Homesick Creek (6 page)

“Good,” Crystal said, licking milk off her last cookie before popping it whole into her mouth.

“Let Gram clean your hands and then how about we go into the living room?” Anita said, getting a dish towel wet and mop-ping at Crystal’s hands. Crystal bounded into the living room before Anita had even hung the towel back up, running straight to the toy chest Bob had made for her. Inside, it was packed with toys Anita picked up at Goodwill: dolls with both eyes and most of their hair, stuffed animals, a toy school bus with two toy children, wooden puzzles with only one piece missing, a plastic pork chop, plastic slices of bread, plastic peas, and a wedge of a plastic banana cream pie.

Anita switched on the television, grateful that the cable was still hooked up. Their bill had to be at least twenty days past due, and the cable company would be cutting them off anytime now. She turned to
60 Minutes
. She loved Morley Safer, thought he was the most gentle-looking man she’d ever seen, not like that Mike Wallace, who kept punching questions at people until they either said what he wanted them to or looked like liars, one or the other. She thought Morley Safer probably treated his wife real nice, brought home flowers for her, or gave her diamond earrings as a surprise. Anita had always wanted a pair of diamond studs the size of raisins, sparkling away so everyone could see. She’d bought a pair of zircon earrings at a flea market once, but they hadn’t fooled anyone, and then one of them dropped down the drain in the kitchen sink.

“Honey, do you have Head Start in the morning?” Anita asked Crystal. She’d forgotten to check with Doreen. Doreen worked in the hospital laundry part-time.

Crystal shrugged, busy with the school bus.

“Well, we’ll ask when Mommy calls.”

Meanwhile, Diane Sawyer was interviewing some crook who’d stolen money from a lot of old people by pretending he was a big-deal real estate developer. They’d caught him in Mexico, living in some fancy house with about five swimming pools and a bunch of gardeners and chefs and laundresses. The old people he’d tricked mostly lived in double-wides and trailers. On the other hand, they’d had money to invest, so Anita didn’t feel totally sorry for them, except for one old couple who sat all hunched up inside themselves in the very middle of their sofa, holding hands. Anita knew that hunch; it was the hunch of people bound for bad weather with no shelter in sight. Anita had been sitting like that off and on for years.

The phone rang just as the old man started to cry. The old woman patted his spotted hand to reassure him. Doreen was on the line, sounding sullen.

“I can’t get Danny out tonight,” she said. “It looks like he’s going to have to stay overnight.”

To Anita, keeping Danny in jail for a night seemed like a good idea, and keeping him longer sounded even better. Maybe it would make him start taking his life more seriously for a change. “How’s he doing?” Anita asked, but it was mostly for form’s sake. She didn’t really care how he was doing.

“He looks like shit, plus they’ve got this Mexican guy in with him who doesn’t speak English, and he’s been talking the whole time even though Danny can’t understand what the fuck he’s saying. Danny told him to shut up, but it didn’t make any difference.”

“Well, it would be scary to be locked up in someone else’s language.”

“I guess.” Doreen wasn’t interested in that, though. She said, “You and Daddy don’t have any money, do you? Bail is ten thousand dollars.”

“Give me a break,” Anita said—as though they could even get their hands on ten dollars right now.

“Danny’s family isn’t going to help either,” Doreen said bitterly. “He didn’t do it, you know. You’re all assuming he did, but he said he just stopped off at Bruce’s to see if he could borrow his car and next thing he knew there were a bunch of squad cars and police dogs. He said one of the policemen wrenched his arm around behind him so hard he might have torn something in his shoulder. He could sue, probably.”

“Honey, my advice is to take a warm bubble bath, open a beer or a wine cooler if you’ve got one, and call it a night. There’s nothing anyone can do until morning anyway.”

Doreen suddenly deflated. “Yeah, I guess. I just can’t believe this shit, you know? First they accuse him of stealing, and now this drug thing.”

“He’s fucking up, honey,” Anita said quietly. “You better face it now, because it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to face later. The boy is bad for you, and he’s bad for Crystal.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“You’re going to have to talk about it one of these days.”

“I’m going to hang up,” Doreen said.

