Going to Bend (23 page)

Bev Houghton answered at the Pepsi distributorship in Sawyer. “Hi!” she greeted Petie when she heard her voice. “You want to talk with Eddie? He’s up north, but I could give you his voice mail.”

“Thanks, but I actually need to talk with Schiff for a minute.”

“Oh! I think he’s in. While I’ve got you, though, are you coming to the company Christmas dinner next week?”

“Sure,” Petie said. “I never miss the chance to attend some dinner where you hold a disintegrating paper plate in one hand and a beer in the—”

“A Pepsi,” Bev interrupted.

“What?”

“Where you hold a disintegrating paper plate in one hand and a
Pepsi
in the other—” Bev said helpfully.

“—until the plate disappears and you’re wearing your food on your shoes,” Petie said. “Count me in. Me and Eddie. Can kids come?”

“Of course.”

“My two kids, too, then.”

“Okeydoke. You ready for me to put you through to Eddie’s voice mail?”

“Schiff,” Petie said through clenched teeth. “I needed to talk to Schiff.”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot. I’m sorry, hon,” Bev cooed—and she a woman who Petie knew damned well could tell you the color of the toilet paper she wiped herself with two days ago. “Nice talking to you, Petie.”

“Sure,” Petie said, and then mouthed into the receiver, “My ass.” God save her from fat Bev and the death grip of her memory, which was puny only when compared with the size of her big mouth.

On the other end the phone rang for the third time. Thank God. Maybe Petie wouldn’t get through but could still tell Schiff she’d tried.

“Hiya, princess,” Ron Schiffen suddenly murmured in her ear. Bev must have told him it was Petie on the line. Of course she had.

“
Fuck
the princess,” she hissed, feeling herself slipping into the unreal and tireless world of Schiff’s knee-jerk seductions.

“That would be nice.”

“Don’t you ever stop?”

“No,” Schiff said sadly. “Not that it gets me anywhere. Still, miracles do sometimes happen.”

“And if you were granted one miracle, what would it be?”

“It has to do with you and a hotel—”

“I’m serious, Schiff.”

“Me, too, princess.”

“Look, why did you call me earlier?” He had left a very careful, neutral message on her phone, presumably in case something went wrong and Eddie checked the machine instead of Petie.

“I wanted to see if you would have lunch with me.”

“I’ve had lunch with you.”

“Some people eat lunch every day.”

“We’re talking every day as it is. Why is that?”

“I like you,” Schiff said simply.

“I don’t think lunch is a good idea.”

“Why?”

“Why? Carla is why. You’re the one with the wife.”

Schiff was silent.

“Okay,” Petie said. “You can call me. Let’s leave it at that.”

“How can I seduce you if I never see you?”

“You said it, bucko, not me.”

“Eddie’s got a south county run the day after tomorrow. Have lunch with me then. You can choose where.”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Schiff. You can call me tomorrow.” Through her own loud breathing, Petie heard his voice still talking as she hung up the phone. She couldn’t explain this to Rose even if she wanted to. Here, in the middle of winter’s pall on the dripping Oregon coast, unseen among people she’d known and been known by all her life, she had found something more dangerous than gunshots, more threatening than sex, and for which there were no words of explanation or retraction. Here, when she didn’t even know she’d been looking, in a man she’d never liked, she had found love.

J
IM CHRISTIE
sat watching girls stream out of Sawyer Middle School like liquid sin. He hadn’t noticed girls like these when he was their age, but he noticed them now all right, the way their skin fit so perfectly over their muscles and bones, the way they were so taut and elastic, too good to be real except they
were
real. Right here, right in front of him, surging all around his pickup like he was no more than a stone in the river. An old man, an invisible man, with his faded hair and worn-out eyes and years of wrinkles from looking into the jaws of bad weather. A quiet man who
looked
with great potency.

Jim Christie wasn’t like most of the men on the boats in Alaska, who took whatever form of woman came along as soon as they hit port. He knew how to wait and what he was waiting for. Sex was a deep, warm, dark place and he wasn’t about to spoil it in a randy moment. He could wait—did wait—for Rose, with her generous hips and her soft luminous hair and the way she hummed when she took pleasure. She was strong drink, turning his head around, making him forget to keep things hidden that were best left concealed—his longing to stay in a place he was desperate to leave; his certainty that he would die in the next fishing season; the knowledge that he would go north to Alaska anyway.

