Going to Bend (21 page)

For just a moment Eula reached out and touched that small and terrible head in the faintest benediction, the merest offering, a futile appeal to the angels she knew damn well had never once come to watch over this child. But shrinking from her touch, the girl slipped away. Eula had heard rumors about the accident up at Camp Twelve, about the poultice Old Man had made with Paula’s ashes. What do you say to a child who has to live with something like that? What do you do when you know that whatever
she’d suffered was nothing compared with what was probably yet to come? Not having an answer, Eula Coolbaugh did what she always did. She set her shoulders, took up her bucket and broom, and got to work.

W
HEN PETIE
thought she was no longer being watched, she crept into the back bedroom and removed a small bundle wrapped in dirty tissue paper. She slipped down the back steps with it, into the chill, and crouched beneath a weather-beaten old coastal pine. She didn’t believe what Eula Coolbaugh had told her. If angels were watching over her mother, they wouldn’t have let her get sick and die in the first place. They wouldn’t have let Old Man burn her in hellfire so hot all that was left behind was ashes and teeth. And now that Petie had also been touched by fire, and her mother’s ashes had been mixed with her own burned skin, she would surely be going to hell one day, too. All this she knew; what was less clear was what would happen to Old Man. Would he be there, too? Or would she and her mama finally be left alone, even if it was to burn in everlasting fire?

From beneath the tree, Petie watched the women begin to load their cleaning supplies into their cars.

“Where’s the girl?” one of them said.

“She must be out here somewhere. She’s a strange little thing, isn’t she? What do you make of a child like that? I sure wouldn’t want my kids around her much. There’s something wild about her—something feral.”

Eula Coolbaugh broke away and squished towards Petie across the sodden yard. “We’re all done, honey,” she called. “You can tell your daddy the place’s been put right and your mama’s things are in a box by the bureau.” She reached Petie and scribbled something on a piece of paper. “If you need anything, hon, you call me. This is my phone number.” Petie allowed the paper to be tucked into the pocket of her jeans but she didn’t speak or move.

When all the women had finally driven away Petie brought out a broken spade she’d found once by the side of the road and dug a hole. She dug it wide and deep and smooth and clean and then she unwrapped the
shreds of tissue paper and took out the chipped teacup and its saucer.
There’s nothing in this world as lonely as a saucer without a cup. You take it, too, honey. They belong together
.

She closed her eyes and turned the cup in her hands, knowing that if God had bones they would surely feel like this, so smooth and cool and strong. She placed the saucer in the ground first, packing dirt beneath and around it, and then nested the teacup in its circle. She buried them together, perfectly paired and cradled in an everlasting embrace, marked by nothing but a smooth, clean place in the dirt beneath the tree. When she was done she turned her back on the house for the last time, crossed her thin arms over her chest and walked up Chollum Road. At its end, it became nothing but a dirt trail into the woods. And there, under the dripping trees, was the little cripple-backed trailer.

Old Man was already inside, sitting on a rickety cot smoking a cigarette and nursing a beer. A sleeping bag had been thrown down on the narrow sleeping platform across from him. “That’s yours,” he told Petie, jutting his chin in that direction. “Drawers are underneath. Your clothes are in there. Bucket’s out back—you use that as a toilet. Dump it out and bury it when you’ve finished your business, then hang the bucket back on the tree. Water’s in that jug out the door. Clean yourself when you need to. There’s a towel somewhere around here. If you get cold, deal with it. We’re not going to be using a bunch of propane every time. Heater’s only for evening, and only when I tell you. Same with that lantern—don’t you be using it unless I give you permission. I know you skinny kids, you’re always cold, always wanting to turn the damn heat up.”

Petie sat on the sleeping platform.

“What are you staring at?” Old Man said. “You and her, you’re both always staring at me like I’m some piece of trash someone drug in. Don’t you go staring at me, girl.”

Petie dropped her eyes. “Is there food?”

Old Man pointed his beer bottle towards an old Igloo cooler and, on top of it, a beat-up camp stove like the one Petie had seen at Camp Twelve. She moved it to the floor and lifted the cooler lid. Inside were six bottles of beer, a package of hot dogs and a package of American cheese.
“You do all the cooking now,” Old Man told her. “Your mama must have taught you something about it, not that she could cook worth a damn—God almighty but that woman
could not cook
. I never had worse food in my life. Hell, it’s probably what gave her that cancer. First woman on earth to die of her own cooking. What d’you think?”

