Morgan Finch tries to define her role in the town, after an altercation.

This was originally written to be a submission for a Pride month-themed publication. It's a lot gentler than most Cannon Shoals pieces. It is also the first clean Cannon Shoals piece. Thanks to :iconkergiby: and :iconspudz: for their help with this, which is mostly contemplative and dialogue, so, I hope you enjoy it even without the smut. Patreon subscribers, this should also be live for you with notes and maps and stuff.

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute--as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

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"The Poetical Answer," by Rob Baird

The water, she knew, would be cold.

It always was, even warmed by six hours of unseasonably cloudless daylight. Now the sun was setting, and the fog had begun to think about making its way over—slouching into the harbor like a bucket had been kicked over, with nobody caring enough to set it back upright.

Morgan took off her right shoe, sat on the edge of the dock, and stretched out until a wave, surging back from the piling, splashed her toes. She gasped: knowing it was cold and feeling the icy bite were two very different things.

The vixen hoped that it might settle her mind, jar it from the same sort of fog that had settled in. But no, it was just cold. Pulled up at the next pier was the Katie Coefeld, a 50-foot longline halibut boat. Beyond that was Eric Sutton’s Hathaway II, floodlights ablaze in starker and starker contrast to the deepening night.

Eric’s done okay for himself.

A moment later, as the Neatasknea Bay gave her foot another chilled slap, she wondered why she thought that. The Hathaway had capsized; Eric had been airlifted to a hospital. From what she knew, he’d been in a coma for a few days, and the crew wound up losing the boat. June Sutton must have despaired when her husband used the insurance money on a replacement.

It was busy now, though. She could hear the crew unloading their catch now, all but feel the energy of a good trip and the promise of its reward. All was well now. The sinking happened while she was away. And, actually, mostly she knew of Eric Sutton from Before, when he was a sort-of-friend to Brian Crow, and he’d stopped by the house now and then.

“Don’t do it.”

Morgan turned. It was Daniel Hayes, the youngest of Cannon Shoals’ police officers. A stoat four years older than her, he was nonetheless sort of timelessly youthful in an angular, sharp-eyed way. “Don’t do what—jump? Like we were in Titanic or something?”

“Nah. Litter. Feed the sea lions. Whatever you were planning. Why’s your shoe off?”

“I wanted to see how cold it was.”

Danny made a face. “Ain’t you got a phone to look that up on?”

He crouched next to her, still scowling as he peered into the murky water. She leaned forward, curious if he might’ve seen something, if he’d divined some more interesting answer from the bay. “You don’t like the docks. What brings you down here?”

“What do you think?”

She answered obliquely: “We’re not friends or anything.”

“True. Probably why they sent me.”

It wasn’t that Morgan disliked him, at least not conspicuously. Their interests didn’t overlap, though. She’d found herself less and less in the mood for his brusqueness, his flippancy—the jagged, hard shell he seemed to have constructed about him like an oyster. And she did actively dislike a few of his fellow police officers.

And, though she hadn’t asked and didn’t particularly want to, she guessed he’d probably taken it a bit personally when she told him she didn’t want to work with them anymore. There’d been a few new opportunities, and it felt like an easier way to get a fresh start, and…

“Who?” she asked, to break the silence.

He jerked his thumb up the steep hill that switchbacked down to the harbor. “Carlos. That collie girl. Somebody else mentioned they’d seen you walking down here, and Scout is ‘busy.’ And I owe him.”

“So this isn’t a, uh. A ’wellness check’?”

“No.” Carlos Ortiz—Scout—wasn’t really her friend, either, but the coyote was the most mellow of the town cops, and the most good-natured. Maybe he cared about her of his own accord.

Or word got around about her altercation at the IGA. The reflexive anger no longer burned, but—for once—neither had any guilt emerged to replace it, any sense that she’d been overreacting, that she needed to stop being so sensitive… “Does that mean you heard what happened? How?”

“They don’t put out an APB for that kinda thing. I dunno.” He shrugged. “Dawn told… Ray, probably. He told Mark or Josh; they told Scout. Fuck, now look what you’ve done—I might as well be gossipping over bridge like a goddamn Golden Girl.”

