Homesick Creek (15 page)

“Well, that’s good,” Shirl said approvingly. “Nita needs the support, what with Doreen back home and Danny locked up and all.”

“They told her at the Lawns she might pick up some more hours next week,” Bunny said. “That Mexican girl’s taking a couple of days off .”

“Goddamned Mexicans are taking over. What?” Shirl said to Hack. “I’m just saying what’s true.”

“Jesus, Shirl,” Hack muttered.

Shirl shrugged loftily. “I’m not afraid to call a spade a spade, Hack, and you know it. There are more of them every year, and none of them speak a word of English, but they get the jobs just the same.”

“Yeah, because they’re damned hard workers, and they’ll work for cheap without complaining.”

“Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.”

“Anita says Bob’s still been acting funny, though,” Bunny said.

“Funny how?” Shirl said.

“I don’t know. She says he’s never home, but when she calls the Wayside, he’s not there either. He won’t tell her anything except she’ll be able to see for herself when he’s ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“That’s just it,” Bunny said. “He won’t say. Has he told you anything?”

“No,” Hack said.

“Well, the man’s always been shiftless,” said Shirl. “Nice enough, of course, but shiftless just the same. Anita’s had to be the man of that household. I just hope whatever he’s doing is legal. He doesn’t have a grain of common sense, and he never has.”

When the waitress brought over their check, Hack was the only one reaching for it, like always. He dug his wallet out of his back pocket, flipping his Vernon Ford credit card on top of the bill. They’d talked about Bob, who was a Vernon Ford employee, so he was okay with using the company card; he didn’t believe in putting too fine a point on his expense sheets, and Marv Vernon never seemed to care. He pulled back Shirl’s chair and helped her up. More than a couple of people at nearby tables gave her hard looks. Hack was used to that. He just winked at a couple of them in collusion—she’s my mother-in-law, what the hell can you do?—and let the rest go.

While he was waiting for the card to be run at the register, Shirl helped them all to toothpicks. She was a big one for dental hygiene, plus she took advantage of anything free just on principle. She walked out of the restaurant picking her teeth and leaving Hack to deal with the tip.

Sometimes, for the hell of it, he tried to picture her and his mother, Cherise, together. Jesus, it would be like the Roller Derby, two tough old broads biting and clawing in the ring. He didn’t even know if Cherise was still alive, though. He hadn’t talked to her in, what, nearly twenty years now. She’d tried to contact him two or three times in the first couple of years she was in prison, but she’d given up after a while, like he’d meant her to. He had nothing to say to Cherise, not a goddamned thing, and he never would. If she was broke and alone someplace now, whose fault was that? Not his. Not his, and not the Katydid’s either. They’d been broke and alone in Tin Spoon, and she hadn’t done a thing, not a single goddamned thing. She hadn’t even had the balls to let them know she was leaving them. She just slipped out of town one day with her forger boyfriend. The last words she’d said to him were:
Looks like you’re nearly grown up
now, kiddo
. It had taken a month for him to figure out she’d been saying good-bye.

He’d just turned fifteen.

Once they figured it out, he and the Katydid never gave away to anyone the fact that Cherise was gone, the difference to them being somewhat academic since she’d already been mostly gone for years. For a long time they brought along some of Cherise’s clothes when they went to the Laundromat. When the Katydid was out sick, Hack sent her back to school with notes he signed with Cherise’s name, forging the signature of a forger being something that gave him a sense of grim satisfaction. They mussed up Cherise’s bed some days too, and Hack dripped her cloying perfume around their apartment from time to time so if anyone came over, it would smell like she’d left only a minute or two before.

And for a while people did come by to check on them: Hack’s boss at Howdy’s Market, who asked gentle questions and watched Hack with concern sometimes when he thought Hack didn’t know it; Katy’s fourth-grade teacher, who brought home-work by once when she was out for a week with the flu.

Then, of course, there’d been Minna.

Minna Tallhorse, hipless and hard-bodied, perfectly erect, eyes as deep as outer space and ferocity crackling all around her like lightning, came into their lives four months after Cherise had left them. They’d found her waiting for them in a beat-up Volkswagen outside their apartment late one afternoon, the department of social services’ answer to an anonymous tip that they were living without adult supervision. She shook Hack’s hand hard like a man and followed him and Katy into their apartment with a long stride.

