Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

  “Well, then. Or Sunday.”

  He could see her chest rising and falling, rising and falling, like she’d run a mile. When she took her hand from the doorjamb, it left a damp mark. But her eyes were locked onto his with complete conviction.

  “Sure,” he heard himself saying, and it sounded to him like he was talking in slow motion. “I could probably do that.”

  Bob was feeling real steady these days—steady and calm and resourceful. He had some things to do at the homestead, and he would do them: shore up the front porch for good, try to make the pump work in the kitchen sink, maybe install a new toilet seat in the outhouse. One day he might even put in a septic system and a real toilet right there in the house. Jesus, but the place was looking good. He liked to imagine sometimes that the original homesteaders would come back and see it and thank him for turning his love on the place like a hose, raining affection and handiness over the whole thing until it sparkled like new. There was love there, he knew, in the walls and the floorboards and the very nails that someone had made all by hand. Dehydrated love, that was what all the dust was. Dehydrated love and desiccated hope, now reconstituted with Bob’s sweat and conviction. He’d never known such a thing before, had to stop himself from gathering pocketfuls and bringing them home, he felt that rich. As he sat at a back table at the Bobcat, waiting for Doreen, he actually felt himself glow.

  “Where’s Mom?” Doreen said to Bob, looking around the restaurant. “She in the bathroom?”

  “No,” Bob said, flipping open a menu, as though he didn’t already know everything that was on it. “I thought it would be nice for just us to have lunch. Just me and you.”

  Doreen looked at him suspiciously. “Why? You haven’t heard from that lawyer again, have you? That son of a bitch better not be—”

  “Nah, nothing like that. Can’t we have lunch?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Okay. So what do you want to eat?”

  “Burger, I guess. A burger and a chocolate shake.”

  “Tell her, not me,” Bob said mildly, nodding at the waitress who’d arrived. He’d been saying, Tell her, not me, to Doreen since she was eight or nine and old enough to speak for herself. Bob was mindful that someone who was shy—Sheryl, for instance— was at a disadvantage out in the world, not being able to talk for herself. He hadn’t wanted Doreen to grow up shy like that. He probably didn’t need to worry, though. The kid had an edge on her, an edge and a mouth. She’d say anything that came into her mind, even ugly things, hurtful things. He didn’t know who she’d learned that from. Anita didn’t talk ugly, not even when things were bad. She got a little cranky from time to time, but that was understandable, what with his drinking and so little money and all.

  “How about a burger and a chocolate shake?” Doreen was saying to the waitress.

  “Same for me,” Bob said, clapping the stiff menu covers together.

  The waitress winked at him. “Seems like she was just in kindygarden, this one,” she said to Bob.

  “Yeah. It sure goes fast,” Bob said.

  “So what’s Mom doing?” Doreen asked when the waitress was gone.

  “Dunno,” Bob said. “Working, probably. She’s got some hours at the Lawns this week.”

  “Is she going to be able to pick Crystal up this afternoon?”

  “Far as I know,” Bob said mildly.

  “Because I can’t. I told her that, that she’d have to pick Crystal up herself, at Head Start.”

  “Then she will.”

  “You know what she said to me this morning?” Doreen asked.

  “Mom?”

  “Crystal. She said, Gram sleeps a lot. I don’t know why she said that.”

  “Mom’s been kind of tired lately, what with her working some extra hours and all.”

  “She’s only been working about fifteen hours a week.”

  “Well, yeah, but she’s been taking care of Crystal.”

  “Is Crystal giving her any trouble? If she’s been giving Mom trouble, I’ll beat her butt. She’s gotten real sassy with me a couple times.”

  “Nah, nah, she’s a good girl.”

  “Well, she better be.” Doreen subsided, tapping the sugar packets into an even row in their little dish. “You know what she said the other day? She asked if Danny was coming home soon. I said no because he’d been sent to a place where bad people go until they can be good again. She wanted to know if Danny’d been bad, and I said yeah, he’d done some real bad things like lying and playing with someone’s toys without their permission and messing up their house. She wanted to know if when you go to the bad place, mommies and daddies can go too, and I said nope, you had to go all by yourself, and it might be years before they’d let you come home.”