Old Man snorted at his own little joke, taking a long pull on the beer that Petie judged to be his third or fourth bottle. Fewer than that and he didn’t ask questions; more than that and he didn’t want answers, though Petie generally had them in her head. For instance, she knew that her mother’s cooking was bad because you can’t make good food when you’re in a sustained state of terror. Old Man was always ugliest to her at mealtimes, baiting her, bumping her so she’d put her hand on the hot pans to keep from falling. The finest cream would curdle in a kitchen like that. Petie knew this as surely as she knew that Old Man had put her mama in hell. It wasn’t just that he’d had her cremated. It was that he’d told her, over and over, “Paula, you will never get away from me, not even in your deepest dreams. You’re mine in this world and I’ll see you in hell when it’s done.” That’s what Petie hadn’t told Eula Coolbaugh back there in the old house. “I’m onto you, Paula,” she’d heard him hiss. “I can read your thoughts, I can see clear into your mind. You will burn in hell forever and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.”

Old Man tossed a few crumpled dollars in her direction. “Tomorrow you take this and go to the store, buy what we need. You have to make that last. Don’t be expecting me to give you money all the time, because I won’t.”

Petie tucked the money into the pocket of her jeans and felt the forgotten slip of paper on which Eula Coolbaugh had written her phone number. Eula Coolbaugh had had a kind face, a good face, the face of a lesser angel. Petie wadded the slip of paper into a ball, lit the stove and fed it to the sickly flame.

N
ADINE SAT
in her car at the Sawyer airfield and chewed a hangnail. Gordon was supposed to have arrived already, and in the rain,
of course; the coastal rain she’d come to take personally, dripping and blowing without end like a bad cold. He had been gone for five days, and good God, how she’d missed him. In his absence she saw them as they truly were: a forty-one-year-old woman who fifty years earlier would have been called a spinster lady, and a forty-one-year-old bachelor known for keeping to himself except on the rare occasions when he was seen with attractive young men in the city.

Ten years ago each of them had had a good life, a life each had every reason to expect would last forever. Nadine, with her master’s in English literature, managed a bookstore, a small shop specializing in important literature and select first editions. She had few friends, but those she did have, she loved. Gordon had just met Johnny and when they were together the two of them glowed like the sunrise. Shy Gordon, shy Johnny, avowed lovers for keeps, lovers forever, only who knew that forever could possibly end so soon? It was still a good time to be a gay man in love. No one was dying, no one had died, no one feared the prospect of death. Old age still meant your seventies, not your thirties. It seemed like such an impossibly long time ago. Nadine and Gordon, smart and kind and to whom the easy way never seemed to apply. Johnny would die in Gordon’s arms, just as Gordon would one day die in Nadine’s. And here they were, waiting, brother and sister clinging together in the hell-blast of terminal illness and irrelevant dreams.

The airplane appeared at last, a tiny thing fighting its way free of clouds as sticky as cotton candy. As Nadine watched, the plane seemed to be simultaneously blown sideways and down, making heart-stopping contact with the runway. Nadine whispered quiet thanks to whatever deity might be listening inside her car and turned up the heat.

When the airplane door opened, Gordon didn’t so much step out of the plane as bore his way into the solid face of oncoming rain and wind. Nadine dashed out to meet him, wrapped a raincoat around him and hurried him back to the car. She hurled his bag into the trunk and, panting, the two of them slammed their doors in unison.

“Jesus,” Gordon said. “Did it stop raining at all while I was gone?”

Nadine shot him a baleful look.

“Did you know that it’s actually
not
raining someplace in the world?” Gordon extended a bag of bagels, the single thing she’d asked him to bring back from Los Angeles.

“I’ve heard, but I don’t believe it.” Nadine dug into the bagel bag as she swung out onto the coastal highway. “Tell me everything.”

There had been movies and sunshine and good food eaten in the presence of pleasant company. There were the greetings extended to her by acquaintances and former neighbors. Nadine listened to it all, chewing thoughtfully until he’d finished. “And Paul?” He hadn’t said a word about
Local Flavor
.

