For the Record

12

Just for the record, my full name’s Pearly Everlasting Crimson Mountain Meadow Celestial Moonshadow Fields.

Yeah, my folks were hippie throwbacks, what can I say? They gave me that gaggle of names starting with some flowers around their yurt up on the Idaho Panhandle and named my little brother Mount Breitenbach—everybody called him Bach though. And as if that wasn’t nutty enough, they gave us each our own last names to boot.

Don’t remember much of those early years apart from running free in the woods with a pack of kids, watching Little Mom give birth to Bach, and seeing my dad Pezi’s body after his pickup skidded off a logging road and broke through thin ice on a nameless lake on the Fourteenth of February, 1994—may his soul be at God’s right hand.

Before long Little Mom moved the three of us on down to Georgia to live in a dank, moldy canvas wall tent on her family spread off the road between Molena and Zebulon.

But I guess my granddad Big Jewels couldn’t deal with her playing that beat-up mandolin and crying all the time about losing the love of her life, to say nothing of Bach being as wild as a Tuckernuck steer.

Sugar, my grandma, wanted to keep just me to raise like my dad’s side of the family put out on the table for both us kids, but neither of those ideas stood a snowball’s chance in hell of happening.

So Little Mom hauled us from boyfriend to boyfriend, job to job, place to place.

Let’s see, after bouncing around Georgia like ping-pong balls, we did likewise through Alabama, South Carolina, New York, Maine, Indiana, Colorado, Wyoming, California, Alaska, and even over to Ireland for most of a year where poor Bach met his Maker—may his soul be at God’s right hand—before trying out almost every town along the Oregon Coast.

The two of us finally put down roots in Waldport at the tail end of August 2000 after she met my worthless piece of shit stepdad—may that gallows bird’s soul be rotting in hell.

13

 Truth be told, the rest of my childhood wasn’t all that much different from a lot of folks I met over the years. You probably heard one version or another somewhere along the way or lived parts of it yourself for all I know—real dad dead, asshole stepdad in and out of the picture before disappearing for good, dead little brother, depressed mom, bare shelves, but always just enough cash for the grown-ups to have their booze, drugs, and case chips.

Bottom line is I survived all that and more thanks in no small part to a stubborn streak in fine fettle, Jordy, and sports. Even got a couple offers to play college softball ’cause of my decent pitching arm, but that whole thing didn’t fit into our game plan.

See, me and Jordy had our lives sketched out from the time we were twelve years old after getting thrown together on account of our names.

On the first day of seventh grade at what would’ve been my nineteenth or twentieth new school—depending on how you count ’em—the rest of the kids found out all eight of my gems ’cause of that bonehead homeroom teacher whose name you couldn’t pay me to remember. Bad enough somebody calling out Pearly Fields or Pearly Everlasting Fields. Course that goofy old fart had to go and read each one slow and loud the way Little Mom sweet-talked him into doing ahead of time even though I begged him not to before the tardy bell rang, so I got myself ready for the usual shit-ton of grief.

But after he clamped down on most of the snickering and snarky comments and moved on to the very next kid, I caught a lucky break flowing headlong into my best in show ever.

That man could’ve just asked Jordy how to say his names right instead of sounding like he was switching over to roll call for porn stars by belting out, “Njord Balzac Siemen Johnson Fuchs.”

Don’t need to tell you what kinda flak Jordy got from a bunch of kids, but he shined ’em all on. He laughed and had a heyday flicking ’em shit for their boring names and making up crude handles for anybody even thinking of hassling him about his.

Couldn’t count the times I heard him let loose with one of his comebacks when some joker tried being all funny after hearing or seeing his names and said, “Jordy Fuchs?”

Didn’t matter who it was, Jordy always busted out that shit-eating grin of his and fired back something like, “Sure would like to, but you’re not my type, thanks all the same. Besides, if I don’t give Pearl first dibs on Jordy Junior, more likely than not she’s gonna slice him up and use him for fishing bait.”

Like Little Mom used to say, the man’s as comfortable in his own skin as anybody walking this earth.

So at lunch on day one, he came right up and flopped down across from me sitting on my own outside the cafeteria doors. He plunked that dented dome lunch pail of his covered with hand-painted Viking stuff onto the picnic table and took a close-up of me with a sad wreck of a point-and-shoot. Then he launched into how much the two of us had in common seeing as we were new to that school, plus our names and all.

You might not believe this, but I swear the very first thing I ever said to Jordy was no way in hell was I changing my name to Pearl Fuchs when we got married or saddling our kids with that ball and chain.

He choked on a mouthful of one of my hush puppies he’d helped himself to a minute before till I went around and thumped him hard on the back a few times. After he could talk right again, he said fair enough, maybe he’d just have to change his to mine, but I wasn’t to expect him to come even close to nailing down all my crazy names since he had trouble enough keeping his own straight.

Me and Jordy shook hands and made our first deal—graduate, get married, go for Viking tatts instead of wedding rings, build a house, have kids, go fishing.

Five years and nine months later on the Tenth of June, 2006, a week after graduating, we tied the knot out on the Spit on that beautiful late spring afternoon. On our way to Cape Perpetua to go camping, we swung by his buddy’s shop and put the finishing touches on each other’s first initials over our hearts.

Neither of us ended up changing our last names. Let me tell you, me not changing mine pissed off a bunch of his family, especially Whistledick—that’s what I called his shirttail cousin with shit for brains who was always on the lookout for the next burr to get up his ass.

Anyhow, after me and Jordy got home from our honeymoon, we went back to chasing down leads on property near town and going fishing whenever we got the chance.

But the kids never showed up—not for lack of trying, mind you. Some might say they were better off in the long run this time round though ’cause who’d wanna live through the Meltdown not knowing if Daddy’s pushing up skunk cabbage somewhere and finding out Mom’s on trial for gunrunning?