Going to Bend (31 page)

“A baby?”

“That’s what people said.”

“A
baby
?”

“Your mama never talked about it. Probably wasn’t a baby at all, at least not here in town. Your mama came to Hubbard by herself and people make up stories.”

“So why’d she marry Old Man?”

Eula shook her head. “Maybe because he’d have her. What with all those stories about her, not many people would have much to do with her. She lived in a little room at the Mosebys’—you wouldn’t know them,
they’re all gone now—and she waitressed for rent money at a place that used to be down by the docks. It wasn’t much, but it was all she was ever going to have, on her own.” Eula lit a fresh cigarette and blew out a thin, ruminative stream of smoke. “You know those seal pups that wash up orphaned in fall, the way they look when night’s coming on and their mamas haven’t been back for them? Paula was like that from the day I met her. I think maybe it’s God’s way to numb His creatures when there’s nothing left for them but how long it’ll take them to die.” Eula patted Petie’s hand. “She didn’t have your spirit, hon. She didn’t have your fire.”

“She would duck her head and let Old Man punch her. I never saw her fight back, she just let him do it.”

“Did he ever hit you?”

“While she was alive? No.”

Eula smiled gently. “That’s why she didn’t stand up to him, hon. She took those punches because as long as she did, you wouldn’t have to. There wasn’t a lot else she could give you, but she could do that one thing.” Eula sighed and stubbed out her cigarette in the cracked custard dish she used for an ashtray. “Your mama did her best, but she was broken, hon, as surely as any starved horse.”

“She never said goodbye.”

“I don’t think she could bear to.”

“She could have stayed if she’d wanted to—”

“Oh, hon.”

“—and then she could have kept Old Man away from me.”

Eula looked at her and said quietly, “I know where you’ve been. I’ve watched that same scenery go by my window for years. I never stopped there myself, but I recognize it when I see it.”

“You know what he’s done to me?”

“One day you can tell me.”

“Then what am I supposed to do now?”

“Leave it by the side of the road and drive away, honey. Just drive away. One day it’ll be just another little spot on the map where you visited once, a long time ago.”

·   ·   ·

P
ETIE LET
Schiff drive out ahead of her, falling back so they wouldn’t appear together at the intersection. All she’d need was to have Carla drive by at that exact moment. Her life had been a straight and unwavering line for a long time, but now she could feel it buckling beneath her feet, had been feeling it off and on for days.

On a sudden impulse, she steered her little car down a logging road. She felt all ripped open, maybe from remembering things she thought she’d put away a long time ago. She’d never even told Eula Coolbaugh about those last months in the trailer, where her words echoed off the dripping walls every night:
If you lay a hand on me, if you even
think about
it, I’ll know. I’ll know, and I’ll wait you out and I will kill you
.

Old Man had wept, cringing over his wounds. He claimed he’d never meant any harm, but what was a man supposed to do without a wife, caring all alone for a teenage girl? It wasn’t right, he said; God Himself would understand that. It just wasn’t right. And him without any money, without any prospects, down on his luck in a down-on-luck town where the best you could hope for was money enough for beer. And Paula never had been worth a damn as far as wives went; never would have him when he asked, and then afterwards she’d cry. The woman cried all the time like a goddamn leaky faucet, said it
hurt
, now what kind of a thing was that? It was against nature, that’s what it was, and he didn’t believe it, thought it was just her way out of what she didn’t want to do—and then she’d found out about the cancer. How was he supposed to have known, when she’d cried from the first day he’d had her, some honeymoon, especially since she hadn’t been fresh to begin with? But he’d put up with her, hadn’t he, and put up with her family (all this pouring out of him after four years of grunts and nods), those terrible brothers who appeared at night out of the rain like pure evil, wanting money, wanting food, as though Old Man had any to spare, except he was afraid of what they’d do if he didn’t. And now Petie, his own daughter, was threatening him the same way, was that anyway to treat family, to treat him, her only known living relation?

And sometimes, during these last nights, his speech would become thick and his gait lopsided and Petie blamed it on cowardice and beer, not blood clots. He cringed before her, whining on until she dozed in her sleeping bags with the knife held tight in her fist.

