Homesick Creek (25 page)

“You busy?” Bob said, shifting from foot to foot in the doorway.

“Nah, just sitting here looking at the backs of my eyelids for a minute. You don’t have any aspirin or Tylenol or whatever?”

“No.”

“Yeah,” Hack said regretfully.

“Ask Francine or Rae, maybe. Girls always have stuff like that in their purse.”

Hack tried to rally. “So what can I do you for?” It wasn’t much, an old joke, a real groaner.

“Do you have time to help me with something? It won’t take long.”

“Yeah? Will it cure a migraine?”

“Don’t know about that,” Bob said.

“Well, go ahead and try me anyway.”

“I have this project I’ve been working on.”

“You finally going to tell me what it is?”

“Aw, it’s nothing much. I’ve been fixing up this place, is all. There’s a bathtub I got to move in, but the bastard is cast iron, and I can’t lift it by myself.”

“You going to pay for my hernia?”

“What?”

“That was a joke. Yeah, I’ll help you. You’ve got me curious now,” Hack said. “When, this weekend?”

“Nah, I’ve got to get it in now, pretty much. How about I ask Francine for some aspirin or maybe some of those pills they take for the cramps, they’d probably help a headache, and then we can just go out and do it?”

What the hell, it beat sitting at his desk pretending to read sales reports. “Tell her to give me double the normal dose,” he called after Bob, who’d taken off so fast he damn nearly left a contrail behind him like a cartoon action figure. And Bob wasn’t the kind of man to move in a hurry normally. Hack was still fishing around in his pocket for his truck keys when Bob returned with a fistful of white pills and a Dixie cup of water. Whatever they were, Hack put four of them in his mouth and pocketed the rest for later, pounded back the water, and crushed the cup in his hand to take his mind off the rush of pain and nausea. If he made no fast moves, no abrupt changes in direction until the drug kicked in, he might just live.

“So where are we going exactly?” he asked Bob as he unlocked the doors to the truck.

“I’ll show you as we go.”

The cab was warm inside, and clean, smelling of wax and Armor All. Hack had detailed it from top to bottom over the weekend. “North or south?” he said.

“North.”

Hack pulled out into traffic, heading north on Highway 101. “Remember those road rallies we used to go on, thirty-six checkpoints in four states in two days?”

“Yeah.”

“That was fun. Maybe we should do that again sometime,” Hack said.

Bob said, “Make a right turn up there.”

“Here?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Weyerhaeuser land.”

“Uh-huh.”

Hack shrugged and turned onto a gravel logging road that twisted and wound back into a valley he’d never seen before.

“There,” Bob said suddenly, and there was a note of excitement in his voice that made Hack look a little harder. Down below them he saw a broken-down barn and an old cabin of some kind—rustic, but some people liked stuff like that. Him, he was all for his creature comforts, his recliner and his remote control and his occasional finger of scotch. He looked over at Bob. What the hell?

Bob hopped out of the truck before it had even stopped, looking like he was going to bust wide open with excitement. He trotted over to an old cast-iron tub resting upside down in the grass by the cabin door. “This is it. This is a real good old tub. They don’t make them like this anymore. Problem is, I can’t get it inside by myself.” He grinned at Hack. “It’s really something out here, isn’t it? Isn’t it just something?”

Hack pushed open the cabin door and walked inside. The cabin had only two real rooms, a front room and a back bedroom, plus a loft, a kitchen—or what Hack assumed was a kitchen, because he could see a sink through the doorway—and a bathroom. It was primitive but tidy and scrubbed and snug, with freshly sealed walls, a fire laid in the fireplace, and a green jar placed carefully on the mantel. Someone—Bob, evidently— had brought in an old rocker, a cane-bottomed chair, a primitive wooden bed, a bureau, a blanket chest, and a couple of old paintings, scenes of mountains and rivers. The bed was made up with soft old linens and a faded quilt.

“Holy shit,” Hack said, impressed. “Did you do this yourself?”

“Yeah,” Bob said proudly.

“Why?”

Bob stood in the doorway, considering. “Anita and me, we haven’t been doing so good lately. So I thought, you know—” He opened his arms, taking in the cabin, the land, possibly the entire valley.

