In the meantime, he still had a store to run.

  He found that the general store was the place on the island that he loved best. Dotty was down there now, seeing to the needs of the guests. He liked the store the best because it gave him tangible proof of his growing success. Every pack of Lucky Strikes he sold brought the chime of the cash register. Every tube of toothpaste he sold to a forgetful vacationer put a little dent in his debt.

  It wasn’t a long walk to the general store from the aquatorium, but it was a quiet one. Everyone was at the aquatorium, as they should be. The chill wind whipped around him, reminding him of the slow winter months. Few people wanted to make the trek over the Cascade mountains in the winter, and the ones who did weren’t keen on things like swimming. Yes, the winter months had been rough.

  He stepped up to the general store, and his eyes marked the sign he had frosted onto the glass himself. Three lines, one above the other. Watch us grow. He didn’t know what had possessed him to post the sign, but it lifted his heart every time he saw it. As he stepped onto the wooden porch of the store, he saw a boy in a bathing suit go darting by, panic on his face.

  “Did it open already, Mr. Stensrud?” the tow-headed boy called. Johnson was his last name, but he had forgotten his first name.

  “It’s up and running,” he called with a smile.

  The boy hustled past as if the world behind him were on fire, and J.S. stepped into the store, the door making the bell above the door chime. Dotty spun around and gave him a smile. He imagined it was like the ones she had given him before the incident, but he knew it wasn’t. He might never see that smile again, that carefree, innocent smile.

  But he smiled back. They were doing the best they could. It was all they could do.

  “How did it go?” Dotty asked.

  “It was a smashing success,” he said, feeling as if he were actually underselling it.

  “Oh, wonderful darling.”

  J.S. stepped behind the counter, and slid behind Dotty, gently placing his hands on her shoulders as he slid past her. He grabbed his apron from a rack, and he tied it on.

  "Do you mind if I go take a nap?” she asked.

  “Headaches again?” he asked.

  She nodded, and he could see the tension around her eyes.

  “You go ahead, get some rest. I’ll hold down the fort.”

  She placed a gentle hand on his arm in thanks, and he treasured it. She undid the straps of her apron and pulled it over her head. He took it from her and hung it on the rack. She exited without looking over her shoulder, and he sat down on the stool behind the counter. It felt good to sit. So much of his time at Beachdale involved him walking and talking to guests. He sighed and pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from the box.

  He had taken up smoking some months ago, after he had made his promise to Dotty. He knew she didn’t like it, but dagnabbit, he needed some sort of release every now and then, and if it wasn't whiskey, then it would be cigarettes. He packed the cigarettes on the palm of his hand, and not expecting any business for the next hour or so, he rounded the counter and stepped out onto the porch. With his head down, and one hand cupping the end of the cigarette to block it from the wind, he managed to light the cigarette. He took a deep burning puff, pulled the cigarette from his lips, and spit a couple of stray grains of tobacco onto the gravel parking lot.

  From the corner of his eye, he spied something hanging in the air. He turned his head slowly to the left, and spied a small smoke cloud wafting through the air. The cloud wasn't his. He turned his head even farther to the left and spied her. She stood with her head down, a burning wick of wood held to the bowl of a long metal pipe. Feathers hung from the pipe, and its metal body was banded by a thin cord of leather around its middle. The old woman's lips puffed in and out as she inhaled the smoke. When she finished, she held the pipe before her, lifting it up and down in the air. She muttered words, small and inaudible, and tiny amounts of smoke escaped her lungs.

  At first, J.S. thought maybe he was losing his marbles. Then an uncommon rage swept over him. He fought it down though. He remembered what had happened the last time he had let his anger get the better of him. Before he spoke, he took another puff off of his Lucky Strike, and then threw it on the ground.

  "You have a lot of nerve showing your face around here," he said.

  The woman finished her mumbling and the pipe fell to her side. She turned and looked at him side-eyed. "I do," she said.

  "What price have you come to claim now?"

  "It is not my price," the woman said. "I only offer you help for your kind are ignorant of the ways of land."

