“Hell, I don’t know how. There are lots of ways you can lose a man—booze, fishing, sports TV—without his even having to take a single step from home. I’m just saying you’re going to drive him away if you aren’t careful, honey.”
They were sitting out on Shirl’s little deck, watching fog as thick as cotton roll in and out of Hubbard Bay. It did that all summer, and it always stopped right across the street from Shirl’s house, a two-story pile Bunny’s father had built in sections over a span of more than twenty years. None of the siding matched, and all the windows were different—whatever he could get for cheap down at the building supply store in Sawyer. The deck was nice, though. Hack had built it for Shirl a couple of years ago so she could get some sunshine between her toes the few times each year when it was warm enough to take your shoes off.
“How’s that girl of yours doing?” she asked Bunny. “I sure miss seeing her around here. She brightens up a room.”
“She’s good, I guess. She doesn’t call much.”
“And your fingers are broken?”
“Don’t,” said Bunny.
“I’m just saying,” said Shirl.
“I call her.”
Shirl lifted the lid of the little Igloo ice chest she’d stocked and dragged out on the deck a couple of hours ago. She extracted a fresh wine cooler for herself and held a second one out to Bunny, who declined.
“You keep drifting off someplace,” Shirl said, sitting down with a grunt and squinting at Bunny. “I’m sitting here looking right at you, and you might as well be over there in China or someplace.”
Bunny sighed. “I heard Sheryl Bigelow, Warren’s wife, is getting remarried.”
“No. So soon?”
“Nita told me.”
“Well, she’d know, close as they all were.”
“They weren’t really that close.”
“No?”
“No. Just Bob and Warren.”
“Well, now I didn’t know that.” Shirl took a long pull on her wine cooler and looked out over the bay. “Honey, isn’t that Jimmy Creech’s boat? What’s she called now, the Angel III? They rechristened her, you know, after that boy was killed on her. College kids are a menace, I’ll tell you that. Many’s the time your father came home cursing the air blue over some smart-ass summer kid who got tangled up in the gear or the nets. Over there, now isn’t that Creechy?”
Bunny peered through the fog. “I think so.”
“Shit, I didn’t even know Creechy took the boat out anymore,” Shirl said. “But no one crosses the bar like he does, with that sort of sideways sidle. Man will be one of a kind even in heaven or wherever. I think the good Lord broke the mold after seeing the way Creechy come out.”
Bunny looked through binoculars hanging from a rope nailed to the deck. “Yeah, that’s him, all right. Windbreaker with the hood up and tied tight under his chin.”
Shirl chuckled. “Yup, Little Red Riding Hood, people used to call him. I heard his kids got together and talked him into deeding the boat over to them. Old bastard’s got to be, what, eightyfive?”
“Something like that.”
“He’ll just drop one day, you watch,” Shirl said with satisfaction. “So you talk to Fanny lately?”
“Couple of days ago, three maybe. She sounded okay.”
“You must not have been listening then.”
“Why? Is she bad?”
“Yeah, she’s bad,” Shirl said. “Frank told her she can keep the furniture—”
“That’s bad?”
“—because he’s getting married.”
“Uh-oh,” said Bunny.
“Uh-huh. He’s marrying some woman it turns out he’s been seeing on the side since forever.”
“She never told me that.”
“Well, she’s got her pride,” Shirl said.
“Even so.”
“She probably didn’t want to upset you, honey.”
“Why would that upset me?”
“It’s not exactly a secret you’re on edge about Hack.”
“Does she know something? She knows something, doesn’t she? See, I told you there’s—”
“She don’t know a goddamn thing,” Shirl snapped. “Christ almighty, Bunny. She just knows you’re jumpy, that’s all. That’s all. And you are.” Shirl stood up and pulled at the crotch of her knit pants. “I’m going to get something to eat and pretend we never talked about this. You want something?”
“No.”
“Suit yourself.” Shirl tugged open the sliding glass door that led into the kitchen, slid it shut behind her, then yanked it open again. “Mark my words, Bunny. If that man ever leaves you, you’ll be the one at fault. There comes a time when you just have to believe in someone. You hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear you,” Bunny said.
