JANUARY 1-7
510 Words
Russell woke when his boat shifted. Someone was aboard—without knocking on the hull first. Someone was breaking the first rule of boat etiquette.
Teri. Crap. Teri was coming on board. She’d been eyeing him toward the end of the party last night. Did she have a late night welcome ritual for any new single man on the dock? Certain parts of his body were indicating they wouldn’t complain about that sort of welcome. But no way.
He scrabbled about for his pants, knocked his head sharply on a deck support he’d been meaning to wrap in foam rubber. He was going to give himself a permanent crease in his skull pretty soon.
“Don’t be stupid, Russ. It’s just been too long since you’ve had sex.” Not since Melanie had jumped him Thanksgiving morning before he’d had a chance to tell that he was leaving for Seattle in a few hours.
She hadn’t stayed after the studio closing party that he’d flown back for a week later and he couldn’t blame her. Others had offered to stay, but he wasn’t that crass. Or, now that he thought about it, that interested. It hadn’t been a cheerful bash though it had all of the catering and blues band trappings of a good go.
The bright flashes before his eyes eased and he struggled into his pants as the boat rocked again. Then there was a step thudding back down onto the dock. He tried to think if there was anything to steal up on deck.
The forward porthole showed no one; no one crossing past the bow toward land. Who’d be up in the middle of the night prowling around the marina? He’d better stop them before they hit a boat that had something to lose.
He ran down the short companionway, the wood shavings and sawdust were prickly against his bare feet, and threw open the rear hatch. The cold hit his bare chest like a slap. He looked along the dock and could just make out a broad figure in a dark coat with white hair.
“Perry?” he half-whispered sending a puff of steamy breath out into night.
The old man waved a hand over his head, but didn’t turn around. He continued toward his battered old tug.
That’s when Russell heard it, the faintest sound at his feet.
He looked down.
Perry had left a cardboard box.
Russell shivered as the chill air wrapped around his body.
The box moved. There was something inside.
And then the box mewed.
Alki Lighthouse
Alki Point, West Seattle
First lit: 1868
Automated: 1970
47.5762 -122.4206
Alki, the Washington State motto, means “by-and-by” in Chinook, a local Native American language. In 1851 the first white settlers in the area landed at the present day location of the lighthouse. They named the settlement New York-Alki.
A few years later a young entrepreneur named Doc Maynard was made unwelcome there and moved on to found another settlement a few miles from the inhospitable point. It is one of the ironies of his life that in his last years, a near destitute Maynard lived very close to the lighthouse where New York-Alki had long since succumbed to Doc’s city, which he’d named Seattle.
- Writer
