Sweet Creek

by Lee Lynch

  A logging truck laden with thin, uniformly sized trunks from a tree farm shifted gears to climb to the freeway entrance. Diesel fumes filled the air.

  Chick explained. “Not yet, but foster parents don’t grow on trees, especially when the kid is a disabled four-year-old with parents out on bail and on the lam. I’m so freaked over who he’ll act like. Forget me being Grandma if he’s a strutting little banty rooster with M.C.’s conniving mind and a rank brown ponytail like his. I’m not even sure I can live with him looking like Pennylane. I remember her when she wasn’t much more than ten years older than Luke is now.”

  “Never mind,” Fina said, shooing her along. “You go meet the kid. He’ll be your greatest love no matter what he looks like. Take it from me. It broke my heart when my daughter married a redheaded gringo. But their kids? I’m nuts about them.”

  “I’m not helping to unleash another M.C. on the world.”

  “No grandson of yours would dare to be an M.C.!”

  “This is true,” Chick answered smartly, doubting her own words.

  She didn’t know whether to sail up the next block or to creep. The closer she got, the more nervous she felt. Why hadn’t they asked her to be an aunt? That would have been more in line with where her head was at. Jeep and Cat had intended to bestow a great honor by making her a grandmother, but was that how Jeep really saw her the first day she’d stumbled down the steps into Natural Woman Foods? Had she made herself ridiculous flirting with a kid who looked at her and saw a crone? Inside, she felt like a kid herself.

  At the Rocket gas station old Regis Rice came gimping over. “How’s my favorite big gal?” he shouted. “Can I fill your tank today?”

  It was windier up here by the freeway, and noisy from logging trucks and triple-trailers making time on this straightaway. Chick was glad for the bulk of her long dress and quilted, puffy jacket near this retired satyr who reeked of tobacco. Still, at least old Regis thought she was chasing material just as much as Donny did.

  She laughed as usual and yelled back, “I’m not driving, Regis!”

  “Oh, I can do the driving, big gal.”

  Poor old goat. She waved him off, amused and not amused all at once. He couldn’t hear a thing she said, so they always had the same exchange. What if Luke grew up to work at the BP station, a slick grease monkey who sold cheap chains to drivers headed over the pass and raised the price when it snowed? Chick would struggle by on a walker twenty years from now, old Regis gone, and an oily guy in a BP cap with M.C.’s face would call her Grandma. She couldn’t deal with it. No way, she swore, lifting her own tangle of still honey-brown hair off her sweaty neck.

  She was already in the freeway’s dank shadow, and she almost turned back. Would Jeep and Cat pull a trip like that on her, introduce an M.C. clone with no warning? If they even saw the resemblance—Jeep had only seen M.C. in the dark in the midst of much confusion, and Cat probably only saw him in the papers when the police were looking for him. Gulp that air! Walk faster!

  The traffic thundered overhead, and several purple foxgloves waved at the end of the overpass. Something nagged at her. Was the remembering part of her brain drying up? Had she destroyed something with all those hallucinogens? Pennylane, M.C.’s wife, had mentioned the child’s daddy—that the boy had never heard his daddy pick guitar—or was it a banjo that he picked? Jeep said the boy had his father’s musical genes. It sounded as if she could stop worrying. M.C. wasn’t his birth father. With a little luck the rest of his genes would overshadow M.C.’s influence as a father figure. Some people shouldn’t be allowed to raise kids.

  Still, it was an honor to get appointed Grandma. Jeep and Cat had invited her, Donny, Clara, and Hector—two sets of grandparents. They’d made a little ceremony of it, presenting fancy handmade certificates and taking pictures so Luke could have them when he was older. This was better, like Grandmama-to-be Donny said, than letting a speck of DNA decide who was family.

  Chick emerged from the shadow of the overpass and continued under the wicked blazing sun around a grassy curve. The incline was steady as she entered the moneyed part of Waterfall Falls. She could see Cat’s grandparents’ home almost at the crest of the hill. The grandfather was a banker, she’d heard. That would give Luke a running start—money for music lessons and a good college once he was cured of not talking. And he would talk. She imagined an M.C. junior in a dark crew cut and double-breasted pinstripe. Would he look like his banker side or like an underground gangster? Or like his birth father? She’d ask Jeep if she could get a photo of him.