“So?”

“So I never gave her a nice house before,” Bob said. “I always meant to.”

“How in hell did you find this?” Hack said.

“Me and a friend used to come out here all the time when we were kids. It’s been that long since anyone lived here. Never used to be a road until lately.”

“It’s Weyerhaeuser land, though,” Hack pointed out.

“Yeah.”

“They’re going to find out, Bob. It might take a while, but sooner or later they’re going to find out, and when they do, they’re going to boot your ass.”

Bob waved a hand dismissively.

Hack’s head hurt too much to be having this conversation. “All right, look. Let’s just hump the son of a bitch inside and get going. We’re trespassing. Tell me at least you know we’re trespassing.”

“I know that,” Bob said.

“All right, that’s all I’m saying.”

They grunted and lifted and twisted and squeezed through the door and fell into the makeshift bathroom on the back porch that Bob planned one day to plumb and outfit with a toilet and a sink, as well as the old clawfoot tub. A neat vinyl floor had been laid with precision. Hack was impressed in spite of himself; he’d never thought of Bob as the kind of guy who could pull something like this together, but maybe Hack had been underestimating him all this time. Maybe he was more than just an alcoholic screwup. Go figure.

“Did you see a lot of people die over there in Vietnam?” Bob said as they were catching their breath.

“What?”

“Vietnam.”

“Yeah, I saw a lot of people die.”

“I’ve never seen that.”

“You’re lucky then,” Hack said.

“Is it bad?”

“It sure ain’t good.”

“Yeah. I’ve never seen it.”

“I don’t talk about that stuff,” Hack warned, because he didn’t. Ever.

“Nah. That’s okay. You know it when they’re dead, though, huh?”

“Yeah, you know it when they’re dead.” Hack picked up the green jar on the mantel, for something to do. “Heavy thing, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yeah. It’s somebody’s ashes, a friend of mine.”

“No shit?” Hack looked at the jar with interest, then put it back on the mantel.

“Yeah.”

“Young guy?”

“Like us.”

“Young. So what did he die from?”

“AIDS,” Bob said.

“Shit,” said Hack.

“Alone,” Bob said. “He died alone.”

“Huh.”

“That shouldn’t happen.”

“Yeah,” Hack said.

“It shouldn’t.”

“No. I know.”

Both of them got quiet. “Was he a fag, or what?” Hack finally said, to lighten things up a little.

“No.”

“Because I heard that most of the people who get AIDS are fags.”

Bob shrugged.

“So you must have been good friends, though, to keep the guy around on your mantel.”

“Yeah. I knew him from when we were little kids.”

Jesus, was he crying? Bob had turned his back and put his head down. Hack looked closer, and sure as shit, Bob was crying. They must have been mighty damn close friends.

Hack walked over to one of the windows and looked out to give Bob some privacy. He said, “You lose someone, and it’s like their dying is a thirty-five-pound undershirt you can’t ever take off. It’s the heaviest goddamn undershirt you’ve ever heard of, but after a while you get used to it. It’s always there, but after a while you won’t notice it so much.”

Bob pulled up the bottom of his T-shirt and wiped his nose.

“Come on, sport,” Hack said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Time to go.”

“Yeah.”

Bob closed the door carefully behind them, waiting for the latch to take. “So you like the place?” he asked. Vinny used to fish for compliments the same way.

“Yeah, man, I do. I like the place a lot.”

Bob drew a deep breath, and then they climbed back in the truck and drove home.

Bunny was folding a heap of clothes at Anita’s kitchen table. She’d come over first thing in the morning to see how Nita was doing. She’d called Bunny last night, crying, and said she was feeling like shit all over again. When she arrived this morning, Bunny saw a mountain of laundry four loads high in the back bedroom that Crystal and Doreen shared, and from the smell of it, it had been there for a while. It wasn’t like Nita to let things go. She might not have much, but she took care of what there was.