When he came out of rehab five months after the stroke, he came to Eula Coolbaugh’s first, holding his ball cap in his hand, hangdog and shaky. Petie was there, listening from another room. “Eula,” he said, “I’m grateful to you for taking in my daughter. We’ve had tough times, I expect you know that, but I’m better now and I can take her back.”

“I don’t think so,” said Eula.

“No?”

“No.”

“Well, I expect she’s talked about me to you,” he said, his voice catching. “I expect she’s told you some things.”

“Yes, she has told me some things,” Eula said evenly.

“A lot of things?” he said.

“Quite a few, John.”

“Well, she’s always had a burr up her butt where I’m concerned. She lies, you probably found that out already. She lies all the time. That’s why I had my stroke, you know. Trying to figure out all those lies.”

“I’ve never heard Petie lie,” Eula said.

“Well, she’s a clever girl, probably been real careful with you, real nice so you’d let her stay. She’s not nice to me. How long was I in that place, and the hospital before that, and she never brought me nothing. That’s the kind of girl she is, takes after her mother’s family, shifty values. Well, you probably remember that from when we were kids, Eula, all that talk.”

“That was a long time ago, too long ago to mean anything. Now you listen to me, John. I don’t care how repentant you are, I don’t even care if you’ve sworn to God Himself that you’ll behave. That child is not going anywhere with you, and if you fight me or lay a hand on her, I’ll get a lawyer. There are a few things a judge might not be real thrilled to hear about you, you understand me?”

“That’s no way to talk. I don’t deserve that kind of talk, I come to your house real nice.”

“And I appreciate that, John. I know you’ll leave the same way.”

And, nonplussed, he had.

In a town the size of Hubbard, it was inevitable that he and Petie would run across each other now and then. He always asked her for money and she always gave him what she had, figuring it was well worth it if he just stayed away from her the rest of the time. She’d married Eddie right out of high school, and then Old Man had nothing on her anymore. But by then it didn’t really matter: she hated him less as the fire of her anger died, and she saw in him the sick, smelly old man he’d become. She had no intention of going out of her way to see him, but she didn’t avoid him anymore, either. More than a few times, she drove down to pick him up at the Wayside when Roy called to tell her he’d fallen dead asleep on the bar.

Hating just took too much energy.

Petie bumped and lurched along the potholed logging road for half an hour, lost in both thought and actuality. As she was beginning to consider turning around and driving all the way back to the reservoir, she saw the siding of a house or shed briefly through the trees—a flash of aqua and it was gone. She rounded one more bend and found herself emerging from the woods at the top of Chollum Road. The aqua she’d seen was the side of Old Man’s trailer, still where she and Rose had left it years ago, only cleaner.

Beside the trailer was Jim Christie’s truck.

And from the trailer itself, as she neared it, Petie first saw Carissa step out, and then Jim Christie himself. Startled, Petie met Christie’s eyes through the windshield.

He didn’t look away.

W
AIT IN
the truck,” Jim Christie told Carissa. He didn’t take his eyes off Petie Coolbaugh again or offer her the advantage of his turned back. Once Carissa had closed the truck door, she took a step or two closer to him. “What are you doing?” she said. Her voice was tight and low.

He set his feet. “I come up here sometimes.”

“Why?”

“It’s quiet.”

“Isn’t it quiet at the house?”

“Man needs his own place sometimes.”

“Is this your place?”

“I use it sometimes. Never seen anybody else here.” He watched Petie’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall.

“So what do you do here when it’s quiet?”

“Smoke. Read.”

She looked over his shoulder at Carissa, hunkered down in the truck. “Doesn’t look to me like you were reading.”

“She comes up sometimes. She knows she’s not supposed to, but she does it anyway. Nothing I can do to stop her.”

“Does Rose know?”

“You think I’m doing something wrong, you’d better just say it.” Christie had seen polar she-bears with the same look when they thought their cubs were in danger. There was nothing you could do to reason
with a she-bear when she had her blood up, and it looked like the same thing with this scrappy little woman. She’d think what she’d think; nothing he could say would change that. And he didn’t especially care for the thing she was thinking. Young girl like Carissa with an old fisherman like him, barely tame.