  “Aw, now, what did you tell her that for? The poor kid. Now she’s going to worry all the time about what if she’s bad?”

  Doreen sulked. “I figure she needs to start knowing the truth about Danny.”

  “She’s three.”

  “She’s almost four, and she could start hearing stuff from the other kids at Head Start about how her daddy’s a criminal and all.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to hear that from the other kids.”

  “Well, she could, though.”

  Bob methodically drank an entire glass of water. “Speaking of Crystal,” he said when he was done.

  “Here it comes,” Doreen said. “I knew there was something.”

  Bob thought carefully about what he wanted to say. “I just think you shouldn’t count on leaving Crystal with us, honey. To raise and all.”

  “I never said anything about that. Have I ever said anything like that?”

  “No, but you’ve been thinking it.”

  Doreen said nothing. The waitress brought over their food and set it in front of them. Bob slowly opened his burger and added ketchup. He’d become very careful with ketchup. You could ruin a perfectly good burger in seconds if you let your attention wander.

  “Will you please just tell me what the hell is going on?” Doreen narrowed her eyes at him. “Because something’s sure going on. You and Mom aren’t splitting up or anything, are you?”

  Bob looked up, shocked. “Why would we do that?”

  Doreen shrugged, took a bite of her hamburger, then opened it up on her plate. “Shit,” she said. “They put pickles on it. I hate when they put pickles on your hamburger.” She picked the two offending pickle slices off with the very ends of her fingernails.

  Bob carefully poured out some ketchup for his fries. “You’ve got to tell them that, honey. You can’t expect them to read your mind.”

  “So are you saying that me and Crystal can’t live with you anymore?”

  “Nah, nothing like that. But Mom gets tired sometimes.”

  “Yeah, well, if she’d lose sixty or seventy pounds, she wouldn’t.”

  “That’s not nice,” Bob said.

  “Well, it’s true.” Doreen was pounding down french fries like she hadn’t seen food in days. The child had always eaten when she was unhappy.

  Bob put down his hamburger and chewed thoughtfully for a full minute or two. “I wish you could have seen your mama when she was your age, honey,” he said. “She was so pretty; she was the prettiest girl in our class. You’d spot her across a room, and her face would be shining like an angel’s. She had skin that was the envy of every girl there; she’s never had a pimple, never in the whole time I’ve known her, not one. And she had a real womanly figure, none of that stick figure stuff like everyone wanted back then, like that Twiggy had. Anita, she was ample, you could say; real curvy—like Marilyn Monroe, someone you could get a hold of. And she was never stuck up either, not even when she was in that Miss Harrison County Pageant and came in first runner-up. You’d have thought that would go to her head, but it didn’t. She was real nice about LeeAnn Sprague winning, even though she was prettier and all. I sat in that audience, and I thought I would bust, I was that lucky to have her as my girlfriend.
I looked at her up there—and I swear, you’ve never seen somebody as beautiful as she was in her gown and all—and I thought I must owe God a pretty big debt for giving her to me.”

  “Jesus, Dad,” Doreen muttered.

  “That’s what she looked like, Marilyn Monroe. Spitting image.”

  “She’s not even blond.”

  “Don’t matter.”

  Doreen raised her eyes to the ceiling.

  “I thank God every day for giving your mother to me,” Bob said gravely. “Every day. Plenty of people wouldn’t have put up with me, with my drinking and all. Plenty of women, they’d have shown me the door, given me the boot. Don’t think I don’t know it. I know it. Your mother, she never locked the door against me, not once, and there were plenty of times she could have. You don’t think I know that, but I do. I know. It hasn’t been easy for her.”

  “Then why’d you do those things?”

  “It’s complicated,” Bob said.

  “Yeah?”

  “There’ve been reasons. Let’s just leave it at that. There’ve been reasons.”