“Small towns,” she said. It had been a few minutes since she’d felt any water; the tide must’ve been ebbing. “The worst thing about them is everyone knows who I am. I never have to explain myself.”

“Not the shitty Internet? Or how we don’t get next-day delivery?”

She blinked, unsure if she’d really expected a reply to the idle musing. Or, if she had, what she’d expected from the stoat. Nothing had changed about his affect, and Morgan began to perceive it as, peculiarly, somewhat reassuring.

It had been such an orthogonal challenge that she could feel safe ignoring it. Because either he’d ignored her, or his distance turned him into a useful sounding board. The kind of conversational partner she could expect to say something actually hurtful, actually cutting, if he wanted. When he wanted.

“No. Because the other side is that if they call me the wrong name, or whatever, they know what they’re saying.”

“Know it, or mean it?”

“I…” The vixen’s ears splayed. She watched the shadows cast by the men on the Hathaway for a spell. “I’m not sure. I guess I think they probably… know it, without meaning it.”

He grunted. “Maybe.”

“Maybe they mean it without knowing it.” She tried to feel out that alternative. “They believe whatever about me genuinely, I guess. Even if it’s not deliberate. Is that what you were getting at?”

“Making conversation,” the stoat said. “You still with your shoe off like you might go for a dip, and all.”

“You want to get back to the bar,” she guessed. Wordlessly, he put his paw at the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt, and ran it down his short fur. She hadn’t been planning on stopping by Annie’s, which was always warm; her hoodie was far better-suited to the Oregon evening. “Alright. Mission accomplished.”

“I wasn’t getting at anything,” he began, while she slipped on her shoe and started doing up the laces. “Don’t matter, right? Wasn’t trying to make excuses.”

“I know.”

“Either way it’s shitty.”

Morgan stopped, the shoe half-tied. “I just realized…”

“Yeah?”

“When you got me that part-time job. They must’ve… I dunno. Asked you about me, right? You must’ve had to explain stuff.”

“Maybe.”

She cinched the lace taut, and got to her feet. “The older guys. Like… Clint or whatever, I bet they didn’t go for it.”

“Clint picks his battles.”

“Gus, then.” Danny shrugged at her. “Did they talk about me behind my back? You don’t know, I guess,” she realized even as she asked the question. “Because they wouldn’t have done it in front of you.”

Another shrug.

Where the sidewalk began, and Bay Avenue turned from the harborfront up the hill, was the fisherman’s memorial: an anchor, atop a block of weathered cement, with a plaque full of names facing towards the bay.

One of the flukes had been worn shiny by decades of passing touches—she didn’t know how old the memorial was. The earliest names, though, dated from the 1920s. The most recent were from 2018. Three came from the year before.

“Joanna Cope—they don’t mean Graham, do they?”

“Yeah.”

Ken Graham’s name was written right above his daughter’s. “God, she was in my class. And Timothy Pless—is that Connie’s brother?”

“Husband. Shelley Mill’s brother-in-law. It was Ken’s boat they were on, though. Caught in an early storm, I think. They had the helicopters out when it started to clear, but… far’s I know, they never found anything.”

“From the whole boat?”

“Big ocean, I guess. I could ask my Coastie friend.”

Vanishing had, once, had its own sort of appeal. Nowadays, the vixen was unsure. “I wonder, if I’d never come back, if it would be like that. A name on a plaque. And… you know, like. What name would it be?”

“Nah.”

“No?”

“Christ,” Danny swore, she sensed, more from the evening chill than anything else. “You want the blunt answer or you want me to be all poetical and shit?”

“You don’t have to be gentle.”

“The year you fucked off for the hinterlands, maybe somebody might’ve cared. Brian and Judy were worried about you until I found out where you’d ended up. But then, 2013 was a bad wildfire year, and 2014 we had the riots, and 2015 there was that huge storm. 2016, Lisa Rourke got herself… well, there was that whole fuckin’ thing. By the time you came back, nobody was thinking about putting your name anywhere.”

She looked at the list of names again, and flicked her ear. “Was that the poetical answer?”

