Chapter Ten

Death and Diners

 

 

          Canner took a lengthy sip, set his mug on the darkly stained oak table, and checked the parking lot through the enormous bay window they’d been seated next to. He turned back to Chloe, sitting across from him, shrugged, and began slowly tracing the grain of the table with his finger.

          There were two servers wearing black shirts and charcoal pants, a young woman and a gangly young man with an unfortunate haircut, that were rolling silverware into black napkins two tables behind Chloe. They had been talking amongst themselves, minding their own business, in such low voices that they could hardly be faulted for the content of their stories. But, with every overheard word, Canner could feel his cheeks turning a little pinker.

Of course they were the right age to be talking about those sorts of things. And Canner knew mundane tasks done with members of the opposite sex encouraged that kind of exchange. And it wasn’t like they were talking about anything absurdly vulgar either. “Naked in the front seat of your car?” the girl had giggled to Haircut. “It was my dad’s car,” the boy then confessed. But their whispers were all carrying down the open bank of windows, Canner could hear every word they spoke, and it was becoming incredibly uncomfortable. Should he mouth to them “I can hear you”? Was that the dumbest and most uncool thing he could possibly do? What was Chloe thinking right now? Could she hear them? Was she facing the wrong way and missing all of it?   

          “Who had the breakfast burrito?” a sharp-featured forty-something woman asked, unexpectedly standing, rigidly straight, beside them.

She was sensibly dressed, a white V-neck with khaki shorts, and held a beautiful black ceramic plate in one hand and a steaming pot of coffee in the other.

          “She did,” Canner sighed, thankful for something to say.

          Chloe raised her hand and nodded with a smile.

          “Then just coffee for you?” she asked.

Before Canner could respond, the woman looked away and leaned in to set Chloe’s plate in front of her. She bent over just far enough for a dramatically sparkling diamond necklace to slack away from her shirt. She stood up again, as straight as Canner believed anyone could stand, and began to tip her pot toward his half-full mug.

“Oh, no thank you,” he blurted, quickly reaching out to put his hand over his mug, guarding it from her.

A small dollop, larger than a drop, smaller than a pour, of scalding coffee escaped the lip of the decanter before she could stop.

It landed with a quick and quiet sizzle on the back of Canner’s hand.

The woman looked down at him, dead into Canner’s eyes, and raised her eyebrows in such a way, with a mix of total sureness and apathy, that it made it instantly and inarguably clear that he was to blame, not her.

The hair on the back of Canner’s neck and forearms stood on end and, even freshly burned, and still flushed with embarrassment, his skin ran cold.

“This is a fresh pot,” she said, her eyebrows still raised but now looking down at Canner’s reddening hand. “Do you want some ice?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, removing his hand to rub it on his jeans under the table. “Thanks,” he added.

“Enjoy, you two,” she said with rehearsed and unbelieved sweetness.

As she walked away, her sharp eyes scanned the whole room, landing for a moment on the two silverware rollers who hadn’t breathed a word since her arrival, then moved on to every other table. Canner thought that it wasn’t just them that had quieted. That the entire dining room had gone a little still with her in it.

          “She did nearly ruin your coffee to cream ratio,” Chloe admitted, cutting into her burrito. “But you almost lost your hand.”

          The door to the kitchen swung close behind the woman, and the normal din of the restaurant returned.

          “Some things are worth fighting for,” he said seriously, rubbing a thumb over his new red welt and showing it off to Chloe. “A scar from my battle with the evil restaurant owner,” he grinned.

          A young man walked out through the swinging door that the woman had disappeared through. He was younger than the silverware rollers, not nearly as nicely dressed, maybe a dishwasher or a busboy, and looked warily out across the restaurant. When he found Girl and Haircut, he quickly ducked over to stand behind them. They each acknowledged his existence, though neither turned or stopped working, and they both listened politely to whatever it was he was telling them. When he was through, the silverware rollers smiled and nodded over their shoulders. Then they ignored him until the boy understood he was being dismissed, though he smiled as he left, like a kid who’d just gotten to tell a great secret.

When they were alone again, Girl looked seriously at Haircut.

“Do you think someone killed him?”

“No,” he laughed. “People wash up on the beach all the time.”

“Not naked, they don’t.”

“Yeah they do. All the fat one’s do.”

“Shut up. That’s gross.”

“Seriously. When they flop around in the surf their clothes fall off.”

“No they don’t.”

“Yes they do. It’s because of their shape. Like greased watermelons.”

“Dude,” Girl squirmed, “that’s so making me gag.”

“It’s just geometry. Convex angles keep clothes on. Concave, clothes off. The opposite of how it works in my car.”

“Your dad’s car,” Girl snorted, “and that is so mean.”

“He was a cop though. That’s weird.”

Girl looked seriously again. It was exciting to be worried. “Right?”

“Ex-cop, I guess. Whatever. But who knows if anything Jack tells us is true.”

“No. It is. Jules texted me earlier. She and the guys are the ones who found it. She said it was so gross. Cope pulled it out of the water. Can you imagine grabbing an old dead naked guy?”

Canner’s heart sank into his feet. He could feel it flubbing in his flip-flops.

He didn’t know what to do. There was no way this was real.

Chloe set her fork down and took a drink of water. She wiped her mouth with the black cloth napkin that had been in her lap and set it on her plate. “I’m done. Let’s go. Birch is obviously not coming.”

Canner leaned to the side and reached for his wallet. He took out some money and fumbled around with it, trying to make sense of the numbers on the bills. Adding them together was impossible. How much did food cost? Should he leave a tip? His hand stung still. How much was the tip supposed to be?

