Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

  The nurse said, “There’s a support group through Sawyer Memorial for HIV-positive people and their families. They get together every week, on Tuesdays, I believe. I think you should consider going.”

  He kept his back turned. “And sit around with a bunch of dying faggots? No way.”

  “Homosexual men aren’t the only people who get AIDS,” the nurse said evenly.

  “Yeah?”

  “There are hemophiliacs, people who’ve had tainted blood transfusions or shared IV needles, family members like your own. And someone is usually there from the Sawyer Hospice.”

  “What does that mean, hospice?”

  “A place where terminally ill people and the people who love them can find dignity and support,” the nurse said.

  “You mean a place where people go to die.”

  “Not only that.”

  “No way,” Bob said. “No fucking way.”

  The nurse stood, seeing that Bob was leaving, but he paused at the door. “What’s your name?”

  “Gabriella,” the nurse said. “Gabriella Lewis. I hope you’ll come back in and talk to me when you feel ready. Or to your family doctor.”

  Bob smiled a thin smile. Bets used to read the Bible to him, so he knew that the archangel Gabriel delivered divine messages.

  God Himself was fucking with him.

  He walked out without another word.

  From a pay phone outside the True Value, Bob called the dealership and told Francine he was sick and wouldn’t be back for the rest of the afternoon. When she pressed, he said it was nothing, just a bad headache, sinus infection maybe, and hung up. He had no idea what he was going to do next, except that he couldn’t go home, at least not yet. So he got back in the Caprice and drove. There were two orange triangles hoisted at the coast guard station: another gale coming in. For now, though, it was so still that the air itself seemed to be weeping.

  As he crested Cape Mano, Bob found himself thinking about jumpers. When he was in high school, a kid had jumped off one of the cliffs, killing himself on the rocks nearly a thousand feet below. They said he died instantly, but how could someone know that? Maybe he’d been alive for a few minutes, too broken to move and feeling the advancing tide already licking his shoes. Drowning had always scared the shit out of him; that was one reason he’d never made much of an effort to fish commercially, though you could make a fortune at it. Boats went down, disappeared, were found with no one on board, drifting empty for weeks, sometimes months. He and Warren used to talk about it sometimes, Bob’s morbid fear of the water. Warren said Bob had probably been in his mother’s womb too long, and that’s where it had all started, the business of breathing amniotic fluid when he was ready to be breathing air. Bob agreed the unconscious memory of sucking that thick fluid into his lungs could make a man nervous. Maybe that was it, and maybe it wasn’t, but either way the ocean scared the hell out of him, and so did falling. Walt Disney movie characters always died by falling, as though it were painless, but Bob knew that was bullshit. You might die instantly at the bottom, but you were thinking all the way down.

  Two miles south of Hubbard, he turned off Highway 101 onto a rough logging road leading inland. He’d never followed it before, though it had been put in a couple of years before by the Weyerhaeuser Catskinners, elite heavy equipment operators who could navigate a Caterpillar on a thirty-degree slope. Now he steered the old Caprice like an ark, wallowing in holes and rising up again on firm track, clinging to steep hillsides. The entire area had been clear-cut right after the road was put in, and there were snags and stumps everywhere. It used to take Bob and Warren two hours to hike in, but now, in just ten minutes, he was in their little homestead valley, the first time in nearly twenty years. He had assumed that when the area was logged, the homestead had been destroyed, but instead he found the alders still standing on the banks of Homesick Creek, providing a fringe of grace around the cabin. He shut off the Caprice and sat for a minute, listening to the gentle tap of raindrops on the car roof. It was so peaceful here, so quiet. The cabin still stood, patient as Methuselah: I have seen some things, O Lord, and I have given shelter.

