Homesick Creek (22 page)

Cherise said nothing. The sergeant got her keys out of the property box and had Hack sign for them. “You mind?” he asked Cherise as an afterthought.

“Ask me if I even give a fuck,” she said.

“I’ll drive you down there,” the patrolman said to Hack. “It’s too cold to be walking.”

Katy stood and went over to the cell. Cherise was still standing there with her back to the room. Katy stood staring at the hunched shoulders, the slack upper arms and sagging bosom, the tiny skirt and thigh-high boots.

“You have something to say to me?” Cherise said without turning.

“No,” Katy said. “I guess I don’t.”

She and Hack followed the patrolman outside. “Jeez,” the man said, rubbing his arms. “It’s a goddamn icebox.” He opened the squad car door for Katy and drove them three blocks south, to the C’mon Inn, a mean little building with blacked-out windows and asbestos siding. Cherise’s Camaro was the only car in the lot. Hack unlocked it with the keys the patrolman handed him and slid inside. It stank of Cherise’s perfume, but it was clean enough.

“You kids be careful now,” the officer said, holding up a hand in farewell. “I’m real sorry about your mama.” He got back in the squad car and headed up the street.

“Yeah,” Hack said to no one in particular.

The engine turned over smoothly, and there was half a tank of gas, more than enough to get them back to Tin Spoon. Hack ran through the gears a couple of times, checked the brakes, and peeled out of the empty parking lot.

“Nice car, Buddy,” said Katy.

“Yeah. Maybe we should keep it.”

The Katydid looked at him.

“C’mon, I’m only kidding,” Hack said.

They drove for a while in silence. Fog had clamped down over the desert, and it was hard to see.

“Buddy? What do you think she wanted to be when she grew up?” Katy finally said.

“Cherise?”

“Yeah.”

“A whore.”

“I mean it. Do you think she had dreams once of being something? I mean, nobody wants to grow up to be a prostitute.”

“How do you know?”

“Come on, Buddy. It’s a shit job. It’s demeaning, and it’s dangerous, even if it is legal. It doesn’t even pay that well.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked Minna once. She said Cherise probably made about as much money as an experienced waitress.”

“Yeah, just hold the sauce,” Hack said.

The Katydid shook her head. “I can’t talk to you. When did you get so mean?”

“C’mon, I’m not mean.”

“Bitter then.”

“Not me,” Hack protested. “Me?”

“Just drive,” said the Katydid. “Let me know when we’re there.”

She pulled her poncho over her eyes, laid her head back against the seat, and put her life in Hack’s hands, the way she had thousands of times before.

Last Christmas Vinny had given Hack a desktop toy, six steel ball bearings suspended on monofilament from a wooden frame. You picked up a few balls and let them drop against the rest, and they set up a complicated ricochet rhythm—tak TAK tak TAK TAK tak tak tak—until eventually the damned thing got fainter and slower, like someone losing his conviction. Hack was sitting at his desk watching the balls go back and forth when Rae walked by—tock tock tock—in her high heels and pure silk stockings that had been spun by pedigreed silkworms in the Shanghai province or some damned thing. She stopped in his office doorway, one hand climbing the doorjamb, the other on her hip in a classic come-on.

“Hey,” she said softly.

“Hey,” he said, stopping the balls from swinging before they left a maddening rhythm in his head.

“You busy?”

“Very busy.”

“Oh—” she said uncertainly.

The woman was pretty insecure for someone who could afford to cover her legs with pedigreed silkworm spit. “I was being sarcastic.”

“Oh.”

“Jesus, doesn’t anyone kid anyone else where you come from?”

Rae sighed. “Not the way you do, no.”

“What way then?”

“Never mind. I don’t know. I’m probably wrong.”

“Ah,” Hack said.

“So are you okay? You don’t look okay.”

She was always asking him if he was okay now, ever since the Bobcat.

“I’m fine, princess, just a little low on motivation today,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about taking a little road trip.” Actually, the thought hadn’t crossed his mind until that very moment. Why would he want to go anywhere?

“Really?” Rae perked up. “Like to Eugene, maybe? Isn’t that funny because I was thinking about going to Eugene this Saturday. Sam’s got a lot of work right now, and I don’t expect him to be home this weekend much, so I was thinking of getting out of town, maybe going shopping or something.”