  By the time she reached the retaining wall that shored up the proud houses, she was wiped out. She paused to catch her breath and pat her face dry with a pink bandanna. The garages here were all at street level, made of concrete that had cracked over the years. Next to Cat’s garage seventeen steps led to a landing, then another eight to the porch. She grasped the hot rail, but let go of it fast, and climbed. Sweat ran down her back. She hoped she smelled all right. The house loomed above her, washed pink stucco with gray-blue trim. Two large windows were set to either side of the dark wood door. Living room and dining room, she guessed, dark and cool on a summer’s day, but gloomy in winter. The house seemed a little overbearing. Maybe she should have waited until Sunday, when the store was closed, so she could have come with Donny. She could turn around and go back.

  Then the door flew open. There was Jeep, bouncing on the balls of her feet, a humongous smile pushing her cheeks up till her eyes were almost closed. Her newly spiked hair looked incongruous in this neighborhood. A small blonde head peered out from behind her, one hand clutching Jeep’s black jeans. No, this child looked nothing like M.C. and barely like Pennylane. Luke’s open face was round, not sharp-featured, and his broad smile was entirely Jeep’s.

  “Blonde?” Chick exclaimed. She quickly touched her own light hair. “My grandson is blonde?”

  Jeep reached around and tousled Luke’s hair. The boy grinned and ducked. “Come out and say hi to your Grandmother Chick.”

  In that moment Chick felt something new in the vicinity of her heart that reminded her of the way vanilla ice cream must feel under a flow of hot fudge sauce, a surge of warmth and a sensation of melting. Luke looked so helpless. Here was someone that truly didn’t know how to do anything for himself.

  “I never got to care for such a small person before,” Chick said. “He’s beautiful.”

  Luke hadn’t yet come out of hiding. “He’s a pretty cool bean, aren’t you, dude? Let’s go inside so you two can get used to each other.”

  Released, Luke ran ahead of them. A large cream-colored cat with patchy brown markings flung himself down at Chick’s feet.

  “That’s Lump Sum,” Jeep explained. “He thinks he’s hungry. Ignore him.”

  Chick laughed. “He looks like a Lump Sum.”

  “When Cat inherited him his name was Simba.”

  Luke cast a shy glance back when he reached the first door.

  “You need to practice now? Go for it, dude.” Jeep turned to her. “Was he stoked when he saw that drum pad. We leave the sound very low because he’s in here every chance he gets.”

  Jeep, despite her hair, seemed to have grown up by a decade. Her energy was smoother, more self-assured now.

  “Luke plays drums like his grandmother? Does Luke know what he’s doing?”

  “I’ve taught him one riff which he’s still learning. Little kids like to do their own thing, though, and Luke’s majorly inventive. Sometimes he plays along with the radio or a CD, but mostly he’s, like, an explorer. He’ll play a simple beat, listen, repeat it. That’s the uncanny thing. The kid can remember his moves and repeat them over and over, even the next day. I talked to my dad about it, and he says that’s way prodigious.”

  Jeep started to move away from the door, but Chick laid a hand on her arm. “May I stay here with him and watch?”

  “Your call. I’ll go chill in the kitchen. George probably wants in by now.” Jeep started to leave
, but turned back. “Are you sure you’re cool with this? You look like you never saw a rug rat before.”

  Chick forced herself to look away from her grandson. “This will sound very strange, Jeep, but I don’t think I really ever did.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Game Plan

  “I’ve always been this way, out of bed in the morning like a junkie for daylight. My mother says that on the way to my first day of kindergarten, I led her to a classroom of grown-up third-graders. I skipped a grade, did college in three years, and I guess I’m still in a rush.”

  Katie was changing cartridges, fumbling a bit in her rush to get everything on tape. Already she was looking forward to the weeks she’d spend editing. She’d found a tiny soundproofed studio with all the equipment she would need in a revamped garage up in Greenhill. The guy had agreed to rent it to her for a full month whenever she was ready because he had a day job and could only use it nights.

