Writings

Whistler, who owned the Main Street Kite Shop, had known my father for nearly ten years the summer he gave him a kite that looked like a huge, ugly, black monster flying over the beach. Under a whale-sized shadow, kids gathered around Charlie’s legs and said, “Look at that thing. It looks like it’s up there with the airplanes. Look at it!”

My father was kind of skinny guy, but he was tall, with a salt and pepper beard, blazing blue eyes that matched the ocean, and abdominal muscles as tight as a teenager’s. Cricket, who had gotten lead poisoning while he was a Chicago house painter, would follow behind Charlie, staying close to the blue-black water. Cricket told people he’d been a famous arsonist, although as far as the town regulars could find out on the Internet, he’d never committed a crime in his life. He wore a thin, blonde, ponytail, surrounded by a shaved head and mumbled “Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare,” toward the waves, before he tried to pan for gold in the ocean.

A rich lady with a time share, who visited the beach every summer without her husband, sent her son running toward my father. Then she chased after her son. Her large breasts bobbled in her tight bikini top as she ran. “Hey Charlie,” she said, after she reached my father. With a bare foot she drew a circle in the sand. She stood up straighter as she slowly lengthened her slim, tan, leg from her waist. “Did you do something new to your kite? Isn’t that a new tail on the end, there?”

“Huh?” Charlie said. He pointed at the ocean, pretending the waves were too loud, pretending he couldn’t hear what she said.

I stood beside my father, pulling at loose threads on my cut-offs, my thighs and shoulders tingling from the sunburn I’d gotten the day before. Then I walked over to Cricket to get some gold- panning lessons and give my father some privacy.

Cricket grinned, a tiny strand of tobacco between his stained teeth, as I walked toward him. When I reached Cricket’s favorite gold-panning spot, he put his skinny arm around my shoulders to give me a hug, his long beard braided in a thin strand that reached his breastbone. “Don’t worry Audrey,” Cricket said, slipping the leather strap from his congas over my shoulder. “She tries that with every guy at the beach. He won’t fall for that shit. You need to learn to drum.”

I gingerly slapped out some awkward beats while the beach home lady shrugged, lay a blanket out in the sand directly in Charlie’s way, opening the pages of a novel. Her son began building a sand castle. Charlie scowled, as he rocked the string holder back and forth to keep his kite flying, and backed away slowly.

“I don’t believe in women anymore,” my father whispered when he reached us. “They’re too much trouble. You’re the only female in my life. Don’t leave me alone with that crazy lady.”

Cricket nodded at me and headed farther down the beach, his fingers running through the meditation beads in his sweatshirt pocket like a wiggling gerbil, his conga drum strapped across his bare, sunburned chest.

“Hope you find some gold today,” my father yelled out, as Cricket walked away.
It was the summer I turned fifteen.

Charlie had moved out to the Washington Coast from Las Vegas, ten years earlier, after he and my mother split up. My father had lived in Nevada since he’d come home from the Vietnam War to move in with his uncle, while he tried to stop having nightmares.

Charlie’s uncle was an iron worker who helped build the Las Vegas playground into a Disneyland for adults during the seventies. “When I was welding,” Charlie would say. “I pulled that mask over my face, lit the torch to seven hundred degrees, and watched the rest of my life melt away.” He would point at a picture pinned to his beach tent. In the yellowed, torn, photo, Charlie stood outside his uncle’s work shop holding a Darth Vader hood in one hand and a desert rat in the other, the shop surrounded by sujaro and Eschevaria cacti, palm trees, and scads of geckos and rodents. “We tried to turn half of them into pets because there were so few people out there,” Charlie said.

My father’s uncle was the only person he trusted until he met my mother Avenue. She was really pretty; she had long black hair and she strip danced in a small town in the Sierras. She had come to Nevada on vacation to check out the nuclear bomb testing sites and would never go back home.

Avenue didn’t talk of her dancing career until they ran into one of her old boyfriends at a Willie Nelson Casino show and he told my father everything. My dad didn’t give a shit by then, though. It turned out okay.