  For the first time, he heard her, actually listened to the woman, and he thought he grasped onto an idea. Whereas before, he had only exhibited rage at the woman's presence, now he felt a sort of burning curiosity. "How am I ignorant?" he asked.

  "You are unaware of the price of land."

  Unlike other times, J.S. chose to let the woman speak. Indeed, he felt as if she had to speak.

  "The price that one pays cannot be paid for with paper and metal. It has to come from the soul. This is why my kind laughed at your people when they offered to buy our lands. Many of us took your paper and metal, laughing on the inside, for the trick that we had pulled on you."

  The Indian woman's words rattled around his head, and it finally dawned on him that her understanding of land was not what his was. The price she kept mentioning was not money, but something else.

  "But by now, you know the price of the land; you know what it requires."

  He recalled the woman's previous appearances. First, he was greeted by the image of a giant boulder, dripping blood onto the sandy turf of the Spit, turning dark and soaking into the ground as if the very earth thirsted for blood. Then the image of his own hands greeted him, blood dripping from his split knuckles and from the nose and lip of Dotty. He thought of all of the injuries that his workers had absorbed. He thought of the broken fingers, severed digits, sprained ankles, cuts and bruises that his workers continually suffered. He thought of the Grady twins, tumbling down the staircase of the Stensrud Arms, breaking their arms and leaving stains of blood on the carpet. The stains were still there, wouldn't come out no matter what he did. He thought of the shark attack that had happened in the Tillamook Bay, just off the eastern shore of the Spit. He thought of the Marrs child, swept out to sea and never seen again. And then it began to dawn on him what price the woman was talking about.

  "I know the price," he said.

  "And are you happy to pay it?"

  "No."

  "Then maybe you are not so bad after all, Guh-wa-l’he-ken."

  "What is this thing you call me?"

  "Never you mind. Are you ready to pay the price?"

  "Do I have a choice?" he asked, knowing somewhere in his heart that he was trapped.

  "No, there is no choice. The price is set."

  "How long until it is paid?" he asked, a sorrow growing in his chest.

  "It is never paid. That is the trick of the land." She smiled at him then, and patted him on the shoulder. Then she turned and walked away from him, shuffling around the corner of the building and out of sight. He had an urge to follow her, but he knew instinctually that by the time he reached the corner, she would be gone.

  His heart fluttered in his chest, and he felt weak in his knees. Above, clouds had begun to gather, swirling with the ocean winds. His eyes fell on the lighthouse in the distance, and he imagined himself living there, his worries forgotten, all concerns about money and legacies gone. Maybe he and Dotty could get right there. Maybe they could get back to what they were.

  A child tugged on his apron, and with visions of a cold night in the lighthouse in his head, he looked down at the child's face. It was an earnest face, the cheeks reddened from the cold wind. He wore no shirt, and his chest heaved as if he had been running. "What is it child?" J.S. asked amiably.

  The child, with gasping breath, pointed toward the aquatorium and said, "There's been an accident." He thanked the child, and then he stood there, not knowing what to do. He already knew what he would find. He knew that the price had been paid yet again. He undid the ties of his apron and pulled it over his head.

  Chapter 5: Indian in the Aisle

  1938

  The disaster at the aquatorium hadn't sunk him. At this point, he didn't think anything would. Though Bobby Sherwood, the lifeguard, had woken up and was still alive, he wasn't the same afterwards. He was in the hospital for months after slipping and hitting his head on the concrete side of the aquatorium. His family's lawyers had come after him and his partners saying that there had been no rules or safety standards posted in the aquatorium.

  "How is that my fault?" he had railed on the stand at the Tillamook County Courthouse. He felt like a heel about his courtroom outburst with Bobby Sherwood looking on, his crossed eyes and drooling mouth barely able to track J.S. on the stand. The red-rimmed eyes of Bobby's parents haunted him the most, but they were just looking for someone to blame for the loss of their son. Free rides. Handouts. J.S. would not be a party to it.