  Bob walked to the cabin and pushed open the front door that he and Warren had planed so it would shut behind them. From inside he could see that their childish repairs to the roof hadn’t held; a lot of the shingles were missing, and the walls had new gaps and cracks where the boards had split and fallen away. It had taken nearly all summer when they were thirteen to patch the cabin together with old boards from the barn and nails they’d stolen one at a time from the True Value. But the bedstead was still there, and on top of it was the hay-filled ticking they’d made to replace the old one, a wild patchwork of scraps taken from Bets’s fabric bag. Now it was worn too, but it held when Bob unfurled it and sat down, feeling the familiar crackle of hay. It was cold in here, but he didn’t build a fire for fear the chimney was clogged with birds’ nests and the accumulated booty of packrats.

  He and Warren had brought Anita and Sheryl here just once, when they were eighteen. It must have been just before the Miss Harrison County pageant, because he could remember Anita fussing about not wanting to mess up her manicure. Miss Harrison County—my God, but that had been a night. Bob had been speechless with pride to see Anita dressed up so fine like that, with her gown and her matching pumps and satin sash. He had sat in the audience at the Elks Lodge, where the pageant was held every year, the grand elder’s chair turned into a throne for just that evening, and stared and stared at this girl who had agreed to be with him when she could have chosen anyone. She had done her swimsuit promenade and runway turns like a movie star, and when it was over, he had held her coat and her champagne glass while she posed for picture after picture. They had stayed at the reception until the very end, both of them drunk, he on beer and her beauty, she on champagne and attention. Afterward they’d parked in a pullout on Cape Mano and traded in their virginity. He had held her in his arms in the tight backseat of his Buick and marveled at her softness after the hard planes of Warren. They coupled in the backseat twice, their blood rich and warm, their prospects bright and whole, because up until then nothing in their lives had gone wrong yet, not really wrong anyway. At eighteen they still held to the touching delusion that failure happens in catastrophic ways instead of by inches, from the inside out.

  Less than a year later Anita had Patrick, his nursing mouth like a sucker pulling Anita’s life toward him and away from Bob. Then, unable to make a living, Warren had moved to Portland. Bob stayed behind, failing at both jobs and sobriety, talking more, doing less, making his furtive pilgrimages to Warren four or five times a year, running up big phone bills in between, and then they got evicted from the house on Adams Street. Anita didn’t think Bob had seen her crying as they picked up their things from the yard where they’d been thrown, but she was wrong; he’d seen her clutching the bag with her pageant gown; he’d seen it all, the terrible humiliation and the sadness.

  He shivered, sitting on the creaky old bedstead in the gathering dark. For something to do, he picked up a loose board lying on the floor. Which one of their ghosts, his or Warren’s, had put it down in that exact spot twenty years before, meaning to get back to it in a second that never came? He stroked the grain, remembering how much he’d loved the feel of wood in his hands, the dying gift of grand old trees. He and Warren argued once about whether trees have souls. Warren maintained that they did: the stronger the soul, the more resilient the tree. In Warren’s mind, trees broke during windstorms not because of physics but fear. Bob had said that was bunk, but now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe, after all, it took more than luck to withstand a high wind.

  He picked a nail loose with his pocketknife, a square-headed nail that had been handmade by some settler dazzled with the good fortune of being here in this protected place, this sheltered valley. And to Bob and Warren too, it had been a sanctuary— away from the molding, rotting trailers behind the First Church of God; away from Bets’s temper, hardening o
ver the years into bitterness; away from Warren’s mother’s suicide by hanging the year they were sixteen.

  Do you think they got lonely here? Anita had asked Bob after looking the homestead over. It’s so far away.

  Away from what?

  Everything.

  Life can happen anywhere, he’d said. But evidently he’d been wrong.

  A sudden gust chilled him through a broad crack in the wall beside him. Shivering, Bob picked up the board on his lap, and the square-headed nail, and found the old claw hammer he and Warren used to keep under the bedstead. He seated the nail and pounded it in. For a little while, at least, the patch would hold.

