Homesick Creek (14 page)

chapter eight

The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!”

—EDWARD LEAR, 1871

Sweating lightly, Hack hunched over the book of children’s poems that Rae Macy had brought in while she read aloud over his shoulder in a light, clear voice. He should have been making sly innuendos, breathing in her nearness, her subtle perfume, and her heat. Instead he was trying to control his breathing as the return of memory thrummed in his veins like jungle drums.

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Rae pressed her hands together in delight and returned to her chair. “My mother used to read me that one. If she read it once, I bet she read it a thousand times, and I never got tired of it.”

Hack closed the book cover he still saw sometimes in his dreams.

“Hack? Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure? You looked so pale for a minute.”

“Must have been the poetry, princess,” he said wearily. “I have a sensitive nature.”

Rae looked wounded. “For a minute you had me fooled into thinking you liked these.”

“Sure I like them. What makes you think I don’t like them? Hell, I’ve
memorized
them.”

“Have you?” Rae tucked the book under her arm protectively. “I don’t know. You’re the most confounding man sometimes.”

“That’s me, princess. I can found with the best of ’em.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“Absolutely not.”

Rae pursed her lips and regarded him for a long minute. “Tell me about your sister.”

“Maybe sometime.”

“Not now?”

“Not now.”

“Can I ask why?”

“No.”

Rae flushed and rose.

“Can I borrow that book overnight?” he said, trying to keep his tone light.

“Only if you’ll tell me about your sister when you give it back.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hack said, figuring he’d get out of it somehow. The book was calling as powerfully as any love letter. He could feel the thick cardboard covers in his hands even after all these years, the top right corner buggered up where someone’s baby had teethed on it, purchased for a quarter in an act of fierce pride at the annual Tin Spoon library sale.

Hack’s phone rang, startling him badly. He needed to get a grip on himself.

“Hey,” Bunny said.

“Hey.” He waggled his fingers at Rae; bye for now. She left the book on his desk and walked out of the room, flushing a deep crimson.
Jesus
, the woman was sensitive. Her other half must have quite the challenge some days.

“I’m bringing Mom over to see the doctor,” Bunny was saying. “We should be done around noon. Do you want us to pick you up for lunch?”

Shirl. God, but he wasn’t in the mood for his mother-in-law right now, with her loud voice and thrusting bosom, but he knew how it would go if he blew them off. Bunny would sulk, and Shirl would sniff and tell Bunny that it looked to her like family didn’t count for shit anymore. “Yeah, why don’t you stop by at least?” he said. “I have a customer who might be coming in, but I won’t know until later.”

For years Bunny hadn’t come over to Sawyer more than once a month, twice at most, to shop the Safeway specials, but now it seemed like she was here every other day to keep an eye on him, remind him he was hers, taken, claimed. Jesus, as though he’d forget. She’d come back from Fanny’s a mess, though. He guessed she’d seen life through her sister’s eyes, and it had scared the shit out of her. But Fanny had married a dick, a son of a bitch who fucked around every chance he got and treated Fanny like live-in help. Say whatever else you wanted about him, but Hack was no dick. He knew where home was, much as he liked his fun like anybody else. If Bunny didn’t know that about him by now, there was nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t going to pander to her, reassure her every minute that he wasn’t having an affair with Rae Macy, goddamn it. He wasn’t. He wouldn’t. Mind you, he would’ve given a lot to see where they might go, him and Rae, but he was a man with a keen sense of reality, and the reality of the thing was that he and Rae Macy were pendulums swinging in opposite directions. They passed each other regularly and made a beautiful noise when they did, but that was all they were or ever would be. The rest was just so much mental masturbation.

Hack noticed that Bunny had hung up, so he must have said good-bye. He set down the receiver and rubbed his eyes.

The book throbbed in his mind like an old wound.

Katy had brought home their copy from the annual Tin Spoon library sale like a conqueror triumphant. The kid already loved to read, and she was only seven that year. She’d pleaded with Hack to take her.

“Come on, Buddy,” she’d wheedled. That’s what she called him, Buddy. “I’ve got some money.”