  J.S. had it on good authority from Cade McCormack that Bobby had been strutting around the place like a peacock, showing off for all of the ladies on hand instead of doing his job. In McCormack's whispered words, it was karma. But J.S. knew the truth. Bobby Sherwood's intelligence, verve, and vim had been the price for his land.

  In the end, the jury had let him off cheaply. He had to pay for Sherwood's medical bills, but that was it. His parents were on the hook for the rest of their lives. He wanted to feel sorry for them, but their son still lived. His own livelihood, his own mark on this world, might not be so lucky, based on the word coming from Tillamook County.

  Whatever Beachdale was, it was still a part of a larger economy. While J.S. survived on tourists, the real driving economic force of the area was the ocean. For small fishing towns around the Tillamook Bay, namely Garibaldi, Tillamook, Hobsonville, and Bay City, the ocean was their lifeline. For J.S., this fact was somewhat of a nuisance, as the only access point for these towns occurred directly to the north of the Spit. Tillamook Channel was a small channel, less than a quarter-of-a-mile wide, that saw a steady progression of ships at any hour of the day. Shipping vessels, ferries, and fishing boats all had to make their way into the bay using the Tillamook Channel, and some bigwig in Tillamook had decided that the channel needed to be protected.

  In the eight or so odd years that he had owned the Spit, no less than a dozen vessels had wrecked themselves on the shore of the channel. When the seas roiled and the wind whipped, the channel became as treacherous a passage as anything on the west coast. There were many times when J.S. had to pay overtime to his employees to go out and sweep his pristine beaches of the broken skeletons of ruined ships. He worried that one day his own ship would be added to the list of lost vessels.

  But now, the lawmakers were talking about a solution. The solution proposed by the Army Corp of Engineers was to build a jetty on the north side of the channel to help protect it from waves and to calm the seas. The towns around the bay were being asked to pay for half of it, and the taxes they were proposing to raise the money would put quite the dent in J.S.'s coffers. But he could handle it. The problem was what the Corp predicted would happen if they built the jetty. Ocean currents would change; Beachdale might be in jeopardy. His white, sandy beaches could be eroded if the current changed the way the Army Corp of Engineers predicted.

  And things were going so well. The aquatorium was filled with a hundred people a day, even in the offseason. The bungalows were constantly filled on the weekend, and some were booked for weeks on end. He was making money hand over fist at the general store, and his cut in the gas station added even more to his coffers. He had bought out one of his partners, and soon, he would be the sole owner of Beachdale. The only person left that he owed any serious money to was Cade McCormack.

  He couldn't help but feel that Beachdale was at its peak, and consequently, he was at his peak.

  He was admiring the fancy new road that had been built to carry people to the Spit. Fresh pavement (He could still smell it.) shone in the sunshine. Standing on the southern tip of Beachdale, with the ocean rolling away to his left and Tillamook Bay disappearing placidly to his right, he had no sense that anything was wrong.

  He thought, if something bad were going to happen, the island itself would clue him in. The Indian woman would appear and demand that he pay the price, which he would gladly pay. But nothing happened. The day was just another beautiful day at the beach. Puffy, cottonball clouds streamed across the blue sky. The wind blew steadily in a southerly direction, carrying the warmth from California up from the south.

  His new car shone in the sunshine, candy apple red. He had the only car like it in the county. It had been the only item he had purchased for himself in quite some time. After making a trip to Tillamook to have a word with a certain editor at a certain newspaper, he had stopped at the narrowest point of the Spit. At that spot, the road and the land it had been built upon were the only barriers between the bay and the ocean.

  A seagull squawked overhead, and he put his Lucky Strike out in the car's ashtray. He had promised himself and Dotty that he wouldn't smoke in the car, but that had lasted a little more than a week. The car started with a purr, and he puttered up his paved road, enjoying the smooth ride until the pavement ran out and he transitioned to the gravel road that he maintained around Beachdale. He parked the car in front of the general store, setting the emergency brake.

