Just Past Oysterville: Shoalwater Book One (5 page)

As she started back down the highway, a semi
truck pulled out of the westbound lane to stop, in a cloud of dust
and the squeal of air brakes, in front of the gas pumps. A
middle-aged man wearing a bright red baseball cap over his long,
blond hair climbed down from the cab and, after stretching a bit,
walked into the store. A thought struck Cassie, as she stood there
looking at the dusty blue cab, and she turned and walked back
toward the truck. She was standing near the bumper when the driver
returned, holding a paper grocery bag in one hand, and fishing in
his pocket for his keys with the other.

"Excuse me," Cassie whispered, then louder,
"Excuse me!” The driver stopped and looked up, seeing her standing
there for the first time.

"What’cha want, kid?" He asked, still
searching for his keys.

"Are you headed to Phoenix?" Cassie asked,
trying to sound nonchalant.

"Yup."

"Could I catch a ride with you?"

The driver shook his head, "Nope,
sorry."

"Maybe just to Tucson?"

"Can't do it kid," he said,
pointing to a small sign on the door of the truck, "company rules.”
The metal plate read
Employees
Only!

"I'd give ya a lift if I could, but I'm not
going to risk losing my job."

Cassie was stunned; her master plan for
crossing the distance between here and Long Beach was crumbling
before her eyes.

"Do all trucks have that rule?" She asked,
her voice starting to waver again, as the man pulled a rattling
ring of keys from his pocket.

"Most of 'em," the driver called back,
climbing into the cab and slamming the door. "You might try to find
an independent, a fella who drives his own truck, but most
companies are pretty strict, insurance rates and all. Really not a
very safe way to travel anyway."

"Thanks heaps!" Cassie muttered, but
returned the driver’s wave as he pulled away.

This could be a problem. She
had been depending on being able to hitchhike so her money would
last through the spring. If she had to buy a bus ticket now, she'd
never make it to summer term, much less September! Turning back
towards the highway, Cassie swallowed the last bite of her sandwich
and started walking again, her mind whirling. How could she tell
which drivers were independents? Cassie thought about this as she
walked along, and finally determined the only way would be to find
a truck stop in Tucson or Phoenix and watch the rigs as they
entered, looking for the telltale
employees only
signs.

This could take longer than she had
expected.

The afternoon passed slowly as Cassie
marched doggedly through the heat.

Around two o'clock, the hottest part of the
day, she took a break to rest in the shade of a highway sign,
spreading out her sleeping bag to finish drying. Her feet had
started to hurt an hour earlier as blisters began to rise within
her sweltering boots. Now, as the blisters had begun to break, her
feet had become a raw, burning ache at the end of her legs. As soon
as she had sat down, Cassie pulled a clean pair of socks from her
bag and then removed her boots and blood spotted socks to let her
feet air and dry. This was a lesson she had learned hiking through
the hills around Bowie as a Girl Scout.

"Change your socks when you
stop to rest," Mrs. Dillard (who some of the girls called
Kong
because of her
hairy legs) had told them, "and you'll get a lot more mileage with
a lot less pain."

Cassie mentally scolded herself, as she
rubbed her sore, burning feet, for not stopping an hour before when
the blisters had began to form.

She ate another sandwich and one of her candy bars, which had
gone so soft in the heat of her pocket that she had to lick the
chocolate first from the wrapper and then her fingers. Taking a
long swallow of water, tepid and plasticky, she leaned back, closed
her eyes, and began to relate the events of the morning onto her
tape machine.

The heat of the afternoon sun made her
drowsy. After putting on clean socks and lacing up her boots (the
last thing she wanted was sunburned feet), Cassie leaned her duffel
bag in the shade of a rock and closed her eyes. She had meant to
take just a quick nap, waiting out the hottest part of the day.
However, her long hike, coupled with lack of sleep the night
before, took their toll and she fell into a deep dreamless slumber
almost as soon as she closed her eyes.

