by Lee Lynch
Pennylane’s voice took on a tough edge. Jeep guessed her accent was from some not-quite-Southern state, like Missouri. Pennylane told Cat, “You were in the living room, watching the TV. Luke was a good boy and stayed in his room while I checked.” She’d been talking mostly to the floor, but now looked Cat full in the face. “You were kissing that woman in the pig uniform. She’s the sheriff here, isn’t she? That’s when I decided I wasn’t leaving my little boy behind. I may be a loser, but I can do him better than dykes.”
“Better than love?” Jeep shot back. “Love and music and sane, sober people who think he’s a total miracle?”
The woman looked at her like she’d been doused with ice water, but then went on with her story. “I was trying for the back door when your sheriff girlfriend rushed into the kitchen and out the back door herself. She would have caught us if she hadn’t been in such a hurry. Luke led me up to the attic. Pretty soon I heard his name being called. There was no place to hide but the roof.”
“That wasn’t a safe place to take a little kid.”
Pennylane hissed, “And this house, with what goes on in it is? Are you her girlfriend too? Don’t you say a word to anyone about me taking Luke or I’ll go to the newspapers with what I saw. She won’t be sheriff long.”
“And you,” Jeep found herself saying, “will be taking a time-out in the ladies’ slammer. Don’t you know the police are looking for you? Then who’ll give Luke what we can give him?”
“His aunt Marly and me, that’s who! She’s got two little ones he’s been raised with. They’re still safe back in Mexico. It’s only M.C. and me who had to come back. We’ve got unfinished business.”
Luke suddenly let go and shook his head with such mondo movements Jeep said, “Luke, stop! You’ll give yourself whiplash.”
It was Cat’s turn. “You’re not taking this boy back to that atmosphere. You’re lucky he was born as whole as he is with all that drug activity. Look, even he doesn’t want that.”
The mother was silent, watching the boy. She held out her arms to him, and as he hesitated she blurted, “You think I don’t know that? Come here, Pumpkin. I know M.C. blew it with you. I know the others picked on you bad. I couldn’t stop them. They made him worse, if you ask me. Every time he opened his mouth the kids were copycatting him. He has this sweet little lisp. They were jealous of you from the first, my poor baby, my favorite, and Marly’s so stoned she doesn’t kick their little asses for them. You’ve always been like an angel come to earth, with that out-of-sight smile, haven’t you? They couldn’t deal with your loving nature. Pretty soon he stopped talking except when we were alone, like he took some kind of, like, vow of silence to protect his incredibly sweet self.”
She looked at Cat, then at Jeep, her eyes like those of someone trapped. “I never knew what to do. I thought leaving him behind he’d be free of the drug life, but I missed you so bad, Luke. I don’t care what I have to do. I won’t freak out on you again.”
“Even,” Jeep asked, filled with guilt that she was using this as a threat, but desperate for herself and for Luke, who’d have no chance at all if he went back to that family, “even if it means getting clean?”
Pennylane looked at her, the anger hard, then smoldering, then draining from her eyes. “Yes. I’m ready. I had my last toke up in your attic. For the longest time it hasn’t been doing nothing for me but frying my brain. Things have been over between me and M.C. for years except the insults, the hitting, and the drugs. I didn’t know where to go, what to do!”
The woman stroked Luke’s blond hair, and he closed his eyes like someone too content to stand much more pleasure. “I’m sorry I got so hateful about you being queer,” she said, not looking away from Luke. “The truth is, I sometimes think me and Marly would be a lot better off without M.C. He’s not much of an improvement on nothing at all, teaching the kids to make shit and peddling it. When I was stoned all the time it was funny, but not any more. I got Luke’s half-sister out.” She dropped her voice to a whisper, as if Luke couldn’t hear her. “M.C. was bothering her. She’s staying with my folks in Oklahoma and going to the community college. My first is over in Africa in the Peace Corps. I’m so proud of him. They’ll turn out okay, no thanks to me.”
“But you stayed,” said Cat.
