Black Eagle, Oregon: A Novel

By Caroline C. Spear

The town of Black Eagle, Oregon sits on the banks of the Columbia River at the foot of snow covered Mt. Hood. It is home to church going citizens, windsurfers and orchard workers. But when real estate prices start to boom, an influx of newcomers arrive and the cultural divide between Whites, Natives, and Hispanic workers create tensions that brew just below the surface in this pretty Pacific Northwest town.

Based on real events in the early 1990s, this fast paced novel reveals how the lives of four very different Black Eagle characters intertwine when a fishing platform is deliberately destroyed at an ancient Native site.

Richard Sherwood is the real estate developer from Back East who has arrived in Black Eagle to make his fortune, who will stop at nothing to reach his goal of becoming a millionaire before he's forty. Jim Hawks is the Native who lives a quiet life on the river with his grandfather, but ever since college harbors deep political unrest that he doesn't know what to do with. Tawny is the church going wife who thought her life would remain perfect when she "married up" to Charles Spotts, but taking care of her new house and two teen-age sons can't contain her restlessness. And Anna Kingston, the single woman who changed her life from Boston businesswoman to Black Eagle high school teacher, struggles with more than she bargained for in her new life.

The protest against the Richard Sherwood's real estate development turns into a full-time encampment -including tipis and a sacred flame and each character his forced to deal with the unfolding events in their own way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 19, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452083179

Caroline C. Spear

Caroline C. Spear is the author of two novels, Computers Only Skin Deep and Black Eagle, Oregon. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, won awards, and achieved national recognition. She earned a MBA from Clark University and a MAT from Boston College. She has taught high school English and Art for 18 years. Prior to that, she worked in high-tech around Boston for 15 years. Currently, she lives in Southern Oregon with her husband and two cats.

Book preview

Prologue

The Gilhouly brothers were drunk but both would argue they knew exactly what they were doing at the time. They got the idea from Frank Elms, the real estate agent, over beers in Maggie’s Pub & Pool Hall in downtown Black Eagle. Laid off in November from Stetson’s Mill, Deegan and Red Gilhouly had been drinking since three o’clock in the afternoon. They had a policy never to count their beers, so they figured out which of the two of them could drive by flipping a coin. On that particular night, it was Red Gilhouly who turned off the lights of the pickup truck as he drove past the entrance gate of Rocky Point Landing on their way to tear down Elizabeth Longfeather’s fishing platform.

Part One

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Chapter One

When Richard Sherwood started making real money in Manhattan, one of the first things he did was to hire a professional genealogist to research his family tree, hoping to discover something grand. Instead, he paid the balding, scholarly man two hundred and thirty-five dollars to inform him he’d been descended from a myriad of ordinary people.

Richard was disturbed when he learned that one of his forbears, Josiah Bartlett (on his father’s side), was hung for stealing horses in 1793 in the township of Mt. Vernon, New Hampshire. He was further alarmed to learn that Zachariah Bullfinch (also on his father’s side) had been incarcerated by the same state of New Hampshire in 1810 for mental incompetence. When Richard Sherwood read in the genealogist’s report that Zachariah Bullfinch had made a habit out of taking his constitutional at four o’clock down Haymarket Street completely naked, he feel something akin to nausea.

He read further to learn that his ancestry included a few small town ministers, merchants, schoolteachers, and farmers. Richard put aside the fantasy of royal or swashbuckling antecedents in the drawer with the genealogist’s report, even while sustaining the suspicion that the man had overlooked something, or perhaps that the antecedents to greatness were perhaps located in his unexplored, mother’s side of the family. After doing a little research on his own, he was pleased to learn that Richard, meant strong ruler – a Teutonic name from the European Middle Ages. Soon after, he informed his family members - his parents and his sister Ann, living in New Hampshire - that he no longer wanted to be called Rick and would only answer to Richard. He wasn’t able to learn anything about the meaning of Sherwood and settled for the assumption that his surname must also have come from the Middle Ages.

Approaching forty, blue-eyed and still blond haired, Richard was ferocious in his determination to forestall the onset of middle age. He worked out at the Sports Club in Black Eagle three afternoons a week and ran five miles the other three days. He gave himself one day off a week and suffered mentally, imagining that his gut was growing by the half-hour. Richard picked up a handy tip from a vacationing television reporter he’d met at the gym, that a dab of Preparation H eliminated the inevitable bags under his eyes after a late night with Gina.