He threw a twenty on the table and took a deep breath before standing up.

“That was gracious of you,” Chloe said, nodding. She stood up and zipped her sweatshirt to her chin. She walked away slowly, waiting for him to follow her, but stopped short of the door to the parking lot.

“Concave,” she said to Haircut, holding up her hand in the shape of a C, “is the inside of the angle. See? It makes a cave. Concave.”

Haircut and Girl stared at her confused.

“You got them backwards. You would describe a fat person as convex.”  

Chapter Nine

Catwalk clarity

 

 

Part of the wisdom that comes with getting older is recognizing the patterns in the day to day, and then smartly anticipating them as they invariably, unavoidably, come and go. Like the tide. Or your teeth. And then, if you live long enough, long enough to become truly clever, you might also begin to appreciate the things in this world that some, even most, might take for granted. Like the tranquility of gardening. Or how much nicer baby wipes are than toilet paper. And then, if you live even longer than that, long enough to become honestly enlightened, long enough to accept the truth in all things, it might become painfully clear just how easy it all could have been. Like the small amount of grace required to relent the proving of your point. Or to please your mother.  

          It’s a state of mind that we are all moving toward, and hopefully grow into before our ends. That, along with every good life, there will come a few bad days. They’ll be here soon. Concede them. That the most enjoyable actions and activities are usually the simplest. You’ve already done most of them. Remember to do them again. And that there aren’t actually very many reasons in this universe worth getting your whiskers in a twist. Arguing with loved ones will only make it worse. Arguing with strangers will even more. So, as often as you can, accept them.

Or call the police.

Or move.

          Coincidentally, in that space of being where we all aspire to someday peacefully end, is nearly the identical state into which a cat begins. But, unfortunately, if you start out as more or less perfection, there really is only one direction to go. And the slow stubborn progression away from calm, balance, and dignity is the curse of all sons and daughters of Bastet.

Charlie had been noticing with more and more frequency that he was spending his emotional budget in far less efficient ways. On matters like breakfast. This morning, it tasted undeniably like someone had spilled the whole thing on the floor, and then, thoughtlessly, brushed it back into his bowl without removing the collected hair and lint. In previous years, a little less sleep or his coat failing to lay flat, regardless the number of compensatory naps attempted or how relentlessly he’d licked himself, would not have resulted in his present funk.

But today he was practically feral.

It was as though every year it took a little more effort to be happy.

And it became a little less possible to keep his joie de vivre.

Just last week, back home, he’d gotten into an incredibly petty argument with a raccoon. One he’d lived peaceably amongst for years. Over a roast beef sandwich he himself had no intention of eating. But, it seemed, in that moment, he couldn’t help but quarrel. Lines were then drawn, voices became taut, and it had nearly come to blows. Over nothing. And now, and probably for the rest of their lives, there would be awkward glances over their respective shoulders.

Though, presently, his mood wasn’t all the fault of his betraying age.

If he’d had his senses about him, and had been capable of searching out the reason for his heightened anxiety, he surely would have found it in the smell.

Life with his family, with Canner and Chloe, had begun at the beach. But after living a mountain range away for years, and now having been taken back to it, back to the place where everything smelled like cold salty wet and warm death, he had obviously lost all acclimation to its influence. It was familiar enough, having grown up with it, that its significance was easily dismissed. But when nothing had its own scent, and everything swirled in together, overly strong, overly sweet, it was easy to lose your wits.

          Though, even so, he still knew a few things.

Nothing could last forever.

          This moment would pass.

There was hope.

And a nice walk could cure plenty.

He hadn’t gotten too old or too irritable to recall that much.

Nor had it passed his attention that his family was undeserving of all the hissing and yowling threatening in his throat.

The love he had for them had built up a barrier that would always stand between. A sort of compassionate failsafe. And, to the end, that would be more than adequate to cover his developing inequities. So much so that his family might never notice that he had any at all. 

          Which is the thought he had settled on while perched, patiently waiting on the kitchen table, when Chloe opened the front door.

He affectionately brushed against her leg as he ran past her.

She shrieked at him to come back, but he bolted away and slinked down the stairs to the parking lot. He couldn’t oblige her just now. There were things that needed doing, while here, if he was going to find his balance again.

          Though the beach was infested with seagulls and crows, it was also plentiful with pigeons. Seagulls were much too large to hunt. Crows were much too smart. And the wonderful thing about pigeons was that you didn’t need to smell them to find them. Their clapping wings and the enormous piles they left beneath their nests were signs too obvious to miss. Which begged the question, how had the hopeless grey things ever survived more than a century of natural selection?

But, honestly, how had anyone?

It was the pigeons that tempted him downstairs. He’d thought maybe he would sneak up on one. Or maybe he’d just enjoy watching them. But the sound of the ocean soon attracted him to the cliff. And then he found a large weed growing out from the wall at the edge that needed investigation. And by the time he was wondering how the thing had become so wholly alive with caterpillars, he had found his focus.

He felt like himself again. A calmer, wiser being that was not unnecessarily aggravated by anything. And it was in that relaxed moment, when his whimsy and curiosity had returned, that his mind was clear enough to notice something out of place.

Something in the salty sweet air had changed.

Charlie tiptoed into a patch of ice plant, down onto the cliff edge itself, a space no human would have been able to follow, and skirted the wall that separated the Channel Inn from the rest of the sprawling bluffs. He traveled quickly north, staying away from the loose sand that crisscrossed in paths and pooled in open spaces, and glided easily between and beneath the grasses and brush where the plants’ roots offered him solid ground to pad.