Eyes cast down, Pennylane replied, “But I stayed.” There was a defiant lift to her chin when she looked up. “What would I do in the straight world? At least Luke got a better daddy than my others did.”
Astonished, Jeep said, “Wait. You mean M.C.’s not his father?”
“Oh, no. Only Luke and me knew, but M.C. guessed not long before the raid went down. His real dad’s Trevor McKinnon, the banjo player for True Harps. I played Luke his tapes since before you were born, right, Luke? It’s old-time—”
“McKinnon rocks!” Jeep exclaimed, and told Cat, “They are like the number-one group in the world, and McKinnon—he’s from Ireland, right?—he’s so fast you can’t see his fingers move. Luke,” she said, kneeling by him, “you’re your old man’s sprout all right. You came by your talent naturally.”
“I know he has rhythm,” Pennylane said. “Every chance he got he’d be tapping out a tune with a spoon or a stick. Drove M.C. nuts. I’d have to stop poor Luke.”
“I always heard M.C. was a few fries short of a Happy Meal. This is super news. Luke’s been, like, in charge of keeping the beat around here. You want to show mom your skins, dude?”
The boy’s sunny disposition reemerged, and he pulled Pennylane after him into the music room.
After a moment they heard Luke’s steady beat and swish on his small traps. Then the piano started up, and the mother was playing a hesitant rendition of the Beatles’ tune “Michelle.” Luke picked up the rhythm.
Cat had tears in her eyes too. “We’ll have to help them,” she said.
Jeep nodded. “Maybe we can stay in Luke’s life. Don’t they have some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card if you rat somebody out? Do you think we can get her to tell Joan about every indictable thing M.C. ever did?”
The phone rang. Jeep went to watch Luke and his mom, both touched by and anxious about the reunion.
The mom called to her, “I haven’t forgotten everything!” She launched hesitantly into an old Neil Young song.
She felt like a trapdoor had opened under her, and she was being held up by nothing more than a swirl of smoke. Music wasn’t enough, she thought. She might live with Luke, take care of him sometimes, but she’d just lost half of the center of her life. Again. Be real, Jeep, you know what you need. Its time to get serious and chase Sarah Teitel. Could be she’s just another dream, this one made of regrets. Could be I’ve been trying to fill up her place in my soul with these imposters. If Sarah was interested, they could start a family of their own. Maybe I’m ready now. Or not.
Cat joined them in the music room. “That was the sheriff. Pennylane?” Pennylane stopped playing and turned to her. “I have some news for you. The sheriff caught up with M.C. on your land, packing up meth supplies. Two boys were helping him.”
Pennylane shook her head. “Marly’s two oldest.”
“All three of them are in custody.”
“Stay with me,” lisped Luke.
Pennylane took him in her arms and rocked him. “Oh, my baby boy, I will. We’ll find our way together, won’t we?” She looked up at Cat. “What I wouldn’t do for a big fat J right about now, but you know—” She extracted a small baggie of dried weed, papers, and a silver roach clip from the back pocket of her jeans and handed them to Cat. “This won’t be real easy after all these years, but he’s more important than getting high. I’m ready to get over it. Would you flush it? You won’t have to tell the sheriff, will you?”
Cat tossed the bag over to Jeep. “Tell her what?”
Chapter Thirty-four
The Center of the Universe
It was September first, but it was still summer, the hot high summer that bleached the grasses and parched the cr
eeks, that left the population of Waterfall Falls limp and sweaty and longing for the first rains. The rains might come any day or might wait until November. The weekly paper reported that the snowmelt on the mountains was long gone. The only sign of fall that Chick could feel was the cooling of the nights and the news of lightning strikes that started forest fires.
The men who harvested the forests welcomed fire season because there would be work. Every few years one of them would get caught setting a fire that might rage for weeks. If he got away with it, he’d hire on to fight the fire and then to log out the burned woods. Still later, he might be one of the planters who dug holes for saplings, or he’d get a job counting the salmon whose habitat was disappearing with the logged trees.