“The it’s-fuckin’-cold one.” Morgan nodded, and they started walking uphill towards the dive bar. “If you want to think of it like that, you’re welcome to feel like there should be a name on the plaque but it just ain’t yours anymore.”

“I don’t think that would make Brian happy, somehow.”

“Yeah,” Danny agreed. “I’ll pay the engraver. Would that help?”

It would help him act as an agent of chaos more than it would help Morgan, the vixen imagined. She had, in any case, a complicated relationship with her past. She shook her head, and focused on the steep climb up Bay Avenue. “It’s fine. Whoever that person was, they’re happy now. All’s well with his soul already.”

“It.”

The ground had leveled out; Annie’s was only a half-block away. She stopped, shooting him a look. “What?”

“It is well. That’s what the memorial says, not ‘all’s well.’ ‘It is well, with my soul.’ You ain’t read it, or what?”

“The opposite—I read it too many times, I guess, when I was younger. But I focused more on the names… never thought about the words specifically, or anything.”

“Obviously. Y’all never were fishermen.”

He left it at that, and she followed him into Annie’s. The dive bar hummed with low activity—later, when the crew of the Hathaway II joined them, it would rise to a deafening roar as they paid the profitable voyage forward to the rest of the town. For now, she recognized only a few regulars.

Carlos Ortiz, Danny’s partner, nodded to the two of them and returned to a separate conversation. Lex Cowan, a younger collie who was one of Morgan’s closer friends in the town, was busy at the pool table, back to the door. Morgan made a mental note to thank her later for her concern.

In the meantime, there was Hayes, who had caught the bartender’s attention. Morgan ordered a glass of beer, and thought about how she wanted to approach the topic. “Hey. Thanks for inviting me back here.” Inviting, and not making sure I was okay.

“No worries.”

“But. I dunno.” It doesn’t really matter, she decided—Danny was the blunt type. “Do you have, like. A trans family member or something? A friend who came out?”

“No. Maybe online.” He tipped the beer back, and made a face. “Fuck. Warm, of course.”

Olympia was Olympia, Morgan supposed, and probably about as bad either way. “Trade, then.” She’d yet to take a drink from her own; the stoat didn’t argue when she slid the glass down the counter and reached for his.

“You’re trying to figure me out?”

“I’m not sure who I’m trying to figure out.” She tried his beer, and immediately understood the face he’d made. “I guess it’s you, yeah. Yes. Sure.”

“The way I see it, is there’s a lot of optional shit, you know? Going to church or volunteering at the shelter or catchin’ vegan or whatever. Accepting someone for who they are isn’t one of ‘em.”

“You’d be surprised.”

He gave her a sharp look. “If you already got me figured out, why’d you ask?” She gestured for him to continue with her paw. “Eh, I was done anyway. My point is, they don’t give awards for doin’ the bare goddamn minimum. Don’t gotta be more than that.”

Morgan forced a few swallows of warm beer down while she considered his answer. “Is it, though?”

“What, the bare minimum? Yeah.”

“Yesterday, Dawn asked me if we should do anything for Pride Month. I don’t know. I mean, we could, right? I don’t know how many LGBT people there are in the Shoals.” She shook her head quickly. “Not the point. I was thinking about it, that was the point. And then, you know, I was at the IGA…”

“Chen is useless. For a couple years, Galvan asked us to lay off the fishermen ‘cause they couldn’t pay the tickets anyway and he didn’t want to repossess the boats. Fuck if he didn’t really mean the Wayward L, though. I had to go up and testify at Newport three times.”

“Against Donald Chen?”

“Because he wanted to argue a forty-dollar ticket. Once, we were there all day. He loses every time—the judge fuckin’ hates him. When Kendrick got called over, he said Donnie Chen was one more objection from getting the chair for a rolling stop.”

Morgan could hear that, playing his condescending argument at the grocery store back in her head. “But it was the cashier, too. And… God, and everyone over in Oak Valley. I was doing some machine work for Gerhardsen’s, but everything he does is for Martin-Barlow, and…”

“What do you want?”

