Homesick Creek (9 page)

Billy Sykes was Vinny’s housemate Jennifer’s dad. He owned Always Oregon, one of the gift shops on the north end of Hubbard. Generally speaking, Hack didn’t completely trust a man who spent his days around figurines and hummingbird feeders and wind chimes and shit, but Billy was okay. He’d been married to fat Janelle all these years, which certainly spoke to the man’s fortitude, Janelle having a voice like a dental drill; the woman could strip wallpaper off the walls just by telling a story, which as a matter of fact she was pretty damned good at, even with that voice and all. Yeah, Hack figured he could team up with Billy for a day, might even get a kick out of it. The man had some pretty good stories of his own, having grown up on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska.

“Did Jennifer talk to him about it?”

“You know they’re not getting along right now. We figured if she asked him, he’d say no. He still thinks she should have stayed at home if she wasn’t going to college. He might do it if you asked, though.”

“Uh-huh.” Hack ran the point of his letter opener under his fingernails, mining grease. He’d finally gotten to work on the pickup last night.

“Please?”

“Yeah, yeah. Look, you need to measure the walls so I know how much paint to buy. Call me tomorrow and let me know.”

“Oh, thanks, Hack, I told them you’d come.”

“Who’s the biggest sucker, huh?”

“No, you’re the best. I love you tons. Gotta go now.”

“Yeah, you too, princess,” said Hack, but the girl had already hung up. She’d always been able to talk him into doing things for her. It still pissed Bunny off, seeing Vinny twist him around her little finger.
She’s a brat, Hack, and you’re just making it worse
. More than a few times Bunny had stormed up to Shirl’s house when Hack and Vinny got too silly together, repeating the punch line to some you-had-to-have-been-there joke she hadn’t been there for.

Vinny. Her name wasn’t really Vinny, or even Vanilla. Hack had made that up, its being the flavor of ice cream she always ordered when he took her out for treats. Her real name was Linda. Not that anyone called her that; not even Bunny called her that anymore, though she’d held out for three full years.

He’d first started making up nicknames with Cherise, his mother. Cherise was a classy name, too classy for a forger and a prostitute, so he came up with Stiletto Jo, instead, for the heels she favored, vicious things that could gouge out eyes and probably had, Cherise being an occasional brawler as well as a drinker, a forger, and a whore. He never called her that to her face, though.

Cherise Neary, his only parent, was a piece of work. She was not only a prostitute but the daughter of a prostitute, second-generation deep trash from Tin Spoon, Nevada, the Refuse State, where, it was true, at least whoring was legal. Cherise’s own mother had come by prostitution honestly after she was abandoned by her husband when Cherise was little. Believing that once you started something you might as well stick with it, she gave up the trade only when she was too old to turn a profit. Within four months she was dead of ovarian cancer, progression of the disease having been hastened, no doubt, by the badly broken-down condition of her reproductive organs. By then Cherise herself had been whoring professionally for fifteen years; Hack was twelve years old, the Katydid nearly seven. God only knew who their fathers were. Cherise never even tried to trace them through her appointment book. Anyway she hadn’t complained. Her pregnancies were the only vacations she ever got, even her regulars not being eager to have sex with a woman six months, eight months pregnant. The last trimester Cherise had filled a cooler with cold beer, put up her feet, and prayed the babies would be late. Once they were born she was back at work within a month, icing herself during her off hours by sitting on a child’s inflatable tube packed in the center with ice chips. In good weather she’d move outside: shop-worn, run-down, cotton-haired; cheap goods in a busted-out lawn chair.

But while Cherise was many things, stupid wasn’t one of them. When she was forty-three, tired and waning, she decided to take a lesson from her dead mother and retool for a new career. While Hack looked after the Katydid, Cherise apprenticed with a pickpocket and forger in the next town. Within a year she achieved a fair proficiency and commuted regularly from Tin Spoon to Las Vegas, where she lifted wallets and checkbooks on the streets outside the casinos.

I’m going now
, she’d tell Hack three or four times a month all the time he was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old.
You look after your sister till I get back, hon, and I promise I’ll bring you something
nice
. If she remembered, she’d bring him a T-shirt or some kind of cheap travel game like car bingo that she’d picked up along the way at a Stuckey’s—as though she’d ever taken him anywhere, by car or anything else. She arrived home after two or three days—four or five, toward the end—amped on speed and wearing some flashy outfit with her hair all ratted and her eyes as darting and wily as a snake’s.
What are you looking at? You
think you’re so special? You’ve got no right to say shit to me
, she’d snap at him.

