Sweet Creek

by Lee Lynch

  The surprise in Donny’s eyes turned to fear. “Am I treating you bad?”

  “No, my egocentric little butch. It’s got nothing to do with you. With us.”

  “Check this woman out. Then why have you been moping around, jumping out of your skin every time I walk through a door?”

  “I’m strung out, lover, and down in the dumps.”

  “Why didn’t you say something? I could’ve brought you flowers. We could’ve gone on a vacation. We still can!”

  “Donny, Donny, the drug may be working. We only now made love for the first time in—”

  Donny sulked. Loopy whimpered in her sleep, her paws running in the air. “Yeah, and next time maybe I better invite my pal K-Y over to help.” She sat up and stared at Chick. “Or is that it? Abeo’s stayed too long? You don’t like my weird trans friend and all the ruckus she’s stirring up?”

  The hot flash sparked again. “Why is this turning into your problem, lover? It’s something inside me, okay? I need you to love me, that’s all, not beat yourself up.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “I was too down to talk about it. Haven’t you ever felt like that?” Donny was a concrete wall when she wanted to be. “I didn’t mean to hurt you or leave you out.”

  “But you did cut me out. This is some serious shit you’re talking, woman. If you can’t let me in at a time like this, then I’m thinking you never have.”

  “How can you say that, Donny? You know you zapped my heart and soul.”

  “I never asked for your heart and soul. All I asked for is a gorgeous, loving woman to share my life with, and now you tell me you’re so damned miserable you have to take drugs to get by?”

  “Is that what’s flipping you out? That I’m doing a drug? It’s not a high, my sweet worrier.” Donny’s back was to her and she slid her arms around her. She felt so cool and soft and smelled slightly minty. Maybe she’d leaned on a bed of mint while she was out fishing earlier with Hector. He was a twilight fisherman, willing to endure the mosquitoes because the fish loved them. “I’m cool, Donny. Taking chemicals for recreation doesn’t do a thing for me anymore.”

  “I’m not flipped out,” Donny protested, squirming from reach. “It’s no skin off my nose what you do to yourself.”

  Chick could hear the fear, though. What a totally stupid thing to confess with Donny’s brother in the shape he was in. “I battled Dr. Wu on this, Donny. It was my last choice. I need help shaking this melancholy I’m going through.”

  “You need help out of that bottle?”

  “What could I have asked you for? You can’t make me happy.”

  “You were always saying I did. What changed?”

  Donny was right, but wrong. “You do make me happy. Or you make it possible for me to be happy when everything else is going right.”

  “Then tell me what’s going wrong.”

  “Dr. Wu thinks it’s some combination of hormones and missing serotonin. That’s the chemical they think controls—”

  “I know what it is. I read the paper. Another fancy new-age way the drug companies are making a buck. Way back when, it was Miltowns for your nerves. Now it’s all about your nerve synapses or something. The way I see it, either you’re content with what you’ve got or you’re not, and no drugs, no alcohol is going to fix you if you’re not.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Donny. Let me brew us a pot of tea and—”

  “I don’t want no cup of tea, Chick. Stop trying to take care of me. Don’t you understand? You need taking care of sometimes too, and you’ve got to let me instead of shutting me out. They don’t sell what I can do in any shape bottle.”

  That unnerved her. “Sometimes all the love in the world can’t fix what’s broken. Look at my brother.”

  “Your brother’s got nothing to do with this. He’s got his wires crossed. You’re having a little down spell. We’ll get Jeep and Abeo and a couple of the gals on the land to cover for us, Chick. We’ll take a trip. A change of scenery, some moonlight walks, maybe palm trees and a boat ride. How about a cruise? We can borrow the money.”

  “You’re so good to me. When this is over I’d love to take a trip with you, but not now. Leaving home would be the end of me. You and our friends and the store are my glue.” She had a vision of M.C. hurting Loopy while they were away. “I’d fall to pieces without our daily routines.”

  Donny was at the side of the bed, sitting up, pulling on her shirt. “Who will you let help you? Who else knows what’s going on with you?”

  “Only Dr. Wu. It’s too heavy to share with anyone but her—and you.”

