. “He’s heading for harbor, see? Red right returning.”
“What do you think he’s returning to?”
“Dinner,” said Earley.
Zan punched him. “I’m serious.”
“So am I. Fishermen eat.” Zan’s brows knit together. She wants me to say something more, Earley thought, and it’s not about fishing boats. Maybe she’s hoping that I’ll be the first one to talk about us. The realization touched him and frightened him: Zan wasn’t as confident as she gave out. She was edging alongside the subject, wondering, as Earley was, where they would go from here. He stared at the gillnetter, hoping the right words would come to him.
Zan followed his gaze. “Think he lives by himself?”
“Not if he can help it,” said Earley. “Most people don’t.”
“You do.” She looked up at his face. “Can you help it?”
Earley squirmed, digging the toes of his boots into sand. “I’m not good at people,” he mumbled. “Anyway, I don’t live by myself anymore.”
“I noticed,” said Zan. She threaded her fingers through his, and the warmth of her skin on his made Earley’s heart pound. They were standing alongside a tide pool, a miniature world ringed with mussels, anemones, barnacles. A wine-red starfish was clinging to one of the boulders. Its shape was so perfect it looked artificial.
Zan took a deep breath, like a diver about to plunge over a cliff. “I couldn’t wait one minute longer,“ she said. Earley looked at her, suddenly thick-tongued. She lifted her hand to the scar in his beard, and he noticed her fingers were trembling.
“Since the moment I saw you,” she whispered. “That night in the bar.”
“Me too,” Earley said.
“I mean, I don’t believe in fate and that garbage, but if I did . . .”
“I’m about to believe in all sorts of stuff I don’t believe in,” said Earley. He put his hands on Zan’s hips, drawing her closer. “Do you give a damn about razor clams?”
Zan shook her head. “But I do give a damn about Reed,” she said. “You can’t even imagine how much he means to me, Earley. He’s one in a million. We can’t shut him out.”
“I won’t,” Earley promised. And lifted her right off her feet.
FOURTEEN
“How do you clean these things?” Reed stared down at the two geoducks on the sideboard. “This is a Freudian nightmare.”
“Slit the skin off the necks and mince them,” said Earley, secretly pleased that Reed’s geoduck wasn’t as big as his.
Reed picked up the knife. “I may vomit.”
“You want me to do it?” Zan asked.
“No,” said both men at once. She looked affronted.
Reed laughed. “It’s a guy thing.”
“You got that right, lil’ dude,” Earley grinned at him.
“Pardon me while I put on my mascara,” said Zan.
“Put on Otis Redding,” said Earley. “These clams could try a little tenderness.”
“So could I,” said Zan. She grabbed a beer and walked back to the tape deck.
Earley and Reed exchanged mystified looks. Earley shrugged and Reed picked up his knife. “The first of the geoduck martyrs,” he said.
Earley turned towards his room. Should I follow her back there? he wondered. Zan seemed to need soothing for something, though he was hard-pressed to say what. He thought of her kneeling on his bed, sorting through his shoebox of tapes, and the thought of her touching these bits of his history made his heart swell. “Since the moment I saw you,” she’d said on the beach, and he realized she hadn’t finished that sentence. Since the moment she’d seen him she’d . . . what? Been in love with him? Wanted to fuck him? Or neither; she might have meant something else altogether. Whatever she’d meant, she was on his bed, and if Reed wasn’t standing right there with a knife in his hand, he would have gone back in a heartbeat and laid her across it.
All the way home he’d been wondering where Zan would sleep tonight—if she decided to stay, he reminded himself; she’d already missed one day of work. Reed had no mattress, though he’d muttered something about making do with the couch cushions till he could pick one up. Earley’s bed was the logical place, but he knew something other than logic would make this decision, and that he could blow it by acting too eager. He’d just have to bide his time, see how the tide ran.
Earley turned over a geoduck shell in his hands. Ten-pound clams, oldgrowth cedars with trunks thick as silos, twenty-foot seaweed: no wonder he liked the Pacific Northwest. Everything here was outsized. Earley’s big body was in perfect scale with this landscape; he fit. His bus, on the other hand, felt close and cramped with three people inside it. He could feel every movement the other two made: Zan flipping open the tape deck, Reed’s hand rocking a cleaver over the clam necks.
“Want me to chop onions?” Earley asked, moving closer. Reed gave him a knife as Zan turned on “Pain in My Heart.”
“That was some wicked good chowdah,” Reed said in his best Kennedy accent, as he leaned back and rolled a cold beer bottle over his forehead. The woodstove had fogged up the windows, and he had stripped down to his T-shirt to cook. Earley noticed that Reed’s arms were starting to look a bit ropier, though still pretty scrawny for someone who split wood all day.
Clearcut Page 12