Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

  “Mom’s in the car. You coming with us?”

  “Yeah, I’ll come.”

  “Don’t you want your jacket? It’s blowing like hell.”

  “Nah.”

  He slid behind the wheel of the LTD. Shirl sat in the front seat beside him, smelling of mildew and gardenia and cigarettes.

  “Hi, hon,” she said, patting his thigh in sporty greeting. She took liberties with him sometimes, but he figured it had been years since she’d had sex, possibly even decades, so he usually let it go.

  At the Bobcat he pulled out her chair for her and slid it back in, no mean feat since the woman weighed close to two hundred pounds. Then he did the same for Bunny, who always waited for him instead of just pulling out the damned chair herself and scooting it back in. Turned out he’d married royalty, only without the money.

  “So what did the doctor say?” he asked Shirl, because he knew she was waiting for it.

  Shirl shook her head. She was always shaking her head when she came back from the doctor. “It’s not good,” she said, and Hack could sense a long report coming. Shirl loved her visits to the doctor, and the worse the news, the better. “Blood pressure’s up again, and so is the cholesterol. He said if I didn’t get it under control, I’d blow out an artery like an old fire hose with a blocked nozzle.”

  “He said that?” Hack asked Bunny.

  Bunny shrugged.

  “Didn’t Dooley have that?” Hack asked her.

  “Nothing like as bad as me.” Shirl sniffed.

  “So what did he tell you to do?”

  “Wait, that’s not the half of it,” said Shirl.

  “No?”

  “He told me my heart was no good, said I might need one of those pacemakers soon. He gave me some pills to take for now, but he’s not hopeful.”

  “Yeah? Well, that’s not so—”

  Shirl held up her hand. “Then there’s my bladder.”

  Hack looked at Bunny and saw the corners of her mouth twitching.

  “Now, you know I’ve got incontinence. Well, he told me my bladder’s real stretched out from having big babies.” She reached over and patted Bunny’s hand. “Don’t feel bad, hon, it’s not your fault.”

  “I wasn’t feeling bad,” Bunny said.

  “There’s gratitude for you.” Shirl winked at Hack. “Anyway, so there’s an operation he might get me to have, that kind of lifts and tucks things back where they should be.”

  “Sounds like a brassiere,” Hack said.

  Shirl slapped at his hand.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Wait and hope, honey. Wait and hope.”

  Their waitress came over and set down their food. “She’d be better off doing separate trays with the drinks and the food,” Bunny said when the waitress had gone out of hearing range. She always critiqued other waitresses’ techniques. “I bet she spills a lot, being so off-balance like that.”

  It was true that Bunny was highly skilled at her trade. Nina Doyle at the Anchor didn’t pay her a buck fifty above minimum wage for nothing.

  Hack bit into his Monte Cristo. He always called them Monte Criscos when he ordered them, just to give the waitresses shit, but he loved the Monte Cristos at the Bobcat: ham, turkey, and Swiss, battered, deep-fried, and sprinkled with powdered sugar. They never scrimped on their portions. If there was one thing he hated, it was a restaurant that scrimped on its portions. You shouldn’t have to go away from a restaurant hungry, but it had happened to him now and then, usually at some fancy restaurant Vinny had taken him to where you were given cloth napkins and water glasses with lemon slices floating in them and shit, and where none of the waiters spoke English. You shouldn’t need an interpreter just to order off the fucking menu. That got his goat every time.

  “You girls going home after this?” he asked, just to say something. He hated a quiet table at a restaurant.

  “I told Anita we’d pick up Crystal at Head Start on the way,” Bunny said. “You know Doreen’s on day shift now. Plus they finally gave her thirty hours. Big deal, but still.”

  “Yeah,” Hack said.

  “That girl’s a hard worker.” Shirl picked a piece of food from between her teeth with a fingernail. “I’ve got to say that for her. Anita’s done a real good job with her.”

  “It’s hard, though.” Bunny poured out more ketchup for her fries. “That house is too small for all of them, plus the roof leaks in Crystal’s room, so they’ve got buckets everywhere. Nita’s been asking Bob to do something about the roof for a week now, but you know him.”