“Did you want to talk to your daugh—”

But Doreen had hung up. Anita smoothed the straining placket of her shirt. If Doreen thought she was going to beat the bushes to find someone with ten thousand dollars, she was wrong. Hack could probably come up with that kind of money, but why should he, even if Anita asked him—and she had no intention of asking him? Danny was bad news, and the sooner Doreen figured that out, the better. Anita wished someone had talked to her that frankly when she was Doreen’s age. Maybe they would have talked her out of Bob, and she’d be married to someone like Hack now instead, someone with money and smarts who gave her nice presents and was only a little unreliable.

“Grammy, it’s dinnertime.” Crystal approached with a plastic pork chop sandwich on a plate and handed it to Anita.

“Why, honey, that looks just wonderful,” Anita said, reaching out and accepting the fake meal that could almost, if you wished for it hard enough, be mistaken for real.

chapter four

Rae Macy was a born pleaser, a woman who, at twenty-nine, still made a point of smiling at road crew flaggers and postal workers, who exchanged pleasantries with checkers in supermarkets and with fellow shoppers waiting in long department store lines. It was a small act of perfection: the slight, ironic smile, the gentle headshake of collusion that suggested,
at
least we’re in this together
. Born a good girl, she had become a nice young woman who remembered special occasions with greeting cards, who listened to other people’s stories with unfeigned interest, who was well liked by her superiors. She dressed tastefully, did her work capably, was still the straight-A student she had been not so long ago. She held a bachelor’s degree from UC Davis and an MBA from Stanford; she was a gifted amateur cellist and spoke fluent Italian. In San Francisco she had held increasingly responsible managerial jobs in US Bank’s marketing department, where she was told that her future looked bright.

But here, in this foul little town overhanging the indifferent Pacific Ocean, here in this hell, she sold pickup trucks. A compulsive achiever, she now lived in a place where her accomplishments meant nothing. What was a poem in the
Seneca Review
when no one had ever heard of it? What was an essay, intricately crafted over weeks and sometimes months, when the best-selling periodical here was
Guns
? A year ago Rae would never have guessed that purgatory was a car lot, but now she knew it was so.

Still, she and Sam had moved to Sawyer with their eyes open. Sam Macy had gone back to law school at thirty-two, only to graduate in a time of glut. His choices, they quickly found, were to be unemployed, abandon his new career, or accept work in a less competitive backwater where others were reluctant to go. Eventually the balance of supply and demand was bound to right itself, and as soon as it did, they could return from exile.

And so Sawyer—three hours from a major airport, two and a half from a decent bookstore, two from a shopping mall, and as many from any institution of higher learning. They lived in a condominium on the beach—the pound of flesh Rae had exacted for coming to Sawyer—which turned out to house an ever-changing cast of tourists who assaulted the premises with vigor and noise.

She and Sam had been married for six years, long enough for Rae to know not just the obvious things like how he coughed and the way he read a newspaper but the composition and location of each dental filling. Yet familiarity was not the same thing as intimacy; they had somehow devolved since their wedding from husband and wife to brother and sister. Was this decaying of passion inevitable, like some law of marital physics?

Rae had met him in Stanford’s student union, waiting in line for a coffee machine that turned out to be broken. After that he turned up everywhere she went. He was thoughtful to his clients and acquaintances, endlessly patient with the elderly, a gifted extemporaneous speaker much in demand by Sawyer’s Rotary, Kiwanis, Optimist, and Lions clubs as well as the Chamber of Commerce. But for all that, she couldn’t remember the fever of an early passion, only a mild annoyance at his persistence. They had never used pet names or terms of endearment, and her heart did not beat faster when she caught sight of him on the street; she at no time longed to be taken into his arms. Was there in her character a deficiency of desire? Yet there was her humiliating longing for Hack Neary, a yearning as strong and confounding as bewitchment.

Through the showroom window she watched Jesús, the lot man, pick debris off the inventory: fir twigs, coffee cup lids, Mc-Donald’s french fry envelopes. He was a good man with a gold-toothed smile and many young children in frilly dresses and western wear. Rae liked asking him about his wife, to whom he was devoted.
La reina
, he called her: the queen. The queen was four feet ten, stout, fecund, twinkling with good humor, in possession of not a single word of English. She called Rae Señora Ray.

“Like the ray of the sun,” Jesús had explained.

“¿Como están los niños?”
she asked him now as he cut through the showroom to get a leaf blower from the service department. “How are your children?”