“Like… existentially?” She expected him to be summoning another round of drinks, but instead the stoat turned his paw up in a light shrug. “I want life to not be so fucking exhausting all the time.”

“Kind of a big ask.”

“But that’s what it is. It’s exhausting. James Gerhardsen is nice, but it doesn’t matter how nice he is if the contract is for the mill and I have to talk to them for the specifications.”

“Brian?”

“No, not him. Not yet. But there’s that, too. I moved back here and I didn’t realize how much I’d lost. I kinda see it everywhere now. Like I came back to a town it turned out I’d never lived in. Dawn or, like… like Niko—you know him? Leo’s son, the guy who runs the Roadhouse. He said it’s okay, because then you get to be whoever, without being tied down to your past. But even if I don’t have a past, Brian’s kid is still… out there.”

“True. Can’t change that, I guess.”

“No. But. You managed it. You’re just… you, right? Nobody ever calls you…” She realized that she didn’t actually know his father’s name. He’d always just been ‘Danny.’ “Who is your dad, anyway?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“There aren’t that many stoats in Cannon Shoals.”

“We’re the only ones.”

“Kind of a dog town.”

“Kinda,” Danny agreed. “With any luck, wherever he wound up, there’s one less weasel there, too.”

She cocked her head. “You don’t know?”

“I don’t think my mom does, either. He went east just after I was born.”

Morgan had the feeling that she knew the answer, but she asked anyway: “You don’t even know his name?”

“Why would I? What’s that look for?”

‘That look’ was the brief, sad smile that had accompanied an equally brief chuckle. “No. I just figured you’d say that. I’m sorry. That… you know, that he wasn’t there for you, I guess.”

“But I didn’t have him hanging over me as an adult? That’s what you’re saying?”

“I guess, yeah. Is that too simple? Everybody likes Dawn Danis. For her… it doesn’t matter, and the way I saw it, it was because she has a role. You know? She’s ‘the artist.’” Morgan finger-quoted the phrase, and the ones that followed. “She has ‘the studio.’ So what if she has ‘a wife,’ too? I thought if I could be something else first, then…”

“Beats me. I don’t gotta deal with any of that. At the end of the day I walk outta here and it doesn’t matter to me. Giving advice is real easy, if you don’t mind your ignorant ass saying something stupid.”

“It hasn’t been stupid. I… I’ve appreciated it.”

“Okay. Well, what are you looking for? The approval of those assholes at the mill? They’re on some whole other Ten Commandments—‘thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s grow lamp.’ Fuck. You don’t need them.”

“I do if I’m going to live here. If this is my town.”

“Nah, you don’t.”

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. He understood that. Moreover, one of them, after all, was in a position of authority—and it was not the vixen. “So what am I supposed to do about them?”

Danny held the glass of beer to his muzzle, eyes narrowing contemplatively. “You got a knife? Thought about slashing their tires?”

It was difficult in general to know when the stoat was joking, and his expression didn’t help. “Aren’t you a cop?”

“Not right now.” He glanced over his other shoulder. “Hey. Scout. Need advice.”

Carlos Ortiz had been chatting with the brindle-furred mutt who seemed to be his girlfriend, or at least put up with Annie’s for more than purely charitable reasons. He excused himself, slipped from the barstool to his feet, and circled the stoat to join them. “Yeah?”

“Is it illegal to slash someone’s tires?”

“Who pissed you off?” Danny didn’t answer. The coyote looked to her instead. “Who pissed him off, Morgan?”

“I think it’s just a hypothetical.”

“He’s always pissed off at someone. Is it Bobby Dean’s boys again?” Carlos took Dan’s cocked eyebrow as an affirmative. “Oh. Yeah, it’s not illegal if it’s the mill boys. Think that’s in the state code somewhere. Nice you made it over, Morgan.”

“Uh. Thanks,” she said. She hadn’t really talked to Carlos much, either, since she’d stopped working for the police. “I hope you’re… I hope you’ve been alright. You and… Samantha?”

“Mmhm. Same old, same old. Sam’s trying to put a book together. She’s got a career, I guess. I just have this…” Shelley Mills, the bartender, had spotted Danny’s empty glass and drifted into earshot. “Uh. This fine young man.”

