The Hauntings of Hood Canal

The Complications of Love

On sunny days the Canal glosses over with a sheen of darkest green, and islands in the flooded landscape rise like wet clumps of moss above the darkness. The Canal covers all sorts of things acquired from the land: automobiles, boats, ships, tools, beer bottles, drowned kittens, corpses, crashed airplanes, sunken buoys, stolen electronics, wedding rings cast by the divorced and depressed, incriminating evidence, pistols, shotguns, rifles, hypodermics, butcher knives, as well as great numbers of other byproducts of the greatest civilization ever seen in all the history of the universe.

In the Canal’s depths, and they are deep, tumble more wrecks than we know. On the surface fishing boats cluster near tidal beaches where salmon runs grow thinner with each passing year, and where, in their seasons, shrimp and crabs and bottom fish are dragged flopping and gasping to the surface.

On dark days the Canal seems more itself. Waters ruffle before the wind, and breakers pound against the Hood Canal Bridge, against the shores, against the islands. Ships come down the Canal, Coast Guard icebreakers, Navy frigates, and atomic powered submarines. The Navy tells us a single sub carries more firepower than has been discharged by all the navies in all of history. Hard to believe, and sort of meaningless. Any boy on a schoolyard can tell you that it ain’t how much you swing, but where do you hit?

By the time Petey pulled onto the gravel lot at Beer and Bait, the westering sun stood smack dab on the mountaintops. On the last day of July that means a little after eight PM. Cars and pickups filled the lot, and from inside came the lonesome sound of guitars. The tape deck in the bar broadcast a country singer mourning loss; and perhaps the loss was a Cadillac, or maybe only a lover. Petey sat in his Plymouth, listened to imitation sorrow from the tape deck, and became aware that he had changed. For years, having made his living in the presence of fiddles that sounded like scalded cats, he did not even hear bar music. Now, though, he wished for nothing but silence, Bertha, and his dog. Petey asked himself if it was time to settle down, buy a little store or something, and pull a few hustles on the side. In other days such an idea would fill him with revulsion. Now the idea seemed almost smart. He told himself he was going through a phase. The road takes something out of a man.

Across the lot, two figures sat on the hood of a pick up as they soaked up last rays of sunlight. One appeared to be a fisherman, and the other bulked too big to be anyone but Sugar Bear. Petey climbed from the Plymouth and trudged toward them. He figured Sugar Bear would catch him up on the news and the fisherman would try, although fishermen are definitely at a disadvantage:

Fishermen, like hustlers, are often away for a month at a pop. While they are away news gets elaborated. While there’s not much time for talk on a fishing boat, there’s plenty of time for folks to misinform poor fishermen when the boat hails into port. Then, of course, the fishermen have to revise everything by asking quest ions. A new round of embroidered news lies waiting to greet the next returning boat. After a few boats arrive, the stories get as confused as trail mix. When blank spaces appear in a story, even an honest fisherman has to make things up.

This fisherman turned out to be the thoughtful one, and he scooched over to make a spot on the hood of the truck. “Petey,” the fisherman said, “do I just keep missing you, or the other way around?” The fisherman had been ashore for a while. His hair shone clean and he did not smell all that bad.

“I been to the big city,” Petey told him. “I’m glad nobody’s revoked your bail.” Petey eased up onto the hood, looked across the fisherman to Sugar Bear, and realized he’d screwed up with his crack about bail. “Things steady out your way?”

“The usual,” Sugar Bear said, but didn’t sound like he meant it. He looked at the last sunlight like a man headed for eternal darkness. His huge shoulders slumped. His hair, furry and curly, brown and thick, fluffed over his ears. His beard curled beneath a furry mustache, and his brown eyes filled with sorrow. He watched the sunlight like a man who sees it for the last time.

“You’re a smart guy,” the fisherman said to Petey. “We were just discussing women.”

“Actually, not exactly women,” Sugar Bear said. “It’s more like a what-the-hell-do-I-do-next discussion.”

“Because Sugar Bear has a thing for Annie,” the fisherman explained.

“And Sugar Bear is headed for jail sure as a bear craps in the woods.” Sugar Bear squinched up his face, which meant that a lot of hair moved around and his eyes blinked. “Suppose I tell her,” he said, “and suppose she likes me, which maybe that could happen, but maybe not. Then, when I make the slammer, she’s left behind. That wouldn’t be right. Everybody knows that. Hell, I know that.”

“I wouldn’t own your conscience if they gave me a winning lottery ticket,” the fisherman told him. “I wouldn’t keep your conscience unless I owned thirty damn churches.”

“Even if somebody gets shouting-drunk, and blabs, the cops would only have a b.s. story,” Petey said. “The cops don’t know the dead guy and the car are there. You’re hustling yourself.”

“You did that punk a favor,” the fisherman told Sugar Bear. “He didn’t suffer. You saved a fishing boat some trouble. The guy was a goner no matter how you slice it.”

