The Blues & Billie Armstrong 61
PELICAN, CROW, DOLPHIN
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
I picked the last stale piece of pizza out of the box on the floor and tore loose a bite, chewed laboriously. Valentine winced. “Put that down, it’s disgusting,” she said. “Finish getting dressed, I’m buying breakfast.”
Valentine cross-examined my eyes a few times to double-check my commitment before she waved off the deputy in the parking lot, then we got in the Cadillac.
The restaurant was called The Lost Pelican. It was everything you would expect from a typical smalltown grease and gossip joint. Full of hubbub and clatter, with saucy waitresses named Fran and Jo, and the owner named Smitty or Red or Mac. The booths upholstered in sky blue vinyl and packed mostly with locals not tourists. You could tell by their practical, workworn clothes, the mud caked on their shoes, and their unimpressed postures.
An oldtimer named Buck lumbered in ahead of us and sat at the counter and ordered “the usual.” He hunched over his coffee in Carhartt overalls and gave the weather report. “Chilly this morning,” he said, and he blew breath across his cup. “Don’t expect this fog’ll burn off.”
A previous occupant had left the sports page of the Eureka Times-Standard on the table. I learned the Giants had pulled off a six-five victory in game four against the Phillies, thanks to a three-hit day from rookie catcher Buster Posey and a walk-off sacrifice fly from Juan Uribe. I had missed Uribe’s heroic blow, passed out chin to chest, but now we were up three games to one, just a win away from a trip to the 2010 World Series.
What I didn’t expect from The Lost Pelican was its secondary purpose as an art gallery. The walls featured paintings of local scenery, each booth with a separate piece mounted above the table. The subjects were commonplace: seascapes, boats, a lighthouse, weathered houses and outbuildings, standard postcard fare. But the style was distinctive and consistent across the six or seven pieces. Vibrant and luminous colors with a quiet energy—low voltage splashes of deep rusty red, electric blues, and rich lively greens. The lines were loose and not always confined by the shape of a particular subject. This produced the effect of a vibrating instability of the forms, suggesting hidden connectedness across false or tenuous boundaries.
The other unexpected thing about this cramped little cafe was that everyone there seemed to already know Ms. Valentine Jones. Customers tramping in and out, the waitresses, even Buck and Smitty or Red or Mac—they all addressed her simply as Val, and they all said hey or howdy, and wanted to know about somebody named Barb. How’s Barb doing, Val? Tell Barb we’re rooting for her, Val. Tell her we love her, Val.
“What’s that all about?” I said, sliding into one of the vinyl booths.
“You really haven’t figured it out?” she said.
“My grandmother always said I was slow on the uptake.”
“And apparently she was right.”
“So, why does everyone know you in this place?”
“Because I grew up here.”
I looked around some more—at Valentine and the paintings on the walls, and an inner dawn came up on what she was saying. “Barb.” I said, letting it sink in.
“Starting to make sense now?” she said. “Isolated, tiny town left off most maps, where everybody thinks they know everybody? Nobody here ever guessed who she really was, not even me. Read the signature on the painting.”
On the wall next to our table, a dark seascape of a small boat on a stormy sea, signed, B. Jones.
“Yeah, Barbara Jones,” she said, leaning toward me with a low voice. “To folks in Shelter Cove, that’s who my mother is, no matter what the papers say.”
“Barbara Jones,” I repeated, in numbstruck monotone.
“It’s all over the television, too. Haven’t you seen the news the last couple days?”
“I’ve been avoiding it like the plague,” I said. “Baseball, infomercials, old movies. Anything but the news.”
She mocked me with a sad headshake. “You have major issues, mister.”
After breakfast, we circled back to the Crow’s Nest, and I packed up and checked out. The fog had lifted despite Carhartt Buck’s forecast.
Valentine had flown in to the local airstrip in a friend’s plane, so the plan was to drive back to San Francisco together in my car. She said there were a couple of stops we needed to make first, and she sat in the passenger seat and talked and pointed me left and right until we turned down a one-lane street called Dolphin Drive.
The blacktop quickly turned pockmarked and gravelly, and the road got narrower and narrower until it shrunk down to a scrabbly path that came to a dead-end on a ledge overlooking a black-sand beach. She told me to park and I did. “There’s something here I think you should see,” she said.
I stepped out of the car into a déjà vu. This looked a lot like the spot in the old Polaroid where my mother was standing on the bluff in her Easter hat. I had searched for it in the drunken fog a day (or two?) before. I had walked (staggered?) the coastline for I don’t remember how long with the photo in my outstretched hand, holding it up to the live scenery, trying to get reality to match the picture. Nothing looked right, and then night came on and I stumbled into the big-legged woman at that blurry house party, after which I gave up the whole besotted quest.
But now I went to the car and got the photo out of the hatbox, and I hurried back to where I’d just been standing. I held the photo in my hand at the end of my arm like a nearsighted man… and it fit. Everything clicked into place like the last piece of Molly’s jigsaw puzzle. A gust of wind pushed the hair out of my eyes, and I flinched at the touch. I didn’t understand it, but I knew this was what I had come to Shelter Cove for. It wasn’t in Room 24, it was out there on the ledge all along. It was a glimpse of my mother’s wild runaway love for J.R. Cole, the joy on her face in the photograph, the fleeting knowledge that a moment is right and true. And for some reason I needed to physically connect with it.
Valentine had been leaning against the Cadillac, silently observing, and I’d nearly forgotten her presence until she cleared her throat. “Thank you,” was all I could muster in response.
I walked to the car, put the Polaroid back in the hatbox and closed the lid. Valentine was waiting in her seat when I slid behind the wheel. I looked over and said, “I’m ready.” I had some grand feeling buzzing in my chest like I was bravely going into battle.
But Valentine said, “One more stop.”
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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