“Any Port in a Storm”

by Stephen Lochton Kincaid

Port Winchester is a sprinkle of old Victorian houses and clapboard saltboxes on the rocky shores of the Pacific Northwest.  It sprouted, like a fungus you could say, from the boom of the timber industry in the 1880s.  For good or bad, its lot was forever cast with the timber.  By the 1940s, the town’s three lumbermills, Packwood, Bickley, and Woolridge, were shipping out three million board feet every year, enough to build a small city by themselves.  The town survived – and sometimes even thrived – in this fashion for nearly a century. 

In the 1970s, however, the steady push for globalism and free trade began to flood the market with cheap foreign wood.  The timber industry sputtered.  By 1980, it was on life support.  And in 1989, not even ten years later, it finally flopped over and died.  In April of that year, Andy Packwood, great-grandson of Albert Frances Packwood, sadly locked the doors on the lumbermill that his great-grandfather had practically built with his own two hands.   It had been the last surviving mill since Bickley closed its doors in 1985.  (Andy Packwood, after losing his wife, his kids, and his house – the fucking trifecta, he would loudly proclaim to anyone willing to buy him a drink at the bar – would later eat the barrel of a gun in a seedy motel room outside of Seattle, staring at the water-damaged wallpaper and listening to the cicada buzz of the motel’s neon sign just outside the window).

Without the taxes from the now defunct lumber mills, the budget cuts came, fast and merciless.  Businesses shuttered.  Fewer police cars patrolled the streets.  Houses, once maintained with the loving and careful pride that is the pure domain of the wealthy or the middle class – or at least the gainfully employed – seemed to develop peeling paint and broken windows and rank lawns overnight. 

When the homeless appeared (an inevitability, really), they put up tents and lean-tos down by the crashing waves and made those rocky shores their home.  To Bill Anderson, it was as if the ocean itself had gotten sick and vomited them up.

March 1991

“My ciggies!” the skinny one cries.  “Ohogg!  You knocked my ciggies in the mud!” 

Indeed, the battered pack of Winstons was now floating in about two inches of scummy water.

“Well, go get them,” the fat one says, grinning.

The skinny one bends over, the top of his pale and decidedly hairy ass crack visible over the waistline of his jeans, and the fat one promptly kicks him in the rear.  The skinny one waves his arms in comic fashion and for one precise moment looks like a man who has fallen out of a window and is desperately trying to learn how to fly.  Then he begins to rock, loses his balance, and falls face first in the mud.

The fat one laughs uproariously at his own magnificent prank.  He holds his sides as if they might actually burst.

Meanwhile, the skinny one has found a milk crate to sit on.  His face is dripping mud.  He’s got a soggy, bent cigarette in his mouth and he’s trying to light it with a cheap plastic lighter in one shaky hand.  But he can’t quite get the angle right; the flame and the tip of the cigarette circle each other like prize fighters, never actually connecting.  He goes momentarily cross-eyed in his effort.

Now the fat one is doubled over, his laughter coming out in loud, barking guffaws.

Bill Anderson watches this Laurel-and-Hardy routine with a wary eye from the raised blinds of a back window in his restaurant.  He hasn’t gotten the shotgun – not yet – but it’s close by under the counter if he needs it.  He’s chased bums out of the alley before.  Once for masturbating out in plain sight, twice for dropping trou and taking a shit in his grass.

           The bums are partial to the alley behind Bill’s diner for two reasons.  For one, it’s convenient: it’s right off the waterfront where they like to congregate and panhandle and pitch their blue tarp tents under the night sky to sleep.  For two, there are often good meals to be found scavenging in Bill’s dumpster.  Bill Anderson has not and never will be accused of being a world-class chef (in truth, there probably isn’t much difference between his food served fresh in the diner or eaten cold out of the dumpster, the bums could attest to that), but he can flip a burger and make a decent lumberjack hash.  Bill still gets his fair share of paying customers.  It’s the only restaurant in town.

          Now the fat one has found his own milk crate and he’s sitting next to the skinny one smoking a cigarette from the soggy pack.  It looks as if they’ve made up; the fat one has got an arm thrown chummily over the skinny one’s shoulders.  The skinny one has his head in his hands and he’s looking morosely at the ground.

          Bill doesn’t like the looks of the fat one.  He’s got one big eye and one little one.  The big eye bulges obscenely and doesn’t ever seem to blink.  The eyelid on the little eye droops down until only a small sliver is visible.  The little eye is constantly gummy with tears and doesn’t seem to move; it just stares vacantly at whatever is in front of it.

