Chapter 8 - The Price of Golden Things
Megan didn't leave Tillamook that night.
She couldn't. Callahan had seen to that without me asking. While we were standing on the timber wharf watching the Eastern District of Virginia sink into the salt mud, Frank had walked over to her rental sedan, unscrewed the brass Schrader valves from her two front tires with his thumbnail, and dropped the stems into the oily water between the slips.
"She can stay at the Nehalem Inn," Callahan had said when he walked back down the ramp, wiping his thumbs on a rag that smelled of transmission fluid. "Thirty-five dollars a night. No phone in the room, and the manager is my sister’s boy. If she starts screaming, he’ll throw her luggage into the slough."
"She’s not screaming," I told him. "She’s finished."
"Nobody’s finished till they’re in the dirt, Virginia," Frank said, squinting through the rime at the white car sitting crooked on its rims. "A woman like that doesn't quit because she got her papers wet. She quits when the meat runs out."
He was right.
The meat ran out thirty-six hours later, on a Thursday morning that broke clear and brittle as bottle glass. The fog had been blown south by an easterly out of the Cascades, leaving the sky high, pale blue, and dry as bone. You could see fifty miles out to sea—the horizon ruled straight and dark against the gray water, with three Russian factory trawlers hanging on the edge of the twelve-mile limit like iron bugs.
I was at the small engine bench behind the shop, rebuilding the carburetor on a four-horsepower Briggs that ran the hydraulic pump for the timber jacks. My fingers were yellow with old gasoline and copper shavings.
The gravel crunched again. Not the slow, heavy creep of Megan’s rental, but the hard, reckless pound of a vehicle being driven by someone who didn't care about the oil pan.
A gold Chrysler sedan—ten years old, covered in the dull white film of cross-country road salt, with Virginia plates hanging loose from one rusted sheet-metal screw—swung wide around Callahan’s fuel tanks and slammed to a halt two feet from the scrap pile.
The engine died with a violent shudder, the radiator spitting a thin jet of brown steam against the underside of the hood with a hiss like a stepped-on copperhead.
The driver’s door didn't open right away. For two full minutes, the car sat there, ticking in the cold salt air, the steam drifting across the cracked windshield.
Then the door creaked open.
Sheila Miller got out.
She had lost seventy pounds. The woman who used to preside over Thanksgiving dinner in Glen Allen—with her triple-washed pearls, her beige knit suits from the good department store at Short Pump, and her voice that could turn an insult into a church prayer—looked like a bundle of dried willow sticks wrapped in a stained nylon windbreaker. Her hair, which she had dyed the color of butterscotch every six weeks for forty years, was three inches of stark, chalky white at the roots, fading into a dry, straw-yellow nest that was pinned to the back of her skull with a plastic grocery-store clip.
She didn't look at the boats. She didn't look at the Pacific Ocean. She had never seen the Pacific in her life, but she didn't give it so much as a glance.
She looked at me.
Behind her, the passenger door opened with a groan of ungreased hinges.
Doug got out.
Or what was left of Doug.
He didn't have his teeth in. The whole right side of his face hung down like wet dough, the corner of his eye dragged toward his jaw by the dead nerves of the stroke, exposing a red, weeping pocket of mucous membrane that twitched every three seconds. His right arm was tucked against his ribs, curled tight like the wing of a dead heron, his hand twisted inward into an iron knot that ended in yellow fingernails that hadn't been clipped in months.
He was wearing an old windbreaker with *MILLER LOGISTICS & TRANSPORT* embroidered in yellow silk over the left pocket. The thread was frayed, the *L* hanging down in a loop of gold floss.
Sheila took two steps toward the bench. She didn't have a purse. She had a manila envelope clutched under her arm, the edges grease-stained from fried chicken or truck-stop doughnuts.
"Johnny," she said.
Her voice wasn't cracked like Megan’s. It was thin, piercing, and high, the voice she used to use when she called Travis in from the back field because his dinner was getting cold while mine sat in the oven under a piece of aluminum foil.
"Johnny, your father drove three days to see you."
I laid the brass needle-valve on the clean cloth. I picked up a six-inch crescent wrench, adjusted the knurled screw with my thumb, and turned back to the Briggs engine.
"You should have saved the gas," I said. "The Chrysler’s burning oil on the three and five cylinders. You’ve got a blown head gasket. You won't make it back over the Siskiyous."
Doug made a sound in the back of his throat—a wet, rattling *g-a-a-r-r-h* that sounded like an old pump trying to lift water from an empty well. His left hand, the good one, reached out and grabbed Sheila’s shoulder, his fingers digging into the nylon of her jacket so hard his knuckles turned gray.
"Look at him, John," Sheila said, her voice rising half an octave, sharp enough to cut lard. "Look at what you’ve done to your father."
I turned the wrench a quarter-turn on the intake manifold bolt. *Click.*
"I didn't give him the stroke, Sheila."
"You killed this family!" she screamed. The sound went out over the water, bouncing off the steel hull of the *Hesperus* where two deckhands stopped their welding to stare down at the dock. "You walked out! You had the money, you had the contacts, you had the credit lines in Norfolk! You knew Travis was sensitive! You knew he was trying to get his feet back under him after that girl in Charlotte took his apartment!"
"Travis was thirty-two years old," I said, my voice dead level, not rising an inch to meet hers. "He was thirty-two years old, and he was in my bed at four o'clock on a Thursday afternoon while I was eighty miles away signing bills of lading."
"It was an accident!" Sheila shouted. She took another step, her face three feet from mine now. Up close, her skin smelled of menthol cigarettes and that cheap, bitter orange water she used to splash on her wrists before church. "He was weak, John! Men are weak! Your father was weak twice when you were a boy, and I didn't break our home! I didn't drag our name through the courts in Richmond! I stayed! A Christian woman stays! But you—you were always so proud. So stiff-necked. You had to have everything right on the line. Just like your grandfather. A hard, cold, ungrateful boy who never knew how to forgive!"