And so he hadn’t.

Hack picked up the phone and called Billy Sykes at Always Oregon.

“Hey, I just talked to the kid, and she conned me into painting the kitchen up there this Saturday. Any chance you want to come along and help?”

“Jesus, it sounds great, but we’ve only got two and a half more weeks until Christmas, and I’m short on help. Can it wait?”

“Can they ever wait?”

“Yeah.” Billy chuckled appreciatively. “They can sure talk you into stuff. Shit, they bat those baby blues, and it’s like big ammunition coming at you at point-blank range, huh?”

“Yeah,” Hack said.

“Look, count me in for anything after New Year’s. You need some money for supplies?”

“Nah. You can spring for whatever’s next.”

“Deal,” said Billy, and hung up through a rising tide of female voices, like he was being hied away by a clamoring mob of bet-ties. Too bad. Hack sure would’ve enjoyed the company, especially on the three-hour drive up and back. Bunny had her regular shift at the Anchor on Saturday, so she was probably out. Normally he’d ask Bob, but he’d been acting too squirrelly lately.

Then he thought of Rae Macy. He’d like to ask her. Not that it made any sense; not that it would be smart in any imaginable way. But the idea that he might have her sitting beside him in his truck all the way up and back wouldn’t go away. Maybe he could propose a shopping trip for her. That way she’d have something to do while he painted, and it wouldn’t be with him; he’d only be providing the transportation, a small favor. Who could read anything into that? Well, Bunny, for one. But if she didn’t know . . . and why should she know? No one would see them together. It wasn’t like he’d be doing anything wrong; he’d just be keeping unimportant information from Bunny that she would find upsetting. It was a kindness, really, that was all.

He might ask her. He might just ask her.

The phone rang, and eerily, it was Bunny, as though she could pick up on the shiftiness of his mind even from over there in Hubbard. Jesus, she kept him on a short tether. But what God giveth, He taketh away again, or some damn thing, because it turned out she was calling to say she and Shirl were thinking of driving up to Bunny’s sister Fanny’s house in Tillamook for the weekend. Tillamook was more than a hundred miles from Portland, in nearly the opposite direction and along a completely different set of roads.

“So we’re thinking we’d leave tomorrow at noon—Beth Ann said she’d cover the rest of my shift,” Bunny was saying.

“You mean you’ll be gone all weekend?”

“We’d be back by Sunday dinner, though.”

“Yeah, I guess that would be okay,” Hack said. “We haven’t had a lot of time together lately, but if your mom’s counting on it—”

“Well, we could try a different weekend,” Bunny said doubtfully, “but the thing is, Fanny’s birthday is Saturday, so we thought we’d have a little birthday celebration, you know, to take her mind off the divorce.” Fanny and her jerk of a husband, Frank, were finally splitting up, after keeping Bunny and Hack squarely in the middle through years of screeching and tears and accusations. The man was the purest form of dick.

“You’re right. You go ahead,” Hack said. “Vinny called a little while ago and wanted me to go up there and paint her kitchen anyway.”

“Are you sure?” Bunny said eagerly. Hack could tell how much she wanted to go by the fact that she didn’t blow up about his doing something for Vinny.

“I’m sure.”

“Oh, thanks, hon. Really,” Bunny said, and hung up.

Some things were just meant to be.

Hack waited a full fifteen minutes before buzzing Rae in her cubicle, to prove to himself that it wasn’t that big a deal whether she came with him or not.

She appeared in his doorway. “¿Sí?” she said.

“See what?”

“What? Oh, no—
sí
. Spanish for yes,” Rae said.

“You’re pretty easy,” Hack said. “I didn’t even ask you anything yet.”

“Ask me—” Rae looked rattled. “Look, maybe we just ought to start over.”

God, but he loved getting her off-balance. “You taking Spanish lessons?”

“Sort of. Jesús is helping me. Spanish isn’t that different from Italian. They’re both romance languages.”

“Ooh,” he said.

