Homesick Creek (24 page)

He held on to the steering wheel and sliced open his memory like a vein.

When he came to in the hospital, the first thing he saw was Minna Tallhorse sitting in a vinyl chair beside his bed, breaking the back of a book in her lap.

“What the hell?” he said.

“Hey there,” she said softly, rising from the chair.

As the room came into focus, Hack realized his head and gut hurt like nothing he’d ever felt before or could have imagined.

“Hi, sweets.” Minna came to stand beside him.

“Jesus, Minna. What the hell? You look like shit.”

Minna smiled a wan smile. “Just wait till you get a look at yourself, sport.”

“Is there water?”

She poured some from a plastic carafe and put a paper straw in the glass. “How do you feel?”

“Like shit. Did you do this?”

She shook her head. “No. Go ahead and drink.”

She held the glass for him while he swallowed a couple of sips.

“What day is it now? What the fuck are we doing here?” he said.

“It’s Tuesday. You’ve been unconscious for a couple of days. You have a bad concussion and a ruptured spleen. There was an accident, kiddo.”

“An accident?”

“You tangled with a train.” Minna rested her hand lightly next to his on the sheet, where they touched like a whisper. “You were on your way back from Diederstown.”

Cherise. They’d been to see Cherise. He remembered that.

Jesus, his head hurt.

“Okay,” he said.

“It was very foggy when you drove home. They figure you never even saw the train coming. It hit you broadside.”

The Camaro. He’d been driving a Camaro. Cherise’s Camaro.

“What about the Katydid?”

Minna’s hand twitched just slightly, but she kept her eyes steady. “She’s gone, kiddo. I’m so sorry.”

“No, listen, she was sleeping. She had on that poncho you gave her, and she was sleeping.”

Fiercely, Minna cradled his eyes in hers. “She died instantly, Hack. She never knew a thing.”

“Are you all right?” Rae asked, alarmed. “Hack? What’s happened? Something’s happened. Is it me?”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t you.”

He’d argued with Minna then, and when she refused to change her story about the Katydid, he lost his temper. His own best guess was that Katy was in the next room, but didn’t want him to see her for some reason. All right, maybe she’d been badly bruised or even disfigured; an accident with a train, that would be bad. She’d probably made Minna promise to tell him some malarkey until she felt more presentable and could spring like a conjurer through the curtain around his bed:
Fooled you!
It was a stupid joke, and his head hurt too much to play, but Minna insisted on sticking to her same cock-and-bull story. Then he was yelling something, and she was crying—Jesus, what was she crying for?—and a nurse came in and did something to his IV, and he fought to stay conscious and lost.

He and Rae were moving fast through railroad sidings and lumberyards and sodden pastures.

“How old was she? Your sister, I mean.”

“Not quite fifteen.”

“That’s not very old.”

“No,” Hack said. “It wasn’t.”

Rae sat quietly for a moment, evidently gathering breath and courage. “Would you like to kiss me?” she asked.

“Not really.”

It might have been the first completely honest thing Hack had said in twenty years.

For the first week Hack had drunk broth, peed blood, and hurt like hell. That was okay with him. The pain and the headaches kept him from spending too much time up there in his brain, where only bad things happened. At all times of the day and night he welcomed open-armed the nurses with painkillers. On gusts of morphine he drowsed outside himself among the clouds. Cherise was up there sometimes, looking like he hadn’t remembered she’d ever looked, a young woman, not much older than he was now, smoking a long, thin cigarette and laughing at him splashing in some little kid’s wading pool in a low-rent motor court. How old was he? Two? Three? He didn’t even know he had memories that went that far back. Cherise didn’t look so bad: cotton-haired and bleached, but with a nice smile. She must have lost that smile a long time ago because it didn’t even look familiar. Happy. She looked almost happy. Happy with him in his little sunsuit, his face all screwed up but taking the sunshine on the chin like a man.

He also saw Minna Tallhorse, felt her cool flat palm on his forehead as she soothed and whispered to him, surrounding him with words like fragrant bubbles.
You couldn’t have helped it.
She wouldn’t blame you. Nothing else you could have done
.

But mostly it was the Katydid he felt sitting in a chair in his room with one of her ten-gallon books and talking on and on.

Come on, Buddy, get moving. You’ve got things to do.

Don’t want to.

Nobody wants to. That’s a thin excuse.

I hurt.

So?

You don’t know what I feel.

Sure I do, Buddy. Sure I do. I know what you feel, and I know what
Minna feels too. Let me tell you, she’s the one who’s hurting.

I hear her crying sometimes.