  “He’s not drinking, though,” Hack pointed out. The women were always ragging on Bob about something, but that wasn’t right. The man simply wasn’t a high achiever, not like Hack, who’d made the most of what he’d been given. Bob lacked backbone, was Hack’s private opinion. He didn’t have Hack’s flair either, but there was nothing wrong with that; not many people did.

  “You didn’t tell me he stopped drinking,” Shirl said to Bunny. “When did that happen?”

  Bunny shrugged, spooning soup; the Bobcat made a damned good bowl of ham and bean. “What, a week ago?” She consulted Hack. “Week and a half, maybe.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Shirl said approvingly. “Nita needs the support, what with Doreen back home and Danny locked up and all.”

  “They told her at the Lawns she might pick up some more hours next week,” Bunny said. “That Mexican girl’s taking a couple of days off .”

  “Goddamned Mexicans are taking over. What?” Shirl said to Hack. “I’m just saying what’s true.”

  “Jesus, Shirl,” Hack muttered.

  Shirl shrugged loftily. “I’m not afraid to call a spade a spade, Hack, and you know it. There are more of them every year, and none of them speak a word of English, but they get the jobs just the same.”

  “Yeah, because they’re damned hard workers, and they’ll work for cheap without complaining.”

  “Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.”

  “Anita says Bob’s still been acting funny, though,” Bunny said.

  “Funny how?” Shirl said.

  “I don’t know. She says he’s never home, but when she calls the Wayside, he’s not there either. He won’t tell her anything except she’ll be able to see for herself when he’s ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “That’s just it,” Bunny said. “He won’t say. Has he told you anything?”

  “No,” Hack said.

  “Well, the man’s always been shiftless,” said Shirl. “Nice enough, of course, but shiftless just the same. Anita’s had to be the man of that household. I just hope whatever he’s doing is legal. He doesn’t have a grain of common sense, and he never has.”

  When the waitress brought over their check, Hack was the only one reaching for it, like always. He dug his wallet out of his back pocket, flipping his Vernon Ford credit card on top of the bill. They’d talked about Bob, who was a Vernon Ford employee, so he was okay with using the company card; he didn’t believe in putting too fine a point on his expense sheets, and Marv Vernon never seemed to care. He pulled back Shirl’s chair and helped her up. More than a couple of people at nearby tables gave her hard looks. Hack was used to that. He just winked at a couple of them in collusion—she’s my mother-in-law, what the hell can you do?—and let the rest go.

  While he was waiting for the card to be run at the register, Shirl helped them all to toothpicks. She was a big one for dental hygiene, plus she took advantage of anything free just on principle. She walked out of the restaurant picking her teeth and leaving Hack to deal with the tip.

  Sometimes, for the hell of it, he tried to picture her and his mother, Cherise, together. Jesus, it would be like the Roller Derby, two tough old broads biting and clawing in the ring. He didn’t even know if Cherise was still alive, though. He hadn’t talked to her in, what, nearly twenty years now. She’d tried to contact him two or three times in the first couple of years she was in prison, but
she’d given up after a while, like he’d meant her to. He had nothing to say to Cherise, not a goddamned thing, and he never would. If she was broke and alone someplace now, whose fault was that? Not his. Not his, and not the Katydid’s either. They’d been broke and alone in Tin Spoon, and she hadn’t done a thing, not a single goddamned thing. She hadn’t even had the balls to let them know she was leaving them. She just slipped out of town one day with her forger boyfriend. The last words she’d said to him were: Looks like you’re nearly grown up now, kiddo. It had taken a month for him to figure out she’d been saying good-bye.

  He’d just turned fifteen.

