Sweet Creek

by Lee Lynch

  “The land is no part of this town’s government,” R said.

  “But this town’s government can make the land a lot more comfy.”

  “A few words in the boys’ charter don’t threaten me.”

  “Damn, woman, they’ll encourage disrespect for you and what your land stands for. That’s dangerous. If they see you standing up for yourselves here, you won’t have to be fighting them off at your border.”

  “Donny, it’s a waste of woman time to do battle with a group of old white men over whether they can make rules about us.”

  “But to make banning books legal? To make a law against letting us hold dances or meetings on city property?”

  “I wouldn’t do either in this town. That’s why we have the land.”

  “Don’t you get it? If discrimination is the law in small ways, it’s open season on queers. If the town says it’s scared of us, what does that tell people? What does that tell punks with blood-hungry fists? The same thing segregation tells African Americans! Would you ignore what’s happening if they wanted to keep The Color Purple off the library shelves? Talk about denial, R. You are Ms. Denial her very own self.”

  R shook her head. “I’m not interested in debating this.”

  Donny took a deep breath and glared at her.

  Abeo swept out of her room. Donny hoped she’d be able to hold her own at camp R. She hugged Chick and Donny, mopped her eyes with a pink bandanna, and presented herself to R, acting like a shy bride. R led the way out the side door in silence.

  Chick shook her head. “Life’s bizarre. This is not a scene I could have dreamed up.”

  “I think our Abe is dying to see what it’ll be like with a woman.”

  “She hasn’t yet?”

  “Not that she’s admitting it to me.”

  “Poor little Abe. She’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know about that, babe. Lesbian politics seem to run higher in some women than lust. R may ‘should’ herself into this one because she thinks it’s what she ought to do.”

  “Have you lost it, honeybunch? Her politics are as likely to get her into bed with a trans woman, as they are to get her to a town meeting.”

  Rather than say something bad about Chick’s pal, Donny took Chick’s hand and kissed the palm.

  “You know R’s not going to get into town politics,” Chick said. “Why do you keep trying?”

  “She gets me so mad. I guess she can afford to stay buried in those hills.”

  “She’s not worth raising your blood pressure over. Save it for the straight boys.”

  Donny leaned her head against Chick’s shoulder. “You’re probably right. You always are.”

  They went to the side door to lock up, but Chick said, “Wait. I’ve got to see this.”

  Outside, they walked to the corner. Donny had half-expected Sheriff Sweet to still be crouched with Loopy, chuckling to herself at Abeo’s newest escapade. An Alaskan robin hopped under the brush in a front yard, its white necklace still exotic to her after a lifetime of Midwestern birds. Pansies blossomed in a planter across the street.

  For the first time in too long, Donny took Chick’s hand. Between Chick’s doldrums and her own crazy-ass fights with the bigots, there wasn’t time or energy for each other. They stood with Loopy in the drizzling rain on Stage Street and watched the tall white woman stride over puddles while smaller Abeo darted around them. They could hear Abeo’s chatter. She dangled a plastic bag stuffed with whatever she’d grabbed in the hurried minutes back in her room.

  “Can you wrap your head around Abeo on women-only land?” asked Chick.

  “I’ve protected Abeo from a lot of men, but she’s on her own around R. Don’t you wish you could be a fly in R’s Honda?”

  Chick laughed. “And who’s going to protect R from Abeo?”

  They put their arms around each other and went back into the store. Donny rushed Loopy up the inside stairs. She usually was careful to follow the health laws, but tonight keeping the mood was more important. She didn’t want a replay of the time Chick’s depression got in their way. She held the door open for Chick, caught her eye, and, without a word, they broke into giggles.

  “Look at you!” Chick said. “I haven’t seen you laugh like this in so long.”

  “You look good laughing yourself.”

  Chick seemed to shine. Donny realized that her breath felt hot as she drew it in. It seemed to burst inside her and send energy to her fingertips. She went to Chick, arms out, needing to press against her. Chick met her with her whole body. “It’s been a long time since a lot of things,” she told her.