Only when she thinks you’re asleep.

Yeah.

You should feel what I feel right now, Buddy. It would help.

Why? What do you feel?

Lighter than air, like a helium balloon, maybe. I can see out over everything.

You see Cherise?

Nah.

Do you miss her?

You’re the one who misses her, Buddy.

I never missed her.

Baloney. You’ve missed her a lot, all these years. Don’t think I don’t know
it. You know what you do? You talk about her in your sleep.

What do I say?

Mommy. You say Mommy.

That’s all?

Mostly.

It’s not much.

I didn’t say it was much.

What do you say?

Me? I don’t have to say anything. You’re there, Buddy ... you and Minna.
I could care less about Cherise. You’re the one who cares.

Stop saying that.

Okey-dokey, Buddy, but it’s true. You should look Cherise up when you
get out of here. You and Minna.

Nope.

Well, there’s nothing I can do for you then.

Wait. Don’t leave.

I’ve got to. I’ve got things to do, Buddy, things that won’t wait.

Like what? What do you have to do?

That’s a stall tactic, and it won’t work.

Come on, I really want to know. What’s so important?

Everything
, she said.
Everything’s important, Buddy, and all of it’s
beautiful. Remember that. It’s beautiful
.

Like hell.

Rae was staring at him across a restaurant table.

“It happened a long time ago,” he said.

“Yes, but how do you live with a thing like that?” she said.

Hack just looked at her. “You don’t.”

A state highway patrolman came to the hospital several days before he was discharged. Hack recognized him as the patrolman who had come to get him and the Katydid at their apartment that night and driven them to Diederstown. He clapped his hand into Hack’s in a meaty handshake.

“Were you there?” Hack asked him. “At the accident? Did you see anything?”

“Yeah, I went out there.”

“And?”

“It was a bad one, son. I’ve never seen worse. You were real lucky to come through it.”

Hack said nothing.

“I was sorry to hear about your sister. She was a real sweet girl; she had a lot of life in her.”

“Yeah.”

“I brought you something. I thought you’d want it.” The patrolman pulled a twisted piece of metal from his jacket pocket and handed it to Hack.

“What is it?” Minna came over to see, then turned away. It was what was left of the silver bracelet Minna had given the Katydid, buckled and scorched.

“A couple of our boys found it a quarter mile or so down the line from where you got hit, son. Must have got caught on the train’s undercarriage. They thought you’d like to have it.”

Hack turned the bracelet over in his hands like shrapnel.

“You know, there’s no rhyme or reason to what you find at an accident scene,” the patrolman said expansively. “You can have a vehicle completely demolished, and right there beside it a lady’s compact will be sitting on the road without so much as a mark on it. It’s best not to try to make sense out of it, son, is what I’m saying. Best you can do is keep going. Honor your sister’s memory, and keep going, that’s the main thing.”

Hack stared at the bracelet.

“You have any plans for when you get out of here?” the patrolman said.

“No.”

“Well, then that’s what you need to put your mind to, son. Isn’t that right, miss?” He looked at Minna.

“Yes.”

“You need anything?” the patrolman asked her. “I heard you were spending a lot of time over here.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you for coming to see us, and for bringing the bracelet.”

“Ma’am,” he said, putting on his hat. “Son.”

“Wait. Does Cherise know about the accident?”

“Yeah. I heard she was real broken up.”

“Fuck that,” Hack said.

Minna stepped toward the bed.

“Yeah, yeah,” he told her.

“I shouldn’t have asked you that,” Rae said as they drove home. “About kissing me, I mean.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m very embarrassed.”

“There’s no reason to be.”

“I love you.”

“Don’t,” said Hack.

After he was released from the hospital, Hack stayed with Minna in her apartment. She had already packed up their things, his and Katy’s, what there was of them: a few clothes, some cheap dishes and pots and pans. The Katydid’s books, which Minna kept in her own overloaded bookcase. Hack rarely left the apartment. In the evenings they said very little to each other, and what they did say was polite, as though they were strangers. But every night he slipped into Minna’s bed, curled up to her long, hard body and found shelter. There was no talk then, only a crashing together of the two of them. She held him fiercely, sometimes all night when the trembling wouldn’t stop, vigilant in the darkness, tiger-eyed. They never talked about this. There was nothing to say.

Once he asked her why she’d given him and the Katydid the jewelry engraved with her name and phone number.

She said, “Just in case.”

“Did you know this was going to happen to us?”

She looked at him from the vast and bottomless blackness of her eyes.

“I don’t know.”