  He smiled at the sign on the front of the store. "Watch us grow indeed," he said. Inside the store, he found Dotty sitting behind the counter. Instead of her usual smile, she looked over at him with confusion on her face.

  His smile disappeared. "You ok, Dotty?"

  Her mouth fell open, and she stared blankly at him, as if someone had turned her brain off.

  "Dotty?"

  His voice elicited no response at all from his wife, and she continued to sit and stare at him. He rushed around the counter, and she followed him with that blank look on her face. When he reached her, he wrapped his arms around her and brought her close. She fought back, pummeling at his chest with one arm, the other hanging limp at her side. "Dotty! What's the matter?" he called. Eventually, she tired of fighting, and she slumped against him.

  "It's the price," a voice said in the aisle.

  J.S. swung around to spy the Indian standing between the bread and the breakfast cereal. She looked at the boxes with curiosity, picking them up and shaking them. She ripped open the top of one box, sniffed it, and then dumped cereal out on the ground.

  "What type of price is this?" J.S. asked as his wife's head lolled upon his shoulder.

  "The land doesn’t care who pays the price, just that it’s paid." She put her hand into the box of cereal and popped some into her mouth. She crunched the Rice Krispies with some curiosity and then spit the mush out on the floor. "The island says she is the price. So she is the price. Be glad it didn't take her from you entirely."

  J.S. picked his wife up by her waist, and together they wobbled out to the car. He had no time for the Indian. She was inconsequential to the health of his wife. He leaned Dotty against the hood of his car and threw the door open. Gently, he lowered her inside. He ran around the front of the car, hopped into the driver's seat, and then gunned the engine of his new car as far as it would go in order to make it to the doctor in Tillamook as fast as he could. Dotty closed her eyes, the side of her head bouncing off of the window.

  By the time the car's tires squealed to a stop in front of Doctor Mockley's house, he heard the radiator in his car bubbling, and he knew he had pushed the engine too hard. He ran around to the passenger door and pulled the unconscious Dotty from the vehicle. "Help!" he called.

  Dr. Mockley rushed out to help him, and together they pulled Dotty inside. They laid her on a bed, and a nurse ushered J.S. to a waiting area. In the waiting area, he prayed like he had never prayed before, not since the days when his own parents would drag him through the winter snows of New York to go to church.

  He thought about much in this time. He thought about abandoning everything. He thought about turning around and selling the Spit, getting whatever he could out of it. It would be a loss, but it was still a valuable piece of land, especially with all of the development he had done. Then he thought about the price that he had already paid for the land, and though a part of him still didn't believe the Indian, he knew that it would be a travesty to sell the land after all the blood and pain that had bought it. But then, he hadn't expected his Dotty to be a part of the price.

  When Dr. Mockley appeared, he told J.S. the bad news. Dotty had suffered a stroke, a pretty major one at that. She might never recover, and it was too soon to tell what the symptoms would be.

  "How soon can I take her home?" he asked.

  Dr. Mockley looked at him, and J.S. knew he had no real answer.

  J.S. slumped on the bench, and then he stood up, running a hand through his hair and composing himself. He didn't want his Dotty to see him worried, as ridiculous as that might sound. In the bedroom, he slumped next to the bed, his knees going out from under him, and he wondered if he were going to have a stroke as well. He reached out and grabbed Dotty's hand in his own. He marveled at how different it looked.

  In his mind, her hand was still thin, pale, and delicate, not this withered thing, the tendons standing out like barbed wire just under the skin. Her breathing sounded ragged, but it was deep.

  He turned her palm over and marveled at the deepness of the lines there, the dryness of her skin. He buried his face in her hand and began to sob. Dotty heard nothing. It would be another day before she woke.

  ****

  Two weeks after the stroke, J.S. was back in Beachdale with Dotty. Dotty was too weak to climb the stairs, so they had to take rooms on the bottom floor of the Stensrud Arms as opposed to their customary rooms on the top floor. Perhaps he could have an elevator installed, though he couldn't stand the wretched contraptions. If Dotty wanted to visit her old rooms now, someone would have to carry her.

 

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