"Keep your eye on the oyster cannery and you'll stay on course." Clara's Gore-tex rainsuit was purple. Her wide-brimmed rainhat, in a paisley print, flopped with the boat's motion. Clara weighed down the stern of her rowboat like a Wagnerian soprano.
I squinted past her and put my back into a long, smooth pull. The oars cut the water without splashing. We were about fifty yards out from the dock, and our progress was not rapid.
Bonnie said, "Are we going to see whales?"
"The south reach of the bay is too shallow. Killer whales nose around once in a while, but they're not really whales. Dolphins." Clara settled her waterproof sketching kit onto the seat beside her. A large thermos reposed between her feet.
I envisaged the boat being nudged by a playful killer whale and caught a crab. That is to say, I mis-stroked and drew a water-spangled arc in the air with one oar. There were crabs in the area, but crabbers caught them in pots. So I was given to understand. Clara was delivering an amiable lecture on the sea life of Shoalwater Bay. I rowed.
I had been running all summer, so my legs and lungs were in good shape, but I should have been lifting weights. My arms ached and my palms smarted through the gloves Clara had made me wear. I rather thought Clara was going to row back. Or Bonnie. Or Clara and Bonnie in tandem.
The weather was dead calm and misty. Wisps of fog blurred the receding dock and the evergreen copse behind it. I kept my eyes on the white siding of the cannery. A van load of tourists gawked at us from the pier.
"I wonder if the folks in the Enclave are watching us?" Bonnie piped from behind me. She had draped herself over the prow like a figurehead. We had loaded our pails and waders into her end. I was straddling the long handles of the two clam shovels. I felt Bonnie wriggle. "That house on the point has a widow's walk."
"They'd have to use binoculars," Clara gave a flip with her left hand. "The Enclave's way over there to the north."
My oars dug below the placid surface of the water, and the boat inched onward.
Clara spent a lot of time telling us about oysters, though none of the oyster beds was open to the public. Over-harvesting and disease had destroyed the tiny native oysters in the 1920s. The larger, less succulent type now harvested was a Japanese import. Tom's oyster bed lay around the point of the island on the east side. Clara lit a cigarette and waved it grandly north and east. I glanced over my shoulder, but the island was still a blue blur in the distance.
Then she launched into a dark history of ghost shrimp. It seemed they were not good for oysters. Their numbers were increasing.
Once in a while Bonnie tossed in a question. Clara talked on. I think she was lecturing because she didn't want to brood about Matt and Lottie. After ten minutes of steady pulling, I lost myself in the rhythm and stopped my mental grumbling.
We were alone on the gleaming sheet of water. As the peninsula began to recede, a thin mist gave it the insubstantial beauty of a Japanese painting. Colors grew subtler. Gray shafts of sunlight touched little clearings and their undistinguished houses with mystery. The northern hook, the Enclave, was lost in mist. As I watched, the ferry slid into distant view, bound for the far shore and civilization. Coho Island lay about a third of the distance across the narrow southern neck of the bay. The ferry headed northeast, across the widest part.
"Angle a few degrees to your right, Lark." Clara interrupted a commentary on the blue heron. "Yes, you're okay now. Almost halfway there."
Halfway? I felt as if I had been rowing for hours. I gripped the oars and pulled.
"Want me to spell you?" Bonnie wriggled. So did the boat.
"Not yet." I wasn't into lengthy utterances. After a few strokes I caught the rhythm again and rowed on smoothly. The mist was lifting. As the light shifted, the wooded ridge behind the now-distant cannery changed color. "I can see why you like to paint it, Clara."
Clara twisted and looked back. "Oh, yes, it's different every time."
"Rouen Cathedral?" I bent and pulled.
Clara smiled. "That's a subject for oils. This is pure watercolor. You have a good eye."
"Thanks." Bend, pull.
"Do you paint?"
"I'm just a looker. I tried a sketching class once."
Bonnie said, "When I got tired of the singles scene in Santa Monica, I started taking night classes, a different subject every semester, in order to scope out the student body. I took a life drawing class. All the students were women. Even the model was a woman."
"Pity." My back gave a definite twinge. I knew I would be bent like a crone the next day. And I still hadn't dug a clam.