He kept his nose in the air when he could; all the while doing his best to separate the wickedness from the wind.

When he arrived at his destination, a clearing close to the abrupt edge of the bluff, he lay quietly at its border, in the cool sand under a knot of lavender, and watched.

There was a man on the ground being zippered into a huge black sack by strange people, and long black ropes trailing off the edge where more of them were climbing up. They appeared to be toting clear plastic bags up from the beach; one containing a shoe, another with a tattered Hawaiian shirt, and another just a wallet.

Charlie remembered the man in the sack fondly. Even though Birch’s scent was broken and lifeless, a good cat never forgets a hand that has touched him behind the ears. He stayed, watching beneath the lavender long enough to wish there had been someone there who might have cried for him. Then he slipped around the clearing without being noticed and continued up the bluff to see what else might be found today.

Chapter Eight

Dusty

 

 

          The trouble with best friendship is that, at the beginning, you don’t absolutely have to agree on the conditions of the contract.

There are no terms.

There is no lease.

With a boyfriend or girlfriend you ask, “Do you want to?” and they either say, “Yes,” or, “No.” And then, with that acceptance, comes an accord. An alliance. An anniversary. Or, with that denial, a good mopy walk. But, unlike the defining moment of a proposed romance, with friendship you don’t usually ask for it.

You announce it.

“You’re my best friend.”

That declaration, though, doesn’t always invite a conversation about your feelings; how you came to that conclusion. Because the person you say it to doesn’t necessarily have to feel the exact same way for it to continue on being true for you. Which can be confusing. But the worst part, far and away, is that it doesn’t entitle you to a good breakup when it’s truly over.

And knowing when something is over is nice.

Because knowing anything is nice.

And not knowing blows whale dick.

To most people, it may have been shockingly obvious why things had started to feel differently between them. Why Copeland had been so distant.

School was over.

There was a girl.

But Dusty didn’t see those things. Partly because he was a few credits short and hadn’t actually graduated with them. And all of his most meaningful relationships with the opposite sex had been nonconventional; or just plain strange. And a lack of shared experiences divides people like a fart in an elevator. But mostly Dusty was just refusing to see it. Refusing to acknowledge the truth.

Copeland’s life was changing.

And their friendship was changing with it.

So Dusty’s life was changing, too.

For him, things had been happy for a while now, where they had been plainly miserable for the long while before, and he would have fought to the death to protect that.

But there was no fight here.

And certainly no fight he could win.

So he followed Copeland back up the cliff, back up the rope, and did his absolute best to ignore just how scared he was that it all might be over.

Chapter Seven

The commuting heart

 

 

          Hildy Wilder was the most powerful law enforcement officer in the world. Not the real world, mind you. Just Oregon. And only on the coast. But for as much as it concerned anything or anyone in her immediate universe she was the all-encompassing embodiment of justice and authority.

          Which meant she was alone.

          All the time.

          It would be that way always.

And no one would ever touch her again.

She craned her hand around the swiveling laptop mounted to the center console of her Ford Fusion Hybrid and turned the volume up on the stereo. It was the third time today that To Love You More had played, and she knew she might soon regret thumbs upping the track. But, Celine Dion help her, twice had never been enough. “Take me back into the arms I love…”

Of course those melancholy thoughts weren’t entirely true. She was one of seven special agents in the Oregon State Attorney General’s Department of Criminal Investigations. So she had six peers. But each of them was assigned to a remote region and they partnered with those regions singularly.

“Need me like you did before…”

They were interagency detectives that worked alongside local, county, and state offices in areas where populations and crime rates were so low that those agencies were often unprepared to handle major crimes; however rarely they occurred.

“Touch me once again…”

So her job was important.

“And remember when…”

She was privileged, honored, and enviable.

But now, and a little more each month, she felt how alone that made her.

“There was no one that you wanted more…”

Hildy’s region was the entirety of the Oregon Coast; a stretch of seven counties that spanned the borders of Washington and California, from the mouth of the Columbia River to Pelican Bay. Every inch of it was beautiful. Incredible. Truly Heaven on Earth. And she thought about it like this:

The combined population of everyone living on the Oregon Coast was a little less than 250 thousand people. Or roughly the same number of people that lived in the city of Irvine, California. But, unlike Irvine, the Oregon Coast wasn’t a practical suburb of Los Angeles, wasn’t a happy 70 degrees year round, and didn’t occupy a mere 66 square miles of real estate. On the other hand, the FBI considered Irvine to be the safest city in America, and had for like ten years in a row, and the Oregon Coast’s rape and murder rates were just about the same. So they were similar; if only Irvine had been located at the practical edge of nowhere, was covered in fog most of the year, and stretched over 5000 square miles.

“I’ll be waiting for you…”

She didn’t mean to relate everything back to California, but she was from there, from Orange County, and when she quantified things, especially things to do with size and distance, she related them back to the place she’d grown up. It made everything feel real and seem easy to understand.

“Here inside my heart…”

And here on the coast she almost had to.

Because this life was so different.

“I’m the one that wants to love you more…”

If you took the population of Los Angeles, just Los Angeles proper, and had every one of those people hold hands, you could stretch that paper doll chain of human beings from the shores of the Pacific Ocean, through America at its widest point, all the way to the Atlantic. They wouldn’t even have to stretch that hard.

“You will see that I can give you…”

But if you took the people that lived on the Oregon Coast, and stretched them out, they wouldn’t even make it halfway down their own coastline. The beach would just be empty from Waldport to Brookings.

“Everything you need…”

Not that she thought any of that was a bad thing. You gained a little serenity and solitude by trading in some of your convenience and efficiency. It was just very different.