Cassie awoke with a start, hours later, to
the piercing sound of brakes squealing to a stop nearby. Quietly,
she peeked around the corner of the sign and saw a rusty old
flatbed pickup parked on the far shoulder. Beyond it, she could see
an old man, walking off across the desert toward a rocky
outcropping some yards off the road. The truck, at least forty
years old, had tall wood rail sides and a heavy green canvas tarp,
which covered the bed and had been tucked into the tailgate.

Before Cassie could think about what she was
doing, she half limped, half ran across the highway to the truck,
where she pulled up the tarp and looked inside. The rusty remains
of a motorcycle, older even than the truck, were strapped firmly to
the rails over one wheel well, the stylized figure of an Indian
head, complete with headdress, surmounted the dented front fender
of the bike. Several boxes of machine tools and parts lay in the
back of the truck as well.

Cassie threw one last hurried glance at the
truck's owner, who was just disappearing behind the rocks, a
telltale roll of flapping white paper in his hand. She swallowed
hard, her mouth going dry at the sight of a pump-action shotgun
hanging on the back window of the cab. Desperation struggled with
fear and prevailed as Cassie quickly tossed her bag over the
tailgate and then scrambled in after it, tucking the tarp back in
behind her.

Climbing over the crates, she settled
against the back of the cab, her duffel behind her, and tried to
calm her beating heart.

At some point in the recent past, someone
had spilled a bottle of beer, or several, by the smell of it, in
the bed of the truck. The fading, sour-sweet smell of hops nearly
gagged her in the heat beneath the tarp.

The thick yeasty smell kindled the memory of
her one and only experiment with drinking. She’d been fifteen and
spending the night at a girlfriend's house after a birthday party.
Her host's boyfriend, with most of the rest of the football team,
pulled up to the back of the house after midnight and, after some
quick and merciless peer-pressure, Cassie had climbed out the
bedroom window and shimmied down to the porch behind her friend.
They had ended up at the reservoir, parked back behind the trees
and away from prying eyes. Her first beer had been awful and the
others had roared with laughter as her face squinched at the bitter
liquid.

One of the boys had passed her a half-full
mason jar of amber colored liquid and told her to take a drink; it
would take the taste away.

If the beer had been bad, the whiskey was
worse by far. The dry bitterness burned across her tongue and
roared up her sinuses at the same time, pinching painfully at the
back of her throat and leaving her choking and breathless.

Teddy Waski, a hulking linebacker with a
body like a dump truck and a brain to match, had laughed
uproariously and slapped her on the back as she drank. A fair
amount of the moonshine had splashed down the front of her shirt.
All in all, Cassie had found the drinks, much like the company, to
be uninspiring and was grateful when the others finally clambered
back into the pickup and headed home. Her head had begun spinning
unpleasantly, and half an hour of twists and turns along the rutted
gravel road, left her sweating and sick.

Her stomach churning, Cassie had asked to be dropped off as
they passed the narrow road leading to the Belanger's trailer.
Stumbling though the door an hour before dawn, she had barely
staggered to the bathroom in time to empty the contents of her
roiling stomach into the toilet. Resting her head against the cool
porcelain of the bowl, and wincing at the sound of footsteps in the
hallway and the bright blinding light of the overhead bulb, she had
looked up miserably at the sound of her mother's voice.

"Cassie, honey, what in the world…"

Her mother's voice trailed off suddenly as
the smell of alcohol struck her. Cassie, with great effort, forced
herself to her feet, and stood, weaving, trying to explain.

"Mom, I…"

The sound of Kathy’s open palm striking her
daughter’s face was as sharp as it was unexpected, and Cassie
reeled, striking the thin wall of the bathroom and clutching her
burning cheek, her eyes wide and shocked. Her mother's face was
like that of a stranger, pale and furious, eyes blazing, her lips
pulled back in disgust and fury, baring her teeth in a feral snarl.
Her hand was still raised as though she intended to strike again or
had simply forgotten to lower it.