  They moved to the bedroom and shed their clothes. Donny switched off the light. In a major splurge they’d made the bed an island of warmth and comfort. Elsewhere, secondhand was good enough, including the store downstairs, where they spent most of their lives.

  Chick had wanted flowered patterns, Donny solids. They’d stopped arguing when Donny made a quilt of solid squares and presented it to Chick for their fourth anniversary. It was so thick and light she felt like she was pulling a cloud up over her naked self.

  Their bed was where they came to feel safe and close. They never lay down and went right to sleep. There were always too many tales of the day to exchange, and plans to make for tomorrow. Tonight neither said a word.

  Without preliminary she lay flat on Chick and rode her, rubbing pubic bone and breasts, shuddering at the thrill of Chick’s wide softness pillowing her. She felt Chick’s small hands on her back. Chick urged her up and down and faster, and then, when Donny let loose, wrapped her arms across her back and held her, rocked her, enclosed her.

  There wasn’t time for languor tonight. She lifted up and slid herself one way, then the other across Chick’s damp body.

  Chick moved her hips under her, like a sleeping thing coming awake. She liked to moan. Donny moved herself so she could touch Chick’s face and breasts, so she could reach around and knead her buttocks the way Chick said felt so good.

  After a few moments Chick’s sounds stopped, but Donny kept on. She was going to make her feel better, damn it. Maybe, Donny was thinking, she’d insist on sex therapy every day, like a vitamin in winter to fight off the cold germs. There’d be no more failed lovemaking if she had her way.

  She felt Chick’s sob before she heard it, startled that Chick had been so ready.

  Then Chick said, “I’m sorry, Donny.”

  Sorry? Donny thought, touching and touching.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  That hadn’t been a sob of pleasure—Chick was crying! Donny fought the impulse to give up. “I want you to feel it, babe,” she whispered. “I just want to touch you till we take you there. I’ll stop if you want me to, but give me a chance. You’re feeling like my girl again.”

  “It’s too hard, Donny. It’s not worth the energy for a sixty-second spasm.”

  “You don’t need any damn energy.” Spasm? What happened to how close they’d feel, how high above the world? “This is like a present I’m giving to you. Would you say no if I gave you a diamond ring?”

  “Oh god, Donny, what am I doing to you? To us?”

  She lay beside Chick, touching all her places while the tears ran along Chick’s cheeks to the pillow. “Don’t you go getting water in your ears, babe, or I’ll have to bail them out.”

  A smile quavered on Chick’s lips. If she could only get her laughing again. Laughter took over Chick’s whole body like an orgasm. Some couples fought and then fell into bed; she and Chick laughed their way to bed.

  “I can see it now,” Donny said. “Me working the store all alone, telling Clara you’re so depressed you have puddles in your ears.” The smile got wider. “Old Clara, she’d come storming up here with a Q-Tip the size of a mop and start sponging them out.”

  “She would!” Chick said and laughed.

  Donny laughed with her and kissed her laugh and then was kissing on her all over again and Chick was moving those sweet hips, giv
ing a weak moan, and her little hands were guiding Donny, no, pushing her south.

  “Oh, babe,” she said, breathing her hot breath onto Chick’s groin, “you smell so good. Let me give you this, babe.” Chick was letting her lap her swollen lips and bud.

  “Oh, babe,” she said again, mouthing the words right against Chick, feeling that little nest of graying fur trying to get in her way. She felt her big gal rising to her mouth now, felt her thighs strain to a warning stillness, and then Chick let out her deep cry and rocked back and forth as if to throw Donny, but she knew Chick didn’t want her going anywhere. She hung in there, arms around Chick’s thighs, her tongue teasing out all those feelings Chick had buried with sadness.

  She almost laughed out loud in pleasure. Chick pulled her higher and held her again.

  “Girl,” she told Chick, “this is ours, you got that? If you start sinking again, these arms are going to catch you, and don’t you forget it.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Trip

  “You’re still the sneaky, power-hungry sex maniac I knew in San Francisco!” Chick shouted into the closed, musty-smelling space of her little-used car.

  Patsy, a maroon ‘87 LTD, strained up a muddy switchback in the road. No, she thought, that would be too general. When she confronted M.C. in his home she wanted his wife there so she would learn how evil he was.

