Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (13 page)

“
I’d heard that somewhere,
yes,” Jack replied.

“
Hush,” Cassie snapped, “I
gave you coffee, be nice. Also, during the gold rush, that oyster
you were talking about, Ost… Ostra…um…”

“
Ostrea
Lurida
, the Olympic Oyster,” Jack
helped.

“
Thank you,” she continued,
“
Ostrea Lurida
was about the size of your palm. During the gold rush, one
oyster could cost as much as a dollar. That was a day’s wages for
most men back then!”

Jack laughed, taking a last swallow from his
mug, “We'll make an oysterman out of you yet!”

*

They drove almost five hundred miles that
day, heading north on Highway 101. Cassie picked up a disposable
camera when they stopped for gas, and began taking pictures of the
breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean. Jack had been quite
impressed with her cassette recorder, even submitting to her
requests to say his name into the tiny microphone. As they followed
the winding freeway, Cassie told him a little more about growing up
in Bowie, and about her mother. Jack, in turn, told Cassie about
his time in the war, and how he had gone to college afterward with
his G.I. loan.

"Where did you go to college?" Cassie
asked.

"Clear Creek Baptist Bible College,
Pineville Kentucky."

"You went to a
Bible
college?"

"What?" he asked, his voice heavy with
indignation, "Are my horns showing again? Why couldn't I have gone
to a Bible College?"

"I…uh…I don't know…" Cassie stammered, "you
just didn't seem like the type."

"Well then," said Jack, his
self-mocking grin returning, "this should, in the parlance
of
my
generation, really blow your mind. In addition to graduating
from Bible College, I spent a year as a missionary, and then
another year as a pastor, as well."

Okay," she said, "now I'm in shock! Where were you a
missionary?"

"Lagos, Nigeria."

"Yeah, like I know where that is. Where were
you a pastor?"

"
Assistant
Pastor," Jack
corrected, "of Long Beach Community Church, Long Beach Washington.”
Cassie paused a moment, letting that sink in. "Why did you
quit?"

There was a pause.

"Who said I quit?" Jack replied, his voice
growing subdued.

"No one," said Cassie, "I guess I just
thought…" Her voice trailed off into an uncomfortable silence.

"I left for personal reasons," Jack said in
a tight voice, "I didn't feel like I should be in ministry until I
worked out some things in my life. Unfortunately, it's been twenty
years and I'm still working them out."

Cassie sat in silence, wishing that she
hadn't brought the subject up to begin with.

They rode for a long while without speaking.
Jack’s face was a thundercloud, scowling through the windshield at
the road ahead, his lips compressed in a thin, pale line. As the
highway swung north, the temperature, already lower that what she
was used to in Bowie, began to drop, and Cassie found herself
shivering as evening progressed. Jack, finally glancing at her and
seeing her huddled in her seat, reached behind him and pulled a
thick wool blanket from the mattress.

"Here," he said gruffly, "take this. You
should have told me you were getting cold; I would have turned on
the heater an hour ago."

Cassie said nothing, huddling miserably
beneath the blanket.

"Hey," Jack said, his voice softening, "I'm
sorry if I barked at you back there. I'm not going to throw you out
for asking a couple of questions.” Cassie nodded as Jack turned the
heater to high, repositioning the vents and directing them towards
her.

"It's okay," she said.

"No, actually it's not," Jack replied, "I've
made my mistakes, and I live with them, but I don't take them out
on other people. So, like I said, I'm sorry."

Cassie looked up and caught Jack's eye.

“
Okay," she said again, a
bit more firmly.

"Good." Jack smiled humorlessly, "Now see? I
warned you that I was a pain in the rear.” Cassie smiled and they
were fine again.

She didn't get a chance to
try oysters that day, raw or otherwise, as the sun had long since
set when they pulled into Fortuna, California. Jack drove into a
nearby parking lot beneath a huge lit sign that advertised
Fortuna Super Eight, Best Rates in
Town!

Digging into the seemingly bottomless glove
box again, he pulled out a battered coupon book, and licking a
finger, he began to thumb through the dog-eared pages, peering
through his reading glasses in the scant illumination of the dome
light.

"Ah, here we go!" he said finally, tearing a
page from the book and handing it to Cassie. "No sleeping bags and
tents for us tonight, it's time to rejoin civilization. Besides,"
he winked at Cassie, "It's cold up here at night."

The coupon offered a free motel room rental
with the purchase of a rental of equal or greater value.

"'Course," Jack went on, "You can always
sleep out here in the parking lot if you really have your heart set
on it."

Fifteen minutes later Cassie was standing
beneath the steaming flow of the shower in the bathroom of room
four.

She woke with the late morning sun slanting
through the window of her room. Cassie yawned, stretching
luxuriously in the soft twin bed, glancing around the sparsely
decorated room as she rose and began to dress. She briefly
considered turning on the television and seeing if she could find a
news channel, and then decided that she was enjoying the peace and
quiet too much to disturb it with the prattle of world events. Jack
bought a local newspaper each morning, and she had gotten in the
habit of reading it when he was finished, usually on the first leg
of each morning’s drive.

Cassie had rinsed her laundry in the sink
the night before, and now she gathered her clean, if stiff, clothes
from the shower curtain rod, and repacked. Checking the room one
last time to make sure she hadn't missed anything, Cassie
shouldered her duffel and closed the door behind her, walking to
the lobby to meet Jack.

"Good morning!" she said to the motel clerk.

"Good morning yourself," the woman replied,
glancing up from her soap opera digest with a smile, "your dad said
to tell you that he would be across the street at the Pancake
House, if you ever got out of bed."