Hack hadn’t heard her talk that much in days. She hadn’t had a lot to say lately.

“That right?” he said.

“Maybe you have something you need to do there too, and we can drive together.” She was turning scarlet, but he had to give it to her, she kept on going. “Maybe you’d like to come with me— you know, save on gas by taking one vehicle. Or something.” She finished lamely. “I was just thinking that. I don’t know.”

“Shopping? Like at Mervyn’s or something?”

He saw her flinch. “Well, maybe Nordstrom or Frederick & Nelson. Kaufmann’s.”

“That where rich women shop?”

He could see her struggling for composure.

“Sorry, princess. I’m not trying to pick on you,” he said. “So you’d do that when, Saturday?” Today was Thursday.

“Well, then. Or Sunday.”

He could see her chest rising and falling, rising and falling, like she’d run a mile. When she took her hand from the doorjamb, it left a damp mark. But her eyes were locked onto his with complete conviction.

“Sure,” he heard himself saying, and it sounded to him like he was talking in slow motion. “I could probably do that.”

Bob was feeling real steady these days—steady and calm and resourceful. He had some things to do at the homestead, and he would do them: shore up the front porch for good, try to make the pump work in the kitchen sink, maybe install a new toilet seat in the outhouse. One day he might even put in a septic system and a real toilet right there in the house. Jesus, but the place was looking good. He liked to imagine sometimes that the original homesteaders would come back and see it and thank him for turning his love on the place like a hose, raining affection and handiness over the whole thing until it sparkled like new. There was love there, he knew, in the walls and the floorboards and the very nails that someone had made all by hand. Dehydrated love, that was what all the dust was. Dehydrated love and desiccated hope, now reconstituted with Bob’s sweat and conviction. He’d never known such a thing before, had to stop himself from gathering pocketfuls and bringing them home, he felt that rich. As he sat at a back table at the Bobcat, waiting for Doreen, he actually felt himself glow.

“Where’s Mom?” Doreen said to Bob, looking around the restaurant. “She in the bathroom?”

“No,” Bob said, flipping open a menu, as though he didn’t already know everything that was on it. “I thought it would be nice for just us to have lunch. Just me and you.”

Doreen looked at him suspiciously. “Why? You haven’t heard from that lawyer again, have you? That son of a bitch better not be—”

“Nah, nothing like that. Can’t we have lunch?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Okay. So what do you want to eat?”

“Burger, I guess. A burger and a chocolate shake.”

“Tell her, not me,” Bob said mildly, nodding at the waitress who’d arrived. He’d been saying,
Tell her, not me
, to Doreen since she was eight or nine and old enough to speak for herself. Bob was mindful that someone who was shy—Sheryl, for instance— was at a disadvantage out in the world, not being able to talk for herself. He hadn’t wanted Doreen to grow up shy like that. He probably didn’t need to worry, though. The kid had an edge on her, an edge and a mouth. She’d say anything that came into her mind, even ugly things, hurtful things. He didn’t know who she’d learned that from. Anita didn’t talk ugly, not even when things were bad. She got a little cranky from time to time, but that was understandable, what with his drinking and so little money and all.

“How about a burger and a chocolate shake?” Doreen was saying to the waitress.

“Same for me,” Bob said, clapping the stiff menu covers together.

The waitress winked at him. “Seems like she was just in kindygarden, this one,” she said to Bob.

“Yeah. It sure goes fast,” Bob said.

“So what’s Mom doing?” Doreen asked when the waitress was gone.

“Dunno,” Bob said. “Working, probably. She’s got some hours at the Lawns this week.”

“Is she going to be able to pick Crystal up this afternoon?”

“Far as I know,” Bob said mildly.

“Because I can’t. I told her that, that she’d have to pick Crystal up herself, at Head Start.”

“Then she will.”

“You know what she said to me this morning?” Doreen asked.

“Mom?”

“Crystal. She said,
Gram sleeps a lot
. I don’t know why she said that.”

“Mom’s been kind of tired lately, what with her working some extra hours and all.”

“She’s only been working about fifteen hours a week.”

“Well, yeah, but she’s been taking care of Crystal.”

“Is Crystal giving her any trouble? If she’s been giving Mom trouble, I’ll beat her butt. She’s gotten real sassy with me a couple times.”