  “You’re stalking me, that’s what you’re doing, M.C., and I’m going to see your sorry ass in jail!”

  Better, except that nervousness weakened her fury. The old Dead tape she was playing to mellow her out didn’t seem to be working. She longed to have Donny by her side, but she still didn’t dare tell her for fear of unleashing Donny the street scrapper. No way she was going to add to the scars on that fine old body.

  The branches of the newer trees along the dirt road grew so low they clawed her roof as she bumped along, and she grasped the cool plastic steering wheel hard to avoid the small craters. She’d never have found this place if the Pensioners Posse hadn’t already come to warn M.C. away and passed along good directions. Their crusade had worked for all of one month.

  Why M.C. had retained his obsession with her since their flower-power days was as much of a puzzle as how both of them could have landed in the same tiny Northwest town twenty years later. It was obviously meant to be, but she couldn’t see a way good might come of it, and she knew there was always good somewhere.

  Whatever the circumstances, she’d come to the end of her tolerance. He wasn’t the only cause of her depression, but swallowing her anger about his harassment made it worse. She’d forced herself to talk more with Donny, not about M.C., but about how she was feeling. Donny, such a wise little street punk, told her that when she’d been younger she’d found it healthier in the long run to get knocked around a little to get the mad out of her system. Chick wasn’t planning any fistfights, but a good old confrontation might do wonders to reset her mellow button.

  About two miles up she saw a huge barn-like structure and a smattering of abandoned-looking outbuildings. There were no cows, no horses or llamas, not even a goat, only three barking, rough-looking dogs in a chain-link pen under some cottonwoods by the barn. A flowering quince ran undisciplined along one side of the barn, and small wild irises dotted the untrammeled earth. The Scotch broom was blooming, giving the whole place a yellow tinge, like she was wearing yellow fog glasses.

  She parked hood out and arranged her keys as weapons between her fingers, ready for anything. The dank air stung her nose with the smell of insecticide. What crop was being sprayed?

  “I’m like a mountain,” she chanted as she strode toward the barn, parka streaming rain. “I can do this.”

  It was a beautiful place, filled with vetch and mallows, monkey flowers and—was that a forktooth ookow? She stopped. Yes, and she’d been looking for just that shade of lavender for light summer overalls. R had taught her so much about flowers on their walks through the park in town. The park was teeming with wildflowers. Last year they’d walked about every week.

  Could she do this?

  In the years before her brother had been prescribed effective meds, she’d learned to fear mental illness. Martin’s behavior had been unpredictable, but worse, she’d had no defense against his verbal attacks on her. When they were kids he’d seemed so reasonable when he had told her that his condition was her fault, that their parents’ failures could be blamed on her. He’d elaborated on the nursery rhyme about stepping on a crack and breaking a mother’s back, convincing her that a sick pet, a grandparent’s death, a broken toy she’d watched him destroy—all were her fault.

  Until she was ten or eleven she’d believed him and at the same time believed that she could make up for all that by taking care of him. Every day she’d made his bed in a room that smelled of rotting apple cores. Her mother had thought her devotion was cute. At eight she’d learned not only to heat a can of soup for lunch, while their mother and father were at work, but to bake Martin cookies and other treats. He’d thanked her with criticism or, worse, silence.

  M.C. had always been wacko, but everyone had been wacko in the sixties. She might still be considered eccentric in her long skirts and tie dyes, her anarchistic worldview and just-get-by business style, but when M.C. smirked in her store window, she could see he’d been, or become, more unbalanced than anyone else from those dangerous days.

  She stopped, astonished. Inside the barn was another whole structure, two stories high, lining the sides of the barn.

  Nothing was painted or even plumb, but it looked sturdy, with windows hinting at an abundance of rooms. Brightly colored window frames and doors painted with the primitive flowers and stick figures of kids made it look like a Laugh-In TV stage set from the 1970s. The roof was punctuated with a half dozen skylights and covered a courtyard that held bicycles, a clothesline, huge stereo speakers, refrigerators, a freezer, stoves, grills, two woodstoves with long stove pipes, and two unpainted picnic tables with benches.

