Sweet Creek

by Lee Lynch

  “I’m still getting lunch there. I hear more. Besides which, bean sprouts hurt my belly.”

  Outside, there was the sound of a car with a problem muffler passing slowly on Stage Street. That would be Fina, come in to town to open her shop. Not a minute later, Chick heard a great rattling by the parking spaces around the corner. There was a timid tapping at the side door.

  “Sounds like Pennylane in her rattletrap retired-post-office jeep, reporting for her first day of work,” Chick said and got up to let her in.

  Donny chuckled. “Sounds like she got wheels to match her crazy homestead.”

  “Penelope, initial C, Bispo, according to the computer,” said the sheriff.

  “Italian?” Donny asked.

  “Portuguese-Irish is what I hear. You’re real good to give her work. I was all for keeping her locked up to teach her a lesson.”

  “Like the judge said, she’s had her lesson,” Donny proclaimed.

  Chick had watched Donny take most of a week to accept the rehabilitation plans for Luke’s mother. Donny, after all, had been in on both busts of Penny’s soon-to-be ex-husband, M.C. She’d taken a flying leap onto his back that night they recaptured him, banging up the same shoulder that had just healed after the first capture. How that skinny butch of hers had managed to handcuff M.C., Chick couldn’t picture.

  “I pretended I was at least ten screaming and kicking dykes saving the world from this scum,” was the only explanation she’d gotten. “I was my whole gang back in Chicago, only I didn’t do as much damage.”

  Donny had blamed Pennylane as much as she did M.C. until she’d learned that the boys, a couple of meek but nasty kids, weren’t Pennylane’s, but Marly’s sons. It helped that Cat had drug-rehab connections who got Pennylane going immediately in Narcotics Anonymous and as a patient in town at a satellite of the rehab center up in Greenhill. The caseworker assigned to Luke was the partner of his school principal. Small town living was a gas. It had been a relief when Donny had come around, as Chick had known she would—she’d needed her to do her figuring-it-all-out fast so she could set things up.

  Having a job guaranteed that Pennylane could stay in the community. Accepting the offer of a home with Cat and Jeep solved their problem too. They got to keep Luke. The court wouldn’t grant Luke to Pennylane for a long time, if ever, but was allowing them to live together on a trial basis. Jeep, in her excitement, joked over and over that they hadn’t lost a son, they’d gained a mother. She’d taken to calling Pennylane Wendy and introducing herself as Peter Pan.

  “The Goddess works in wonderful ways,” she said to Pennylane as she let her in. “Stay, Loopy.”

  “I’m so nervous I’m going to forget everything you teach me, Chick.”

  “Nervous about working at Natural Woman Foods? There’s no need. If you were tough enough to survive what you’ve gone through so far, you can do anything.” She led Pennylane to the back room and showed her where to leave her coat. “Okay?”

  Pennylane did look even more pale than usual, and when Chick took her hand it was damp with nervous sweat.

  “I’ve never worked for a living before, Chick, and my mind is still kind of foggy.”

  She’d confessed this more than once, and Chick had reassured her the same way she did today. “Yes you have. You’ve baked, canned, cleaned, kept your shelves stocked, and even done some sales work before. You’ve got all the skills to work here.”

  “Selling drugs doesn’t count!”

  “Of course it does. Not that I’m recommending it as a career path, but I think you had to deal with tougher customers than we get here, handle bigger money, and be real careful about quality. What is that expression Jeep uses? You’ve got the right skill set.” She looked up at the big old wall clock that advertised horse medicine. “We need to boogie. Put this apron on because you need to pull produce out of the cooler and make the case look pretty. Donny? You want to show Pennylane the ropes?” Donny’s elbow was still in a brace. “You came along just in time. Donny still can’t do much lifting and reaching with that shoulder she keeps injuring.”

  “Good, I don’t want any charity.” Pennylane’s tone had a resentful edge to it.

  Chick smiled. “We need you.”

  The sheriff nodded at Pennylane on her way out and laid two dollars on the counter. She said, “Miss Chick, thank you for breakfast.”

