Going to Bend (12 page)

“They’re all right.”

And Petie meant it: they were all right. They were honest and they worked hard and they had given her and Rose jobs. But they were taking advantage of Rose, getting her to do all that work and not paying her, and Petie didn’t like that.

It took a long time for Gordon to answer the door. When he did, Petie recognized one of Rose’s crocheted afghans around his shoulders, and he wore a pair of burgundy suede slippers on his feet. From within, a vaporizer hissed. He was very pale, and looked like the boys did after a bad bout of the flu: rabbit-eyed, clammy-handed, fuggy from too much bed rest and fever.

“Rose called and said you’d be dropping some pages by,” he said. He spoke thickly. Rose had said something about there being fungus in his mouth. “Do you want to come in?”

“That’s okay. I’ve got to get back.”

“Wait. I’ve got some proofs I want Rose to see. Can I send them with you? Would you mind?”

“Sure.”

Petie stepped inside and looked around. She had never been here before. Along one wall there was a slender-slatted bench; the other furniture was pretty, upholstered in chintzes of salmon and green. On the walls were several pencil sketches of men, small things in thick wooden frames; one a face, another a nude—a
man
—lying on his side. A whole wall of books, plants; an electronic keyboard of some kind. Some tall brass candlesticks with salmon-colored candles. It was beautiful and immaculate and no other man Petie had ever known would have been caught dead there.

On his desk a computer showed a page of Rose’s book on the screen. Gordon did a few things and the page changed.

“Take a look at this.” He motioned Petie over. “Remember the cabbage and chorizo soup? Here’s the spread we’re doing on it. It’s good, isn’t it?”

Petie looked, but it was just a recipe to her, except that it had a longer explanation beside it than she’d have wanted to read. Rose had always been the reader, not her.

“Rose has a strong, earthy voice,” Gordon said, rapidly flipping other pages onto and then off the screen. A printer began dragging paper through itself in the corner. “It’s very unusual, very clear. I think we’re going to be able to find a regional publisher for her. Think of it. You two will be famous.”

“Not me. Just Rose.”

“She includes you in everything she’s writing. Haven’t you read any of it?”

“Nah. She’s talked about some of the recipes with me, you know, double-checking things, but I’ll read it when it’s done.”

Gordon nodded and tapped the new papers into order, put them in an envelope and handed it to Petie. She took it and headed for the door, but before she got there she could hear Gordon clearing his throat, a thick, painful sound. “Petie.”

“Hmmm?”

Gordon draped the afghan over the back of his chair and set his feet carefully. “Has Rose talked to you about me?”

“Sure.”

“So you know I don’t have the flu.”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay with it?”

“No,” said Petie. “Are you?”

Gordon smiled. “No.”

“Look, I’m not afraid of you, if that’s what you mean. I’m not thrilled, either. Okay? You’re my boss. I work for you and Nadine. I like my job, and I’m not planning on going anywhere else. Is that what you wanted to know? The rest is none of my business.”

Gordon nodded and colored.

“Hey,” she said more softly. “I say what I mean, but it comes out hard sometimes. It’s awful, what’s happening to you. And I’m sorry. Look. Rose is the nice one of us two. You make sure she knows if there’s anything we can do. Anything. Okay?” She crossed the room and picked the top off the vaporizer, took it into the apartment’s tiny kitchen and filled the well, then hooked it back up again in the living room. “You’re not leaving this on overnight, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, if you do just make sure you fill it up real good.”

Gordon smiled a little, shivered and readjusted Rose’s afghan over his shoulders. Petie picked up the envelope again.

“Petie.”

She turned around at the door.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah.” Quietly she pulled the door shut behind her and sighed.

I
T HAD
always seemed like a mistake that, of the two of them, Petie had been the one to have two children—her, on whose reluctant shoulders children had fallen like a sack of cats. Rose had spent a tranquil, besotted pregnancy rubbing her belly and dreaming, while
Petie had spent both of hers fighting back, prodding at the kicking babies with a ruler, a pencil, a spoon, her thumb. All three children responded to them the same way. They brought Petie their anger and outrage, but when they were hurt, especially Loose, they went to Rose. And so there was nothing really new in Petie’s turning over Gordon to Rose as she so often turned over the boys.

