by Tom Wright
As we stood at the top of the hill observing Mary’s, I thought about the last time I’d eaten there. Mary was slight but had a gigantic head of unnatural red hair—thin and sparse, but always poofed-up. Her wrinkled, withered skin hung from her face and arms like gathered curtains. I watched her as she carried the entire meal for a table of eight in one trip—plates stacked carefully one on the other and wedged between fingers with bulging knuckles—and wondered how many times she’d made the same trip. How many plates had she lost before she could do that? She probably required multiple trips to serve large parties early in her career but gradually built up her strength and balance, plate by plate, until she finally reached the height of her career and could do it all at once. The Michael Jordan of waitresses. What pride she must have felt at having mastered what none of her other staff—some less than a quarter of her age—could do.
After enough time had elapsed, we moved down the hill toward Mary’s. As we neared, I noticed some faint yellow light spilling from a window. We walked up to the small building and peered carefully through the old, wavy glass. A candle flickered on the counter. Everything inside looked in order.
“Do you think we should go in?” Joe asked.
“I don’t know.”
Just then, movement inside startled us. A withered, old hairless Chihuahua of a woman shuffled slowly about. She ran bulging knuckles through the few remaining strands of poofed-up red hair. Gravity continued its relentless work on Mary’s sagging skin. Her sallow eyes, however, glinted with the last remaining sign of life within her.
“What the hell is that?” asked Joe.
“It’s Mary,” I said, motioning to the sign. “I think it’s ok. She looks harmless. Everybody eats here. She might know something.”
Joe pushed open the door, and the bell jingled which gave her a start. She quickly regained herself as we came through the door. “Hello,” Joe and I said in unison.
“Come on in and sit down anywhere you like,” she whistled from a puckered and toothless mouth. “Except table four. That’s reserved.”
We looked to our left and saw the ‘Reserved’ placard on table four.
“Are, are you open?” asked Joe.
“Why sure! We’re open every day of the week here at Mary’s.”
Joe and I looked at each other and shrugged while Mary stared at us intently. Although the worst had passed, the stale smell of rotting food and cigarette smoke wafted through the room.
“Well, then. Where will you sit?” she gummed.
“I guess we’ll sit at the counter,” I offered.
“That will be fine. Keeps me from walking so far.”
Joe and I took seats in the middle of the long counter, near the candle.
“Can I get you some coffee?” Mary asked, even though she had already turned over both cups and placed them on their saucers.
“Sure, but we don’t have any money to pay,” I said.
“We’ll worry about that later,” Mary said, chuckling.
She grabbed a clear pot with the orange handle and pretended to dispense coffee into Joe’s filthy cup.
I put my hand over my cup. “I’ll take regular,” I said, motioning to the pot with the brown handle sitting on the coffee machine. Mary switched pots and pretended to dispense caffeinated coffee into my filthy cup.
Joe and I looked at each other again. Joe circled his finger around his temple to signal that she was crazy. I nodded. We smiled and began to pretend to drink from the cups.
“So what’s kicking Mary?” I asked in an upbeat voice, attempting to play along and change the tone of the conversation. “Do you remember me?”
“Of course!” she lied. “Will you have your usual?”
“Naturally! And may I say you are looking as beautiful as ever?” I said.
“Now Jim Lambert! If I didn’t know your wife, I’d think you were trying to pick me up!” she exclaimed.
“You keep that between us, huh Mary?” I said.
“And for your friend here?”
“Uh, I’ll have what he’s having,” Joe said.
“In a jiff!” Mary said as she wrote out the ticket, clipped it to the wheel, and spun it back into the kitchen.
She turned and faced us and placed her gnarled, knuckled hands on the counter to balance herself. I was afraid she’d fall and instinctively reached toward her. So did Joe. She caught herself without our help.
“Well, then. I guess I had better go back into the kitchen and see what’s taking so long,” she said.
Joe began to rise. “Why don’t you let me check? You stay here and rest.”
“Nonsense!” she scolded as she waved Joe off.
Joe sat back down.
She shuffled to the end of the counter and around the corner toward the kitchen.
Joe and I waited. Nothing needed to be said. Mary was obviously off her rocker. She either didn’t know or didn’t care that anything had happened. How she stayed alive in that restaurant was anybody’s guess. But there would have been no point in saying anything to her. We couldn’t help her. She had spent her entire life in that restaurant and was obviously quite content to spend the rest of it there too—however little remained. Even if we had tried to help her, she probably would have died ten minutes after leaving the restaurant. She was better off there than anywhere, and the best thing we could do for her, as fellow human beings, was to play along.
She placed two plates onto the service bar and shouted: “Order up!” She emerged from the kitchen and served the dirty plates to us.
We pretended to eat, and she pretended to tend to other business.
“Say, Mary?”
“Yes Jim.”
“Do you get many customers anymore?” I asked, faking a mouth full of food.
She looked at me, puzzled.
I cleared my throat. “This economy, I mean.”
“Well, Sunday’s are our busiest day. But it varies. Not so much, no. But personally, I’m busier than ever.”
“That’s good,” Joe said.
“What are you up today, Jim?”