Bunny had called and looked in every room, but no one was home. She loaded up all the laundry and took it to her house and ran it through her new washing machine with hot water for both the wash and the rinse cycles, along with a double dose of Spray ’n Wash. It was a splurge, especially the hot-water part, but from what Bunny could see, it might be the only thing that would get Bob’s coveralls clean after sitting for so long with grease and muck all over them, front and back. The man must sit directly in the pools of oil and fluids on the garage floor, to get that filthy.

Anita was home when Bunny humped the clean laundry back. She was sitting at her kitchen table, perfectly still and perfectly silent, scaring the crap out of Bunny, who didn’t even see her at first.

“Jesus Christ, Nita. I mean, whew, you nearly gave me a heart attack sitting there.”

Anita pushed up from the table. “I’m sorry, hon. I was just—” She gestured vaguely around the room, but Bunny didn’t see anything that would indicate activity of any kind.

“You all right, Nita?” Bunny said.

“Oh, sure. Sure.”

“I brought you clean laundry,” Bunny said carefully. “It looked like it might be getting ahead of you there in the back room.”

“Was it?”

“Well, four loads. Is your machine still broken?” Anita had the oldest Maytag on the planet.

“Yeah. I asked Doreen to do our things at the hospital laundry, but she said she couldn’t use it for personal.”

“Well, I could see that.”

“I didn’t want to bother you.”

“You could have.”

“You do enough,” Anita said. “I’m going to sit.”

She was already sitting. Bunny said again, “You okay?”

Anita looked straight at Bunny for the first time. “No. I don’t think so. What do you think this is?”

She tugged up her knit top and pointed to a purple spot the size of a quarter just above her left breast. When Bunny moved in closer for a good look, she noticed that Anita’s bra fitted loosely. That was odd.

“A bruise?” Bunny said. “It doesn’t really look like a bruise, though.”

“See, that’s what I said. I noticed it a couple days ago, but it doesn’t hurt.”

“Allergic reaction maybe?”

“I’ve never been allergic to anything,” Anita said.

“Well, it doesn’t look like a wart. Doesn’t look like much of anything exactly.”

Anita shrugged and lowered her top.

“Honey, you’ve lost some weight,” Bunny said carefully. “Have you been dieting?”

“No. It’s just happened. Not that I’m complaining.”

“It doesn’t seem right, though.”

Anita sighed. “Well, I’m too damned tired to think about it anyway. I don’t remember when I’ve been this tired.”

“You running a fever again? You look like you’ve got one.” Bunny laid her hand across Anita’s forehead. “Maybe a little one. You’re not real hot, though. When’s the last time you took your temperature?”

“Nineteen eighty-six.”

“I really think it’s time you went to a doctor, Nita. This has been going on too long. It’s been, what, three months maybe?”

“Off and on. I was better.” Anita dipped into the laundry basket. “Well, I’ll figure something out,” she said. “Next Monday’s payday, plus I’ve got money coming from the motel.”

“I wish you’d let me take you. I’d loan you the money, you know that.”

“It’s only a few more days. I’ll be fine.”

Bunny didn’t think so, but she let it drop. You could only push Nita so far, and then she dug in her heels and brayed like a mule. It didn’t mean Bunny wouldn’t worry, though. She’d worry all right. She thought she’d talk to Hack, get him to give Bob a hard kick in the ass. Bunny had never met anyone so oblivious. Anita had deserved better all these years, and that was a fact. Bunny couldn’t see what she saw in Bob, never had. He was a skinny, lazy, worthless man who never seemed to get things right, at least not where Anita was concerned. The night Anita had had Patrick, Bob had picked up a bottle on the way to the hospital. By the time the baby arrived he was three sheets to the wind and on a bender that lasted, off and on, for a year.

“I’ve got me a son,” he’d tell Bunny whenever he saw her, “and I got to be a father to him. How am I going to get that right? Huh? I never had a father; Warren never had a father, at least one who was worth a goddamn. You tell me how I’m supposed to get it right.”

