Going to Bend (18 page)

Petie’s small quick hands broke open a crab body and, with a crab claw, flicked out the yellow intestines, green liver and other muck, ripped off the gills and broke open the cartilage compartments for the succulent lump meat. She had picked crabs all one winter at a processing plant over in Sawyer and she was twice as fast as anyone else at the table. By long-standing agreement, she did all the bodies because the guts made Rose queasy, and Rose did all the legs because Petie didn’t have the patience. It was a good system. They both passed body parts to Carissa whenever she ran short.

Rose told Petie, “I like your hair that way. It’s real pretty.”

“It’s pretty ratty, you mean,” Petie said. “I would have done better if I’d had more arms.”

Carissa giggled.

“You should put some makeup on,” Carissa said. Rose had recently let her buy her first cosmetics.

“Sweetie, if I went to a makeup counter they’d take one look at me and say, Oh,
please
.”

“You used to wear makeup,” Rose said.

“Well, yeah, like a racoon, but that was before.”

For a few minutes the only sounds were the cracking of shells and cartilage and the sucking wet sound of meat being extracted. Rose wished she hadn’t said anything about Petie’s hair. She’d probably scared her off, now, and it had been so long since Petie had taken any interest
in herself. Years ago, way back in high school, Petie had worn rings of black eyeliner and mascara around her eyes, plus pearl lipstick and shiny eye shadow, all applied from a shoe box stowed under Rose’s bed. Petie and Old Man had been up in the trailer by then, and Petie came to Rose’s house every morning and used the shower. She had had her own house key, her own towel, her own place in Rose’s closet for some of her clothes. Rose and her mother had lived in the tiny old cottage off Third then: four rooms, nine hundred square feet total including the crawl spaces, the whole house saggy and faded as an old shirtwaist and powdery with dry rot. Rose’s father had left them when Rose was two years old, and her mother supported them by doing dress alterations and custom sewing, often enlisting Rose’s help and even sometimes Petie’s for the big jobs like the Sawyer High cheerleader uniforms and, once, uniforms for the entire high school band. She was a proud, brittle woman who brooked no disagreement with Rose over the fact that, while she liked Petie, Petie was still trash. Eight years ago, just before she died, she told Rose that Petie had been her greatest act of Christian charity. Small wonder Petie hadn’t been able to stand her. Still, Petie had come every morning, doing her makeup in a broken wall mirror she’d found and given to Rose so they could see what they were doing.

Rose bore down and cracked a claw. “Mama used to say you had hair like a Chinaman,” she said. “Remember her saying that?
From the back Petie looks just like one of those Chinamen I saw down in San Francisco
, she’d say.
Small and with that hair
.” When she was eighteen Rose’s mother had gone to San Francisco for a week with her father, and she never let anyone forget it.

Petie nodded. “She was always so afraid I was going to rub off on you.”

“Well.”

“Her worst fear was that I’d somehow infect you and you’d end up spending your life in a twelve-foot camp trailer somewhere. You know that’s true,” Petie said.

“Well, she worried about the same thing for you.”

“No, she expected that for me. What she worried about was that I’d take you along.”

Rose chuckled. “Well, then she’s up there feeling stupid right now, isn’t she? Seeing Eddie with his good job, and you finally being able to ease up a little.”

“Who are you guys talking about, anyway?” Carissa said.

“Grandma.”

“Oh.” Carissa wrinkled her nose. “She always smelled like mothballs. I don’t remember her much.”

“I do,” said Petie. “On the other hand, she was good to me.”

Rose sighed and swept over a new pile of legs Petie had separated from the bodies. “Nadine was sure pleased for you about your being able to go back to the Sea View.”

Petie smiled. “No kidding. I thought she was going to start crying when she laid me off.”

Rose laughed softly. Poor Nadine. She still had hopes that one day Petie would at least like her from a distance. Nadine deserved to be liked.

“Did you bear that Rhonda’s run off with Clayton See?” Petie said. “I give it five weeks, six at the outside. Jesus, I mean he’s even stupider than she is.”

“Well,” Rose said idly, and sucked on the first bad cut of the morning, one on the ball of her thumb. Outside a little wind sprang up out of nowhere, knocking hard little pinecones out of the trees and down onto the flatish roof of her double-wide. They sounded like chipmunks bowling. It was probably rough out on the water, where Jim was. Boats were lost this time of year, even when they weren’t crabbing. Last year the
San Pedro
had gone down in plain sight of the jetty. Cal Hansen hadn’t washed in for four days and another crewman whose name Rose couldn’t remember—a Sawyer boy, college kid on semester break—had never been found at all.

