Homesick Creek (23 page)

“Are you crying? Jesus, you’re not crying, are you?” Doreen looked at him, appalled. “Stop it,” she hissed.

“I always meant to do right by Nita, that’s the thing. I always wanted her to be proud of me, to see me as a man who could accomplish things, you know? A capable man. But it wasn’t so easy for me.”

“Why are you telling me this anyway?” Doreen said. “Because I really don’t want to know this.”

“I just think you need to be nice to Mom right now,” Bob said. “She deserves it. That’s all I’m saying.”

And then lunch was over. He went up and paid their bill and got a toothpick from the dispenser, confident that he’d expressed himself clearly for once. He’d said what he had to say even if it wasn’t what Doreen wanted to hear.

chapter fourteen

Hack had always hated Eugene. Everyone seemed to be connected in one way or another to the University of Oregon, shuffling around in their Birkenstock sandals and socks and tie-dye T-shirts like they’d fallen into the 1960s and couldn’t get out. Plus the place was always fogged in, as though it were permanently cupped beneath the sullen, clammy hand of God. You couldn’t see shit, not even with good fog lights, which Hack always made sure he had, on whatever vehicle he was driving. In fact, it had been foggy almost all the way over from Sawyer, ever since they got out of the Coast Range and hit the Willamette Valley. He negotiated Highway 99E with care.

Rae Macy sat beside him with her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Earlier he could have sworn she was crying. What was she crying for? There were at least three feet of space between them in the truck cab; he hadn’t laid a hand on her, hadn’t so much as said an improper word the whole way, and they’d been on the road for an hour already. Plus they’d met at the old Georgia-Pacific mill outside Sawyer, which was derelict now and had been for years. Rae had left her car around back, where you certainly couldn’t see it from the street.

“Princess,” he said gently, “we’re only driving. That’s all. Nobody ever turned into a bad person from driving, at least no one I ever heard of.” He couldn’t help cracking a little smile. “
Parking
, yes. Driving, no.”

With his peripheral vision he could see her nod. As scared as she looked, she might as well be wearing a chastity belt. Chastity belts: Now there was a screwed thing. What kind of person had invented those? Probably someone like Bunny, someone jealous, only male. Suddenly it didn’t seem funny anymore.

“You okay?” he said.

She nodded again and cleared her throat.

“So tell me a story,” he said.

“What story?”

“Hell, I don’t know. You’re the writer. Make something up.”

“It doesn’t really work like that,” she said.

“No?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

They drove for a while.

Hack said, “You know, old Luther Newton went into that creek one time when it was foggy like this.” He nodded at the muddy water licking its upper banks beside the road. “He was seventy-five years old, and it scared him so bad he never did get behind the wheel again, made Hattie do all the driving, and all of Hubbard knew Hattie couldn’t drive worth a damn. Turns out the creek was only three feet deep there, but old Luther didn’t know that when he went in. Took the paramedics fifteen minutes and a pile of Valium to get him to stop yelling so they could get him out.”

“Luther Newton?”

“Yeah. Funny old guy, lived in Hubbard all his life. He’s dead now.”

“Oh,” Rae said, and went back to looking out the window.

Hack sighed and planted his hands more firmly on the wheel. This could turn out to be one long goddamn day.

Before Hack had gotten even five miles from Diederstown and Cherise and the police station, all he could see was the double yellow line down the middle of the highway. Tiny fog particles were flying toward him in the headlights at the speed of light, millions of them like he was traveling through intergalactic space. Luckily, it was nearly three-thirty in the morning, and no one else was on the road. The only sign of life was a single brilliant light moving far away through the fog—odd since there were no roads in that direction, but the desert in nighttime played tricks even on a clear night. The Katydid was fast asleep with her poncho over her face, snoring gently from inside its folds. He liked to give the kid a hard time about keeping him awake with her snoring, but it was a peaceful sound, the sound that a healthy body makes repairing and improving itself in the night. He’d listened to her snoring more times than he could count when he was awake and worried about money, which was mostly all the time. His idea of paradise was a place where everything was free and no one could ever take the last one of anything.

He marveled at the Katydid’s ability to shut herself off, no matter what the circumstances were. He couldn’t have slept right then if you’d offered him a million bucks. He was too pissed off. Cherise had some balls, trying to hit them up for money. They were the kids; they were supposed to hit
her
up for money. Isn’t that what parents were supposed to do, accuse you of costing them a fortune and give you a hard time about staying out too late? He’d said that to Minna Tallhorse just the week before.