  The last of the light had gone. Bob closed the door behind him tenderly and saddled up the damned Caprice. It was time to go home.

  chapter eight

  The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar, “O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are, You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!”

  —EDWARD LEAR, 1871

  Sweating lightly, Hack hunched over the book of children’s poems that Rae Macy had brought in while she read aloud over his shoulder in a light, clear voice. He should have been making sly innuendos, breathing in her nearness, her subtle perfume, and her heat. Instead he was trying to control his breathing as the return of memory thrummed in his veins like jungle drums.

  And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand

  They danced by the light of the moon,

  The moon,

  The moon,

  They danced by the light of the moon.

  Rae pressed her hands together in delight and returned to her chair. “My mother used to read me that one. If she read it once, I bet she read it a thousand times, and I never got tired of it.”

  Hack closed the book cover he still saw sometimes in his dreams.

  “Hack? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure? You looked so pale for a minute.”

  “Must have been the poetry, princess,” he said wearily. “I have a sensitive nature.”

  Rae looked wounded. “For a minute you had me fooled into thinking you liked these.”

  “Sure I like them. What makes you think I don’t like them? Hell, I’ve memorized them.”

  “Have you?” Rae tucked the book under her arm protectively. “I don’t know. You’re the most confounding man sometimes.”

  “That’s me, princess. I can found with the best of ’em.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Rae pursed her lips and regarded him for a long minute. “Tell me about your sister.”

  “Maybe sometime.”

  “Not now?”

  “Not now.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “No.”

  Rae flushed and rose.

  “Can I borrow that book overnight?” he said, trying to keep his tone light.

  “Only if you’ll tell me about your sister when you give it back.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Hack said, figuring he’d get out of it somehow. The book was calling as powerfully as any love letter. He could feel the thick cardboard covers in his hands even after all these years, the top right corner buggered up where someone’s baby had teethed on it, purchased for a quarter in an act of fierce pride at the annual Tin Spoon library sale.

  Hack’s phone rang, startling him badly. He needed to get a grip on himself.

  “Hey,” Bunny said.

  “Hey.” He waggled his fingers at Rae; bye for now. She left the book on his desk and walked out of the room, flushing a deep crimson. Jesus, the woman was sensitive. Her other half must have quite the challenge some days.

  “I’m bringing Mom over to see the doctor,” Bunny was saying. “We should be done around noon. Do you want us to pick you up for lunch?”

  Shirl. God, but he wasn’t in the mood for his mother-in-law right now, with her loud voice and thrusting bosom, but he knew how it would go if he blew them off. Bunny would sulk, and Shirl would sniff and tell Bunny that it looked to her like family didn’t count for shit anymore. “Yeah, why don’t you stop by at least?” he said. “I have a customer who might be coming in, but I won’t know until later.”

  For years Bunny hadn’t come over to Sawyer more than once a month, twice at most, to shop the Safeway specials, but now it seemed like she was here every other day to keep an eye on him, remind him he was hers, taken, claimed. Jesus, as though he’d forget. She’d come back from Fanny’s a mess, though. He guessed she’d seen life through her sister’s eyes, and it had scared the shit out of her. But Fanny had married a dick, a son of a bitch who fucked around every chance he got and treated Fanny like live-in help. Say whatever else you wanted about him, but Hack was no dick. He knew where home was, much as he liked his fun like anybody else. If Bunny didn’t know that about him by now, there was nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t going to pander to her, reassure her every minute that he wasn’t having an affair with Rae Macy, goddamn it. He wasn’t. He wouldn’t. Mind you, he would’ve given a lot to see where they might go, him and Rae, but he was a man with a keen sense of reality, and the reality of the thing was that he and Rae Macy were pendulums swinging in opposite directions. They passed each other regularly and made a beautiful noise when they did, but that was all they were or ever would be. The rest was just so much mental masturbation.

  Hack noticed that Bunny had hung up, so he must have said good-bye. He set down the receiver and rubbed his eyes.