“Hey, how’s Gordon?” Petie asked. “Is he feeling better?”

“Yes. He thinks he’s over the worst of it. They gave him some new antibiotics that cost ten dollars a tablet.”

“Whoa,” Petie said. “What did you think of his apartment?”

“I thought it was beautiful. You’d never know you were in Sawyer at all.”

“I liked the drawings,” Carissa said, watching out of the corner of her eye to see what Petie or Rose might say.

“You let her see those?” Petie said to Rose. “Carissa, you’re too young to see pictures of naked men.”

“I thought they were beautiful,” Carissa said. “The man in the pictures was Gordon’s lover. His name was Johnny and he was twenty-nine, and he died of HIV. That’s why Gordon and Nadine came up here. Gordon said all his friends had died, that Johnny was the last one. He said he wanted to die someplace where it didn’t surprise him to be alone. I think he meant except for Nadine.”

“Jesus,” Petie said. “So you told her about Gordon?”

“She knows she has to keep it a secret,” Rose said. “Right?”

Carissa nodded vigorously. “I know how to keep a secret.”

The table grew quiet again. Petie picked the meat from the body of the last crab and absently started stacking backs, one shell on top of the other like Yertle the Turtle.

“Carissa, get the popcorn bowl for Petie to put the crabmeat in, okay, and then put all the newspaper and shells in one of those Hefty bags Jim keeps by the back door. I’ll get him to take it up to the dump tonight so the house doesn’t stink.”

“It already stinks,” Carissa said.

“So it doesn’t stink worse. Please, hon.”

As soon as Carissa left the room Rose said to Petie, “What’s going on with you? Something’s happened.”

Petie blew out a breath. “Loose’s been grabbing some little kid’s dick at school.”

“What?”

Irritably Petie snatched the elastic band from her French braid and shook out her hair. “Just what I said. He’s been cornering some littler kid and grabbing his dick.”

“Well, maybe it’s just a phase. I mean, Loose has always been such a physical kid, and kids their age play doctor all the time. We used to.”

“It’s not the same thing. The kid’s name is Harry, he’s a runt and he definitely was not playing doctor.”

Rose stared across the table with concern.

Petie said, very low, “I look at that child and he makes me sick.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I told him if I ever hear of him doing that shit again I’m going to beat him senseless.”

Rose looked at her hands. Several of her fingers were bloody; all of them stung.

“No one does shit like that around me,” Petie hissed. Her face was pinched and white. “No one.”

L
ATER THAT
day, along with a final paycheck, Nadine presented Petie with a small blank book made of beach grass paper. All of it—the paper itself, the binding, the pen-and-ink cover illustration of a steaming soup pot—was done by Gordon. Inside, on the front page, he’d calligraphed
Thanks for the warm memories. Nadine and Gordon Latimer
. It was very beautiful, although God only knew what Petie would make of it. They held a long-standing position that a gift must be something in which the giver as well as the recipient could invest. Otherwise, it put the material exchange above the mutual emotional bond the gift was meant to express. The integrity of the emotional exchange was the thing; otherwise, why not just give Petie a six-pack of Bud or some hunting socks and be done with it?

In the midst of Nadine’s ruminations Petie had arrived with the final delivery of soup—just ten minutes before the cafe was due to open. Nadine had gotten over worrying about it. Petie and Rose hadn’t failed her once, and besides, it wasn’t as though there were customers lined up along the sidewalk waiting for her to unlock the doors. Although, bizarrely, business had picked up. About a week ago a large party of local people had come in unannounced for dinner—some kind of motorcycle
club, Nadine gathered. Fortuitously, Rose and Petie had fixed a couple of their most sturdy soups that day and Petie had baked one of her plainer breads. The surprise audition had turned out to be a success, and now other Hubbard people had begun dropping by for lunch.

Between them, Petie and Nadine wrestled the two vats into the kitchen—chowder plus Crab Pot Chaos. Nadine let out a little cry of pleasure when she peeked under the lid, although her menu had called for navy bean.

“Our favorite!” she said. “I’ll bring some home to Gordon after lunch, he’d never forgive me if I didn’t.”

“Twelve crabs, and we have the cuts to prove it,” Petie said, holding out her hands. “How’s he doing?”

“Better. He’s better.”

“Good.” Petie nodded curtly and turned and walked out of the cafe to get the bread. Nadine accepted a tray from the car’s backseat.

“We’re going to miss this,” Nadine said, holding the cafe door open for Petie with her hip. “I only committed to the Riseria for two weeks, you know, in case you change your mind.”

“Never happen.” Laden with the other tray, Petie led the way back to the kitchen. Nadine had envisioned them lingering there for a minute or two, sentimentally, but after Petie put her tray down she headed straight back out through the cafe and to the front door. At the door she turned—Nadine jumped—and clapped Nadine lightly on the shoulder. “So, good luck,” she said. She hitched her purse up on her shoulder and stood there, small and fierce and somehow slightly menacing. “Were you going to pay me now, or do you need me to stop back?”

“What? Oh! No. I’ve got it right here. And this is something from Gordon and me. just to say thank you.” It was then that she handed over the little book. Her hand trembled slightly as she held it out.

Petie pocketed the check and gift with barely a glance, and that had been it. Nadine would have to make up something more graceful for Gordon. It was the first present either of them had given since Johnny’s birthday, two months before he died.
Get what you like
, Johnny had insisted to Gordon.
I mean, it’s going to be willed back to you anyway, sweetie,
so you might as well go for something with carryover
. Blind from cytomegalovirus by then, and too frail to leave their home except for appointments at the medical center, Johnny announced that he had become nothing but two ears and an asshole, and the one gave him life and the other took it away. So Gordon and Nadine had fed him as well as they knew how with Puccini and chants and Peruvian flute music and Paul Horn at the Taj Mahal and, for his final birthday, the best portable CD system they could find, so he could have it with him in the hospital. The last music he asked for on the day he died was
Fanfare for the Common Man
. If there was a piece in the world that could have been more terrible to hear bursting like false hope into that room, Nadine couldn’t imagine it.

The CD system and all its music still mourned in a box in Gordon’s apartment. One day soon it would be resurrected, a homely old attendant, to preside over Gordon’s dying. His last T-cell count had been 42. He had two new KS lesions. On the other hand, his sinus infection was gone, the thrush was under control and he had so far been spared the wasting diarrhea that had stripped Johnny so vengefully to the bone. So he would go on. In fact he was flying to L.A. tomorrow morning, the first trip for either of them since coming to Oregon. Gordon had a meeting set up with his publisher friend Paul to discuss
Local Flavor
. Paul had been very enthusiastic about the project over the phone. Nadine would have liked to go, too. She missed the city desperately, although she’d never let on to Gordon She didn’t miss any one thing in particular, or even all the predictable things like good coffee and art and movies and the one or two close relationships she’d left behind. What she really missed was being understood. Half the time when she talked to them, Rose and Petie glazed over. It wasn’t the subject matter, either; they simply didn’t understand her vocabulary. She was learning to speak in synonyms as well as body language, offering two choices whenever possible to raise the odds of word recognition. Just for a day or two, it would have been a relief not to feel like the last surviving member of her species.

·   ·   ·

J
IM CHRISTIE
sat alone at a table at the Wayside, nursing a beer and staring with no particular impatience at Scruffy Johnson’s signature carved into the tabletop like a terrier’s yip. He’d crewed with Scruffy one year, stringy little fellow with a high voice and low motivation, one of the few people Christie’d ever really disliked. It took a lot. Mostly he didn’t pay enough attention. You had to be pretty easy to get along on the boats. You had to know when to climb down inside yourself, way down where it was quiet, and just wait until the weather went by. Coming up wasn’t always easy, but all in all it was a useful secret most people didn’t seem to have learned.

Eddie Coolbaugh brought the rain in on his back. “Blowing like a son of a bitch, too,” he said cheerfully, obliterating Scruffy Johnson with two fresh bottles of Henry’s Private Reserve. “Coast Guard was just posting a storm warning when I came through town.” He removed his Pepsi jacket, shook off the rain and draped the jacket tenderly over the back of his chair. He looked spruce these days, walking high on the balls of his feet, ballpoint pens hooked jauntily over his breast pocket, his name stitched there in suave blue script. Christie had heard from Rose that he was making good money. It sounded like a dog’s life, driving that truck up and down the coast all day delivering crap, but then Eddie had never liked boat work.