The Off Season Read online

  For Carol

  Author’s Note

  The Author’s Imagination, being sufficiently sardonic, found no reason to fashion any character in this book after anyone living or dead. Resemblances between the town of Point Vestal and the city of Port Townsend, Washington, are, however, purely intentional. I am real proud of tatting together the histories of both places, and of capturing their essential charms. I’d be equally proud if I could take credit for the occasional snatches of Victorian poetry appearing here and there. Except for one sachet by Poe, however, they are quoted from Poetry of the Pacific, May Wentworth, editor (San Francisco: Pacific Publishing Company, 1867). The poets are Edward Pollock, W. A. Kendall, B. F. Washington, and Emilie Lawson.

  Ever since I was a pup, I’ve been enamored with the works of Mark Twain. The book that follows is not an attempt to emulate the master, because that would be a surefire failure, a real dumb thing to do; and I am not a masochist. I had one thing foremost in mind when I wrote The Off Season. I wanted to write a book that would gladden the hearts of readers, but also a book that, if possible from the land of wit and poetry where all great writers surely go, my hero Mark Twain would enjoy reading.

  Introduction

  Gordon Van Gelder

  I have not read all of Jack Cady’s novels (one is socked away in a cache of books meant for a time when I can enjoy more leisure reading), but I’ve read most of them and The Off Season is my favorite.

  One reason is because I edited the book and twenty years later, I have only good memories of the experience. Perhaps the file for the book, somewhere in the basement of the Flatiron building in Manhattan, is full of contentious correspondence, but if so, those memories are buried deeper than that basement. I don’t remember any difficult negotiations, no spats over editing the book or the cover design. The Off Season was not a book that made anybody rich, but the experience of publishing it was one of many small joys.

  (I do, by the way, remember a wonderfully cranky letter Jack sent me concerning copyediting. He said something to the effect of, “I’ve gone on the record of saying how much I hate the city of Chicago. Hate the weather, hate the architecture. When I was driving, I’d go miles out of my way to avoid that city. But my feelings for Chicago pale in comparison with my hatred for The Chicago Manual of Style.” I’m pretty sure, however, that Jack sent me that letter in regard to another work.)

  There are other reasons why The Off Season is my favorite, but first, let me tell you a bit about Jack.

  When I first met him in the early 1990s, Jack Cady was in his early 60s, a tall man with a craggy face and a full head of dark hair (gray around the edges) and a beard he would stroke enthusiastically—not as urbane intellectuals in movies do, but more like a little kid playing with a toy. I happened to see the 1948 film Brute Force recently and it occurred to me that Charles Bickford (Gallagher in the movie) would have made a good choice to play Jack on the big screen. Aside from the physical resemblance—both of them big guys with bushy hair and gruff voices who were clearly not afraid of physical labor—Bickford could have captured the sincerity, wisdom, and generosity of spirit that Jack exuded.

  Jack worked a lot of blue-collar jobs: truck driver, tree high-climber, auctioneer. I’m pretty sure he met his friend Frank Herbert (author of Dune) when he was doing landscaping work on the Herberts’ property in Port Townsend. Jack’s appreciation of laborers shows in most of his fiction; Steinbeck’s influence on Cady is strong.

  Jack wound up teaching at the university level, including thirteen years at Pacific Lutheran. He told me that in his first year, a student asked him: “Do you think I can make it as a writer?”

  As Jack told me, “The guy was writing the most godawful stuff—cutesy and clever and just bad. But I said to him, ‘Sure, why not?’ and damned if he hasn’t gone on to have himself a respectable career.”

  I did mention Jack’s generosity of spirit, didn’t I?

  In the summer of 1997, Jack hosted me and my wife as we were took off a week after a convention in Seattle. As I recall, Jack and his dog Molly had just returned from a trip to a jazz festival in Montana, but he made us feel welcome right away. His house in Port Townsend was full of good, solid wood furniture and the kitchen bookshelves overflowed with fiction rescued from thrift stores. (I particularly remember seeing Hervey Allen’s work there. Was he reading Anthony Adverse at the time? I think so.) There was no television in the house that I saw.