"I enjoyed the class, but I wasn't any good," Bonnie went on. "As an artist, I'm definitely a wordsmith. I had better luck with economics."
Clara cupped her hands around her lighter and exhaled a stream of blue smoke. "With the subject or your classmates?"
Bonnie gave a reminiscent snort. "Both. Hey, watch it!"
The boat grounded and slid sideways. I straightened and rested the oars. When I turned around I saw we were still at least twenty yards offshore.
"Shoal," Clara said, rocking to port. "They shift." The boat wallowed free. Smoke curled around her head like a wonky wreath.
I rubbed my back. "Can you do a little depth analysis there, Bonnie? I don't need a herniated disc. Sound the bottom or something."
Clara was groping in the slosh at the edge of the crude decking with her free hand. She pulled up a damp yardstick and leaned forward, passing the dripping thing over my shoulder. Clearly the situation was not unprecedented.
"Shove off a little with the left oar, Lark, and Bonnie can guide you along the rim of the sandbank. The tide's farther out than I anticipated." Clara wiped her hand on her purple pants.
"Is that a problem?"
"No. But we do want to ease in closer to the shore."
After perhaps fifteen minutes of gingerly maneuvering, we nosed around the leading edge of the shoal. Between it and the slope of beach ran a temporary channel. Clara decided I should row us aground on the island side. Bonnie would then leap overboard in her waders and pull the lightened boat farther up on the sand. I would repeat the process. I thought it likely the boat would upend, bow over stern, the moment Bonnie deprived us of her weight.
Pulling the clumsy rubber waders over our wool socks took a while. Tom had lent us a rubberized bag for our tennies, fortunately. After some awkward wobbling and rocking, Bonnie managed to slide over the edge. She landed in about a foot of water which a sneaker wave augmented, but she hung on as she scrambled to higher sand. Then she pulled and I rowed.
We advanced about half a boat length on the next mild wave. I made my way forward, having shipped the oars, and, as the next wavelet receded, I flung one leg over the side onto hard-packed sand. The prow rose considerably with Clara's weight on the stern. Bonnie and I pulled hard with the next little surge, and the rowboat grounded.
Clara stood, with hardly a wobble, tucked her sketching gear under one arm, picked her way forward with surprising agility, and stepped down onto nearly dry sand. She was wearing calf-high purple boots the exact hue of her rain suit. She beamed at us. "There. Nothing to it!"
Bonnie and I looked at each other. It crossed my mind that Clara was putting us through some local initiation rite, like submarine races or snipe hunting. The clams were probably mythical.
While Bonnie and I lugged the boat up onto the beach and removed our pails and shovels, Clara strolled toward the salal and huckleberry bushes that rimmed the wooded island. She had taken a small folding camp stool from her pack and was sitting on it, high and dry, by the time Bonnie and I joined her. She began to rummage in the pack.
"What do we do now?" Bonnie put my question into words.
Clara was rigging an ingenious easel with telescoping legs. "Oh, dear, I forgot my thermos."
"I'll get it." I slogged back to the boat, grabbed the thermos and the waterproof bag that held our sneakers and, Tom's suggestion, a change of socks apiece. I also tugged the boat a foot or two higher on the sand. The tide was still going out.
"Good girl." Clara gave me a big smile and took her thermos from me. "Coffee?"
I set the bag on the sand beside her. "You brought three cups?"
"Certainly." I expected her to unscrew the lid and reveal a series of cups, each inside the other like a Gorbachev doll, but she reached into her pack and pulled out a stack of cardboard hot cups instead. "I always come well supplied."
The coffee was laced with brandy. When I had warmed my hands and my innards with Clara's brew, I began to feel my hostility leak away. "So where are the famous steamer clams?"
"That depends. Do you want softshells, cockles, little-necks, or quahogs? You might luck out and find horse clams and geoducks today, because of the minus tide, but that's only if you don't mind a good wallow in the mud."
"Mud?" The sand beneath our boots was clean and pale gray.
"I like this stretch of beach. The view of the dock and cannery is ideal." Clara took a last sip of coffee and gestured southward with the inevitable cigarette. "The best softshell clam bed lies about a quarter of a mile down there, around that grove of pines. The sand gives way to a mixture of gravel and mud. You can't miss it."