“Hey!” The top of a blond head just showed above the window on the passenger side of his truck. “Open the door!”

Christie reached across a wasteland of mechanical parts and cracked
the door. Carissa elbowed it open and tossed in an armload of books and notebooks, then heaved herself onto the seat after them. “Whew! I’m glad you’re here. I thought Mom was coming for me.”

“She had to work.” Christie turned over the ignition and steered his old truck into the crush of beater cars and school buses clogging the road.

Carissa raked her loose hair back and then let it fall in a tumble, Rose’s mannerism eerily reenacted. Christie kept his eyes on the traffic.

“What do you want for dinner?” she asked. “I could make that tuna casserole you like.”

“That’d be fine,” Christie said.

“Or we could have meat loaf.”

Christie shrugged. “Whatever you want.”

“What do
you
want? You never say.”

“Don’t want anything. If I do, I can fix it myself.”

“You never let anyone take care of you. Why won’t you let us take care of you?”

Christie reset his ball cap. “Don’t need it.”

“Well, it’d be nice if you’d let us spoil you sometimes. Mom spends the whole time you’re away thinking up things to fix while you’re home, and then you don’t ever want anything.”

“I like everything you fix, your mom, too. She knows that.”

Carissa sighed and set her jaw. “Well, it would help if you were a little more demonstrative.” Christie cocked an eyebrow. “You know—showed how you feel.”

“I know what it means.”

They drove the rest of the way to Hubbard in silence. Carissa absently twirled a strand of hair around and around her finger. Christie could just make out the scent of her shampoo overlaid with something else, maybe perfume. He drove with both hands on the wheel.

They drove past Souperior’s. “How late is Mom working tonight?”

“Till seven.”

“Can we go by your place, then?”

“No.”

“Are you still fixing it up?”

“I go there sometimes,” Christie said.

“Every day?”

“Depends.”

“Do you take Mom?”

“No.”

“Does she even know about it?”

“Only if you told her.”

“I promised it would be a secret.”

“Doesn’t need to be.”

“Then why haven’t you told her?”

“Haven’t had any reason to.”

Carissa made a sound of exasperation. “Well, I wish you’d let me go back there again. I want to see what you’ve done.”

“Haven’t done anything.”

“Well, you could, though. Curtains maybe; maybe a rug. A chair.”

“I’ve got what I need.”

“Could you take me up there some other time, then?”

“We’ll see,” said Christie.

“Please?”

Christie set his shoulders and Carissa subsided, crossing her arms over her chest. She perked up again almost immediately, putting her hand on his arm. “I know, I’ll make brownies. How about brownies?”

Christie turned into their driveway, leaving the carport empty for Rose when she came home.

“Brownies would be fine,” Christie said, and walked away from the girl to the house.

She touched him a lot. It wasn’t a good idea.

E
DDIE COOLBAUGH
had finally found a place for himself that he loved: Pepsi. He wore his snappy uniform with pride, stood a little taller whenever he was wearing it—the neat striped shirt, the blue zip-front jacket, the pants with the smart creases sharp as knives. He hopped from his truck cab with a confident bounce, knowing he was
good-looking, knowing he was somebody. The women always held him up at his stops, signing for his delivery slowly, pretending to look things over, making foolish remarks about the weather, about a daughter’s wedding coming up, about nothing at all. What they were really saying was that he was a good-looking man of some importance, a man worth noticing, perhaps even worth remembering. For that, Eddie owed Ron Schiffen big-time. Eddie might even take over for him one day, who knew? He would learn the business, maybe get an inside position after a while, warehouseman or bottling plant foreman. He’d be good at that. Not a desk job, though. He’d hate a desk job, unless it was Schiff’s and he had a secretary who did all the work while he, Eddie, put his boots up on the desk and talked on the telephone. He’d mentioned his ambitions to Petie, but she just told him to go slow, do the job he had, be satisfied with that. Petie didn’t understand the fire in his gut when he thought about his possibilities. Schiff might, though. Eddie would talk to him one day soon, lay things out for him and see what he had to say. Not yet, though. Eddie wasn’t ready yet.

