Tess, re: Archer

By John Shinnick

How many layers of the onion do you have to peel before you get to the truth? As many as it takes. Don meets Tess following a storm off the British Columbia coast. Tess the hunter is hunted. Getting her off the island undetected involves a lot more than just a ferry ride. This yarn is a multi-layered multi-plotted enigma wrapped in a riddle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newave Publishers
• Release date: Aug 20, 2010
• ISBN: 9780978025946

John Shinnick

John Shinnick is an author, editor, publisher, photographer and illustrator living in Vancouver, B.C. He taught magazine feature writing and magazine production at Langara College, sold books briefly online. He has written magazine features, screenplays, short stories and long-form fiction. A series of short stories will be published in the fall. He is currently working on graphic novels.

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Tess, Re: Archer

By John Shinnick

Vancouver, B.C.

Copyright John Shinnick and New Wave Publishers

Smashwords Edition

published 2010

ISBN: 978-0-9780259-4-6

Thank-yous

Thank you, Judy, for putting up with me during this project (and a few dozen other projects over the decades).

Thank you, too, Bob Wakulich, for editing this manuscript and pointing to new directions for the rewrite when a dozen publishers delegated the reading of this yarn to secretaries and freshman English majors.

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Copyright 2010 by the author for all purposes,

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Vancouver, B.C., Canada,

Ph:604.618.7086

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1.0: The dark fandango ...

Let us pry. We know this much. Don Black huddles in a phone booth on a damp night at the head of a ramp that angles low-tideward into the Port Cloudy civic marina. Don, a waiting man, is a man of the O words: overweight, out of shape, overdue.

He waits, like we all do for Godot, for God, for God-O, for the next Big Bang, for the truth. Don's status quo was not changed nearly enough by the thing that happened 9-11. It would take more than the terror of the towers to alter his destiny.

Post 9-11, post Tess, planets still spin, light still takes millions of years to get here from distant galaxies. The energy from a wave off the coast of Japan still takes whatever it takes to cross the Pacific and tap against the Port Cloudy seawall.

Fucking-A: the laws of nature remain immutably unaltered.

Now is still now, with a slight difference. The now now is quite different from the then now, the pre-9-11ness of it all. The cosmetics have changed. New York's skyline is now a cinematic carbon-dating for the three thousand times 21 grams of life snuffed in an al Queda minute, the ripple effect outward, three thousand intersecting billions, including Don.

Unchanged is Don.

Ten years before Tess, he married. After that, he followed his pecker into a major alienation from his bride. He and that bride, in the endless barrage of shit that seemed to fall on their heads since then, found one another again by accident in the Port Cloudy General Store one afternoon. It didn't take much to remember what attracted them.

They married a second time. That marriage crashed and burned eighteen months later.

After that, they lost touch until they found one another again, this time waiting for the same plane in the lobby of the airport, heading to Las Vegas. This time, they ended the third attempt on the steps of the wedding chapel at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, but not before locking themselves away in first her and then his room. Of course the sex was good. It was always good. It was always the problem. Too good. They just didn't have anything else in common.

After the third attempt he had to get the fuck out of Dodge, to exile himself from Dor, exile from Storm Island, from even the possibility of trying to patch it up again. For three years, he was exiled from himself.

Then one morning he awoke two hundred miles distant, ten beers hung over.

Lying there ... in a rumpled sleeping bag in the bunk of a nameless fish boat tied to a wind-swept dock in an up-coast port whose name he cannot remember. Lying there ...he realized the cycles didn't just begin and end with his marriages. Lying there ... the cycles of his hangover looped like planets through the solar system of his life, his family, his parents, the history of the town, that fucking boat that won't go away, won't sink, always comes back and that other fucking boat, and myriad other boats, fucked up and otherwise. Lying there ... something in that particular hangover compelled him to return to Storm Island.

But that was then, this is now. Here in the phone booth on a rain-soaked dock waiting for a call he assumes is from Tess, he looks outside the booth at the dark water in the marina. His thoughts are smash-cut memories, a quarter second of this or that, images bound by emotion. He remembers an A word. Alienation.

Not his, hers. The alienation of his mother, this California girl imported from sunshine to rain, her Catholic marriage crashing to ruin and rubble like the twin towers, no less catastrophic in the eyes of her children. They forced him to choose sides then, so he chose his fishing buddy, baseball coach, companion. His father was less complicated than this woman of the who whispered her fears in darkness before she collapsed and died. He sometimes believed he might have played some part in her loss, like a terrorist taking credit for and a president denying complicity in. But he was sure - as others were sure who downed the towers - who downed the marriage, who wrecked the insane naiveté of peace on earth or peace within a family.