"Ew," Bonnie said. "Mud."
"Just beyond the mudflat, there's a gravelly sand beach that's supposed to be pretty good for cockles. I was teasing you about geoducks and horse clams. There aren't many little-necks or quahogs around here either. They do better along the Hood Canal and in Puget Sound. God knows why, considering the pollution. This is a relatively clean estuary, so far. Your best bet is the softshell. It likes mud--" When Bonnie let out another Valley Girl "ew," Clara relented. "People have been known to find soft-shells in the sand and gravel area, too."
"Let it be mud." I reminded myself that I did not like clams. If Bonnie got her fill of mud right off the bat, we could be home by three-thirty. "What do we look for?"
"An oblong dent in the mud, about three-fourths of an inch long. It's hard to see sometimes. When you find sign, dig a bit to one side so you don't smash the shells."
"How deep do we have to dig?"
"Cockles are really shallow--one to three inches usually. Soft-shells lie deeper. Half a foot to a foot and a half. If you find a big concentration, dig a trench and pull them out as soon as you see them. They don't burrow, so you won't have to chase them the way you do geoducks."
Chasing clams sounded like a barrel of fun. "What's the limit?"
"Forty apiece of the softshells, and twenty five cockles."
Bonnie let out a long whistle.
I was surprised, too, and not thrilled.
Oblivious to my dismay, Clara went on with the rules of the game. "You have to dig separately, and you ought to wear gloves if you go for softshells. They can cut up your hands."
Bonnie said, "I didn't bring gloves."
"Maybe you should look for cockles, then. They have a less fragile shell."
I swallowed the last of my coffee. "I brought gloves. You can dig the holes, Bonnie. I'll grope for the little devils."
Clara said, "Trade off. Be sure to take both buckets. I doubt that you'll run into a warden, but it's best to stick to the letter of the law. Fines for violations can be hefty. And be sure to fill your holes. That's the number one rule."
Bonnie shouldered her shovel and grabbed her pail. "Let's go, Lark."
Hiking in waders was no damned fun, but Bonnie said we should save our sneakers for the trek back. I carried the bag of shoes, along with my shovel and pail. We plodded on. By that time the sun had burned off the last of the fog. A tiny breeze riffled the water. We stopped to admire a blue heron.
"Just like an Audubon print."
I glanced at Bonnie. Her face had a look of purest ecstasy. Of course, she hadn't rowed across the bay.
When we rounded the shoulder of wooded land, we lost sight of Clara and the boat. One of the many ships' crews that had wrecked in Shoalwater Bay in the 1840s had wintered on Coho Island. I decided I wasn't enough of a pioneer to want to be similarly stranded. Clara had said we had plenty of time for clamming. It was not yet low tide. I imagined a freak wave floating the boat out to sea--and lapping around Clara's purple boots.
When we finally reached the stretch of mudflat and got down to the business of looking for clam sign, I began to see the utility of our rain gear. I had left my jacket unzipped while I rowed, and even so I had worked up a sweat. The waders felt like a portable sauna.
The day was cool but by no means cold. It wasn't raining. Still, one slurp with the shovel in the sticky mud persuaded me I'd need a total cover-up. I handed the digging over to Bonnie, took my gloves from the pocket of my jacket, and zipped up.
Bonnie was sure the dents she had spotted in the mud were clam air holes. She found quite a few worms but no clams. I dissuaded her from digging deeper. We strolled farther out and tried again. This time we found seven undersized softshells. At least we knew what they looked like.
We picked our way over mossy gravel strewn with dead crabs and bits of shell to another streak of mud. As we intruded on their territory, half a dozen gulls squawked and flew off.
Then we lucked out. Bonnie spotted the oddly rectangular dents almost at once and began digging. About a foot down she uncovered a cluster of fine specimens. I knelt and began to pull them out.
Perhaps we went a little mad. Bonnie dug. I scooped clams. When she saw my primitive delight, Bonnie leaned her shovel on her pail and started scooping, too. We found fifty-two keepers in ten minutes. The mud felt glorious, once I removed my right glove and began squishing with my bare hand. By the time we had picked over that colony, refilled our trench, and divided the spoils, we were hooked.
