Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

  Bob and Warren. They had been Bob-and-Warren since almost as far back as he could remember, back to when they were six. They had sat beside each other at school, had eaten from the same paste pot clear through third grade, staunchly defending each other when questioned. No, ma’am, they’d say. If he was eating,I woulda seen him, and I didn’t see nothing, I swear.

  They’d both lived in the Eden’s View Trailer Park out back of the First Church of God, and it was generally acknowledged that they were the poorest kids at Hubbard Elementary, and that was saying something, Hubbard’s being a poor town to begin with.

  Everybody had a story. Bob’s began when his mother, Vivian, ran away the day before Bob’s fifth birthday and his father dumped him on Vivian’s sister, Bets, with the promise that he would repay her with a lifetime of free auto repairs. It hadn’t been much of a deal to begin with, his father being an indifferent mechanic, but then he died two months later in an accident at the mill involving caustics and a loose valve. People said by the time someone could get to him, he looked like raw meat weeping. It took him a couple of days to actually die, but that was just a technicality.

  After that it was him, Aunt Bets, and a one-eared tomcat named Pretty Boy. Bets doted on the cat, fed him choice scraps she brought home from work at the Sentry Market over in Sawyer. Pretty Boy ate pork loin and sirloin and prime ribs of beef, salmon and halibut and albacore tuna. Bob ate Wheaties and milk and occasionally a pork chop when Bets could be bothered to fix one. Sometimes when her back was turned, Bob would sneak some scraps from Pretty Boy’s bowl, trading the cat for his leftover cereal milk. He and Pretty Boy generally banded together when Bets was in one of her moods, and she was often in one of her moods, seeing as how her feet were always killing her from standing up at the Sentry, running a cash register all day long. She packed a wallop for someone four feet ten. She slapped and she hit and one time she bit him. Bob and Pretty Boy both stayed out of the trailer most of the time and no matter what the weather.

  But when Bob turned six, the Lord must have heard his prayers, because Warren Bigelow and his family moved into the dump next door. Warren’s father gambled for a living, but he’d been on a losing streak since the year before Warren was born, so the family mood was generally sour. They yelled a lot, everyone in the family except Warren, who never said anything to anyone unless he absolutely had to. He claimed he hadn’t talked at all until he was four years old, and Bob believed it. For the first week that Warren lived next door, Bob thought he was retarded or maybe deaf, but it turned out he was just careful. When it came to making up his mind, Warren believed in taking his time, but when he was good and ready, he talked to Bob all right, and after that he never stopped. He’d talk about anything: airplanes and death and car wrecks and the way his mother hit him with a slotted spoon once so hard that he had striped bruises for a month. Another thing about Warren was he ate dirt. He’d take up a pinch like fine candy and pop it into his mouth. He told Bob he’d always been a dirt eater. Bob couldn’t see it himself. He tried it once, but it tasted like shit, plus he kept thinking of all the banana slugs that had oozed over it. He told Warren that, but Warren only shrugged and went right on eating dirt, a little every day.

  Warren was the most beautiful person Bob had ever seen. His eyes were so dark they were almost black, and his hair was the exact color and sheen of a crow. He was pale, though, paler than anyone Bob had ever seen, which was saying something, all the people in Hubbard being pale from the never-ending rain. You could see all his veins winding around under his skin, headed for his heart, and he had a cleft in his chin and dimples when he smiled. The other boys said he looked like a girl, but Bob always thought he looked more like an angel. He’d never seen a dark-haired angel, of course, but he was willing to allow as how Warren might be the first, especially since he’d never actually seen a blond-haired angel either.

  The two boys took to each other like salvation. Around Hubbard they were commonly acknowledged as strays, but since they didn’t cause trouble and had each other for ballast, they were given a wide berth. They ate hot lunches for free thanks to the unspoken largesse of Bea Jones, the cafeteria cook, and were encouraged to wash their faces and hands in the boys’ bathroom every morning by Mrs. Norris, the school nurse, who kept washcloths and towels there just for them. She also checked them regularly for head lice, which were found on neither of them or on both. A number of families left secondhand clothes for them with Mr. Deloitte, the principal of Hubbard Elementary in those days. Say what you would, Hubbard took care of its own.