“How quaint,” Minna had said, patting his arm. “Do you also believe in the tooth fairy?”

“So then what’s it like to have parents?” Hack said. “You had parents.”

“Sure. One was a drinker, and the other was a drunk,” Minna said. “Tell me, kiddo, when are you getting out of Dodge? Have you got your bags packed yet?”

Hack just shook his head. She asked him that question every single time she saw him now, ever since he’d dropped out of high school, and he always answered it the same way: not now, not yet. In three and a half more years the Katydid would have graduated, and that was when he would leave Tin Spoon. Minna insisted that Katy could come live with her right now and finish out high school there, but Hack didn’t go for that. It wasn’t that he wanted to stay in Tin Spoon any longer than he had to; he’d even told the Katydid what he’d do when he drove away for the last time. “I won’t say good-bye, nothing like that. I’ll just hold up my middle finger and floor it.”

“Oh, Buddy, it hasn’t been that bad.”

“Sure it’s been that bad.”

But even with all that, here was the thing: Minna Tallhorse couldn’t unconditionally guarantee that she could keep the Katydid from harm. Hack himself was the only one he trusted to make that promise. As long as he was there, the kid would be all right. In his soul he knew it.

“Do you want to go home?” Hack said to Rae after another five miles of silence. “Just say so, and I’ll turn around right now.”

Rae looked stricken. “Do you want to?”

“I’m not the one who’s shaking.”

“I’m fine,” Rae said, folding her arms more tightly across her chest. “I’m just a little cold.”

“Ah,” said Hack.

Neither one of them moved to turn up the heat.

The Katydid was determined to attend college, planned to go to one in California, maybe, or even New York. She was always reading some ten-pound book or other. She’d try to describe the story to Hack, but he could never follow them. He was more practical. He liked cars, car engines, car styling, all that. Maybe he’d end up in Detroit working for Ford or something. Maybe he’d end up in Los Angeles dating beautiful women to whom he’d sold Mercedes-Benzes. Who knew? He was good enough looking; he had something on the ball too. He was a hard worker who earned every dime he got. Other people slacked off, did a shoddy job, but he was the genuine article, a man who could put his head down and get things done and done right. Minna Tallhorse was always telling him he should cut himself a little slack, relax a little bit, but that wasn’t how you got ahead. Hadn’t he been the youngest person Howdy had ever made a checker? Didn’t he close the market regularly now, night after night and all by himself? His register had never been short, not even by a penny, in all the time he worked there. He knew the meaning of responsibility. Even in Tin Spoon, Nevada, he was on his way up. Nothing but good things awaited him. Three years from now he might even have enough extra to give the Katydid a few bucks toward college. Him, from a family with a college graduate. Wasn’t that a hoot.

They had reached the outskirts of Eugene and were traveling fast through flat, ugly fields and lumberyards and mills. “So do you have any brothers or sisters?” Hack asked. Not that he really cared, but the silence was getting on his nerves.

Rae roused herself a little, made herself brighten. “Just an older sister.”

“Yeah? She smart and beautiful like you?”

“PhD, summa cum laude, from Berkeley. She teaches women’s studies at Humboldt State.”

“Huh.” Hack didn’t know why they taught shit like women’s studies. He had never met a woman yet who didn’t know perfectly well how to be a woman on her own; women came fully equipped at birth with all the know-how they’d ever need and often more than was necessary or fair. Even dykes were plenty good at being women, just women of a different flavor. He had nothing against that: whatever got you off. In the end, sex might just be God’s way of compensating for all the shit He planned to send your way.

“Hey. I brought your book back.” He nodded in the direction of the toolbox in the bed of the truck. “ ‘The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat.’ ” He shook his head. “Jesus, you’d think they wouldn’t want little kids hearing something like that.”

“I’ve always thought that poem was a sociological metaphor for the violence between disenfranchised groups of have-nots. Like gangs; like
West Side Story
.”

“
West Side Story
?”

“You know, ‘I Feel Pretty’?”

“Do you?”

“No, I mean, that’s the name of the song. ‘I Feel Pretty,’ ” she said.

“Oh. So anyway, I brought your book back,” he said.

“Thank you.”

They fell silent again.