He and Petie didn’t see things the same way much anymore. Eddie didn’t know exactly why that was. He’d cheated on her once or twice, but everyone did that and the women mostly got used to it after a while. He took care of his kids and kept a roof over their heads; he let Petie do pretty much what she wanted to, even when it stank up the house and jacked up their electric bill. He didn’t see the point of it, himself, but he wasn’t a man who tried to tell people what to do. Now she was digging up little bits of drawings and shit from everywhere because Rose had told her she was an artist. She’d always doodled, from as far back as he could remember. When she lived with them, his mother had always kept paper and pencils around the house. It was probably because of Eula that Petie had shown anyone she could draw in the first place. It was beyond him why someone would pay for her doodling, but if they were willing to, well then, Eddie wasn’t going to discourage them. It was just like her and Rose to go off on another wild-goose chase that wouldn’t take them anywhere in the end, but hey. If Petie wanted to waste her time, that was her lookout, not his. He wasn’t a man who kept too tight a rein on things,
plus Petie got mean when she was cornered. He’d learned a long time ago to swing wide.

Her beater Colt was already in the parking lot at Hubbard Elementary when Eddie pulled in with his Pepsi truck. He ran a deft comb through his hair, straightened the lay of his jacket and ducked into the school. Petie and Mrs. Hendrik were already in the first-grade classroom there, seated at a ridiculously small desk with a folder opened between them. Mrs. Hendrik—a twenty-four-year-old do-gooder he couldn’t stand and neither could Petie—jumped up, scraped over another chair made for dolls or midgets, and urged him to sit down.

“Mr. Coolbaugh, your wife and I have been talking about Loose. As you know, I thought it would be a good idea for us to get together.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, looking around the room at the bulletin board cutouts of parrots and monkeys and jungle crap. Jesus, he’d hated school.

“Mr. Coolbaugh, I believe Loose is having some problems.”

Petie stiffened almost imperceptibly in her chair. “He hasn’t been doing anything wrong with the other kids, has he?”

“Excuse me?” said Mrs. Hendrik.

Eddie could see Petie’s hands fist up, never a good sign with her. “He was picking on another boy a week or two ago, a smaller boy.”

“Well, he can be aggressive. We have had to discipline him several times, Mrs. Coolbaugh, as you know. But that’s not what I wanted to discuss with you both.”

“No?” Petie said.

“No. Loose is having some trouble with his reading.”

“Reading?”

“He doesn’t seem to be, well, getting it. The other children are reading whole sentences, but Loose can’t. I think we may want to have him evaluated.”

Petie leaned forward over the tiny desk. “You mean, he’s not in trouble for doing things to other kids?”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Coolbaugh. Loose is a physical boy and he can be rough sometimes on the playground, but that’s normal in a child with
his temperament. No, what I’m concerned about is whether Loose has some mild disabilities that are getting in the way of his learning.”

Eddie squinted. “What exactly are you talking about, Mrs.—ah—?”

“Hendrik.” The young woman colored. “You can call me Nan.”

“Well, then, Nan, are you saying there’s something wrong with my boy?”

“Eddie,” Petie warned.

“No, I want to hear this. Are you saying my boy isn’t normal?” Fucking teachers—God, but he hated teachers.

“Oh, no,” the teacher said. She looked frightened. “No, what I’m saying is that it’s possible—just possible, Mr. Coolbaugh—that he may have a learning disability of some kind, or an attention deficit disorder. Has anyone ever discussed this with you?”

“No,” Eddie said flatly.

“Eddie is dyslexic,” Petie said.

“Oh! Well, that might give us some clues, then,” Nan Hendrik said.

“Loose is not stupid,” Eddie said.

“No one’s saying he’s stupid, Eddie.”

“Just the opposite, Mr. Coolbaugh. Loose is very bright, and he seems to have a rare mechanical gift. He says he helps you fix things.”

“We work on cars, dirt bikes.”

“Well, that’s very impressive.”

“So what do you want us to do?” Petie said. “We don’t have money, Mrs. Hendrik, for special counseling.”

“Oh! No, none of it costs money—the school district provides testing and assessment. If we find anything we think will require more specialized help, we’ll talk about it then.”