Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

  “Hey. I brought your book back.” He nodded in the direction of the toolbox in the bed of the truck. “ ‘The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat.’ ” He shook his head. “Jesus, you’d think they wouldn’t want little kids hearing something like that.”

  “I’ve always thought that poem was a sociological metaphor for the violence between disenfranchised groups of have-nots. Like gangs; like West Side Story.”

  “West Side Story?”

  “You know, ‘I Feel Pretty’?”

  “Do you?”

  “No, I mean, that’s the name of the song. ‘I Feel Pretty,’ ” she said.

  “Oh. So anyway, I brought your book back,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  They fell silent again.

  “This isn’t working out very well, is it?” Rae said.

  “No,” Hack agreed. “Not very.”

  Minna Tallhorse was really the one the Katydid talked to about her books and shit. She’d read a book by some Russian guy, and then the two of them would talk about why the book was written and who the author was and what symbolism made it go. Hack didn’t know where Minna had learned all that: She was a social worker and an Indian, for God’s sake. But she and the Katydid would go on and on for hours sometimes. Hack was glad the Katydid had someone to talk to, though. If Minna pushed her a little, and she did, what she taught the kid might be her ticket out. People didn’t leave Tin Spoon all that often. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. You had nothing, you knew nothing, you offered nothing a million other people didn’t offer too. That was the fucker of it; that was the real world. In the real world you were from a dirt town in the middle of nowhere, and that’s where you were likely to stay. Except for him, of course; except for the Katydid.

  “Did your folks read to you much as a kid?” he asked Rae. Your folks. He loved that.

  “My mother did. She has a beautiful reading voice. We’d go from one book to the next; there was always something wonderful to look forward to. Of course in the beginning they were just young kids’ books: The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, all of those. But as soon as I turned eight, my mother started on The Hobbit . I have wonderful memories of that book. You know, they’ve made it into a movie, but I’ve never wanted to see it because I could already visualize the characters so clearly in my head and I didn’t want that spoiled. What did your mother read to you?”

  “The Valley of the Dolls.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Well, she wasn’t much of a reader. She liked that writer, though—what was her name, Suzanne something.”

  “Jacqueline Susann.”

  “Yeah, her. I guess the Katydid was the only one of us with what you could call book ambition. Kid started reading Shakespeare in the sixth grade. She told me once she was pretty sure that William Shakespeare, not Jesus, was the son of God, because how else could you explain how one person could know so much about human nature?”

  Rae laughed. “I like that. I wonder if she’s right. Did she have a favorite play?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, that was a long time ago, and anyway, I could never keep them straight. Couldn’t understand them either. She tried reading them aloud to me, but I’d just fall asleep. She’d punch me and say, Wait, Buddy, just one more part, you’ve got to hear this part, and then she’d read me some more drivel and I’d start snoring and she’d get mad. She used to tell me all the time that just because we were from a hellhole, it was no excuse for having narrow horizons. I told her she could have broad horizons for us both because I had to work the late shift again tomorrow and I needed my beauty sleep. I sure could rile her. Jesus, I made her so mad one time she stuck a meat fork through my hand. It wasn’t really her fault, more of a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

  “What had you done?”

  Hack shrugged. “Hell, I don’t remember anymore. It could have been almost anything.”

  He did remember, though. They had been fighting about food stamps. The Katydid wanted them to enroll in the program, but Hack wouldn’t do it. He had a job, didn’t he? He paid their bills on time, didn’t he? The Katydid had said pride was stupid and nobody overcame fucked-up roots by turning away help, especially when it came to money. And if it was offered to him now, Hack would probably take it. But then he couldn’t stand pity. It’s not pity, Buddy; it’s just a leg up, that’s all, the Katydid had said, but it smelled like pity to him, and he said so, and that’s when she’d given a roar of frustration and stabbed him. She’d been very solicitous afterward, and from then on they’d had this thing they used to say to each other if it looked like they were headed for another stabbing. One of them would say, How could you do such a thing? in this hoity-toity voice, and the other one would say, Fuck if I know, honey.

  Hack smiled to himself. How could you do such a thing? Fuck if I know, honey. God, he’d almost forgotten about that. The Katydid had had a bunch of fancy things she liked to say. Oh, my dear, and I beg your pardon? and the one that always killed him most, May I? instead of Can I? like she was some society debutante.

  May I?

  Well, God had sure as hell given her the big No, you may not . Hack earnestly hoped that up there in heaven or wherever, she’d been given the chance to say it again and hear Yes.

  He’d asked Minna Tallhorse once what she thought happened to dead children’s souls. She said, “They become all the things you think are beautiful. Full moons, just the right shade of purple, perfect lawns. They aren’t the things themselves, just the extra bit that makes them beautiful. Like MSG on Chinese food.”

  He held on to the steering wheel and sliced open his memory like a vein.

  When he came to in the hospital, the first thing he saw was Minna Tallhorse sitting in a vinyl chair beside his bed, breaking the back of a book in her lap.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  “Hey there,” she said softly, rising from the chair.

  As the room came into focus, Hack realized his head and gut hurt like nothing he’d ever felt before or could have imagined.