“This isn’t working out very well, is it?” Rae said.

“No,” Hack agreed. “Not very.”

Minna Tallhorse was really the one the Katydid talked to about her books and shit. She’d read a book by some Russian guy, and then the two of them would talk about why the book was written and who the author was and what symbolism made it go. Hack didn’t know where Minna had learned all that: She was a social worker and an Indian, for God’s sake. But she and the Katydid would go on and on for hours sometimes. Hack was glad the Katydid had someone to talk to, though. If Minna pushed her a little, and she did, what she taught the kid might be her ticket out. People didn’t leave Tin Spoon all that often. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. You had nothing, you knew nothing, you offered nothing a million other people didn’t offer too. That was the fucker of it; that was the real world. In the real world you were from a dirt town in the middle of nowhere, and that’s where you were likely to stay. Except for him, of course; except for the Katydid.

“Did your folks read to you much as a kid?” he asked Rae.
Your
folks
. He loved that.

“My mother did. She has a beautiful reading voice. We’d go from one book to the next; there was always something wonderful to look forward to. Of course in the beginning they were just young kids’ books:
The Wind in the Willows
,
Alice in Wonderland
,
Winnie-the-Pooh
, all of those. But as soon as I turned eight, my mother started on
The Hobbit
. I have wonderful memories of that book. You know, they’ve made it into a movie, but I’ve never wanted to see it because I could already visualize the characters so clearly in my head and I didn’t want that spoiled. What did your mother read to you?”

“The Valley of the Dolls.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Well, she wasn’t much of a reader. She liked that writer, though—what was her name, Suzanne something.”

“Jacqueline Susann.”

“Yeah, her. I guess the Katydid was the only one of us with what you could call book ambition. Kid started reading Shakespeare in the sixth grade. She told me once she was pretty sure that William Shakespeare, not Jesus, was the son of God, because how else could you explain how one person could know so much about human nature?”

Rae laughed. “I like that. I wonder if she’s right. Did she have a favorite play?”

“Hell, I don’t know, that was a long time ago, and anyway, I could never keep them straight. Couldn’t understand them either. She tried reading them aloud to me, but I’d just fall asleep. She’d punch me and say,
Wait, Buddy, just one more part, you’ve got to hear this
part
, and then she’d read me some more drivel and I’d start snoring and she’d get mad. She used to tell me all the time that just because we were from a hellhole, it was no excuse for having narrow horizons. I told her she could have broad horizons for us both because I had to work the late shift again tomorrow and I needed my beauty sleep. I sure could rile her. Jesus, I made her so mad one time she stuck a meat fork through my hand. It wasn’t really her fault, more of a spur-of-the-moment thing.”

“What had you done?”

Hack shrugged. “Hell, I don’t remember anymore. It could have been almost anything.”

He did remember, though. They had been fighting about food stamps. The Katydid wanted them to enroll in the program, but Hack wouldn’t do it. He had a job, didn’t he? He paid their bills on time, didn’t he? The Katydid had said pride was stupid and nobody overcame fucked-up roots by turning away help, especially when it came to money. And if it was offered to him now, Hack would probably take it. But then he couldn’t stand pity.
It’s
not pity, Buddy; it’s just a leg up, that’s all
, the Katydid had said, but it smelled like pity to him, and he said so, and that’s when she’d given a roar of frustration and stabbed him. She’d been very solicitous afterward, and from then on they’d had this thing they used to say to each other if it looked like they were headed for another stabbing. One of them would say,
How could you do such a
thing?
in this hoity-toity voice, and the other one would say,
Fuck
if I know, honey
.

Hack smiled to himself.
How could you do such a thing? Fuck if I
know, honey
. God, he’d almost forgotten about that. The Katydid had had a bunch of fancy things she liked to say.
Oh, my dear
, and
I beg your pardon?
and the one that always killed him most,
May I?
instead of
Can I?
like she was some society debutante.

May I?

Well, God had sure as hell given her the big
No, you may not
. Hack earnestly hoped that up there in heaven or wherever, she’d been given the chance to say it again and hear
Yes
.

He’d asked Minna Tallhorse once what she thought happened to dead children’s souls. She said, “They become all the things you think are beautiful. Full moons, just the right shade of purple, perfect lawns. They aren’t the things themselves, just the extra bit that makes them beautiful. Like MSG on Chinese food.”