Hack resigned from Howdy’s Market by telephone. They tried to talk him into staying, but he couldn’t go back there again. He couldn’t go anywhere in Tin Spoon. Tin Spoon was over and so, in many ways, was he. He joined the army as soon as he was well enough, and after basic training found himself in Vietnam. A month after he shipped out he got a letter from Minna saying she had taken a job back on the Blackfoot reservation in North Dakota. He never found out exactly what she did there; maybe he never asked. Over the years her letters came less and less often, and Hack answered fewer and fewer of them, until eventually they stopped coming. He assumed she had remade herself the way he had, out of scrap cloth and baling wire. He wasn’t a real person at all anymore, but people mistook him for real. At first it was awkward being new like that; it was like being a puppet you didn’t know how to work very well. But you got better and better until, after a while, even you forgot the difference.

chapter fifteen

Funny how?” Shirl said.

“I don’t know—just funny,” said Bunny. “Like he was upset or something, except when I asked him he said he was fine, which is what he always says. He wasn’t fine. There’s something going on.”

“Well, he’s not cheating on you, honey, I can tell you that. I had a little talk with him day before yesterday. If there’s something going on, hon, it’s in his mind, not his dick. But listen to me—are you listening? You’re going to lose him if you don’t back off. There’s only so much even a good man can take.”

“Lose him how?”

“Hell, I don’t know how. There are lots of ways you can lose a man—booze, fishing, sports TV—without his even having to take a single step from home. I’m just saying you’re going to drive him away if you aren’t careful, honey.”

They were sitting out on Shirl’s little deck, watching fog as thick as cotton roll in and out of Hubbard Bay. It did that all summer, and it always stopped right across the street from Shirl’s house, a two-story pile Bunny’s father had built in sections over a span of more than twenty years. None of the siding matched, and all the windows were different—whatever he could get for cheap down at the building supply store in Sawyer. The deck was nice, though. Hack had built it for Shirl a couple of years ago so she could get some sunshine between her toes the few times each year when it was warm enough to take your shoes off.

“How’s that girl of yours doing?” she asked Bunny. “I sure miss seeing her around here. She brightens up a room.”

“She’s good, I guess. She doesn’t call much.”

“And your fingers are broken?”

“Don’t,” said Bunny.

“I’m just saying,” said Shirl.

“I call her.”

Shirl lifted the lid of the little Igloo ice chest she’d stocked and dragged out on the deck a couple of hours ago. She extracted a fresh wine cooler for herself and held a second one out to Bunny, who declined.

“You keep drifting off someplace,” Shirl said, sitting down with a grunt and squinting at Bunny. “I’m sitting here looking right at you, and you might as well be over there in China or someplace.”

Bunny sighed. “I heard Sheryl Bigelow, Warren’s wife, is getting remarried.”

“No. So soon?”

“Nita told me.”

“Well, she’d know, close as they all were.”

“They weren’t really that close.”

“No?”

“No. Just Bob and Warren.”

“Well, now I didn’t know that.” Shirl took a long pull on her wine cooler and looked out over the bay. “Honey, isn’t that Jimmy Creech’s boat? What’s she called now, the
Angel III
? They rechristened her, you know, after that boy was killed on her. College kids are a menace, I’ll tell you that. Many’s the time your father came home cursing the air blue over some smart-ass summer kid who got tangled up in the gear or the nets. Over there, now isn’t that Creechy?”

Bunny peered through the fog. “I think so.”

“Shit, I didn’t even know Creechy took the boat out anymore,” Shirl said. “But no one crosses the bar like he does, with that sort of sideways sidle. Man will be one of a kind even in heaven or wherever. I think the good Lord broke the mold after seeing the way Creechy come out.”

Bunny looked through binoculars hanging from a rope nailed to the deck. “Yeah, that’s him, all right. Windbreaker with the hood up and tied tight under his chin.”

Shirl chuckled. “Yup, Little Red Riding Hood, people used to call him. I heard his kids got together and talked him into deeding the boat over to them. Old bastard’s got to be, what, eightyfive?”

“Something like that.”

“He’ll just drop one day, you watch,” Shirl said with satisfaction. “So you talk to Fanny lately?”

“Couple of days ago, three maybe. She sounded okay.”

“You must not have been listening then.”

“Why? Is she bad?”

“Yeah, she’s bad,” Shirl said. “Frank told her she can keep the furniture—”

“That’s bad?”

“—because he’s getting married.”

“Uh-oh,” said Bunny.

“Uh-huh. He’s marrying some woman it turns out he’s been seeing on the side since forever.”

“She never told me that.”