  Donny stepped into her overalls. “It’s not right. That’s what I’m for.”

  Donny would for sure think going after M.C. was a help. Chick bit her lip. No matter what she did, whether she lied to Donny to protect her or came clean, M.C. had worsened the big depression. He’d stopped coming in the store to play mind games with her, but she’d heard that he was helping out with Katie’s video project, connecting her with the straights, insinuating himself into the women’s community, getting closer.

  Thinking about it made her feel crazy. She wanted to get under the covers and never come out. She saw herself, naked, at the top of Blackberry Falls, sliding down the worn rocks, one with the water, riding the flow to the dark pool and letting it take her down the mountain, along Sweet Creek to the Elk River, the easiest ride of her life, swift and buoyant and free of herself, to the Pacific Ocean. She could hear the rush of the waters and the osprey crying when they mistook her for a giant fish. She felt the salmon as she slid past them in the blessedly numbing cold.

  She needed to talk to Donny and forced herself to surface. Donny was gone. Where? How would it feel if Donny never came back? She told Donny everything else; why was she blowing this so badly? Because this wasn’t her scene. She didn’t want this ugliness that clung to men like a cloud of furious insects to spread to her life.

  She sat upright, felt the chill in the room as the covers fell from her. Donny didn’t have to leave—without going anywhere, the Chick Donny loved had split and didn’t know her way back. Who would take care of her lost butches—Donny, Jeep, Sheriff Sweet, the very young land women who didn’t have a clue about life? Her days of chasing them were over, but they remained a passion. She’d been born Wendy to every lesbian Peter Pan. She had to get it together.

  It was too hard. Under the covers again, she stared at the motionless ceiling fan and remembered another night like this long ago. She remembered lying on the shore of Lake Michigan in the fall, chilled, without energy to put on her coat, hungry with no appetite, fatigued to the bone but sleepless, so stoned she wanted a flood of water to bear her away.

  The lake was coming at her again, welcomed and feared. She was too confused to know the question, much less the right thing to do. K-Y, Prozac, and lying to her lover—is that what her Age of Aquarius had come to?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lonesome in the Country

  Jeep thought it would be a kick to visit dinky little Blackberry Casino on a Friday night, but the locals she’d want to go with had already checked it out. Tonight she was so desperate to escape the lonelies that she’d found herself pondering a move back to Reno where she had even more nothing than she had here. If nothing ever happened in Reno, what was she doing in Hickrock, Nowheresville? Donny and Chick were visiting Clara and Hector, Cat was M.I.A.—was she with her mystery lover?—the band didn’t have a gig until tomorrow night, women’s land was out of bounds for her as long as Katie was around, and she wasn’t really friends with the people from school any more than she was with the band women. That left herself. She already knew she was no fun alone, but she’d have to do.

  She put on one of the five faded rugby shirts she’d snagged at a garage sale for $2.50, grabbed her board, and glided alone through the misty night, skidding occasionally on sodden leaves. Somehow lonesome in the country was twice as severe as lonely in the city. Maybe that’s
why country-western music tended terminally toward the poor me’s.

  The bright blinking lights outside the casino and the roar of sound within immediately cheered her as she checked her skateboard and scoped out the machines. This was a taste of home, of Nevada, and not as little and dinky as she’d expected. Garish, obnoxious, but familiar. From an early age she’d been drawn to the neon—what a word: neo! on!—and the merrymaking crowds. Her family’s old ranch house—operative word “old”—had belonged to generations of ranchers before they sold their land to developers and their house to the Morgans, Jeep’s grandparents, who passed it on to her mom and dad. It was a rambling compound of add-ons and outbuildings, always in need of paint, completely different from the compact homes of her friends and set on a rise, like a standoffish neighbor.