 “Let me be the one to love you more…”

In the end, the hard part for her just boiled down to a matter of distance between objects, and how that affected time and opportunity.

When she was in high school, when she opened her locker, she could, and did, rely on just how many boys were behind her, staring at her ass. If there were 200 people in the hallway, 40 of them would be close enough to see her unobstructed. The ratio at her school favored the male gender slightly, so a little more than half of those would be boys. 21. She usually wore tight fitting jeans, and the curve of her backside was easily in the top eightieth percentile. So if there were 10 other girls near her, digging through their lockers, she would only likely be in competition with 2 of them. 7. Accounting for the possibility of girlfriends in the area policing wandering eyes, and countering with the average high school boy’s generally low level of self-control, an honest assessment was 4. So, then, whenever she’d bent down to pick up a text book, 4 sets of eyes were looking at her. Were being attracted to her. Genuinely pondered her body. Wondering. Imagining. Wanting.

That kind of information was difficult to ignore.

And just as hard to forget.

She slowed and parked her car on the side of the road, at the back of a long line of fire trucks, ambulances, and police vehicles, beside an impressively tall tussock of pampas grass, and waited for the song to end. The music was moving through her so powerfully now, like only Celine ever could, and she was actively brushing the goosebumps down on her arms.

She remembered those moments in high school as the last time she knew any boy had been looking at her.

“Believe me… I will make you see… All the things that your heart needs to know…”

She took a deep breath and blinked hard. She was definitely going to finish the song, because she had to, but she began training her mind on work so that she would be focused when she began talking to subordinates in a few minutes.

Driving straight through from Astoria, the northern tip of her territory, to Brookings, the southern, took just over 7 hours on Highway 101. Hildy usually turned that into a 12 hour day, stopping at every tragedy along the way, and that was her life. She kept an apartment at both ends, driving up one day, spending the night, and then back down to the other apartment the next; visiting the calls nearest to her, that filtered through from the three Oregon dispatch stations to the screen beside her, as she went. “To love you more…” She made appearances wherever she could and stopped at varying calls, ranging from domestic violence to downed aircraft, helping out in whatever way seemed appropriate at the time. “Oh uh eh-oh oh oh oh uh eh-oh…” All in an effort to become familiar. That way, when the inevitable day came where she needed to take control of a scene, hopefully, she would already be able to depend on the people around her, and everyone would already know she was the boss.

And a naked man’s body washing ashore certainly warranted a visit.

The song ended with thumping timpani and she sighed deeply.

She reached up to turn off her car, pausing briefly with her hand on the keys, just to hear which song might play next. “The whispers in the morning…”

She laughed and ripped them out of the ignition.

How Pandora could possibly play two Celine Dion songs, of that magnitude, back to back, was beyond her. She didn’t imagine she’d have to argue with anyone very hard to convince them it was in the interest of public safety to ban such a thing. Although, she thought, it might be just as easy to argue it was her own fault for starting a Celine station in the first place, and thumbs downing every track that wasn’t Celine, Mariah, or Whitney.

She stepped out into the cool beach air.

As she closed her door and opened the door to the backseat, leaning in, bending over to pick up her green canvas jacket and brown leather journal, she quickly counted how many firemen, paramedics, and patrolmen were staring at her ass instead of the unusually large and gleaming “Attorney General” badge on her belt, or the petite Glock 26 sheathed to the small of her back.

0.    

Chapter Six

Revelations between

 

 

          In her opinion, of the many things that seemed to make her father miserable, his inability to enjoy the moments that would bring balance to his life was the saddest.

          At some point last summer, a point Chloe thought had very likely happened in the grocery store parking lot, she’d begun moving from the very comfortable position in which she’d believed everything her father did was acceptably eccentric to the much more confusing place in which she didn’t. And, standing over him now, considering him as a genuine human being, attempting to understand his methods and how the man could possibly still be sleeping with the Inn’s bedside alarm clock squawking beneath him, muted under his pillow or not, very little sleep or not, Chloe began reflecting on the year that had passed, and how appreciative she was for it.

            It had all started when Dick’s Family Market, the only grocery store in Buena Vista, hired a new cashier. No one really talked about it openly, but no one argued the fact either; the new girl was cute.

          Not more than cute. Not scandalously desirable. She didn’t inspire every old man in town to make needless small talk with her, to ask her where she came from, or to inappropriately comment on her creamy skin and silky brown hair. Nor did the boys shamelessly allow themselves to be caught staring at her chest while presenting her their pocket change, no matter how impressively her 22 year-old composition occupied her uniform.

She was, after all, only cute.

But it was also the kind of cute that, in the estimation of some people, could possibly be measured as perfect.

Chloe had carried their shopping bags all the way to the truck that evening before noticing her father hadn’t followed. They’d taken to small nightly shopping trips, as opposed to a weekly gathering of supplies, partly as an excuse to drive their new truck around town, but mostly just to give them something to do outside of the house. Her father had, through the more frustrating stages of his building project, viewed their home as a jobsite and a place to be escaped from.

A quick scan of the grocery store’s small parking lot found him standing in front of the new cashier, outside on her break, and revealed them just in time for Chloe to witness one of the more extraordinary of all those potentially life-harmonizing events.

The sun had just gone down.

Her father had been standing five feet in front of the girl, his back to Chloe, hands in his pockets.

Chloe couldn’t hear what was being said, but the girl was raptly listening. So much so that she hadn’t even bothered to continue smoking the cigarette that was hanging from her hand.