  “Hi, sweets.” Minna came to stand beside him.

  “Jesus, Minna. What the hell? You look like shit.”

  Minna smiled a wan smile. “Just wait till you get a look at yourself, sport.”

  “Is there water?”

  She poured some from a plastic carafe and put a paper straw in the glass. “How do you feel?”

  “Like shit. Did you do this?”

  She shook her head. “No. Go ahead and drink.”

  She held the glass for him while he swallowed a couple of sips.

  “What day is it now? What the fuck are we doing here?” he said.

  “It’s Tuesday. You’ve been unconscious for a couple of days. You have a bad concussion and a ruptured spleen. There was an accident, kiddo.”

  “An accident?”

  “You tangled with a train.” Minna rested her hand lightly next to his on the sheet, where they touched like a whisper. “You were on your way back from Diederstown.”

  Cherise. They’d been to see Cherise. He remembered that.

  Jesus, his head hurt.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “It was very foggy when you drove home. They figure you never even saw the train coming. It hit you broadside.”

  The Camaro. He’d been driving a Camaro. Cherise’s Camaro.

  “What about the Katydid?”

  Minna’s hand twitched just slightly, but she kept her eyes steady. “She’s gone, kiddo. I’m so sorry.”

  “No, listen, she was sleeping. She had on that poncho you gave her, and she was sleeping.”

  Fiercely, Minna cradled his eyes in hers. “She died instantly, Hack. She never knew a thing.”

  “Are you all right?” Rae asked, alarmed. “Hack? What’s happened? Something’s happened. Is it me?”

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t you.”

  He’d argued with Minna then, and when she refused to change her story about the Katydid, he lost
his temper. His own best guess was that Katy was in the next room, but didn’t want him to see her for some reason. All right, maybe she’d been badly bruised or even disfigured; an accident with a train, that would be bad. She’d probably made Minna promise to tell him some malarkey until she felt more presentable and could spring like a conjurer through the curtain around his bed: Fooled you! It was a stupid joke, and his head hurt too much to play, but Minna insisted on sticking to her same cock-and-bull story. Then he was yelling something, and she was crying—Jesus, what was she crying for?—and a nurse came in and did something to his IV, and he fought to stay conscious and lost.

  He and Rae were moving fast through railroad sidings and lumberyards and sodden pastures.

  “How old was she? Your sister, I mean.”

  “Not quite fifteen.”

  “That’s not very old.”

  “No,” Hack said. “It wasn’t.”

  Rae sat quietly for a moment, evidently gathering breath and courage. “Would you like to kiss me?” she asked.

  “Not really.”

  It might have been the first completely honest thing Hack had said in twenty years.

  For the first week Hack had drunk broth, peed blood, and hurt like hell. That was okay with him. The pain and the headaches kept him from spending too much time up there in his brain, where only bad things happened. At all times of the day and night he welcomed open-armed the nurses with painkillers. On gusts of morphine he drowsed outside himself among the clouds. Cherise was up there sometimes, looking like he hadn’t remembered she’d ever looked, a young woman, not much older than he was now, smoking a long, thin cigarette and laughing at him splashing in some little kid’s wading pool in a low-rent motor court. How old was he? Two? Three? He didn’t even know he had memories that went that far back. Cherise didn’t look so bad: cotton-haired and bleached, but with a nice smile. She must have lost that smile a long time ago because it didn’t even look familiar. Happy. She looked almost happy. Happy with him in his little sunsuit, his face all screwed up but taking the sunshine on the chin like a man.

  He also saw Minna Tallhorse, felt her cool flat palm on his forehead as she soothed and whispered to him, surrounding him with words like fragrant bubbles. You couldn’t have helped it. She wouldn’t blame you. Nothing else you could have done.

  But mostly it was the Katydid he felt sitting in a chair in his room with one of her ten-gallon books and talking on and on.

  Come on, Buddy, get moving. You’ve got things to do.

  Don’t want to.

  Nobody wants to. That’s a thin excuse.

  I hurt.

  So?

  You don’t know what I feel.

  Sure I do, Buddy. Sure I do. I know what you feel, and I know what Minna feels too. Let me tell you, she’s the one who’s hurting.

  I hear her crying sometimes.

  Only when she thinks you’re asleep.

  Yeah.

  You should feel what I feel right now, Buddy. It would help.

  Why? What do you feel?

  Lighter than air, like a helium balloon, maybe. I can see out over everything.

  You see Cherise?

  Nah.

  Do you miss her?

  You’re the one who misses her, Buddy.

  I never missed her.

  Baloney. You’ve missed her a lot, all these years. Don’t think I don’t know it. You know what you do? You talk about her in your sleep.

  What do I say?

  Mommy. You say Mommy.

  That’s all?

  Mostly.

  It’s not much.

  I didn’t say it was much.

  What do you say?

  Me? I don’t have to say anything. You’re there, Buddy ... you and Minna. I could care less about Cherise. You’re the one who cares.

  Stop saying that.

  Okey-dokey, Buddy, but it’s true. You should look Cherise up when you get out of here. You and Minna.