“Where’d you get money? You didn’t roll old Mr. Nelson again, did you?”

Katy put her hands on her hips. “Buddy,” she’d said indignantly. Hack was always accusing her of the most heinous crimes against the frail and aged of Tin Spoon.

“So c’mon, tell me where you got it.”

“Mr. Elliott gave me a quarter for holding open the door for him at the Thriftway.”

“Honey, you can’t block the doors like that until they pay you. It’s against the law.”

“Oh, Buddy,”
she said, hands on small hips.

He even cracked himself up sometimes.

Still, people were always slipping the Katydid money, a dime, a quarter, even a couple of bucks sometimes. It wasn’t pity money either; it was treat money, thanks-for-that-smile money, because Katy had the gift of delight, and it shone through everything she did. People smiled just because she was smiling, greeted her because it made her light up when they did. And he didn’t just think that because she was his kid sister; people were always asking about her when he was in town alone, sending their greetings home with him.

So he’d given in and walked with her to the library sale on a scorching hot day when he would rather have been anywhere else. The library was a squat concrete building in the center of town, a WPA legacy with a frieze of heroic, thick-necked men and women parading across the front. They were presumably bound for glory on account of the knowledge gained from the books within. Privately Hack thought that was a bunch of shit; no one got anywhere sitting around reading. People who read went hungry. Work was the thing, and lots of it. He’d already had a job for a year, working as a bag boy at Howdy’s Market six days a week. He wasn’t supposed to accept tips, but if people slipped a little something into the pocket of his jeans when his hands were full, what could he do? When Cherise was in Las Vegas stealing and turning the occasional trick, he fed the Katydid from his own pay like a man.

That day she had marched into the library with her head held high; here was a discriminating buyer with money to burn. She’d agonized over her choices. Poems or fairy tales? Animal stories or silly riddles? She’d finally chosen the book of poems and grandly presented herself and her money at the checkout desk. The librarian slipped the book into a canvas tote usually reserved for people who spent fifty dollars or more, all proceeds going toward new book acquisitions, but she just gave the Katydid a sly wink. Katy used that tote for years, for lunches, school-books, groceries. It was one of her most prized possessions.

She’d read him the poetry book all the way through that first night. That was the way they did it, her reading to him at bedtime because he was a lousy reader. She propped herself up in bed and read the way the librarians did, turning the book around importantly and panning it to show him the pictures every few verses, prouder than shit to be doing something he was no good at. She’d read him every single poem, more than an hour’s worth. He’d started protesting halfway through: “Jesus, Katy-kid, you really go for this shit? ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’? It’d never happen. In real life she would have done him in in about a minute flat and eaten him for lunch.”

She’d said what she always said, her voice a masterpiece of world-weariness: “Buddy. It’s poetry.”

“It’s shit, is what it is,” he’d said, but mostly just to get a last rise out of her. He’d let her read him the entire book, and after that she’d read him at least one poem every night for years. One of the worst things of all, later, was hearing those verses in his head. It had taken Vietnam to shut them up.

Now the book lay within arm’s reach and ready to detonate. He put it beneath his jacket, hooded until it was time to take it home.

With a supreme effort he distracted himself by making follow-up phone calls to prospective customers who’d come into the showroom in the last several weeks but hadn’t bought. It didn’t get him anywhere—it never got him anywhere; it was a sales technique proven to fail—but it made the morning pass. At twelve o’clock precisely Bunny came through the showroom doors, fluffing her hair and straightening her clothes in case she came face-to-face with Rae, smiling a showy smile at him.

“Mom’s in the car. You coming with us?”

“Yeah, I’ll come.”

“Don’t you want your jacket? It’s blowing like hell.”

“Nah.”

He slid behind the wheel of the LTD. Shirl sat in the front seat beside him, smelling of mildew and gardenia and cigarettes.

“Hi, hon,” she said, patting his thigh in sporty greeting. She took liberties with him sometimes, but he figured it had been years since she’d had sex, possibly even decades, so he usually let it go.