“Maybe you could just look in on him,” she told Rose back in Hubbard as she handed her Gordon’s envelope. “I mean, if you’re going over there anyway. He seemed to want something.”

“You mean like food?”

“No, no, nothing like that, he’s got Nadine for that stuff. No, more like someone to talk to, maybe. I don’t know. He wanted to know if I knew what he had.”

“So?”

“Well, I do. So I said so.”

“God.”

“I don’t know, he seemed relieved he didn’t have to tell me.”

Rose shook her head. “It’s awful.”

“I know. So I told him to tell you anytime he needed anything we could help with.”

Rose nodded.

“I thought I’d better let you know.”

“Okay.” Rose began to slip the new pages out of the envelope.

“I had lunch over in Sawyer with Schiff.”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He asked. I thought he wanted to tell me something about Eddie, some fuckup.”

“Did he?”

“No. Eddie made some deal with him for some dirt bike, though. He wanted my okay.”

“Oh.” Petie opened the front door, but Rose called out, “Hey! I nearly forgot. Barb Dumphy called. She thought you might be over here
cooking. Something about setting up an appointment to talk to you about Ryan.”

“Shit.” Barb Dumphy was Ryan’s fourth-grade teacher.

“You’re supposed to call her back between three-thirty and four. Or she said she might try you.”

Sure enough, the telephone was ringing when she got home. Like a fool, she picked it up. “Mrs. Coolbaugh? This is Barb Dumphy at school. Ryan’s teacher? I’m glad I managed to find you. I’m calling because I’d like to set up an appointment to talk with you and Mr. Coolbaugh about Ryan.”

“Is he crying at recess again?”

“Actually, I’d rather not talk about it over the phone. What I was wondering was, could you and Mr. Coolbaugh come to school tomorrow afternoon, maybe at three-thirty?”

The woman sounded nervous. Son of a
bitch
. Petie hoped they didn’t owe anyone money. With a dish towel she whacked at a late-fall fly dying on the windowsill. “I could probably come. My husband has to work.”

“Well, that’s fine, even just one of you. Do you know which is Ryan’s classroom?”

“Yes.”

“All right, Mrs. Coolbaugh. We’ll see you at three-thirty tomorrow. Bye, now.”

Petie kept the receiver to her ear as the connection was broken and then replaced by a dial tone. By the kitchen clock the boys would be home in ten minutes, and the sink was piled with dishes Petie had turned her back on to meet Schiff. She looked at them with anger; she hated dirty dishes in any sink. Old Man had always left crusty plates around, and old juice glasses with a film of beer still on them. The trailer had stunk of them all the time, even when Petie cleaned them the minute Old Man turned his back. Not that there was much of a way to clean anything in twelve feet of no kitchen and just a dishpan of water to wash in, another for rinsing, poured from the jerry cans she filled three or four times a week at the spigot outside the First Church of God.

Old Man never got water. Hell, he would have kept on peeing out the
window if Petie and Eddie hadn’t built an outhouse for them. That had been eighteen years ago, when she hardly knew him except that he’d watch her in class sometimes, two years older than the rest of the students and still flunking algebra. One day out of the blue, he turned up whistling in a place where no one would normally go—they were squatting on state land, so the trailer was a good fifty feet off the petered-out end of Chollum Road. The day Eddie showed up, Petie had been struggling to get some scavenged boards anchored to a two-by-four. It was October, and cold, and she didn’t have much of a hammer.

“Hey,” Eddie Coolbaugh had said. He had a hammer in his hand. At the time he seemed as unlikely to be there as Santa and his reindeer. Maybe someone had told him she’d been scavenging wood from the landfill. “You could use a better hammer.” He extended his and Petie took it.

“You have any nails?” she said.

“Those nails are all right.”

“They bend pretty easy.”

“Because you were using a tack hammer. You try that one, they won’t bend. Hit it square, though. You got to hit it real square or you’ll bend any nail.”

He watched her pound a couple of nails, all of them true. “Big wall or little?”

“Who said it was a wall?”

“It’s either that or a fence, and this doesn’t look like a place for a fence. Big?”

“I don’t know. I guess not. I don’t have much wood.”

Eddie sorted through the pile she’d collected and lined pieces up on the ground and sawed them even while Petie hammered. Between them they made four walls and a doorframe by dark. Eddie sank a post-hole or two in the loamy ground, against which the walls could be raised and then anchored. He still had not asked what they were building, nor shown any particular curiosity. Out of the corner of her eye Petie watched him work, and there was something about his profound lack of interest she liked. And the fact that he had no smell, none whatsoever.