The girl began to smile, and then appeared to wipe a few happy tears from her face. She nodded to Chloe’s father, and the cigarette dropped to the ground.

They both looked at it meaningfully before she stepped on it.

Then, before anyone knew what was happening, including Chloe, including her father, maybe even including the new cashier, the girl walked the five feet that had separated them, stood on her tiptoes, closed her eyes, and kissed Chloe’s father so delicately and with so much purpose that the Earth itself stopped turning for an entire moment just to give everyone enough time to take a good deep breath and notice how lovely everything had suddenly become.

          By the time things began moving again, Chloe’s father had already climbed into the truck behind her and was putting on his seatbelt.

          The passenger side window rolled down.

          “Chloe, are you coming?”

          “What just happened?”

          “You walked to the truck and forgot to get in.”

          “I didn’t. I mean. You were talking to the girl. And then. What did you say to her?”

          “I convinced her to quit smoking.”

          “What?”

          “Chloe, could you please get in so we can go home?”

          And that had been it. For the ride home, and forever after, he claimed that all he’d actually said to the girl was that cigarettes would give her wrinkles. And then he just denied everything else. He successfully turned the whole story into an unremarkable event, and refused to talk about it ever again.

          In all honesty, it felt to Chloe like, despite the closure her father had expressed recently finding, regarding her mother, that he was still having trouble relaxing. That his guard was still up. That maybe, after all this time, he simply didn’t know how to let it down.

Because any other human being would have gotten into the truck and talked about nothing else. Possibly for days. Possibly about nothing else ever again. Even if she was his daughter, and talking about stuff like that was always going to be a little weird, because whatever happened that night with the new cashier had been spontaneous, and exciting, and totally unbelievable. And that’s the kind of fun and crazy stuff in life that you talk about. Because it doesn’t happen that often. And those are the rare moments that make us who we are. And sharing them with each other is the best part.

          And the worst part, other than Chloe never finding out what magical combination of words and dulcet tones could possibly motivate a young woman to consecutively quit smoking and sensuously squish faces with an absolute stranger, was that she could tell it really had meant something to him.

They mysteriously went back to once a week shopping trips. Saturday mornings. When he was sure she wouldn’t be there. And, like so many other things, that was that.

Chloe grabbed a fistful of sheets and blankets and yanked them off her father, and dropped them on the floor.

“Chloe!”

She went to the window, pulled the blinds, and slid it all the way open. A rush of cold beach air filled the room, along with the sounds of the waves and the gulls.

Her father growled and hugged his squawking pillow tighter.

“We’re already late for breakfast,” she informed him.

He growled more.

“I texted Birch. Just get up and get in the shower. I’ll make coffee.” The upside of it, and the thing she was genuinely appreciative for, was that now she found it easy to recognize and seek out those happy little moments. “You like showers. You like coffee. You can no longer sleep. Get up. Get up. Get up.” Because, whether he acknowledged them or not when she pointed them out, everything, from coffee to love, was important.

Chapter Five

Expectations and disappointment

 

 

Jules believed with all her heart, particularly now, that the human brain’s tendency to shut off under stress was the absolute dumbest evolutionary progression of all time. That Shock, as we now experienced it, was even less useful than tonsils or armpit hair; so obnoxiously cumbersome that its original purpose could hardly be imagined.

For her, the sensation was wearing off, the world was just slowing down to a tempo she could keep up with, and she wondered if that didn’t explain a thing or two.

She’d spent so many nights, sitting with her sisters in pajamas, making fun of pageant contestants. Those girls, live on television, were continually being asked questions like, “Please divulge your thoughts on climate change,” and it felt like without exception they would answer, “I believe that dribble drobble flobble pop,” or some such nonsense. The ordeal was so embarrassing that it was mesmerizing to watch. What ridiculous thing were they going to say next? Watching those stunningly statuesque women, enviable goddesses in almost every way, break down on camera under the slightest pressure… They tuned in specifically for it. And tuned right out again when the contestants began walking around in their underwear. No one should be that comfortable with their half-naked body.

But what if it was all connected?

Those women couldn’t possibly all be actual idiots.

Julianna usually kept her “silly mouth” shut around her siblings. As the youngest, with four older sisters, her opinions were much safer that way. But that didn’t keep her from having them. And, in real life, those pageant girls had to be regular people. The law of averages said so. If you found yourself having a conversation with one of them in someone’s living room, they would, of course, know where the Middle East was. They would never ask you to repeat simple questions. And would almost certainly never speak to you in indecipherable gibberish.

The root of the problem had to be that, sexually speaking, they were too highly evolved. Being a nine or a ten served them well on the catwalk, but worked seriously against them when it came to mental reflex. Because their poor reactionary abilities, like deer in the headlights, were inherited traits. Jules had read somewhere that animals that didn’t move when frightened were way easier to get pregnant, and, so, were the ones that had the most babies. They were also the ones that were most likely to be hit by a bus. But motorized vehicles were a relatively recent environmental variable, and would take a thousand years to level out the gene pool.

Jules knew that the logic only made sense if, at some distant point in human history, men actually hunted their mates. When she imagined Copeland grunting like a caveman, walking toward her with a club in his hand, she snorted. He’d once spent six months trying to catch a rat in the Inn’s basement, only to give up when he found babies in its nest. She didn’t think Copeland was a wuss or anything, but he was by no means a Neanderthal.

The only problem she really had with the theory was that, if she had come from a long line of women being hunted like foxes, shouldn’t shock, then, be a singularly female trait? Unless, she supposed, it was some sort of genetically shared carryover.

Like nipples.