“Well, she’s got her pride,” Shirl said.

“Even so.”

“She probably didn’t want to upset you, honey.”

“Why would that upset me?”

“It’s not exactly a secret you’re on edge about Hack.”

“Does she know something? She knows something, doesn’t she? See, I
told
you there’s—”

“She don’t know a goddamn thing,” Shirl snapped. “Christ almighty, Bunny. She just knows you’re jumpy, that’s all. That’s
all
. And you are.” Shirl stood up and pulled at the crotch of her knit pants. “I’m going to get something to eat and pretend we never talked about this. You want something?”

“No.”

“Suit yourself.” Shirl tugged open the sliding glass door that led into the kitchen, slid it shut behind her, then yanked it open again. “Mark my words, Bunny. If that man ever leaves you, you’ll be the one at fault. There comes a time when you just have to believe in someone. You hear me?”

“Yeah, I hear you,” Bunny said.

“No, you don’t, and you never have. I don’t even know why I waste my breath anymore.” Shirl slid the door shut with a decisive thunk and disappeared inside.

Bob was having linoleum dreams. Every night it was a different pattern, but the rest was pretty much the same: He measured and cut and laid down the adhesive in big swirls with his trowel and then pressed down the flooring like he’d done it a million times. The glue went on like butter, and it all fitted exactly perfect.

In actuality, the stuff he had was vinyl, not linoleum, a pretty beige and blue in a tile pattern. Larry Hopkins was putting down a new floor in the Sea View Motel office and said he’d give the old stuff to Bob for free, just for hauling it away. It was in real good shape too, except for a couple of cigarette burns and a gash like someone had tried out new ice skates on it. Bob had been able to hide the damage under cabinets he’d salvaged from a house that was being torn down. He’d also scavenged a clawfoot bathtub for the bathroom, a heavy cast-iron thing that would last forever.

Not that he needed it to last forever.

He’d even found an old push lawn mower at a garage sale and mowed a little yard out of the weeds and wild grass. The place cleaned up so pretty. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever have let it go.

“Bob? Come on in.” Gabriella Lewis summoned him from the clinic waiting room. He tugged at his ball cap as he followed her down the usual corridor of posters and handbills. He thought she had a pretty nice backside for an archangel. You wouldn’t necessarily expect that.

He sat in his schoolboy chair by her desk. She took her seat, folded her hands in front of her, and looked at him expectantly.

“I wanted to ask you about that pneumonia,” he said.

“Pneumonia?”

“That one you said goes with AIDS.”

“
Pneumocystis carinii
pneumonia, PCP. Why? Do you have a fever? You look well.”

“Not me, my wife. She’s been under the weather.”

“What do you mean, under the weather?”

“Oh, just real tired and that. She got better for a while, but now she’s not feeling good again.”

“Fever?”

Bob frowned. “Yeah, probably sometimes.”

“Is she coughing?”

“Maybe some.”

“Look, surely you don’t expect me to diagnose something from a conversation like this.”

“Nah, I wouldn’t ask you to do that. If she did get that pneumonia, she could die, though. Isn’t that right?”

“You know that. I’ve already told you that how many times. PCP is swift, and it’s deadly, especially in someone with a T-cell count under two hundred. Look at me.” Abruptly the nurse reached across her desk, put her hands on either side of Bob’s head, and turned him to look at her. “Take your wife to the doctor.” She dropped her hands. “You’re never going to do it, are you? And for the life of me I can’t figure out why.”

“Well, sure,” Bob said, drifting along on his own thoughts.

“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

“Yes, I have,” Bob said. “I have.”

He stood up and straightened his chair. It reminded him of being in school, those heavy chairs that made a noise like the rending of heaven when you scooted them. He’d always sat toward the back of the classroom, him and Warren, so they’d be overlooked for questions. Not that they were ever called on. Mostly teachers and parents looked right through them, their being so poor and often raggedy and all. Plus they didn’t always smell good. People thought they didn’t know it, but they did. It’s just that it wasn’t so easy getting to a real bathroom with a shower and all. There had been a lot of times when he and Warren had gone out back of Eden’s View into the woods with a bucket of water and cleaned themselves that way, in the freezing cold and with rags for washcloths. Of course, once they were in high school they could shower to their hearts’ content in the locker room. They washed their clothes in the sinks until Coach found out and offered them the school washer and dryer, which was real nice given that neither of them had gone out for a sport in their lives or ever would. By then Bob was wanting to date Anita so bad it made his toes tingle. Warren had told him a million times that she’d never go out with someone like him, but he’d been wrong; Bob had proved that. She’d come with him the first time he asked her out toward the end of eleventh grade. That was the first time he’d been able to summon up the courage, her being so pretty and all. By then he’d had his big old Buick; suddenly he was a man with transportation to offer. And he guessed he was good-looking enough, though sometimes people mistook him for Mexican with his skin tone and black hair and all.

