Homesick Creek (20 page)

“I’m aware of that,” Minna said.

“So you can go.”

“What—and miss the fun?”

Cherise subsided.

“How come she hit you?” Hack asked Katy.

“I told her I wished she hadn’t come back.”

Cherise dug in her bag for a cigarette and lighter, making a production out of ignoring Minna Tallhorse. She picked a fleck of tobacco off her tongue and flicked it onto the floor, then walked across the room and fingered the cheap cotton throws Minna had bought for them to put over the battered sofa.

“Nice touches,” Cherise said.

“What are you even doing here? This isn’t your apartment anymore,” Hack said. He could feel Minna’s eyes burning behind him like coals.

“Is that right?” Cherise said.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Take a look at the name on the lease, kiddo. You know, you’ve sure turned out mouthy. She let you get away with that?” Cherise jerked her chin in Minna’s direction. “Or maybe she’s the one who taught you.”

Behind him Hack could feel the Katydid’s fingers latch on to his belt, ready to restrain him.

“She’s helped us,” Hack said.

“And I’m real glad. Now say thank you so she can leave.”

“Isn’t it fun to think it might be that simple?” Minna took a step forward. “The way I see it, you have a couple of chances to do something right. You can simply walk back out the door, which is the easiest thing. Or you can petition the state— through me, of course—to return the children to your care. Let’s see, you’ll need four consecutive pay stubs to verify your current ongoing employment, plus, of course, you’ll have to prove that the state of Nevada’s definitions of desertion and neglect don’t apply in your case. Not to mention you’ll have to convince me that you haven’t been drinking, which I’ll be legally obligated to include in my brief to the court, never mind the fact of your having struck your daughter. But if you feel full of vigor, by all means try it. You might even get a judgment from the courts before Hack turns eighteen, and if they turn down your request for custody, which of course they will, here’s the beauty part: You’ll have refined your communications skills, which may help you get increasingly responsible jobs in, say, the food service or hospitality industry. It’s entirely up to you, of course, but in either case you should probably be thinking of which motel you plan to stay in tonight.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Cherise said. “My name’s on the fucking lease for this dump. I have the right.”

“Well, no,” Minna said. “Actually, you’ve pretty much done yourself in in the rights department.”

Cherise looked at them all, dropped her burning cigarette onto the floor, slowly ground it into the linoleum, and stalked out of the apartment with her middle finger raised. A minute later they heard the Camaro roar off, its tires spinning in the gravel.

“Well,” said Minna, “that was bracing.”

“You were great,” Hack said.

“Was it true, what you said to her?” Katy asked.

“Which part?” said Minna.

“All of it. It sounded true,” said Katy.

“Yes,” Minna said, starting to smile. “It did, didn’t it?”

Hack watched Shirl tuck into her fresh beer.

All these years, and suddenly the past was leaching out of him like poison.

“What are you thinking about, baby?” Shirl said, watching him. “You’re sure working something over.”

“Nah. Just enjoying your company.”

“Well, there’s a pile of shit,” said Shirl.

A week later Minna Tallhorse brought them gifts, small boxes wrapped in red—a powerful color, she told them, a lucky color. She’d been wrong about that, but of course they hadn’t known it then. They’d opened the boxes with excitement, presents being a rarity. Hack pulled out a sterling silver dog tag on a chain, and the Katydid had a bracelet. Both were engraved with Minna’s name and phone numbers.

They were odd gifts, if handsome.

“In case,” she said, as though that explained anything.

“In case what?” said the Katydid.

“Just in case.”

“You ready to go?” Shirl asked Hack. “Since you’re not going to tell me any secrets.”

“I don’t have any secrets,” Hack said, draining the last of his beer.

“Like hell, son,” Shirl said, reaching across the table to pat his cheek. “Like hell.”