  A gang of kids from the subdivision around it would bike and skateboard into town, a mile north, on a Saturday afternoon in the fall or spring when it was cool enough to be fun. They indulged in minor mischief like chalking up the sidewalks and weaving through pedestrians on the sidewalks of the main drag. They were full of resentment that any grody out-of-town adult could go into the casinos while they, the natives, could only peer in through glass doors. Occasionally one of them would escape notice long enough to win a handful of coins from a grocery store slot machine, but they’d all get so excited and noisy that they’d be tossed out. Even the arcades got pissed at them. The best ones were at the casinos and hotels for out-of-town kids in their best play duds. The sight of a crew in old jeans with skateboards under their arms was a tip-off to the change dragon who would hover and interrupt until they left.

  The Blackberry Casino gave her a whiff of the old cigarette-smoke-infused excitement. Gambling equaled adulthood to the local kids. No matter that their parents made fun of the losers weeping in the streets and shuffling into pawn shops. Games of chance had seemed like real life. As she got change from a machine she thought of the irony: a bunch of children could see that gambling was a shabby substitute for life, like life was nothing but a trip to a game parlor where you played till you died at tables that dealt love and money and bad breaks.

  She glanced around at the wall-to-wall machines. Had the empties been abandoned by losers? Did these players know something she didn’t? The place was wall-to-wall slots. Bing, bing, bing, bing—the electronic sounds could make you nuts. On top of the endless binging came the tunes the machines played every time someone got a win. The only thing missing was the rush of coins down a metal chute. Passersby were shouting to be heard. You never saw so many empty slots at one time back home.

  She roamed a row trying to pick up a good vibe, then grabbed a stool in front of a machine with a Western theme. No cherries, only cactus, boots, Ranger hat, crossed Colts. This was cool. Not Reno, but here she was, rassling with a one-armed bandit again, excited that she might win some money, but more excited that she’d become the grown-up she’d imagined all those years ago and the lesbian she’d dreamed of becoming when she saw Desert Hearts at fourteen. She pulled down the arm of the slot for old-times’ sake. The pictures spun. Nada.

  She’d already had a girlfriend by then, a guitar player all of sixteen whose permissive parents let her play on the street for change. The first time she skateboarded by Mindy she’d skipped to a stop. She’d realized immediately that this was a place she could fiddle. She’d been listening to her mom’s bluegrass tapes and playing along for years. After an hour or so someone in the house would cry, “Enough, Gina Pauline!”

  The weekend after she found Mindy performing on a corner, she skated around town until she found her doing a classical guitar number outside a parking lot where tour buses by the dozen parked. She set her closed violin case next to Mindy’s open, nearly empty case and began to play along with the guitar. Mindy scowled at first, but didn’t send her away. When Mindy finished, Jeep asked if she knew “Beautiful Blue Eyes.” Almost immediately after they began to play, money was tossed into the guitar case.

  Over pizza that afternoon they named themselves Two Girl Dudes. A month later they were skipping the pizza and making out on a bench in the park along the Truckee River. That had been exciting—the girl, the music, the way people would stop on the street and tell one another she was a prodigy—they’d talk about her as if she wasn’t there and guess that she was Mindy’s kid brother.

  “Assholes,” Mindy would whisper.

  Jeep loved it and let her hair grow a little too long. “I ought to be arrested for impersonating a male musician,” she’d told Mindy. That’s when she decided the word “impersonate” really meant “imperson,” like “him-person,” “ate,” like consumed. Because the “him” persons of the world consumed it. Mindy called her a damn feminist.

  Then Mindy started bringing big cans of beer in a paper bag to the park, then to the street, slugging from the bag between numbers. Jeep tasted the stuff and spit it out. That wasn’t worth getting busted over, she’d tell Mindy. But she didn’t mind kissing the smell at all and still tasted it sometimes even when she was with a woman who never drank. Too soon the beer got more important to Mindy than the kissing, and then it got more important than Two Girl Dudes and Mindy started flaking out on Jeep.

  She got away with this for almost three years when somehow Jeep’s parents, who were teachers and never came downtown, heard that their sixteen-year-old daughter was panhandling alone on the streets of Reno. Jeep tried to explain that it was the playing she went for, not the bucks, but Mom and Dad were afraid she’d get in with street kids and start on dope. She’d pictured herself aflame from a crack fire, like that comedian, fiddling till she dropped.