  Being neither missed nor mourned in their respective trailers, every summer the boys took to roaming the three hundred thousand acres of Weyerhaeuser timberland that stretched back of Hubbard into the low Coast Range mountains. At first all they found were unceasing fir trees, but when they were ten, they discovered a derelict homestead in a little valley choked with alders. There was a cabin, a fallen barn, leaning fences, and an overgrown pasture on a tiny stream they named Homesick Creek—the spare remains of lives that had guttered out or moved on ten or fifteen years before.

  Warren was the first inside, pushing the cabin door open wide and slow, so if there were any ghosts in there, they could leave in an orderly fashion instead of running over the top of him and Bob. Warren claimed to have trafficked with a ghost or two, and in this, as in much else, Bob took him at his word.

  Inside, the cabin walls were stained a rich tarry brown, the color in the bowl of a well-loved pipe, and rich with the odors of loam and smoke and dereliction. They found a primitive bedstead in the front room, its mattress ticking carefully rolled back and still stuffed with hay, though now old and rotten. The fireplace had been swept clean, as if someone had loved the place enough to leave it tidy even at the moment of abandonment. The roof was in better condition over the front room, but even so, daylight came through in dozens of places. Birds and rodents had made nests in the corners and low rafters of the place, and the windows were as empty as missing eyes. A quick search of the yard and overgrown kitchen garden yielded an old iron skillet, a kettle, and a stoneware crock, cracked but still watertight.

  “Why do you think they left?” Warren said, standing in the middle of the front room again, shivering in the gloom and the spookiness and damp.

  “Something bad,” Bob said.

  “Bad?”

  “Like maybe a wolf attacked their cow or something.”

  “Are there wolves here?” Warren said with apprehension.

  “Well, coyotes.”

  “Coyotes can kill a cow?”

  “Sure,” Bob said.

  “Can they kill people?”

  “Nah, but they can gnaw your leg pretty good, I bet.”

  Warren shuddered. “Maybe someone came back here and killed everyone.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Maybe there was gold.”

  “Maybe they all got sick,” Bob said.

  “Sick?”

  Bob shrugged. “Could have. Smallpox, maybe, or yellow fever.”

  “So do you think anyone else knows about this place?”

  “Don’t look like it,” Bob said. “I say it’s ours.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “Why not?”

  Warren grinned. “Hey, we’ve got a house!”

  “Except we can’t tell anyone.”

  “I swear,” Warren said gravely. If there was one thing they understood, it was the worth of a house.

  “Me too,” said Bob. “Shake.”

  They shook hands with great solemnity.

  “So now it’s ours?” Warren said.

  “Yup.”

  And it had been. Many times in summer they stayed overnight, lighting a fire of twigs and branches, huddling together on the mattress ticking they’d made. In sleep they would often spoon up like puppies, Bob gratefully accepting the heat radiating from Warren’s perpetual sunburn. Sheltered from the ocean winds, they often shucked off their clothes and spent the days naked.
It had been Warren’s idea at first, but Bob had taken to it happily. They were Indians; they were heathens; they were in the Garden of Eden, where Warren usually consented to play Eve. But mostly they were settlers facing scarlet fever, crop failure, ax injuries, plague. By the end of August they both had perfected dying. Warren worked up to a series of twitches and spasms, as though he were being electrocuted or eaten alive from the inside out. Bob’s interpretation was less showy, involving massive paralysis followed by a single convulsive tic and the crowning touch, a trickle of drool out of one corner of his mouth.

  It had all been so long ago and started so well.