Of course Bunny was trying to deal with JoJo, and that made her surly, but even discounting her circumstances, she’d have had no patience for him. Bob was trash; he always had been, he always would be, and he was going to drag Anita down with him. She’d told Anita so even on the eve of her wedding; threatened to tie her up and kidnap her until her good sense kicked in, but of course she hadn’t. There’d been many a time over the years that she wished to hell she’d gone through with it. This was one of those times, this rainy afternoon that oozed like a sore, as she watched Anita go down without so much as a struggle. But if there was one thing she knew from her years with JoJo and Hack, it was that you couldn’t make someone do squat if they didn’t want to. Nobody listened to anybody else and they never had, at least not in her experience. The most you could hope for was that they’d lip-read from time to time.

chapter sixteen

Rae Macy was nervous; that was the first thing Hack noticed. The second thing was, she wasn’t wearing perfume. He liked her perfume. Sometimes he could still smell it when he went to bed, like it had crawled up through his sinuses and taken root in his brain. She didn’t have it on today, though.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“For an hour, princess, if you want to.”

“It won’t take that long.” She ran her palms down the sides of her skirt. It was a denim thing, more casual than what she usually wore. That was the second thing he’d noticed. “I wanted to let you know that I’m resigning.”

“What?”

“I’m giving my notice.” She handed him a plain white envelope. Her voice was steady enough, but her hands were shaking.

“Why?”

“My husband has asked me to head up his election campaign. He’s decided to run for state representative.”

“Your husband?” What was that shit? As though Hack were some stranger.

“Sam,” she said, flushing. “Yes.”

“You think he’ll be any damned good at it?”

Rae bridled. “I think he will, yes. He has the right training, and he cares about people.”

“You?”

“People. Me. Yes.”

“You sure never said that before.” He watched her flush.

“You know, you’re not making this any easier,” she said.

“Was I supposed to?”

“It would have been the generous thing to do.”

“Then I’m not a generous man.” He was all off-balance, like someone had hit him hard on the back of the head with a brick. He lifted up three of his desktop toy’s six steel ball bearings and then dropped them sequentially. THOCK thock THOCK thock thock, THOCK thock—

Rae caught the ball bearings in her hand. “I’m sorry, Hack. I just can’t do this anymore,” she said quietly.

“Do what?”

“You.”

“Why not?”

Rae just looked at him. It had been five days since they’d come home from Eugene.

“All right. Look,” he said. “You don’t have to quit, though.”

“I think I do. Plus we’ve been talking about having a baby. I’m twenty-nine. I’ve always wanted children. A small town’s a good place to raise a baby.”

“Is it?” said Hack.

“Isn’t it?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether you love somebody there.”

“I love my husband,” Rae said.

“Oh,” said Hack.

“I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

“So am I supposed to feel happy?”

“No, but look at it this way.” She smiled a sudden, tight little smile. “You can score some points with your wife. Tell her you fired me.”

“Hell, she doesn’t believe anything I tell her,” Hack said bitterly. “If I was the Virgin Mary, she’d accuse me of screwing the stable boy.”

Rae stood up and laid a wrapped gift on his desk. “I thought you’d like to have this,” she said. “It seemed to mean something to you.”

He knew what was inside. It was the poetry book.

“I’m going now,” she said. “I think it would be best if I make this my last day rather than work the two weeks.”

“Best for who?” he said, but she was already gone.

He couldn’t remember the last time things had felt this fucked up.

He picked up the wrapped book, grabbed his jacket and keys, and told Francine that he would be at an out-of-town meeting for the rest of the day. Five minutes later he was speeding north on Highway 101, his head so full of junk he could hardly see.

While Hack was holed up in Minna Tallhorse’s apartment, the district attorney paid him a call. He was a greasy bastard, the kind of john Cherise had liked to service because they came fast and paid full price anyway. Hack and the DA sat on Minna’s stove-in couch for hours with a tape recorder turning on the coffee table. Hack talked on and on, words tumbling out of him. He only came up for air when the DA had to change tapes.

“Slow down, son,” he said, fumbling to thread a new reel of tape. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”

There was no point in telling him that time had already run out. What was left wasn’t time; it was purgatory. Instead, as the tape fed through, Hack talked, naming names, dates, places, events, a banquet of facts all served up from the excellent oven of his memory. When Hack was finally done, the DA wiped his face with a handkerchief and said, “Well, it’s quite a story, son. Now, I have to ask you again whether you personally witnessed or had direct knowledge of everything you’ve told me. Do you understand that family quarrels have no place in the courtroom? What’s between you and your mother is between the two of you.”