“Just the other day you were calling him an asshole,” the lioness teased. “You two doing okay? Another for you, Daniel, I suppose. And…”

The stoat grabbed Morgan’s half-drunk glass and pushed it out of her reach. “She needs another one, too. Because this is warm. Because somebody runs the heater—”

“Fishermen come in here wet. What do you want me to do?”

“Career-counsel them off those fucking boats.”

“Language,” Shelley warned. “Anyway, Daniel, I didn’t give it to her warm.”

“Well, it got warm somehow.”

“The inescapable curse of entropy.” Morgan often kept quiet at Annie’s; she was not a regular, and the dive bar admitted few others. Shelley gave her an odd look. “Fate? The hand of God?”

The lioness took both glasses, shaking her head. “One of these days, Daniel, you’ll have a normal friend. And on that day, I’ll be very surprised.”

Seeing that the locus of conversation had moved, Samantha joined them, leaning against Carlos. “Hey. We’ve met, right?” The coyote nudged her. “Oh! Yeah, okay. Morgan. He talks about you sometimes.”

“I’m… almost afraid to ask why.”

“You’re the one who told him about the dam on Deerblood. I found some of the old equipment, and that shack. And you knew about the truck, right?”

Did I? Maybe a friend of hers, when they used to play in the woods out there, had talked about it. Samantha had her phone out, pulling up a picture of an ancient panel truck, with a crank starter and no windshield. Plant growth wrapped around the rusted metal, caressing it; in black and white the contrast was haunting. It did not look like the truck had been softly reclaimed—it looked like it had been strangled. “How old is that, do you know?”

“Not exactly. Maybe 1910? Here…” She showed Morgan another picture, of the truck’s side. “K. BARL” was barely visible, in block type. “Google said Kenny Barlow was a local; ran the mills here and upriver from the turn of the century on. Must’ve been there before the PWA showed up in the ‘30s. Neat find!”

“Real cool, yeah.” Samantha swiped through a few more photos. “Oh, wow—this is all from up there?”

“Yup. Every time I want to head back out Carlos reminds me I should ask you, ‘cause you’ve been here forever.” She grinned. “So, think of anything you can give me as a steer and I’ll put you in the acknowledgments of this book I’m doing.”

“Could go with you. Sam needs a chaperone,” the coyote suggested.

“I’d like that. If you want,” Morgan added; she’d spoken impulsively. She was still turning over the offhand way Mills had called her Danny’s “friend.” Was she? What about Samantha? “The weather will be nice for going hiking, anyway.”

“I think it will…” Sam checked her phone thoughtfully. “I could check how much film I have left and sharpen my machete…”

Danny, distracted by handling the next round of drinks, had had his interest piqued. “You have a machete? Could kill two birds with one stone, then.”

Morgan took the beer, at least, if not the suggestion. “You’re still going to be off-duty, or will you be a cop again?”

“I can plan ahead,” he said.

Instead, over the course of another beer, she caught up with Carlos and his girlfriend. And then with Lex, who wanted to know if she was doing okay. For the first time that day—possibly the first time that week—Morgan felt that she finally was. And she decided to talk to Donnie Chen, in the morning.

Just talk. Just explain yourself.

But there was still anger in it, and she thought keeping the anger around would be useful if she wanted to assert herself. She woke with the same thought, and a clear head—the Hathaway crew finally showed up, late the previous evening, and the others stuck around, but Morgan left. She hadn’t needed the crowd, and hadn’t wanted the hangover.

But as she made her way past the memorial towards the docks, a voice called over to her. She recognized the voice’s owner when he appeared: Carl MacRory, a burly mixed-breed dog who owned a crabbing boat. With him was a younger dog, with wiry fur, a deerhound or something.

Carl didn’t seem to recognize her, though. “Are you lost or something?”

“No. Just…” She fumbled, tilting her head back towards the memorial. “Sometimes I come down here to… think.”

“Not a fisherman, though? Nobody else comes down to look at that thing.”

“They’re Brian Crow’s kid,” the deerhound explained. “Not really water folk.”