  Bob pushed himself out from under the Bloom minivan. He had found nothing wrong, of course, so he changed out filters and belts, not wanting to disappoint Faye. If he began to make up to her for all the cruel things the kids had done to her with this admittedly small act of kindness, maybe God would look down on him with pity. It was a long shot, a very long shot, but it was worth floating out there. You never knew who might be watching, God or even a lesser angel.

  It was one forty-five. He was due at the health clinic at two.

  He could hear his pulse hammering in his ears.

  Fuck.

  In the bathroom he cleaned his hands as well as he could and wiped down his face. The way he figured it, you shouldn’t go to the health department in less than excellent condition. Otherwise you were giving them a chance to blame you for whatever it was they found wrong. Telling Francine he was taking a late lunch, he grabbed his jacket and walked the plank of the dealership parking lot to the Caprice. Fucking car leaked like a sieve; a new puddle mocked him from the passenger seat. Some mechanic he was, owning a car the color of a used sanitary napkin and worth about as much. Somehow the money just went, and the best he could manage was trading one beater for another. He knew Anita wanted a nice car, nice like Hack’s LTD: landau roof, leather upholstery, radio that worked, power windows, power steering, seats as comfortable as old armchairs. It wasn’t going to happen, though, not now.

  At the clinic he was told to have a seat and someone would come out for him shortly. Why was it that government offices made you wait, often for a long time, even when there was just one other person in the waiting room? Did they sit back there and linger over an extra cup of coffee, just so you’d know they were better than you? He didn’t keep people waiting at the dealership. It wasn’t that hard to be on time.

  He sat in one of eight molded plastic seats bolted to an aluminum frame—like anyone would steal the ugly pieces of shit if they were separated. Across the room, in a beat-up wooden teacher’s chair, a young woman with stringy blond hair and a hooded sweatshirt two sizes too big rocked a screaming baby in her arms. Hell’s lobby must be like this place, an ugly, down-at-heel room where they handed out faulty vaccines and notices of impending death.

  “I didn’t know if I should feed her before they gave her the shots,” the girl across the room apologized to Bob over the screams of the baby, looking like she might start crying, herself.

  A nurse appeared in the doorway. “Dorothy? Come on back.”

  “I didn’t know if I should feed her before you gave her the shots,” she said as she followed the nurse through the door.

  Bob looked at his hands, back and front, at the broken nails, at the old grease that would never come off if he washed a million times with pure Comet cleanser, at the wedding band he hadn’t taken off once in twenty-one years. He and Anita had picked them out at a jewelry store over in Sawyer: nineteen years old and getting married. Kids. He had still been boy-skinny, barely bearded, cock of the walk, marrying a girl he couldn’t believe he’d landed.

  “Bob?”

  The woman who’d drawn his blood last week stood in the doorway in a white nurse’s smock, wise-eyed and weary, her skin softly furred. It occurred to Bob as he stood that she might be the last person who would ever see him as a man with a future, as the person he had been and assumed he always would be. She knew his test results; she might already know that she was looking at a dead man.

  He was scared. He was so goddamned scared.

  They walked down a short hall decorated with posters from Al-Anon, AA, a breast cancer support group, the La Leche League. She showed him into a small, cluttered office and indicated that he should sit in the visitor’s chair. She took her own seat on the other side of a beat-to-death old wooden desk.

  “How are you?” She asked him as though she meant it.

  Bob slumped. “Okay. You know.”

  “Good,” she said, letting the lie pass, and opened a manila folder in front of her on the desk. “Okay then, let’s see.” She extracted a slip of paper and smoothed it on top of his folder.

  Bob wondered if he might vomit.

  He watched her take a breath and fold her hands on top of the paper. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “Your HIV test came back positive. The lab ran it twice just to be sure.”

  Bob dropped his head. His ears began to roar, but inside his mind it was suddenly quiet, deadly quiet; deeper than deafness, absolute as a vacuum.

  “Would you like a glass of water?” the nurse said.

  “No.”

  “Would you like a minute to yourself?”

