Homesick Creek (7 page)

Out in the filthy service department toilet, Bob vomited up the last of his coffee and scotch. Hack had handed him a flask at the Bobcat, hair of the dog that bit him. Looked like he was going to sober up, though, whether he wanted to or not. And he definitely did not. Anita was watching him all the time with hawk eyes, Doreen was busting his chops because he didn’t have ten thousand bucks—
ten thousand
—to bail out Danny, and Crystal was bouncing among all of them like a pinball. Little girl damn near broke his heart, she was so smart and pretty, just as smart and pretty as Doreen had been when she was little, though there wasn’t much sign of it in her anymore with that sticky makeup and nasty mouth of hers. The other evening, when Crystal had come out to say good night to him and Anita in her little Cinderella nightgown, he’d seen a ring of bruises circling her arm, and they had Doreen’s fingerprints all over them clear as day. He’d hated giving her back to Doreen this morning—Crystal had come over from Hubbard with Hack and Bob, barely able to see over the dashboard of Hack’s big pickup, singing “The Wheels on the Bus”—but what could he do? Anita had gotten a call to be a substitute chambermaid at the Lawns Motel and Tourist Cabins, and she’d gone. They needed the money. They were going to need it a fuck of a lot more before it was all over.

But he didn’t want to think about that, so he turned his attention to rebuilding Merle Stanley’s carburetor. He’d always found peace among car parts. Merle’s old Fairlane was obviously terminal, but Merle was so cheap she’d drive it until her ass was dragging on the pavement. And the way the rust was creeping up the chassis, a butt-busting breakthrough might not be too far away. Bob found the thought of Merle’s withered old haunches hanging an inch above the asphalt faintly amusing. Not that he wished Merle any harm, of course; he meant no one any harm, never had, tried to give everybody just what they wanted, all of it good. Maybe that was why his life was such a fucking mess. Maybe right there he had the reason. There had to be some reason, and it was the first one he’d thought of yet that made any sense. And he’d been trying to make sense of what he knew since he drove home from Portland four days ago, where he’d been handed the proverbial truckload of shit.

What he found out up there was that Warren Bigelow had AIDS.

Bob didn’t know much about AIDS, but from what he did know, it had always sounded like somebody else’s problem, him and Warren being sole playmates and all. They’d been playing together—he couldn’t say fucking, he didn’t think of it as fucking—since they were little kids living in the Eden’s View Trailer Park out behind the First Church of God in Hubbard. It was their secret. Nobody needed to know, especially with Warren marrying Sheryl and Bob marrying Anita right out of high school. Neither of them was a faggot, was the thing, or at least that’s what Bob had always thought—hell, still thought. Except somehow Warren had come up with AIDS because Bob sure as hell hadn’t started it. No, Warren must have lied to Bob all those times he’d sworn that it was just the two of them, he’d never do a thing like that with anyone else. He was a married man, wasn’t he? Sure, he liked girls just fine.

But up in Portland this time Warren had lifted his shirt and shown Bob a couple of red spots no bigger than doll’s eyes, except Warren said they were cancer. They hadn’t looked like much to Bob. He’d had a couple of warts burned off a couple of years ago; he bet you could do the same with those little spots, and he told Warren so. But Warren just started crying, saying once you got those little cancers they spread; he’d seen men covered from head to toe, until it made people puke just to look at you. How was he going to tell Sheryl? What would they do? He’d never get life insurance now, and when the produce company he worked for found out he was sick, they’d fire him on the spot, him being a food handler, even though you couldn’t get AIDS from food. So don’t tell them, Bob had said, but Warren just shook his head and said it didn’t work like that, at least not toward the end, when you were so sick and maybe blind or crazy. He’d already seen men die of it.

“Jesus Christ”—he’d wept—“no one should have to go that way. You think God’s punishing us?”

“Nah,” Bob had said. “We haven’t done anything wrong; we just had a little fun. God don’t frown on fun. Besides, you think He sees us down here? Shit, He’s too busy to see us, two little specks down here just doing what feels good with what He’s given us. Besides, how come He waited this long to strike us down?”

“They say you can have it for ten years before you ever get sick. He could have struck us down in 1980. We’d already done plenty by then.”

“Well, you think what you want,” Bob had said, “but I don’t think God’s got a damn thing to do with it.”