Hack had never seen anyone before who looked quite like Minna Tallhorse, dark and taut and somehow dangerous, as if she’d known things other people didn’t. He stared openly as she sat on their old sofa, her heavy hair falling straight down on either side of her face until she seized it impatiently and tied it in a double knot at the nape of her neck. Mining her satchel for a notebook and pen, she finally looked them over and said, “Tell me about yourselves.”

“You first,” Hack said warily.

“Fair enough.” She rested her elbows on her knees and frowned, her chin in her hands. “I grew up on a Blackfoot Indian reservation in North Dakota, was caught once stealing a steak, always wanted a dog but never had one, and my father is my mother’s first cousin. Your turn.”

The Katydid pressed a little closer to Hack. They were sitting side by side on the living room floor, the sofa being their only piece of furniture.

“What do you want to know? I’m Hack Neary, and this is Katy. I’m fifteen. She’s ten.”

“Keep going. I already knew that part.”

“Our mother’s out right now, but she should be back soon.”

“How soon?”

“Soon,” Hack said. “Anytime.”

“Ah,” Minna said. “So what did you have for dinner last night?”

“Hot dogs.” The Katydid piped up, she being the cook in the family. “Macaroni and cheese and canned green beans.”

“My favorites,” said Minna, showing them her first real smile. She had beautiful long white teeth. Beside him Hack could feel the Katydid relax. “How much money is in the house right now, would you say?”

“Six dollars and twenty-two cents.” Hack made a point of keeping current on their cash situation. “Why?”

“You should always have a little money around the house. You could need, I don’t know, a cotton ball and not find one anywhere. If you have money, you can just go out and buy one.”

“Why would you need a cotton ball?” Katy said.

“It’s just an example,” Hack said.

“Cotton balls can be very important.” Minna crossed her arms and frowned thoughtfully. “You can put calamine lotion on a bug bite with one. You can clean goo off your stove, maybe, or blot up a nosebleed.”

“Do you get nosebleeds?” said Katy.

“All the time,” Minna said. “Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re lucky.”

“Why is your name Minna Tallhorse?”

“The same reason yours is Katy, I imagine; my mother named me that. Minna was one of my aunts. I never met her, but I always imagined her as fat and with hairs on her chin. I would have preferred Augusta or Aurelia, but there you are.”

“No, I mean the Tallhorse part.”

“Ah. My great-grandfather was the first Tallhorse, as far as we know. I assume he owned a tall horse; we’ll never really know for sure, but my family name has been Tallhorse ever since.”

“I think it’s a pretty name.”

“Do you? Well, maybe so.” Minna reknotted her hair and rose from the sofa like a Valkyrie. “I’d like to look around a little. May I do that?”

“Sure,” Hack said. The Katydid hopped up and followed her. Hack trailed behind as the two of them poked around in closets and kitchen cupboards. Though the apartment was an absolute and undeniable piece of shit, with daylight coming through cracks in the walls and a bathroom you had to go around the outside to reach, the whole place was clean, cleaner by far than when Cherise had lived with them, the Katydid’s being a tidy housekeeper. Soon they were back in the living room with its single ratty sofa balanced on three legs and a brick.

“Why did you steal a steak?” Katy asked, perching beside Minna.

“Ah, you remembered that, did you? My little brother Luther was terrible when he was hungry; he yelled and threw things from misery. I took the steak to shut him up.” She leaned in close to Katy. “It wasn’t the first one I’d stolen. I think the butcher knew all along. He would have let me get away with it too, but he wasn’t working that day, his wife was, and she didn’t like Indian girls very much.”

“You have a brother?”

“Five.”

“Five?” Katy brightened. “How old are they?”

“Oh, we’re all grown up now. Three are younger than me. One’s a year and a half older.”

“That’s only four.”

“Sharp girl. My fifth brother died.”

“How?”

“He had a hole in his heart.”

“Did it hurt?”

“No, but it made him tired a lot of the time,” Minna said. “And the bigger he got, the harder his heart had to work. After a while it just wasn’t strong enough to keep up. He died when he was eight.” Minna frowned. “He was my twin.”

“But you don’t have a hole in your heart.”

“No?” Minna smiled a strange little smile. She turned to Hack. “I’d like to talk to you alone for a few minutes. Why don’t we go outside?”

