Homesick Creek (8 page)

“What’s been going on with you?” she said. “What the hell’s going on with you anyway?”

“Aw, baby,” he crooned to her in the dark, stroking her thin hair. “It don’t matter. Papa’s home now. Everything’s fine. Everything’s going to be just fine.”

It occurred to him the next morning that without even meaning to, he’d gone and answered the rubber question: no rubber. Just the way he liked it.

chapter five

Hack Neary believed that cars have souls. When he laid his hands on the flanks of a car or truck, it sang to him, told him dreams of miles or mountains, of places where it had been or hoped to be going. Not all the stories were good, any more than all souls are good. He remembered a Camaro once that had scared hell out of him. It had had custom paint, custom upholstery, custom wheels, immaculate service records, but when Hack laid hands on, it had looked to him like pure evil—and not just because it was a Camaro either. He’d dealt with plenty of Camaros; if he hadn’t made his peace with them, exactly, he had at least learned to walk on by. It had taken two years to get that hell car off the lot, and later Hack heard that the kid who bought it crashed the car and died in a nine-foot-deep ditch just south of Hubbard. Hack knew how to read them. He always had.

Rae Macy, on the other hand, had no feel for cars, but then again, that’s not what he’d hired her for. He’d hired her because he wanted to look at her some more. She had a narrow waist and a strong back and that fairy hair, fine and white as spiderwebs. If she turned around one day and he saw angel wings, he wouldn’t be surprised.

So Hack planted a few car and truck sales a month to keep her spirits up, except that it wasn’t working as well as he’d thought it would—not because of her poor sales performance but because it turned out she was ambitious, something he’d never seen before in a woman, especially when she’d chosen a man’s job to begin with. He’d have to find something else for her to do, and soon, before she found another job. That nightmare with Bunny and the phone last week had brought Rae down, a long way down; he could see that. He wouldn’t have expected it, but then it had never occurred to him that Rae might call the house in the first place; she was naive that way and so had made a mess of his home life for a few days. He’d had to promise Bunny a long weekend at Eagle Crest Resort, over in Bend, and a trip to Cabo San Lucas for their fourteenth anniversary next year.

Hack still remembered their wedding as if it were yesterday. They’d gotten married at the Elks over in Sawyer, and Bunny and Anita and Shirl, Bunny’s mother, had spent hours putting up crepe paper streamers and an arch of white helium balloons they walked under for the ceremony. Bunny had made him buy a new pair of cowboy boots for the occasion, and his feet had hurt the whole damn time; that and the rented pants of his blue tux had been too tight, which had given him gas. But Bunny had been in heaven, wearing a long fluffy white dress Shirl had made her that reminded Hack of Little Bo Peep, but of course he’d never said it, just told her she looked beautiful—and she did look pretty, still being in possession of her overbite. Him and Bunny side by side, her in that dress and him in a tuxedo shirt that had looked like one long cascading ruffle, a fussy waterfall frozen in cloth and lace. Bunny had dressed Vinny in a dress that matched her own, only cut down to a six-year-old’s size, and she’d also given her a little basket of rose petals to drop along the way to the arch of balloons, like a trail of bread crumbs, only classier.

Even that long ago Vinny had a perfect face and tiny elf bones, which Bunny attributed to Vinny’s father, JoJo, who was a small man. She had cried when Hack slipped the wedding ring on Bunny’s finger at the end of the ceremony, but Hack had second-guessed that and pulled a little silver ring from his pocket. He’d gotten down on one knee and slid the ring onto her finger, shining in the light of her smile.

Vinny. She’d had his heart that very first day, when he’d first met her and Bunny at the park. He hadn’t found much to smile about until then. He’d bummed rides and bounced around and washed himself in plenty of gas station bathrooms, passing through places he’d never been to before and never would return to again, and where he never seemed to find anything to hold him down. His memory was of one long tavern stretching from Seattle to Sawyer, until he’d found Bunny and Vanilla on that hillside like God had put them there to rescue him.

When Hack sat at Bunny’s feet that day, still half drunk and watching Vinny, it had taken all he had to keep from breaking down. Little girls had a way of skipping, a way of giggling, eyes as clear and all-seeing as a crystal ball. In her eyes Hack had found reason to hope, after such a long time. Vinny brought him through the Valley of the Shadow of Death as surely as any angel, kept him from the memories that had chased him there, cornering him in a box canyon he hadn’t thought there could be any way out of. God, to have a little girl in his arms again after coming through such a wasteland.