As promised, Minna Tallhorse came over for dinner every Thursday. Hack liked to hear her stories. They often had to do with her family, as large as Hack’s was small, though no less harrowing to live among. Most of her stories chronicled damage: wrecked cars, wrecked health, wrecked expectations and hopes. A brother who blew another brother’s foot off with a shotgun; a cousin who got pregnant too soon and died in childbirth at fourteen, the fetus born dead, with cloven hands like hooves. Drunks, drug addicts, incorrigible losers, unrepentant slackers and wastrels and pests. The circle was broad, the familial bed roomy. Cousins bedded with cousins, and sometimes sons with daughters. From such blighted roots Minna Tallhorse had sprung, anomalously straight and strong. With that strength she blazed a trail for him and the Katydid right there in Tin Spoon, Nevada, a trail that led to school every day when otherwise Hack would have dropped out sooner; a trail to the cool interior of the public library, where the Katydid found salvation; to the market where Hack worked thirty hours a week humping groceries for a steady wage. Her legacy was a good and lasting one, and if she had ultimately failed to save them from harm, she had nevertheless managed to hold it at bay. For nearly five years in all, Minna Tallhouse had given them shelter, a wispy haven, a rickety, straw-built thing, granted, but nevertheless able to withstand almost five years of bad weather.

When Hack got home, Bunny wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the mood for silence, so he picked up the phone and called Vinny’s apartment. She answered on the second ring. In the background Hack could hear girls laughing. “Hiya, kiddo. Sounds like you’re having a party.”

“Hack! When are you coming up to see me again?”

Her voice was high and light, the voice of a young girl. His heart lifted. “When do you want me?”

“Anytime, you know that.”

“You working this Saturday?”

“Not at dinnertime.”

“I bet you say that to all your dates.”

“Only the ones with money.” Vinny laughed.

“Oh, and that’s me, Mr. Money?”

“Oh, Hack, you know I’m only teasing.”

“Yeah, I know. So how’s tricks?”

“Okay. They gave me more hours,” Vinny said.

“Yeah?”

“I heard you get a raise at the end of six months too if they like you. My six-month anniversary’s in three weeks.”

“You want me to call and put in a good word for you?” Hack offered.

“Like that would help.”

Hack laughed softly. He was always threatening to intervene on her behalf and really screw things up. He looked at his watch: just about time for the evening news. “Okay, Vin, I’ve got to go.”

“Come up soon, though,” she said.

“Soon,” he promised.

He went into the living room, switched on the news, and awaited Bunny among the rabbits. She hadn’t spoken to him since yesterday at the Bobcat. God, he was tired of her complaints about his imagined unfaithfulness, his inadequate passion for her, his dirt bikes and side buys, even though he’d gotten her the goddamn washing machine she wanted, a top-of-the-line Maytag that cost more than all the dirt bikes he’d ever bought, combined.

Hack had asked Minna Tallhorse once why she wasn’t married. She’d said, “You’ve obviously never met my brothers-in-law.” Even so, she’d probably found somebody by now. Women needed men, in the end, even when they pretended they didn’t, even when men made them crazy, like they did to Bunny.

Even if Hack had been able to look down the road, he guessed he’d probably still have married Bunny. She was an okay wife. She loved him; he knew that. She loved him, and she wanted him to love her back, and he guessed it wasn’t her fault that she wanted more than he had to give to her or anyone. Women didn’t want to hear,
I’ll love you as much as I can
. They wanted to hear,
You’re all I’ll ever need
. He couldn’t help that. A leaky vessel couldn’t hold more water than it could hold, and no amount of wishing was ever going to fix it.

Just before the weather report, Hack heard the door from the garage bang open and then shut. Bunny must have come in with a load of groceries, from the sounds of bags and cans landing hard on the kitchen counters. Hack pushed himself out of his recliner and went to help, something he didn’t do except when he was in the doghouse.

“Hey,” he said carefully, probing her mood like a wound.

“Hey.”

They stacked cans.

“You left work early today,” Bunny said. “I called, but they said you were gone.”

“Yeah. I met somebody for a beer.”

Bunny looked at him out of the corner of her eye. A muscle in her cheek jumped.

“Jesus, Bunny, lighten up,” said Hack. Her jaws were so tightly clenched Hack could hear her molars grinding. “You know who I met at the Wayside? Your mother. She wanted to talk to me about my dick. Imagine my surprise. You probably know about that, though.”

Bunny cracked open a Pepsi, slapped a cut of meat on the counter.