“Nah, nah, she’s a good girl.”

“Well, she better be.” Doreen subsided, tapping the sugar packets into an even row in their little dish. “You know what she said the other day? She asked if Danny was coming home soon. I said no because he’d been sent to a place where bad people go until they can be good again. She wanted to know if Danny’d been bad, and I said yeah, he’d done some real bad things like lying and playing with someone’s toys without their permission and messing up their house. She wanted to know if when you go to the bad place, mommies and daddies can go too, and I said nope, you had to go all by yourself, and it might be years before they’d let you come home.”

“Aw, now, what did you tell her that for? The poor kid. Now she’s going to worry all the time about what if she’s bad?”

Doreen sulked. “I figure she needs to start knowing the truth about Danny.”

“She’s three.”

“She’s almost four, and she could start hearing stuff from the other kids at Head Start about how her daddy’s a criminal and all.”

“I don’t think she’s going to hear that from the other kids.”

“Well, she could, though.”

Bob methodically drank an entire glass of water. “Speaking of Crystal,” he said when he was done.

“Here it comes,” Doreen said. “I knew there was something.”

Bob thought carefully about what he wanted to say. “I just think you shouldn’t count on leaving Crystal with us, honey. To raise and all.”

“I never said anything about that. Have I ever said anything like that?”

“No, but you’ve been thinking it.”

Doreen said nothing. The waitress brought over their food and set it in front of them. Bob slowly opened his burger and added ketchup. He’d become very careful with ketchup. You could ruin a perfectly good burger in seconds if you let your attention wander.

“Will you please just tell me what the hell is going on?” Doreen narrowed her eyes at him. “Because
something’s
sure going on. You and Mom aren’t splitting up or anything, are you?”

Bob looked up, shocked. “Why would we do that?”

Doreen shrugged, took a bite of her hamburger, then opened it up on her plate. “Shit,” she said. “They put pickles on it. I hate when they put pickles on your hamburger.” She picked the two offending pickle slices off with the very ends of her fingernails.

Bob carefully poured out some ketchup for his fries. “You’ve got to tell them that, honey. You can’t expect them to read your mind.”

“So are you saying that me and Crystal can’t live with you anymore?”

“Nah, nothing like that. But Mom gets tired sometimes.”

“Yeah, well, if she’d lose sixty or seventy pounds, she wouldn’t.”

“That’s not nice,” Bob said.

“Well, it’s true.” Doreen was pounding down french fries like she hadn’t seen food in days. The child had always eaten when she was unhappy.

Bob put down his hamburger and chewed thoughtfully for a full minute or two. “I wish you could have seen your mama when she was your age, honey,” he said. “She was so pretty; she was the prettiest girl in our class. You’d spot her across a room, and her face would be shining like an angel’s. She had skin that was the envy of every girl there; she’s never had a pimple, never in the whole time I’ve known her, not one. And she had a real womanly figure, none of that stick figure stuff like everyone wanted back then, like that Twiggy had. Anita, she was ample, you could say; real curvy—like Marilyn Monroe, someone you could get a hold of. And she was never stuck up either, not even when she was in that Miss Harrison County Pageant and came in first runner-up. You’d have thought that would go to her head, but it didn’t. She was real nice about LeeAnn Sprague winning, even though she was prettier and all. I sat in that audience, and I thought I would bust, I was that lucky to have her as my girlfriend. I looked at her up there—and I swear, you’ve never seen somebody as beautiful as she was in her gown and all—and I thought I must owe God a pretty big debt for giving her to me.”

“Jesus, Dad,” Doreen muttered.

“That’s what she looked like, Marilyn Monroe. Spitting image.”

“She’s not even blond.”

“Don’t matter.”

Doreen raised her eyes to the ceiling.

“I thank God every day for giving your mother to me,” Bob said gravely. “Every day. Plenty of people wouldn’t have put up with me, with my drinking and all. Plenty of women, they’d have shown me the door, given me the boot. Don’t think I don’t know it. I know it. Your mother, she never locked the door against me, not once, and there were plenty of times she could have. You don’t think I know that, but I do. I know. It hasn’t been easy for her.”

“Then why’d you do those things?”

“It’s complicated,” Bob said.

“Yeah?”

“There’ve been reasons. Let’s just leave it at that. There’ve been reasons.”