  Bob shook his head.

  “Then let’s talk about what this means.”

  “My wife.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Yeah.” Bob jackknifed over his knees. “Does she have it?”

  “Do you mean, is she HIV positive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you had unprotected vaginal or anal sex with her?”

  Bob nodded. Murderer.

  “Unfortunately, there’s no way to know that without a test,” the nurse said. “But just because you’re infected, it doesn’t mean that she is. For every time you had unprotected intercourse, she had a one-in-a-hundred chance of being infected. It’s possible to beat the odds. But she needs to come in so we can find out. In the meantime I can’t stress enough how important it is that you practice safe sex. Are you familiar with the term?”

  “Rubbers.” He could feel gummy spit building up in the corners of his mouth: fear spit, coward’s spit.

  “Condoms, yes, but there are also other sexual practices and alternatives that are safe. Mutual masturbation, fondling, protected oral sex. I’ll give you some literature about it.”

  Bob licked his lips. “How long have I had it?”

  “There isn’t a test that can tell us that,” the nurse said. “I wish there were. We’ll need to find out how many T-cells you still—”

  “I heard you can have it for years before you get sick. If I’ve had it for a long time, my wife has it too.”

  “Let’s not jump that fence yet. Bring her in and let’s get her tested. Then we aren’t guessing.”

  “How?”

  “How can you get her here?” the nurse said. “I’m sure we can arrange for transportation, if that’s a problem for you.”

  “No, I mean how can I get her tested without telling her why?”

  She looked at him compassionately, her voice low and even. “Honesty is usually best, though it’s never easy. Is there any possibility that you might have gotten the virus from her and not the other way around? Has she had other sexual partners? Is she an intravenous drug user?”

  Bob shook his head dumbly.

  “Then you’ll have to tell your other partners about your HIV status too,” the nurse said. “That means anyone you’ve had unprotected sex with.”

  “He knows,” Bob whispered. “He’s sick. He’s already sick.”

  “I see.” The nurse leaned across the desk. “Listen. There are things we can do, that we can get started on right away, to prolong your quality of life, and your wife’s too, if she’s also HIV positive. We can’t prevent this nightmare, but we can sure turn up the lights a little. There’s a drug called AZT that’s just been approved. It keeps your T-cell count from dropping as quickly—”

  “Do you believe in Go
d?”

  The nurse sat back in her chair. “Yes, I do,” she said evenly. “I didn’t always.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did I start believing in Him?”

  Bob wiped his face on his sleeve. “Yeah.”

  “Three years ago my son was in a head-on collision. He was in a coma for two months. We were told he’d never walk again, never speak clearly. If you saw him now, if you talked to him, you’d never know anything had ever happened.”

  “And God did that?”

  The nurse said softly, “I think He did, yes.”

  “My wife is going to die.”

  “You don’t know that yet.”

  “I’m going to die.”

  The nurse looked away.

  “What kind of a God would do a thing like that?”

  “That’s a question only you and He can answer. I’m afraid what I have to offer is more practical.” She began pulling pamphlets and photocopied pages out of her desk drawers. “Let’s go on. We have a lot to talk about.”

  “We got nothing to talk about.”

  “What?”

  “Can you make my test negative?”

  “No.”

  “Then nothing you’ve got to talk about is what I need to hear.” Bob stood and circled the room, stopping in front of a poster about prenatal health care. He studied it for several minutes and then said, “Nobody knew about this shit when Nita was pregnant, you know? Hell, she ate pizza, drank beer, smoked a pack a day. She wouldn’t have done that stuff if we’d have known.”

  The nurse watched him.

  “That’s the thing: We wouldn’t have done it if we’d have known. But we didn’t know,” he said. “How the fuck were we supposedto know?”

  “No one knew,” the nurse said gently. “No one could possibly have known.”

  Bob stalled where he stood, looking out the window at the meaningless street, the pointless traffic, tears running down the panes of his face like rain.