Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Incident at Lonely Rocks.pdf

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INCIDENT AT LONELY ROCKS
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
* * * *
Winter on the Oregon beaches was unlike winter anywhere else. Winter on the
beach meant fifty-degree temperatures and the occasional rain. The surf was high,
but the beaches were empty—tourists spent their vacation dollars on Maui or the
Virgin Islands, or even Las Vegas in December.
But Oscar loved the beach. And he loved the fact that his route took him there
every single week.
Mondays were his beach days. He drove from the warehouse, which was on a
side road exactly between Seavy Village and Anchor Bay, and headed north. His
first stop was always at the Lonely Rocks Wayside, and he’d always think it was
incredibly well named.
Not once had he ever seen a car parked there, not once had he watched a
tourist walk along the beach. When he arrived, there was only him, the crumbling
parking lot, and thePOTSportable toilet, which was as close to the highway as he
could get it.
He would pull up alongside the toilet, get out his scrubber and bucket, then
put on his gloves. He’d keep the ignition on—he had to; the hose wouldn’t work
without it—and then he’d get out. He’d open the toilet’s door, stick the hose
through the hole, and let the machine suck the waste into the large container at the
back of his truck.
He also had another portable toilet strapped into the back in case he had to
switch one out or he got called to a new job. Usually that toilet remained there for
most of the week.
Then, when he finished vacuuming out the waste, he scrubbed the interior and
added new chemicals in the portable toilet’s storage container. He had become a fast
cleaner, and a precise one. His motto was simple: He wanted moms and grandmoms
to comfortably use his toilets.
He particularly liked the Lonely Rocks Wayside. It had been built in the 1950s
as a large turnout where tourists could watch the waves. Over the years, it had had
slight upgrades: The parking lot was now asphalt instead of flattened dirt, a guardrail
had been placed along the cliffside, and state-produced signs told idiots not to climb
over the side.POTSgot the wayside’s first and only portable toilet contract in 1991,
and Oscar had been servicing Lonely Rocks ever since.
Oscar figured it was the highway warning signs that kept the casual tourist
away. In addition to the BEWARE SUNKEN GRADE signs that dotted every mile
of the old road (it wasn’t Highway 101 anymore; the state had gotten terrified of the
erosion this high up and had moved the highway two miles inland, away from the
 
ocean), there were DO NOT WALK signs posted along the shoulder and
CAUTION: UNSTABLE GROUND signs even closer to the wayside itself.
Most out-of-state tourists didn’t know Oregon terminology, so the “sunken
grade” signs wouldn’t bother them. Sunken grade meant the same thing that the
unstable ground sign meant with a slight twist: Sunken grade would most easily be
translated as “sinking road.”
He was a native Oregonian, which was why he always stopped his heavy truck
on a turnout on the east side of the highway, just before the sunken grade signs
started. Then he’d walk the length—again on the east side, away from the
ocean—and inspect the road, just to make sure it was sturdy enough for the
one-ton-plus he would drive across it.
So far, he’d been lucky. But a few times, he had come across crumbled
asphalt on the far end of the wayside about a hundred yards past his delivery spot.
Then he’d turn around and go the ten miles out of his way on the highway, heading
to the next wayside. He’d call the deteriorating road into both the State Police and
the Oregon Department of Transportation, figuring that he would be the first to
discover it, even if the slide had happened in a storm three or four days before.
In the winter, hardly anyone used this road. In the summer, he mostly saw
folks he called “environmental tourists,” people with PROTECT THE EARTH
bumper stickers or bikes or camping gear on the back of their car. The SUVs or the
families whose kids had iPods hardly came here.
This morning, the road had seemed stable. There hadn’t been serious storms
or high surf in the past week, so he gave the road only a cursory inspection. Then he
drove up alongside the portable toilet and started his ritual.
He put the truck in park and left it idling. He set the emergency brake and got
out. He paused, mostly because he couldn’t help it, and took a big sniff of the fresh
ocean air. A touch of salt and a bit of brine all mixed with the chill that suggested the
water itself. He loved it.
Just like he loved the view: the Lonely Rocks, all five of them, standing (that’s
how the brochures described them) in the surf, looking forever like people in a
semicircle with their backs to each other. He would’ve named it the Angry
Rocks—he could almost imagine their fronts, the scowling faces, the crossed
arms—but he supposed people would want something more dramatic with a name
like that, instead of one of those silent stand-offs his ex-wife used to give him in the
last few years of their marriage.
Then he squared his shoulders and headed to the portable toilet.POTStoilets
were a light green. The company got its start renting toilets to logging companies,
and for some reason, some designer thought it would best to have the toilets blend
into the scenery.
 