So he’d courted Bunny with furious intent; he’d have offered her Venus and Saturn, if she’d wanted them as part of the deal, and then figured out some way to make good. She hadn’t, of course, but she’d asked for plenty else: fidelity; a house she could be proud of; a look the other way when she and Shirl drank too much sitting up there on Shirl’s deck in the summer sun; all those damned stuffed bunnies, until he’d have joyfully set Elmer Fudd on them, or whoever that cartoon character was that hunted wabbit.

Not that Bunny was a bad wife, not by any stretch. She was tolerant, by and large, and had learned not to ask questions that she didn’t want to hear the answers to. Except this Rae thing had thrown her, turned the clock back to the days when he still transgressed from time to time, never infidelity, not really, not to the letter anyway; just a little casual playtime off on one of the logging roads back of Hubbard, a little head, a little hand job maybe, and then home in time for dinner. The thing of it was, none of them had ever loved him, and he’d never even seen any of them again; they were strictly roadhouse booty passing through.

But this time maybe Bunny was right to worry. This thing with Rae was completely different. She was in love with him or at least well on the way down that road. A smart girl like her, a sophisticated girl, made him nervous sometimes, made him afraid he wouldn’t understand what she was saying, like those damned poems she wrote and wanted to talk about with him. He hadn’t made it through eleventh grade; what the hell did he know about poetry? While pretty boys like her husband Mr. Briefcase had been studying poetry in high school classrooms, he’d been busy taking care of the Katydid, making rent money at Howdy’s Market, scrounging up odd jobs to keep some kind of car going.

Like Rae, though, the Katydid had loved poetry. One of her most treasured possessions was an old poetry book she’d bought herself and read to him every night. The one about the gingham dog and the calico cat was her favorite for a long time, a funny choice, its being the story of two nursery toys tearing each other limb from limb in the night. He’d teased her about that, but she loved to read it anyway, night after night in their sucky little apartment behind the Tin Spoon Laundro-Queen.

There it was. With Rae Macy somehow came Katy—now, again, after all these years and all the miles—and it had been like that since the first day Rae had walked in the door. He didn’t know what it was about her that made this cave of memory suddenly yawn before him like eternity, except that she was smart like the Katydid, and she seemed to
see
him, to see right through the muscles and bones to his heart. Maybe the Katydid would have turned out like that if she’d grown up and become a woman.

Now, sitting at his desk in a puddle of weak sunlight, he lifted his telephone receiver. “Hi, beautiful,” he said when Rae picked up the phone in her cubicle across the showroom.

“Hi.”

“Come see me when you can. I want to talk to you about something.”

“I’ll be right there,” she said, and almost immediately appeared in his doorway. She was anxious. Not being able to understand what a woman like her, a woman with money and beauty and options, could possibly be anxious about, he tended to forget how anxious she was. He stood and gestured to his plastic visitor’s chair, an ugly orange thing.

“Is everything all right?” she asked, searching his face for clues.

He smiled and said, “Everything’s fine.”

“Oh,” she said. “Whew. Ever since I made that stupid call—”

“Forget it, okay?” he said impatiently. “I’m not kidding. Forget about that.”

“Oh, right.”

“Anyway, how would you like to be Vernon Ford’s new finance officer?”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. It makes perfect sense. Look, whenever we sell a vehicle, we need to put together financing, right? Ever since Marv’s been retired part-time, we’ve been pretty much on our own to work out loans directly with the banks. Costs us time, makes us look unprofessional having people hang around while we scramble. You with me?”

“Yes.” Rae smiled, as though his mind had ever been quicker than hers.

He picked up the pace. “So I was thinking you could stay on top of lender programs, you know, and once we close a sale, we hand customers over to you to work out loans. We look better, and you get a promotion.”

“I wouldn’t be selling anymore?”

“Only if one of us is out at lunch or sick or something and a customer comes in.”

“Huzzah.”

Hack squinted at her. “What does that mean, huzzah?”

“It means there may be a God after all.”

“Oh.” Hack grinned. “Well, I’ll still need to clear it with Marv, but I think he’ll go for it. There might not be a pay raise, though. He’s a cheap son of a bitch. I’ll try, but don’t get your hopes up.”