His face lit up like Christmas.
“Muy bien, gracias,”
he said. “They are very good, thank you.
¿Donde está señor Neary?
”

“No sé.”
Rae sighed.
“Señor está tarde.”
He was ten minutes late. Hack was never late. She felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. Somehow, in what had to be the joke of an unjust God, she was in thrall to a man of dubious intellect and limited sagacity whose conversations she couldn’t remember even fifteen minutes later. Yet there was something winning about him, something deeply appealing, a spiritedness, an almost childlike desire to please, to be liked, that shone unbroken through his shield of glib talk, double entendres, and incessant small lies. Now she had incurred the wrath of his terrible wife, with her nylon waitress’s uniform and sagging face, her teeth drawn and claws bared to fight for her man. It was too awful.

“Aquí. Señor está aquí,”
Jesús said, pointing to Hack’s truck just pulling in. Rae turned in time to see him dismount from his pickup, beautiful as any prince, green-eyed, neatly coiffed and bearded, graceful. Jesús smiled at her as though Hack’s arrival were their doing, a conjuring act, and removed himself and his gleaming tools into the gloom of the service department.

Bob emerged from the truck’s passenger side, looking greenish and frail. Hack said something to him, slapped him on the back, and split off to come into the showroom.

“Hey, beautiful!” he called to her, smiling his best Cheshire cat smile, his normal good mood evidently restored after yesterday’s disaster. “And how am I this morning?”

Señor
was, indeed,
aquí
. Somehow she never remembered the full extent of his obnoxious good nature until he was in her presence.

“Bob okay?” she said.

“Yeah, he’s fine.”

He hadn’t looked fine, but Rae let it pass.

Marv Vernon, the dealership owner, pushed through the showroom door, portly, hale, big-eared, small-time, brimming with satisfaction at the world over which he found himself lord. He held out his hand to give Hack a hearty handshake, then nodded at Rae. She wouldn’t let him kiss her cheek, and he refused to shake her hand.

“So, boys and girls,” he said. “It looks like a fine day to buy a car!”

He always said that. Rae smiled weakly.

“Is there coffee, hon?” he asked her.

There was coffee.

“Good girl.” Then he put his arm around Hack’s shoulders and took him across the showroom to the coffee station, talking business in a conversation that wouldn’t include Rae if she stayed here until she was a hundred, as might happen. Sam, a native San Franciscan and stranger to any small town, found that the way of life here suited him. He loved knowing everyone and being known by them. He relished the hands-on contact with clients who considered him just one step from God—or, equally gratifying, from Satan. Here, in this town no one had ever heard of, balanced on the lip of the sea, he was a man of learning, a person of station and substance. His clients liked his modest manner and easy handshake, his genuine interest in their families, businesses, and politics, his ability to make sense of incomprehensible laws and legislation. There was a certain Jimmy Stewart ingenuousness about him, a lack of lawyerly smarminess, that they trusted. Several had begun hinting that he might consider running for state representative; the office cried out for a man of his training and temperament. He admitted to Rae that he was taken with the idea of running for an elective office, though even as recently as three months ago it had never crossed his mind. Didn’t small towns and provincial backwaters need educated leadership as much as major cities—arguably,
more
than major cities, where the talent pool was already teeming? Here he could make a difference. Rae was forced to agree that he and Sawyer, in the most improbable way, were a perfect fit.

A young couple came into the showroom, stamping the rain off their shoes. They brought in on their clothes the yeasty, sulfurous odor of the pulp mill on the edge of town. Rae guessed the boy had probably just gotten off the graveyard shift. She knew about these things now: swing shift, graveyard, day. The girl whose hand the boy held was six or seven months pregnant and still wearing a regular T-shirt, which strained across her belly. Through the taut cloth Rae could see she was wearing regular jeans too, unzipped all the way and held together by a piece of basted-on elastic. She couldn’t be older than eighteen; the boy, twenty, at the most. Both had the pasty, unhealthy pallor of the coast in winter, forsaken as it was by the sun between October and May. In Rae’s opinion, the sheer numbers of sex crimes, petty burglaries, assaults, batteries, and alcohol-related incidents supported the reality of seasonal affective disorder.

She smoothed her skirt and stepped forward to greet the couple.

“Is there a salesman here?” the boy asked.

“I’d be glad to help you,” Rae said.

The couple looked at each other.

“Oh.” The boy broke eye contact. “Well, maybe we’ll just look around, if that’s okay.”

