Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One

by Perry P. Perkins

  Ramming it to his lips hard enough to draw blood and crack painfully against his teeth, Jack tipped it back and took a long, gurgling swallow. Thick, wet fire tracked a snail trail down the back of his throat. Swallow after swallow, choking, the bitter bourbon sloshing from his mouth and over his chin, a baptism of anger and rebellion.

  That evening he slept, and had no dreams.

  Dawn found him, nearly unconscious, clinging miserably to the cool porcelain of the toilet bowl; finally reduced to muscle wrenching dry heaves, his head throbbing like a mouthful of infected teeth.

  Two nights later, Jack revisited his dank, basement altar, returning to the kitchen with a fresh bottle.

  By spring, he had exhausted Bill's rainy day supplies, and walked through the swinging doors of the Surfside Liquor store for the first time in his life.

  He’s glanced around guiltily like a young boy sneaking a peek at a dirty magazine. By summer, he was a regular, receiving a nod from Bob, the owner, each time he walked in.

  By September, the dreams were back, and no amount of Tennessee whiskey would wash them away again.

  *

  A year stretched into two, then three, and Pastor Karl's unhappy prediction proved true, as the church body of Long Beach Community saw less and less of their former friend and youth pastor. Karl knew that guilt and bitterness had kept Jack away, ashamed to show his face to those he felt he'd failed.

  Jack always claimed that it was work on oyster beds, or Bill's condition, which kept him home, and it was some time before his former employer learned just how far his young friend had slipped. Jack had all but disappeared from their lives, but in a small town, secrets are hard to keep, and what small town folks see, they talk about. Jack's late night drives to Surfside were soon grist for the church rumor mill, and far be it from the congregation to keep their pastor in ignorance. Karl came by the house on occasion and once, over a cup of coffee on the wide front porch, he asked Jack about his drinking.

  It was a Sunday, Jack remembered, and the church service he’d missed had been over long enough for Karl to close up the building and make the drive down Pacific Avenue to Nahcotta.

  Jack had been sitting on the porch, wearing the same rumpled jeans and stained chambray that he had slept in the night before. A steaming cup of coffee rested on the porch-rail, his second that morning and not yet touching his hangover. He was just considering lacing the caffeine with a little hair of the dog when Karl’s old Chevy had chugged up the gravel driveway and groaned to a stop.

  “Morning, Jack,” Karl had smiled, climbing the three wide steps up to the porch, “or afternoon, I guess. We missed you this morning.”

  Jack nodded, reaching for the chipped coffee cup and thinking what Karl had left unspoken.

  We’ve missed you the last sixSunday mornings…

  “Yeah,” the younger man grimaced, “been feeling a little under the weather lately.”

  Karl eased himself into the old wicker chair opposite Jack and stared at him wordlessly for several moments. Jack suddenly wished that he had combed his hair this morning, maybe put on a fresh shirt as well.

  “Hmmmm,” Karl intoned finally, “so, just how much did you have to drink last night, Jack?”

  Jack sighed. There it was, out in the open now. Trust Karl not to beat around the bush. If only he could have gotten a couple of more cups of coffee in him first, he wouldn’t have felt so off guard—

  (guilty)

  --and been a bit more ready to face the tongue-lashing that was about to begin.

  How much hadhe drunk last night? Jack couldn’t say.

  Fuzzily, he seemed to remember an empty bottle, one more dead soldier, laying on the floor beside his bed this morning and, even more fuzzily, the recollection that he’d stopped at the liquor store yesterday afternoon.

  “That much, huh?” Karl had asked, interrupting the thick molasses flow of his thoughts, and Jack had felt the warmth of blood rushing to his face.

  He rubbed a hand across his eyes as the headache that had plagued him all morning began to return in earnest, like a rusty, frozen spike piercing his forehead.

  “Look Karl,” he started, “it’s not a big deal. I had a couple of drinks to help me get to sleep, that’s all. I might have had a little more than was good for me last night, but it’s under control.”