  At the far end of one of the benches sat a lone middle-aged woman in a green-and-purple patterned Guatemalan jacket, faded jeans, and kelly green polyurethane clogs. She was brushing her long graying hair. As Chick got closer she could hear that the woman was singing a Beach Boys song in a thin clear voice—“Help Me Rhonda.” It was eerie to hear the old music in this backwoods medieval hall. There was no sign of M.C.

  The lyrics had become, “Help me, Donny,” in her head, and she chanted silently.

  “Hello?” she called, her free hand clutching at the crystal on her necklace. This whole place was full of bad vibes, and she didn’t know if they all were M.C.’s.

  “M.C. took the kids to church,” called the singer, turning.

  “Church? M.C.?”

  The woman’s vague smile disclosed gaps in her teeth. “You know how straight-acting the man’s got.”

  Chick edged closer. Would her revelations shatter this fragile creature? She pulled her rain hood back and got her second shock. “Goddess! You’re Pennylane, aren’t you?”

  The woman squinted a long moment. “Isn’t that Earthbird from next door? It isn’t. It’s—Chick? Is that Chicago Chick? Far fucking out!”

  Chick felt an impulse to envelop in a hug this living remnant of her past, but held back. No wonder M.C. had become so crazed about Chick. Pennylane was still his old lady. But it had been nothing. Chick doubted that Pennylane even remembered the night she had spent with Chick, tripping and making love until M.C. walked in on them.

  Except for that one stoned session, Pennylane hadn’t been a woman she’d been particularly drawn to back in San Francisco, but she’d been a constant in the park and at the concerts. She could feel the damp grass of the park under her feet and the strange mix of chill and heat that was the San Francisco air. Pennylane had been younger than Chick, not too far into her teens, and now looked washed out, but not old at all. Chick remembered Pennylane’s intense, laughing craziness, a live-free-or-die defiance she’d flaunted. In retr
ospect, Chick realized that Pennylane had acted as if she had a compulsive need to challenge. She took on cops, business owners, rules, facts, street signs. She remembered when the city had initiated a campaign to stop panhandling in the Fisherman’s Wharf area. It had been Pennylane who’d organized the brilliant zap action for the freakiest of them to distribute change to tourists. That had frightened the visitors more than the begging, and made the patrolling cops look silly. And here she was, in Waterfall Falls, all grown up.

  “What a trip,” Pennylane finally said.

  “This is mind-blowing, seeing you transported here from the old scene. You ended up with M.C.?”

  “I was a runaway. He was Robin Hood.”

  “I would have loved to see you around town.”

  Pennylane shuddered. “Too big. Too many people. Buy this. Do that. The freeway goes so fast. Here I have no newspapers, no TV. We don’t even get good radio reception. This is world peace, right here.” Lazily, she waved the old “V” peace sign. “Except it’s probably time to start Sunday dinner. It takes a while for fourteen.”

  “That’s heavy. You didn’t have twelve kids?”

  Pennylane’s voice had a weary huskiness to it. Her fear of town sounded like burnout. Had she lost too many of her challenges? Chick wanted to hold and soothe this sputtering flame of a woman, but if Pennylane remembered their encounter she wasn’t acknowledging it. “Three. My two oldest I sent away, and Luke’s with M.C.” She looked at Chick, eyes briefly clear. “Marly’s the baby machine.”

  “Marly?” Chick asked.

  “You’d split the scene by then. M.C. dropped me, got together with Marly for about six months, then came back. After we got married and moved onto the land, here comes Marly, carrying his first son. We couldn’t turn her out.”

  The words flew out of her mouth before she could stop them. “So he’s a bigamist, too.”

  “No,” Pennylane said quickly. “He didn’t marry her, only me. By the time Marly showed up I was tired, Chick. All that rebellion takes its toll. I was glad to share him. When he decided the three of us should get it on together I found out—you’re still a dyke, aren’t you?” At Chick’s nod she laughed and continued. “I found that M.C. was not at all necessary.” She narrowed her eyes. “But what do you mean too?”