Doug let out another wet croak. His left arm swung out, and his good fingers caught the edge of my work bench, knocking over the small tin of gasoline.
The fuel ran across the fir planks, dripping through the cracks into the harbor below.
*Drip. Drip. Drip.*
"Travis is in a county jail in Glynn County, Georgia," Sheila said, her voice dropping suddenly into that low, conspiratorial murmur she used to use when she was telling the neighbors why Travis hadn't graduated with his class at VCU. "They have him on an interstate fraud warrant, Johnny. Five hundred thousand dollars bond. If we don't post fifty thousand cash by Monday, they’re going to transfer him to the federal holding facility in Atlanta. You know what they do to boys like Travis in Atlanta. You know what those people will do to him."
She laid the manila envelope on the greasy bench, right in the pool of spilled gasoline.
"The lawyer says you have equity here," she said, her eyes darting toward the cranes, the long lines of sorted hemlock, the three steel barges tied off at the wharf. "The man at the gas station in town said you’re the foreman. He said you have a third of the company. That old man Callahan doesn't have any boys left. He’s leaving it to you."
She leaned in, her eyes wide, glassy with a terrible, insane conviction that forty years of lies had turned into stone.
"You take a mortgage on this dock, Johnny," she whispered. "Just fifty thousand. We get Travis out on bond, we get him a good lawyer in Savannah—somebody who knows the judge—and then we’ll all sit down together. We’ll go back to Virginia. We can get a double-wide on the three acres Doug still owns out by the river. We can be a family again. Like before you got so hard."
I looked down at the manila envelope. The yellow gasoline was soaking through the brown paper, turning it dark and translucent, revealing the red-stamped letters beneath: *NOTICE OF FORECLOSURE / COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA.*
I looked at Doug.
The old man’s good eye was fixed on me. It wasn't the eye of a father. It was the eye of a dog that has been beaten until it doesn't know why the stick is coming down, only that it hurts to stand up. There was no love in that eye. There wasn't even hate. There was only a dull, wet terror that the furnace had gone out and nobody was coming to bring in the wood.
"Dad," I said.
The twisted corner of his mouth twitched. A line of thick, clear spit ran down through the stubble on his chin, dripping onto the yellow silk thread of the *MILLER LOGISTICS* logo.
"Do you remember the treehouse?" I asked him.
Doug didn't blink. The dead eyelid hung low over the pupil.
"The one behind the barn in Richmond," I said. "I was nine. Travis was eleven. The hemlock branch broke because Travis wanted to build the deck four feet further out than the book said. I told you the joist wouldn't hold. I told you three times."
Sheila made a sharp, furious hiss, but I didn't look at her. I kept my eyes on Doug’s one good, watery pupil.
"The joist broke," I said. "I fell thirty feet into the rock pile. I broke my collarbone in two places and cracked three ribs. Travis didn't fall. He was standing on the ladder."
The harbor was so quiet I could hear the diesel pump on the *Hesperus* three hundred yards away. *Chug-chug-chug.*
"You came running out of the barn with the grease gun in your hand," I said. "You didn't look at my shoulder. You didn't pick me up out of the rocks. You ran to the foot of the ladder, you reached up, and you caught Travis by the belt. You held him against your chest and you said, *'Thank God you’re alright, Travvy. Thank God you didn't fall.'*"
Doug’s good hand slipped off the edge of the bench. His fingers dragged through the gasoline, leaving five dark streaks on the gray fir.
"I lay in those rocks for forty-five minutes until the rescue squad came from the county," I told him, my voice as calm as a summer morning on the Chesapeake. "My bone was sticking through the skin, Dad. I could see the white of it. And every time I cried, Sheila told me to hush up because I was upsetting your brother."
"Johnny," Sheila spat, her fingers curling into claws against the nylon of her coat. "That was twenty years ago! You’re bringing up a children’s game when your brother is in a cage?"
"It wasn't a game, Sheila," I said.
I picked up the manila envelope by the dry corner. The paper was heavy, soggy with fuel.
I walked over to the oil-drum stove that stood by the shop door. The fire inside had been banked with green hemlock bark, but the coals at the bottom were white-hot, humming with that deep, muffled roar that eats iron if you leave the draft open.
I lifted the lid with the hook.
A blast of orange heat hit my face, smelling of pitch and old ashes.
"Johnny, no!" Sheila shrieked. She lunged forward, but her foot caught in the iron loop of a crane sling that was lying coiled on the planking. She went down hard on her hands and knees, the salt gravel tearing through her stockings, her plastic hair-clip popping off and skittering across the deck into the water. "Doug! Stop him! He’s burning the title!"
Doug didn't move. He couldn't move. He stood there by the small-engine bench, his good hand hanging limp at his side, watching me with that dead, yellow eye.
I dropped the envelope into the drum.
The gasoline took first—a soft, muffled *whump* that blew a puff of blue soot out of the draft hole. Then the bond paper caught, curling into black lace, the red stamps turning gray, then white, then vanishing into the draft as the sixty-foot chimney sucked the ash up into the Oregon sky.
I put the lid back on the stove. The iron clanged down, heavy and solid as a tombstone.
"There’s a Chevron station on Highway 101," I said, looking down at Sheila where she lay in the oyster shells. "They have a tow truck. If you tell them you’re Doug Miller from Richmond, they won't give a damn. But if you have forty dollars cash, they might pull that Chrysler as far as the California line."
I turned around, picked up the Briggs carburetor, and set it into the vice.
May you like
"Get off my dock," I said.
***