Rae smiled thinly. “I haven’t had my hopes up since we moved here,” she said. “I wouldn’t even know what hopes to
get
up here. That it will stop raining? That we’ll finally get a decent speaker at Rotary?”

“So how’s your poetry going?”

“Oh, slow, you know. I just had a piece accepted by the
Kenyon
Review
, though.”

“Yeah?”

“It has a small circulation, but it’s a prestigious journal.”

“Oh.” Hack cast around for something to say. “Hey, did you ever read that poem about Little Orphant Annie?”

“An’ the Gobble-uns \’at gits you / Ef you / Don’t / Watch / Out,” they recited in unison. Rae laughed. “I
love
that poem. God, I’d forgotten all about it. Did your folks used to read it to you?”

“Nah,” Hack said. Folks. He’d never had Rae Macy’s kind of folks, a mommy and daddy who tucked you into your bed every night, all snug and safe.

Then he heard himself say, “I used to read it to my kid sister sometimes. She always liked that one.”

What the fuck was he doing?

“I didn’t know you had a sister. You never talk about your family.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Nothing to talk about.”

“Oh.” She looked at him curiously, catching him with that smart-girl lie detector of hers. The cave yawned. Jesus, his heart was pounding.

“So I’ll talk to Marv as soon as he comes in.”

“Marv?”

“About your promotion.”

“Oh! Right.”

“Well, I better get some work done,” Hack said, shuffling empty file folders around on his desk. She stood—God, that back of hers, like it could withstand even the worst earthquake —and clicked out of his office in her courtesan heels and expensive suit. He’d never seen anyone dress like that before, except on TV. Her husband ought to kneel down every night and give thanks. He’d come into the dealership to pick Rae up a couple of times, narrow-chested guy with a long nose and five o’clock shadow, a Jew, maybe. Not that Hack had anything against Jews; they were good at making money, an ability Hack respected greatly. Guy sure must be doing something right if he could afford to dress Rae in those expensive clothes. Hack could have been a lawyer too if he’d had money like them. Lawyers weren’t as smart as they wanted you to think. Guy Ferguson, who’d been a Hubbard lawyer forever, was drunk by eleven o’clock every morning, regular as clockwork. Some days his shoes didn’t even match.

What would it take to keep a woman like Rae Macy? More than a baby grand and a million stuffed rabbits, probably.

At his elbow the phone rang, scaring hell out of him.

“Hack?” It was Vinny.

“Hey, sweetheart! Where are you calling from?”

“The house. I’ve got five minutes before I have to go to work.” Vinny sold Estée Lauder makeup at Meier & Frank in Portland. Hack was real proud of her for getting that job; all her friends wanted to sell cosmetics too, but in Hack’s opinion they didn’t stand a chance, probably never would; they were big, dumpy kids. Not one of them had Vinny’s delicate looks, not even close. He still thought the kid should go to college, and he said so to Bunny all the time, but what could you do when they were bubbling over with life and wanted to be grownups
now
? He’d talked to her about taking evening classes while she was up there in Portland anyway, and she said she might, but he was pretty sure she was just humoring him. She knew he hadn’t even finished high school and that it was too late for him. Besides, he’d done pretty well on his own, all things considered. But you couldn’t always count on that, and he wanted more for her.

“Listen,” she was saying, “do you think you can come up here and help us paint the kitchen? We finally got the landlord to agree to let us, as long as we use a neutral color, which is pretty rich coming from him, Mr. Orange Cabinets and Avocado Refrigerator.”

“Do you have paint?”

“Not exactly, because to tell you the truth, we’re all kind of broke right now, but couldn’t you pick some up and we’d pay you back?”

Hack smiled. “So when were you thinking I would do this?”

“Well, see, Heidi and Jennifer and me, we all have to work this Saturday, so no one would be here to get in your way.”

“Uh-huh.” Saturday was the day after tomorrow. “And what was that part about your helping?”

“Well, we’d clean up after you were done. And you could stay over and take me to dinner. Come on, Hack, say yes, please say yes. You know what a dump this place is.”

As a matter of fact, Hack knew what a dump it was
not
; on the dump scale, it was only about a five, ten being hell. He’d lived in hell; he knew. Not that he was going to tell her that.

Vinny was saying, “You could see if Mr. Sykes wanted to come up and help.”