Because Dusty, Cope’s best friend, was as characteristically male as it got, and had stood just as motionless and disbelieving as she had. At the top of the cliff, next to her, his trance may have worn off quicker, but for the longest time they’d both just watched as Copeland writhed in agony below.

Now, however, Dusty was moving so fast that she could barely watch.  

The thick mooring line she’d made the boys tie around the trunk of an overgrown Cyprus on the bluff had been the defining prerequisite for her ever going down with them. But even they had taken to using the rope lately, citing their backpacks, “Full of your crap,” as, “Not too heavy,” just, “Awkward.”

She just liked it when everyone was safe.

But, watching Dusty move, Jules knew there was no way he was holding on to it. And she couldn’t help but be in awe. He wasn’t carefully climbing down there to spend the night drinking beer on the beach, like so many times before. Copeland was at the bottom, hurt, and Dusty was practically falling off the cliff to get to him. Franticly. On the verge of losing control. Like a cat coming out of a tree.

She’d never seen anyone move like that.

She’d also never heard anyone scream like he had.

The whole thing still felt a little unreal.

          The trail that led from the road, meandering through the trees and sand dunes to the cliff edge and rope, was sentineled by two tussocks of pampas grass. The entire north end of the lane was bordered by them, from the Channel Inn for half a mile to The Underhill Chapel on the point; vestiges of an earlier age, the people responsible for planting them long dead. But two, for no perceivable reason, and only if you knew to look for them, were slightly larger than the rest. Between them, if you pushed through with your hands, covering your eyes for protection from the giant cutting blades, hid the trail mouth.

Dusty had pulled up in his truck, apparently unable to find Cope either, just as Jules had been about to walk in. He’d then driven past her a couple hundred yards and parked on the gravel shoulder. The boys both believed their most holy of holies was only truly safe from outsiders if they refrained from entering while anyone was watching, and never left giveaway clues like parked cars.

Vida Seca Lane was only sparsely inhabited, just a few hotels and summer cottages, but was also the only concrete road on the northern peninsula. It began at the edge of Bayocean’s historic old town and traveled up the coast for miles, rounding the point, passing under the Cape Meares Bridge, and ending on the bayside in the parking lot of Tillamook State Park. The highway had been built parallel to it, but was inaccessible until you reached town, running along the peninsula’s hilly spine. But there were at least a hundred trails and service roads crisscrossing the hill, through walking-tunnels beneath the highway, bringing park-goers and instagramers to viewpoints and wildlife sanctuaries from miles around. And they all drove in, whether visiting the inn, the chapel, or the park, on the lane.

          It had only taken a minute to walk in together from the road, and to find Copeland at the bottom, pissing on a bush. And Dusty had immediately knelt to pick something up.

          “No, Dusty,” Jules had said sternly.

          But Dusty just smirked, looked over the edge, and said, “Fuck it.”

          Copeland and Dusty were as close as two boys could get. And Jules tried to respect that. When they were talking to each other, she knew to stay out of the way. Interrupting meant you got the silent treatment, from both of them, for the rest of the day. And that went double for ruining pranks or jokes. So, when Jules had been tempted to yell down a warning to her boyfriend, she’d stayed quiet.

Annoyed. Anxious. And quiet.

          Dusty had been practically drooling, looking over the edge, waiting for the splash in the sand that would scare the absolute shit out of his friend, and Jules had been watching, waiting to ignore the inevitably obnoxious victory howl, when Dusty’s miscalculated toss landed the fist-sized dirt clod directly on Copeland’s head.

Dusty saw what he’d done, gasped, and then screamed like a wounded animal.

And then the shock.

Dusty was still ten feet from the bottom when he jumped. Impatient as he had been, he didn’t get far enough away from the wall, and landed in the sandstone crumbles at the bottom. But the sand beneath it was soft, and he rolled to the ground, unhurt. He got up to run, stumbled, fell back down, got up again, and ran as fast as the beach would allow him to his friend.

Copeland had just gotten to his feet when Dusty came up behind him. But he didn’t turn around to acknowledge him. Instead, Cope just kept both hands on his head and looked down at the water. Dusty pulled at them, trying to inspect the damage, but Cope held them tight and ignored him.

Dusty was two or three inches taller than Copeland, and was on his tip toes in the sand, looking through Copeland’s hair and fingers for blood.

Copeland still just looked away.

And then they both just stood there, looking into the water.

Completely still.

Copeland shook his head, but Jules had no idea what the question had been.

Then the boys stepped closer, together, toward the waves.

Dusty suddenly began pulling Copeland back, though only halfheartedly. And, when Cope bent over and began pulling something out of the surf, Dusty moved in to help him.

Then Jules saw what they had.

Before her eyes, a snow white man was being dragged out of the water by his arms. Jules gagged. She wished the two of them had been decent enough to drag him face down so she wouldn’t be so certain it was a man, but why were they touching him at all?

The answer, she imagined, to Copeland’s way of thinking, was that by the time help arrived the tide might have shifted and he could be lost forever.

Jules took a deep breath and screamed, “Throw it back!” But no one heard her, and she sighed. They wouldn’t have listened even if she’d been standing right next to them.

Dusty might not have been at the top of any girl’s list of preferred best friends for their boyfriend, but if ever there was a bonded pair, it was those two. And, sometimes, it was nice to see that kind of loyalty in action. If one of them decided to do something, whether it was a good idea or the worst ever, whether it was what to do on Friday night or to pull a drowned naked man out of the water, their commitment knew no boundaries. And, if she had to be perfectly honest, she was extremely envious. She’d never had anyone like that. And now she worried she never would. That she was too old. She worried that allegiance like that could only be formed early on, with someone who shared your childhood history.