  “Are you crying? Jesus, you’re not crying, are you?” Doreen looked at him, appalled. “Stop it,” she hissed.

  “I always meant to do right by Nita, that’s the thing. I always wanted her to be proud of me, to see me as a man who could accomplish things, you know? A capable man. But it wasn’t so easy for me.”

  “Why are you telling me this anyway?” Doreen said. “Because I really don’t want to know this.”

  “I just think you need to be nice to Mom right now,” Bob said. “She deserves it. That’s all I’m saying.”

  And then lunch was over. He went up and paid their bill and got a toothpick from the dispenser, confident that he’d expressed himself clearly for once. He’d said what he had to say even if it wasn’t what Doreen wanted to hear.

  chapter fourteen

  Hack had always hated Eugene. Everyone seemed to be connected in one way or another to the University of Oregon, shuffling around in their Birkenstock sandals and socks and tie-dye T-shirts like they’d fallen into the 1960s and couldn’t get out. Plus the place was always fogged in, as though it were permanently cupped beneath the sullen, clammy hand of God. You couldn’t see shit, not even with good fog lights, which Hack always made sure he had, on whatever vehicle he was driving. In fact, it had been foggy almost all the way over from Sawyer, ever since they got out of the Coast Range and hit the Willamette Valley. He negotiated Highway 99E with care.

  Rae Macy sat beside him with her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Earlier he could have sworn she was crying. What was she crying for? There were at least three feet of space between them in the truck cab; he hadn’t laid a hand on her, hadn’t so much as said an improper word the whole way, and they’d been on the road for an hour already. Plus they’d met at the old Georgia-Pacific mill outside Sawyer, which was derelict now and had been for years. Rae had left her car around back, where you certainly couldn’t see it from the street.

  “Princess,” he said gently, “we’re only driving. That’s all. Nobody ever turned into a bad person from driving, at least no one I ever heard of.” He couldn’t help cracking a little smile. “ Parking, yes. Driving, no.”

  With his peripheral vision he could see her nod. As scared as she looked, she might as well be wearing a chastity belt. Chastity belts: Now there was a screwed thing. What kind of person had invented those? Probably someone like Bunny, someone jealous, only male. Suddenly it didn’t seem funny anymore.

  “You okay?” he said.

  She nodded again and cleared her throat.

  “So tell me a story,” he said.

  “What story?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. You’re the writer. Make something up.”

  “It doesn’t really work like that,” she said.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  They drove for a while.

  Hack said, “You know, old Luther Newton went into that creek one time when it was foggy like this.” He nodded at the muddy water licking its upper banks beside the road. “He was seventy-five years old, and it scared him so bad he never did get behind the wheel again, made Hattie do all the driving, and all of Hubbard knew Hattie couldn’t drive worth a damn. Turns out the creek was only three feet deep there, but old Luther didn’t know that when he went in. Took the paramedics fifteen minutes and a pile of Valium to get him to stop yelling so they could get him out.”

  “Luther Newton?”

  “Yeah. Funny old guy, lived in Hubbard all his life. He’s dead now.”

  “Oh,” Rae said, and went back to looking out the window.

  Hack sighed and planted his hands more firmly on the wheel. This could turn out to be one long goddamn day.

  Before Hack had gotten even five miles from Diederstown and Cherise and the police station, all he could see was the double yellow line down the middle of the highway. Tiny fog particles were flying toward him in the headlights at the speed of light, millions of them like he was traveling through intergalactic space. Luckily, it was nearly three-thirty in the morning, and no one else was on the road. The only sign of life was a single brilliant light moving far away through the fog—odd since there were no roads in that direction, but the desert in nighttime played tricks even on a clear night. The Katydid was fast asleep with her poncho over her face, snoring gently from inside its folds. He liked to give the kid a hard time about keeping him awake with her snoring, but it was a peaceful sound, the sound that a healthy body makes repairing and improving itself in the night. He’d listened to her snoring more times than he could count when he was awake and worried about money, which was mostly all the time. His idea of paradise was a place where everything was free and no one could ever take the last one of anything.