She and my dad split up, not because she’d been a strip dancer, but because she didn’t want to be poor any longer, and since she still wore pretty, thick, long hair and men found her beautiful, she married a rich guy who owned a mortgage company. She remembered her dance moves and her new husband liked them a lot. I could hear the two of them at night. In their house with too many rooms I felt afraid at night, and I huddled up outside their door and slept on the carpet. Before they woke up in the mornings, I crawled back in bed. They never caught me huddled up outside their bedroom door.

On the beach, after my father got out of the way of that married lady’s long, tan, legs, we watched the ugly kite the rest of the afternoon, watched it dip and sway before moving clouds until it was nearly time for the sunset. Then, while I reeled the kite in, Charlie jogged the few blocks to the bookstore to pick up his pet bird “Gopher,” a green Macaw from Columbia. Gopher could mimic engine sounds and other bird calls and coyote sounds, but refused to speak human words no matter how hard my father tried to teach him.

As my father walked back down the street, he kept Gopher tucked in his jacket, protected from the evening wind blowing in. When he reached me, I had the kite tied up and the lines rolled up neatly.

Charlie, Gopher, and I liked to watch the sunsets to see if we could spot a green light that flashes across the edge of the ocean just after the sun dips below the horizon when there aren’t any clouds in the sky. Most people only catch the green flash every few years, so tourists don’t know about it. We sat on a log with charcoal ends from midnight campfires. Sand, salty waves and empty crab shells left by tourists smelled like summer.

My father gave Gopher his English lesson.

“I’m an angry, hungry, bear,” Charlie said, his lips barely an inch from Gopher’s beak.

“He knows you’re not a bear,” I said. “That’s why he won’t talk. And maybe you shouldn’t have named him Gopher. Gawd, Dad. That’s so lame.”

“You try then.”

Gopher preferred imitating the crashing waves.
With salt water lapping at his ankles, Cricket was playing his conga drums, his elbows and shoulders rattling out a frantic, awkward beat. He believed the luckiest hours for panning were right at sunset and sunrise, he believed the right rhythm would separate gold from the sand.

“It’s almost time,” my father said. “Don’t blink … keep your eyes wide open … or you’ll miss it.” He kept Gopher out of the wind, a black and red Carhardt gently warming Gopher’s wings.

It was easier for me to catch the magic light, which meant I saw twice as many flashes as Charlie.

“It’s not green like a fir tree,” I told my father. “It’s the color of apples, like old glass bottles, like beach grass. Last time it was darker. Could it be a space ship landing way out there?”

The first ten years Charlie lived in Rocky Beach, he carried Gopher around with him wherever he went, while he still worked the vacation rentals. The eight or nine small cabins facing Paradise Creek were a hometown operation. My father’s job was to make sure people didn’t break in a steal things when the cabins were closed up for the winter, make sure other beach bums didn’t homestead to get out of the winter wind. In the springtime, Charlie pruned roses and fruit trees. Summers, he mowed lawns and picked berries to sell in the rent shack. Back then, Whistler was the maintenance man, before he opened the kite shop. He fixed broken pipes, fixed holes in walls, set up rat traps and tarred sections of leaky roofs.

After sunset, my father helped him finish things up.

Harley, the former owner of the rustic retreat, an old hippy like my dad, kept one of the cabins vacant so he could use it as a brewery. On hand-made labels, Harley drew a made-up, Chinese-healing sounding name: “Ginsingluk.” During sunset, when tourists came out of souvenir shops and the bars, Harley hooked a cart to the back of his sand bike and rode slowly down the beach. As the sunset lovers traded a few dollars for his amber bottles, he smiled with his large teeth, and explained the secret main ingredient: marijuana tincture.

Harley kept a big barn turned into a shop—near his own house two blocks off the beach—and he let my father set up his welding equipment there, to keep his skills up. In the old barn, a stack of smashed beer cans climbed three-quarters up the red walls. A small TV sat on a shelf tuned to a baseball game, and Harley and Cricket sat in the overstuffed chairs, a blue and white styrofoam cooler of beer resting between them.

“It’s your birthday,” Cricket said to Harley, “tomorrow…. so I brought you a present.” He handed Harley a white envelope with an old address scratched off, Harley’s name written in red with a large marker.

Harley unfolded the paper while he slipped the cigar he was smoking to the side of his mouth, pressed his lips together tightly to hold it.