  Once they figured it out, he and the Katydid never gave away to anyone the fact that Cherise was gone, the difference to them being somewhat academic since she’d already been mostly gone for years. For a long time they brought along some of Cherise’s clothes when they went to the Laundromat. When the Katydid was out sick, Hack sent her back to school with notes he signed with Cherise’s name, forging the signature of a forger being something that gave him a sense of grim satisfaction. They mussed up Cherise’s bed some days too, and Hack dripped her cloying perfume around their apartment from time to time so if anyone came over, it would smell like she’d left only a minute or two before.

  And for a while people did come by to check on them: Hack’s boss at Howdy’s Market, who asked gentle questions and watched Hack with concern sometimes when he thought Hack didn’t know it; Katy’s fourth-grade teacher, who brought home-work by once when she was out for a week with the flu.

  Then, of course, there’d been Minna.

  Minna Tallhorse, hipless and hard-bodied, perfectly erect, eyes as deep as outer space and ferocity crackling all around her like lightning, came into their lives four months after Cherise had left them. They’d found her waiting for them in a beat-up Volkswagen outside their apartment late one afternoon, the department of social services’ answer to an anonymous tip that they were living without adult supervision. She shook Hack’s hand hard like a man and followed him and Katy into their apartment with a long stride.

  Hack had never seen anyone before who looked quite like Minna Tallhorse, dark and taut and somehow dangerous, as if she’d known things other people didn’t. He stared openly as she sat on their old sofa, her heavy hair falling straight down on either side of her face until she seized it impatiently and tied it in a double knot at the nape of her neck. Mining her satchel for a notebook and pen, she finally looked them over and said, “Tell me about yourselves.”

  “You first,” Hack said warily.

  “Fair enough.” She rested her elbows on her knees and frowned, her chin in her hands. “I grew up on a Blackfoot Indian reservation in North Dakota, was caught once stealing a steak, always wanted a dog but never had one, and my father is my mother’s first cousin. Your turn.”

  The Katydid pressed a little closer to Hack. They were sitting side by side on the living room floor, the sofa being their only piece of furniture.

  “What do you want to know? I’m Hack Neary, and this is Katy. I’m fifteen. She’s ten.”

  “Keep going. I already knew that part.”

  “Our mother’s out right now, but she should be back soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Soon,” Hack said. “Anytime.”

  “Ah,” Minna said. “So what did you have for dinner last night?”

  “Hot dogs.” The Katydid piped up, she being the cook in the family. “Macaroni and cheese and canned green beans.”

  “My favorites,” said Minna, showing them her first real smile. She had beautiful long white teeth. Beside him Hack could feel the Katydid relax. “How much money is in the house right now, would you say?”

  “Six dollars and twenty-two cents.” Hack made a point of keeping current on their cash situation. “Why?”

  “You should always have a little money around the house. You could need, I don’t know, a cotton ball and not find one anywhere. If you have money, you can just go out and buy one.”

  “Why would you need a cotton ball?” Katy said.

  “It’s just an example,” Hack said.

  “Cotton balls can be very important.” Minna crossed her arms and frowned thoughtfully. “You can put calamine lotion on a bug bite with one. You can clean goo off your stove, maybe, or blot up a nosebleed.”

  “Do you get nosebleeds?” said Katy.

  “All the time,” Minna said. “Don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re lucky.”

  “Why is your name Minna Tallhorse?”

  “The same reason yours is Katy, I imagine; my mother named me that. Minna was one of my aunts. I never met her, but I always imagined her as fat and with hairs on her chin. I would have preferred Augusta or Aurelia, but there you are.”

  “No, I mean the Tallhorse part.”

  “Ah. My great-grandfather was the first Tallhorse, as far as we know. I assume he owned a tall horse; we’ll never really know for sure, but my family name has been Tallhorse ever since.”

  “I think it’s a pretty name.”

  “Do you? Well, maybe so.” Minna reknotted her hair and rose from the sofa like a Valkyrie. “I’d like to look around a little. May I do that?”

  “Sure,” Hack said. The Katydid hopped up and followed her. Hack trailed behind as the two of them poked around in closets and kitchen cupboards. Though the apartment was an absolute and undeniable piece of shit, with daylight coming through cracks in the walls and a bathroom you had to go around the outside to reach, the whole place was clean, cleaner by far than when Cherise had lived with them, the Katydid’s being a tidy housekeeper. Soon they were back in the living room with its single ratty sofa balanced on three legs and a brick.