“Well, I’m off to Langley to get the truck fixed, and Joe here, he’s riding along.”
“I didn’t hear your truck pull up.”
“How could you have through all this noise,” I asked. I winked and smiled and motioned around, despite the silence.
Mary smiled.
“Have you seen Carol lately?” Joe asked, making up the name. He must have thought that everyone knows someone named Carol—especially someone who would have been exposed to as many people as Mary.
“Why no. How do you know Carol?”
“She’s my mother.”
“You don’t say. What did you say your name was?”
“Joe.”
“Of course! I think I remember Carol mentioning you.”
“Anyway, tell her that I said hi when she comes in again, won’t you Mary?”
“Of course I will.”
“And tell her I’m back in town for good.”
Mary suddenly had a twinkle in her eye—a purpose. To wait for Carol, whoever she was, and to give her an important message from her son.
“Of course, I’ll be happy to,” she gummed, less articulate than before.
Sensing that we were finished, Mary offered us desert. We declined.
Her mouth relaxed from smile to neutral as she folded the check and placed it in front of us.
“Will you take a credit card?” I asked.
“Nope! Machine’s busted!” She pointed off into a dark corner where a broken credit card machine must have sat collecting dust.
“Well, I guess we’ll be paying in cash then.” Joe and I pretended to fish for our wallets.
“Now, you go on, Jim Lambert! Your money’s no good here. I just appreciate your coming in,” she said, as she sighed.
I remembered the money I had taken from Paul's house. I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a hundred dollar bill. I put it on the counter.
“I'm not taking your...”
“I insist,” I said.
As we made for the door, Mary repeated: “I just appreciate your coming in. Please come again.” She meant it.
She cleared our dishes and placed our check and the hundred dollar bill amongst the other receipts.
As we passed by the front windows, Mary leaned back against the counter and stared at the candle.
Joe and I walked along quietly. It grew colder, and a light rain began to fall. I couldn’t see much of the sky through the canopy of trees, but had I been able to, I probably would have seen the clouds lowering in advance of another storm. My apprehension grew the closer I got to the house. Less than an hour away then by my reckoning, I increased the pace.
We approached a bend in the road, and blackened woods on the far side of the curve caught our eye. We hustled to the corner and stopped at the edge of a small gully. About ten feet below sat a blackened car upside down. Blackened ground surrounded the car and a burn scar extended away from the road as far as we could see into the woods.
Joe looked back up the road. “See those skid marks?”
I looked back and saw two sets of skid marks—one set stopped at the edge of the pavement and the other extended across the shoulder to where we stood and off into the gully.
“This car was run off the road,” Joe said.
We picked our way carefully down the bank to the vehicle and peered in. The stench was overwhelming. Nausea burned in me as I recognized the blackened remains of people still buckled into their seats. Two adult-sized people remained strapped into the front seats and two smaller humans were buckled in back. A little black lump of melted remains sat slumped on the ceiling of the car, just below an infant car seat.
Joe stepped to the front of the car and dry heaved.
I sat back against the wet ground too shocked to feel anything. “At least it was probably quick,” I said to no one in particular.
Joe stood upright and looked intently at something behind the car. “Uh, Matt? Take a look at this.”
I moved around behind the car and found Joe kneeling next to another body—this one not black, but a normal looking male leaning against a tree. He slumped to his left and the left half of his head was gone. A gun lay next to his right hand.
Joe rolled the body over and retrieved a wallet from its back pocket. He flipped through the contents and then threw it on the ground. “Christ,” he said and walked away.
I picked up the wallet and studied the driver’s license. Jeremy Peterson, age 33, from Raleigh, North Carolina. I found a common access card assigned to him by the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. I flipped through his photos. There were photos of a beautiful teenage girl in a cheerleading uniform, school photos of young twin boys, and an infant girl. There was also a wedding photo of him and a stunning redhead.
Disgusted, I threw his wallet into his lap, sighed heavily, and turned to leave. I stopped and retrieved the gun from his dead hand—a big, shiny, silver gun—and shoved it into my waistband. I scaled the bank back to the road.
I caught back up to Joe.
“What are we going to do?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
We walked on in silence.
It crossed my mind to turn the gun on myself. One of those involuntary thoughts that seemed to come from nowhere. But contained within the fact that I still had a gun was the suggestion that I should carry on to the end. I had at least some inkling that prayers could be answered now. Maybe it was all coincidence—Joe, the exact kind of person I needed, coming along just when I needed him. But what if not? No, I had to go on if for no other reason than when I found them all gone or dead, I could end it knowing that there was no further reason to live, nothing else I could do on this dreadful planet, just like Jeremy Peterson. Suddenly I remembered that I had never actually asked for the very thing I wanted most. God knows I had hoped, but perhaps there was a difference. I dared not take that chance.
“Ok, so I still don’t know if you are there, but I am willing to take the chance after all that has happened. I still hate you, and I still give up. But I need Kate and my children to be ok. I need them. I don’t know how I’ll care for them, but if you are there and can do this, I will figure it out. I don’t expect an answer since I’ve never heard one before. But we’ll see what happens. At least I need to know what happened to them. That won’t give me a reason to live, but at least I can put a bullet in my head, hoping to see them on the other side. Maybe I’ll see you, for all I know, and then I can tell you what I think about you putting us through all this.”
