Going to Bend (19 page)

“Two more fronts right behind it,” Christie said. “Cold ones, too, coming down from Kodiak. Could be a tough year for crabbing.”

“Every year’s a tough year for crabbing.”

“Got that right.” Crab season went from December 1 to January 31, the roughest seas of the year. Boats went down. Christie’d never needed money bad enough to go out on a crabber, never would. You had to ride the ocean on your own terms.

“Schiff tell you I’m buying his bike?” Eddie said.

“I heard it somewhere.”

“Good price, too. Damn good price. I figure I’ll get it by Christmas. You need to come out sometime.”

“I never had much of an appetite for bikes.”

“Yeah. Well, you’re missing something, though, I can tell you. We got some great new trails in there back of Chollum Road.”

“Well,” Christie said, and lifted his beer. He liked that Henry’s. It went down cold and clean as ice water.

“So how’s the car going?” Eddie asked.

“Good. It’s going good.”

“Loosey came home real excited that day he was over at your place. Petie said you might be doing something fancy. Big secret or something, she said.”

“Nah. Just fixing it up. I might sell it, get Rose something newer.”

“Yeah? You got something special in mind to buy? I heard old Dooley was wanting to sell that little Chevy Nova his sister used to drive before she passed away.”

“I heard there was rust,” Christie said.

“That right?”

Christie shrugged. “It’s what I heard.”

The door blew open, and a couple of men Christie recognized but didn’t know came in slapping rain from their chests with their bare hands. Eddie waved them over. Christie downed the last of his Henry’s, nodded at the men, slapped Eddie’s shoulder and headed out into the rain.

It was five-thirty in the afternoon and dark and slick-looking as creosote, the same weather they’d had for a week solid. As Christie drove through town he looked inside Souperior’s and saw Rose with her back turned, looking west into the rain—or, more likely, into her own reflection. Her hands were clasped behind her and she wore her hair in a soft loose ponytail. Christie slowed down, drank her in, drove on. It didn’t occur to him to stop and go in. He didn’t feel right in there; it wasn’t a place for him, with all the ferns and church pews and women’s touches.

When he got to the house Carissa was in the living room watching TV. She had stretched out on the sofa, but when he came in she sat up and quickly fixed her skirt and her hair.

“Hi,” she said, and clicked off the television.

Christie nodded and hung his coat in the coat closet. “Your mother closing up for them?”

“Yeah. Nadine is driving Gordon to Portland tonight so he doesn’t have to get up so early tomorrow to catch his plane. He’s going to Los Angeles to talk about Mom’s book. It’s so exciting.”

Christie nodded. He was suspicious of Gordon’s soft voice and soft clothes and apparent dislike of work, but he knew Carissa had taken a liking to him so he kept his mouth shut.

“Does that bag outside have the crab shells in it? She said she left me some to take to the dump tonight.”

“Yeah. There’s soup for you, too. I could get it for you if you’re hungry.”

“Nah.” Christie went into the kitchen and drank a big glass of water from the tap. Then he came back out and put on his coat again.

“Are you going out again? Why are you going out again already?” said Carissa.

“To dump those shells.”

“Well, I could go with you.”

“No.”

“But I did all my homework. Look.” She picked up a school notebook and stood close to show him three or four neatly printed pages. “It’s a book report on
The Yearling
. It’s for extra points. I finished everything else on the bus.”

Christie gave in. While he waited, Carissa grabbed one of Rose’s coats from the closet. She had gotten to be as tall as Rose, but her long legs and heart-shaped face were not Rose’s. And then there was that extraordinary skin, fair and buttery and new, unblemished, unaged, unmarred. Christie was a little afraid of her. He had never seen anything he wanted to touch more than her pinkening cheek.

He turned and walked out the door.

“Wait up. Do you have a key?”

“Yes.”

Carissa slammed the house door shut behind her. Christie slung the garbage bag into the truck bed, then hoisted himself in behind the wheel, opening Carissa’s door from the inside as she struggled with the
bad hinge. He had to shove some salvaged auto parts away to make room for her; he never had passengers, didn’t like them.

“Don’t sit there,” he said. Carissa paused uncertainly halfway into the cab. He scrabbled under the seat for a towel and spread it over the grease left behind by the car parts.

Carissa arranged her skirt precisely and sat. Then she fluffed up her hair.