Here, the light green looked slightly out of place. The trees along this cliff face
were scraggly, wind-raved pine, with needles so dark they almost looked black.
Against the asphalt, the green seemed festive, and more than once, he’d found one
of those see-through Oregon Ducks stickers pasted onto the door. If the company
hadn’t minded, he would’ve left the sticker on—he understood team spirit; it had
taken him through that glorious season when the football team he’d played for
couldn’t do anything wrong—but he had to follow regs. Nothing but the company
logo on the outside (a big P with a toilet-bowl-shaped O, a T behind that in a way
that kinda looked like a toilet, and an S that seemed to brace the entire mess up) and
a spotless, pine-fresh interior.
This toilet looked relatively new. It had the new curved door handle that
informed someone outside whether the toilet was occupied or not, and it didn’t have
a lot of scratches or polished-off graffiti marks.
He walked around the toilet first, making sure nothing had happened to the
outside. He braced a hand on the side of the toilet and accidentally shoved it, which
made it rock.
Something banged inside.
In fact, it banged so hard, he nearly toppled over. Weight had shifted.
Someone had planted something inside his portable toilet.
Then his breath caught. Had he interrupted a customer? A hiker maybe?
Someone frightened by the required beep-beep-beep of the truck as it backed up?
He could just imagine some scrawny hiker in his Birkenstocks, huddled inside,
waiting for civilization to go away.
“Hey!” he said. “C’mon out. It’s okay.”
He almost banged on the reinforced plastic wall, then thought the better of it.
That would probably scare Mr. Birkenstock even more.
So he went around front and stopped as he peered at the door. It wasn’t
latched from the inside. The little red sign that changed as the handle latched read
VACANT.
He felt a little relief at that. Never once, in all his years as aPOTScustomer
service representative had he ever tried to clean a toilet with someone in it.
Although that didn’t explain the weight shift. He might have to amend his
record to never cleaning a toilet with someone obviously in it. There was no way to
tell this thing was occupied. The parking lot was empty, there was no backpack or
camping gear outside (not that there was a place to camp anywhere near Lonely
Rocks, although there was a great hiking trail—if you didn’t mind that it could
crumble out beneath you at any minute), and the door wasn’t latched.
 
He couldn’t be blamed for making this kind of mistake.
“Hey!” he said again. “My name’s Rollston. I service these toilets. No need to
be scared of me. Are you okay?”
No one answered. And he had the odd feeling that no one would.
Then he frowned. Kids. Kids were the only downside of this job. Not little
kids, who actually loved outdoor toilets, seeing them as an exotic novelty. Not even
the local high school crowd, which mostly found the toilets gross, if they thought of
them at all.
No, the kids that bothered him were the college kids. Old enough to come to
the coast unsupervised for the weekend, but young enough to forget that the word
“responsibility” applied even here.
Those kids would get drunk, build fires on the beaches, and toddle up to the
nearest portable toilet to get rid of the excess beer. Then they’d get the bright idea in
their head that they needed to mess with the toilet somehow. Sometimes that messing
was just a team sticker. But most often, it manifested in the urge to turn the toilet
turtle.
Oscar never understood why. Did the kids think there was a hole underneath
it? The toilet just had a receptacle under the seat, a receptacle filled with chemicals to
dissolve the waste and get rid of the smell. The things were designed so that they
could be turned on their side and not spill (too much) unless they were overfull—and
he never let his get overfull. So the irritation was just that he had to right the toilet
before he could clean it.
An extra five minutes, which bothered him in the summer and usually didn’t
disturb him at all in the winter.
But sometimes the kids were creative. Sometimes they stashed things inside
the toilet. The worst was the bearhide wrapped around a wooden frame. The hide
still had a head, and damn if that thing didn’t look real when he opened the door the
first time, and damn if he didn’t let out a little scream as he slammed the door
shut—not something he’d want his old football buddies to know. But not many of
his old football buddies would’ve opened the door again either.
He had, and he’d been fine. (He’d half expected that bear to lunge out at him,
but it hadn’t. It hadn’t moved at all, which was the thing that tipped him off to its
fakeness.)
He expected something like that here. Some kind of prank—a log, maybe, or a
mannequin. He’d come across things like that before, things people had intentionally
or otherwise left inside the portable toilets, and while they’d given him a start, they’d
never scared him.
Not like that fake bear.
 
He knocked one final time, hoping that someone would open the door. When
no one did, he squared his shoulders, put his fingers in the little half-moon handle,
and pulled.
The door came open easily enough. That surprised him, and looking back on
it, he wasn’t sure why. Later, he realized that everything about the toilet had
surprised him, and yet the parts registered separately, not as a cohesive whole.
First the door, then the flies—an entire swarm of them, buzzing around him as
if it were summer. He tried to wipe them away from his face with his free arm.
Then the darkness. He thought the entire place was in shadow, even though he
knew it wasn’t: There had been sunlight on the door, after all. But the interior looked
dark, and these places only looked dark when they were in shadow.
Only he tried not to leave them in shadow, so no one would be tempted to
pull a prank or get hurt using the facilities.
What he saw as darkness was actually blood, great gobs of it, dried black
against the molded plastic walls.
And finally, he saw the body, wedged—which was the wrong word because
obviously, he’d heard the body flopping around—between the tiny sink and the side
wall. The body belonged to a man, a Birkenstock wearer just like Oscar had initially
suspected, only this guy had a knife stuck up to the hilt in the left side of his flannel
shirt. He had a pair of glasses hanging from one ear, and his face looked naked. It
also looked weird, with the blood spatter on one side, but not on the other. It took
Oscar a while to figure out that the glasses had been in place when the guy died.
Oscar had probably dislodged the glasses. He’d probably moved the entire
body when he shoved the portable toilet.
That made his stomach heave. He backed out of the toilet and ran toward the
guardrail, planning to let go of his breakfast over the edge.
He didn’t quite make it. He lost a great meal on the side of the asphalt,
crouching so that he barely missed his shoes.
He stayed that way for a minute, afraid he’d lose more. He couldn’t very well
leave the guy here, but he couldn’t take him either. That would be tampering with a
crime scene, right? Oscar watched a lot of the detective programs on
television—from CSI to all its spin-offs, and its nonfiction inspiration shows on
Discovery and PBS—and he knew that touching stuff was the worst thing he could
do.
So was panicking.
He swallowed against the bile still rising in his throat and made himself
concentrate. No car, no other people, nothing obvious. He wasn’t in any danger,
 

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