  Nope.

  Well, there’s nothing I can do for you then.

  Wait. Don’t leave.

  I’ve got to. I’ve got things to do, Buddy, things that won’t wait.

  Like what? What do you have to do?

  That’s a stall tactic, and it won’t work.

  Come on, I really want to know. What’s so important?

  Everything, she said. Everything’s important, Buddy, and all of it’s beautiful. Remember that. It’s beautiful.

  Like hell.

  Rae was staring at him across a restaurant table.

  “It happened a long time ago,” he said.

  “Yes, but how do you live with a thing like that?” she said.

  Hack just looked at her. “You don’t.”

  A state highway patrolman came to the hospital several days before he was discharged. Hack recognized him as the patrolman who had come to get him and the Katydid at their apartment that night and driven them to Diederstown. He clapped his hand into Hack’s in a meaty handshake.

  “Were you there?” Hack asked him. “At the accident? Did you see anything?”

  “Yeah, I went out there.”

  “And?”

  “It was a bad one, son. I’ve never seen worse. You were real lucky to come through it.”

  Hack said nothing.

  “I was sorry to hear about your sister. She was a real sweet girl; she had a lot of life in her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I brought you something. I thought you’d want it.” The patrolman pulled a twisted piece of metal from his jacket pocket and handed it to Hack.

  “What is it?” Minna came over to see, then turned away. It was what was left of the silver bracelet Minna had given the Katydid, buckled and scorched.

  “A couple of our boys found it a quarter mile or so down the line from where you got hit, son. Must have got caught on the train’s undercarriage. They thought you’d like to have it.”

  Hack turned the bracelet over in his hands like shrapnel.

  “You know, there’s no rhyme or reason to what you find at an accident scene,” the patrolman said expansively. “You can have a vehicle completely demolished, and right there beside it a lady’s compact will be sitting on the road without so much as a mark on it. It’s best not to try to make sense out of it, son, is what I’m saying. Best you can do is keep going. Honor your sister’s memory, and keep going, that’s the main thing.”

  Hack stared at the bracelet.

  “You have any plans for when you get out of here?” the patrolman said.

  “No.”

  “Well, then that’s what you need to put your mind to, son. Isn’t that right, miss?” He looked at Minna.

  “Yes.”

  “You need anything?” the patrolman asked her. “I heard you were spending a lot of time over here.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you for coming to see us, and for bringing the bracelet.”

  “Ma’am,” he said, putting on his hat. “Son.”

  “Wait. Does Cherise know about the accident?”

  “Yeah. I heard she was real broken up.”

  “Fuck that,” Hack said.

  Minna stepped toward the bed.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he told her.

  “I shouldn’t have asked you that,” Rae said as they drove home. “About kissing me, I mean.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m very embarrassed.”

  “There’s no reason to be.”

  “I love you.”

  “Don’t,” said Hack.

  After he was released from the hospital, Hack stayed with Minna in her apartment. She had already packed up their things, his and Katy’s, what there was of them: a few clothes, some cheap dishes and pots and pans. The Katydid’s books, which Minna kept in her own overloaded bookcase. Hack rarely left the apartment. In the evenings they said very little to each other, and what they did say was polite, as though they were strangers. But every night he slipped into Minna’s bed, curled up to her long, hard body
and found shelter. There was no talk then, only a crashing together of the two of them. She held him fiercely, sometimes all night when the trembling wouldn’t stop, vigilant in the darkness, tiger-eyed. They never talked about this. There was nothing to say.

  Once he asked her why she’d given him and the Katydid the jewelry engraved with her name and phone number.

  She said, “Just in case.”

  “Did you know this was going to happen to us?”

  She looked at him from the vast and bottomless blackness of her eyes.

  “I don’t know.”

  Hack resigned from Howdy’s Market by telephone. They tried to talk him into staying, but he couldn’t go back there again. He couldn’t go anywhere in Tin Spoon. Tin Spoon was over and so, in many ways, was he. He joined the army as soon as he was well enough, and after basic training found himself in Vietnam. A month after he shipped out he got a letter from Minna saying she had taken a job back on the Blackfoot reservation in North Dakota. He never found out exactly what she did there; maybe he never asked. Over the years her letters came less and less often, and Hack answered fewer and fewer of them, until eventually they stopped coming. He assumed she had remade herself the way he had, out of scrap cloth and baling wire. He wasn’t a real person at all anymore, but people mistook him for real. At first it was awkward being new like that; it was like being a puppet you didn’t know how to work very well. But you got better and better until, after a while, even you forgot the difference.

  chapter fifteen

  Funny how?” Shirl said.

  “I don’t know—just funny,” said Bunny. “Like he was upset or something, except when I asked him he said he was fine, which is what he always says. He wasn’t fine. There’s something going on.”

  “Well, he’s not cheating on you, honey, I can tell you that. I had a little talk with him day before yesterday. If there’s something going on, hon, it’s in his mind, not his dick. But listen to me—are you listening? You’re going to lose him if you don’t back off. There’s only so much even a good man can take.”

  “Lose him how?”