Gordon looked out the window, milking the moment but failing to suppress a grin. “He liked the book. No. He
loved
the book. Apparently the press has been kicking around the idea of starting a line of Pacific Northwest books for a long time—travel, history, field guides, lighthouses, that kind of thing.”

“And cooking,” Nadine guessed.

“
And
cooking.”

“Was he willing to commit to the manuscript?”

“Yes, and here’s the thing: he wasn’t the only one. His whole editorial board has bought in. They love Rose’s voice. They’re willing to give her a decent advance and pay me to edit the rest of the manuscript. They like what we’ve got, but they want about half again as many recipes.”

“Can she come up with them, do you think?”

“I think between her and Petie they can. If not, we’ll revive the rest of the contest recipes. Oh, and they want the book illustrated. Pen-and-ink drawings, watercolor washes, maybe woodcuts, of bread, vegetables. Folk art, primitives. They’re leaving it open until we’ve found an artist.”

“Will they look for someone in L.A.?”

“They’d prefer to hire someone up here so the writer/illustrator team are really from the Pacific Northwest. Publishing integrity and all that. I agree with them.”

“We could run another contest, just around here to see what we come up with,” Nadine said doubtfully.

“I thought I’d ask Rose. She already knows everyone within a hundred-mile radius.”

Nadine chuckled. He was right, of course. How she loved him, her last remaining family, her greatest fan and supporter, the one person alive who loved her unconditionally. She reached over, squeezed his forearm and piloted their tiny ship into the less than safe harbor that was Hubbard. Although she parked in front of Souperior’s and turned off the car, she made no effort to get out. “Is Paul doing all right?”

Gordon sighed. “He’s holding his own. He had Pneumocystis a few months ago, but they pulled him out of it. You’ll enjoy this. He says HIV has made him a professional maverick, a guerrilla editor. ‘Baby,’ he said to me, ‘I back what I believe in now. What the hell can happen to me if I’m wrong? And here’s the thing: I never
am
wrong now. God must reserve a special privilege for the dying.’ ”

“Well, they could fire him,” Nadine said.

“That’s not what he meant.”

“I know it’s not what he meant.”

Nadine drove in silence for a moment before asking the question they had been avoiding since leaving the airfield. “What about you?” Gordon had seen his doctor while he was away.

“I seem to be okay.”

“No new lesions?”

“No.”

“T cells?”

Gordon shrugged. “A few less. Not many.”

Nadine scrutinized him. He was telling the truth.

“Okay?” he said.

“Okay.”

They went into Souperior’s together, two and a half months to the day after Gordon had imposed his own exile. At the kitchen door Nadine could feel him draw a deep breath and let it out the way a connoisseur might reluctantly part with the smoke from a prized cigar. Rose was checking on a pot of soup—chicken and wild rice with tarragon. The minute she saw them she put down her spoon and gave Gordon a hug.

“Oh, welcome home!” she said, holding him by the elbows for a minute to get a look at him. Whatever she saw apparently satisfied her. She took up her spoon again and stirred. “Did you have a good trip?”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’m glad.” She stirred, sipped, added a bit of pepper, stirred, sipped again and covered the pot.

“Aren’t you going to ask me anything?” Gordon said.

“I did.”

“I mean anything else.”

Rose wiped her hands on her apron. “I assumed it was private.”

“Private?” Gordon said.

“Your doctor visit. I hope they had good news for you.”

“Oh! No, that’s not what I was thinking. I mean, yes, my doctor had relatively good news for me—I’m doing okay. But I was thinking about the book. I thought you’d want to know what the publisher said about the book.”

“And what
did
he say?”

“Sit.” Gordon led her to a booth in the empty restaurant. “Nadine, do you want coffee?”

“I’ll get it. You two talk.” Nadine disappeared into the kitchen.

Rose regarded Gordon mildly. “Well? What did your friend say?”

How could the woman be so serene? The source of such equanimity must be genetic—there was simply no other explanation. They watched a couple come in and find a table near the windows overlooking the bay. Nadine, hearing them, came from the kitchen, set mugs of coffee in front of Rose and Gordon, and handed menus to the couple. Gordon had missed the place, missed the atmosphere of quiet purpose these women had created.