“The cops will find the car,” Sugar Bear told Petey. “You ain’t been here. The cops got divers pulling out wrecks. They’re going through that water like you run tranny fluid through a strainer.” Music moaned through the open doorway of Beer and Bait, something about love letters stashed behind a commode. “Besides,” Sugar Bear said, “that’s not exactly the problem. I got to live with this.”

“You ought to talk to Annie,” Petey told him. “It looks like she has a stake.”

“Annie talks to bugs,” Sugar Bear said, as if he were explaining something.

“In other words,” the fisherman said thoughtfully, “we’re talking about you having a case of the hots. I figured we talked long term.” He made a motion to slide off the hood of the pickup, then decided to wait for an answer. On the Canal the first suggestion of mist hovered on the surface.

“You don’t get it,” Sugar Bear told him. “I like it that she talks to bugs. I like it that she’s a nut. That stuff don’t bother me. It’s actually kind of cute.”

“Long term?”

“Sure, long term. But girls who talk to bugs must be conning themselves, because you sure can’t con a bug. If I ask her, she’ll maybe con herself. Then I get busted…”

“I been missing my dog,” Petey said. “Is he okay?”

“What the hell does that mean?” Sugar Bear seemed ready to apologize, or fight, or run and hide.

“You can’t predict what will happen ten minutes from now,” Petey told him. “You’re trying to arrange her whole life, and your whole life forever. And I thought I could hustle.”

The fisherman slid off the hood of the truck. “Get off your back pockets and propose, or take her to a movie, or something.” Music from Beer and Bait sobbed, lonesome as a lost man in a desert, sitting beside his dying horse.

“I’m feeling sort of fatalistic.”

“I’m not sure,” the fisherman said thoughtfully, “that Annie’s the biggest kid in these parts. And you, a full-grown man.”

The three men watched the forest go dark, while at their backs a little light still lay across the Canal; light reflected from high clouds, and from trees and buildings on the far side. A couple of outboards piddled along like moving specks, but the surface of the Canal lay otherwise deserted and calm. Sugar Bear slid from the hood of the pickup, seemed uncertain whether to go inside Beer and Bait, or head for home. Petey slid down to stand beside him. “I really do miss my dog,” he said to Sugar Bear. To the fisherman he said, “You comin’ in?”

“I’ll be there directly,” the fisherman told him. The fisherman watched as Petey and Sugar Bear trudged across the lot, and the fisherman thought neither one looked like a man with a happy thirst. If he had to choose a word to describe them, he thought, that word would be “beleaguered.”

And no doubt the fisherman felt beleaguered as well. As Petey and Sugar Bear disappeared through the open doorway of Beer and Bait, and as the music changed to twanging sobs because some guy’s lady ran off in some other guy’s Peterbilt, the fisherman walked to the side of Beer and Bait, hesitated, then moved slowly to the bank of the Canal.

Perhaps he only came to watch the show, as water humped and carried on. It may be he wondered why the thing that humped out there never bothered with anything on the surface, and he surely wondered why it did not bother police divers. As darkness slowly descended over the face of the Canal, the fisherman, accustomed to deep water, and accustomed to not thinking of their depths—because sailors don’t—surprised himself by thoughts of coldness, darkness; the eternal night lying at the bottom of the Canal.

He shivered, but not with cold or fear. He knew about cold, having spent a good deal of his life offshore. He knew about fear, because there are things that happen offshore so scary that no witchery on the Canal could equal them. In his day, the fisherman’s long lines had brought from the depths colorful creatures, gasping and strange. The lines snagged an occasional carcass, sea lion, or seal, or other things. Since much of this happened in mist, and since mist is ghostly, the fisherman (like most of his clan) had seen many-a-thing walking across the water, some of those things vaguely human. A little problem like water humping on the Canal would not occupy this fisherman for long.

Something bothered him, though. It may be… it just might be, that although Annie scared him, this fisherman also had a thing for Annie. It might be that the studly talk that goes on aboard boats or in bars does not actually tell much about the boldness of the average guy; although, of course, this fisherman thought of himself as higher-than-average.

And so he probably asked himself why, if weird things of the sea did not scare him, and the thing in the Canal did not scare him, how come a pretty girl had him tied in fearful knots?

Because, he told himself, the whole deal was hopeless. Even if he had a “sort of a thing” for Annie, he somehow knew Annie was infatuated with Sugar Bear. Besides, the fisherman told himself, he was probably too old for her, anyway. Still, the whole deal made him about as sad as a cynical guy can allow himself to get.

He turned toward Beer and Bait, while at his back, water began to hump and spread. He figured everything was working out about the way it should. Annie was almost surely a stay-at­-home type, and would rather hang around boilerplate in a warm shop, than sit in a small house waiting for a man who made his living at sea.