Sheriff Sweet had two teens in the jail for arson. The sons of a laid-off chain puller in a mill, filled with resentment at environmentalists and sheer summer boredom, they’d been setting fires along the railroad tracks for weeks.
Donny had baked well before the heat of day. Chick was sharing a sticky pull-apart with her, Cat, and the sheriff before opening the store. The building still smelled strongly of cinnamon and held chilly air from the night before.
“I’m glad we didn’t waste any more bait today,” Donny announced after they’d polished off the whole pull-apart.
Joan didn’t answer, but accepted a refill of coffee from Chick.
“From what you’ve been saying, there isn’t a fish left in the valley,” Chick said, pouring the last of the coffee into her own cup. She went over to the sink to put on a fresh pot, but she was still in earshot, and she could see Cat’s foot running up under Joan’s uniform leg.
“The water’s lower than I’ve ever seen it,” Donny said. “I think it’s that clear-cut up above. Soil can’t hold much water or snow with no root system, and the fish skipped Sweet Creek this year. Soon there won’t be any shade left to sit under if the creek dries up and can’t feed the cottonwoods.”
Cat said, “It’s going the way of Dry Creek outside my place this year.”
“Not much else dry in that neighborhood,” muttered Joan, sliding her glance toward Cat.
Chick and Donny laughed while Cat made as if to slap the sheriff’s hand and said, “Joan!”
The sheriff wiped her lips with a paper napkin. “Pretty bleak,” she commented. “I’ve been wondering if Old M.C. was dumping waste chemicals in that water last winter and killing the fish.”
“You think?” Chick asked, rejoining them.
“I wish you’d had an excuse to shoot the critter,” Donny mused.
“If I’d known then how abusive he’d been to little Luke or that he’d taught his own kids the fine art of chemistry and dealing, I might have found an excuse.” Joan stretched her legs out and tipped back her chair before she went on. “We’ve got him on charges of possession, manufacture and delivery, endangering the welfare and supplying a minor, maintaining a place where controlled substances are used, booby-trapping, skipping bail, eluding and assaulting an officer, and two counts toward the three-times-and-you’re-out law. Prison won’t be enough punishment for a sleazeball like that.”
“How about impersonating a human being? Doesn’t that add twenty years or so?” Donny asked. “Can I recommend it to the court as head honcho of the local DARE? I should at least have used the pepper spray when I tackled him.”
“There you go.”
“At the very least,” Chick agreed. She gave Donny a kiss on the top of her head. “My hero.”
“One more stalker bites the dust,” said the sheriff with a chuckle.
Donny wiped her hands with a blue bandanna. Chick could see from her eyes that she was trying to hide a proud grin. Cat briefly linked her arm in Joan’s and hugged it to her. Joan peered out the window toward a lone cable guy getting into a van, his back to them.
Loopy was outside, chewing on a back toenail while a couple of retired guys walked from Mother Hubbard’s to their pickups.
After the second arrest the whole sad story of her and M.C. had to come out, but Donny had never admitted to knowing about the stalking before that. Chick had gone along with pretending she didn’t know Donny knew. She saw no harm in letting Donny feel like her secret savior.
She’d been blown away when she realized her tailspin of depression was starting to slow after they locked M.C. up again and the judge refused to set bail. That week, for the second time that summer, she and Donny finally went up to the waterfalls. They had closed the store and powered up Blackberry Mountain in Chick’s V-8 LTD. At odd moments of the day Chick had packed them a picnic supper of apples, cheese, pecans, and chocolate. When they reached the trailhead, Donny slid the backpack of food onto her shoulders, and Chick carried the bottle of sparkling grape juice wrapped in her plaid car blanket.
There had been no one at the falls when they arrived, and they had walked, Donny first, to the ledge behind the water slowly and silently, as if approaching a temple. If ever she had found a power spot in the world, this was it, she remembered thinking. The smoothed and slightly concave rock wall, scooped out by eons of water, offered the suggestion of an embrace. Before them the two streams of water, still lively, but diminished by the dryness of the season, fell through the evening light like beaded curtains forever twisting into whirlpools.
