Homesick Creek (21 page)

This latest girl, this prissy piece of merchandise, had been sitting in a booth at the Bobcat just two days ago like Queen Shit—and
in their booth
, hers and Hack’s. Bunny made sure to keep Hack there long enough for the woman to get good and soaked walking all the way back to the dealership in the rain. Her perfume, some thick, sweet stuff that smelled like pastry, had stayed behind. Bunny could still smell it sometimes, even days later, like it had gotten wedged up her nose as a reminder. Hack could swear nothing was going on between them—and he did, over and over—but he’d gone white when he saw Bunny come in. Well, she’d caught him all right. She’d caught him, and now she was holding him, playing him out like a fish on a line. When she got hurt, it made her mean. Hack knew that. That’s why he was being so sweet now, bringing her beers, watching TV with her. Same old same old, the way he always atoned for his sins. What would she do the day he no longer cared enough to bother?

If every day you thought about committing murder, did that make you a murderer, at least in your soul? If so, then Rae Macy was an adulteress, and no amount of protestation and hairsplitting would change it. Though she was only mentally wanton, this thing between her and Hack Neary, this love or lust, was so solid, so real you could walk across a bridge of it all the way to China.

She would have thought that such a great sin, such a moral transgression would at least return equal parts of pleasure and pain, but it wasn’t so. The obsession went on and on, with none of the relief or release of consummated sex, but all the retribution. Bovine Francine, with her GED certificate and her grade-school handwriting, was now forgetting to pass along Rae’s phone messages—all except the ones from Sam, which recorded the caller as
Sam, your husband
. Whenever Rae walked by Francine’s desk, which lately was as infrequently as possible, Francine gave her a nasty smirk. In fact the only people at the dealership who did
not
seem to regard her with contempt were Hack himself and Bob. No, there was Jesús too, with his touching belief that there was such a thing as goodness. To judge by the stair step ages of their children, La Reina must have been pregnant during all but a few months of their marriage. She had a fierce Aztec face and the short legs and powerful build of a wrestler, a woman with corners instead of curves. Yet Rae had seen Jesús look at her with unqualified adoration when she stopped by sometimes to bring him lunch. How did a man develop such a love, the deepest desire of the soul as well as the body? When he and La Reina talked, he always put his head close to hers and spoke quietly, even intimately. What did he say to her? Rae imagined beautiful couplets, a continuous song of humility and gratitude. What would it be like, to be loved in that way, to have a man grasp and hold you with his eyes until he’d memorized every cell, every molecule? She would have liked to ask Jesús these questions, but her Spanish and his English were too poor, and besides, he was a simple man, a man in command of inarticulable truths: gladness, honor, joy. This morning he had shyly presented her with his latest pictures of
la reina y los niños
on the occasion of his oldest son’s first communion. The child was dressed like a cheap lounge act, but he regarded the camera with serenity, a boy at peace with himself and his place in the world around him, a state from which Rae was increasingly a stranger.

She often dreamed now about leaving her house unclothed. Sometimes she arrived at Fred Meyer naked; at other times she was fully, elegantly dressed, but only from the waist up. When Sam was at work and she was not, she’d taken to driving blindly up and down the coast highway in a fug of stale longing and cheap sentiment. She’d put nearly a thousand miles on the car in three months.

Overwhelmed by misery, Rae had talked to Sam about how out of step she felt, about how she was being ostracized because she wasn’t like everybody else, how neither her graduate degrees nor her sense of style seemed to mean anything to anyone in Sawyer even though those things
defined
her. Yes, she had perhaps ruffled some feathers by befriending men, but what was she supposed to do when these narrow Sawyer women would have nothing to do with her? She’d told him this as though Vernon Ford were teeming with high-spirited men with whom she glibly jousted and punned and discussed politics. “Honey, you’re losing me. Exactly who is it that we’re talking about?” Sam had asked mildly, trying to inform her vague statements with fact, and she’d whispered Hack Neary’s name, and Bob’s as a decoy, with a burning face.