We were also covered with mud, juicy, salty, glorious mud. We made a lot of noise.
Bonnie said, "It's like messing with Play-doh."
"Nope, too dry. Mud pies."
"My mother never let me make mud pies." She adjusted her glasses and left a streak of silt on her nose.
I snickered. "You look like Paleolithic Woman."
"I want to sit in that mud. Sit and roll and make grunting noises like a hog in a wallow."
I grabbed my shovel and pail. "More!"
It took us awhile to find another concentration of clams. We dug side by side, giggling and squeaking. At once point Bonnie lay up to her shoulder in the muddy hole and began to grope frantically.
"God, you must have found a geoduck."
"My ring!"
"What?"
"I lost my ring." She swore and groped and kept pulling up bits of shell and rock.
"Want me to look?"
"What's to see?" She stood up and shook off about half a pound of slime. "Rats, it's lost. That was my mother's friendship ring. She's going to kill me, but it was worth it. How many do we have?"
We took inventory. Definitely forty apiece. We looked at each other. Bonnie started scooping the heap of mud and gravel over the grave of her mother's ring. "Let's go on to the gravel bar and find those cockles."
"Okay." I filled in my hole, too.
Clara had said the bar lay just beyond the mudflat. She was right, but she hadn't mentioned that the mudflat extended a good quarter of a mile south. Here the evergreens were beginning to encroach on the shore. Something had made a crude path through the underbrush. Beyond the bushes that rimmed the beach, the trees loomed taller. I hoped the path-maker wasn't a bear.
Cockles proved more elusive than the soft-shells. We probed and dug, and uncovered quite a few worms. I saw the shadows of ghost shrimp in a tide pool. Once I thought I heard Clara calling. I stood and listened. The sound came again, vague and high, but not from the north. Some bird, probably, whose call I didn't recognize. I went back to serious clam hunting.
I started to think about the time, though. I kept glancing at my watch. A quarter of three. We had perhaps forty five minutes of slack water. Then the tide would creep back. According to Clara, the change wasn't dramatic in calm weather, so we were unlikely to run into trouble. Still, it would take a while to haul the pails with their burden of clams and seawater back to the boat.
I was about to suggest that we leave when Bonnie found a clump of cockles. They were prettier than the softshells, and the sandy aggregate was much less messy than mud, but cockles were too easy. They lay a mere hand-span under the sand. We had sorted our limits into the pails and filled the shallow holes by three o'clock. Plenty of time.
The distant bird call came again. I listened hard, frowning.
"What is it?"
I shrugged. "Just a noise."
"A bear?"
"More like a bird."
"Whew. I don't like the idea of bears. Let's change into our sneakers before we walk back. That bucket's heavy and I don't want to walk in waders."
We sat on a drift log with our backs to the woods and stripped the waders off. I decided to change socks, too. In my clam frenzy I had slopped seawater into the left side of my waders. My sock and jeans were damp.
Bonnie tied her Reeboks and stood up, stretching. "God, that was fun. There must be some atavistic impulse that makes women want to amass shellfish. Did you read about those Stone Age sites in Spain with all the mussel shells? I wonder if the mussels in this area are tasty?"
I tied my laces. "Probably. I ordered a smoked mussel appetizer once. It was good eating."
"All right, stand up. Slow and easy now."
The man had approached so carefully down the crude pathway that I hadn't heard him. I stood. Bonnie and I turned. My first thought was that the game warden wanted to inspect our catch, so I was more annoyed than alarmed. Then I saw the rifle.
He was a heavy-set, ruddy man in a plaid shirt and jeans. He raised the barrel so that the little black hole pointed right at my stomach. "Follow me."
I swallowed and exchanged a swift glance with Bonnie. She looked pale and blank. Far off and inland, the birdcall sounded.
"What's the problem, officer?" Bonnie had leapt to the wrong conclusion, too.
I cleared my throat. "He's not--"
"Shut the fuck up. I said follow me." The barrel waved in the direction of the path.
I bent to pick up my shovel.
"Leave it!"
I dropped the handle on the sand and straightened. "You must be Kevin Johnson."
The rifle swung my direction again. "Yeah, so what? Who the shit are you?"