          Of course, the skinny one is no looker, either.  Besides the unwashed hair and the ragged clothes he’s wearing, the skinny one has a livid scar running down his face.  Bill thinks they both used to work at one of the lumber mills, but he isn’t sure.

            It was a damn shame about the mills.  Bill’s business hasn’t been the same since.  And he still has a mortgage to pay.  Norma doesn’t take much in from her sewing, either.  They may have to cut the cable off next month.

          The fat one produces a bottle of Night Train out of his tattered pea coat and hands it to the skinny one.  The skinny one perks up.  He throws his cigarette – it was down to the filter, anyway – into the offending mud puddle and takes a swig.  The fat one, magnanimous in this gesture of camaraderie, leans back, takes a puff off his own cigarette, and stares into the blue sky, a big, dreamy, indulgent smile on his face as though he’s the last lord of creation.

          From the diner, the old-timer at the counter – only his third customer all morning – shouts: “Bill!  I want some ketchup for my eggs!”

          Bill closes the blind with an angry flip.  He’s got work to do.

          September 2003

          “That’s my shopping cart!” the bag lady screams.

          The fat one is holding the bag lady from behind in a bear hug while the skinny one rifles through the contents of the cart.  He tosses aside an old radio with a broken antenna, newspapers, cracked Tupperware, a pair of tennis shoes mended with duct tape, a plastic doll missing a leg – the alley behind Bill’s house is fairly littered now – before he finally gets to the good stuff.  From the bottom of the cart he pulls out a bottle that sloshes darkly with liquid.

          This elicits another scream from the bag lady: “NOOO!”

          She kicks the fat one’s shin hard with her heel and his grip loosens just enough for her to get away.  She takes a run at the skinny one, but he pushes her back with one hand to her face while the other one holds the bottle out of her reach.  Her arms windmill desperately for the bottle.  The skinny one is laughing.

          The fat one grabs one of her flailing arms from behind and she wheels on him, shrieking.

          “You cocksucker!”  She gets in a good kick this time, right to the gut.  The fat one doubles over and loses his supper.  In the sick-yellow glow of the alley light, it’s a black gout of fish, worms (Worms? That can’t be, Bill thinks), and oysters.  This makes the skinny one laugh harder.

It’s two a.m., and Bill has been watching this scene unfold from the bedroom window on the second story of his house for the past ten minutes.  Ever since the bag lady’s screeching woke him from the first decent night’s sleep he’s gotten in a week.  Norma, meanwhile, is a snoring lump under the covers on their bed; if her own snoring doesn’t wake her up, nothing will.

There are a lot more homeless on the streets now, and while the two homeless men down there look familiar to Bill, his brain has outright rejected the possibility that they are the same men he saw behind his diner ten years ago.  These men are much the worse for wear.  They’re dirtier, their clothes are ripped and mended with duct tape, and they seem to have lost most of their hair.  All they have left are some long, stringy clumps on their otherwise bald heads.  Also, both their faces are pallid nearly to the point of translucency.  Bill sees cataclysmic liver damage in those faces.

But the fat one has one big eye and one little eye; the skinny one has a scar running down his face.

The fat one regains his composure and grabs the bag lady from behind again.  He begins dragging her out of the relative safety of the cone of light from the alley lamp and into the darkness.  Her scream cranks up to the shriek of a fireball.  The skinny one follows with a dark smile, still holding the pilfered bottle.

Maybe I should call the police, Bill thinks.  Then he looks down and realizes his hand is actually touching the receiver of the telephone beside the bed.  He jerks his hand back as if it has burned him.  Bill isn’t prone to playing the good Samaritan.

Gah, he thinks, it wouldn’t do any good anyway.

October 2024

A lamplight blinks on.

Bill Anderson wakes up, startled.  Not because he finds himself sitting on a park bench down by the waterfront; no, he’s used to that.  Lately he’s taken to falling asleep on this bench in the afternoon and waking up while the sun is setting.  The steady boom-whoosh of the ocean is quite relaxing.  No, it’s because he can’t remember the last time he’s seen a lamplight turn on down here.  The waterfront path is lined with rusted streetlamps about every fifty feet and most of them have broken domes ringed with shards of glass, like teeth in a shark’s mouth.

The fog has rolled in in big thick sheets and the sky is leaden.  The lamplight is a tiny yellow ball hanging in the distance. 

