Winter Tides Read Online Free PDF Page B

a Wonderful Life
or
Farewell My Lovely
. The walls were paneled with vertical wooden boards and battens, painted gloss white, and the doors had brass knobs and ripple glass windows. At either end of the balcony there were palm tree tikis standing on top of the railings. They were comical tikis, with long noses and blubbery lips and undersized arms folded across their bellies. One of the tikis wore a garish aloha shirt and a straw hat, and it bent down over the floor below, watching like a sentinel, secured precariously to the post at the end of the balcony by a wide leather belt. Tikis had been the rage in the early sixties, but they’d gone so far out of style by now that they’d nearly disappeared off the fashion map. Earl Dalton, who had established the company in 1951, predicted a tiki comeback and was “displaying the tikis to advantage,” as he put it. The Earl’s had an economy Hawaiian package, with a bamboo bridge, giant clamshells, an outrigger canoe, torches, and a backdrop painted with palm trees and a moonlit ocean—everything you’d need for a luau except the hula dancers and beach sand, both of which could be obtained for a fee. The tikis were a bonus if you rented the whole package.
    The sound of his feet echoed on the wooden floorboards, and he stopped for a moment and stood on the balcony next to the tiki in the shirt. The sound of the ocean was louder now, and he could see through the bank of west-facing windows that the fog was thinner than he had thought. From where he stood he could look out over the rooftops toward the pier, where a long gray wall of water rushed through the pilings, seeming almost to scrape the bottom of the pier before throwing itself forward, the lip of the wave striking the ocean and exploding skyward in a fury of violent white water that surged in a ten-foot wall toward the beach. Dave heard the staccato boom of its breaking then, a crack nearly like thunder….
    * * *
    L ESLIE C OLLIER AND HIS FIVE-YEAR-OLD GRANDDAUGHTER Jenny appeared now on the path through the vacant lot. The path led to the Supreme Doughnut Shop, which sat a hundred yards away from the Earl of Gloucester on the edge of the Highway. Collier, an old friend of the Earl’s, rented the two-bedroom bungalow behind the Ocean Theatre. The Earl owned the bungalow and the theater both, and he paid Collier a small salary to keep the theater in operation, even though it hadn’t earned a penny in years. The comedy improv on Friday nights drew a big beach crowd, but that was about it.
King Lear
would play to half an audience, which didn’t matter to the Earl, who could afford Collier’s salary and wrote off the bungalow rental as a business expense. Nothing having to do with money mattered to the Earl. What did matter was that the show went up on schedule, and that the little out-of-time world he had invented on the corner of 6th and Walnut Streets spun along in its course without interruption or complication.
    The two of them stopped at the edge of the lot, and Collier, balancing his coffee cup in front of him, did a little sideways shuffle, back and forth like Soupy Sales, the sunlit fog swirling around him. Jenny tried it herself, getting it about half right, and then Collier showed her again. Dave could hear the sound of Jenny’s laughter, and he watched as the two set out again, disappearing beyond the corner of the warehouse.
    D AVE WATCHED AS ANOTHER WAVE SLAMMED THROUGH the pier, and it occurred to him that no matter how much concrete they poured into holes in the sea bottom, no matter how many engineers calculated figures and assessed the potential energy in a breaking wave, one day a swell would come in out of the Pacific that would sweep it all away like it was nothing at all.

4
    E DMUND DALTON’S VIDEO CAMERA EQUIPMENT WASN’T professional quality, but it did the job, and most of his film work was better than the average in the “industry,” as he liked to call it. His artistic sensibilities made