On the page, hand written letters read: “Official Land Deed, A two-acre Gold-Mine on the Salmon river is hereby bequeathed to Harley Rogers on this 29th day of June.” Beneath the letters, a small map was neatly drawn from Hwy 121 to a small plot of land on a salmon river in Southern Idaho. On the map, small cabins were given windows and doors and tree varieties stood at alternating heights, thin needles labelled Douglas fir, and gangly red branches labelled Viney Maple; tree stubs, and shrubs, penciled in, edging a dirt road. The shack at the gold mine was colored in yellow with a red trim.

‘Damn,” Harley said raising his eyebrows. “Are you shitting me? You own a gold mine?”

Cricket nodded silently. “You own it now, buddy.”

Harley got up and leaned over to hug Cricket and slap him on the back. “That’s damn nice of you … handing it off to me like this.”

“I thought you would take better care of it than my relatives,” he said. “My family’s worthless. They’re all criminals.”

Harley walked over to my father and pulled on his arm. I watched them walk quickly to the far side of the house where they started laughing so hard they were falling against each other, hugging like graduates, and slapping each other on the backs, my father’s thin frame dwarfed by Harley’s two-hundred and seventy pound biker-body. A few minutes later, when they walked back to the barn, I watched Harley wipe at his eyes and try to stop chuckling while he focused on the baseball game and chugged a beer in two gulps.

“That’s the best gift I’ve ever received,” Harley said after awhile. “It’s priceless.”

Cricket nodded, chewing on his lower lip. He took out his meditation beads and began quietly mumbling.

I realized then, that the gold mine was just like Cricket’s imaginary friends and the houses he felt sad about burning down. I felt sorry for him, felt mad at my dad and Harley for laughing and being mean.

Harley didn’t know anything about running a cabin resort, though, and pretty soon he ran out of money and lost it. Some bigwig Californians came in, burned the rustic cabins down, turned the property into a six-story playground for weddings or corporate vacations – big, noisy parties that keep the neighbors up all night. After my father’s cabin got burnt down, we set up a tent on Harley’s property and lived in it year round.

“We used to have three types of people who came to town,” Charlie said when we turned up the gas lamp in the evenings. “We had guests, we had visitors, and we had tourists – but the people who stay in that resort – we won’t even call them tourists.”

I knew I wasn’t ever going to have to work there, because the summer I turned seventeen, right before my last year in high school, Charlie taught me how to weld.

My father led me to the back side of Harley’s shop and pulled out a black metal screen to stand between us and Harley and Cricket. I pulled a huge welding hood over my eyes. When he flipped open a plastic eye shield, I did the same thing so we could talk to one another, until we turned up the torch.

“Now listen,” my father said. “What happens is that the sparks are gonna fly up and scare you. But don’t flinch or you’ll mess up the solder. The sparks won’t hurt you as long as we clean the metal off good.” He had me dressed in so many layers of leather that I could barely move my arms, anyway. I was way too stiff to flinch.

Welders have to make sure solder heats up high enough before they run it along a seam; when it’s done right, the mixture of tin and lead appears shiny and smooth as its cooling down, but if you move the rod too fast, with solder that’s not hot enough, the metal looks grayish and leaves sharp, ugly points. The best thing about welding is that you can generally fix things with the tip of the iron if it’s not perfect the first time.

That summer, I learned to heat the torch to 374 degrees, to weld copper into daisies or roses and lamp bases. Within a few months, I was selling my copper olive-oil lamps on Third Avenue at the Sleepy Cove Bookstore. Olive oil won’t smudge up white walls. It makes a pretty, smoke-free light.

My father thought I might be able to join the welders union one day, something he never got around to doing, but one of his female friends, who worked on bridges, told him it’s still pretty rough out there for female quotas.

“If a woman’s too good at what she does,” my dad told me. “If she’s a better welder than some of the guys are, they’ll steal her tools. Or they’ll tell her the foreman wants her to weld pipes together that aren’t in the blueprints. They’ll cut a chain holding a part she’s welding together to burn her. They’ll do anything to get her fired.”

So my father helped me learn to make jewellery and olive oil lamps instead.