“No, you don’t, and you never have. I don’t even know why I waste my breath anymore.” Shirl slid the door shut with a decisive thunk and disappeared inside.
Bob was having linoleum dreams. Every night it was a different pattern, but the rest was pretty much the same: He measured and cut and laid down the adhesive in big swirls with his trowel and then pressed down the flooring like he’d done it a million times. The glue went on like butter, and it all fitted exactly perfect.
In actuality, the stuff he had was vinyl, not linoleum, a pretty beige and blue in a tile pattern. Larry Hopkins was putting down a new floor in the Sea View Motel office and said he’d give the old stuff to Bob for free, just for hauling it away. It was in real good shape too, except for a couple of cigarette burns and a gash like someone had tried out new ice skates on it. Bob had been able to hide the damage under cabinets he’d salvaged from a house that was being torn down. He’d also scavenged a clawfoot bathtub for the bathroom, a heavy cast-iron thing that would last forever.
Not that he needed it to last forever.
He’d even found an old push lawn mower at a garage sale and mowed a little yard out of the weeds and wild grass. The place cleaned up so pretty. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever have let it go.
“Bob? Come on in.” Gabriella Lewis summoned him from the clinic waiting room. He tugged at his ball cap as he followed her down the usual corridor of posters and handbills. He thought she had a pretty nice backside for an archangel. You wouldn’t necessarily expect that.
He sat in his schoolboy chair by her desk. She took her seat, folded her hands in front of her, and looked at him expectantly.
“I wanted to ask you about that pneumonia,” he said.
“Pneumonia?”
“That one you said goes with AIDS.”
“Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, PCP. Why? Do you have a fever? You look well.”
“Not me, my wife. She’s been under the weather.”
“What do you mean, under the weather?”
“Oh, just real tired and that. She got better for a while, but now she’s not feeling good again.”
“Fever?”
Bob frowned. “Yeah, probably sometimes.”
“Is she coughing?”
“Maybe some.”
“Look, surely you don’t expect me to diagnose something from a conversation like this.”
“Nah, I wouldn’t ask you to do that. If she did get that pneumonia, she could die, though. Isn’t that right?”
“You know that. I’ve already told you that how many times. PCP is swift, and it’s deadly, especially in someone with a T-cell count under two hundred. Look at me.” Abruptly the nurse reached across her desk, put her hands on either side of Bob’s head, and turned him to look at her. “Take your wife to the doctor.” She dropped her hands. “You’re never going to do it, are you? And for the life of me I can’t figure out why.”
“Well, sure,” Bob said, drifting along on his own thoughts.
“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”
“Yes, I have,” Bob said. “I have.”
He stood up and straightened his chair. It reminded him of being in school, those heavy chairs t
hat made a noise like the rending of heaven when you scooted them. He’d always sat toward the back of the classroom, him and Warren, so they’d be overlooked for questions. Not that they were ever called on. Mostly teachers and parents looked right through them, their being so poor and often raggedy and all. Plus they didn’t always smell good. People thought they didn’t know it, but they did. It’s just that it wasn’t so easy getting to a real bathroom with a shower and all. There had been a lot of times when he and Warren had gone out back of Eden’s View into the woods with a bucket of water and cleaned themselves that way, in the freezing cold and with rags for washcloths. Of course, once they were in high school they could shower to their hearts’ content in the locker room. They washed their clothes in the sinks until Coach found out and offered them the school washer and dryer, which was real nice given that neither of them had gone out for a sport in their lives or ever would. By then Bob was wanting to date Anita so bad it made his toes tingle. Warren had told him a million times that she’d never go out with someone like him, but he’d been wrong; Bob had proved that. She’d come with him the first time he asked her out toward the end of eleventh grade. That was the first time he’d been able to summon up the courage, her being so pretty and all. By then he’d had his big old Buick; suddenly he was a man with transportation to offer. And he guessed he was good-looking enough, though sometimes people mistook him for Mexican with his skin tone and black hair and all.