“Yeah, I understand.”

“And you’re prepared to testify under oath to everything you’ve told me?”

“Yes, sir.”

The DA scratched his head. “Mind my asking why you came to me with it?”

“There were reasons.”

“I imagine there were.” The man packed up his pens and tablets and tape recorder. “Well, whatever they are, the state of Nevada is grateful to you.”

“Yeah.”

At the door the DA turned back. “I’m sorry for your recent loss, son.” He shook Hack’s hand. “Real sorry.” Then he’d taken his tape recorder, tapes, pens, pads, and briefcase and packed them into a snappy new Chrysler and driven away.

Hack washed his hands as soon as he closed the apartment door, used up half of Minna’s bottle of Joy before he stopped.

Oh, Buddy.

C’mon, she’s a whore, a liar, a cheat, and a thief, and she has been for
years.

It was nobody’s fault, Buddy. See it for what it was. It was an accident.

You think we’d have been out on that road at three-thirty in the fucking
morning if it hadn’t been for her? That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit.

You’re so angry.

Yeah, I’m angry.

You always get into trouble when you’re angry.

Hey, you heard him. He said the goddamn state of Nevada would thank
me.

Oh, Buddy.

The next day he went down to the local recruiter and joined the army. They deposed him overseas and wrapped up the trial in just four days. Cherise was given the maximum sentence allowed by the state of Nevada. He heard that a year before her prison time was up she came down with liver cancer, but he didn’t know whether it was true or not. Either way, it didn’t matter to him. He could not, by then, have given a single goddamn.

Hack arrived on the outskirts of Portland at the height of rush hour. He could never see what the big deal was about living in a city. It didn’t seem like much of a life to him, spending an hour in traffic to go twenty miles. Vinny sure seemed to love it, though. He drove by her house, but no one was home, so he battled his way downtown to see if she was at work. No, the other girls at the department store told him, she wasn’t scheduled to work that day. No, no one knew where Hack might find her, but they’d be glad to give her a message when she came to work tomorrow afternoon.

Screw that. Hack put the gift-wrapped poetry book on his dashboard, where he could see it, and went across the Willamette River again, inching along in traffic, cursing out loud until he lost patience completely and pulled into an AM/PM minimart just to get the fuck off the road for a few minutes.

“Where are you?” Bunny said over the phone. “It’s late. I was worried.”

“I’m here in Portland.”

“Portland?”

“I came up to see Vinny,” Hack said.

“Why?”

“No reason. I just thought I would.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“It was a pretty day for a drive, so I just . . . drove,” he said.

“You could have stopped here on the way,” Bunny said. “I would have come with you.”

He hadn’t wanted to stop. He hadn’t wanted her to come with him. “Yeah, I guess I didn’t think you’d want to,” he said.

“I would have, though.”

“Well.”

“So is she there?” Bunny said.

“I don’t know. I’m stuck in fucking rush-hour traffic.”

“How do you know she’s even home?”

“I don’t, Bunny. Call me crazy, okay? I just thought the kid might like a visit. That’s all.”

“She’s a young woman now,” Bunny said. “She’s not going to want you up there all the time.”

“I’m not up here all the time.”

“You know what I mean.”

Hack didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to know what she meant.

“What will you do if she’s not there?” Bunny said.

“I’ll drive home.”

“And if she is there?”

“I’ll take her to Elmer’s or something and
then
drive home.”

Silence.

“Look,” Hack said. “I called you, didn’t I?”

Bunny sighed.

“So, anyway,” Hack said, “I’m getting off the phone.”

“Wait, wait a minute. I went over to Anita’s today. I think something’s wrong.”

“Here we go again.”

“No, I mean, really wrong. She didn’t seem right. She’s got this, I don’t know, this rash or something. And she’s lost a lot of weight.”

“Hell, throw a party.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Bunny said. “I was going to ask you to go by there and see what you thought. I guess that’s out, though.”

“She’s forty, for God’s sake. She’s a big girl.”