  “Why did you steal a steak?” Katy asked, perching beside Minna.

  “Ah, you remembered that, did you? My little brother Luther was terrible when he was hungry; he yelled and threw things from misery. I took the steak to shut him up.” She leaned in close to Katy. “It wasn’t the first one I’d stolen. I think the butcher knew all along. He would have let me get away with it too, but he wasn’t working that day, his wife was, and she didn’t like Indian girls very much.”

  “You have a brother?”

  “Five.”

  “Five?” Katy brightened. “How old are they?”

  “Oh, we’re all grown up now. Three are younger than me. One’s a year and a half older.”

  “That’s only four.”

  “Sharp girl. My fifth brother died.”

  “How?”

  “He had a hole in his heart.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “No, but it made him tired a lot of the time,” Minna said. “And the bigger he got, the harder his heart had to work. After a while it just wasn’t strong enough to keep up. He died when he was eight.” Minna frowned. “He was my twin.”

  “But you don’t have a hole in your heart.”

  “No?” Minna smiled a strange little smile. She turned to Hack. “I’d like to talk to you alone for a few minutes. Why don’t we go outside?”

  Reluctantly Hack followed her out into the heat and dust.

  “What makes you tick, I wonder?” Minna Tallhorse said, folding her arms ruminatively and leaning against her beater Volkswagen.

  Hack shrugged.

  “Then tell me about Katy,” she said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything. Everything. What’s she like?”

  “She’s real smart.”

  “I already figured out that part. What else?”

  There was a lot else, but Hack had no intention of telling any of it to this tall, prickly woman with a body like the flat, hard blade of a sword. He did not intend to tell her that the Katydid had nightmares all the time, screaming ones that woke Hack up in the middle of the night panting with fear until she sank down again into the hostile arms of sleep. He didn’t intend to tell her that sometimes they got so mad at each other over stupid t
hings like who’d finished the milk that three months ago she stabbed him in the hand with a meat fork and that once or twice he’d slapped her. And he had no intention of telling her the worst thing of all, that sometimes the Katydid cried for Cherise, and when she did, he yelled at her for it, screamed, Shut the fuck up, just shut the fuck up . To him it was all so much bullshit. If someone walked out on you like that, she was dead to you, ashes and bone. He’d never wept for Cherise, and he never would.

  Minna was watching him shrewdly. How long had he been standing there with her sizing him up like that? “Is she hard to take care of?” she asked.

  “The Katydid?” He tried to sound breezy. “Nah, she’s easy. She pretty much takes care of herself. I mean, you never have to remind her about her chores or anything like that.”

  “What are her chores?”

  Hack thought for a minute. “Well, she cooks usually, and she cleans. We both do the laundry because I don’t want her around the Laundromat alone, but she folds better than I do. She keeps the grocery list.”

  “She sounds very independent.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And your chores?”

  “I pay the bills and stuff, the rent and electricity and all. Plus I work.”

  “What’s left for your mom, then? What does she do?”

  Hack stiffened. Had he given too much away? “Oh, she does plenty of stuff. She takes care of us and all.”

  Minna held him with her eyes like an oncoming train. Hack forced himself to stare right back at her.

  “And what about you?” she said. “Are you like your sister? Do you read a lot too?”

  “Nah. Reading’s boring.”

  “That depends on what you read. Are you a good reader?”

  Hack shrugged. “I’m all right.” He wasn’t, though. He’d been the worst reader in his class since second grade, and he didn’t write worth a damn either. The words he wrote looked okay to him, but his teachers said they were inside out or something. They got mad at him for not trying harder, but when he tried harder, he still wrote his words inside out, so what was the point?

  “So what do you like to do? Sports?”

  “Nah, I don’t have time for that,” he said proudly. “I’ve got a job at Howdy’s Market.”