Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (34 page)

Once the paperwork was complete, he'd move
his belongings back up the highway and into the Beckman homestead
again. This saved him the pittance of rent he had insisted on
paying the Rolf's, since he no longer had time to look after the
grounds.

He had toyed with the idea of cleaning up
the old house. Getting it in a condition to sell as one of those
bed and breakfasts that were popping up all over the peninsula the
last few years. The plan only left one problem, there was just one
more spinning plate than Jack could handle. That, he realized, as
Karl Ferguson leaned forward and tapped the letter sitting in the
middle of the desk was what his pastor's question had been about
after all.

"Are you sure, Jack?" Karl asked again,
touching the single sheet of typing paper that held Assistant
Pastor Jack Leland's carefully written letter of resignation.

"Yes," Jack said, around a surprising lump
that rose suddenly in his throat, "I'm sure.”

“
I can keep the oyster farm
going and take care of Bill, but I can't afford to hire someone to
run the farm while I work here, and I can't ask you to pay me what
the farm would, to keep my position."

Jack looked down at the scuffed, wood
floor.

"A year, maybe two, and I'll have the house
ready to sell. If my job's still available then, you had better
believe I'll come knocking. Until then I'll be as involved as I
can, you know that."

Karl smiled and nodded, but his big heart
was heavy.

The haunted look in Jack's eyes, the
bitterness in his voice, and a lifetime of ministry told Karl that
Jack might, indeed, return someday, but it wouldn't be in a year or
even two. Jack would have a formidable host of personal demons to
contend with before he would be ready to accept God's mantle again.
What hurt Pastor Ferguson, turning like a knife in his faithful, if
weary, soul, was the knowledge that he couldn't do a thing to help
his young friend.

Well, that isn't
completely true
, he thought,
I can pray
.

He could and did, bending his knee and
folding his hands each day, speaking grace and mercy into his young
friend's life. He would be faithful in his daily supplications over
Jack Leland's soul, for a long and rocky decade until he, himself,
would at last be called home.

The two men stood, finally, and shook hands,
neither recognizing that Jack's tenure with the church ended almost
exactly as it had begun, with a handshake across the big, oak desk
on a warm August morning. The bang of the heavy front door echoed
down the hallway, sounding to Karl like the closing of a tomb. Jack
didn't even notice it as he walked away.

*

Bill's paperwork was completed in short
order. The gentlemen from the state seemed more than happy, eager
even, to let Jack take responsibility for William Beckman. Jack
spent his first night back in the old house as the leaves on the
big oak tree were turning a deep burnt-umber and making their slow,
fluttering migration to the weed-choked lawn. In the early hours of
the morning Jack thrashed and moaned in his new bedroom,
dreaming.

He was walking across a wide, hot desert. His mouth caked
and dry, his legs trembled with exhaustion. The heat of the midday
sun burned against his face and sweat poured from beneath the heavy
pack on his back. He trudged on and on, one heavy foot falling in a
cloud of alkali dust, wearily followed by the next. There was
nothing in sight but the desert, no water, not one shred of
merciful shade, only the heat and pain and terrible thirst. Slowly,
in the manner of dreams, Jack became convinced that he heard liquid
sloshing in the unbearably heavy pack that rubbed at his raw
shoulders. Staggering to a halt, nearly swooning in the baking
glare of the sun, Jack slipped the pack to the ground. Being a
dream, it didn't strike him strange that, though the pack now
rested in the burning white sand at his feet, he still felt the
unmerciful weight of it bearing down on him.

Again he heard the tempting, teasing sound
of water, coming distinctly from the depths of the pack as, licking
cracked and bleeding lips with his parched tongue, Jack noticed
buzzards beginning to circle overhead. His fingers fumbled thickly
with the knots that held the flap shut and an eternity passed
before it was free. Swallowing painfully, he tore open the top of
the pack and gagged.

There, folded impossibly and stuffed into
the pack was the body of Bill Beckman. One side of his face was
gone, a pulped mass of flesh and bone, crawling with great green
and black flies. Blood dribbled from a black hole in his right
temple, running a thin rivulet down his cheek and dripping into the
depths of the pack. As the maddening buzz of flies filled Jack's
ears, he took a horrified step backwards and Bill's eyes opened to
stare at him, the left eye bulging grotesquely from the massive
internal pressure of the passing bullet. Those staring, distended
eyes imprinted themselves on Jack's mind like a boot track in the
mud. Slowly, the white heat of the desert overwhelmed him, driving
him to his knees, and Bill's head swiveled an impossible two
hundred and sixty degrees to follow him to the ground.