She said, “I don’t know what you were doing. But it doesn’t look good to me, I’ve got to tell you. It doesn’t look good.”

“You saying I did something to her?”

“It happens.”

“You saying it happened with me?”

“I’m saying I hope to God it didn’t,” Petie said. She approached the truck, rapped on the passenger window and gestured to Carissa. The girl slipped out of the truck, meekly following Petie to her car. They drove off without a word.

Christ.

Christie wrenched open the creaky passenger door of his truck and rooted around until he found a fresh pack of cigarettes, then ducked inside the cripple-backed trailer as hailstones began ricocheting like grapeshot off the aluminum. He shook off his cap, reseated it on his head and sat down in his camp chair sucking smoke.

The wind was picking up, another storm front on the way, a spring storm. Three more weeks, four at the outside, and he’d need to be back in Dutch Harbor looking for a boat to crew. Some of the men at the Wayside were already heading up. You could tell who they were by how nice they were being to their wives and girlfriends, buying them sudden foolishness like perfume and cheap gold rings to make up for another three, four months of being dumped. Christie himself had courted that way once when he was still a young man. He had a woman named Tina Bea Martin he liked well enough, met her up in Anacortes, Washington—small town, tightly packed and full of fishermen. Tina Bea had been trying to get him to anchor himself in her harbor and nearly succeeded, got him as far as buying her a Black Hills gold earring and pendant set at the jewelry store closest to the harbor, the one he’d been told favored fishermen. The jewelry was in the shape of a whale and he thought she’d like
it, not that he knew anything. Hell, he’d been afraid to even touch it, it looked so fragile, like spiderwebs on a sunny day.
Someone’s getting something special
, the salesgirl had teased him in a voice that made him break into a light sweat.
Lucky her
.

And Tina Bea had liked them just fine, too, but somehow he’d never gone back to Anacortes. He heard in Dutch Harbor that Tina Bea had married a skipper the next year, captain of the
Flying Dutchman
. Christie knew him: good skipper, good man. As for Christie, he didn’t have a special woman again until he met Rose. He’d come down to Hubbard with a deckhand from the
Phoebe K
., nice kid who was swept overboard the following year, never found. They’d made it as far as Hubbard and stopped at the Anchor Inn for lunch. Rose had served them, with her pretty smile, sweet round hips, bosom like perfection. She’d asked where they were from and where they were headed and Christie had said,
Here. We were headed here
. When the kid pulled out of town an hour later, he pulled out alone. Christie took a job on a charter boat and stayed until the following March. Slept in a campground on the outskirts of town for the first week, at Rose’s after that.

It frightened him sometimes, how good she looked to him. She sucked the air out of a place, made him light-headed and stupid, same thing drinking had done when he was young and still a heavy drinker. Drunk, he could take on the world if he had to; sober, he was nothing but a tired man who just wanted to get out of the season alive and without owing. And when he did get out the last two years, money in his pocket and a month of sleep coming to him, he hitched a ride down Hubbard way and dreamed of Rose.

And yet, he’d been able to quit drinking.

P
ETIE DROVE
Carissa home in silence. The girl kept her head down, examining her fingernails. In the driveway Petie turned off the ignition and turned to face her. “Do you know about that trailer?”

“Is it the one you used to live in?”

“Yes.”

“We didn’t hurt it or anything.”

“You couldn’t hurt that trailer if you hit it with a ball peen hammer.”

“Why are you mad, then?”

“Am I mad? I’m not mad.”

“Yes you are.”

Petie sighed. “Why were you up there, ’Rissa?”

Carissa shrugged miserably. “I don’t know.”

“Did you walk there on your own?”

“Yes.”

“Do you go there often?”

“I go there sometimes.”

“Why?”

“I like Jim,” the girl whispered.

“I know you like him. Does he like you?”

“I don’t know. I think sometimes he does.”

“How does he show it?” Petie asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Does he give you compliments, maybe tell you you’re growing up, tell you you’re pretty? Does he touch you?”