  She knew Joan was too young to have watched Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty flirt on the TV show Gunsmoke, but she felt like Miss Kitty when she replied, “My pleasure, handsome.”

  The sheriff smiled and shook her head, then put on her cowboy hat as she passed through the door. A few minutes later, Cat hugged Donny and Chick, saying, “I need to get to work.”

  “Can’t you and Joan even walk out a door at the same time?” Donny asked, leading Pennylane back in with a basket of tomatoes.

  “Leave her alone,” said Chick. “They need to do what they need to do.”

  Cat explained, “Joan says all it takes is one careless minute and some Orange County transplant will have an impeachment petition with four hundred names, and we only have nineteen hundred people in Waterfall Falls.”

  By late morning Chick needed to prop open the front and back doors to let out the heat of the late-morning sun. Donny had gone to the bank for change, leaving Pennylane to fill the bulk bins. Pennylane was well-dusted with chickpea and soy flour and more cheerful now, if hesitant with the customers. Chick began to dream of taking a vacation with Donny while Pennylane ran the store. The woman, after feeding all those people for so many years, knew her hippie health foods.

  Katie bounced through the front door, holding aloft a check. “I got it!” she cried. “My friend in New York gave me the go-ahead to do Funeral for a Forest!”

  “That’s amazing!” Chick said. “Our Katie’s going to do a TV documentary?”

  “For a network, girlfriend. And they’re giving me money up front so I can live here, live the story!”

  Chick admired Katie’s spunk, the nervous energy that seemed to force her to create. Poor Katie got put down a lot for placing her life, all their lives, under scrutiny, but wouldn’t this work to their advantage in the long run? Maybe it would, as Katie thought, save the trees to have their plight personalized, so people all over the country would learn to care.

  “I’m still a sixties kid,” she told Katie, taking a warm, petite hand in her own. “I believe you’ll make a difference.”

  “Oh I will. We have to tell people the story. What do they know about it, living in the cities or on the plains and being fed this propaganda about renewable resources and retraining? They don’t understand that this is their land that’s being converted into bucks for big business, that their grandkids won’t have any resources if we let things go on the way they have.”

  Pennylane came up to the counter and wiped her hands on her apron.

  Katie stepped back as if to see Pennylane better. “I didn’t know you had a new helper.”

  “This isn’t any old helper. This is our new sidekick, Pennylane. Penny, meet Katie.”

  “I know you,” Katie said. “Your picture was in the paper.”

  “For all the wrong reasons,” Pennylane said. She hid her gap-toothed smile behind her hand.

  “I thought that dim judge was going to treat you like a felon when it was obvious your husband ran you. That’s a tough one, needing the dude’s drugs.”

  Pennylane sounded sullen again. “I like to think I had something to do with my first forty-three years.”

  “Why? Most women don’t.” Katie looked at Chick. “I have to fess up to your helper, Chick. I mean some of this is my fault.”

  Chick had been wondering how to give Pennylane this awkward bit of news. “Because you called the sheriff when M.C. threatened to hurt you?” she asked.

  “I turned him in—Penny? Is that your name?”

  Pennylane nodded and looked at Katie for a long moment. “I guess it’s like Chick says, the Goddess works in
wonderful ways.”

  “The Goddess?” Katie said slowly, as if tasting the word.

  With a shy laugh Pennylane said, “M.C. has tainted enough lives. I’m glad he didn’t hurt you too. He was a pretty desperate hombre by then.”

  “Oh. I’m too tough and wily for any old dealer to mess me up.” Katie looked at Chick. “When does Pennylane get a break? Want to have a latte with me, Penny?”

  “As if I could stop Katie-energy. Watch out for this woman, Penny. She’s insatiable for other people’s stories. Two lattes coming up. On the house—to celebrate your project, Katie.”

  “You’re a TV writer?” she heard Pennylane ask as they moved to a booth by the window. “That is so far out there. Where do you get the courage?”

  And Katie’s urgency as she said, “So are you really into this goddess stuff?”