You can’t just make that stuff up or find it with someone you just met.

Cope was the only person she’d had anything close to that with, but he already had a best friend. He’d never spend that kind of energy with her. But, watching them drag in some dead guy together, she was still jealous.

Why couldn’t Copeland have just been asleep in his bed this morning?

Now they were going to talk about this all day.

She reached into the back pocket of her shorts and pulled out her phone to call 911.

She sighed.

One more day.

Chapter Four

Perilous preoccupation

 

 

          Copeland had spent the last hour curling deeper into his sleeping bag. The embers of his fire were all finally dead, and he knew he was never going to be as warm as he’d once been, no matter how he crossed his legs or tucked his knees into his chest. He’d denied the inevitable for as long as possible, and it was finally time to get up.

Lying on the cold sand, he wished he hadn’t been so lazy an hour ago. If he’d gotten up and grabbed any one of the fifty logs scattered around him, he’d probably still be sleeping. Every piece of his once monstrous blaze had fallen in on itself and had smoldered into practical nothingness. Now it was just a large greyish circle, filled with crunchy black things that used to be driftwood. With a core that hot, there would have been no further effort required of him; he could have just dumped the wood on and crawled back to his pillow.

Regrettably, that was no longer the case.

And yet, there was nothing quite like being woken by the cold. He felt calm, unfettered, and alert. He was very clearly shivering. But invigorated by it. The world around him was alive and interesting. An improvement to be sure over his natural waking state.

Sitting up, he could see that the cold shadow, the darkness below the cliff, stretched only to the water. The ocean itself, and whatever was in it, glistened in the full light of the morning sun.

He held his hand above his eyes and squinted.

It really was ideal, this morning. Bright blue sky. A few fluffy white clouds. And the sea. It was like waking up inside one of those shitty paintings they sold in town. Every shop seemed to have at least a few of them, hanging on a wall by the window. Local artists, attempting to sell ten dollars’ worth of paint, crudely manipulated on a five dollar canvas, all seemed to have the same notion of what the perfect ocean-scape looked like. And that each one of their efforts was worth a hundred and fifty dollars.

Copeland believed, if you lined all those paintings up, side-by-side, you might find the entire Oregon coast captured on the most unbelievably flawless, and mind-numbingly monotonous, day of all time. A day that, in the history of everything, never actually existed. But, he also knew, stormy and provocative realism wasn’t usually worth a one-thousand percent markup. Not in a tourist town hell bent on relaxation.

There was something unusual out there, though. He saw it only for a second, being completely thrashed by the break.

The head high surf that rolled into the steepest sand, built-up by the highest tides, regularly brought the sea’s flotsam ashore. But, whatever was coming in now, he’d never seen anything like. An enormous ball of sun-bleached kelp? Cope couldn’t say for sure. He’d only caught a glimpse of it before it went under, and his eyes hadn’t completely adjusted to the brightness of day yet.

He’d, of course, never heard of such a thing. Kelp pretty reliably came in only a standard set of colors; varying shades of shit green. But that’s all his eyes knew to see. So that’s what they saw.

Honestly, oddities were continually being tossed ashore. The likes of which were commonplace on any beach, in the early morning; shells and sea glass, trinkets and lost things, all washed onto land from the depths. Further south, in town, if you got out early enough on the larger public beaches, you could even find the rare fruit bowl or picture frame; artifacts just now surfacing from the homes that fell in decades ago.

Copeland’s beach was guarded on every side by fifty foot cliffs, and there was absolutely no need to rush out and gather anything like that. His tiny refuge, a crescent of sand that was maybe two hundred yards long, was the only beach in Bayocean that no tourist could get to. Only the ocean that deposited its treasures there in the first place dared to take them back.   

Even so, Copeland refrained from partaking in the pastime. He viewed beach combing as a sport reserved for vacationers, fishermen, and the elderly. People with a predisposed fondness for souvenirs and bric-a-brac. It was just so pointless. If they found that exact same crap in a store, there’s no way they’d pick it up and take it home. It was useless junk. Pure sentimentality, romanticized by how and where they’d found it, and where they’d found it was Copeland’s backyard.

On the other hand, women sometimes made it more interesting.

On a motivational level.

He’d overheard enough to know that, apparently, if a wife was clever, and woke before her family, and got far enough away from her hotel room before victoriously calling her own mother to brag, she could be searching for sand dollars, coffee in hand, when the routine requests for breakfast, cartoons, and clean diapers began. Those ladies, even if they were sacrificing their bewildered and unprepared husbands to do so, Copeland respected. Seizing their freedom like that. Shenanigans or not. Those bitches deserved it.  

The ocean splashed and curled white in front of him, thick and heavy waves, rolling over and over, crashing and rushing up the sand, pushing foam and rocks further along as it went, sucking back out only to rush in again. It was music. As pure as it ever was. Always playing. Every day. His entire life.

He’d been born not far from here; just above and about five hundred yards to the south, in the apartment he still lived in. As a young child, Copeland had lived there with his mother, the Inn’s property manager, and picked up garbage for Gabby in the parking lot whenever she asked him to. Now he was in charge of all maintenance at the Channel Inn.

He was only eighteen, but was as sharp as anyone when it came to comprehending the physical plane. It felt like mere common sense to him. He just liked to fix things and know how they worked. Not just that they did work. If he’d been as brilliant in every area, he may very well have grown up to rule the world. But, as it was, or so he believed, with his superior spatial reasoning being much more of a blue collar sort of genius, the apartment and his meager paycheck were all he ever hoped for.