“I talked to Vinny today,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“She thinks she’s going to get a raise soon.”

“That’s good.”

“She wanted to know when you’d be coming to see her. She’s thinking you don’t give a shit.” He was lying, but somebody had to say it. “I just told her you didn’t like driving in Portland.”

“That’s not true,” Bunny said, stung.

“Yeah, well, what else am I supposed to tell her? You’ve made one visit, Bunny. One. What’s the kid supposed to think?”

“She can come down here anytime she wants.”

“The reason you won’t go up there is you’re busy spying on me. Imagine what it was like, defending my dick to your mother in the middle of the Wayside. I’m sick of this shit, Bunny. You hear me?
I am sick of this shit with you
.”

He saw Bunny’s knuckles turn white as she gripped the countertop, but she didn’t turn to look at him. It didn’t matter; he was done. He walked out of the kitchen, into the sanctuary of his garage and tools. At least out there if something was broken, he stood a reasonable chance of fixing it.

He didn’t come into the house until midnight, when he was sure Bunny was asleep. She’d been opening the Anchor all week. With luck he wouldn’t see her awake again until tomorrow night, and even then he might just talk to old Marv and snag an evening’s invitation to the Elks.

To hell with her. To hell with them all.

Sometimes Bob missed Warren like a fist clenched in his gut so hard it made him short of breath. But now, standing on the homestead road, there was only silence and the memory of those two little doll’s-eye dots of cancer, too small to kill someone. Hadn’t they been too small to kill someone? But Anita said it couldn’t have been pneumonia.

Whatever it was, Warren must have known what was coming. “Are you scared, Bobby?” he’d whispered over the phone in late February just a week before he died.

“No.”

“I am. I’m scared all the time.”

But Bob had heard a lifetime of that. He brushed it off.

“Will you get your T-cells checked at least?” Warren had pleaded.

“You and that nurse. I’ll tell you the same thing I told her. I’m not getting the damned test because there’s no point in it.”

“What do you mean, no point? Of course there’s a point.”

“I’m going to die anyway, right? Isn’t that what you all keep telling me? I don’t want to know how fast I’m going down. I’m good right now. I don’t feel sick. I don’t look sick. Could be I’m
not
sick. Could be it’s all a goddamned mistake. Who’s to say no? Those doctors don’t know everything. I figure I’m going to keep working on the homestead, I’m going to keep doing exactly what I’ve been doing until I can’t do it anymore.”

Bob could hear Warren breathing on the other end of the line, fast and light from high in his lungs. He whispered, “I love you, Bobby.”

And because he’d been pissed off, Bob had said, “Yeah, okay.”

Just fucking
Yeah, okay
.

It had been the last time they’d talked.

He hadn’t gotten to say it back: I love you too. I love you like myself, like blood family—more than blood family. I love you, and I will keep you safe. He hadn’t said that.

He’d meant to say that; he’d even thought it, loud and clear as a prayer. But he hadn’t said it.

Now he could say it. Now that it was too late.

He guessed it was too late for a lot of things. Like the chance for him and Anita to get old in matching recliners they’d buy on credit at La-Z-Boy. Him and Anita, they’d joked about that for years, how they were going to get a pair of recliners and a fine TV and a fancy entertainment center to put it in, and they were going to get old right there in their living room with their feet up and their hands around ice-cold cans of beer, yelling at the sportscasters and the newscasters and the new generation of young people. Wasn’t that what old folks did while the young bucks were screwing and having babies and making money? Of course, not everybody made money. Look at him; look at Warren. They’d provided the best they could, but that hadn’t been saying much.

Until now. Now Bob was doing something worth crowing about. He had all the windows bought, and half of them installed. He had rebuilt the back porch out of salvage and sweat, roughed in a staircase to a new loft in the rafters. He had hewn broad-plank doors from windfall in the woods, built a lean-to for firewood, and cut enough wood to see them through a season. What he needed now were salvaged bricks to rebuild the chimney and the fireplace.

Are you scared, Bobby?