  The book throbbed in his mind like an old wound.

  Katy had brought home their copy from the annual Tin Spoon library sale like a conqueror triumphant. The kid already loved to read, and she was only seven that year. She’d pleaded with Hack to take her.

  “Come on, Buddy,” she’d wheedled. That’s what she called him, Buddy. “I’ve got some money.”

  “Where’d you get money? You didn’t roll old Mr. Nelson again, did you?”

  Katy put her hands on her hips. “Buddy,” she’d said indignantly. Hack was always accusing her of the most heinous crimes against the frail and aged of Tin Spoon.

  “So c’mon, tell me where you got it.”

  “Mr. Elliott gave me a quarter for holding open the door for him at the Thriftway.”

  “Honey, you can’t block the doors like that until they pay you. It’s against the law.”

  “Oh, Buddy,” she said, hands on small hips.

  He even cracked himself up sometimes.

  Still, people were always slipping the Katydid money, a dime, a quarter, even a couple of bucks sometimes. It wasn’t pity money either; it was treat money, thanks-for-that-smile money, because Katy had the gift of delight, and it shone through everything she did. People smiled just because she was smiling, greeted her because it made her light up when they did. And he didn’t just think that because she was his kid sister; people were always asking about her when he was in town alone, sending their greetings home with him.

  So he’d given in and walked with her to the library sale on a scorching hot day when he would rather have been anywhere else. The library was a squat concrete building in the center of town, a WPA legacy with a frieze of heroic, thick-necked men and women parading across the front. They were presumably bound for glory on account of the knowledge gained from the books within. Privately Hack thought that was a bunch of shit; no one got anywhere sitting around reading. People who read went hungry. Work was the thing, and lots of it. He’d already had a job for a year, working as a bag boy at Howdy’s Market six days a week. He wasn’t supposed to accept tips, but if people slipped a little something into the pocket of his jeans when his hands were full, what could he do? When Cherise was in Las Vegas stealing and turning the occasional trick, he fed the Katydid from his own pay like a man.

  That day she had marched into the library with her head held high; here was a discriminating buyer with money to burn. She’d agonized over her choices. Poems or fa
iry tales? Animal stories or silly riddles? She’d finally chosen the book of poems and grandly presented herself and her money at the checkout desk. The librarian slipped the book into a canvas tote usually reserved for people who spent fifty dollars or more, all proceeds going toward new book acquisitions, but she just gave the Katydid a sly wink. Katy used that tote for years, for lunches, school-books, groceries. It was one of her most prized possessions.

  She’d read him the poetry book all the way through that first night. That was the way they did it, her reading to him at bedtime because he was a lousy reader. She propped herself up in bed and read the way the librarians did, turning the book around importantly and panning it to show him the pictures every few verses, prouder than shit to be doing something he was no good at. She’d read him every single poem, more than an hour’s worth. He’d started protesting halfway through: “Jesus, Katy-kid, you really go for this shit? ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’? It’d never happen. In real life she would have done him in in about a minute flat and eaten him for lunch.”

  She’d said what she always said, her voice a masterpiece of world-weariness: “Buddy. It’s poetry.”

  “It’s shit, is what it is,” he’d said, but mostly just to get a last rise out of her. He’d let her read him the entire book, and after that she’d read him at least one poem every night for years. One of the worst things of all, later, was hearing those verses in his head. It had taken Vietnam to shut them up.

  Now the book lay within arm’s reach and ready to detonate. He put it beneath his jacket, hooded until it was time to take it home.

  With a supreme effort he distracted himself by making follow-up phone calls to prospective customers who’d come into the showroom in the last several weeks but hadn’t bought. It didn’t get him anywhere—it never got him anywhere; it was a sales technique proven to fail—but it made the morning pass. At twelve o’clock precisely Bunny came through the showroom doors, fluffing her hair and straightening her clothes in case she came face-to-face with Rae, smiling a showy smile at him.