We started working twelve hours per day making our oil lamps. My father payed Cricket to ride up and down the beach delivering them to shops along the way. After a long day of welding, as soon as we hit the sleeping bag, we’d be out like a light until the staticky rock and roll started up at the six-story resort down the street. Electric guitars and a base drum playing from squeaky loudspeakers so loudly that so you couldn’t hear the waves.
It was starting to sound like Las Vegas downtown:

This was supposed to be the Washington Coast, not sin city.

My father would say, “Audrey, get the phone book. Call the FBI, call the CIA, call the Governor; let’s hire Cricket to burn the place down.”

The Rocky Beach City Council members weren’t local, so they didn’t care about the people who had to get up early and go to work. It was money they were interested in. Since the City Council wouldn’t even build a skate park for the kids across the street from the Rocky Beach grocery store, why would they make big money follow an eleven p.m. noise curfew?

My father and some of the neighbors finally called the cops when the resort music went on past three a.m., but they wished they could have taken care of it themselves.

When the oncologist diagnosed my father’s cancer, he refused to take the poisonous chemotherapy they prescribed for his lymphoma. On the Internet, Charlie met a woman who studied herbology in the mountains of Peru for almost a decade and healed her own son of brain cancer. She said he could help out on her organic farm outside of Puerto Vallarta in exchange for her healing, if he could come up with the money to get to Mexico.

“Chemotherapy costs a ton of money I don’t have and kills you anyway,” Charlie said. “If I use herbs I might die, but at least I won’t feel like shit until the very end. And I plan on coming home healed. I’m going to swim in the warm salt water and make love to women in Spanish and eat a lot of mangoes,” he said.

One Wednesday morning after he’d gotten the cancer news, after there’d been a huge storm warning that pretty much cleared out the hotel, Charlie got up at sunrise to fly his kite at the city park. Mornings following large storms were a good time to walk around town in the quiet because most of the tourists hadn’t come back yet.

He lit a cigarette and walked the white string out a ways before he took off running across the grass. Even with his slow-growing cancer my father ran fast – outran the track team during sprinting practice when he coached at the high school. And he got that ugly, too-long, dragon-shaped monster kite lifted up higher than the fog lights on the radio tower at the airport in just a short time.

He paced around some, reeling the line and moving it back and forth in front of his chest gracefully, drinking a little breakfast whiskey and enjoying the sunrise in the peace and quiet. But then something terrible happened, the wind died down-suddenly-just like that, and his kite started falling away from the clouds.

At the edge of the park, over a twenty-foot high chain-link fence, alien-looking metal houses with wires and knobs sticking out everywhere were the power breakers for all of Rocky Beach.

My dad tried to reel the line in as fast as he could.

The huge kite flew over the schoolhouse and missed the maple trees. He ran fast across the grass, feeling pretty sure he could run around the edges of the fence, and guide the kite to the parking lot, but then the kite dropped all at once like a dead goose. The damp kite draped its dragon body across the circuits and there was a blanket of small bursts of red and blue fire, like a field of firecrackers that never made it very high off the ground, going off all at once. He’d knocked all the power out for the entire peninsula with his big kite.

Loud noises from the huge explosion brought everyone out of the breakfast cafes and there was smoke and the firemen came and the police. A wet-silver smell of burning metal in the cool air replaced dewy beach fog.

“Jesus Christ, Charlie.” said Arthur Hornyak, one of the policemen. “Don’t you know you aren’t supposed to fly kites in the city park. Stay on the beach with those things. They’re dangerous.”

Linemen collected as many pieces as they could find, strewn through the breakers, to give to Charlie for a souvenir. He stitched them together and hung them outside our tent in the woods.

That winter was one of the coldest winters we’d suffered at the beach, it felt too cold for Gopher, under the tent.

Before he left for Mexico, Charlie had to put Gopher up for adoption.

I remember the day he sent Gopher off on the bus to go and live with his new owners; he tucked his head low into his jacket like Gopher did when they walked the beach together most afternoons.

The new owners made Charlie sign papers saying he’d give up all rights to his pet, and he kept reading the sentences over and over to me, as we sat drinking hot chocolate in a cafe by the boardwalk. “Under no condition will Gopher’s previous owner try to contact the new caretakers by phone, letter, or in person, and he will have no rights from this day forward in regards to the Macaw we are describing herein.”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to participate in Gopher’s life,” Charlie said, striking matches, one by one, against a thin sulphur strip, holding them up to his lips to blow out slowly. “See how healthy Gopher is. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t get to take the bus down to Dark Sands beach to visit him.”