  Part of my reason for visiting Jack was because I wanted to visit Port Townsend—which brings me to another reason why The Off Season is a favorite of mine. I’m not giving away much when I say that the town where Jack lived for thirty years served as the model for Point Vestal; I found the information online after eighteen seconds of searching.* *[If you’re curious, it turns up in the Publishers Weekly review for The Off Season and in the Peninsula Daily News obituary for Jack, both of which are online.] Jack was not one to let the sins of the past go unremembered and Port Townsend had plenty of such for the remembering.

  While we were in town, Jack took us to the old jailhouse that has been converted to a museum and I spent a few minutes in a cell. Jack took us to the fort. Did he show us staircase like the one in the novel? Memory fails me. I know he pointed out some mansions as we drove, but I can’t remember if he indicated that any of them modeled for the Starling House or the Parsonage. I do know for certain that we saw none of the strange doings that you’ll encounter in The Off Season. Fiction did not become fact.

  But I did get a feeling that Jack captured some of the town’s essence in his novel. Look on the pages—in between the words—and you’ll find the spirit of the place.

  No one acquainted with Jack Cady’s fiction should be surprised to know that his works are grounded in their settings, rooted to the land. Like the American writers he surveyed in his book on the subject, he was aware of the history, the traditions, and the terrain of his stories’ locales. When he wrote about the homeless in Seattle, he knew the streets in question. When he wrote about the North Carolina wilderness in Inagehi or the highways of the United States in Singleton, the reality of the locales are there—they get under your fingernails, they lodge in your head.

  I love The Off Season because there are spirits in the Pacific air of Port Townsend and they mixed perfectly with the magic in Jack Cady’s fiction. This novel blends the past and the present, the darkness and the light, the weight of our sins and the joy of being alive, and damn if it doesn’t get that blend just right.

  And I didn’t even mention the cats.

  —Gordon Van Gelder

  March 2015

  The Off Season

  . . . which showed me plainly that, so far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired his two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse.

  —Mark Twain,

  “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”

  Chapter 1

  Tides along Point Vestal rise dramatic, like the ghosts who sometimes run this town. Tides lift boats to the level of the only road, and from the boat basin spectators peer through mist toward voices of the dead. People who work and live on the boats gaze downward toward the road. They step from high decks to worn concrete sidewalks stamped with emblems of the New Deal and the Public Works Administration, sidewalks carrying dates reading 1937, sometimes 1938.

  Some of us were children when those sidewalks were poured. Some were adults. Our people are more than simply long-lived, for the town cares nothing about casting us into the mists of death. Tourists often look surprised to learn our oldest citizen carries 113 years, and is only in competition. The oldest person in Point Vestal history was/is 120, or 119;
records remain unclear.

  The New Deal’s sidewalks line the downtown business district, its nineteenth-century brick raising Victorian facades four and five stories above the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The New Deal’s 307-step concrete stairway runs a thin line up the hill beside the bluff. That stairway with its many small steps links downtown and uptown, although a couple of streets also lead up the hill. Everything on the bluff is uptown, where polite haunts echo.

  Along uptown streets Victorian mansions congregate like parishioners sitting through an eternal sermon of rain and mist. Wet streets reflect stained glass windows, tall turrets, wrought iron fences. The houses bear creaking joints and windswept roofs; and people in those houses dwell comfortably beside a hundred years’ worth of ghosts.

  In the Starling House, a four-story mansion, a drawing room held one of many legends haunting this town. It is a Victorian tale, and we still think of the story in Victorian terms. In October 1888, when the Starling House stood brand-new and smelling of fresh paint, August Starling was discovered in full evening dress, dancing to the tinkle-bell music of an Austrian music box. His partner wore a plain but lovely long gown, which was not shocking, nor reason for fear. But some people were distressed, others thrilled, because she was dead. Starling danced with a corpse. Even more shocking, the corpse was not his wife.