Sam hadn’t known what to make of it, of course, except to point out mildly that she’d always valued diversity, and Sawyer was nothing if not diverse, at least in socioeconomic terms. Couldn’t she learn from these people, put what she found to some use? But Rae didn’t want to learn from these people. All she wanted, really, was to play out her tawdry little obsession in private. Not that she could say that, of course, and then it had gotten late and Sam had had an early court appearance the next morning, and the conversation hadn’t so much ended as guttered out. Rae was left wondering what she might have given away that she would later come to regret. She was in the habit lately of replaying all her conversations and dealings with Sam. His mind was encyclopedic, a strangely efficient data storage system that indexed and cataloged even the most obscure information. One of his law school professors had said that Sam was the most highly evolved attorney he had ever seen, perfectly adapted to the dusty bins and endless shelves that were the law. Sam could recall in detail conversations that Rae couldn’t even remember having, quoting as meticulously as though he was reading from a text. Yet he was at best only a fair judge of character. He could cite information chapter and verse, but he often missed the subtext. He was most at home with dry, bureaucratic matters: contested deeds, right-of-way disputes, articles of incorporation, contract law. There were times when Rae felt parched by the desert landscape of his mind, but she also had to admit it allowed her great psychic privacy. He could no more see inside her soul than perform miracles in the village square.

During her solitary drives up and down the highway, she sometimes thought that their relationship, hers and Sam’s, was a mealy thing, without the glue and effervescence of bloodlust. There had been no wild nights, no weekends of sex from which they’d emerged groggy with pheromones, raw and stinking like zoo animals. Theirs was a gentlemanly, civilized affection that had developed during talks on many subjects. Sam had a lively intellect and the broad knowledge of a voracious reader; Rae always felt that she was a step or two behind him, the eager student rather than peer.

With Hack Neary, on the other hand, Rae gladly suffered ridiculous chatter about neighbors and dirt bikes and salmon bakes and sex, thinking all the while about how much she would like to run her tongue around the inside of his mind, lick it clean with her spit and adoration, then rebuild what she found there until it sang like fine crystal. She was reasonably sure he was not a stupid man. But where Sam lived all up in his head, Hack was a primitive, a throwback to times of brawn and guts and lustiness, where you seized what you would. He was Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, a pioneer pushing westward with two oxen and a bolt of cloth, weevily flour and a single Dutch oven. His instincts were highly developed. Sam did not have instincts; he had taste.

Six years ago they had been married in quiet elegance in the front parlor of his parents’ exquisitely restored Victorian house in San Francisco. Sam’s father was a retired history professor whose specialty was Victorian America. He had used his house as the central metaphor for a well-received book on Victorian values and the self. He was a man of beautiful manners and formal turns of speech, and just before the wedding ceremony was to take place, he had asked Rae to step into a small butler’s pantry he used as his office, so that he could speak with her in private. She had had a spray of baby’s breath in her hair, and when he lifted a hand to adjust its blossoms, she had misunderstood his intentions and turned away. Stricken, he said that he had only wanted to wish her, in private, happiness and long life with his son. My God, did she think he had intended to kiss her? She had stumbled through an agony of self-abasement and mortification, but they had never been entirely comfortable with each other again. And Sam was very much like his father, a man of ironclad morality and lukewarm lusts. Until recently they had made love comfortably, pleasantly, sometimes even wryly, as though their sexuality were a bit of evolutionary foolishness, the vestigial remains of their Cro-Magnon heritage. But for the last few months Rae had been repulsed by his touch, dreading the inevitable invitation that would come from beside her in the dark:
Would you care to share a roll?
They used to laugh about that silly turn of phrase, invariably asking each other the question in front of the baked goods section of the student union cafeteria, as their private joke. Now it made her flesh crawl.

So she drove her obsession north along the coast highway to Hubbard in hopes of catching a glimpse of Hack or even of his truck. Once she’d even driven by his home, a dangerous thing since he lived just two houses from the end of a dead-end street, and his wife would recognize Rae if she saw her. She had risked it, though, taking in with appalled reverence the chain saw bear carvings and climbing bear silhouettes in the front yard, the cheap frilly curtains and mailbox painted like a rabbit, its raisable ears acting as flags for the postman. It was a fussy house, a woman’s house, Bunny’s house more than Hack’s, Rae guessed. She drove on with her heart pounding, terrified of being caught, knowing that this time she’d gone too far. As she turned around, she saw a pickup coming toward her up the hill, and for a minute she was sure it was Hack’s truck, that he’d know she’d sunk to spying on him. It had turned out to be someone else, in a truck that looked nothing like Hack’s, but she drove home deeply shaken.

