Homesick Creek (2 page)

But the whole time that was all going on, there was this other thing Bunny knew. Hack had come to Hubbard on his way to someplace else, and he had never meant to stay, just to stop and rest awhile. Right from the start there were times when he got sad, got lost-looking and homesick for someplace he’d never been. The spells hadn’t lasted long, and when they were over, he’d been glad to be back. But in the last few years the sad times had started coming more often and playing out meaner, and even though Hack still wouldn’t talk about them, she knew it was because he was trying to figure out what to do. And whatever he chose, he meant to do alone. One day, Bunny knew, he’d just take her and Vinny and Vernon Ford and everything else about their lives and pitch them over the side and rise up like a big hot-air balloon and be gone. You couldn’t keep a man like Hack. The best you could hope for, if you were lucky and you played your cards right, was to get the use of him for a while.

Hack finally walked in the Anchor’s back door at six, half an hour late. Joelle Burden, Dooley’s sister, was with him. Joelle worked the six a.m. shift. She was wide-mouthed, small-eyed, and tough as all hell. She’d been tough even when she was fifteen and used to baby-sit for Bunny and her sister, Fanny. She used to tape their mouths shut with duct tape if they gave her any flak. Sometimes Fanny went around with tape marks on her face for days. Now Joelle was fifty-seven, but she was walking real close to Hack anyway, the way women always did. Even Beth Ann, who had plenty of boyfriends her own age, liked to come over and flirt when Hack was around. Hack would tell her jokes and talk in that sweet dirty way of his, and Beth Ann would blush and giggle and make a fool out of herself.

Bunny was setting up some tables in the back for when the tourists began to come in. Paper napkins, paper place mats, forks, knives, spoons. Sugar, Sugar Twin, Equal. Upside-down coffee mugs, upside-down water glasses, fake carnation, fake greens, fake crystal bud vase, real water. Joelle gave Hack a little see-you-later punch on the arm and signaled Bunny to meet her over at the waitress station.

“That man sure can tell a story,” she said when Bunny got there. She poured herself a mug of caffeinated and turned her back so Bunny could tie her apron. Joelle had bursitis so bad in both shoulders she couldn’t do up half her clothes anymore.

“Do you think Hack’s going to buy that Leonard kid’s dirt bike?” she said while Bunny worked the bow. “He just asked me what I thought, but shoot, I don’t know anything about it. What did you tell him?”

“First thing I heard of it was from Dooley fifteen minutes ago,” Bunny said grimly, giving Joelle’s bow a final yank.

“Shit. Oh, honey—”

“I’ll tell you what, if he gets that thing, he better buy me a new washing machine first,” Bunny said. “Mine walks all over the house on the spin cycle. Look at that. See that guy at table seven? Every two seconds he’s putting his damn hand up for something like this is the goddamn Ritz.”

“You go ahead and talk to Hack, and I’ll take care of His Majesty,” Joelle said.

“I don’t want to talk to him,” Bunny said, but Joelle had already hustled out of range.

Hack had been out the front door at the newspaper machine. He passed Joelle on the way back, with the paper tucked under his arm so he didn’t get any of the print on his hands. While Bunny filled a mug of coffee for him from the dregs of the oldest pot, he stood real close and slipped his hand over her backside. In a minute, she thought, he’d be talking dirty to her. Last night, after he’d hung up from that phone call, he’d been real nice too, bringing her beers with the tops already cracked open, watching TV in the living room with her instead of working on his pickup out in the garage like she knew he’d planned to. He probably knew she’d overheard something last night. He was being good until he could figure out how much trouble he was in. He didn’t even know yet that she knew about the dirt bike.

“You should’ve stayed in bed another minute or two,” he whispered in her ear. “I was warming up something nice for you, but you were too quick.”

“Something nice for you, you mean.”

“That too.” He grinned.

“Go talk to Dooley,” she said. “He was asking about whether you’re going to buy that boy’s dirt bike or not.”

Hack didn’t miss a beat. He just nodded like he assumed she’d known all along, like maybe he’d even mentioned something about it to her himself once or twice. Joelle must have given him a heads-up when they passed. People were always saving Hack like that. They never did it for Bunny.

“It’s a hell of a good price,” he said. “I don’t know, though. I guess I’ll probably let it go. We could use the money for some things around the house.”