  Chapter 2

  We must tell our reader how this book is getting written. Five of us work on it: Bev from the bookstore, Frank, who tends bar at Janie’s Tavern, Collette, who runs the antique store, Samuel, a retired pastor, and Jerome, who edits the newspaper. At first we thought we would each write separate chapters, but Bev said, “If we do that the book will sound like a combination of William Morris, John Ruskin, and the confessions of Amy Lowell.”

  “Around this town,” one of us said, “that would make it a bestseller. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing,” Bev said, “but don’t expect people in Seattle to read it.”

  As to why we write: every town has an official history. In Point Vestal, an official history is easy come by, but a true history is not. Around here history is not over just because an activity passes. We write an absolutely true history, one uncloyed with romance. We include our own awful mistakes because each of us played a part. The book reveals pretty horrid events that happened some years ago. In fact, since those events, our tourist industry has fallen off. We want to explain what happened, and we want to state for the benefit of tourists that the town is fully reconstructed.

  Our problem in writing a true history is: at some time or other, strange forces got loose in this town. They probably arrived early on. When the first whites moved here, they asked the Indians where to settle. The Indians pointed to the site of Point Vestal and said, “Take that. We don’t want it. It is cursed.”

  That was 130 years ago. Our founders, mostly from Puritan New England, came to this frontier coast and built big houses. Gloom and mist, eternal rain, criminality went into building the town—smuggling, prostitution, Chinese bond slaves—and caused the builders to feel depressed and guilty. Recall, also, their frontier isolation. The green forest pressed close, as it does today. The sea crashed down the Strait and battered beaches.

  Our founders answered back by building an exaggeration of Victorian society. They were ultimate Victorians. If August Starling danced with a corpse, it was no more than many Victorians did symbolically. Combine Victorian firmness with a definite strain of East Coast Puritanism—add strange forces already running—you have a small town where history is active as the present.

  It has taken a while to figure history out. We had to factor in men named Kune and Joel-Andrew, together with a multilingual cat named Obed. Those three supplied their own forces during the early 1970s.

  These days we meet at The Fisherman’s Café two mornings a week for coffee (except Frank drinks tea from his mustache cup). Everybody talks about how to get the history set down. Then we go home and write our parts. Then Jerome, our newspaperman, takes the parts and fits them together. He cuts and pastes, trying to make it sound like the same person is telling it all. We make jokes about who writes this book, and we call ourselves The Committee on Specters, which is, as Bev points out, a good way to write about this town. Point Vestal has manifested so many ghosts that only a committee would be ignorant enough to think it possible to handle all of them.

  Meetings happen this way, more or less.

  We arrive at the warm café about 7:00 AM. Outside, tide beats against rocks, and, if there is a wind, spray rises like gray fingers and blows across Main Street to hit the front of Janie’s Tavern. Wind pries at the bookstore’s cracked window. It blows salt spray against Mikey Daniels’s milk truck, always moseying by about this time. At 7:00 AM nothing else moves out there except wind in the trees. Point Vestal’s morning going-to-work traffic is composed of that milk truck.

  At sixty-seven, Bev is our group leader. She is even taller than her mother, in her mother’s prime. (Bev’s mother is ninety-six.) Bev looks like Dorothy Lamour, except with silver hair. She is able-tongued, quick, and makes Frank twitch because she is so beautiful and Frank is such a bachelor. We suspect Bev is the smartest person in town, and know she is the kindest. Bev sits next to Samuel, our retired Methodist minister. Samuel is eighty-seven, looks no more than seventy, and also looks like an ancient dockworker. He stands tall, wide-shouldered, dressed in black broadcloth. He still owns some muscle, plus all his teeth. Samuel would impress a Jehovah’s Witness.