Rae shot him an irritated look, so he straightened up. “Look,” he said, “how would you like to drive up to Portland this Saturday?”

“But we just had a regional sales meeting.”

“No, this would just be for the hell of it. My daughter thinks I should paint her kitchen; she lives up there. So I thought you might like to tag along and do some shopping or whatever.”

“Oh. Well—oh!” He watched the blood drain out of her face. “I’ll have to see what we have planned.”

“Sure,” he said. “Whatever. It’s no big deal.” Little Jack Horner or whoever had probably said that as he pulled his thumb out of the dike.

“Look, I think it’s probably not a good idea, Hack,” she said softly.

“No?”

“No.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well, it just sounded nice.”

“It would be nice.”

“I wasn’t planning on jumping you or anything, you know.”

“I know that,” she said.

“So how come I feel guilty?”

“Well,” she said. “That would be the question, wouldn’t it?”

He left the house at six o’clock Saturday morning, the passenger seat in his truck loaded with gear instead of Rae. He’d been hoping she’d change her mind at the last minute, not that he really expected her to, and it was probably all for the best. Still, his heart had jumped when the phone rang yesterday evening. It had been Vinny, though, worrying about the accuracy of her measurements. He’d already figured out that she was pulling the figures out of thin air and had picked up an extra couple of cans, just to be sure. Hack Neary was the King of Paint—not that Vinny or anyone knew it. Every new dive Cherise had moved them into, Hack had painted within the first couple of days. If they didn’t have money to buy paint, he stole it. It was amazing what a fresh coat could do to a place, even when the rest was all bugs and drafts and sag. Hack never asked for permission. The landlords were scum. If they didn’t like it, they could evict them, a hollow threat since they’d been evicted more times than Hack could count by the time he was fifteen, Cherise not always keeping current with her bills or her earnings.

Katy always helped, once she was old enough. When she was four, she stirred the paint and poured it from the big can into a smaller stewed tomato can he wore around his neck like a noose. Later she got to paint too; by the time she was six and could be trusted, she was the official trim detailer, being more careful than Hack was. She had her own little two-inch brush and tomato sauce can full of paint, and when she painted, she always stuck out her tongue. He got a boot out of that, called her Princess Paints-with-Tongue. She could have passed for Indian too; she had this thick black hair that shone like patent leather and a skin tone you could warm your hands by. Hack thought she was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen, an opinion he held on to right to the end, and he wasn’t the only one who thought so.

Traffic was light heading northeast, its being Saturday morning and still early. Hack turned on the radio, as he always did. Normally he enjoyed talk radio, but this morning some asshole was going on about freeze-drying the dead or some damned thing, and it pissed him off. When people died, they were gone, end of story, and it had been that way for millions of years; if you didn’t like it, you’d better be praying mighty hard for an afterlife, because short of that, you were just whistling in the dark. He knew. He’d seen a lot of people die in Vietnam, had looked into their faces once they were gone, and he might as well have been looking at an old sock, for all that they resembled the people they’d been when their souls were still attached. Where the spirit went he had no idea, but if it turned out there was an afterlife, it would be like winning the jackpot, pure good luck. Because from the earth-side view of things, all you could count on was when you died, you were gone, period. Harsh but true.

Then there was the overcrowding issue. If there
was
an afterlife—call it heaven or whatever—it had to be getting mighty overpopulated up there. Was there some kind of check-in system? Otherwise, what were your chances of finding your loved ones in that big a crowd, which he envisioned as people standing shoulder to shoulder in every direction as far as the eye could see? Hell, the recent population of China alone was in the billions, and that wasn’t counting a single person from the thousands of years leading up to it. You could spend your entire afterlife doing nothing but tapping people on the shoulder and asking if they’d seen a little girl with dark hair or whatever. Or maybe heaven was just a place where you were steered in the right direction by the first person you asked; hell was the very same place, only no one had ever heard of you or yours for all eternity. Could be.

Hack turned off the radio, wondering what he would have been thinking about if Rae Macy had come along. Not heaven and hell. Sex probably. Sex was a whole lot more fun to think about, that was for sure. Maybe he would have told her that he’d started dreaming about her regularly, and in all the dreams she was naked. That would’ve made her pink up. He’d learned to have his eyes ready on the V of her blouse when he said something dirty to her. Watching the flush rise was better than the dawn.