  Chick went out in front of the store and stood on the covered sidewalk, breathing in the smell of hot dust. She didn’t hear the snort of trucks accelerating or the frequent whoosh of the cars pushing eighty up on the freeway. She didn’t see the gas stations up the hill or their lighted signs, only the faded gray stair-step storefronts as they might have looked a hundred-odd years ago. The cafe, Fina’s Finery, the store that sold jeans, saddles, and riding gear, could have been there back then. Outlaws might pull into town any minute. She’d come to look forward to the days Sheriff Sweet rode the length of Stage Street like a U.S. marshal charged with keeping the peace in a wild frontier town.

  A hot flash crept through her body, radiating out from under her rib cage. That heat, combined with the noon sun, was like a sauna, moist yet dry, unbearable yet cleansing, a feeling she dreaded and at the same time reveled in. The Goddess must be making all the arrangements, she thought. I couldn’t have chosen a more satisfying place to live.

  The town and its people, with its smattering of dykes, could not have been more commonplace or more rare. It drew modern-day pioneers like the land women and bandits like M.C.; it produced Claras and Hectors, Cats and Lukes, Rs and Joans. Was there another place in America like this, or was this like every place in America, only her size, so she could grasp it, understand it, embrace it. She got teary with love for Waterfall Falls, her home now and her homeland. She could feel another scrap of her sadness float up over the mountains toward the sea.

  Inside, Katie and Penny’s heads leaned together over their table. Chick was chuckling again when Donny returned from the bank with the change bag.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “People. Here goes Katie again, this time interviewing Pennylane for her film.”

  Donny followed her eyes. “And she’ll probably paste her in right with M.C., just as if she taped them together.”

  “Kind of like real life, the way things fall in place,” Chick said, slipping a hand under the bib of Donny’s overalls.

  “Like my mama always said, will wonders never cease.” Donny squirmed against her hand as Hector and Clara pulled into one of the diagonal parking spots in front of the store. “Looks like Luke’s other Grandma and Grandpa are here.”

  “Did you ever wonder if this store’s become the center of the universe?”

  “Isn’t it?” Donny asked with a straight face.

  Chick smiled. “I suppose the planet could do worse.”

  “It’s the kind of day I expect to see Mr. Bigot himself, John Johnson, come in here with a white flag.”

  Clara’s strident voice preceded her. “Where’s that paper you’ve been having all those women sign up on to take care of the lady with the breast cancer?” When R started needing care, lesbians from women’s land all over the state stopped by to ask how they could help, as if this was the attack against which they’d planned to circle their covered wagons all along. Chick had finally blocked out a month on a piece of notebook paper and told them to sign on. Clara added, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to help.”

  “Maybe she wants her own kind around her at the last,” Hector suggested.

  “And maybe she shouldn’t be so fussy. Her friends would probably like some time off. Where is it?”

  Chick pulled a clipboard out from under a stack of order books under the counter. “As long as you’re of the female persuasion, I don’t imagine R will object.”

  Donny gave a grunt. Her attitude toward Pennylane might have done a turnaround, but her opinion of R hadn’t improved. Chick suspected Abe might have shared some state secrets Donny didn’t find to her liking but was too honorable to reveal.

  “Okay, let’s try this one, gang,” said Hector. “When does a ship tell a falsehood?”

  Donny groaned. “Get it over with, Bob Hope.”

  “When she lies at the wharf!”

  “Cut!” Katie said, jumping up and taking off her sunglasses. “I knew there was something I came here to tell you.”

  Chick felt cold. “R’s not worse, is she?”

  “Who knows? Sorry. I got distracted by my New York call. R’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Donny repeated.

  Chick felt like an earthquake was shaking the Valley.

  “Gone,” Donny went on, “like dead or like split?”

  “Like she has blown this taco stand, people.” Katie gestured toward the freeway with her sunglasses. “Her ex-husband came to take her away at the crack of dawn, complete with her two grown sons to load up the truck. She took her wigged-out macaw so you know she’s not coming back.”

  “But, R?” Chick protested. She felt around for the stool she sat on to do the books. Donny slid it under her. “This can’t be happening. She talked about her husband and their sons like they were something she’d cleaned out of the litter box.”