Cassie blinked at the woman, her shock at
the mention of her father stopping her in her tracks. "Wha…excuse
me?" she spluttered.

"Across the street at the restaurant, hon.
He said he'd meet you there."

"Oh!" Cassie exclaimed, realizing the woman
was talking about Jack, “Okay, thanks!"

"Sure thing, hon."

Cassie shook her head as she crossed the
parking lot towards the restaurant.

"Geez," she muttered,
"
Good morning, Ca
ssie!"

Walking through the front doors of the
Pancake House gave her an eerie sense of deja vu. She could see
Jack seated at a booth towards the back of the room, facing away
from her, his short white hair showing over the top of the booth
behind him. If she could have replaced the aroma of breakfast
sausage with the smell of French fries, it would be the truck stop
in Phoenix. This time, however, she approached him without
apprehension.

"Well," he said, looking up from his paper,
"I'd given up on breakfast, but I was hoping you would make it in
time for lunch!"

"Very funny," she replied, sliding into the
booth and picking up a menu, "how long have you been waiting?"

"Young lady," he growled, "I learned a long
time ago, as a much younger man, there are two questions that a
smart fella never answers."

"And those are?" Cassie asked, rolling her
eyes, knowing he wouldn't go on until she asked.

"
How long have you been waiting
?" Jack answered with a flourish, "and
does this make me look fat
? Try
the omelet; it's the talk of the town."

Cassie threw her napkin at him as she
continued to scan the menu. The omelets did look good. "So," she
asked, "will we make it to Long Beach today?"

Jack took a sip of his coffee, "Possible,"
he replied, "But unlikely. It would be a long drive to push all the
way home. We'll probably hole up somewhere about halfway. I have to
stop in Gold Beach for a book delivery. It's going to save me sixty
bucks in postage, and a whole lot of worry, to pick them up
myself."

"Where's Gold Beach?" Cassie asked absently,
still scanning the menu and sipping from her water glass. Jack set
down his newspaper and looked at her, his face serious but his eyes
twinkling.

"I thought you were doing a book on coastal
towns of the Pacific Northwest?"

Cassie nearly choked on her water, as she
looked up at Jack and then back to her menu, her face a mask of
guilt. "I've focused mainly on Long Beach and the Washington
Coast," she replied lamely.

"Of course," Jack replied, picking up his
newspaper, "I forgot."

As Cassie watched him make a great show of
his reading, she had the sickening feeling that her story, as
well-contrived as she’d thought it had been, wasn't fooling the old
man for a second.

Later that morning, as Cassie sat dozing in
the passenger’s seat, they rolled into Oregon. Crossing over the
Rogue River, Jack pointed down to the bank where a man stood,
knee-deep in the current, lazily waving a long, supple fly fishing
rod, back and forth, above his head. The sun cut the water in a
curtain of sparkling diamonds, silhouetting the angler in a silvery
nimbus of light, and glistened off the long slow curl of wet line.
The scene reminded Cassie of Norman MacLean’s vivid descriptions of
his ill-fated brother Paul, plying the waters of the Big Blackfoot
River.

Then they passed over the bridge and out of
sight of the river.

"
The charm of
fishing,”
Jack quoted,
“
is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable,
a perpetual series of occasions for
hope."

Cassie nodded; she liked that one, being in
pursuit of something elusive, but hopefully attainable,
herself.

A short time later, they pulled off the
highway into Gold Beach. Jack drove slowly through town as Cassie
read the street directions that he had written on a napkin.
Finally, they pulled up to a quaint, shingled building sporting a
hanging marquee that read
Spring Leaves
Bookstore
.

"This is the place,"
Jack said, pulling into a parking space along the curb, "let's see
if anyone’s home!"

No one was.

A sign hung in the window telling them the
proprietor would be back in an hour. Unfortunately,
it
didn't
tell
them what time the sign had been hung in the first place. Jack
stood there, looking helplessly up and down the empty street,
before sighing and climbing back into the
van.

"I'll tell you what," he said, pulling away
from the curb, "how about if I drop you off at the library while I
track this guy down and get my books?"

"The library?"

"If you're planning to write a book, you had
better get familiar with the local libraries. Those are the folks
who know what there is to know about these towns and their
histories. An hour in the local library can save you weeks’ worth
of research on your own."

"Oh," Cassie replied, "I guess I hadn't
thought of that."

She was beginning to wonder if maybe she
really would end up writing a book. Between the stories that Jack
had told her, and the information she was likely to gather on the
rest of their drive, she might as well. They followed the signs to
the Curry Public Library, where Jack swung a quick, and probably
illegal, u-turn in the middle of the street to drop her off at the
curb.

"I'll be back in an hour," Jack promised,
"whether I find him or not.” Cassie waved him off and followed the
winding gravel path to the door.

*

As she walked through the
double glass doors and into the foyer, Cassie found herself facing
a low oak counter. A sign hung above the polished desk, with arrows
pointing in various directions. To the left was the nonfiction
section, the reference and research areas, and a doorway leading to
a small room labeled
Videos
. To the right of the
entryway she could see the fiction and children’s sections, with
another doorway marked
Research
. This caught Cassie's
eye and she wandered over, through the hushed aisles between the
shelves, to see what the room contained.

Against the far wall of this much smaller
room sat a narrow folding table with two computers. A large humming
machine, which Cassie didn't recognize, sat in another corner, and
filing cabinets covered the rest of the available wall space. Just
as she began to wonder if this might be an office of some kind, the
librarian, a young man wearing black slacks and a white dress
shirt, walked in to the room and asked if she had any
questions.