  Clara White said, “You’re one of those type ace personalities they talk about on the TV.” She was squinting as if watching bright electrical charges orbit Katie’s head.

  “You don’t get many of those around here,” Hector White commented from his recliner by the woodstove. He hadn’t moved since she’d arrived. On this second day of shooting, in the scene she thought of as The Indoor Life, she decided to tape him on his chair, his wife across the big kitchen the way they really lived instead of mashed together on the sofa. The TV was going, Hector half-watching “Live with Regis.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asked, film rolling.

  Hector pushed the recliner back with a groan. Now he was man of the house, not the nervous creature who cracked his knob-like knuckles alone with her out in the meadow where his sheep grazed and he couldn’t look straight at the camera.

  “A person gets out in the woods, puts his whole self into taking down a big old spruce—a person does that for a few hours and he’s in another world. There’s no place out there for hurry-up.”

  “Cool.”

  This was excellent. Hector had retired from logging when the industry began its slide downhill. Last time he talked about how, like a lot of the guys, he’d worked for years with a bum knee and decided, the next time he hurt it at work, he’d put in for workman’s comp and buy whatever livestock he could with his retirement. The insurance people, he’d told her, had hassled him, but he bided his time and eventually they came through. Never used a lawyer either, he bragged—lawyers were for people in a god-awful rush, and he got a couple more sheep instead of paying lawyer fees.

  “My son lives in Portland,” Hector said today. “He tells me he feels the same when he jogs as I used to in the woods.”

  “A runner’s high?” Katie asked, jotting a quick note to herself to ask how the Whites felt about environmentalists.

  “There you go. When I falled trees for a living, it was what being in a church is supposed to make me feel. The preacher down at the Community Bible Church is always saying we should get high on God, not on liquor and drugs. Where’s God if not in those trees?” he finished, pointing out the window. “Speaking of church, listen to this one. Did Adam ever have a date with Eve?”

  “No, just a fig leaf?” Katie joked.

  “Close, but no banana. It wasn’t a date, it was an apple.”

  “What are you blaspheming about now, Pa?” Clara called over the water running into the kitchen sink. Dishwashing suds rose steadily, their sharp perfume striking at Katie’s nostrils.

  “You’re like me,” she said. “Work’s a mission.”

  “I don’t know as a person would say it exactly like that,” Hector answered.

  “When I’m into it. Tripping over cables, clock ticking, crew running around like the sky is falling. It’s a zoo. I stay there until I’m off the air. It takes me hours to chill.”

  The cities seemed so long ago. Even her arrival in Waterfall Falls seemed a distant past. Since then Jeep had turned into a mom, she’d watched a town get strung along by its own vigilante, she’d taken and lost a new lover, and she’d learned a bit about who she really was. She felt as old as Yoda without the wisdom.

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t been around, or that the combination of R and Abeo was a big deal in itself. She’d had fun and loved with abandon before coming to Waterfall Falls. The day after she’d refused to film R and Abeo, she had forced her journalist self to ask R what had happened with Abeo. R claimed that Abeo had never removed her own clothing or allowed R to touch her in any intimate way. Katie’s anger had turned to puzzlement.

  R had been wrapped in a woven Mexican blanket, eyes aglitter with the reflected light of her oil lamp, remembering aloud the whole shitty scene. “We fell on each other like beasts,” R told her. “I’ve never experienced anything like it.” Toto gave an anguished caw under his cloth covering. Katie had felt as stripped and ripped off as she had when she’d slipped from the cabin the night before, leather jacket and Sony in hand, and cleansed her lungs with damp, pine-scented air.

  Hector brought the recliner down like he was crashing an airplane. “You know what the first step is before Henry Mancini or even old Beethoven could write a tune?” He paused. “It’s me, cutting the timber that makes their pianos.”

  She’d managed to put the Sony back on him just in time.