When he asked her out that first time, he’d put his car keys into a little box he’d made in wood shop and had her open that. It was a good way to break the ice, even if Warren had told him it was silly and wouldn’t ever work. She’d laughed and looked him full in the face and said if he was asking her out for a drive, why, she thought she’d accept. Now what other girl would do that for a trash heap boy like him? You could have carted him directly off to heaven that day and he would have believed he’d been granted his wings. Warren had slipped into a funk for a week, but he pulled out of it eventually, like he always did. If Bob had gotten a nickel for every one of Warren’s bad moods, he’d have been rich as a king by now. Warren was—had been—the moodiest person Bob ever saw. Not that he didn’t have some damned good reasons why. Jesus, imagine wanting another man the way he wanted Anita. How could he have stood it? Warren never had to drink when they did that, like Bob had to. And now that Bob thought back on it, Warren had had crushes on boys all through high school, though Bob didn’t recognize them as crushes, of course, not back then anyway. He’d thought Warren’s attentions were fueled purely by envy, especially since he admired their clothes as much as the boys themselves.
“Look,” he’d whisper to Bob, and point out somebody’s sweater. “Do you think it could be cashmere?” As though either one of them would know cashmere any more than they’d recognize a Rolls-Royce. What they did recognize, mostly, was clean instead of dirty, big enough or small enough instead of a bad fit. Even in high school they wore secondhand clothes they got at a place over in Sawyer. It didn’t bother Bob much, but Warren was mortified. He’d cried bitter tears more than once over the outdated cut of a jacket or the wrong-way taper of a pants leg. Bob did the best he could to keep Warren’s spirits up, but it didn’t always work, and then he could count on hearing silence for days on end. Not that Warren would stay away from him; neither of them ever stayed away from the other one. No, Warren would just clam up, wade through the days like he was hip-deep in mud and working like hell to reach more solid ground. Bob wasn’t moody himself, but he didn’t hold that against Warren. He knew Warren wouldn’t be like that if he’d had a choice, especially after his mother committed suicide by hanging herself off an old broken-back pine way up near the top of the windward side of Cape Mano. No one had ever figured out how she got there or why she chose that spot. Hell, no one even found her for more than a month, and that was just by accident when Julius Otten pulled over to take a leak on the way home from a Sawyer tavern. Scared the holy bejesus out of him, he was fond of saying; peed all over his own shoes when he saw that body dangling in open space over a nine-hundred-foot drop straight down to the ocean. Rocks down there too; big ones. How had she known the tree would hold her? What if it hadn’t, and she’d plunged all the way down there and busted herself all up? They’d talked about it for weeks, all over town. All but Warren. He hadn’t had more than maybe ten minutes to say about it all together, and that was mostly spent explaining how he’d been expecting it all along. Still, he had his mother’s eyes, and when the heebie-jeebies were on him, he’d say, Bobby, you know that look she’d get in her eyes sometimes, like things had gone all crazy in her mind? Sometimes I think I’m going to get that way too. God, Bobby, I think about things—things I shouldn’t. Please don’t let me do what she did, die all alone like that in the woods at night in the wind. It doesn’t matter if you’re dead. You’re still you, and you’re still alone hanging over a whole lot of nothing off the thin end of a pine tree.
Bob would promise, of course, and if it got really bad, he’d take Warren to the homestead and lie down on the mattress ticking and hold him for hours in the gathering dark. And no matter how old he was, Warren would ball up and tuck into him just like a boy. They didn’t do that then; never then. Bob would sing, sometimes; or they would talk. Mostly, though, they just were. And that was all right too.
Hack was sitting at his desk nursing the dregs of a migraine when Bob pushed open his office door and came in. It occurred to Hack that he hadn’t seen much of the man in a long time except to hand over his truck keys from time to time. Jesus, he looked reborn: sunburned, bandy, bouncing up on his toes the way high school kids walked when they believed in themselves. Things must be going better at home. Hack hadn’t asked in a while. There was only so much bad news you could take, and Bunny kept him apprised daily of the deepening shit that Anita had fallen into. The latest thing was some kind of skin problem or something; Hack hadn’t been paying much attention. With Bunny, you couldn’t.