At the Bobcat he pulled out her chair for her and slid it back in, no mean feat since the woman weighed close to two hundred pounds. Then he did the same for Bunny, who always waited for him instead of just pulling out the damned chair herself and scooting it back in. Turned out he’d married royalty, only without the money.

“So what did the doctor say?” he asked Shirl, because he knew she was waiting for it.

Shirl shook her head. She was always shaking her head when she came back from the doctor. “It’s not good,” she said, and Hack could sense a long report coming. Shirl loved her visits to the doctor, and the worse the news, the better. “Blood pressure’s up again, and so is the cholesterol. He said if I didn’t get it under control, I’d blow out an artery like an old fire hose with a blocked nozzle.”

“He said that?” Hack asked Bunny.

Bunny shrugged.

“Didn’t Dooley have that?” Hack asked her.

“Nothing like as bad as me.” Shirl sniffed.

“So what did he tell you to do?”

“Wait, that’s not the half of it,” said Shirl.

“No?”

“He told me my heart was no good, said I might need one of those pacemakers soon. He gave me some pills to take for now, but he’s not hopeful.”

“Yeah? Well, that’s not so—”

Shirl held up her hand. “Then there’s my bladder.”

Hack looked at Bunny and saw the corners of her mouth twitching.

“Now, you know I’ve got incontinence. Well, he told me my bladder’s real stretched out from having big babies.” She reached over and patted Bunny’s hand. “Don’t feel bad, hon, it’s not your fault.”

“I wasn’t feeling bad,” Bunny said.

“There’s gratitude for you.” Shirl winked at Hack. “Anyway, so there’s an operation he might get me to have, that kind of lifts and tucks things back where they should be.”

“Sounds like a brassiere,” Hack said.

Shirl slapped at his hand.

“So what are you going to do?”

“Wait and hope, honey. Wait and hope.”

Their waitress came over and set down their food. “She’d be better off doing separate trays with the drinks and the food,” Bunny said when the waitress had gone out of hearing range. She always critiqued other waitresses’ techniques. “I bet she spills a lot, being so off-balance like that.”

It was true that Bunny was highly skilled at her trade. Nina Doyle at the Anchor didn’t pay her a buck fifty above minimum wage for nothing.

Hack bit into his Monte Cristo. He always called them Monte Criscos when he ordered them, just to give the waitresses shit, but he loved the Monte Cristos at the Bobcat: ham, turkey, and Swiss, battered, deep-fried, and sprinkled with powdered sugar. They never scrimped on their portions. If there was one thing he hated, it was a restaurant that scrimped on its portions. You shouldn’t have to go away from a restaurant hungry, but it had happened to him now and then, usually at some fancy restaurant Vinny had taken him to where you were given cloth napkins and water glasses with lemon slices floating in them and shit, and where none of the waiters spoke English. You shouldn’t need an interpreter just to order off the fucking menu. That got his goat every time.

“You girls going home after this?” he asked, just to say something. He hated a quiet table at a restaurant.

“I told Anita we’d pick up Crystal at Head Start on the way,” Bunny said. “You know Doreen’s on day shift now. Plus they finally gave her thirty hours. Big deal, but still.”

“Yeah,” Hack said.

“That girl’s a hard worker.” Shirl picked a piece of food from between her teeth with a fingernail. “I’ve got to say that for her. Anita’s done a real good job with her.”

“It’s hard, though.” Bunny poured out more ketchup for her fries. “That house is too small for all of them, plus the roof leaks in Crystal’s room, so they’ve got buckets everywhere. Nita’s been asking Bob to do something about the roof for a week now, but you know him.”

“He’s not drinking, though,” Hack pointed out. The women were always ragging on Bob about something, but that wasn’t right. The man simply wasn’t a high achiever, not like Hack, who’d made the most of what he’d been given. Bob lacked backbone, was Hack’s private opinion. He didn’t have Hack’s flair either, but there was nothing wrong with that; not many people did.

“You didn’t tell me he stopped drinking,” Shirl said to Bunny. “When did that happen?”

Bunny shrugged, spooning soup; the Bobcat made a damned good bowl of ham and bean. “What, a week ago?” She consulted Hack. “Week and a half, maybe.”