Then that horrible,
bulging eye closed slowly, in a ghastly, knowing wink,
and Jack woke himself screaming.

Four weeks later, Bill Beckman came
home.

Jack had moved him into the small bedroom
behind the kitchen, as Bill still had some trouble with his balance
and the long flight of stairs to the master bedroom could have
proven disastrous.

Along with a small bag of clothing, and a
few toiletries, Jack lugged in a heavy bag full of plastic letters,
numbers, children's reading books, and several other physical and
mental therapy tools. These he scattered across the floor of the
living room until he could build a box to keep them in, which he
never did. Bill would wander through the room and pick up the ones
that caught his fancy and he and Jack would work with those.

Of the Bill that Jack had known, good and
bad, there was no longer any real resemblance. Oh, certainly, the
features were the same, give or take the odd bulge or scar, but the
hard, wary look was gone. That sharp, intelligent glint was absent
in his eyes, and his face had settled into a soft, questioning
expression, hanging from his skull, thick and rubbery, ready to
laugh or cry.

In his face, it was clear what Bill had
become...a six-foot, two-inch child.

He was weak, at first, on his right side,
but that passed soon enough, though Bill would favor that side and
use his left hand (though he'd been right-handed before the
accident) for the rest of his life. The doctors had warned Jack
that Bill could suffer from seizures, but he'd had yet to have one
and the danger of them lessened as the weeks went by.

The bullet had passed within millimeters of
his optic nerve but, amazingly, there was no visual impairment.

There had been some residual damage to the
muscle tissue around the eye, which caused the eyeball to bulge
slightly in its socket, and gave that eye a tendency to wander.

Jack would sit with him, most evenings, amid
the educational clutter of the living room floor, and they would
sound out the alphabet together, or count painstakingly from one to
one hundred.

By winter, Bill was speaking in full sentences, albeit the
faltering and wandering sentences of a youngster, helping Jack work
on the house, scraping paint and clearing the weed-covered
grounds.

Still, Bill was a full-grown man, and could
be a dangerous responsibility on those rare times that he threw a
tantrum.

After replacing a second window in a month,
Jack and Bill took the bus to Seattle and came home with a new
prescription in hand. The tantrums ceased almost immediately.

*

One evening, during that first winter, after
an especially long and difficult day with Bill, Jack had finally
gotten him to bed and was cleaning up the mess the former had made
of his dinner, having spread it across the far reaches of the
dining room.

Exhausted, defeated, and
angry, Jack gathered the dishes and flung them in the general
direction of the kitchen sink, taking some perverse satisfaction in
the sound of shattering china from that direction. He knew he'd
have a bigger mess to deal with later, but he didn't really care.
Flopping onto the couch, he sat fuming for an hour, reading the
same paragraph of the same book over and over, until he finally
rose and started searching the house for some gloves to clean up
his
own
tantrum.

Gloves, he mused darkly, were one of those
many household items that seem to be in every drawer. They were
always in the way, when searching for a pen, or scissors, or
something else, but just you try to find one pair of gloves when
you need them.

Finally, he stumped down the creaking stairs
into the dank, cobwebbed cavern of the cellar. A waist-high
workbench sat against one long wall, the width of the house. It was
a relic of grandfather Beckman's workshop, and liable to outlive
this house and the one to follow. The legs were built from huge,
black railroad ties and two-by-fours covered in thick plywood made
up the much-pitted surface.

Great, heavy drawers were built into the
table at knee level, and it was here that Jack went searching.

What he found, instead, there in the
moldering gloom, was Bill Beckman's hidden treasure; the one thing
that young William had found worthy to invest his hard-earned and
much-needed income on. After prying open the last of the deep,
creaking drawers, Jack found that half of the three-foot by
six-foot interior had been filled with dusty, unopened whiskey
bottles.

There must have been fifty bottles in there,
all with the same familiar black label, all filled to the narrow
neck with the same dark amber liquid.

Jack held the first bottle in his hand a
long while, gazing down at it as he stood in the dim light of the
naked bulb, surrounded by the forgotten, rotting treasures of the
dead.

In his mind’s eye, he could see Bill, on his
increasingly frequent trips to the liquor store, buying two bottles
at a time.

Always two.

The first for his instant gratification, the
second to store up against the threat of the unknown; against that
day when there might not be even a handful of wrinkled dollars,
smelling of sweat and brine, to buy relief for the dry, screeching
demon in his throat.

Minutes passed, five, then ten, and still
Jack stood there, unblinking, a great thousand-yard stare on his
face as he gazed into the tawny depths of the bottle. Then, with a
defiant, agonized growl, he ripped the plastic cap from the
bottle.

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
six
Sunday mornings…