  Karl nodded, letting the conversation lapse back into silence as he picked imaginary lint from the knees of his slacks. Jack sat there, the cup cooling in his hands, and began to wish that he’d stayed in bed this morning, pretending not to hear when Karl knocked.

  “It’s under control,” Karl repeated to him softly. “I guess I don’t need to tell you that’s what they all say, huh?”

  The warmth in his cheeks had turned hot, and Jack had sat with his burning face pointed at the weathered planks of the old porch. He felt as though Karl was seeing into the dark, hidden corners of his soul, and he found himself desperately embarrassed at what his pastor was finding there.

  “I know,” he muttered, looking away across the wide expanse of the bay, where sparrows flitted across the mudflats, picking at sand fleas. He was too ashamed to look his former employer in the eye, “It really is under control. I just need some time to get a handle on this…”

  “You’re not going to find any answers in that bottle, Jack. You and I both know it.” Karl nudged Jack’s foot with a black loafer, “You have friends here that can help you through this, if you’ll let them.”

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, Jack felt tears start to form, and he fought them off savagely.

  “I know,” he said again, “and when the time comes--”

  “What time?” Karl interrupted, exasperated, “what time are you waiting for? This…this, lifeyou’re living isn’t going to get you any closer to what you need. You pick up a bottle and go down that road and you’re just following in Bill Beckman’s footsteps, and we saw where that got him, didn’t we?”

  Jack’s head snapped up so fast that the bones in his neck cracked like pistol shots, his lip curled, and his face pale with anger, his fingers clutching the armrests of his chair until the tired wicker creaked. The coffee cup, which had rested precariously on his knee, slipped and crashed to the porch in a splash of cold coffee and glass shards. Jack started to rise, paused, and then slumped back into his seat, the clear fury that had risen at Karl’s words dissipating as the cloud of guilt and hopelessness returned.

  Yes, he had certainly seen where Bill’s footsteps had led him, hadn’t he?

  After all, Jack was the one to put him back on that path. Hadn’t his own weakness and sin driven Bill on, hadn’t his betrayal been the impetus that had put Bill’s finger on the trigger?

  Karl watched these conflicting emotions flicker across Jack’s face until his features settled, once more, into a mask of bitter apathy. He had stood, reaching into his pocket for his keys, trying not to show the disappointment that flooded his heart.

  “Look,” Jack muttered without glancing up, “I’m going to have to head out to the farm pretty soon…”

  “Yes.”

  The conversation, such as it had been, was over. Karl descended the steps and, as he reached the gravel walk, he turned back. “You know where I am, Jack, if you need to talk.”

  “I do,” Jack replied, “and thanks. That means a lot, Karl, really.”

  “It’ll mean a lot if you call me.”

  “I will.”

  Pastor Ferguson climbed back into to his listing Malibu, and rolled down his window, as Jack started back into the house.

  “Jack?” he called.

  Jack turned. “Yeah?”

  Karl’s face was set and impassive.

  “You’re giving up on Him, Jack,” he said, “but Heisn’t giving up on you.”

  The old preacher raised a hand, and then backed out of the driveway and was gone, leaving Jack standing there, biting back tears. It was the last time he had been available when Karl dropped by.

  *

  By
the fall of 1987, Jack had only the most tenuous grasp of what was happening with the oyster beds, having long since turned the day-to-day details over to one of the young men he hired to work the fields. Under sober management, the small farm prospered, as it never had under Bill's leadership, and the income it produced, along with Bill's monthly check, was more than enough to cover the meager lifestyle the two men lived.

  The beauty of oyster farming, as Jonathan Beckman (a man not unfamiliar with that demon rum, himself) had been fond of saying, was that you could leave the cows in the pasture, as it were. And, many a morning, Jack found the cows were doing just fine and he had more urgent concerns at home.

  Glass in hand; he would begin to deal with those concerns as soon as the breakfast dishes left the table.