If Sam had had an affair, or contemplated one, it would have made her feel better in some obscure way, but she didn’t think he had the imagination for it, or the desire. She was the overheated one of the two of them, with her secret thong panties and the lace teddies she bought on a trip alone to Portland on a day when she knew Sam couldn’t go with her. She had gotten that far out of control. She waxed her legs every second Monday, wore an expensive perfume she had picked out and bought for herself. She experimented with cosmetics that enhanced her pale, fairy complexion until she looked like she was made of silk or marble, an acolyte offering up her immaculate beauty as part of some perverse cosmic contract with God.

She would not leave Sam if He would allow her to seduce Hack Neary.

chapter thirteen

Hack hadn’t sold a car in a week—a week and a day, to be exact, ever since he and Bunny had turned to shit at the Bobcat. He knew his sales patter was lackluster, his enthusiasm forced. People could read that plain as day and knew you weren’t at the top of your game. You’d think that would make them zero in for the kill, but they didn’t. It seemed unsportsmanlike. They were happy to kick your ass,
eager
to kick your ass, but they wanted you to be in peak condition when they did it. They wanted you to break a sweat, writhe in pain, cry out for mercy. Old Marv Vernon had been masterful, right down to the groans, the lowered head, the hangdog expression.
If all my customers were
like you
, he liked to tell them,
I’d be waiting tables right now. God only
knows what I’ll tell my wife
.

What it came down to was, Hack Neary didn’t bounce back like he used to. Bunny had whipped him good, and here was the thing he was beginning to think: If he was going to be hammered for having an affair, he might as well
have
an affair. It wasn’t like the sex at home was any good anymore. And he was already paying the price of choosing the wrong company for lunch. It had been eight days since Bunny had found him with Rae at the Bobcat, and when he’d walked by her sewing room last night, the machine had still been open full throttle, racketing along like a jackhammer. He pictured her feeding some poor Hack rabbit under the sewing foot without even slowing down, stitching him shut from his balls to his eyebrows. That’s what he’d become, the Hack Neary Voodoo Bunny.

But—and this was the worst part, the truly depressing part— he didn’t really want to have an affair. He didn’t know what he
did
want, but it wasn’t sex on the side, not even with someone as beautiful as Rae Macy. What the hell? He couldn’t remember the last time a problem had been too big to be solved by sex. Sex was the answer to everything. You got your parts all slicked up and perky, and the rest just drifted away on a tide of slow orgasmic bliss. By the time it was over, you were too fuck-drunk to care.

He’d been dreaming about Cherise lately. In his dreams she showed up at his front door in Hubbard, wearing hot pants and four-inch heels.
Hey, baby doll
, she’d say to him.
It’s Mommy
. And he’d tell her to fuck off, but he didn’t really mean it, just the way he didn’t really want to have an affair.

What was going to sustain him if it wasn’t sex and rage? What did you have left when that was gone? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You were as helpless as a newborn kitten in the bulldog-slobbery jaws of hell.

Hack couldn’t remember anymore how Cherise had wheedled the police into coming to the apartment in Tin Spoon and waking him and the Katydid out of a sound sleep at one o’clock in the morning. Maybe she told them they were too young to be left alone while she was at the station; maybe she just told them the truth, that she was hoping they had enough money to post her bail. Whatever it was, Hack awoke to insistent knocking on the door. By the time he got there, hoisting jeans up over his boxers, the Katydid was padding out of her room in her nightgown, her hair going in a million directions.

“What the hell?” Hack had said when he saw a state patrolman standing in the doorway.

“Are you Hack Neary?” the officer said, consulting a notebook.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“Hack—unusual name.”

“Tell me you didn’t come here at one o’clock in the morning to say that,” Hack said.

“Let him in, Buddy,” Katy said, shivering. “It’s cold.”

It was cold, a February night in the desert, icy air leaking in through all the shoddy window frames and cracks in the flooring and doorjambs. Katy held her arms tight across her chest.

The officer tipped his hat. “Plenty cold. Thank you, miss.”

Hack backed up and let the man through.

“Whew,” the officer said, snuffling and stamping his feet.

“So?” Hack said.

Preparing for trouble, the patrolman set his feet while Katy shut the door behind him. He consulted his notebook again and said, “We have a Cherise Neary in custody over in Diederstown. She says she’s your mom. That right?”

“Never heard of her,” Hack said.

“That’s right,” Katy said at the same time.

“Well, we picked her up for solicitation and theft over there. She stole a couple wallets off some guys in a bar who weren’t as drunk as she thought they were. Bail’s seven thousand bucks.”