It was the first and only time that her
mother had ever hit her. Kathy Belanger had always shied away from
spankings, even when her daughter was young. Cassie felt tears
began to spill down her cheeks; less from pain and surprise, as
from the hazy understanding that something had taken place between
them that could never be taken back.

After a long, tense moment, Kathy's gaze
shifted from her daughter to her own upturned hand and she
shuddered visibly. Cassie watched as her mother's shoulders sagged
and her face became a hurt and weary version of the woman Cassie
knew. Her hand had dropped to her side like a deadweight.

"Go to bed Cassie, go sleep it off. I'll
clean up in here."

Cassie had drawn a hitching breath to
apologize, her young body quaking with shame at the disappointment
in her mother's eyes.

"Go," she repeated, "We'll talk about this
tomorrow."

As she turned the corner towards her room,
she heard her mother's voice mutter to herself.

"I've cleaned up after drunks before."

Cassie had fled, weeping, to the guilty
darkness of her room.

True to her word, Kathy had sat down at the
table with her daughter the next afternoon and listened to the
whole story.

She had apologized for slapping her, and
Cassie had asked her forgiveness repeatedly. Both had cried, and
then laughed, and life had moved on. It was the first and last
drink that Cassie had ever taken. Over the years she had been
teased by her classmates, as bottles were passed, and she had shook
her head. It wasn’t a temptation. Each time the bottle was offered
she would see, reflected in the sloshing contents, the
disappointment in her mother's eyes.

All of this flashed through Cassie's mind in
an instant, as she stowed away quietly among the debris that
littered the bed of the old pick-up.

"Cassie Belanger," she scolded herself in a
shocked whisper, "have you gone completely insane? How do you know
this truck is going to Tucson? How do you know this guy won't shoot
you and leave you in a ditch when he finds you in the back of his
truck?"

As she huddled in the dim heat beneath the
canopy, no answers came. All she knew for sure was that her sore,
tired feet didn't have much hiking left in them, and that she was
nearly out of water again. Wherever this truck was headed, it was
in the right direction for now. An old gas-guzzler like this
couldn't go too long between fill-ups, and when it stopped, she
could hop out the back and run like a rabbit.

"Well," she whispered to
herself, as the image of the shotgun rose in her mind, "Maybe not
like a
rabbit
."

Cassie had nearly nodded off again when the
driver's door suddenly creaked open, and she bit her lip to stifle
a startled scream. There was a long pause and Cassie began to
shake, certain that she had been heard. Then the door slammed shut
and the truck rumbled to life, belching smoke. Whatever springs the
pickup may once have had, had long since expired, and Cassie
rattled and bounced along amid the clatter of loose tools and the
staccato thunder of the rippling tarp.

Amid this din, Cassie drifted off to sleep once more. It would
be many hours later before she remembered that her battered old
sleeping bag had been left, draped over the rocks to dry, somewhere
along Interstate 10.

*

The screeching of the pickup’s tired brakes
roused her from her sleep and Cassie blinked in the darkness,
disoriented, until she remembered where she was and why. Panic
clutched at her as she realized that her legs had gone completely
asleep, folded under her on the hard metal truck bed. Not much
chance to run like a rabbit, or anything else for that matter. The
door creaked open, then banged shut again and, for one terrified
moment, Cassie thought she heard the man coming around toward the
back of the truck. As she held her breath and listened, Cassie
heard diminishing footsteps along with a momentary blast of twangy
country music as another door opened and closed.

Silence resumed, broken only
by the sound of her own breathing and the slow
tink, tink, tink
, of the
cooling engine. Cassie rubbed life back into her legs, wincing at
the pins and needles as circulation returned to her feet. Slowly
and quietly, she pulled her duffel bag out from behind her and
crawled over the crates to the tailgate, pausing to listen for any
sound beyond. Hearing nothing, Cassie slowly untucked the heavy
cover, and poked her head out, like a wary turtle, from under the
tarp.

The parking lot was dim, lit by a single
amber streetlamp, and mostly deserted, with only a handful of cars
lined up in front of a low, dark building.