  In fact, most days found Jack a fair way through his bottle by mid-afternoon and passed out, often as not, by nightfall. The only day that he refused the temptation of the black label was Saturday, for their trip to the Sandcastle Bookstore to see Dottie Westcott, which had become a weekly ritual.

  Having given himself over to debauchery, some small spark of self-respect still flickered in him, and Jack wouldn't have the outspoken old woman see him in that condition.

  In an alcoholic blur, he rode this unending carousel round and round as the seasons changed and life went on about them. Each year, as summer pressed on toward fall, Jack would ease himself out of the fog enough to get oyster beds ready for another season, while the weather was at its best.

  Two long weeks of sweating, shaking and mostly trying not to vomit as he repaired old stakes and buried new ones, washed and patched the equipment, and repainted the little roadside building where Bill sat, selling oysters, and waving to passing cars.

  Laboriously, the two men had gone over the rudimentary math skills involved in making change on a five-dollar bag of oysters, until Jack was comfortable that he wasn't losing too much money to the tourists.

  By mid-autumn the operation would be up and running itself again, usually with a four-member crew of high-schoolers and one supervisor.

  Then, as the leaves began to turn color once more, he would begin the long winter descent back into drunken oblivion. This was the pattern of Jack Leland’s life.

  *

  The last letter had come during the winter of 1984 and, like the five previous correspondence, Jack returned it, marked as undeliverable.

  The address was that of a law firm in Texas, and Jack was pretty sure that Kathy's letters to Bill were being forwarded from a real address that she preferred to keep anonymous. Jack understood this, as he also understood that if she knew what had happened to her husband, Kathy would feel as responsible as himself for Bill's current condition and insist on taking care of him.

  Even in the depths of his own descent, Jack couldn't allow that to happen. Wherever Kathy was, she had made a life for herself, hopefully a good life, and Jack wouldn't let himself to destroy it again by allowing her to spend the rest of her years caring for her childlike husband.

  Worried that Kathy would recognize his own handwriting; Jack took each letter back to the post office with a red line through Bill Beckman's name and address and stamped with the words "Undeliverable.”

  "Sorry, Katie," he whispered, as he slipped the last letter across the counter.

  Finally, the letters stopped coming, and Jack tried to convince himself that Kathy must have decided to get on with her new life.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  In the winter of 1988, Long Beach Community Church burned to the ground. A freak winter ice storm brought down the power lines that ignited the roof of the building. With the slick roads and high winds, the fire department couldn't reach the blaze, and by the time they got control, there was little left that they could do. The church, which had stood for almost ninety years, burned to its foundation.

  Late one night, nearly a week after the fire, Jack drove Bill's pickup down to the Sunshine Market. Parking just across the street from the charred remains he’d stood, heedless of the bone-chilling winds that whipped around him.

  Tears had wet his cheeks as he stared at the pitiful blackened hole that remained. At dawn he’d returned, shivering, to the truck and drove slowly down Main Street towards home. He’d fallen into bed too saddened, sickened, and exhausted to even stop by the kitchen for a bottle.

  The next great shock came in 1991. That spring Karl Ferguson was found by his daughter, slumped in his easy chair with his worn Bible open across his lap. His eyes were closed, as though in sleep, and his wide face relaxed and content. He was buried in the Chinook Cemetery.

  Jack watched his former pastor's interment to the grave from the window of the truck, parked on the far side of the graveyard on that rainy April morning, and pulled away from the curb as the service ended. He went home, boiled a pot of water, and sat in his study, looking out on the Willapa Bay from the attic window and sipping his tea. Karl's passing brought a deep regret for the days and years that had been lost between them, but no tears, for a man who had surely been welcomed into victory with open arms, there was no need for tears. The teacup grew cold in Jack's hands as he watched rain sweep the wide gray surface of the bay, sitting alone with his envious thoughts.

  *

  If there was a bright light in the lives of the men who shared the rambling confines of the old Beckman estate, it was Dottie Westcott. She had, over the years of his self-imposed isolation, become Jack's last friend and only confidante.

