Port Cloudy

By John Shinnick

Ten yarns, each a glimpse into isolation, all linked by their setting, the village of Port Cloudy on Storm Island off the British Columbia coast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newave Publishers
• Release date: Sep 21, 2010
• ISBN: 9780978025953

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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Port Cloudy

By John Shinnick

Vancouver, B.C.

Copyright John Shinnick and Newave Publishers

Smashwords Edition

published 2010

ISBN: 978-0-9780259-5-3

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

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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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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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Intro

Yarn #1, The Field

Yarn #2, The Arena

Yarn #3, The Fams

Yarn #4, The Stalker

Yarn #5. The Famous

Yarn #6, The Top of the Ninth

Yarn #7, The Firepower

Yarn #8, The Crosshairs of Love

Yarn #9, The Barking Eagle

Yarn #10, The Neighbors

About the Author

Introduction

Port Cloudy and Storm Island do not exist on any nautical chart.

None of this, in fact, exists, yet all of it exists.

None of these characters has ever drawn a breath, said a word, or moved through time and space other than in my head, yet all are composites of people I have encountered or people who have made me think about the way things work.

The ballpark and hockey arena do not exist, but they reflect yacht clubs, boating clubs, racquet clubs, ballparks and hockey arenas where I have spent more time than I probably should have.

--J.S.

Port Cloudy Yarn #1

The Field

Cyrus Cloudy Stadium is probably the only place in Port Cloudy where serious casual conversations can focus on dirt. Sure, they talk about hygiene at the Port Cloudy family clinic, but hat's dirt of a different order: invisible dirt, diseased dirt, somehow potentially evil dirt, dirt that can turn a healthy person into a toxic wreck.

Ball-field dirt is more akin to art.

Cyrus Cloudy Stadium has a fair amount of dirt. It is a regular baseball field, 335 ft to left and right, 395 to straight-away centre. Its fences are too tall, making it difficult for some young sluggers to develop confidence in their swing.

Between the dirt around the batter's box and the swath of dirt in the warning track, lies an expanse of green grass. This sod is planted, replanted, watered and nurtured by a team who are never paid what they are worth.

Some nights, the geometry of green and brown looks better than others. When the beauty of the field is noticed in the bleachers, heads start to bob like those novelty birds who dip water out of a glass: Up and down in agreement, up and down in agreement.

The psychology of the ball fan? Who really understands this creature? The marketing staff, perhaps. To put warm bodies into the bleachers, they compile stats on the fans the way fans compile stats on players. But... here's part of the psychology of the stands that no marketing stat can explain: whose voice do you hear when someone hits a foul ball? Listen closely. First, you hear the crack of the bat. Then you hear an Ooooooohhhhh from the stands. Who is it? Is it somebody sitting near you? Never. That collective foul-ball voice sounds feminine, about 12 to 14 years old, but look around you ... the number of 12- to 14-year-old adolescent girls sitting still long enough to see a foul ball on any given evening can be counted, probably, on one hand. Does this mean that beneath the collective, raggedy exterior of the average adult, both male and female, is a 12- to 14-year-old adolescent girl whose voice emerges from the adult, like that thing in Sigourney Weaver's abdomen?

It's one of life's mysteries.

Someday a smart kid from Port Cloudy will go away to school and study psychology, making a name for herself with the definitive answer behind the Cyrus Cloudy Stadium-fan phenomenon. It's like gravity. You take the fan's voice for granted, then along comes someone who notices it. Presto! The apple falls from the tree. A seed pops into fertile soil. A theory grows up around it, changing the world for all time. Go to the ballpark, you'll hear the mystery too.

Anyway, dirt. Out here at the ballpark, dirt is a work of art, sort of like those Japanese rock gardens where the stroke of a rake visualizes emotional purity. Here, the dirt's edges are proscribed in a clear demarcation between green and brown, smooth and textured. At one edge of the line you're into the game, at the other you're borderline. Balls, depending on the eyesight of the ump and the politics of the moment, are mostly fair to one side, out of bounds to the other.

This is the first place on earth where the local horticultural club will come to a ballpark on a field trip first thing in the spring. Kibitzers, the lot of them. Some men just want to get a lawn mower into it or hit it with something toxic to take out a little of the weed you can see when you are actually standing on the grass and thereby closer to it than you are in the bleachers. And some of the women, standing in the thick richness of that grass during one of those horticultural-club field trips, are just rehearsing that special little inflection they use when they know the lawn needs mowing. Those times when their husband, lathered in guilt, just wants to take the boat out fishing one more time before he has to drag the fire-breathing dragon out of the shed and set it to feeding. I just bet.

There are people who have cultivated their ignorance about lawn mowers because they don't belong to a horticultural club. They spend all their free time at the ballpark, and have fifty-one ways to feign deafness when hearing any sentence that contains the words grass, lawn, lawnmower, mow or any phrase such as needs mowing. They're immune. And it's why anyone who pays attention only a little will be able to tell you what really goes on at the ballpark.

When the horticultural people come out to the park, Ernie McElroy and his ground crew take them on a tour of the facility. They talk about the head pressure in the Dipping Bird Lawn-Care Sprinkling System. Stand close enough to home plate during one of these tours you will overhear one of the horticulture clubbists ask Ernie how many sprinkler heads there are. Any self-respecting baseball fan will deliberately go deaf upon hearing a question like that. What kind of question is that? A true fan of the game just doesn't want to know. There are important statistics in baseball, even a few important personal statistics, such as: how many beers did you really drink last time? How many games have you attended this season? Did you see all of the Pearl Beach games this year? But the number of sprinkler heads in the watering system at the park? That's not among the really important stats.

The true Port Cloudy ball fan will someday compile that sprinkler-head stat, compare it to previous seasons, factor in technological changes