“Just go talk to Dooley. He had some things he wanted to tell you.” Ten years ago she might have been fooled, but not anymore. She knew Hack would buy the bike. There wasn’t even any point in talking about it. He’d probably already bought it and just slipped the kid a little extra to keep quiet about it until he could break Bunny into the idea. His agreeing with you about something didn’t mean he wouldn’t turn right around and go off in the opposite direction, with nothing more between him and your conversation than the hope that you wouldn’t find out until he’d had a chance to work on you.

“Listen,” Bunny said. “Don’t you work me, Hack. I bet you just paid the boy not to tell anyone for a while.”

Hack’s face closed up, and his eyes froze over. “Now, I come over here to be nice to you,” he said, quiet and deadly. “I came over to keep you company. I didn’t come over here to take crap. You talk to me when you’re sweeter.” He turned around and walked away from the waitress station and out of the Anchor. In another minute she heard his pickup roar out of the back parking lot.

Just pretend this is about work. Oh, Lord, Hack, do I feel stupid; I didn’t
think she’d be home. You can’t talk with her there, can you? So I’ll hang up
now. I guess I’ll just hang up. Here I go.

Bunny didn’t know for sure if Hack had ever cheated on her. He flirted with everyone, but he was always home when he was supposed to be, and he never went anywhere alone on weekends, not even when Bunny had to work a shift at the Anchor to cover for someone. Of course he was always home now too, and there was that phone call. And a few years ago Bunny had suspected a little cotton-haired girl who tended bar at the Wayside Tavern for a couple months and was always having car trouble and catching a ride with Hack to get it fixed over in Sawyer.

It was hard to know what to think. Hack still laid hands on Bunny whenever she’d let him. Bunny wasn’t much for sex herself anymore. Somewhere along the line, in tiny bits and pieces, she’d lost her appetite. Every time Hack tried to con her, every time he promised not to do something and then went and did it anyway, every time he dished up some little bones and gristle of truth and tried to sweet-talk her into thinking it was a meal, she’d lost the taste for another little part of him. His sex parts went first, of course, but they were followed by other parts that she missed a lot more. The backs of his thighs. His neck, between his ear and his shoulder. The meaty part of his chest below his collarbone, where the hair made a hurricane shape. The pale insides of his wrists and elbows. Finally, one morning four or five years ago, she woke up and found she could look at him all over and not get the urge for a single bite. Except for times like now, when he might be leaving her; when he might have already left. Watching him walk out of the Anchor Inn, Bunny thought his whole body looked just like a picnic.

When she got off work at ten, Bunny drove by Anita’s house. Anita had an edge on her like a razor lately, but Bunny didn’t feel like going home. If Hack called to sweet-talk her, she didn’t want him to find her that easily, and if he didn’t bother to call, she didn’t want to know. At least it had stopped raining.

Anita was standing in the lee of her carport, hanging out laundry. She’d been real pretty when she was younger, but you couldn’t tell now. Bunny used to cut out diet tips from the newspaper, but she didn’t even bother anymore. Anita was up to 190, and she carried most of it on her hips and thighs. Today she was wearing blue sweatpants and a pink checked blouse that gapped at the buttons. Bob hadn’t been bringing in much money lately, so she’d had to do the best she could at the thrift shops over in Sawyer.

“You do Bob’s,” she said, the minute Bunny came around the carport. “Every time I pick up something of his I want to just roll it in the dirt.” She snapped a pillowcase, and it sounded like a gunshot. “Last night he came home so toasted he tried to pee in my bureau drawer. He said he thought he was in the bathroom. I had to lead him to the can by his whatsis.”

Bunny snickered. Anita looked at her and snickered too. “Jesus,” she said, shaking her head. She handed Bunny some underwear and T-shirts and a fistful of clothespins.

Bunny took the other side of the line and started pinning. Bob’s underpants were smaller than Hack’s. Some of the waistbands were separating from the knit bottoms too, and the elastic was shot. Hack would never wear underpants like that, no matter how broke they were. He’d never even let Bunny try to fix them when they got like that. He always had her keep a package or two of new ones in his drawer. She wondered if the woman on the phone last night understood things like that about Hack, that he wasn’t the kind of man who’d wear worn-out underpants. Probably not. When you first started with someone, you didn’t notice about his underpants or whether he liked a clean towel every day or what deodorant made him break out. And he didn’t notice those things about you; half the time, in the beginning, he didn’t even seem to think you peed just like everybody else. Then, when he figured out that you did, he held it against you. That’s where men and women were different, in Bunny’s opinion. Men went out and looked for women who didn’t pee. Women just went out and bought the right deodorant.