  We soon settle, breathe deep sighs, and it seems we go through a little stage play. It looks and sounds something like this:

  BEV (pushes long hair back with worldly gesture, smiles widely so her worldly gesture looks friendly and hometown): We’ve got to put Kune in the book. No way out of it. Kune killed that woman in Seattle. Should we put that in? I worried about Kune, even after I got all the facts. Or, maybe, especially then.

  SAMUEL (steeples hands as if in prayer, gives Bev a look more seductive than preacherly): If we tell, the Seattle police will come over and arrest Kune. If Kune gets arrested, he can’t walk through the streets all night. If he doesn’t walk through the streets all night, there will be no witness to all the carryings-on. That could cause a crime wave.

  FRANK: And you a minister of the Bible.

  Frank appears built around his beard, but Frank is smart for his age. He is fifty-seven, his beard getting gray, and he looks like John Ruskin. He even dresses like John Ruskin. Without the beard and his little potbelly, Frank would weigh 120 soaking wet. Younger people consider him a greedy little bartend­ing priss, but most people think him sensible.

  FRANK (pulls at mustache, looking more ministerial than Samuel): A minister of the Bible is supposed to be straightforward. Especially if that minister is a Methodist.

  SAMUEL: Kune was well intended, and he was once a man of medicine. A real doctor. Let’s have a little professional courtesy.

  COLLETTE (tries to look like Irish enchantress. Almost succeeds): You can’t prove Kune is alive, anyway.

  Whereas Bev is beautiful, Collette is pretty. She is forty-one, but educated, and knows more about history than any other person in town. She is short, slender, dark-haired, blue eyed. If she had brown eyes, she would look like a gypsy.

  FRANK: I vote Kune’s alive. We’ve found out the hard way that ghosts are not real consistent. Kune is consistent.

  JEROME: I vote Kune’s dead. I vote the corpse who washed up on North Beach eight years ago was Kune. I wrote it that way in the paper, and I stick by my story.

  BEV: You can’t just vote on this. Kune is either alive or dead. We’d better find out which.

  FRANK: We could ask him.

  JEROME (peers from beneath green eyeshade with steely journalistic gaze): Kune equivocates. He would not understand the question. Besides, how can you ask him anything when he is moving all the time?

  That is the kind of question Jerome would ask because Jerome is 60 and so methodical he could tizzy watchin
g a sail­boat race. He thinks of himself as a literary gentleman and a closet humorist. We must constantly watch his editing because he keeps slipping in things he believes are funny. Jerome is bald and chubby. He wears a green eyeshade when he edits, wears a double-ender Sherlock Holmes hat when he does not. Jerome has steered the local newspaper for thirty-five years. He still hand-sets the headline type.

  COLLETTE: Have Gerald ask Kune if he’s still alive. Kune will still talk to Gerald.

  Gerald is our town policeman. He raised forty kinds of almighty sand with Kune after Kune killed the woman in Seattle.

  There’s more to explain about our working methods, but at this point, Jerome says we’d better stop just telling things and start apologizing. Otherwise the reader will think we make bad jokes.

  So, we offer apologies. We can’t help it if history is alive in Point Vestal. We can’t help it if no one knows whether Kune is dead. We can’t help it if one of our most famous houses, The Parsonage, moves around town with a mind of its own. We can’t help it if the ghost of Joel-Andrew prophesies along beaches, portraying images of seven golden chalices, of seven fatted cattle, of seven bronze trumpets blaring into raging wind. We also can’t help it if people in Seattle do not want to read the book. Seattle people probably think they are modern and safe . . . although—to tell the truth—few of us know much about Seattle. Seattle people visit with red license plates, and green and blue and orange license plates, and spinner hubcaps. We know Seattle is sort of like the sky—not up or out, but around. As the crow flies, Seattle is circular: no way out of it except Point Vestal.

  In Point Vestal, we may not be sophisticated, but we are not modern and we sure-God know we are not safe. We know about Indian uprisings and ghostly uprisings and earthquakes.