She was only twenty-six and a nationally ranked windsurfing champion, so he was careful to hide the Preparation H and the Paul Mitchell Thickening Spray in the cabinet under the sink, in the back behind the toilet bowl cleaner. She stayed over at least two nights per week for aerobic sex because Richard had read (in Esquire) that twice-weekly sex was the minimum for a healthy, American male.

Sitting in the bar after an extensive workout (he’d done lower and upper body), Richard conversed with Scully, the bartender who’d also moved to Oregon from Back East. Richard didn’t wonder much about Scully’s previous life, he just gratefully accepted the frosted mug that was pushed across the bar and confided what he thought to be profound insights into his life.

I remember reading Dale Carnegie for the first time when I was still in high school, he said after his first deep swallow of Full Sail.

Richard guessed that Scully was intensely interested in the psychology of someone as successful as himself and that he was doing Scully some sort of a subtle favor by sharing the secrets of his psyche.

"My Dad kept a dog-eared edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People in the downstairs bathroom and another copy in the glove compartment of his car." Richard added this explanation to make clear the significance of this early influence to Scully, confident it would aid his bartender friend. He paused and took a sip of his microbrew.

There weren’t any other customers at the bar, so Scully leaned back with his arms crossed loosely across his barrel chest with a bemused expression on his deeply creased face. Scully didn’t nod or smile when Richard told his stories, but he knew well the basic laws of tipping and that therapist was in his job description.

Scully had moved away to escape an unhappy marriage. He was fifty-two years old and had the body of a thirty year old. He worked out in the early mornings for over an hour, partly because he was an insomniac. He didn’t drink. But his face showed the ravages of what loving an alcoholic woman for thirty years had done to his soul. He’d sold his house, his business, and gave away most of his belongings to the Good Will. He chose Oregon because it wasn’t California and because he’d heard that Seattle had gotten jammed up in the past few years with emigrants and Microsoft millionaires. He’d kept driving until he reached the city farthest away from Trenton, New Jersey. He’d gotten the job as a bartender to bring in some easy cash and force him to talk to people because he knew he had a tendency to depression after too much solitude. Sully half-listened to Richard, having perfected a visage of interest to his customers while thinking of other things.

Richard would have been surprised to learn that Scully was descended from Dutch nobility, one of whom decided in 1694, (after killing a local favorite in a duel), that his luck would be better served in the New World. Richard never bothered to learn that Scully was a nickname drawn from his surname Schuyler, earned while growing up on the tough streets of Trenton. If confronted with this disparity in ancestral status, Richard would do what he did with any fact which did not fit into his carefully hierarchical universe. He would ignore it.

Richard believed that Scully was hanging on his every word. He managed to schedule the completion of his workout at the gym before the nine-to-fivers filled up the place. Since he was making his money in real estate, his hours were his own, which he devoutly believed placed him in a higher category of evolution. He looked forward to his talks with Scully and felt a kinship with him because he had also moved to Oregon from New Jersey. Richard felt, without actually being conscious of the fact, that he and Scully shared an unspoken brotherhood of those who had left the civilized environs of the East Coast for the vast adventure of The West.

In the parking lot, before going in to a customer site to sell electronic components, my Dad told me that he’d flip open to any page of Dale Carnegie for a quick ‘pick-me-up’. Carnegie sold more copies of that book in his time than any book except the Bible, Richard said, leaning a little bit over the bar toward Scully. He made a decent living, I guess. He looked down at the bowl of shelled peanuts. But he lacked that fire in the belly - to really make it big.

Scully was confused for a second, and then realized Richard was talking about his own father, not Dale Carnegie. He returned to not-really-listening.

Richard stopped and let his words float in the atmosphere of the cool, air-conditioned bar along with the obvious and unspoken fact that he was not like this. He did have that unspecific, but absolutely determined impulse to make it into the Big Time. And, in Richard’s mind, Big Time could mean nothing other than Big Money.

Richard had moved to Oregon to Make It Big. He’d done well enough in New Jersey, settling there after graduating without distinction from Rutgers University with a degree in Business Administration. He worked during the day at a brokerage house in New York and commuted there each day in horrific traffic. He participated in the feeding frenzy during the years of Reaganomics, earning thousands in speculative properties, inflated stocks, and foreign exchange markets. He’d even bought on margin a few times, but the stress of the potentially humungous wins or losses caused him to develop perpetual diarrhea, which didn’t depart until he returned to straight market buys.