Christie turned over the key and pumped hard until the ignition rasped and caught.

The dump was an unmanned landfill north of town. No one paid the dump fees administered on the honor system; people drove up at all hours and heaved into a ravine their household rubbish, old Christmas trees, corrugated sheeting, doomed appliances. Christie drove there in silence, gripping the smooth old steering wheel with concentration. He’d have to replace the wipers one day soon. The old truck could use some work, once Rose’s car was done. A couple more weeks, if his luck with parts held.

When they turned onto the landfill access road Christie took a series of potholes hard. Carissa squealed and bounced a few inches to the left, a few inches to the right. Perfume—Rose’s perfume—wafted through the disturbances she left in the air. Christie leaned into the windshield.

“You got some mail today,” Carissa said, holding on to the dashboard. “Did you see?”

“No.”

“Well, it was some real estate thing. We didn’t open it or anything, it was just a postcard. It’s for some weekend at the Bachelor Butte over in Bend. Mom said it’s like they give you two nights for free and all you have to do is let them show you a movie and talk to you for a little while or something. And you could even win a TV or an electric knife or something. Me and Mom think you should take us. Mom said she heard it was real nice over there.”

Christie shook his head in the dark. Fool property deals. He knew people from the boats who played the real estate market like cards,
owned a condo in Anchorage, a place in Seattle, time-shares. Always trying to figure out which one to go to, which one to rent out, which to unload. What did he want with property?

“So?” said Carissa.

“Go if you want to.”

“But we want you to go, too.”

“Nah.”

“But it’s free.”

“Don’t matter.”

Christie bounced the truck into the landfill, fighting the wheel.

“But there are Jacuzzis,” Carissa cried.

“Let it go, girl.”

Carissa crossed her arms and sulked.

Christie stomped on the emergency brake, jumped out and strong-armed the garbage from the truck over the brink into the darkness. He heard the crab shells clash feebly as they landed. He kicked after them a couple of pieces of twisted sheet metal lying by his feet. The place was a hazard. He imagined that if he stayed quiet enough he’d be able to hear a thousand small animals at work down there breaking into all the Hefty trash bags. It made him shudder. Animals in the wild were one thing; he was okay with that. But animals in men’s places, on the boats and around the docks, was a thing he couldn’t abide. There were no rats on any boat he worked because he couldn’t sleep right until he’d gotten rid of them all. Once, when he was young and working a stinking heap of a boat that sank a few years later from sheer rot, he’d woken up when a rat stepped on his eye.

As Christie got back in the truck the rain started picking up. Exposed in the truck bed was a new Coleman lantern he’d bought in Sawyer that afternoon. He’d nearly forgotten about it. He turned the truck up Chollum Road. Carissa looked at him inquiringly in the darkness, but said nothing; wherever he was taking her, she was game.

At the very top of Chollum Road, where every year another foot of asphalt was reclaimed by ferns and undergrowth, Christie stopped, turned off the engine and left the headlights on.

“What are we doing here?” said Carissa.

“Nothing. Stay here.” Christie opened his door.

“But where are you going?”

“Just stay here. I’ll be back in a minute.” He slammed the door and hauled from the truck bed the soggy lantern box. Hopefully the mantle hadn’t gotten ruined. He hurried into the woods with the box, following the headlight beams breaking up among the trees. Although it was overgrown there was a well-defined path, and in a minute he reached a humpbacked little trailer. He pushed open the door—there was no lock, now or when he’d found the place a few weeks ago—and felt inside for the big utility flashlight he’d left there last time. He turned it on, set it down and wrestled the box through the narrow door.

Inside the air was strong and spicy. Two days ago he’d cut ten or twelve noble fir boughs, scored the branches and piled them in the middle of the floor. Now the astringent fir sap cut the loamier smells of dereliction and decay—nature’s room deodorizer. He’d clean the branches out tomorrow. Christie set the wet box down on the only piece of furniture in the trailer, a cane-bottomed chair he’d found at the Twice Around in Sawyer last week. A two-burner gas camp stove and a wall barometer sat on a warped fold-down table built into the trailer wall. Except for Christie’s sleeping bag rolled up on the wood platform where a bed was supposed to be, there was nothing else.

“Is this yours?”

Christie turned around sharply. He hadn’t heard the door open. Carissa was standing outside peering in. “I told you to stay in the truck,” Christie said.