  “I don’t know why these blockhead environmentalists can’t understand it,” Hector fumed. She wouldn’t have to ask her question after all. “They wave signs—what’s the poster board and the stakes that hold it up made of, if not wood? They plan their foolishness in meetings—what do they think the chairs and table are made from? They look out the window at the forest—and let me tell you, there’s plenty of forest left—that window frame they’re looking out of is likely pure wood.”

  Clara jumped in, clanging pots, “And for what? So some bird doesn’t have to move? I love the birds. There’s swallows galore who nest under the eaves of the garage right now, making a mess. But it’s the loggers who have to move if they can’t put food on the table for their babies. Those birds have taken good care of themselves since the beginning of time. If they disappear, maybe it’s God’s will. Tell those green people we’re all going to disappear sooner or later. Maybe it’s time for those trees to make space for some other things to grow.”

  “What about your grandchildren?” Katie asked. “If you cut all the trees scientists say the whole eco-system—”

  “Echo-schmeko,” Clara replied, vigorously scrubbing a pot. “My grandkids need those jobs more than some bird does.”

  Hector said, “I’d rather my grandkids work in the woods instead of cooped up in some factory making chips for the damn computers. What the heck kind of thing is that anyway, chips? Why are we fighting with the Japs over who gets to make fancy chips? Wood chips are good enough for me.”

  “You won’t find wood in one of those computers,” Clara scoffed.

  Katie had seen long trailer-trucks bearing cages of wood chips on I-5 and supposed pressed-wood furniture was made from them. “I did a special on silicon chips,” she said, and was surprised as she explained them at how much she’d retained, especially about the dependence of the West Coast on the little devices.

  Clara ignored her husband and turned to Katie. “Listen at her go, Pa. If TV’s what rings your bells, honey, what are you doing in Waterfall Falls? I remember when you first came to town with that spike-haired girl. You were at Chick’s place looking like somebody off the TV.”

  Hector let out a roar of laughter. “That’s what she is, Ma! Somebody off the TV!”

  Clara dunked a pie plate. “You think I don’t know that? But she wasn’t in New York City. She was here in Waterfall Falls, makeup, funny clothes, and all.”

  “New York!” exclaimed Katie, turning off the Sony and settling at the kitchen table. “In my dreams.” But her silent voice knew this documentary might get her where she wanted to be in the end. Katie Delgado, the filmmaker’s filmmaker, the bright star from Southern California
via the rural Northwest.

  This place had changed her fast. She’d traveled here wanting to rewrite the script that had ruled her all her life. She’d imagined a never-ending music festival where free-loving women cast off their clothing and played hard. She’d imagined her own spirit thriving in the nurturing mountains. On the way north she’d stopped at Mt. Shasta and, after she sent Jeep to walk around the town, had waited for her cloud crown to lift, and to lift her to a spiritual level she’d never before experienced, but neither happened.

  Instead she’d found R’s world, with its court of loyal handmaidens, more intense in its way than TV land, lit with the flickering wisdom Katie was struggling to learn. This women’s land business was so effing weird. Only through her Sony did she begin to see the patterns and purposes in a way of life so alien to her. In the city she’d thought that to be truly alive she must be a perpetual-motion machine. By following R’s mellowed-out style she’d planned to blend the old into a new Katie, but R’s was a strangely purposeful peace, like she was acting a part. And that made Katie wonder if serenity and ambition were complete contradictions.

  She grabbed a dishcloth. “May I dry?”

  “Of course. He’d never pick up a hand to help.”

  “Aw, Clara. You tell me I’m a clumsy oaf around the house.”

  “I’d rather have my dishes whole, thank you.”

  “Who trimmed back your honeysuckle this morning in this heat? I don’t know why she encourages that weed. Sometimes I think I’d rather have the poison oak. At least she’d let me get rid of that.”

  “You be careful what you wish. I remember that summer when all you’d talk about was the heat, heat, heat and how you wished for a snowy winter. That next winter we stood and watched those cedars we had out back bend under the weight of the wet snow and the wind during the night. We got the kids up and took them to the living room and told them we were having a slumber party in case any of the trees came down on the house. Nothing fell on the house, but they came down in the pasture where it was more damp. Trees fell for two days after that storm.”