Wrecked, too, was the insane bridge of family politics that spanned not only the duration of the marriage but also the crapped-out adult lives. His two brothers death-spiraled into alcohol and pills on the streets of Canada's cities, while one of his sisters found Jesus in a San Francisco commune and never returned to Storm Island.

Now here, in the drizzle of this inky red-neon-drenched darkness, he thought not about why he was standing there waiting for a call from a killer - whose job had been to roam the earth and alter the established view of life - but of his mother whispering to him that his father was sleeping around, seeing another woman, a woman with short brown hair who had come into the boatyard with her brother once. He remembered the woman.

He remembered another night many years later, perhaps, when everyone had gone far to the north, far inland, away from the sea away from boats and fish, deep into an icy Canadian winter and his mother sat late with her sister, who had run, too, from the California sunshine. Living with an austere Canadian hippy, she lived in a pinched little Canadian two-story farmhouse with outhouse and slop buckets. He, his two brothers, his two sisters huddled in the cold upstairs bedroom beneath layers of musty quilts and blankets.

Painful, confusing adult words climbed the cold pinched wooden steps, as his mother smoked Canadian pot downstairs and revealed that she had another man in her life who was, in fact, the father of two of her sons and one of her daughters. And thus it was revealed that parents could have marital mysteries sealed in unshared secrets.

The shards were already hitting the floor then, but it would take a million years to hear the pieces fall from the sky. A million seconds. Light years. Days bathed in the light of a dying sun. Who knows how much time passed before the night his mother locked his father out of the house, told the children not to let him back in, and he came to Don's window and knocked. Don, open the door. Don...

He went through the hall to find his mother blocking the front door, small, frail, seething with wild anger and hurt, saying No! Don't! She gripped his arm with fingernails so sharp and anger so focused the scars remained on his arms decades after. Pushing past her, she screamed He hit me, my son hit me, screaming to nobody, screaming to the void, screaming to herself, screaming to him, screaming to his father, screaming to his brothers and sisters.

He opened the door.

Don's memory shut down at that moment.

Anger may have infected that house for days, but he would remember none if it until that day in the survival suit. His brain shunted that baggage off onto a siding. Five children and two adults in a house without love. Life went on, or stood still, he could not remember.

In a small grey filing cabinet, Don found correspondence between his mother and an off-island lawyer named Fernando. It was mostly numbers, the family finances and how much could be expected from the remnants of the company in divorce. Once, in the after-schoolness of the house, he opened the filing cabinet and read secrets she shared with the lawyer foreshadowing that other day, an afternoon, when he stood with his father on a dock looking down at The Answer, the last boat Mercator Bay Boatbuilders would launch.

The company's fortunes had waxed and waned with the price of fish and the prospects of war for sixty years. Standing then with his father down dock from where this phone booth now existed, a court clerk - who had come by ferry from the mainland just for this particular moment - approached carrying divorce papers with a court order instructing his father to leave the house.

Everything - even the arrival in this phone booth on this night, even the arrival of Tess on the island, perhaps even the toppling of the two towers - begins and ends for Don on that narrow dock on that day. Don: conceived just there, played here, encountered darkness there. Now he waits.

He remembered knowing the unknowable, touching the untouchable. How could he ever have begun to understand his mother's faith? This remnant of the California surfer girl he would never know, whose womb he remembers in a feeling of dark pre-natal softness and warmth, remembered in his fingertips as a child in the twilight of dreams.

While his father was simple to understand - business was the man's only religion - his mother's faith was structured with the certitude of a cave-crouched terrorist or a presidentially palaced puppet or a throat-slitting zealot crouched over a lamb. This frail woman's faith encompassed a fundament of flying saucers spun by a fundamental god who segregated native Indians to prison-like residential schools and reservations, assuring her place as a white woman in a white heaven.

Don knew all this because she told him, and yet he understood none of it.

So, it is late. Here stands this complexed organism remembering the first woman in his life while waiting for a call from the most recent. Surrounding him is a wet June night in Port Cloudy, a hundred nautical miles from the loom of one of the continent's large cities, twelve nautical miles due west of the silhouette of the continent's last contiguous land mass.

A crabber offloads repaired traps onto the aft deck of a boat and, with much exertion, pushes a wheelbarrow up the steep incline. Don knows the man, though he no longer remembers the man's name.

Rain shutters night to a starless void at the interface of land and sea. The phone booth lies mere yards (though Don is unaware of this simple fact) from where first his granduncle then his grandfather first touched Storm Island circa 1938.

