Pearce Hansen: Stagger Bay

© 2012 Pearce Hansen

This book is dedicated with respect to Mr. Dante Bonaduce

The morning I went to hell I was passed out drunk.

One moment I was lost in the sodden oblivion last night’s twelve-packs had bought, the next a whole passel of cops was rat-packing all over me in my bed, slamming me onto my face to shackle my wrists behind me before I could fight back.

The feel of cold steel snapping shut around my wrists made me relax, despite them ratcheting down tight enough to cut off the blood flow completely and hurt. I’d worn such bracelets more than a few times when I was a kid and the familiarity cut right through my alcoholic haze, made me stop any resistance.

I was wrenched to my feet and propelled out the master bedroom and down the hall, all of the cops shouting: at me, at one another, at the world. As I was staggered toward the front door (or what was left of it, for now it was no more than a shattered pile of wood dangling to the side off the bottom hinge) my son Sam stood mute by the TV holding one of his injection-molded plastic action figures.

Sam’s eyes were bright blue and wide, looking as fake as those painted on the toy dangling limp from his hand. His thumb was rammed up to the root in his mouth even though he was ten and no longer a baby at all. The TV was tuned to one of the cartoons he liked, the volume turned high so the show’s atonal music and manic sound effects blared loud and cutesy-bouncy.

Our eyes met as I was bum-rushed along by the cops. My eyes were bleary; I was dull-witted as a steer headed for the slaughter chute. Sam’s eyes were blank dull stones reflecting the shock unseating his little-boy world.

As they stumbled me out the front door my wife Angela stood in the kitchen with her knuckle in her mouth, biting down on it hard enough to draw blood. Her thick black hair wasn’t brushed and combed into the long shining raven’s wing I so loved to run my hands through; it was tangled and bedraggled, and spilling over her face.

Angela was short and petite. Now she looked shrunken as an abandoned doll, surrounded by all the appliances and furniture we’d bought to shield us from our former lives, from before we’d escaped up here to Stagger Bay. Some kind of message burned from her eyes past her bedraggled locks, but I was too drunk to decipher it as I somehow tripped off the porch and onto my face on the front walkway.

One of the cops accidentally ground his knee into my back for a while, and then they hoisted me into the air by wrenching me up by my hands cuffed behind my back before letting my toes touch ground, almost dislocating my shoulders in the process.

It was Cop City out in front of my house. It looked like the entire Stagger Bay Police Department had shown up to make the arrest. There were so many rollers that just the squawk off their radios would’ve activated my radar back in the day, even inside the house and asleep.

But I was years from the Life, doing my best pretending to be a stone cold Citizen now, and my street instincts were stunted and atrophied. And of course, I was still so drunk from last night’s carouse with my big brother Karl, my brain might as well have been cottage cheese.

All our neighbors were out on their front lawns to gawk at my plight, cookie cutter dolls in a cloned diorama of row houses extending as far as the eye could see down the street. They looked like masquerading demons at about that point; I’ll assume I was imbuing them with about as much humanity in my mentations as they were presently according me.

As I sat in the back of the squad car my bleary gaze lit on my new Ram pickup truck in the driveway, the over-sized black beast I was working double shifts on the loading docks to pay off. I looked at the trim and ship-shape little bungalow Angela and I had somehow scraped up the down payment for, the first and only house either of us had ever owned. Angela watched me from the kitchen window, her face a pale blur as the roller surged away from the curb.

I squirmed my butt around on that hard plastic bench of a seat. It was a suck-ass kind of a homecoming to be sitting in the back of a squad car again after so many years.

“What’s your PC?” I asked the cop chauffeuring me to the Slams, my voice still slurred from the drinkage. He stared straight ahead, giving me nothing more than the close-cropped back of his head to relate to.

“Shut your cake hole, baby killer,” he said. That’s when I had a sneaking suspicion I was royally fucked.

Maybe you grow up in the gutter with no one to lend you a hand. But that’s okay; nobody owes you nothing no how.

Maybe you meet your one true love, have a son, and leave the Life forever to become a Citizen. You pay your bills, obey the law, and think maybe you’ve paid your dues, earned your way into the consensus. You fool yourself into believing you’ve got something coming to you; you think the past is past, no more than a bad dream long gone.

You have a mortgage; you feel like you and your family are finally part of something, embedded within a community. You get to thinking you’re safe, that the people and the things you love are well protected.

But sometimes that’s all shown up as a load of crap. Sometimes reality slices through all your illusions and bites you right on your flabby pale ass.

Stagger Bay, my erstwhile home, was a smallish city or a largish town depending on who you asked, up on the Redwood Coast of Northern California. It was county seat for an extremely isolated mountain region a day’s drive from San Francisco, with only three highways in and out, landslides and wild-fires cutting us off from the rest of the world several times a year. Hell, we couldn’t even keep a railroad or a fiber optics line open; the closest we came to the outside world was satellite-fed TV, Internet, and syndicated talk radio – otherwise, we might as well have been on another planet from the rest of America.

For Angela and me, coming to Stagger Bay from Oakland had felt like jumping through a time warp back into the 1950s, or through a television screen into an episode of Leave It to Beaver.

It was a town originally built around the twin industries of logging and fishing, tiny as a toy model compared to the sprawling urbanization of the Bay Area. Stagger Bay was barbecues and truck parades, oyster festivals and free concerts, beautiful beaches and coastline, farmer’s markets and redwoods tall enough to tickle the sky.

Moving to Stagger Bay felt like winning, like coming home to a safe harbor the likes of us had never known. For Angela, my darling professional paranoid, Stagger Bay’s isolation was one of the clinchers.

She’d laugh and say that even if civilization collapsed outside our little community, even if some super-flu ravaged the world, our town would come through it smelling like roses and completely untouched. But I could tell she never really believed in its safety; I knew she was terrified of what she most needed to trust here.

As for me? I’d never really even pretended to rely on it but that was no matter. I figured Sam was less likely to get chopped in a drive-by up here; less likely to have a crack pipe jump into his hand.

‘Our Town,’ Angela always called it. Stagger Bay was intimate and neighborly even if tightly clannish and old fashioned. We’d settled down and done our best to fade into the background, nodding and grinning foolishly at all those who lived about us.

But now my neighbors were howling for my blood.