Except that now, four days later, he wasn’t so sure. When his aunt Bets was going through her short-lived religious period, she used to tell him,
God’s watching everything you do, kiddo, every littlething. He’s just biding His time till Judgment Day. Then He’s going to
hold you to a full accounting, and you better be ready, you better be clean
and pressed and wearing your best suit. He’ll forgive you your transgressions, but only to a point, bub. Only to a point
.

Shit. Still, God could wait. Right now what he was worrying about was Anita. What the fuck was he going to do about Anita? Warren had told him he needed to wear a condom from now on if he slept with anyone, so he didn’t pass the disease along.
Me
and Sheryl, we don’t do it anymore, haven’t in nine, ten years, so she’s okay,
thank God,
he’d said.
But you’ve got to look out for Anita
. Not that it made a hell of a lot of difference now, from what Bob could see. She probably had the disease already, anyway, like him. And how the fuck was he supposed to explain about wearing a rubber, Anita having had her female parts taken out ten years ago, no more birth control needed? Until he figured things out, he wouldn’t sleep with her at all, even though he normally liked to after his little play weekends, to remind himself that he was a man, not a fairy. But he couldn’t stay away from her forever, and even if he could, she was going to want to know why, him normally being highly sexed and all.

Then there was the question of being tested. He didn’t think it really mattered, for him. He’d been playing with Warren right along, for years. If he hadn’t caught the thing one time, he’d have gotten it another. Plus Warren had described some of the symptoms to him, so he’d know when he started getting them. No, it wasn’t him that needed testing; it was Anita. If she didn’t have it, that would ease his mind, even though it still left the rubber question, and if she
did
have it, that would at least solve the rubber question. But how the fuck was he supposed to sneak some of her blood without her knowing? And them without health insurance to cover any of it. They might as well just wait. If she started getting sick, he’d know what was what, and they’d deal with it. It wasn’t like you could cure the fucking thing. It wasn’t like there was a way out. That was the thing. You couldn’t cure it. You died. Warren Bigelow was going to die, and so was he.

Him and Warren had gone and fucking done it this time, they really had. Goddamn son-of-a-bitch bastard.

He sank down beside Merle Stanley’s piece-of-shit 1972 Fairlane and wept.

Rae Macy pushed through the service department door. She had fielded a question from one of the dealership’s car owners about whether an air filter had been replaced on his Escort. She’d pulled his file, and the most recent job ticket said nothing about it. She took the ticket with her to Bob’s work bay; the car had been in just a week ago, and there was a good chance he’d remember. To her astonishment she found him on the floor, keening, pale-faced, crazy-eyed, clammy.

“My God,” she said, “are you all right?”

He jumped up and wiped his face with a greasy rag from his coverall pocket. “Yeah. Got something in my eye, burns like a son of a bitch.”

Like hell. But since Rae couldn’t think of any more appropriate response, she pressed on. “We’ve got a customer asking about whether we changed out an air filter.” She extended the folder lamely. His hands were shaking, but he appeared to be sober, or at least nearly sober. He looked at the folder blankly.

“Guy’s a dick,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Tell him I changed it out. Or, I don’t know, maybe I didn’t. What the hell difference does it make? He can get along with a dirty air filter; it’s not going to fucking kill him. Tell him it’s not going to fucking kill him.”

“He didn’t say it was going to kill him,” Rae said softly. “He just asked if the work had been done.”

Bob subsided. “Yeah. Well, have him bring the car in, and I’ll change it out if I didn’t already do it.”

“That’ll work.”

“Yeah.” He handed the folder back to her and then stood there, staring at her. There was something going on behind his eyes, something not necessarily friendly.

She shifted her feet uneasily. “What?”

“Nothing. You look real healthy,” he said.

“Look, is there something I can do for you? Shall I get Hack?”

“No.”

Rae walked back to the showroom and straight into Hack’s office, where she closed the door.

“Ooh, this could be nice,” Hack said, sliding his eyes all over her. “I like it when you close the door.”

“Stop,” Rae snapped, sitting in the visitor’s chair next to Hack’s desk. “Look, I just found Bob out there crying. There’s obviously something wrong.”

Hack leaned back in his desk chair, folding his arms across his chest and regarding her. “Yeah, well, him and Anita have some financial problems. Things are a little tight.”