Richard also snorted a small amount of cocaine before realizing its market potential and so began a modest trade with other Wall Street types. Disregarding any consideration other than profit, Richard swept aside all other possible objections with a simple, Everyone does it.

Before selling his condo (with Jacuzzi), Richard decided on Oregon for the same reasons that Scully had, (it wasn’t California, and Seattle had already been saturated), but in his case it was to reach a Promised Land. Richard had made a promise to himself when he was twenty-two, when he was still working in New Jersey and doing the books for the largest hardware store in Trenton. He was living in a studio apartment to which he was too embarrassed to ever invite a girl and hating his life. I will never settle for the small time, he promised himself; I’ll be a millionaire by the time I’m forty.

Fulfilling the first part of the promise meant he needed to get a job in New York. He watched enviously when several of his friends landed jobs on Wall Street, but it wasn’t until his father arranged for an interview through one of his golf buddies with a financial management firm that Richard (he was still called Rick then) made it there. Fulfilling the second half of his promise required that he augment his income with financial speculation on his own time, which was what led him into the markets, real estate sales, and drug dealing. When it came time to leave the East Coast, Richard had accumulated an impressive amount of capital, but he was still hungry to reach that magic mark that would move him into a higher echelon.

Leaving his friends was no big deal because his friendships were based on partners needed for tennis matches or drug dealing, requiring only a shared beer and hearty fare thee well. His girlfriend at the time, Misty, was one of a stream of nubile twenty-year olds. Richard drew the line for his sex partners at twenty years old when he passed thirty. He felt it wasn’t dignified to be dating a teen-ager. He simply told her after they’d had sex that he was leaving. He didn’t expect her to cry and she didn’t. But he did gave her a gram of cocaine as a going-away present and surprised himself when a felt a lump in his throat when she hugged him good-bye.

Saying good-bye to his parents was slightly more problematic. He had the annoyance of the drive up the New Jersey turnpike and through New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, to New Hampshire. While he was there, he called his sister who lived in a nearby town with her husband, the doctor, and her two small children, to say good-bye. His sister didn’t offer to drive the forty-five minutes over country roads to do so in person, which Rick accepted without saying anything. He would have made the drive to her house since he didn’t know when he’d come Back East again, but he let it pass. When the brief weekend was over, he ignored the tightness in his chest when he looked back to see his parents waving from the driveway as he drove off. Richard drove his dark blue SAAB onto the highway filled with relief and exhilaration.

It was on the drive back down to New Jersey to pack his final bags that Rick decided to change his name. Ricky had always annoyed him, partly because he was named after his father whom everyone called Dick. Rick sounded diminutive to him. He had violently recoiled at being called Junior, so his family had settled on Ricky. Not able to come up with anything better and determined to have a new name to match his new life, Rick Sherwood changed his name to Richard Sherwood for good. His friends at the Manhattan bar laughed when Rick told them, but the point had been made on him that longer, formal names held more weight.

In February 1993, right after the Arabs bombed the World Trade Center, he’d heard that a man he knew from Wall Street parties had been busted for cocaine trafficking. Richard decided to get in gear. He figured that if someone he knew had been caught; the net of the law had been cast too near. He decided to cut his losses, consolidate his capital, pursue the real estate market boom in the Pacific North West, and make his Big Move. In other words, Richard decided to get out of town.

He arrived in Portland, Oregon in June with his SAAB packed with several suitcases. The drive across the country had been long and boring. He had been tempted to pick up hitchhikers, but overruled his instincts, figuring they might be crazed drug fiends and deciding not to risk it. He chose to rent until he got to know his way around. He would send back for his belongings after he bought his first house. Richard was determined to push his capital into investments that would result in early retirement. His big strategy was real estate. He had seven hundred thousand dollars and he knew he could at least double his money when he found the right deal. He knew he’d have to make bold moves and he was ready for the fight.

