Going to Bend (4 page)

“Same old same old. I’m getting stronger, though.” Petie flexed her fingers. At the end of the first week, her hands had been so sore from kneading ten loaves of bread a day that she could hardly pick up a Kleenex. “Couple more weeks and I’ll be strong enough to strangle someone if he crosses me.”

“Hey, not this man,” Bob said, holding up his hands. “I don’t mess with you career women.”

“The only thing different about this from the last twenty-two years is I’m getting paid.”

“I heard you made real nice soups out there, though, you and Rose. I’ll have to come by and try it one time.”

“Hell, I’ll just bring you a bowl of something next time I come in,” