Going to Bend (3 page)

R
OSE CAME
over and sat across from Petie at the table; Nadine had disappeared into the kitchen. “We need to lighten up a little,” she whispered, stirring cream into a cup of coffee. “She’s pretty upset.”

“Talk about needing to lighten up.”

“This is her place, Petie. She can be any way she wants to. And she’s got an awful lot of leftovers back there from yesterday.”

“ ‘Each new day, new soups,’ ” Petie said, quoting Nadine’s motto. “You know, she’s going to go broke.”

“God, I hope not,” Rose said. “I like this job.”

“It does beat getting your butt patted at four-thirty in the morning by some old boy at the Anchor,” Petie said. “Or being up to your elbows in dirty sheets, like me.”

“I kind of miss the boys, to tell you the truth,” Rose said. “Except for the ones like old Dooley Burden, you know how he was always moving his coffee cup way over to the other side of the table and then taking a look down my shirt when I went to give him a refill.” It was widely acknowledged that Rose had very pretty breasts. Just about every male customer at the Anchor had tried to sneak a peek sometime.

“I hope you didn’t put up with that,” Nadine said. She’d come up drying her hands on a dish towel.

“Only when I needed the tips.”

“If you give in like that, you just enable the behavior,” Nadine said sourly. She slid into the booth across from Rose, next to Petie.

“It’s okay,” Rose assured her. “They’d do it anyway.”

“Hell, even I do it,” Petie said. “Rose has great boobs.”

Nadine sighed. “I’m never going to understand you people.”

“Ditto,” Petie said. “How much did that dish towel cost you?”

“Six for twelve dollars. I order them from Williams-Sonoma. It’s a kitchen catalog.”

“It’s expensive,” said Petie.

“Well, there’s nothing better than good-quality cotton,” Nadine said primly, folding the towel in quarters and putting it in her lap, out of sight.

“Huh,” said Petie. She had just been warming up, but Rose had kicked her under the table.

“What I came over to tell you was, the soups are delicious. What gives the lentil its body?”

“You puree a little of the salt pork and add it back in.” Rose said.

Petie sighed. Every day she just wanted to drop off the soup and go, and every day Nadine ended up backing them into small talk. Rose was nicer about it than Petie.
The woman’s just lonely
, she would say to Petie once they’d left.
She doesn’t know anyone yet and business is slow and I don’t think anyone’s been in love with her in a long time, so be nice. It won’t kill you
. As usual, Rose was right.

“So tell us about L.A.,” Petie said to Nadine, making an effort. “Give us the inside scoop.”

Nadine shrugged. “There is no inside scoop. People shoot other people for no reason on the freeways. The whole place is on a seismic fault. Where most of the people can afford to live, it’s ugly. Hollywood turns out to be just a state of mind.” They’ve been over all this before.

“But what’s it
like
?” Petie said. She’d never been to California, but she would like to see Hollywood, Universal Studios, Disneyland. She could do without the beaches. She’d lived around beaches for thirty-one years and they’d never done a thing for her.

“It’s like anywhere else, just more expensive. People go to work too far away, they have jobs they don’t like, they talk about getting out. I worked in a bookstore for seven years and I never even knew the names of the people in the shop next door. I thought a lot about rape and door locks. What do you want to hear, Patricia?”

“She wants to hear about Richard Gere,” said Rose.

“Richard Gere?”

“I like Richard Gere,” Petie said. “He looks like the kind of guy who isn’t worrying all the time about his hair mousse.”

“I never met Richard Gere,” Nadine said.

Suddenly there wasn’t much left to say.

Rose, who was facing the small window onto the street, suddenly leaned forward. “I think I just saw Eddie go by,” she said. “Is he working a half day today?”

“No.”

“Maybe he came home sick,” Rose said.

“Maybe,” Petie said.

“Or maybe I saw wrong.”

“God, I hope so.”

The street door to Souperior’s jangled, and a man and a woman in expensive matching jogging suits looked inside.

“Would you have a menu?” The woman stayed in the doorway but her perfume came on in.

“We serve soup,” Nadine said, getting up from the table. “Today we have corn chowder and lentil. They’re both excellent.”

“Oh,” said the woman, backing away. “Oh, no. We wanted seafood.” She turned around and left.

“All right, we’ll have clam chowder,” Nadine said to Rose, who’d been after her to offer it. “We’ll carry it on the menu as a third soup every day. I’ll pay you both an extra forty dollars a week for it.”

“Forty dollars each?” said Petie.

Nadine just gave her a look.

“Oh, all right,” Petie said to Nadine. She shook her purse, found her car keys and stood up to go. “Want a ride?” she asked Rose.

“I’ll walk. Call me if it was Eddie.”

“I will,” said Petie. “If it was, pray for flu.”

W
HEN SHE
got home Petie found Eddie Coolbaugh’s old beater Ford pickup halfway up the rutted drive. Eddie was still inside,
stalled behind the wheel. Petie pulled around him, parked on the hardpack in the side yard and came back down on foot.

“Fired?”

“Quit.”

“Son of a bitch.” Petie walked around, let herself in the passenger side and shut the door. This was Eddie’s seventh job in six years. Anybody else would have run out of places to go years ago, but everyone liked Eddie. Except for the way he looked he didn’t take himself too seriously, plus he wasn’t the only one around with a history of slipping: off the wagon, into adultery, out of work. He didn’t even slip as often or as far as some.

“Call and tell them you didn’t mean it. Say you were coming down with a migraine.”

“Hell, I did mean it. The guy was getting on me about reports all the time. Report this, report that, write this down, write that down. Today he tells me he wants a shift log entry every hour, that’s the latest thing. I was hired to do security, not be some fucking writer.”

Eddie Coolbaugh had been a terrible student, severely dyslexic, though they hadn’t known it then. By the time they’d finally figured it out, it was too late to fix it. Most people didn’t know. The security job was doomed.

“Plus the little prick keeps calling me Coolpaw, thinks he’s real funny,” Eddie was saying. “Ha ha ha.”

“You could see if they’d take you somewhere else at the mill. You could turn union, maybe.”

“Sure, if they had an opening,” said Eddie. “Which they don’t.”

“Two hundred and twenty dollars,” Petie said. “We’ve got two hundred and twenty dollars in the bank.”

“Come on, Petie, the guy’s a prick.”

“Yeah, well, he’s a prick who was paying you a lot of money. And it was a lot of money we were
spending
every paycheck.”

“I thought you’d take my side for a change.”

“Honey, when you’re right I’ll take your side so fast your head’ll spin.” Petie got out of the truck and slammed the door. The truck was a
piece of trash and should have been driven into a ditch and left there years ago. The door didn’t even slam, it just whined and then stuck. Eddie fired up the engine and chugged along beside her, talking through the half-open door.

“Come on, Petie. I’ll find something else. It’s not that big a thing.”

“Trust me,” Petie said. “This is a big thing. Big. What’s not a big thing is when you throw away a shit job. This was not a shit job, Eddie.”

“You could just get it over with and hit me.”

“I could,” Petie said agreeably, “but I might break your nose again, and then we’d have to pay a doctor bill
we can’t fucking afford
.”

“Screw you, Petie, you know? You never understand,” Eddie hollered. He turned the truck around in the ratty side yard and roared off. On the way by, he flipped her the bird. It had all happened before.

Petie let herself in through the kitchen and sat down at the table. The house was thick with the smell of onion and bay and salt pork and lentil. Under that was the fainter, nicer, sweeter-saltier aroma of little boys and sneakers and the morning’s damp towels and laundry; and then there was the fusty odor of the house itself, with its hint of worn carpet and dry rot. And finally, faintest of all, was the scent of Petie herself, the warm soap and skin smell she had been inhaling from the crook of her arm since she was a little girl to calm herself.

While her mother was alive she used to wear some cheap sweet toilet water Petie couldn’t remember the name of, and their house always smelled of that. Later, the camp trailer on Chollum Road had smelled of her father; his cigarettes, his hair oil, his diesely work clothes, all the hot pungent odors about him that were so thick she used to be afraid they’d stick to her when she left for school in the morning. Of all of them, through all the years, only Eddie Coolbaugh had no scent, none whatsoever. He never had. Even soap didn’t stay on him long, even beer. Petie didn’t know why that was.

The phone rang.

“Fired?” It was Rose.

“Quit. The damned guy he works for wanted him to write a lot.”

“Oh, man,” said Rose.

“Listen. When’s Christie coming home?” Jim Christie, Rose’s boyfriend, was still fishing out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and had been gone for two months. It was about the right time of year for him to be heading home.

“I don’t know. Soon. I thought I would’ve heard from him by now.”

“I hope whenever he does come down here, he has room for Eddie.”

“I don’t think you can count on it. He’s not bringing a boat down with him this time. You know, I’ve got a little bit of money, Petie. You take it if you need to.”

“Nah. We’ve got a little. Plus, hey, there’s always the clam chowder money.”

“You take that.”

“We’ll split it. But I wonder what she pays the Riseria for bread?”

“Not much, I bet.”

“Yeah, but she was complaining the other day because she couldn’t get them to do specialty breads—you know, cheese dill, honey granola, husk and stem stuff. Maybe I could make bread for her.”

“You could ask. It’s not much money for the work, though.”

“Yeah, well, the night desk isn’t open at the Sea View anymore.” Once Petie had worked the graveyard shift at the Sea View Motel for an entire summer while Eddie was out of work. (Marge and Larry Hopkins wouldn’t hire Eddie for the job. They told Petie very nicely that they didn’t feel he could be counted on. Petie had patted Marge on the shoulder and said, “No kidding.”) Ryan had been just five months old at the time, and from June through September he had slept all night under the counter in a basket, among the spare stacks of scenic drive maps and giveaway tide tables; Petie had slept nearby in a La-Z-Boy, with all the lights on and the
VACANCY
sign flashing. In the morning Larry would wake her up and she’d go clean rooms for a while with Ryan riding shotgun in her housekeeping cart. It was a good setup, and it lasted until Eddie got work on a construction job over in Sawyer and Petie could afford to gently break it to Marge and Larry that they no way in hell needed a night desk clerk. “Oh, we know that, honey,” Marge had told Petie. “We were just waiting until Eddie found something for himself. You go on
home, now.” Petie had been baking her and Larry holiday treats every year since then without fail, whether or not she was working for them, and not just to celebrate the big holidays, either: Presidents’ Day, the first day of spring, Groundhog Day.

“Hey,” Rose’s light voice came echoing down the line. “You all right? You stopped talking.”

“What? Oh yeah,” Petie said. “I’m fine.”

O
N ITS
way south out of Hubbard, the coast highway dragged itself up and around a stony headland and then reeled straight down into Sawyer. It wasn’t unusual, on a foggy day, to crest the cape and be blinded by sudden sunshine from a microclimate yawning on the other side.

Comparatively speaking, Sawyer was the land of riches: home of the mill, the jail, the big fish-processing plants, three supermarkets that stayed open twenty-four hours a day. En masse every morning and evening, and in a steady trickle all the hours in between, Hubbard’s citizens scaled the headland and fell over the other side into Sawyer’s banks, law offices, schools, pharmacies, movie theaters, car dealerships, Wal-Mart. The road could be treacherous and everyone had a story to tell about the time they’d spun out on black ice, come upon a neighbor wheels-up in a ditch, lost it going around the last curve. Last year Petie had done a three-sixty on wet pavement early one fall morning when a young buck leapt across her headlights and then disappeared into the treetops on the far side of the road. When she got home, she had found a hoofprint punched right into the middle of her grille.

Now she navigated the same curve cautiously, even though the sun was out and the road was dry. For one thing she was so tired her senses felt like they were wandering around on their own. For another thing, she didn’t trust her car, a beat-to-shit Ford Colt that Eddie had picked up cheap and
tinkered with everlastingly. It was an act of God when they got through a week without mechanical failure. Now she eased into Sawyer and ground to a halt in the parking lot of the Cash ’n Carry wholesale store in the center of town. Rose had wanted to come over in Petie’s place but Petie convinced her that the drive and a little shopping was a joy ride compared to being stuck at home with Ryan, Loose and Eddie.

Secretly, Petie loved the Cash ’n Carry. Here was a place of plenty where you could buy toilet paper rolls in packages of three dozen and pickle slices in five-gallon drums. Disposable banquet tablecloths came in nine colors, little plastic champagne glasses were shrink-wrapped in packs of twenty-five, crepe paper was available in thousand-foot rolls. Someone was having fun.

“Hey, pretty lady. How’s it going?” Approaching her from the complimentary coffee station was Bob Harle, the Cash ’n Carry’s owner, a low-slung, short-legged, barrel-chested man Petie liked a lot. He always fetched her a rolling pallet personally. Now he extended a free cup of coffee.