  Those were her defining moments, though, playing old-time music for an audience lavish with praise and kissing a beer-breathed girl in the park. The memory of those kisses got her damp down under. She sighed and realized she’d been locked in a staring contest with the electronic one-armed bandit in front of her. She tried again and watched the Wild West icons spin. Nada.

  Too bad Cat had been busy tonight. Kind of like Chick would say, she’d be a blast here. It was just as well she wasn’t interested in a romance with Jeep. Even if she hadn’t been clear about not wanting a girlfriend, Jeep would have hesitated, not eager to lose a fun chum. Gawd, she missed Sarah. Once in a while they’d take ten dollars and duck into one of the casinos to see if they could make their money grow. Even when they lost it was cheaper than two seats at the movies and usually more fun.

  In their last months together, she’d become both restless and tired from managing the gift shop at The Lucky City Hotel and Casino. She’d worked there forever, starting after school in eleventh grade, then working whatever hours she could schedule through four years of college. The job market had been so bad by graduation that she’d jumped at the chance to be manager when her ex-showgirl boss retired.

  Her work hours had been good for playing the shows for which she was sometimes called in, but she’d started wondering where temp gigs would take her. Did she want to be a full-time casino musician? In that world young was in; old never would be. There were a thousand musicians in Reno, and most of them expected to make it big tomorrow. She could see herself, age sixty-five, all wrinkled up from the sun, still breathing casino cigarette smoke, the oldest surviving member of the Lucky City Orchestra. Except they’d can her long before that.

  There had been a railroad switching yard behind the apartment building where she lived with Sarah. It always got her dreaming of distant places. One day while she’d watched a freight train being assembled, the cars creaking and groaning and bumping with the effort, she’d said, “I was thinking about starting a band.”

  With a tone of loving exasperation Sarah called, “Tell me something new,” and continued to rummage in the freezer.

  “No, this is different. I need to face it, Sar. I’m never going to make it into the classical world. And I’m pretty good with that old-time music number in the show. The director gave me the solo last night. He’s going to let me go electri
c tonight. If the crowd keeps liking me, it could turn into a regular routine.”

  Sarah had stopped what she was doing and moved quickly to Jeep, arms out to hold her. “You see? It’s happening! You and your old-time music are going to make it. You’re going to have a rockabilly hit, lover!”

  “It’s not a hit I’m after. It’s the chance to play music. Electric violin is like beyond description, Sar. He went ape shit when I used a pickup on my acoustic, but I want to get the real thing, maybe a vintage Fender if I can find one on eBay. They are so retro.” With a thump the engine connected to a length of cars. “Want to come hear me? My number’s around 10:15, then 11:15.”

  “I wish I could. I’ve got a meeting with Housekeeping first thing in the morning—Management’s changing our health insurance. With Benefits off on pregnancy leave, I’m it in H.R. Friday night if you’re working?”

  “Date.”

  “Date,” Sarah agreed, smiling.

  Jeep tried to stop her restless fidgeting. “I’m sure glad you like old-time music.”

  “Growing up on Mom and Dad’s Dylan and The Band LPs sort of prepared me.”

  “You could be road manager!”

  “Jeep, dearest, you hate the idea of touring.”

  “Not if you were with me.”

  “Right. Ms. Homebody ‘01 suddenly has roaming feet?”

  “Probably not,” she answered.

  It was true. Normally she liked nothing more than coming home after work and staying there. She had so much she wanted to do. Find that old Fender fiddle for one thing. Practice, for another. She never missed practicing on days she wasn’t playing. And her refinishing projects were getting stacked up—the blue ukulele stenciled with daisies she’d found on the sidewalk in somebody’s trash, the $2 clarinet from a garage sale, and the ancient banged-up banjo one of her teachers at the U had given her. She’d learned enough watching her dad refurbish instruments that she was about ready to string it. She wasted a lot of lunch hours roving garage sales, picking up old sheet music, original tapes of local groups, and all manner of clothes she dreamed of wearing in an old-time music band—vests and hats, suspenders and striped collarless shirts. Sarah said she was her garage sale dyke. The memory made her smile. Part-time teacher wages didn’t leave enough money to do much garage saling now.