“Pigs will fly first,” Hack said.

“Pardon?”

“Buddy,” Katy warned.

“She told you we have seven thousand dollars?” Hack said.

“Look, son, all I know is I’m supposed to bring you down to the station. If nothing else, maybe you’ll be able to settle her down some.” The officer cracked a rueful smile. “She decked the sergeant, landed a good one on him.”

“I’ll go. Let her stay here,” Hack said, nodding toward the Katydid.

“I’m not staying, Buddy. If you’re going, I’ll go too.”

“She doesn’t trust me to keep my temper,” Hack told the officer.

“That’s because you
don’t
keep your temper. He doesn’t keep his temper worth a damn,” Katy told the officer.

“Like we’ve even seen the woman in two years,” Hack said.

“Doesn’t matter,” said the Katydid. “I’m going.”

“Okay, look, both of you come then. You want to follow me?”

“Can’t,” Hack said. “Fucking car’s in the shop again.”

Two months earlier Hack had finally saved up enough money to buy them a car he hoped would run for a while, but it turned out to be yet another piece of shit, just a more expensive one. He’d bought it off an Indian Minna Tallhorse had warned him about, but the guy had promised Hack it was clean, and it looked clean, even to the boys in the garage. Yeah, right. In the first six weeks he’d owned it, he’d had to replace the carburetor, the timing belt, and now—for the second time in a month—the head gasket. He was fucking sick of piece-of-shit cars and being too broke all the time ever to buy a good one. His life goal, his dream, his obsession, was to have a new car, a white T-bird with porthole windows and red tuck-and-roll upholstery. Like that was ever going to happen. He was making only fifty cents an hour over minimum wage as a checker at Howdy’s Market, and no one ever slipped tips to the checkers like they did to the bag boys. After expenses, they had fifteen dollars a month left over—unless they had to make car repairs, and of course they always had fucking car repairs because they could only afford a goddamn piece-of-shit car.

“I’ll run you in,” the officer said.

“Jesus,” said Hack. “What if we don’t want to go?”

“We have to go, Buddy,” Katy said.

“Like hell.”

“Well, I’m going.”

“Fuck,” Hack said, and pulled his jacket off the back of the couch. Katy put a poncho Minna Tallhorse had given her over her nightgown and they followed the officer out to his squad car. It was twenty minutes to Diederstown, and Katy nodded on Hack’s shoulder. She was fifteen years old, but when she was asleep, she was still going on eleven. He smoothed out his jacket so she wouldn’t have a big wrinkle mark in her cheek when she woke up. She always had wrinkle marks in her cheeks when she woke up; she had the kind of skin that was sensitive that way. He used to razz her about that all the time, told her she must have been a rag doll in her past life, the way she wrinkled up so easily.

“Yeah, well, if I was a rag doll, then what were you, one of those roly-poly dolls that you punch and they get right back up?”

It was true that he got into his share of fights, especially when he hung out at the Black Diamond Tavern, where someone was always spoiling for a fight. Hack was happy to mix it up, see what he could do. He was earning a reputation as a fighter. Lot of guys would back down before things had even gotten out of hand if they knew he was in the place.

So Cherise had decked a cop. He watched the sage go by in the moonlight and wondered what fucking ill wind had brought her back to them this time. Last time they’d seen her she’d breezed in like she owned the place and tried to leave some suitcase behind in the closet. Hack had jimmied the lock and found five Omega wristwatches, two Rolexes, a bunch of traveler’s checks, a pearl necklace, and thirteen credit cards. He’d made her take the goddamn thing back. That was two years ago, and they hadn’t heard a word from her since. If the cops had picked her up for theft, her timing must be off. Age did that to you, he guessed. Jesus, what was she now, forty-three, forty-four?

The patrolman pulled into the station lot in Diederstown.

“Out you go,” he said, opening Katy’s door for her. The kid was barely a kid anymore, and everyone still opened doors for her.

Diederstown was a dive, and so was the state police station, an old Quonset hut the government must have gotten cheap. There were only two cells, and Cherise was in one of them, carrying on a lively discourse with the duty officer—the sergeant, by the looks of him, all swollen up around the right jaw and making a show of ignoring Cherise and doing paperwork. Looked like it hurt. Hack had been hit there a few times himself, and he’d ended up sucking Cream of Wheat through a straw.