Not nearly. He was dying, and for the first time in his life things were looking up.

chapter twelve

Warren and Sheryl and Bob and Anita were married in a simple double ceremony at the Elks over in Sawyer, the site of Anita’s near triumph at the Miss Harrison County Pageant, now the place of her culminating dreams. She and Bob drifted down the aisle first, Anita woozy with sentiment and morning sickness, Bob stiff in a rented blue tux. They passed under an arch of pink and white balloons, along an aisle lined with potted azaleas, to the spot they’d chosen in front of the Grand Elder’s chair, filled for the occasion with a huge spray of pink roses and baby’s breath. Anita had wept from start to finish, spongy with sentiment and yo-yoing hormones, grateful she’d chosen waterproof mascara. Halfway through the vows her mother had tiptoed down the aisle and handed her a Kleenex, to the everlasting amusement of all.

Warren and Sheryl, by contrast, swayed beside them in an agony of embarrassment and reservation. Sheryl once told Anita she remembered nothing about the ceremony, only the terrible effort it had taken not to faint. She was still a virgin, though she and Warren had tried hard to act as though they weren’t, the two of them having gone parking numerous times with Bob and Anita, steaming up the windows of Bob’s big Buick up at the Cape Mano lookout. Despite the opportunity, Warren had never done anything more than kiss her, and that had been chastely with closed lips. She told Anita it was years before she realized that that was not how other men kissed. Sex had been the same way, even on their wedding night. Warren was in and out of her like a rabbit, insisting on total darkness and the briefest possible penetration. Next door they could hear Bob and Anita humping like crazy, the headboard knocking on the wall between their two rooms at the airport Best Western all night long. Next morning they all flew off to Disneyland, where Anita spent four days vomiting on the rides and Sheryl anticipated with mounting dread the coming night, each one the same: the perfunctory kisses, the reluctant penis, the embarrassment.

Anita didn’t know how Sheryl had stood it all those years. She told Bob what Sheryl had said, but Bob had only shrugged and said not everyone was as highly sexed as they were. Anita didn’t know about that, but she let it drop. It was obvious that Bob didn’t share whatever problem Warren might have. Patrick had been born seven months after the wedding, and Bob and Anita had had sex regularly right up to the birth and started again just one week later. It was only in later years that they’d slowed down, but that had been Anita’s doing, not Bob’s. She was tired from the kids all day, plus working at whatever job she could find—chambermaiding, clerking at gift shops, scooping ice cream at Passionetta’s until she got tendinitis so bad that for months she could barely lift a spoon.

Mostly, though, Anita attributed her lack of lasting sexual enthusiasm to their living conditions: seven apartments in the first four years of marriage, all of them dumps. It was her belief that you could muster enthusiasm for scraping other people’s dirt off floors and windowsills for only so long before your expectations started to dim. For Anita it had been a lasting struggle to keep her standards up. She’d bring Bunny over, and the two of them would scrub and scour all day while the kids played with pots and pans or watched hours of cartoons. But even with company there was only so much cheeriness you could fake before you had to acknowledge to yourself and to the world that you were living in a shithole.

Sheryl and Warren seemed to have better luck finding the apartments Anita never could, ones with cute window boxes or new carpets and curtains. After Sheryl and Warren had moved up to Portland, Anita only saw them once or twice. That had been all right with her. She was too damned busy to care, by then, what with the everlasting laundry and cooking and cleaning, with Doreen’s croup and Patrick’s recurrent ear infections. And since Sheryl and Warren never had kids—Anita privately thought that Sheryl, with all her food allergies and finickiness, was just the type to be barren—there wasn’t really anything for Anita to talk with Sheryl about.

Warren never came down to Hubbard at all once they moved away either. Anita thought that was peculiar. How could you not want to come home? But then she couldn’t imagine moving away in the first place. Granted, neither Bob nor Warren had a decent family, but what about your friends, your favorite spots? When she asked Bob once why they never came back, Bob just said, “Not everyone has roots like you do, Nita.” Plus Warren got that job with the produce company and became an expert on lettuces or whatever, which probably took up a lot of his time.