Carl looked her over. “Nate? I thought—”

She steeled herself. “Morgan Finch. I… changed my name.”

“Oh. After the shit with Harlan, I guess. Can’t blame you.”

“No. Uh.” She settled for shaking her head; changing the subject. “You know where it came from? The plaque and stuff?”

MacRory looked to the deerhound, who shrugged. “Yeah. It was after that big storm in the 30s. There’s a bunch of names there, if you look—like… half the fleet, I think. More than on the war memorial, for sure.”

“Oh.” The explanation seemed to have sparked some memory in Carl. “Dad talked about that, I remember. Really fucked up his folks. Man, that gale a few years back—shit, KJ didn’t have nothing on the lecture I got from my sister when we didn’t put in early. Weather radar and all, though. It’s safer.”

“Safer,” the deerhound echoed, tracing the newer names with a calloused finger. “Of course, if he hadn’t—”

“Don’t.”

“C’mon. You know what I think happened—”

Carl cut the younger man off again, more sharply. “I know. And you ain’t sayin’ it here where they all can listen. I’ve sure they’ve got better things to do, wherever they are.”

The mood had darkened. Morgan cleared her throat. “What’s the quote from?”

Danny had implied the fishermen—the water folk, as Carl put it—would know, and sure enough the mutt looked surprised that she didn’t. “From a hymn. There was this guy from out east, Chicago I think. His family was going to Europe, but he couldn’t make it ‘cause of work. He’d lost his business in a fire, was tryin’ to rebuild and all. Said he’d come later. And this is a couple hundred years ago—18th century, or whatever. So they didn’t have none of that modern technology.”

“After the Civil War,” the deerhound said.

Carl rolled his eyes. “You want to enlighten the young lady, or am I telling it?”

“Go ahead.”

“There was a shipwreck. News came back, but he didn’t know what had happened to his family. Finally he got a telegram from his wife. Just: ‘saved—alone.’”

“Jesus,” Morgan said, quietly.

“He went to meet her, though, right? And on the passage over, he wrote a hymn. ‘When peace live a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll; whatever my lot, Thou hath taught me to know…’”

“It is well, it is well, with my soul,” she finished, voice still soft, eyes flicking to the plaque. “Ah.”

“Yeah.”

They were silent for a spell. “I should head back to town,” the vixen said. “Errands to run and all. Thanks for explaining, though.”

“Sure.” The names on the plaque held Carl’s attention, though. At length, his fingers brushed them, and he turned away to head to his boat.

The deerhound made to follow him, but stilled himself. “Sorry about your friend. Jo Graham?” Now she felt a little guilty for the excuse—Joanna hadn’t exactly been a friend, just a classmate—but she nodded anyway. “It was rough.”

“You said you knew what happened?”

“Ah…” he drew the sound out, and shook his head. “Carl’s right. It doesn’t matter what I think.”

She watched him go, headed for the Katie Coefeld. At the far end of the docks, Morgan saw shapes moving on the Wayward L, and she thought about the distance. The footfalls between where she stood and the boat’s berth, and the time between impulse and action. The shadow between her desire for catharsis and her need for…

For what? What do you want, Morgan?

She walked up Bay Avenue and paused at the corner of Bay and Lincoln. Highway 101 cut through the town two blocks west of Bay, but the business route was a loop that ran from Lincoln to State Street, and rejoined the highway just north of Fillmore.

Just north of the IGA, as it happened.

Tourist season would start soon enough; travelers, making their way down the coast, would see into the plate-glass storefronts of a waking town. Dawn Danis was starry-eyed to the point of blindness if she thought Cannon Shoals would embrace Pride Month the way it did July 4th, or Christmas, or Easter.

But Jenny… Jenny thought of herself as a friendly person, and Dawn did plenty of work for her, and she’d see the business sense in redecorating Jenny’s Jetsam. Or Jim. Jim Riggs. His daughter had come out as a teenager, and Riggs was sensitive about it, wanted to be supportive…

The water was cold, would always be cold. But it was behind her and, with the sun warming her back, Morgan set to work.