That same winter, Harley, who still believed in women, got into a fight with his girlfriend who sang jazz scat at The Last Stop Tavern every other weekend. After their fight, the girlfriend wrote Harley a letter and mailed it to the shop. In it she called my father’s friend a “lazy slob, a drunk, and a two-timing gambler.”

Charlie listened to his buddy read the letter all the way through. Without saying anything, my father bent down and crawled into his tent to pull out the tin box he kept Gopher’s adoption papers stored in.

A propane torch we used to practice welding hung in a lean to under a fifty-year-old fir tree.

An evening wind rustled the branches and shook leftover morning rain onto my father’s shoulders as he ducked into the shelter to find the torch. A few minutes later, he handed the crook-necked metal handle to me, and said, “Fire that sucker up.” Cricket stood beside me, looking at the torch longingly, so I handed it to him, instead. “I use that thing all day. You take it.”

I asked if we could make costumes first by weaving leaf stems together to wear like necklaces as if we were forest spirits. My father tied Harley’s long hair back with a piece of string to keep it from catching on fire and we slid the extra hood over his long gray curls before we pulled our own hoods over our faces.

Using clothespins, we hung Harley’s letter and my father’s pet-adoption papers from a metal wire we’d tied between two trees to dry our clothes on. The branches were high enough we needed to climb a ladder to reach the clothespins.

Cricket held the torch toward the dark sky and I remember bright flames shooting through layers of paper like a meteor. Harley mailed the ashes to his angry girlfriend and told her he didn’t care how mad she got at him, he still loved her; he told her to plant a tree with her angry words so she could transform her negative energy.

My father buried the ashes from Gopher’s adoption contract around a wild strawberry plant and built a campfire. At midnight, after he’d finished a half-pint of whiskey, he told us the story about the day he lost his bird and the day Whistler gave him a big, black monster kite.

At the end of the winter, we’d saved enough money for Charlie to move to Puerto Vallarta, to live off his social security income, and heal himself with South American herbs from the Rain Forest. He boarded the Green Tortoise hippie bus headed for Baja and then Guadalajara.

“Como Esta, Mija,” Charlie emailed from Mexico City. “That means, ‘How are you my daughter,’” he wrote. I would go to The Last Stop Tavern to use the free Internet there.

“My body is being replaced by brand-new, cancer-free cells,” he said when he called from his landline in Puerto Vallarta. “You won’t even recognize me pretty soon.”

The next week, from a neighbor’s sailboat, he emailed, “But no one is ever going to make me stop drinking whiskey.”

One day, at The Last Stop Tavern, a contractor from the noisy resort walked in to join a dart tournament. His phony smile had those perfectly straight, white, Californian teeth.

“Hey, tell all your customers,” he told Ivy, the bartender, “Tell them we just built a man-made lake so tourists can catch a salmon to take home or smoke without having to get sea sick.”

“How the hell do the fish like that noisy D. J. music?” Cricket barked out.

While my father was healing his cancer, feeding ripe mangoes to pretty Latina women in Mexico, I often couldn’t sleep during the noisy resort parties. I used Harley’s phone to call my father’s landline in Puerto Vallarta.

He told me to get out of bed, to walk out to the shop and weld.

He said the herb harvest this year was one of the most profitable they’d had in ten years. They were even going to pay him, so he would send me a check at the end of the summer. But you better prepare for the next time there’s a power outage, he said. “Work really hard so you can keep one closet full of extra lamps ready, just in case. Imagine it as if you were a freightliner not too far away. With the power out, it looks as if the ocean reached further inland, as if there weren’t a peninsula at all. Now, imagine all of the windows in town suddenly lighting up with your sweet-smelling, smudge-free, copper, lamps. Imagine the power going out in the middle of a California wedding, and you walking into the hotel lobby with a beer-wagon full of light.”

Loretta is a massage therapist and etsyier who lives in Portland, Oregon near the Willamette River and the Smith and Bybee Lakes Bird Sanctuary. She is finishing her MFA in writing at the Rainier Writing Workshop and completing her novel about three wounded healers living in a logging town. You can find her handmade journals, tea towels, and photographs at http://www.portlandia.etsy.com.

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