She wished that Bob had Warren’s drive. How many times had she suggested to him that he might need to get a second job? He never did, so she had had to, and that had been a wedge between them ever since, his inability to support them, her fatigue and frustration. As far as that went, the way they were living now—supporting Doreen and Crystal, trying to put decent food on the table—was nothing new. Anita took whatever work came her way. Lately she’d been helping out Marge and Larry Hopkins at the Seaview Motel.

Anita had thought of telling Doreen to pull Crystal out of Head Start for now and save the money, that Anita would look after her, but it was probably good for Crystal to have little friends to play with. She worried about Crystal. Doreen was mean to her, like Crystal was to blame for all her problems, even though she was only three. If Anita didn’t cook a meal every night, Crystal would probably be living on nothing but peanut butter and jelly. You could probably get rickets or scurvy or whatever from that. So Anita made meat loaf and tuna noodle casserole, and if there wasn’t anything else in the house, she fried bologna. On a good week, she bought Lucky Charms and a half gallon of whole milk instead of that low-fat watery shit Doreen picked up at the market to keep her weight down. Children needed fat and calories, Anita was sure. And Crystal liked Lucky Charms better than any food on earth. She was a good and loving girl despite living in an atmosphere that was damned thin on belovedness. She’d climb into Anita’s lap when Anita was feeling low and tuck her small head into Anita’s neck and rock until Anita would have tears running down her face. If Doreen took off for greener pastures once the divorce was finalized, and Anita was sure she would, she wouldn’t take Crystal with her. That little girl deserved more than to be brought up by a worn-out old woman. Yet when Anita mentioned it to Doreen, Doreen didn’t want to hear about it. She just said, “You’re not old; you’re fat. What do you expect when you’re seventy pounds overweight?” Never mind that Anita had been overweight for years.

Everything was about weight, with Doreen. Everything was about weight, and nothing was her fault: Danny got her pregnant; Danny got arrested and slapped in prison; Danny was the reason she had to live at home again instead of in her own cute apartment. Anita guessed Doreen came by that quality through Bob, who could pass the buck better than anyone she knew. His bosses were idiots, no one was hiring, he was fired because he’d been set up, his talents were overlooked; she’d heard them all, over the years. In the end it didn’t mean a thing. What meant something was that they never had money and never would.

Yet she’d known Bob’s limited capabilities early in their marriage. She could have left him before Doreen was even born, but she hadn’t. When Hack had first appeared like an apparition in the park, she might have gone with him if he’d picked her, despite already being married, but he hadn’t picked her. But even if he had, she’d probably only have stayed away for a little while. There was something about Bob; there always had been. In Anita’s mind he was Buster Brown, always spit-shined and eager to please even though he was holding nothing in his hands but air. Even now he had the look of a boy with happy eyes and a winning smile, and if it was all based on delusion, Anita still didn’t begrudge him. Everyone had to get through the days, and that was just Bob’s way. He’d never had a strong grip on the truth. If he had, he wouldn’t have lasted past his boyhood, wouldn’t have been able to tow Warren along behind him into calmer waters. But he had lasted, had brought Warren with him through childhoods so bereft that Anita often wondered how a just God could look away. He had looked away; Anita knew this, and in His absence Bob had done the best he could for her and for the kids and for Warren. Anita knew that too. If she was bitter now—and there were days when she was bitter enough to curdle milk—it was herself she blamed, not Bob. This was what she’d never been able to explain to Bunny or anyone: that Bob was not to blame for her life. And she accepted it.

She accepted it.

For as long as she could remember, Bunny had been sensitive about other people’s appearances, especially when they looked better than she did. When people told her over and over how cute Vinny was, and later on how pretty, she’d considered it a mixed compliment. It wasn’t that she minded Vinny’s being pretty; it was that she minded her being prettier than Bunny had been. Bunny had never been what you would call a pretty girl exactly; it was her figure that got her the looks, small in the hips, long in the legs, and just busty enough to pull off any top. She took excellent care of her breasts, always buying bras that gave good support; plus she’d bottle-fed Vinny when she was a baby, so she wouldn’t sag like those women in Africa who looked like they’d had their boobs sucked dry and then ironed. Those women were a cautionary tale, as Bunny had told Anita on more than one occasion. If it came down to it, Bunny would rather have a plate in her lower lip or a stack of gold rings around her neck.

