Gone, No Forwarding

Fourteen

Ballard woke on Sunday morning in a motel in Eureka on California’s great northern redwood coast, population 24,337 and falling, due to the decline of the logging industry. He woke with somebody’s used sweat sock in his mouth and all five fingers of his right hand rammed into somebody’s monstrous gooey eye.

“Help!” he yelled, jerking upright in bed.

Then he relaxed. The sweat sock was his tongue, courtesy of Jack Gunne, the listed reference in the Rose Kelly file. Gunne hadn’t been at his Second Street address, which turned out to be a skid-row bar. Gunne was due back today. The gooey eye he was now licking off his fingers belonged to the Colonel: a lemon-whipped cream tart he had been too full to eat after downing the Colonel’s Extra Crispy 5-piece Jumbo Dinner the night before.

Shaving, Ballard realized that he hated Eureka and had always hated Eureka. If it wasn’t raining, it was foggy in Eureka. You had to drive through endless miles of endless redwoods dripping endless gallons of water down the back of your neck to get to Eureka. He contemplated the empty rumpled bed as he dressed, and wished Yana the gypsy queen were in it so he wouldn’t have to face the Eureka Sunday morning coming down.

Coming down, he learned as he made a dash for the coffee shop, by the bucket. And still coming down as, around 10 A.M., Ballard ducked from his car to Gunne’s run-down joint on Second Street. It was jammed with skid rogues of both sexes eagerly pulling at the hair of the dog. Gunne was a mild-mannered Englishman who wore a white shirt with a patent-leather snap-on bow tie, old-fashioned patent-leather hair and a Charlie Chaplin mustache.

“Haven’t seen Rose for a month of Sundays, old boy. Had to eighty-six her last time she was in.”

“Really?” Ballard shuddered as his first gulp of cold beer jumped up and down in his delicate stomach on the two over-easy from the motel coffee shop.

“Wonderful, jolly gal until she’s had too many whiskeys. Then she’s a holy terror. Must run close to two hundred and fifty pounds, you know.”

Ballard remembered her then. Almost six feet tall and built like one of the Raiders’ front four.

“Fred Burchard, he’s your man. The Pavilion, Third and C.”

Fred Burchard’s Pavilion looked very much like a barn, and, Ballard thought as he stood inside the front door dripping on the floor, it smelled very much like one. The crowd was smaller but noisier than Gunne’s, yappy as a dog fight, and Fred Burchard was drunk as the rest of them at a corner table in the rear. He was shamelessly cheating himself at solitaire as a couple of equally stewed cronies watched.

“Married? Rose? Hadn’t heard that. What you want with her?”

“I want to sell her a tractor,” said Ballard.

“Went back to farmin’, did she?” He shouted across at the bar. “George.” He turned back to Ballard. “George’ll know where Rose is. He used to plow her field for her now and then.” He dug a sudden elbow into Ballard’s ribs and winked grotesquely.

George looked too drunk to know where he himself lived. Red suspenders with a black stripe down them held up his gray wool pants. He had a four-day beard, the shakes, and a breath to pickle specimens.

“Feller here wants to sell Rosie Kelly a tractor.”

“Rosie don’t need no tractor,” shrieked George, “Rosie is a tractor.”

He doubled up at his own wit, slapped his knee, and fell on the floor. He landed on his side in a fetal position, jerked his shoulder a couple of times like trying to pull up the covers, and started to snore. Burchard looked at him with a practiced, calculating eye. “Nope. He’s gone off. You want Rosie, better come back...”

He stopped talking because he had lost his audience. Ballard had turned around and marched back out into the rain. Burchard stared after him a moment, then turned to his cronies.

“Abruptest goddam John Deere salesman I ever see,” he said.

California 36 cut off 101 at Alton, twenty miles south of Eureka. The rain had become a cloudburst brisk enough to swamp Ballard’s wipers as he pulled up in front of the Carlotta General Store. He ran through sheets of falling water to find the front door locked. Floundering through a calf-deep carpet of pine needles to the living quarters behind, he surprised a red Douglas squirrel on the back stoop. It gave a giant leap into a sodden thicket of huckleberry and was gone.

A stooped gray-haired man opened to Ballard’s knock. Mild blue eyes watched the water from the eaves pour down Ballard’s neck. “Roy Shelby? Sure. Stay on the blacktop here for another five miles or so, you’ll run into a dozen shacks along the road. Ain’t any of ’em been painted in a while, so you can tell Roy’s cause it’s got a new door.”

There was no car in front of Roy Shelby’s shack — three rooms and made of unpainted wood — and nobody answered Ballard’s knock. Cutting across the sloping ground to the next shack through the wind-torn sheets of rain, Ballard slipped and landed on his butt and roiled all the way down to the next house in the mud. He felt like an old war-movie character as he cursed his way up to the front door.

A mid-twenties woman in a bathrobe and smelling of Herbal Essence shampoo answered his knock and listened to his tale about being a friend of Roy’s and having a flat tire and... “Well... Roy, he’s still driving for the lumber camp, you know. They’re working today even though it’s Sunday. You ask for my husband — that’s Chuck Farber — you ask at the loading dock there, and he can tell you where Roy’s working at.”

The lumber camp was two more miles further in, on a dozen cleared acres deep in the redwoods. There was a sawdust burner with a screened stack to keep sparks in, and a sawing shed full of wet, rough logs. Chuck Farber was a massively-muscled man in a stained lumberjack shirt spattered with fresh wet sawdust, as if he’d been in a wind tunnel. “Roy’s been havin’ some personal troubles lately—”

“Not from me, he hasn’t,” said Ballard.

Farber bought his story. Yet another two miles down the road, past the gas station and the two-story hotel. Up the hill, and the first gravel road to the right. After the bridge a mile in, left.

Ballard took a good look at what the logging trucks had done to the muddy road down into the deep woods beyond the bridge, and decided to hike in from there. Within a few yards he was making tracks like Bigfoot because of the great mud boots his shoes had started wearing. Damn Dan Kearny, oh, just damn Dan Kearny.

When one of the huge, grumbling logging rigs came up the track by him, he yelled “Roy?” at the driver. The truck stopped. The driver said in a wary voice, “Who’s asking?”

“I’m trying to get in touch with Rose. It’s important.”

“You come all the hell back in here to ask about Rosie?”

Ballard told his story and Shelby, a wiry black-haired man with quizzical eyes, loosened up considerably. “She married a wop this time around, name of Angelo Palermo. But are you sure you gotta see her in person? Mail gets delivered three times a week up to their place.”

“Gotta see her.”

“Okay, then there’s two ways in. Either through Bridgeville — ten-twelve miles further down the road here — or all the way back up through Eureka to Arcata, and then in through Kneeland. You got four-wheel?”

Ballard shook his head.

“Then go in through Kneeland, cause it’s mud all the way from Bridgeville. Last week you could of made it but we been gettin’ some moisture these past few days.”

“I hadn’t noticed!” shouted Ballard above the roar of falling rain.