“You busy?” Bob said, shifting from foot to foot in the doorway.
“Nah, just sitting here looking at the backs of my eyelids for a minute. You don’t have any aspirin or Tylenol or whatever?”
“No.”
“Yeah,” Hack said regretfully.
“Ask Francine or Rae, maybe. Girls always have stuff like that in their purse.”
Hack tried to rally. “So what can I do you for?” It wasn’t much, an old joke, a real groaner.
“Do you have time to help me with something? It won’t take long.”
“Yeah? Will it cure a migraine?”
“Don’t know about that,” Bob said.
“Well, go ahead and try me anyway.”
“I have this project I’ve been working on.”
“You finally going to tell me what it is?”
“Aw, it’s nothing much. I’ve been fixing up this place, is all. There’s a bathtub I got to move in, but the bastard is cast iron, and I can’t lift it by myself.”
“You going to pay for my hernia?”
“What?”
“That was a joke. Yeah, I’ll help you. You’ve got me curious now,” Hack said. “When, this weekend?”
“Nah, I’ve got to get it in now, pretty much. How about I ask Francine for some aspirin or maybe some of those pills they take for the cramps, they’d probably help a headache, and then we can just go out and do it?”
What the hell, it beat sitting at his desk pretending to read sales reports. “Tell her to give me double the normal dose,” he called after Bob, who’d taken off so fast he damn nearly left a contrail behind him like a cartoon action figure. And Bob wasn’t the kind of man to move in a hurry normally. Hack was still fishing around in his pocket for his truck keys when Bob returned with a fistful of white pills and a Dixie cup of water. Whatever they were, Hack put four of them in his mouth and pocketed the rest for later, pounded back the water, and crushed the cup in his hand to take his mind off the rush of pain and nausea. If he made no fast moves,
no abrupt changes in direction until the drug kicked in, he might just live.
“So where are we going exactly?” he asked Bob as he unlocked the doors to the truck.
“I’ll show you as we go.”
The cab was warm inside, and clean, smelling of wax and Armor All. Hack had detailed it from top to bottom over the weekend. “North or south?” he said.
“North.”
Hack pulled out into traffic, heading north on Highway 101. “Remember those road rallies we used to go on, thirty-six checkpoints in four states in two days?”
“Yeah.”
“That was fun. Maybe we should do that again sometime,” Hack said.
Bob said, “Make a right turn up there.”
“Here?”
“Yeah.”
“This is Weyerhaeuser land.”
“Uh-huh.”
Hack shrugged and turned onto a gravel logging road that twisted and wound back into a valley he’d never seen before.
“There,” Bob said suddenly, and there was a note of excitement in his voice that made Hack look a little harder. Down below them he saw a broken-down barn and an old cabin of some kind—rustic, but some people liked stuff like that. Him, he was all for his creature comforts, his recliner and his remote control and his occasional finger of scotch. He looked over at Bob. What the hell?
Bob hopped out of the truck before it had even stopped, looking like he was going to bust wide open with excitement. He trotted over to an old cast-iron tub resting upside down in the grass by the cabin door. “This is it. This is a real good old tub. They don’t make them like this anymore. Problem is, I can’t get it inside by myself.” He grinned at Hack. “It’s really something out here, isn’t it? Isn’t it just something?”
Hack pushed open the cabin door and walked inside. The cabin had only two real rooms, a front room and a back bedroom, plus a loft, a kitchen—or what Hack assumed was a kitchen, because he could see a sink through the doorway—and a bathroom. It was primitive but tidy and scrubbed and snug, with freshly sealed walls, a fire laid in the fireplace, and a green jar placed carefully on the mantel. Someone—Bob, evidently— had brought in an old rocker, a cane-bottomed chair, a primitive wooden bed, a bureau, a blanket chest, and a couple of old paintings, scenes of mountains and rivers. The bed was made up with soft old linens and a faded quilt.
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