I didn’t say those things out loud, but somehow it made me feel better to articulate them to myself. Then doubt crept back in, and I felt ridiculous.
“Do you think it is wrong to keep sex slaves?” I asked Joe as we ambled along.
“Yes,” he replied.
“I don’t understand how people can behave like that.”
“Hunger,” Joe replied.
“That fat bastard I killed yesterday wasn’t hungry,” I said.
“Maybe not for food,” Joe retorted.
“Whoever ran those people off the road back there wasn’t looking for food,” I said.
“What made people ever behave?” I continued.
Joe explained his theory that, at some point during our evolution, a few people found it easier and more beneficial to get along with each other than to oppose one another. It came to be considered good or moral to treat each other in a certain way.
“Then,” he said, “Certain moral beings noticed that not everyone was behaving this way. They had to come up with some way to make them all toe the line. They invented gods and devils and heaven and hell to scare everyone into good behavior.”
“So you think morality came first and then religion.” I stated rather than asked.
“Yes. I believe religion was simply man’s attempt to make everyone conform,” Joe said.
“But what makes two heathens like us behave?”
“The ironic thing is,” Joe replied “The religious types try to behave out of fear that the great watcher is watching, whereas you and I behave because we know that they were right in the first place: it is just better to get along. So, I ask you: who is really moral, the ones who behave out of fear, or you and me, who behave just because it’s right?”
I thought about that as we walked along. Then my mind wandered to a different subject.
“You know what my worst fear is, Joe?” I asked. “That what seems most likely is actually true—that, like a candle, we die and then, poof, we’re done. And I’ll never get to find out the answers I’ve always wanted to know.”
“If there is a god and you could ask him one question, what would it be?” Joe asked.
“What is outside this universe?” I responded immediately.
“Not one of the usual questions like what was the purpose?” Joe asked.
“No, by the time you get to God, the answers to most of the big questions will already be obvious,” I said.
Joe smiled. “You are a surprising person,” he said. “I’d ask him what we were supposed to have learned from little babies suffering. And then I’d tell him what he can do with that answer.”
We reached a fork in the road. One path circled back around toward Holmes Harbour and, although circuitously, from whence we had come, while the other made directly for Shadow Point and my family. I had thought long and hard about a request I was about to make of Joe, and I knew this was the best and last place to make it. Any further and Joe would have to backtrack, which wasn’t that big of a deal, but truth be told, I felt a strong desire to be alone when I discovered whatever I was to discover at Shadow Point.
Joe and I stopped and looked back and forth down the east-west oriented road.
“It’s right, right?” Joe asked.
I indicated that it was.
“What’s the matter then?”
/> “Listen Joe. There is something I have to ask you.”
“Shoot,” Joe said.
“You remember when we first met, you asked me what else you should be doing besides walking around aimlessly?”
“Of course. And you think you know what I should be doing?”
“I made a promise to some people, and I don’t think I can keep it. But I think you might be able to.”
23
Town of Langley, Whidbey island, WA
Having parted ways with Joe, I suddenly felt very alone. Whidbey Island started to seem more like a morgue than a quiet tourist island. The thing about Whidbey Island is that it gets spookier as you go east. The west side is weathered and beaten from the incessant parade of Pacific storms, and while it has plenty of vegetation, it tends to be sparse in places, which makes the west side seem lighter. The east side, by contrast, is densely vegetated and overgrown. It seems dark because, in the afternoon, it is. The beach upon which Kate’s parents lived was called Shadow Beach precisely because, as an east-facing beach with high cliffs, it came into shadow in the early afternoon and remained that way until dark. The mornings were nice and warm, but the afternoons and evenings were shadowy and cool, exacerbated by the afternoon north wind that frequented the area during the summer months.
Less than a half hour after leaving Joe, I came within sight of Langley, WA. I didn’t need to go down into the town as the road to Shadow Beach passed by on a bluff above. I stopped for a moment at the overlook and scanned the town for any activity. A few overturned cars sat rusting in the middle of Main Street. The windows of many buildings had been broken out. One building—a restaurant, if memory served—had burned to the ground. A huge fishing boat remained perched in dry-dock on the beach down below town.
Langley always struck me as odd. It was a town of over 5,000 residents, but I found no reason for its existence. It sat next to the water but seemed to ignore it. It was the only tourist town I had ever been to that seemed oblivious to the one thing that might have attracted tourists. Not one of the beach side restaurants actually faced the water. Buildings blocked the entire shoreline from the rest of the town. Stairs that led down to the water and the so-called waterfront below looked like more of an afterthought than a planned attraction. A single, poorly maintained dirt road provided the only vehicle access to the beach, and even that led only to a dilapidated marina. Langley couldn’t claim to be a gateway to anything, a ferry from the mainland didn’t terminate there, the town effectively blocked its only view, it lacked a great waterfront, and it wasn’t even at a crossroads. There simply wasn’t much there. Yet it existed.