“Of course.” Rae made a stiff about-face, clicked into her cubicle in her expensive Italian shoes, and sat staring at her computer monitor. Several minutes later she heard the couple leave the showroom as quietly as they could, so she wouldn’t notice. She knew how it would go from here. They would come back this afternoon, and Hack, not Rae, would greet them, and he would joke and schmooze and close their car or truck purchase as easily as you’d slip into an old jacket. The thought occurred to her that the only thing worse than working for a car dealership was being fired by a car dealership. The whole six months she’d worked here, she’d sold only a dozen vehicles, and most of those were when Hack had been away deer hunting for a week.

While she was ruminating, another young woman came in, this time a tough-looking girl with back-combed hair and Tammy Faye eyes. She was holding the hand of a little girl wearing a pink plastic Barbie raincoat. She knocked on Rae’s cubicle and, cracking a small piece of gum, said, “I’m looking for my dad.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Bob Simpkins. I didn’t see him out in the service department.”

“Oh! You must be Doreen. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Yeah.” Doreen snapped her gum deftly. “So have you seen my dad?”

“No, not since he came in this morning.”

“Shit. If you see him, I need him to call me.”

“Of course. Is there something I can help you with?”

Doreen assessed Rae with sullen eyes. “Do you have ten grand?”

“Not on me, no,” Rae said dryly.

“Guess you can’t help me then.” Doreen reset the strap of her purse over her shoulder and turned to go. Her little girl was playing with a stack of sales literature, pretending the ratty teddy bear she was carrying could read. Doreen pulled her away with a swat at her backside. “
Leave
those. You’re not supposed to touch stuff. Didn’t I tell you not to touch anything?”

“Oh, she’s fine,” Rae said. “Really. We have about a million of those brochures.”

Doreen looked at her with frank dislike and hauled the little girl out of the showroom roughly by one arm. The child started to cry, and to her horror, so did Rae. She hated this fucking place, hated the weather, the small-mindedness and bigotry, the way everyone thought they were better than she was, hated, most of all, that she was beginning to believe they might be right.

Hack came banging through the showroom door fifteen minutes later, whistling tunelessly. First giving her mascara a quick look in a pocket mirror, Rae walked across the showroom to meet him.

“Bob’s daughter, Doreen, was here a little while ago, looking for him. Is he here?”

“Just got back. I took him out to coffee.”

“He looked as if he could use it.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, maybe you should go out and tell him she was here,” Rae said. “She seemed on edge.”

“Hell, Doreen’s always on edge. Anyway, she found us at the Bobcat. Danny’s in jail.”

“Danny? Is he her husband?” Rae was a diligent student, committing the names of Hack’s many Hubbard friends and family to memory. That way, when faced with one of Hack’s interminable stories about dirt bike riding or the conversation over that morning’s coffee at the Anchor, she could pretend she knew them too.

“Yeah, Doreen’s husband.” He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time that day. She stood up a little straighter in her pumps and silk suit, trying to pull the shreds of her dignity around her. With his eyes Hack licked her from head to toe. She could feel a familiar, confused flush begin.

“Hi, baby,” he said softly.

“Hi.”

“You look so good.”

Rae dropped her head in an agony of longing and embarrassment. Hack stood still, perfectly at ease, drawing that look out into a soliloquy of steam and funk, sinking his hands deep into his pockets. She might as well be turning on a pin.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

“Do what?” His voice was bedroom low, bedroom intimate.

“That. Looking at me.”

“I like to look at you.”

“Yes, I know.” She could feel his eyes burning away, until she could feel the flush between her legs. It was indecent in this workplace, this mundane public fishbowl. “Are things okay at home again?” she asked, having calculated the likely effect of this on his latest seduction.

“Home?” As she’d expected, he shot back to the surface. “Why wouldn’t they be?”

“Me. The phone call.”

He looked mildly annoyed. “She’s fine.”

He never referred to his wife by name, at least not with Rae. Just
she
.

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Fine.”

“I am now,” he said, sliding his eyes around her collarbone, but the moment had passed. He winked—
winked
—and went to his office to answer the ringing phone she’d never even heard.

She walked to her cubicle, dizzy with desire. Urban sophistication, academic degrees, and eloquence counted for nothing here. With all the finesse of a tacky 1960s action hero Hack Neary was leading the lamb of her morality to slaughter, and there didn’t seem to be a thing she could do to prevent it.