Today, a phone booth and Don's oil-and-herring-scale-flecked international-orange slicker, black gumboots and jeans. This muted figure beneath a small black fisherman's cap is silhouetted by a wound of red neon from the Wet Rock Cafe sign. On starless nights, the sign has served Don as the inshore light of a makeshift range marker approaching from the strait.

In 1938, the Wet Rock Cafe's ragtag soup and beer civilization huddled at the head of a single barnacle-encrusted log-float dock, its cranky marine railway and a cluster of small uncomplicated boats.

Today, three generations removed from the Fujimoris, the original owners of the cafe. fiberglass boats mingle with wooden vessels in the water beyond.

On this particular June night, at this particular juncture of hour and tide, the ramp points like a bony finger from the light into the dark abyss, points at ten thousand miles of Pacific energy reduced to a wavelet. It points, too, toward a large slab-sided red-lead hulk of a packer, THE ANSWER painted in white caps against layered, battle-scarred gunwales. Only up close - and Don had been up close to this particular hull all his life - could you see Swiss-cheesed gunwales drilled by fishermen who moved gear from season to season, species to species, quota to quota. The wood evolved into a loose accretion of splinters. Given a choice, he would pick The Answer any day over the slab-sided white motor yacht beside her.

She let him save his soul.

Three years away. Not long enough. The faces from his island childhood remained firmly attached to names. He nods and smiles as the man, winded, passes the booth with the loaded wheelbarrow. He knows the man knows him. Oh, yes. By rep if nothing else.

Mixed blessing that rescue.

This phone conversation, as pending as it seemed, was a rocky shoal of a different sort, itself the wavelet of a much larger surge in his life.

Dor, his ex-ex-almost-ex, had relayed a message left at the dock phone booth.

I don't know who. Female. She spat fee male into two syllables, each distinct unto itself, as if peeved at being asked her to identify a crab species she had never seen before. How the fuck should I know who it is? She paused long enough for a lifetime to pass between them. Tim says she'll call back at 0700 hours. Zulu. Whatever the fuck that is. This another bimbo from up the coast?

The last was not a question. It was an accusation, a statement of fact. She knew him. As much as he loved her, thought he loved her, said he loved her, thought about her when he was away from her, he hated the sound of her voice.

He knew who.

Sixty per cent of a year ago Tess had left the island. For hours after she left he counted the hours, for days he counted days.

Now he counted months.

Sometimes he could not believe in her.

It took a while to figure the military clock.

He arrived early, like a boat arriving at an ocean pass against the tide, pressing against the currents of time itself.

Held in place.

Waiting.

Then, 0700 hours Zulu.

The phone rings. Her usual precision.

Not even a hello or an is it you. For sixty per cent of a year there had been only silence, then: I want to know what I don't know.

Here was that ache again - dull, persistent, unrelenting. Even time could not erode its rocky surfaces.

Don't we all, Don said.

Tell me about your fucking island. I lived it, but I hardly saw it. What are its rumors? What's your story?

I don't have a story. Just questions. Who the fuck's Tess?

Tess? Yeah... well, that's a valid question, too. I wish I had an answer. It's just a name. I wore it like a pair of cheap panties. Threw the name in the dumpster when it got too dangerous. Esta la vida. Just one damn situation after another. Me? I'm just a girl who hates those little Greek fisherman's hats the yachties wear.

Don self-consciously touched the brim of his cap. Bought on a whim, a souvenir of Athens, a memory he once thought he would want. Discarded in a corner of his life until one of his sister's kids found it.

Don't go getting paranoid, she said. I looked at the Port Cloudy dock cam on the net before calling you. Saw you standing there.

Her voice was distant, digitized, not across continents but across time, across sixty per cent of infinity. For a fleeting moment, two colliding freighters of thought met head on in an ocean pass. From the depths of his subconscious: a fleeting paranoia.

I don't do Internet, said Don.

Well, even if you were I can't tell you how to find the cam that's looking at me right now.

Kapow. Chaos theory. Just hearing her voice gave him the early stages of an erection. And, from the testosterone-fueled boiler room of his libido: he thought of phone sex. In her absence she had become so much more than she had been when she was here. Okay, so you hate my cap. What else bothers you? Don's anxiety ran aground on the rocky shoals of anticipation. Love, fear, anger. Loss. It all confirmed that she had, indeed, been a part of his life, once.

People who tan until their skin looks like the side of a worn wallet. Fuck'em.

Okay, so you're a bigot. Is there anybody you don't ...?