But the woman on the phone probably didn’t know anything about that yet. She probably only knew about putting on lipstick and body lotion and sexy brassieres to try to fool Hack into thinking she was perfect. And Hack would probably believe her, the way he used to believe Bunny.

“What’s the matter, hon?” Anita said, touching her arm. “You need to sit for a minute?”

“What?”

“You looked real bad just then. You were just standing there.”

Bunny shook out a T-shirt and pinned it to the line. “Hack wants to buy some kid’s dirt bike. He didn’t even tell me. Dooley spilled the beans.”

“I heard about that,” Anita said.

“Who’d you hear it from?”

“I don’t— Oh, wait, I know. Roy, down at the Wayside.”

“Shit. Hack must have talked about that kid’s bike with every single person in this town except me.”

“Roy said Hack was real hot on it,” Anita said. She stopped hanging laundry. “Actually, I heard he already put money down on it.”

“See that?” Bunny cried. “I knew he had. I told him so this morning, and he got mad like he always gets when he does something sneaky and I find out about it anyway.”

“Boys and their toys.”

“Well, he’s really pissed off this time,” Bunny said. She picked up the empty laundry basket and followed Anita inside, where Anita made them a pot of coffee. Bunny had been thinking of taking them both for lunch and a few beers at the Wayside, but she didn’t think she could stand hearing from one more person who knew about that damn dirt bike.

“Remember when they used to talk to us?” she asked Anita.

“Who?”

“Bob. Hack.”

“Did they talk to us?”

“Hack did. He used to talk all the time. He used to tell me everything, all his plans. When did they stop doing that?”

“Well, Bob stopped about five minutes after we got married, but then, he never was much of a talker.”

Bunny stirred sugar into her coffee, making a little whirlpool with her spoon. “Don’t you miss it?”

Anita frowned. “No.”

“Hack didn’t tell me a thing about that damn dirt bike, and then, when I let him know I knew, he lied about it. He said he probably wouldn’t get it. Why does he do that?”

“Because you’re his mother, honey,” Anita said.

“Yeah, well, the whole time he was sweet-talking me, I could just see him trying to figure out how he’d sell the bike back to the kid if I made too much of a stink about it.”

“He’s always been shifty when you’ve got him in a corner,” Anita said. Anita hadn’t liked Hack much ever since he picked Bunny and not her to talk to that first day.

“He doesn’t drink, though.”

“No,” Anita said quietly. “He doesn’t drink.”

“Oh, Nita, I don’t know what made me say that,” Bunny said, jumping up and putting her arm around Anita’s shoulder. “I’m just mean today. Don’t mind me, I’m just tired and strung out from opening the Anchor every morning.”

“You sure are,” Anita said. “You better go home and get some rest, or you’re
really
going to start saying things.”

Bunny had no intention of going home. Instead she drove over to Sawyer. It was the first time in a long time, even though Sawyer was only ten miles away. Bunny had gotten out of the habit of leaving town. There wasn’t anything beyond Hubbard she really wanted. She wanted Vinny to give her grandchildren and be around to take care of her when she got old. She wanted to have enough money for a new deck and decent wallpaper in the bathroom and a washing machine that didn’t walk around during the spin cycle. She wanted to have a wine cooler with her mother, Shirl, in the afternoon sometimes and to get on a later shift at the Anchor. She wanted to be the wife of someone who planned to stick around. Those weren’t the kinds of things you could get over in Sawyer.

Bunny parked around the back of Vernon Ford, next to Hack’s pickup, and tried to fluff up her hair in the rearview mirror. She’d been trying it short lately, even though Hack liked it longer. It didn’t look very good. She started to take off her name tag and then decided to leave it on so she wouldn’t have those two round holes in her blouse showing naked like some kind of vampire bite over her left boob.

As soon as she walked in, she saw Hack working in an office at the far end of the showroom, tipped back in a big chair with his boots up on his desk. Big smile, little chuckle, phone receiver snuggled into his shoulder. Selling. He looked happy. It had been a while since she’d seen him look like that.