Copeland’s mother, Kathy, had lived with him, in his tiny apartment, only until he hit puberty. After that, Gabby quickly decided, having heard one too many stories about how much time Copeland had begun spending in the bathroom, that everyone could probably use a few more walls between them. She gave Kathy the slightly larger, and nicer, apartment next door, and they lived like that for years.

Forever, as far as Cope was concerned. But he’d never gotten tired of that sound. Of the waves crashing into the sand.

Not for one second.

And he swore he never would.

Although, just right now, the perfection of it all was a bit less enjoyable than it might have been otherwise. He wasn’t even 24 hours into what he’d recently decided was the most traumatic period of his life, smelled so badly of smoke that breathing had gotten annoying, and had just rubbed sand into his left eye.

And the kelp was really beginning to bother him.

He’d caught sight of it again, just for a moment before accidentally pressing the sharp grain deeper into his cornea. It was just that he’d never seen white kelp before, or anything that resembled it. And, even though it was kind of cool, sparkling in the sun, unusual and interesting, it wasn’t normal. And he wondered where it came from.

          It was the wondering that did him in.

Wondering was just one step shy of worrying, and he didn’t need one more thing to worry about. Before he knew what was happening, or had time to stop it, his eyes were flooding with tears and a knot began forming in his throat. The fact that the tears were washing the sand away was inconsequential under the weight of the world crumbling down on top of him. His legs began to shake and his knees knocked in his sleeping bag. He wrapped his arms around them, but he couldn’t hold them still. Pressure began packing so tightly behind the knot that he thought he might explode.

Then Copeland suddenly wanted to run.

To run away forever. Escape from trouble forever.

No one would catch him.

No one would ever find him.

Or maybe he could just hide somewhere.

A deep hole sounded nice.

If he’d had a shovel, he would have started digging. He would have dug down with his bare hands, but he’d resigned such unnecessarily intimate contact with the beach. “Having your own apartment,” his mother had told him, “means doing your own laundry.”

Sand, rocks, and the odd sea creature had a funny way of coming home with him in his sleeves. Subsequently, those things made their way into his washing machine, and, after finding a half cup of wet sand and one highly polished hermit crab rattling around in the bottom of his inaugural load, spun and rinsed, he announced that he’d built his last sandcastle. Cleaning was an unpleasant enough chore without the guilt of inadvertent vagabond crustacean death.

Copeland sniffed and closed his eyes, then wished desperately for his future self to send their time machine back to this exact moment on the beach. When he opened his eyes again, to check for sudden appearances, or miracles of any kind, the only thing that had changed was the ball of white kelp. It had been rolled up and out of the surf and was lying in a much less impressive pile on the wet sand.

All Copeland wanted to do was grab himself by the shoulders, that guy he’d been a few weeks ago, and shake vigorously. Self-loathing like that is impossible to ignore, despite the impracticality of time travel having been so clearly laid out for him in the Back to the Future movies. Mostly because, if that dummy would listen to him, and see how scared he was right now, and what misery looked like, on his own face, none of this would be happening right now.

He sniffed and absentmindedly rubbed sand into his nose. It stuck there, and onto his snot covered upper lip. He just wanted to undo everything. Then Jules would still like him. He’d never actually been mad at her. He was just terrified she was going to leave him. About all of this, he realized, that was what he feared the most. When she’d just ridden away from him last night, without a word, what else could she have been thinking? That’s what she was going to do. He knew it.

He also knew he was going to piss himself if he didn’t go soon.

Standing up, Cope pushed his sleeping bag to the ground, and stepped out onto the beach with his bare feet. The small sticks and bits of debris in the sand poked through his toes as he walked. When he reached the looming wall of sandstone, he pushed the waistband of his sweats down, and pulled himself out over a dying Salal bush. He spread his feet as wide as they would go, so as to stand outside of any run off, and whizzed with tears still falling off his cheeks.

He shook, and was very nearly about to put himself away, when he was struck so squarely on the top of his head that he nearly blacked out.

The blow sent him reeling backward, falling away, holding his skull with both hands.

Without thinking, or even really knowing what had happened, he doubled over and spun around, running away through the center of the fire pit, racing toward the sound of the ocean.

The sensation was so overwhelming that it could barely be categorized as pain. Not yet. Just a fire that encased his head and throbbed with a heaviness that crushed him to the ground.

He was on his knees, crawling, when the pain finally came. Trying to get someplace safe. Somewhere to recover. Or maybe just to curl up and die. It was hard to be bothered with endgame planning just right then. It was sudden and very recognizable, roaring from above, knocking him flat on his stomach.

Then there was freezing water rushing all around him. He rolled to his side, and into a ball, trying to get out of the water, but he was so disoriented and it was everywhere.

Wet sand covered him, packed into his ears and hair, caked his clothes, and salty ice water splashed into his eyes and mouth. He blinked and coughed, trying to, at the very least, keep from drowning.

He saw the bunched mass of white kelp, also caught in the sudden tidal surge, being lifted and moved toward him. His endorphins were kicking in, and the pain was dulling in such a way that he dared not move, lest it come back, but he knew he had to.

As the kelp washed closer to him, he couldn’t help but notice it had fingers.

The largest wave so far rolled ashore and flipped the mass one last time and Copeland sat up. He was soaked, frozen, covered in sand, very likely concussed, and as miserable as he could imagine ever being, but, even so, he stood and wiped his eyes.

And stepped closer.

It didn’t help.

No matter what he did or how he looked at it, the kelp most certainly had a face.

And feet.

And chest hair.

And then it wasn’t kelp at all.

Just a very pale, very naked, very dead man.