Want to know who I really hate? I like cell phones, but I hate people who use them. Fuck'em. How wireless these bastards going to get? Does anyone really need to answer e-mail while squeezing cantaloupes? Let's dial 9-1-1 on that one. And I hate those testosterone-infected assholes who drive big fucking things - shiny off-road vehicles that never go off-road. It's bad enough that those embarrassing, posturing, cammoed wannabes clutter the highways, but the trendy fucks with little dicks prance onto the shooting range. Little gun purses and designer ammo. Don't get me started. Put the motherfuckers in the crosshairs.

Still shooting people?

Not a one since I met you. It might make me feel better to blow someone away. She went quiet. Instead of filling the void with his own words, the miles crackled between them. Satellite pings and microwave silences routed through dark towers, bounced off geostationary complexities. Between them, micro-volts surged beneath the pressure of cold, dark oceans. Digital synapses snapped open then closed. Somewhere in the circuits, he imagined the nascent consciousness of a nameless intelligence listening.

There's gotta be rules, she said.

You're high maintenance, even on the phone.

There's only nine rules to all of life. Ten only if you include thou Shalt Not Kill. But that fucking rule ... It's got so many exceptions it doesn't count any more. It's easier to kill someone than to get an abortion. I can kill you, of course, when I'm invading your small country, or bringing down a building in the name of somebody's god ... sure as hell ain't my god.

Okay, so give me the fucking rules.

First rule: I won't answer questions about where I am. People might still want to get their hands on me. Someone could be listening, even on this ratshit phone. I'll call when it's safe... a different town, different state, different country.

Nobody wants to lis...

Don't bet on it.

I count two rules there?

Fuck the corollaries. For survival, I assume someone will overhear this conversation.

You're fucking par...

You're the one who said he'd never find me. I have one simple fucking rule. If he doesn't find me, I won't kill him.

Life is a moving target.

The earth pulls the apple to ground and the apple has the unmitigated arrogance to pull, ever so gently, on the earth, the moon, sun and stars as it falls.

I've got a rule, he said, we tell each other everything.

Even the painful shit?

Even the painful shit.

Okay. Tell me everything about that weird fuck of an island. I didn't exactly get a tour when I was there. I'll tell you how your boat got back there.

On an island, everything always starts with a boat, he said.

Did he hear an accent? Did she now have a displaced Manhattan Jewish southern twang from the retirement reaches of Southern Florida? Something more exotic? Lyrical? Caribbean? Slightly Latin? Twingie Baja?

Time will not exist, he said. Backwards to the present, but never the future.

A universe, all time, all matter, all energy folded onto itself. Cool. Sure. But you can't rule out the future of the past...We're living it.

It all began and ended with two boats, the first The Answer, whose keel was laid long before Don was born, way back in the Wet Rock, in downtown Port Cloudy where Tess had never been (so close, yet so far), back when the cafe was still newish, before Paul Blanco's last name had been anglicized into Black.

In 1938, the Wet Rock's counters and tiles - all hand-laid by hungry Italians - still shined. The mirrors - hung by a perpetually unhappy Brit-Irish remittance man with a manor-born accent and gutter sexual proclivities - reflected prices that never topped fifty cents. At that time, the cafe's paint still smelled like paint, not the decades of lard and vegetable oil that permeate the cafe's wood today, some of it at a molecular patina the casual observer might think is varnish. The Wet Rock's food in 1938, basic North American meat and potatoes, was prepared by the bemused and befuddled Fujimoris, who never comprehend the brutish cuisine of their clientel.

At the end of each day, the family, seen through a window, sat in the dim light at a booth in the corner, dining with chopsticks on strange and mysterious sushi, yakitori, kats udon, tempura, sea urchin and teriyaki, items that never appeared on the Wet Rock menu, much of it refuse tossed overboard by draggers.

On the day Paul Blanco's father, Aloisio, jumped ship from an Azores-based cod boat on the shores of Newfoundland, Donald Fujimori's father, Yoshio, jumped ship from a British-registered freighter on the west coast, working first as a caretaker on one of the islands in the strait, looking after the summer estate of a German prince. Then he noticed a need for a cafe in nearby Port Cloudy. Later, son Donald added a grocery store and post office to the building, making Port Cloudy even more important to the scattered residents of the coast.

Don's great uncle, Paul Blanco, was in his early twenties when he arrived in Port Cloudy, bearded down to the base of his sturdy European neck. In much the same way Donald Fujimori stood out, Paul, too, stood out from the dozens of older, tired Depression-era men who trudged up the coast to the farthest point on the highway and somehow got to the