When he asked her out that first time, he’d put his car keys into a little box he’d made in wood shop and had her open that. It was a good way to break the ice, even if Warren had told him it was silly and wouldn’t ever work. She’d laughed and looked him full in the face and said if he was asking her out for a drive, why, she thought she’d accept. Now what other girl would do that for a trash heap boy like him? You could have carted him directly off to heaven that day and he would have believed he’d been granted his wings. Warren had slipped into a funk for a week, but he pulled out of it eventually, like he always did. If Bob had gotten a nickel for every one of Warren’s bad moods, he’d have been rich as a king by now. Warren was—had been—the moodiest person Bob ever saw. Not that he didn’t have some damned good reasons why. Jesus, imagine wanting another man the way he wanted Anita. How could he have stood it? Warren never had to drink when they
did that
, like Bob had to. And now that Bob thought back on it, Warren had had crushes on boys all through high school, though Bob didn’t recognize them as crushes, of course, not back then anyway. He’d thought Warren’s attentions were fueled purely by envy, especially since he admired their clothes as much as the boys themselves.

“Look,” he’d whisper to Bob, and point out somebody’s sweater. “Do you think it could be cashmere?” As though either one of them would know cashmere any more than they’d recognize a Rolls-Royce. What they did recognize, mostly, was clean instead of dirty, big enough or small enough instead of a bad fit. Even in high school they wore secondhand clothes they got at a place over in Sawyer. It didn’t bother Bob much, but Warren was mortified. He’d cried bitter tears more than once over the outdated cut of a jacket or the wrong-way taper of a pants leg. Bob did the best he could to keep Warren’s spirits up, but it didn’t always work, and then he could count on hearing silence for days on end. Not that Warren would stay away from him; neither of them ever stayed away from the other one. No, Warren would just clam up, wade through the days like he was hip-deep in mud and working like hell to reach more solid ground. Bob wasn’t moody himself, but he didn’t hold that against Warren. He knew Warren wouldn’t be like that if he’d had a choice, especially after his mother committed suicide by hanging herself off an old broken-back pine way up near the top of the windward side of Cape Mano. No one had ever figured out how she got there or why she chose that spot. Hell, no one even found her for more than a month, and that was just by accident when Julius Otten pulled over to take a leak on the way home from a Sawyer tavern. Scared the holy bejesus out of him, he was fond of saying; peed all over his own shoes when he saw that body dangling in open space over a nine-hundred-foot drop straight down to the ocean. Rocks down there too; big ones. How had she known the tree would hold her? What if it hadn’t, and she’d plunged all the way down there and busted herself all up? They’d talked about it for weeks, all over town. All but Warren. He hadn’t had more than maybe ten minutes to say about it all together, and that was mostly spent explaining how he’d been expecting it all along. Still, he had his mother’s eyes, and when the heebie-jeebies were on him, he’d say,
Bobby, you know that look she’d
get in her eyes sometimes, like things had gone all crazy in her mind?
Sometimes I think I’m going to get that way too. God, Bobby, I think about
things—things I shouldn’t. Please don’t let me do what she did, die all
alone like that in the woods at night in the wind. It doesn’t matter if you’re
dead. You’re still you, and you’re still alone hanging over a whole lot of
nothing off the thin end of a pine tree.

Bob would promise, of course, and if it got really bad, he’d take Warren to the homestead and lie down on the mattress ticking and hold him for hours in the gathering dark. And no matter how old he was, Warren would ball up and tuck into him just like a boy. They didn’t
do that
then; never then. Bob would sing, sometimes; or they would talk. Mostly, though, they just
were
. And that was all right too.

Hack was sitting at his desk nursing the dregs of a migraine when Bob pushed open his office door and came in. It occurred to Hack that he hadn’t seen much of the man in a long time except to hand over his truck keys from time to time. Jesus, he looked reborn: sunburned, bandy, bouncing up on his toes the way high school kids walked when they believed in themselves. Things must be going better at home. Hack hadn’t asked in a while. There was only so much bad news you could take, and Bunny kept him apprised daily of the deepening shit that Anita had fallen into. The latest thing was some kind of skin problem or something; Hack hadn’t been paying much attention. With Bunny, you couldn’t.