The Hauntings of Hood Canal

The Wrecks—Three Views

The kid became a regular at Beer and Bait as he averaged a tow a week. His truck, all lights and hook, looked almost cautious as he hauled wrecks on a trailer. The wrecks still caused people’s hearts to go dull with fear and wonder.

The kid worked up a routine of two beers and talk at Bertha’s, because Beer and Bait is friendly. Then he hauled to the police lot outside the Capitol. Then he finished off with a beer or two at Lee’s China Bay Taverna. The kid became a kind of newspaper. He connected the south end of the road with the middle. Messages went back and forth.

“Lee’s bartender says the Canal’s no different than ever,” the kid confided to Bertha. “If something’s different, it’s not made of water. That’s a smart bartender.” The kid looked uneasy.

“…smart enough to stay away from here, anyway.” Bertha, who figures herself for smart, claimed people at the south end had no right judging what went on toward the middle. “Next we’ll hear from up north. Al’s Rough and Randy will form a posse.”

“Nothing too sober,” Petey told the kid. “Al’s is more randy than rough.”

While Bertha took to the kid in a motherly way, Petey hustled him like a father teaching a son about hazards. The kid proved brighter than he looked, catching on to Petey’s hustle in under fifty bucks. The kid, and everyone else, still shivered when looking at the wrecks.

Meanwhile, worry spread up and down the road as more local people saw more drowned cars:

Greek Annie found herself at the site of the biggest haul which was not even a car. A drowned tractor-trailer was pulled glowing like a red sunrise from beneath the water. Annie, who at twenty-two is young for a witch, and actually pretty gorgeous when she brushes her hair, watched from the woods where she gathered herbs. She muttered and promised to take a lesson about who and what she cursed. This was a wholesale grocery truck, and, while Annie could never remember cursing groceries, she thought she might have once said a word or two on behalf of trucks or truck drivers. She watched as the silver trailer slid back into dark water where it remains. She watched as the red tractor got pulled ashore. The fiberglass cab squashed inward, like someone ran it through a giant garbage compactor. When the coroner’s men pried the truck door Annie discovered that she had been watching about thirty seconds too long. She headed for Bertha’s Beer and Bait at a slow trudge, which is not her nature. Her elfin face can ordinarily find a smile, and her lithe body is that of a runner. She is often seen trotting like a college girl who jogs, hoping to impress a quarterback.

And Chantrell George, whose visions are sometimes induced and sometimes not, took no lessons; that being his nature. He walked his bike along the shoulder of the road as a little foreign car was pulled ashore, squashed like the middle part of a sandwich. Chantrell stopped to watch while keeping fast hold on his bicycle. The bike has no chain because Chantrell doesn’t ride, but it has nice baskets front and rear. He pushes it along the shoulder as he peddles legal mushrooms, saving the other kind for himself and a select group of consumers. He sometimes comes up with a stone tool, or other Indian relic, scrounged from the forest. A village lies back there beneath an ancient mudslide. The relics bring a couple of bucks. Chantrell George just misses being a deadbeat, but scrapes by on small bills and change. Plus, some nights he tends bar.

Chantrell watched the car, this one orange, and as usual he looked like a raggedy scarecrow. His long brown hair lies greasy over thin shoulders, framing a thin face that carries amber eyes alight with things that to other people are unseen.

Visions lie behind those eyes, and in a vision Chantrell saw the orange car stewing in subterranean fires of an undersea volcano. Then the car rose through dark waters as it was trailed by pink sea lions. The orange and pink caused darkness to turn to sunrise, and sunrise changed the car into a chariot pulled by giant pigeons. The pigeons gradually tired and the chariot fell toward the sun. Chantrell George pushed his bicycle away from the scene as he analyzed the vision. He walked right past two state cops. He was too busy to have time for them, and they were too busy to notice the illegal merchandise riding openly in the front basket of the bike.

Still, Sugar Bear Smith, who is pretty as his name, and as big, had it worst. Sugar Bear stumped his toe on a wreck scene as he meandered toward Bear and Bait. Sugar Bear arrived during late afternoon on one of those miserable northwest days when the thermometer hits seventy-five and proposes to go higher. Sugar Bear, whose beard and mustache are brown and furry, and whose hands can bend steel rebar, closed down his blacksmith forge, closed up his tool repair shop, and went on strike against the weather. He shambled from the woods as easygoing and smilely as a satisfied saint.

The police crane stood waiting. It snaked out a small, red­with-top-down sports car. The car came up empty. The driver’s spirit dwelt no doubt in heaven, or possibly elsewhere, but the driver’s remains were forever below in the Canal, along with all other mistakes people make in the presence of deep water.

Sugar Bear tsked, said a few prayerful words, hummed a couple bars of a hymn and felt he’d done his duty. His shamble turned into a stroll as he resumed his trip to Beer and Bait. Then his stroll ended.

A nice looking man and an attractive woman watched the red car dangle from the crane like a sea creature that has been hooked for so long it’s dead. The two were in their fifties, well-dressed, and the woman clung to her husband like someone about to slide from a cliff. He held her as close as love or fear can cause. His eyes blinked, his face ran with tears. He murmured to his wife, consoling words that did not console. Other people stood in a group, gawking. The gawkers watched the sorrow and took pleasure in sensation, like people reading headlines on papers at the grocery.

“Cheaters,” Sugar Bear said to himself about the gawkers. “Gyppers.” Sugar Bear walked quickly from the couple’s sorrow. He knows when he can help and when he can’t. If those people mourned a son or daughter lost forever in that dark water, their mourning deserved privacy. Sugar Bear walked quickly, because, while it takes a good bit to make him mad, he doesn’t like himself when he is mad. Vulgarity sometimes makes him explode. The cheaters probably didn’t know they were vulgar, and they sure didn’t know they were in danger; even if cops were present.