Reluctantly Hack followed her out into the heat and dust.

“What makes you tick, I wonder?” Minna Tallhorse said, folding her arms ruminatively and leaning against her beater Volkswagen.

Hack shrugged.

“Then tell me about Katy,” she said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Everything. What’s she like?”

“She’s real smart.”

“I already figured out that part. What else?”

There was a lot else, but Hack had no intention of telling any of it to this tall, prickly woman with a body like the flat, hard blade of a sword. He did not intend to tell her that the Katydid had nightmares all the time, screaming ones that woke Hack up in the middle of the night panting with fear until she sank down again into the hostile arms of sleep. He didn’t intend to tell her that sometimes they got so mad at each other over stupid things like who’d finished the milk that three months ago she stabbed him in the hand with a meat fork and that once or twice he’d slapped her. And he had no intention of telling her the worst thing of all, that sometimes the Katydid cried for Cherise, and when she did, he yelled at her for it, screamed,
Shut the fuck up,
just shut the fuck up
. To him it was all so much bullshit. If someone walked out on you like that, she was dead to you, ashes and bone. He’d never wept for Cherise, and he never would.

Minna was watching him shrewdly. How long had he been standing there with her sizing him up like that? “Is she hard to take care of?” she asked.

“The Katydid?” He tried to sound breezy. “Nah, she’s easy. She pretty much takes care of herself. I mean, you never have to remind her about her chores or anything like that.”

“What are her chores?”

Hack thought for a minute. “Well, she cooks usually, and she cleans. We both do the laundry because I don’t want her around the Laundromat alone, but she folds better than I do. She keeps the grocery list.”

“She sounds very independent.”

“Yeah.”

“And your chores?”

“I pay the bills and stuff, the rent and electricity and all. Plus I work.”

“What’s left for your mom, then? What does she do?”

Hack stiffened. Had he given too much away? “Oh, she does plenty of stuff. She takes care of us and all.”

Minna held him with her eyes like an oncoming train. Hack forced himself to stare right back at her.

“And what about you?” she said. “Are you like your sister? Do you read a lot too?”

“Nah. Reading’s boring.”

“That depends on what you read. Are you a good reader?”

Hack shrugged. “I’m all right.” He wasn’t, though. He’d been the worst reader in his class since second grade, and he didn’t write worth a damn either. The words he wrote looked okay to him, but his teachers said they were inside out or something. They got mad at him for not trying harder, but when he tried harder, he still wrote his words inside out, so what was the point?

“So what do you like to do? Sports?”

“Nah, I don’t have time for that,” he said proudly. “I’ve got a job at Howdy’s Market.”

Minna cocked an eyebrow. “A man on the rise.”

“Yeah, I’ve been working there for four years already. I’m going to make cashier next year. You have to be sixteen.”

“So you’re paid, what, minimum wage?”

“Plus tips.”

“Plus tips,” Minna acknowledged. “How often do you get paid?”

“Every Thursday.”

“What do you use the money for? Cigarettes? Taking girls out on dates?”

Hack turned scarlet. “Nah. I don’t have time for that.”

“What then?”

“I buy stuff with it.”

“Stuff?”

“Yeah, food and stuff.”

“Ah,” Minna said.

“I’ll probably stop going to school after next year,” Hack blurted out. “I figure I’ll know all I need to by then.”

“Will you?”

“Sure. Plus I’ll be earning good money.”

“Let’s talk about money,” she said. “If I gave you forty dollars, what would you do with it?”

Hack frowned. “Forty dollars? I’d buy us coats. Then, if there was some left over, maybe I’d take the Katydid to a movie. Some Disney picture maybe. She hasn’t seen that many movies.”

“Have you?”

“Sure, I’ve seen plenty.”

Minna nodded and folded her arms across her chest. “You and Katy live here by yourselves, don’t you?”

He looked Minna dead in the eye. “No.”

“If I asked Katy, would she say the same thing?”

“Yup.”

“I guess she would.” Minna regarded him for a long minute, deliberating. “Look. If you go hungry, or if one of you gets sick, or if you’re in
any kind of trouble at all
, I expect you to call me,” she said. “There are some rules I’m willing to bend, but that’s not one of them. You break that rule even once, and I’ll have you both in foster care so fast it will make your head spin. Do you understand?”