“Look at them,” said Donny, “taking on the world together.”
“And apart,” Chick added, mesmerized by the sight. “They only merge at the pool.”
Donny spread the blanket and they sat. Chick opened the grape juice while Donny set out the food, cutting chunks of Swiss cheese, then peeling and slicing the apples with her penknife. While it wasn’t full enough to roar, the falls filled their embrasure with sound. Every move they made seemed to be part of a deliberate ritual, filled with import. This was like tripping, but now love was the trip, love as she’d never imagined it could be.
Donny presented her with apple and cheese on an orange, oversized napkin from last Thanksgiving. Chick passed over a plastic wine glass of bubbling juice. They raised their glasses to each other and drank until the glasses were empty.
Donny squirmed on the cool rock as if, thought Chick, she was getting ready to make a big speech. “Chick, maybe I didn’t always say everything I should have these last few months.”
She refilled Donny’s glass and said, “Shhh. Maybe we don’t always need to.”
“I never lied to you. I need to be honest with you and with me. Things just don’t always make it into words. Does that sound crazy?”
“Oh, wow, not only doesn’t it sound crazy, you’re saying what I’m thinking.” She laughed. “Unless we’re both crazy.”
“Babe, we already know that!” Donny replied, stretching her arm to catch waterfall spray in her glass. “But, you know,” she said, frowning, “I could learn to talk more if that’s what we need to keep us going.”
“I was just so afraid that—” Chick said, hesitating to bring up Donny’s temper when she knew Donny was working on that. “I was just afraid,” she finally said, “of everything. That shut me up too. But I never stopped loving you or wanting to be with you.”
Donny slid closer. She whispered, “Good, cause I’d drag you back and rope you to me if I had to.”
She looked up through her lashes and asked, “Front to front?”
Donny raised her eyebrows and looked cocky. “I don’t think I’d need the rope in that position, babe.”
Laughing again, she’d asked, “Is it getting hot under here, or is it just me?”
They’d gone home soon after that, completed their nightly chores, and climbed under the covers, naked. Their lovemaking was slow, deliberate, and more cautious than usual—as if it was the first time. Loopy finally figured out that if she was going to get any sleep that night, she needed to be in her basket, not with them.
More and more, since the night of the waterfalls, Chick felt a bubbly mellowness coursing through her, like she was a mountain pleasurably tickled by waterfalls. Some days she w
as down, but not as low, and more days she was up, but not as high. She was scheduled to be off the Prozac completely by the end of summer. Although she’d never gone to the sheriff to complain about M.C., fearful that between her hippie past and uncloseted present she’d made herself a target for a crazy like him, apparently Joan had heard, probably through the Pensioners Posse. The whole situation was in good hands. Now she needed to let it all go.
“I wonder where Jeep is,” she said. “She never misses a pull-apart day.”
Cat said, “She took my truck up to Eugene to pick up her friend from Reno.”
“I completely forgot.” She felt that little anxious stab that reminded her she was letting her age show. “It’s a good thing we still have hot young items like you and the sheriff around, to remember things.”
Cat and Joan’s eyes met. Chick looked at Donny and fanned herself.
The sheriff moved her gaze from Cat to scrutinize Chick briefly. She said, “You’re not over any hills yet that I can see, Miss Chick.”
“That was the right answer,” Chick told her. “Sometimes I try to remember what it was like to have a memory.”
Joan eyed Donny next. “I hope Jeep’s out-of-town friend isn’t anything like yours.”
“Abraham? If nothing else, we taught him that San Francisco is his real home,” Donny said. “He can be as trans or gay or none of the above as he wants to be and always fit in.”
“Abe didn’t do anyone harm,” Chick said.
“True,” admitted the sheriff, “but he was about ripe for some kind of trouble. You don’t live someplace like this without either fitting in real quick or getting spit out like a piece of gristle that can’t be digested.”
Cat lightly slapped her hand again. “Lovely image at breakfast. They’re going to encourage you back across the street to Mother Hubbard’s.”