  Katie said, “She hadn’t changed her mind on that as of last night when she came by the cabin where I’m crashing, but this morning, before anyone else was up, she went with the men. They had an SUV. It made a lot of noise coming up the mountain, then backing to her yurt. I watched the women move out of their spaces in nightclothes and stand staring. The mist was hovering over the ground. They looked like ghosts. No one said a word. R didn’t even look at us.”

  “Now we know,” said Donnie, “who all those secret rendezvous were with.”

  “Check,” Katie agreed. “Her bouncing baby boys. Count them—two.”

  “This is too strange,” Chick said. “I can’t take it in. And you, Katie? You’re back at Spirit Ridge?”

  “Once Abeo left and R got sick, I lost my attitude fast.”

  Clara’s eyes followed from speaker to speaker. Hector had taken off his hat and was scratching his bald spot.

  “Go on,” urged Chick. “There’s got to be an explanation.”

  Katie rubbed together thumb and index finger. “Dinero. Hubby has the big bucks to finance a cure down in Mexico. There’s also a guy in New York she’s trying to get in to see. He does curing with nutrition.”

  “But,” Chick protested, well aware that the messenger couldn’t change a thing, “she’d accepted that she was going to die. She was looking forward to her personal audience with the Goddess.”

  “I guess she changed her mind.”

  “What, Donny?” Chick asked. “You look like you’re choking.”

  “I’m not surprised, that’s all. I’m just not surprised.” Donny let out a quiet laugh. “Some women can’t give up on men. And some men might be worth going back to, right, Hector? What’s going to happen to all those women on the land?”

  “I hadn’t even thought of that.” Chick glanced at the clock. They’d get a flood of customers come noon. Thank goodness it wasn’t senior citizens’ day or they’d be swamped by now. Half an hour to get it together.

  “You have to understand,” Katie said. “R’s a panicked woman. She told me last night that she may have to sell the land if her ex runs out of funds and she still needs therapy.”

  “Sell the land?” Chick exclaimed. “She can’t do that. Too many of you depend on living there.”

  “At her pleasure,” said
Donny in a tone both sarcastic and disgusted. “She has no use for it anymore. It served her purpose only as long as it drew in volunteers to help pay the mortgage, or keep her company, or to get one of her projects done.”

  Chick spoke sharply. “R gave back as much as she took.”

  Donny turned sad eyes on her. “She did. But the equation’s changed now, ladies. She resigned as prime taker.”

  Katie asked, “Do you really think R’s that much of a user?”

  Donny answered, “I do. We all are, sometimes, and we all have reasons to let ourselves be used, but I think R’s the hustle queen. Does that mean I’d vote for M.C. as chief dogcatcher over R? She raised my blood pressure now and then, but on a scale of one to ten, with M.C. being a 10, I’d say R was only about a two enemy-wise.”

  “I have to admit I’m going to benefit,” Katie said. “She asked me to come back to Spirit Ridge rent free and help Dorothea take care of things. That’s the other reason I’ll be able to do this script; the cash advance wouldn’t have been enough by itself.”

  “Poor R,” said Chick. “I hope she finds her cure. Whoever or whatever she really is, wherever she got her money, how she left—she made a place where women could be themselves. Whether she was one of us or not, she gave us ourselves.”

  “God love her. She wanted to change the world like the rest of you girls, didn’t she?” Clara slowly shook her head. “Life kicks the legs right out from under us just when we think we’re in charge.”

  Chick grabbed onto Donny’s arm and held it tight between her hands. “Thank you, Goddess,” she whispered, astounded by the joy and wholesomeness she found in her life, “for everything you’ve given me.”

  “For what you’ve created, my little chickadee,” Donny said. “It’s good because you are.”

  Chick squeezed her eyes shut to keep back tears. “I do want to be good, to do good,” she whispered, pleased at this discovery. “For us and for all of them.” She released Donny’s arm and gestured to their friends talking among themselves.

  Pennylane went back to the disordered health-and-beauty shelves. Chick felt hopeful about her industriousness. The woman really wanted a new life for herself. She didn’t see Cat’s truck arrive, but she heard Jeep doing her donkey laugh somewhere outside.