"I'm Lark Dodge. I met your wife."
"Well, ain't that nice? Move it, lady."
"Shall I bring my clams?" Bonnie had to be out of her mind.
Apparently Johnson thought so, too, for he snarled and gestured with the rifle. Bonnie abandoned her pail and trotted to the edge of the woods. I followed with Johnson behind me. I couldn't see the rifle, but I felt it in the center of my spine as if he were prodding me with it. In reality he kept his distance, but the sensation was undeniable. We stumbled along. When we slowed, Johnson swore at us.
The path would have been difficult walking without the threat of a bullet between the shoulder blades. It looked as if an elk had crashed its way through the tangle of undergrowth in a beeline for the water. Fallen branches and blackberry tripwires made the footing treacherous.
Bonnie and I were Johnson's prisoners, hostages. At first I had no idea why he hadn't just ignored our presence on the beach. We were clamming, unlikely to turn our attention inland to his hideaway. Why hadn't he just watched us and let us leave? Then the cries of the bird began to resolve into human shrieks. Somebody was hurting. I remembered Melanie.
"Has your wife gone into labor, Kevin?"
A wordless snarl answered me, but I knew I was right. He had dragged his pregnant wife off into hiding with him. She was going to have her baby at any minute from the sound of her. Kevin had spotted a couple of women on the beach and decided we would make good midwives. What a hope.
There was nothing funny about the agony in Melanie Johnson's cries, nothing amusing in the prickle between my shoulder blades, but I had to suppress a wild urge to laugh. What I knew about childbirth would take less than a typed page to tell. Kevin was going to have to go for a doctor or a paramedic. Whatever. I would have to persuade him.
I decided the path was not the right place.
Kevin's camp indicated that he had done some planning. There was a green umbrella tent, from which came the now-piercing screams, and a fiberglass canoe rested against one of the huge evergreens that ringed the clearing. He had set up a Coleman stove. A tarp covered a hump that was probably supplies. He must have made several trips. The site looked oddly familiar, but it took me a minute or two to make the connection. He had pitched his tent under dark towering cedars like those that dwarfed his mobile home.
When we came to a halt, I turned and tried to ignore the rifle. "Look, Kevin, I know you want us to help your wife, but the truth is she needs a real doctor."
His mouth set in a thin line. "Tough shit. You help her."
I said, "I'd be glad to, but I don't know anything about childbirth. I've never had a baby, Kevin. I've never even spent any time around babies. What can I do for her?"
Melanie shrieked.
Bonnie said, "I'll help her."
Kevin and I looked at her.
Mud streaked her face and her nylon rain jacket. Her blond hair had wilted into witch-locks. She raised her chin. "A friend of mine needed a Lamaze coach. I took the course. I can help Melanie. Come on, Lark." She jerked her head toward the tent.
"No funny business." Kevin waved the rifle.
I followed Bonnie into the tent.
Melanie Johnson was lying on an open sleeping bag. She was half naked, and blood and mucus streaked her white thighs and buttocks. She lay on her side. She was sobbing as we ducked into the dim green shelter, whimpering with pain, her eyes clenched shut. A spasm rippled her too-visible belly, and she screamed. My hands went to my ears. I was as near panic as I have ever been.
Bonnie knelt at her head. "Melanie, we've come to help you."
Melanie gave another soul-rending shriek. Bonnie reached out and took her face. "Look at me. I'm Bonnie. Do you see me, Melanie?"
The eyes fluttered open. "Hurts."
"Yes, I know. You're afraid. But it's just a baby, and you've already had two babies. You know what to do. I'm going to help you breathe."
The next shriek was muted.
"That's better. Come on. I know you're scared, but that just makes the pain worse. Lark is going to find something to make you warmer. Did your water break?"
Melanie gasped. "Yeah. I went to take a pee. When it broke, I come back and got out of my jeans. Oh, ow. It hurts."
Bonnie was holding her hand. "That's right. Brace against me. The pains are pretty close together, aren't they?"
"It's coming. Help me."
"Right. Do you want to lie there on your side or would you rather squat? I'll help you up."
"Lie. Ow. I'm thirsty."
"Go get her something to drink, Lark."
I went.