When the light was gone, Eddie had said, “We better do the roof tomorrow. Supposed to be rain coming in.”

Petie let nothing show. “Yeah.”

Eddie brushed off his clothes, ran his fingers through his hair to tidy himself.

“Why’d you come up here, anyway?”

Eddie had shrugged. “There wasn’t anywhere else better. You want a ride back into town? It’s getting late.”

“Nah. My dad and I, we’ll probably camp out here tonight. He’s supposed to meet me.”

“Yeah?” Eddie looked at her blandly through the gathering darkness.

“I’m building an outhouse,” Petie had said flatly. “We live here.”

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “I heard that.”

Next day he’d come back with lumber and a toilet seat and it had been that way between them ever since.

F
OR NEARLY
as long as Ryan could remember, Rose had kept a scrap bag in her bedroom closet. It was a plain muslin sack filled with the leftover bits from sewing projects stretching back years: baby quilts she’d made for all of them, smocks and rompers for Carissa, skirts and blouses and dresses for herself. The two of them used to pore over the contents like two kings in a countinghouse. Rose loved rich colors and fine naps, and inside the plain bag were whole seasons: a springtime garden of pinks and yellows and blues, smoky autumn afternoons of grays and golds and fading greens.

Ryan sat in the narrow entrance to Rose’s closet with the bag open at his feet, cloth carefully unfurled and transforming his legs and feet and lap into a fine landscape: a vast blue velveteen sea, green-checked fields, brown-striped mountains spiking from his toes. Deployed across the folds at the foot of the mountain range but not far from the sea were several Pilgrims and an Indian. The Pilgrims were begging the Indians to give them food, since they lacked the skills to take care of themselves in the New World. Ryan’s class was learning about the early settlers and Thanksgiving in social studies. Ryan was deeply interested in the Pilgrims’ plight. He himself felt unprepared most of the time, and knew the shame and terror it caused.

Ryan loved being at Rose’s, even with Jim Christie there. Christie rarely spoke, which was all right with Ryan because he understood that
Christie was shy. When Ryan and Loose had walked in after school today, he had simply nodded to them both, flipped a faded ball cap onto his head, pulled it low and gone outside. Loose had trailed after him, hoping for mechanical revelations—Christie was known as a first-rate auto mechanic, better even than Eddie Coolbaugh. Ryan had Rose and the house to himself until Carissa came home from Sawyer on the school bus.

Rose poked her head into the room. “Sweetie, are you going to want a brownie?”

“Okay.”

“Oh, look!” Rose cried, seeing the scrap bag. “All the beautiful things! It’s been a long time since any of us got into my scrap bag, hasn’t it? When you were little you used to take stuff out one by one and rub them against your cheek.”

“I don’t do that anymore,” Ryan lied. He had stroked his cheek with every cloth he’d withdrawn. It was one of his rituals. He had a lot of rituals. In his pocket was a little satin scrap he’d stolen because he liked the way his fingernail felt scraping across it. He would bring it home and put it under his pillow, where he could scratch it as he fell asleep. The thought made him shiver a little with pleasure.

“What are the Q-tips for?” Rose had come in to take a closer look.

“They’re not Q-tips. They’re Pilgrims.”

“Oh! Is it Thanksgiving?”

“No, because they need to find a turkey first. They’re all starving to death, except the ones who are dying of mosquito bites.”

“Yuck.”

“So they’re walking to the mountains to try and find an Indian who could give them a turkey.”

“You have the wildest imagination. You know, you could watch cartoons if you want to. Loose is outside with Jim working on my car. You could choose whatever show you want.”

“Maybe in a little while.”

“All right, sweetie. Just clean up in here when you’re done.” Rose turned to leave.

“Rose?”

“Hmmm?”

“Why did my mom have to go to school?” Ryan tried not to sound nervous, but he’d worried all day. Maybe they thought he had done something wrong. Sometimes he could feel Mrs. Dumphy looking at him, especially lately, when he wasn’t playing with the other kids at recess. He was sculpting a hole under the fir tree with the knot on the trunk. He’d been perfecting it for a week, a round, smooth hole the size of an upside-down helmet.