She should have told the cop that lemonade at China Bay was the way to go. Instead, she somehow managed to tell him to come back when he ditched the cop suit.
She sat, vaguely aware that Petey leaned on his cue and whispered, and Petey looked like a hustler who had been hustled. He whiffed another shot. The logger watched in cynical disbelief, because Petey does not shank easy shots unless he’s hustling.
“Gotcha,” the logger said, “or at least I gotcha if I don’t screw up.”
“Run ’em out,” Petey told him about the game. “That cop…” and Petey nearly strangled on the words, “that cop is gonna be back. That cop saw something interesting.”
“As long as it wasn’t my hot chainsaw,” the logger said. “This is the last time I do business with teenagers. They ain’t discreet.”
“He seen the bartender,” Petey said in a tentative way, like he wondered if he could trust the logger.
“Chantrell’s been busted before,” the logger said, “it’s not like he’s a virgin.”
Petey shut up, because he wasn’t talking about Chantrell, and the idea of virgins makes him break out in hives.
“Maybe,” Petey said and changed the subject, “this wind will put that car to the bottom of the ditch. Maybe it will clean the whole shoreline.”
“Cars weigh a helluva lot,” the logger said, his voice a little tense because he was in the middle of a run.
“They don’t weigh much under water,” Petey said. “The water lifts ’em, sort of.”
Bertha listened in a half-hearted way, being not a little distracted. Bertha generally thinks honesty is the best policy when dealing with yourself, so figured she must be lonesome. The first fine-looking man who came along, and who smiled at her… and she fell for it. She acted as innocent and dumb as Annie. She told herself, sure as the wind blew, if that cop came back wearing work clothes she’d forget he was a cop. She would not lie to herself and say she felt a little too warm just because of a warm evening.
“And if the shoreline gets cleaned,” Petey said, “some problems around here might get cleaned up too.” He glanced toward Sugar Bear who sat in the center of the room like a mountain of sadness.
“He sure is takin’ it good,” the logger said, and his voice filled with admiration. “Sugar Bear just sat there and faced that cop down. He didn’t run away, or nothin’.”
The Dead Guy Disappears
It wasn’t twenty-four hours before news of Sugar Bear’s standoff with the cop spread along the Canal. The story started with the simple mistake that Sugar Bear had the moxie to face down a cop. By the time the story hit Rough and Randy, it bloomed into a titanic struggle between a giant cop and a giant blacksmith. Accusations were said to have passed back and forth. Blows were struck. Sugar Bear prevailed, but now had a big price on his head. Guys at Rough and Randy took pride in loudly claiming they would not turn a buddy in, even for a million bucks, but some looked sneaky when they said it. By the time the story was twenty-four hours old, it claimed the Canal was about to be overrun by a task force composed of National Guard, Marine MPs, and every state cop west of the Cascade Mountains.
As the story spread south it grew more sophisticated. Storytellers know the bartender at China Bay. That bartender can spot a snow job faster than Jubal Jim can spot a barroom sausage. The story claimed Sugar Bear had something on the cop, or the cop and Sugar Bear exchanged looks that said they were in cahoots. Maybe (the story said) the cop shacked up with a rich lady from the development, a lady whose husband spent time doing business in far places. The story figured the cop had enough evidence to hang Sugar Bear, but Sugar Bear had so much evidence the cop could not make a move. This story went for quiet drama. Rough and Randy adores John Wayne. China Bay discusses Casablanca.
Meanwhile, the dry wind blew. Weather forecasters on TV puzzled over a high-pressure zone camped above the Canal, while on either side of the Canal rain pizzled in typical northwest manner. As dry wind blew, needles on firs browned and dropped. Chop on the Canal rose, became waves, and churned against the shores. The entire Puget Sound area between Olympic Mountains and the Cascades range was once covered by a mile-thick sheet of ice. The Canal is a giant trench plowed over millions of years by three separate glaciations. It’s shallow near the shore, then plunges to deep, deep water. Wave action against the shore moves debris. Banks and shores are glacial moraine and will collapse with little more than a whim. People build houses near the shore, but not too near.
Above the shores stand third growth trees, or blackberry bushes, or, sometimes, nothing. There are stretches of rock shingle where even a cactus would feel deprived. It is along these shingles that cars usually go in. It was along one of these shingles that Sugar Bear dunked the dead guy. And, it was to this place that Sugar Bear, on late nights, visited. He came rain or shine, calm or raging storm.
Darkness covered the forest as Sugar Bear left his small house and drifted along a familiar path. He carried a flashlight. Wind swept the sky of clouds. Up high, wind hollered and yelled, blowing even harder than on the surface. Sugar Bear’s hair and beard and mustache blew all curly, sometimes in his eyes. Sugar Bear told himself he had seen some wind in his day, and, telling himself that, felt experienced and old.
And it is true he was older than Annie, but younger than a fisherman who also sometimes strolled through dark hours. The fisherman wended his solitary way because he was a man who thought too much, although folks claimed that what he thought wasn’t worth the time it took to think it. The fisherman occasionally encountered Sugar Bear. Sometimes they walked together, silent, each engaged with matters he did not care to discuss.
At other times, Sugar Bear, or the fisherman, might encounter Jubal Jim Johnson whose specialty is to run all night. Except for those three, and for whatever it was that made the road turn ugly, night seemed untouched except for the pounce of owls, the squeak of doomed mice, the eternal wash, and shush; the liquidly speaking voice of the Canal.
On this night of brilliant moon when waves crashed against the shore, and wind sucked moisture from the forest like soda pop up a straw, Sugar Bear stood at the site of the dead guy in the dunked car. He believed himself alone, but was not. Annie crouched nearby. Annie was on her own errand, plus the fisherman walked somewhere in the neighborhood.
There being no one around to talk to, or at least no one Sugar Bear knew about, it seemed natural to talk to the dead guy; since, by then, Sugar Bear was sick of talking to himself.
“All this had to happen,” Sugar Bear explained toward the water. “There’s stuff that’s gonna happen no matter what anybody does, and this was some of that stuff. That don’t mean it’s right.” His voice, which after this much time should have been steady, trembled with grief.
“When I was a kid,” Sugar Bear explained to the Canal, or the dead guy, or maybe to the wind that snatched his tired words, his sad words, and blew them over the forest and out to sea, “I seen some bad stuff. Then I grew up and there was more bad stuff.”
On the Canal, a running light, red-right-returning, showed a fishing boat beating its wet way home. Overhead, stars shone so clear it seemed they might start to click, and movement among the stars showed a satellite that no doubt broadcast weather, or TV pictures of clowns in dressy paint, dancing before trained poodles in a cosmic circus.
“So maybe you saw bad stuff, too,” Sugar Bear said to the dead guy. “Only how come you acted one way and I acted the other? And, now look at the mess.”
Water boiled at Sugar Bear’s feet, and wind took tops off waves so the Canal lay like churned milk beneath the moon.