It took Richard less than a month to figure out that he’d missed the jump in the Portland real estate market, so he quickly looked to surrounding areas. He decided to stay on the Oregon side of the Columbia River and surmised quickly that windsurfing and mountain biking would continue to draw Portland yuppies who fashioned themselves as Weekend Warriors. They raced out Highway 84 to the Gorge in their Jeep Cherokees loaded with equipment on Friday afternoons, to push the limits of their athletic prowess and their alcohol consumption. Wanting to be close to the action, Richard moved his meager stuff into a furnished apartment in Black Eagle. The second floor of the blue Victorian provided a view of the Columbia River for only five hundred a month, and a short walk to downtown. He figured he would buy his own place after he made his killing and knew better where he wanted to live. After he had his money transferred to the Wells Fargo Bank, Richard finally made the call home he had been putting off.

After they exchanged greetings and pleasantries, Richard waited for his father to speak.

"Ricky, I mean Richard, how’s the real estate business going? Have you baited those hooks yet? I was reading an article the other day in Business Week -"

Richard interrupted him, somewhat rudely (even he thought so), but he was annoyed when his father called him by his old name and then tried to cover it up. It annoyed him even more to listen to the old man suppose he could give him business advice.

"Dad, I’ve been subscribing to Business Week for fifteen years."

After a short silence, his father changed the subject and asked, How’s Regina Taylor?

Richard had an unproven suspicion that his father wrote down the name of his current girlfriend so that he wouldn’t lose track, which they might have had a laugh over but never did. Richard told him that Gina would be racing in an international windsurfing event on Sunday, the one fact he thought his father wanted to hear so that his father could tell his buddies on the golf course. Richard barely heard his father tell him to wish her luck and realized he was gripping the receiver.

Richard asked, How’s mom?

Fine. Fine, his father answered hurriedly, She’s getting better all the time. Positive thinking, you know. He paused. She’s staying with her sister for a while. It’s closer to Mass General.

Richard couldn’t think of a way to reply to the obvious statement that Wayland was closer to Mass General than New Hampshire, so he switched the phone to his other hand. He learned his mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer before he had reached Portland. His father’s forced optimism caused him embarrassment, and then shame, because he realized anything he might say to support or console his father would sound hackneyed and inadequate, so he simply murmured, I’m sorry, without even being sure what he meant by it.

Dad, Richard said suddenly as if just remembering, I have to go. I’ve got an appointment up the river. He wanted to escape his tightening stomach and the thought of his father rambling around alone in the big white house on Minuteman Lane, imagining he could give his son real estate advice. But more to the point, Richard felt a sudden constriction in his intestines that boded ill and demanded immediate action.

Bye, Son.

After taking care of the diarrhea, Richard hurried out to his car. He wanted to drive out the Gorge before it got too dark to look at the Clyde Crag’s property again. He’d put down several thousand as a promise fee on thirty acres and he was pretty sure it was the right deal. Richard’s research revealed that property in the National Scenic Area along the Columbia River Gorge was prime, gorgeous, and still within reach. Demand was high in the Gorge: Portland’s wealthy desired a week-end spot that was within a two hour drive; windsurfers from around the world coveted the high knot winds; Reagan’s rich were land hungry, believing it an unshakable investment; and Easterners were looking to relocate to a new life in the country. Richard felt in his gut that he had found his pot of gold. All he had to do now was to count the coins.

Richard pushed his empty mug to the other side of the bar.

Another? Scully asked. He had been talking with a plump, middle aged woman drinking white wine at the other end of the bar. He was still smiling when he reached for the beer glass.

No, thanks, Richard replied, I’ve got some business to attend to downtown. Slighted that Scully hadn’t continued their conversation, Richard turned away without smiling. But he made sure to leave all the coins in his pocket for a tip.

Chapter Two

Tawny Spotts did not realize her name was ridiculous until she went to the First Street Christian Church annual regional meeting in The Dalles. When Bobbie Lee Johnson, who was chairing the meeting, read her name aloud along with the other candidates for the Church Conference Education Committee, everyone laughed. Tawny was confused only for a second and then felt her face turn deep pink, right up over her carefully tweezed eyebrows and up under her carefully trimmed bangs to her hairline. Tawny hadn’t realized it before because she had decided in the seventh grade that she was going to marry Charles Spotts and by the end of her senior year in high school, he had agreed.

Tawny had never for one second before been ashamed of who she had married. Quite the contrary. She had married up when she’d married Charles and even though it was sixteen years and two kids later, she still felt like she’d pulled