Bunny wrapped the noose of recrimination around his neck. “I should have known you wouldn’t understand,” she said.

“Fuck that, Bunny. Just
fuck
that, you know? You think you’ve got me by the balls like some giant kite, like you can give me so much string and then—yank!—you can reel me back in again? Well, just fuck that. Fuck that, and fuck you too.”

He slammed down the phone.

Now he’d gone and done it.

Oh, Buddy.

Yeah.

Vinny’s car was parked in the driveway when he got back to her house. He pulled up to the curb but didn’t turn the truck off right away. He watched through the living room window as Vinny walked through the room with a towel wrapped around her hair. Even years ago she was the hair-washing queen. She was dressed, though, so she’d probably put her head in the kitchen sink, not showered. She did that sometimes.

He turned off the truck and picked the wrapped book off the dashboard. She answered the door immediately, as he’d known she would.

“Hey, Vanilla Sundae,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

He couldn’t tell whether she was pleased or not. “I ran away from home,” he said.

“Does Mom know?” Still standing in the doorway, she took off the towel and shook out her wet hair.

“Yeah. She just chewed me a new asshole.”

Vinny rolled her eyes. “Well, come on in.”

“Is it okay?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?” She closed the door behind him. “God, the thing is, though, it’s a mess. I wished I’d known you were coming. I mean, everyone’s been real busy.” She gestured broadly at the room, with its unfolded clothes and dishes and glasses and empty soda cans. Neither of them sat down.

“You eat yet?” Hack said in what he hoped was a light tone.

“The thing is, I’m going out in a couple of minutes. Someone’s coming to pick me up.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. So what are you doing in Portland anyway?”

“I had an errand to run for the dealership,” he lied.

“That’s a pretty long way for them to make you drive for an errand,” she said.

“So anyway, I brought you something.” He held out the gift-wrapped package.

“Oh, how sweet!” She tore the wrapping off. Inside, as he’d suspected, was the book of children’s poetry.

Vinny looked up uncertainly and then brightened. “Oh! I know—was this one of my favorite books when I was little or something?”

“No,” Hack said.

“I don’t understand.”

Oh, Buddy.

He made up something about getting two gifts mixed up— hers had been a new chemise, but he must have left that at home—and in minutes he was back in his truck, shaking so badly it took several minutes just to get the key in the ignition. As he pulled away from the curb, a car pulled into his place and a boy jumped out: a kid about the age Hack had been when it had all come apart. Vinny’s date.

She wasn’t me, Buddy. She was never me.

You think I don’t know that?

I think you didn’t know it. Now you do.

Yeah. Now I do.

So what will you do?

I don’t know.

It’s cold here.

Yeah.

It was one o’clock in the morning, and Hack was sitting at the overlook near the top of Cape Mano, looking at the halogen lights of the fishing fleet winking like stars out to sea. Jesus, he was cold. He’d started shivering halfway back from Portland, and he hadn’t stopped since, not even after he’d cranked the heat up to high. Shit, maybe he should just light a small fire on the floorboards and warm himself that way. He could use the poetry book to get it started. Then he’d go ahead and add his marriage license and his house keys and his electric garage door opener. He’d toss in Bunny’s Hack Neary Voodoo Bunny doll and a bunch of her other rabbits, and then maybe he’d add the goddamn piano no one knew how to play, and how about their bed, while he was at it? Now, that would be a thing to see. He got some satisfaction from picturing the refuse from all those years going up in a single whoosh and tower of sparks. A conflagration, one of the Katydid’s thousand-dollar words.
Why do you talk
like that, use a word no one but you can understand?
he used to ask her.

Because it means what I mean.

The Katydid always knew with crystal clarity what she meant. He used to envy that.

Hack thought about Minna Tallhorse. If she were here, what would she tell him? To buck up, probably; to pull himself together and move along. She never had had any patience for sloppy thinking or self-pity. She and the Katydid had had that in common. Thursday night dinner conversations with them were like sparring matches, requiring muscle and agility.

You should find her, Buddy.

No.

Maybe she could help you.

The only thing we ever had in common was you.

That’s not true.