Anita had never been much competition for Bunny. It was one of the reasons they’d done so well together all these years. Bunny secretly believed that she would have beaten out Anita at the Miss Harrison County Pageant if she’d entered that year. Anita had been voluptuous, full of curves and bosom, but she hadn’t been pretty. LeeAnn Sprague, who’d won, hadn’t been all that good-looking either. Bunny was sure she’d have turned heads if she’d walked down that runway, but Shirl had nixed it. Shirl had nixed a lot of things that year, hoping that keeping Bunny close to home would prevent her from running off with JoJo. A lot of good it had done. She hadn’t run off with JoJo, but three years later she’d had Vinny. Shirl had just sighed and shaken her head when Bunny finally told her she was nearly five months gone. “I knew you couldn’t let him get away clean,” Shirl had said. “It’s an old trick, hon, but it don’t work, and it never has. You’d think after so many centuries girls would’ve figured that out.”

It wouldn’t have done any good to tell Shirl—and JoJo, if he’d given her a chance—that she wanted a baby about as much as she coveted a dead herring. No, Vinny was the product of a defective Trojan that JoJo busted right through one night in his orgasmic zeal. When he pulled out of her and she saw those shreds of rubber, she knew she was well and truly fucked. In Hubbard when girls got pregnant, they had their babies. They had their babies and they lived at home as long as they needed to—permanently, in more than a few cases—and year by year their color faded and their eyes got sullen and one way or another they took a 180-degree turn away from everything they’d once thought they’d be: a stewardess, a rich fisherman’s wife, a telephone operator, a nurse. They weren’t anything at all except somebody’s mother and maybe the wife of someone who wasn’t anything either. Bunny knew that her life was over the night her water broke all over her favorite chintz vanity stool. She endured thirty hours of labor with no one but Shirl and Anita in the waiting room, plus a torn perineum and stretch marks that lasted down the years no matter what she did with cocoa butter and baby oil. At least she hadn’t had a cesarean section like Anita had had with Patrick and then Doreen, a big, ugly scar that said,
Open here
, like some kind of a party favor.

Yet Vinny had had the softest head, the most beautiful cap of curls when she was small. Bunny could still remember cradling that small pulsing skull in the palm of her hand and wondering how God could send down one of His most cherished possessions in such a fragile package. Vinny had been a sprite from the get-go, pretty and cheerful and eager to please. At first it was Bunny she’d tried to please, but then later it had been Hack. Vinny thought Hack hung the moon. If she was with Bunny and Hack together, she outshone Bunny every time, at least in Hack’s eyes. She’d seen him; she’d watched. All these years that had been her special hell: to know he was in love with her daughter. A mother was supposed to be her daughter’s best friend, but with Bunny and Vanilla it had never been that way, and Bunny didn’t think it was all her fault. She and Shirl were close; Fanny and her daughter, Chantelle, were always going out shopping and to lunch or something. But Vinny was always out someplace with her girlfriends, and the few times Bunny had tried to set up something—dinner and a movie for just the two of them, or lunch together at the Bobcat over in Sawyer—Vinny always put it off until Bunny just gave up. That’s just the way it was between them. They’d never meshed, and now they probably never would. Bunny could live with that except when Hack brought up that he’d been on the phone with Vinny or up there for a visit, like he was a better parent than her. He hadn’t been the one who’d gotten kicked in the ribs so hard from the inside out that during her pregnancy Bunny had had to sleep sitting up for a month. He hadn’t stayed up with her all night when she had colic in the beginning or when she got pneumonia and a double ear infection all at the same time. He hadn’t scrounged for money or bought clothes only for her when there wasn’t enough money to buy for them both. He hadn’t done any of that, but somehow he’d turned into Mr. PTA anyway, the Good Dad, the perfect stepparent; that was what everyone always said about him.
Bunny
, people always told her,
you’re the luckiest woman
in the world to have found that man, but hey, you already know that
. It wasn’t easy being married to a man who was better-looking than you, more likable than you, and who attracted women like iron filings to a magnet. There were always women, and there always had been, with Hack. It didn’t make a bit of difference what he told her. She knew what she knew.