“I got scared waiting out there.”

“Go on back.”

Carissa edged past Christie to get inside. She touched the barometer, fiddled with the knobs of the camp stove, looked around. “Is it yours?”

“For now,” Christie said. “Go on, now.”

“But where did it come from?”

“It was here. I found it. It was empty.”

“It’s kind of nasty, isn’t it.”

“Suits me.” Resigned, Christie worked on the cardboard box for a minute, lifted the lantern gently from its packing and set it on the little fold-down table. The mantle looked fine.

“I bet this used to be Old Man Tyler’s trailer,” Carissa said. She sat on the sleeping platform beside Christie’s sleeping bag and leaned on it with her elbow. “Petie’s father. I heard Petie used to live up here somewheres a long time ago. I never saw it because we weren’t allowed.”

“Well, who sever it was, it’s empty now.”

“He died.”

Christie nodded and pulled a kitchen match from his pocket. He always carried a few with him, a habit that had come in handy more than once. The lantern mantle caught, flared and expired into a fragile incandescent net of ash enclosing the flame. Christie lowered the glass chimney into place, and the hiss and pop of bottled propane filled the small space. In the white light the trailer walls were covered with mold.

“Aren’t you going to live with us anymore?” Carissa said quietly.

“I am.” Christie hung the lantern on a hook he’d found overhead. It swayed as he backed away to the opposite end of the trailer. He’d have to replace the floor with a fresh sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. “But a man needs a place of his own to come to sometimes.”

Carissa looked around doubtfully. “But it smells,” she said.

“It won’t after a while.”

“Are you going to sleep here?”

“Don’t know.”

“Does Mom know?”

“Nah.”

“If you let me come up here with you sometimes I won’t say anything. It could be a secret.”

Rain beat down harder on the metal roof. A thin rivulet ran down one of the metal seams. Caulking would fix that.

“Time to go,” Christie said, and shut down the lantern. He held the
utility flashlight so she could see as she stepped lightly off the bed platform and picked her way around the pile of boughs to the door. As she passed Christie, Carissa placed her hand briefly but firmly on his chest. She might have been steadying herself. Then she stepped out into the darkness.

O
LD MAN
didn’t have a service for Petie’s mother when she died; he didn’t even bring her home from Salem. He said he couldn’t afford a funeral, plus who were her friends, anyway? So he had her cremated someplace near the hospital while they waited and collected her ashes in a cardboard box. When Old Man opened it to see what his money had bought, there was only a plastic bag inside, no different than the bags in which bulk chicken parts are packed and about the same weight, fastened with a similar metal clip. Old Man handed the bag over to Petie, and in her hands the ashes felt warm and pliant and dense, like a living weight. Some of the ashes—fine, gray, greasy—had sifted out of the bag, or been carelessly packed to begin with, so that a film covered the outside. When Petie put the bag down on the seat beside her, some of the ashes came away on her skin. She screamed. Old Man had made her hold the bag—gritty with little bits of bone and teeth—on her lap all the way back to Hubbard.

The next day Old Man took Petie and the bag over a maze of logging roads to Camp Twelve, where Petie had never been before and where her mother, she knew, had been afraid to go. Camp Twelve was in a clearing in the middle of nowhere at all. Old Man steered the truck slowly between two rows of falling-down cabins that faced off across a mud road, ten cabins in all, and all alike. Someone had once made an effort with them, building them with quaint, steeply peaked roofs, front doors centered
between paned windows and tiny front porches just big enough to hold a chair or two on a nice evening. But that had been a long time ago. Most of the cabins had been derelict for twenty years and more; the window-panes were broken out or taken, the front doors missing, the porches rotten and separating, the stairs gone. Near the ground, termites had eaten ragged holes in the rough clapboard siding, and animals of all kinds slunk in, in the night, and nested. The difference between these cabins and Petie’s grandfather’s cabin, when Old Man pulled up in front, was little more than curtains at the windows, a rusting junk heap out front and the presence of a front door. The curtains were too old to be any color, and hung out of the broken panes like shirttails, pushing against some plastic that had been nailed up on the outside. The front door stuck. Old Man told Petie to stay in the truck, but she was scared of being alone with the ashes and bones and teeth so she followed him anyway, leaving the heavy box on the seat.