“You son of a bitch bastard no-good asshole,” Cherise was saying. “You impotent pansy faggot. You’re going to be so sorry—”

Then she saw Hack and Katy. “Hey, baby dolls,” she said, turning sweet on a dime, like she always could. “Look what they’ve gone and done to your mama this time.”

“Looks like a good place,” Hack said.

“Are they treating you okay?” Katy said.

“Better than she’s treating them,” Hack said. “Look at that guy.” He nodded in the direction of the sergeant, who glanced up at Hack wryly.

“Got that right,” he said.

“So?” Hack said to Cherise.

“You don’t sound glad to see me, baby. Aren’t you glad to see your old mother?”

“Fuck you,” Hack said.

“Well,” said Katy, “at least we’re starting off on the right foot. C’mon, Buddy. It’s not going to help for you to get ugly.”

“Listen to your sister,” Cherise said.

“Fuck off,” said Hack.

Katy shook her head and retreated to a metal bench against one wall.

“Let me get a good look at you, honey,” Cherise wheedled, leaning on the cell bars. Even retired, she looked like a hooker: the hip-shot stance, the ridiculous flashy clothes and cotton candy hair.
Casino-wear
, she used to call her getups.
Designed to
please
. “My God, but you’ve gotten big and handsome,” she said to Hack. “How old are you now, baby? Eighteen?”

“Twenty.”

“A man.”

Hack shrugged, but some of the anger was ebbing away. Close up, Cherise looked so damn old. Her lipstick had bled into lines around her mouth that he’d never noticed before. Her eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed, like she’d been on a bender. She didn’t seem drunk now, though.

“What time did you pick her up?” Hack asked.

The sergeant consulted his log. “Call came in at ten oh six.”

Enough time to get sober.

“I told them you’d come,” she said. “Bastards.”

“What do you want?”

“They’re asking seven thousand for bail.”

“And?”

“I thought you might be able to help me out, baby.”

“What a joke. If we had that kind of money, we
wouldn’t
have that kind of money because I’d have rented us a decent place with it and gotten a car that actually runs.”

“So how much do you think you can come up with—a thousand, maybe, maybe two? They might go for that,” Cherise said, talking fast. “Hey, would you go for that?” she called to the sergeant. “A couple thousand? I’d get the rest in the morning.” Like she could be trusted to turn over that kind of money if she had it. The sergeant didn’t even bother replying, just shook his head.

“C’mon, baby, think. Don’t you know someone who could help us out? Honey, what about you?” she called to Katy. “Are you dating someone, maybe, someone with money?”

“No,” Katy said flatly.

“Jesus,” Hack said. “What’s she supposed to do even if she does know somebody, say,
Excuse me but can I borrow seven thousand
dollars to bail out my forger–pickpocket–thieving-whore mother
?”

“Watch your mouth.”

“You watch it,” Hack said. “This whole thing better be your idea of a joke.”

“I don’t know why you have to be ugly,” Cherise said, fluffing her hair mechanically. She looked around the cell until she spotted a package of cigarettes. She looked inside, but the pack was empty. “Goddamn it,” she said. “Honey, do you have a cigarette, by any chance?”

“I don’t smoke, and neither does she,” Hack said. “Look, this is bullshit. We don’t have any money, and they’re not going to let you out tonight without it. We’re going home.”

“Shit.” Cherise balled up the empty cigarette pack and threw it across the cell. “I would’ve thought you’d want to help your mother.”

“Why in hell would you have thought that?”

“You’re my kids. I raised you.”

“You raised us?
You raised us?
Ask her who was cooking dinner for her when she was five. Go ahead, ask her.” Hack pointed at Katy, who was still sitting on the metal bench. Cherise turned her back. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

“I gave birth to you, I brought you into this world,” she said, but the fight had gone out of her. “I did the best I could. I would have thought that counted for something.”

“It doesn’t count for shit,” Hack said.

On the bench Katy raised her knees, folding her arms on top, and laid her head down. “How late is it, Buddy? God, I’m tired.”

“We’re going,” Hack said, seeing her. “C’mon, this is garbage.”

“You want me to give you a ride back home?” the patrolman asked. Hack had forgotten all about him, standing back there by the coffeepot.

“Nah. What’s she driving these days?” He jerked his head toward the cell.

“Looked like a Camaro. It’s down the block at the C’mon Inn, that’s where we picked her up. You want to take it? She’s not going to need it until she’s arraigned. Least you’d have transportation.”

“Yeah, we’ll take it.”