  He marveled at the Katydid’s ability to shut herself off, no matter what the circumstances were. He couldn’t have slept right then if you’d offered him a million bucks. He was too pissed off. Cherise had some balls, trying to hit them up for money. They were the kids; they were supposed to hit her up for money. Isn’t that what parents were supposed to do, accuse you of costing them a fortune and give you a hard time about staying out too late? He’d said that to Minna Tallhorse just the week before.

  “How quaint,” Minna had said, patting his arm. “Do you also believe in the tooth fairy?”

  “So then what’s it like to have parents?” Hack said. “You had parents.”

  “Sure. One was a drinker, and the other was a drunk,” Minna said. “Tell me, kiddo, when are you getting out of Dodge? Have you got your bags packed yet?”

  Hack just shook his head. She asked him that question every single time she saw him now, ever since he’d dropped out of high school, and he always answered it the same way: not now, not yet. In three and a half more years the Katydid would have graduated, and that was when he would leave Tin Spoon. Minna insisted that Katy could come live with her right now and finish out high school there, but Hack didn’t go for that. It wasn’t that he wanted to stay in Tin Spoon any longer than he had to; he’d even told the Katydid what he’d do when he drove away for the last time. “I won’t say good-bye, nothing like that. I’ll just hold up my middle finger and floor it.”

  “Oh, Buddy, it hasn’t been that bad.”

  “Sure it’s been that bad.”

  But even with all that, here was the thing: Minna Tallhorse couldn’t unconditionally guarantee that she could keep the Katydid from harm. Hack himself was the only one he trusted to make that promise. As long as he was there, the kid would be all right. In his soul he knew it.

  “Do you want to go home?” Hack said to Rae after another five miles of silence. “Just say so, and I’ll turn around right now.”

  Rae looked stricken. “Do you want to?”

  “I’m not the one who’s shaking.”

  “I’m fine,” Rae said, folding her arms more tightly across her chest. “I’m just a little cold.”
/>
  “Ah,” said Hack.

  Neither one of them moved to turn up the heat.

  The Katydid was determined to attend college, planned to go to one in California, maybe, or even New York. She was always reading some ten-pound book or other. She’d try to describe the story to Hack, but he could never follow them. He was more practical. He liked cars, car engines, car styling, all that. Maybe he’d end up in Detroit working for Ford or something. Maybe he’d end up in Los Angeles dating beautiful women to whom he’d sold Mercedes-Benzes. Who knew? He was good enough looking; he had something on the ball too. He was a hard worker who earned every dime he got. Other people slacked off, did a shoddy job, but he was the genuine article, a man who could put his head down and get things done and done right. Minna Tallhorse was always telling him he should cut himself a little slack, relax a little bit, but that wasn’t how you got ahead. Hadn’t he been the youngest person Howdy had ever made a checker? Didn’t he close the market regularly now, night after night and all by himself? His register had never been short, not even by a penny, in all the time he worked there. He knew the meaning of responsibility. Even in Tin Spoon, Nevada, he was on his way up. Nothing but good things awaited him. Three years from now he might even have enough extra to give the Katydid a few bucks toward college. Him, from a family with a college graduate. Wasn’t that a hoot.

  They had reached the outskirts of Eugene and were traveling fast through flat, ugly fields and lumberyards and mills. “So do you have any brothers or sisters?” Hack asked. Not that he really cared, but the silence was getting on his nerves.

  Rae roused herself a little, made herself brighten. “Just an older sister.”

  “Yeah? She smart and beautiful like you?”

  “PhD, summa cum laude, from Berkeley. She teaches women’s studies at Humboldt State.”

  “Huh.” Hack didn’t know why they taught shit like women’s studies. He had never met a woman yet who didn’t know perfectly well how to be a woman on her own; women came fully equipped at birth with all the know-how they’d ever need and often more than was necessary or fair. Even dykes were plenty good at being women, just women of a different flavor. He had nothing against that: whatever got you off. In the end, sex might just be God’s way of compensating for all the shit He planned to send your way.