Bill thinks, Time to get home.  He goes to rise and it’s the slow, careful exercise of the very old and infirm.  He has arthritis in his hips and he has to use a walker.  He begins his delicate shuffle back home.

At least he can still wipe his ass himself, he thinks with grim satisfaction.  Not that there’s anyone else to do it – Norma has been in the grave for six years.  She sat straight up in bed one night, clutching her chest and scaring the holy hell out of Bill.

“My heart!” she cried, as if there had been any doubt.  This was the last bit of wisdom she imparted to the living world; she promptly fell back onto the bedsheets and was gone.

He still misses her.  They got on well enough, he thinks.

“Hey bud, got a light?”

Bill is startled for the second time that day (a dangerous proposition for his straining ticker).  He hadn’t even noticed the two men sitting on the next park bench over.  It’s not surprising, though.  His hearing is bad and his eyesight is even worse.  He peers up at them.  They are completely bald, as pale as cheese, and they both have faces like trout.

The fat one has one big eye and one little one; the skinny one has a scar running down his face.

Bill stares at the ragged stub of cigar the fat one has produced and pointed at him as though he’s a lawyer making an accusation at a witness in court.  Bill hasn’t smoked in twenty years, but he still carries his lighter everywhere.  Old habit.  He digs it out of his pants pocket – it takes some effort with his clumsy old fingers – and obligingly lights the man’s cigar.

“Thanks, bud.”  The fat one takes a deep drag and leans back in the bench, a self-indulgent smile on his face.  Smoke puffs out of the gills on his neck.

Gills? You’ve gone senile old man, Bill thinks to himself.  But he gives the man a curt nod and shuffles on a little faster just the same. 

The waterfront is a homeless encampment, rife with tarps and cardboard boxes and trash strewn about in the weedy grass.  Town’s gone to hell in a handbasket, Bill thinks.  It’s a thought that’s been running on an endless track in his mind lately.  There’s no anger in the sentiment, though, just the tired sadness one reaches down at the point of utter exhaustion.  Most of the houses in town have surpassed the stage of being merely run-down and entered the state of quiet decrepitude.  The Winchester General Store out on Highway 101, home to BEER – BAIT – LOTTERY TIX as proclaimed by its faded wooden sign, is the only store left in town.  (Every week, Bill pays the neighbor kid to fetch him a supply of TV dinners from this same store because driving is a Christing agony on Bill’s hips).  When he could no longer run the diner, Bill let the county take it for $423 in back taxes; he could find no buyers for it.  It now sits vacant among a graveyard of boarded up buildings on Front Street.

Farther down the path, by the pier, he passes the bulwark that holds back the crumbling seaside cliff.  It was unmarked when Bill walked down to his bench this afternoon.  Now he finds that some vandal has spraypainted in large, scrawling red letters on the chipped concrete:

DAGON HAS ARRIVED!

ALL HAIL DAGON!

He shakes his head.  Utter nonsense, as far as Bill is concerned.

It’s grown dark, the fog has thickened, and now he can barely see the sidewalk in front of him.  Strangely, the lamplight is now over to his right.  He thinks he must have lost his bearings somehow in the fog.  He turns and follows the light.

 The ocean has pushed more sand and seaweed onto the path down here.  It mostly covers up the wood of the old pier.  Bill doesn’t notice, regardless; he’s following the light.  His walker rises and falls over the little dunes as if he’s shuffling over the ocean itself.  It’s quite lulling.

Bill walks past a fish lying in the sand.  It’s big – the size of a full-grown collie – and quite pallid.  It has vestigial arms and legs and it gawps up at him vacantly as he passes.  Bill ignores it; it’s the light Bill’s interested in.

Almost there, he thinks with some satisfaction, because surprisingly his arthritis isn’t bothering him right now.  It’s leaving him alone and he’s grateful and he’s almost home.  There’s a serene smile on his face.  The light is a yellow disc floating almost directly above him.

He doesn’t see that the light is attached to a tall, fleshy gray stalk.  Because of the fog.  He also doesn’t see that the boards of the railing surrounding the dock have been pried off and now lie in a jumble off to the side.  He just shuffles on, quite content.

And when he falls off the end of the pier, when he plunges through fifteen feet of open air and into the gaping mouth of the leviathan angler fish that’s been waiting for him there, waiting in the murky water with its lusterless black eyes and rows of yellow needle teeth entwined with rotten seaweed, patiently, almost as if it has all the time in the world, that serene little smile never leaves Bill’s face.