  The first winter following his resignation from the church, the old woman had invited him and Bill to come over for Christmas dinner. Jack had declined politely. The next year she had invited him again, and again he graciously turned her down.

  In November of 1983, Dottie had informed him, as he lounged in the bookstore's easy chair one Saturday afternoon, that if he didn't come over for Christmas dinner that year, he could find another bookstore to sit his sorry, loitering rear in.

  “No arguments!” she'd said with a growl, wagging a stern finger in Jack’s face.

  Jack had graciously accepted the invitation to dinner, and that December the twenty-fifth was a brief voyage to the past, to a time of laughter and warmth.

  Dottie had opened the door to her small apartment clad in a crimson evening gown, glittering with thousands of bright sequins. A silver tiara encrusted with deep green-glass emeralds atop her head, shod in a faded pair of pink Converse high-tops and, of course, wearing her lime lensed glasses.

  "You look lovely," Jack had said, grinning and smoothly kissing the back of her outstretched hand.

  "You are too kind, sir," she returned, "I don't believe a word of it, but don’t ever stop!” She waved them into the small apartment that was permeated with the mouthwatering aromas of roasted turkey and garlic stuffing.

  After eating what was, by general consensus, far more than they should have, the three retired to the living room to drink eggnog and watch Christmas specials on Dottie's VCR. Bill gazed in rapt and joyous attention as the misfit toys cavorted across the screen, and Tiny Tim proclaimed his seasonable, "God bless us, every one!"

  Laughing together, in the blinking rainbow glow of Dottie's little plastic Christmas tree, they exchanged gifts.

  The week before, Jack and Bill had driven down to Lincoln City and browsed the shopping mall. Bill had insisted on an outrageous pair of electric-blue fuzzy slippers. (Which, in retrospect, Jack had to agree made a perfect gift for Dottie.)

  He, himself had picked up a more restrained, purple silk scarf, hand painted with bright tulips. Her gift to Bill was a small portable radio and cassette player with headphones. He had looked at the device with some confusion until Jack had popped open the tape player and explained that Bill could take his music, a handful of boom-twangcountry cassettes, anywhere he wanted now.

  As far as Bill was concerned, he had won the lottery, and he spent the rest of the evening blissfully lost in the wonderfulness of his new toy.

  With great excitement he showed them, again
and again, how the little door popped open and how to adjust the headphones, grinning from ear to ear all the while.

  Dottie handed Jack a heavy rectangle wrapped in white tissue. Tearing open the paper revealed a red, tooled-leather case holding a matching hardbound volume of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The edges were gleaming gold and, opening the front cover, he saw that it was a first edition, printed in 1974. Jack took a deep breath, running his hand over the warm, textured surface.

  "Dottie," he whispered, "this is too much…"

  "Nonsense," she replied, "I've had that copy forever. No one will pay what I'm asking for it and I'll be darned if I'll lower the price!"

  Jack thanked her, his gaze never leaving the crisp, unread pages of Middle Earth, and Dottie smiled, satisfied with his reaction. After Bill had fallen asleep on the couch, Jack and Dottie sat up late, nibbling on sugar cookies and sharing memories of Christmases past.

  From that year on, the invitation was open and by the holiday season of 1985, the custom had expanded to include Thanksgiving and Christmas both, usually held at the Beckman house, with the much larger kitchen and dining room.

  Before long, Jack and Bill became the outrageous old woman's unofficial dates to the tourist events and music festivals that toured the coast each season.

  She would walk, arm in arm with her men, flattering Jack shamelessly and buying sweets for Bill whenever his protective guardian's back was turned.

  When he was with Dottie, something about the irrepressible old woman was infectious, and Jack found himself, for a few brief hours, setting aside the pain, which by now seemed as much a part of him as his beating heart.

  He could almost forget those things in life that had been denied him, his mistakes and regrets, casting off the shadow of his guilt and living again. Soon enough, the day would end, though, and Jack would lead Bill back across the old porch and into their home, with its lonely, empty rooms and gray future.