“He didn’t look like someone with financial problems. You don’t drop to your knees and weep in a service bay with grease all over you just because you have financial problems.”

Hack regarded her with a small, hostile smile. “That depends. Have you ever had financial problems, princess?”

Rae bridled. Did he think she had no problems, that they had money coming out their ears? If they did, would she be working in this hellhole?

“Don’t patronize me,” she said.

“I wouldn’t dream of it. Look, what do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know. Go out there, see if he’ll tell you what’s wrong. Maybe he needs help.”

“Always leave a man his pride.”

“God, Hack.”

“It’s true. Look, I already took him to coffee and sobered him up. I’ll talk to him on the way home tonight.”

Rae nodded, but she didn’t buy it. She’d been here long enough to see the way no one asked anyone the really hard questions, like why do you hit your daughter and how could you have chosen that man for your husband. They could talk for hours about meaningless things like motorcycle rallies, motocross races, and beer, but she’d never heard anyone, not anyone, talk about the things that really mattered.

Bob was better by the time Hack dropped him off at the Wayside. For one thing, it was the time of day for drinking, which he fully intended to do even though he’d had to bum some beer money off Hack. For another thing, he’d bucked up, looked the facts straight in the face, and changed his thinking. First of all, Warren hadn’t even gotten the results from his AIDS test back yet; he just knew that some guy he’d played with had it. Those little red sores could have been anything, could have been a reaction to new laundry detergent, some new goddamned fabric softener Sheryl picked up because she had a coupon. He’d seen worse sores when he’d fished on the F/V Giddyup and guys had been in rain gear and salt water too long. Plus in Portland once he’d seen a guy with cysts all over him, hundreds of them the size of peas, nasty things that looked a fuck of a lot worse than Warren’s lousy little red splotches.

And he felt fine. That was the main thing. He felt fine. Last month everyone had had a cold, everyone from Anita and Doreen to the morning coffee drinkers at the Anchor, and had he caught it? No, he had not; he was the only one who hadn’t, so don’t talk to him about immune system problems, whatever the fuck that even meant. And how about sex? If he had a deadly disease, would he be this horny? Hell, no. He remembered when Billy Johnson got pancreatic cancer and died before he’d even had a chance to finish cataloging his gun collection. He’d told Bob his sex drive had been the first thing to go; cancer had made him limp as an old sock even before the chemo. No such problems here, no, sir. To test himself, Bob had thought about some hookers he’d seen in Portland, thought about some things they could do to him, and sure enough, he’d gotten a hard-on, right there halfway up Cape Mano in a driving hailstorm, bouncing along in Hack Neary’s pickup.

Fuck it. He was fine. He was fine, and Anita was fine too.

When he hopped out of Hack’s truck at the Wayside, he felt better than fine; he felt downright festive. On Hack’s dime he drank Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve on tap, best beer ever made, he’d challenge anyone who felt differently. Nobody much was at the tavern yet, its being dinner hour; Roy was busy polishing glasses for the coming evening, and Dooley Burden was the only other customer, buried deep in the pages of the
Sawyer Sentinel
in the far back corner. That was okay with Bob. It wasn’t true that no one liked to drink alone. He’d never minded, as long as the beer was cold and the bartender kept it coming. A man found peace at moments like that, his mind floating easy, touching on the best things there were: the way Anita’s hands felt when she rubbed his back; the way Crystal sounded when she had a giggle attack; the first swallow of an ice-cold Henry’s.

He and Warren always drank Henry Weinhard in Portland; it was their beer.

Fuck it. Warren wasn’t dying either. He couldn’t be dying. He’d looked just like normal, hadn’t he, except for those two little doll’s-eye spots? He was fine; Bob would have known if he wasn’t. You couldn’t know someone as well as he knew Warren and not know something as basic as whether he was dying or not.

That night, when he climbed into bed beside Anita, not overly toasted for a change but buzzing pleasantly, he rolled toward her instead of away. And she opened herself wide. She was a testy woman sometimes, but she loved her man, that he knew. He sank into her substantial hips and bosom, buried himself deep inside her, comfortable as a man on a beloved old horse. When he was through—and it didn’t take long, him being highly sexed—he heard her crying softly.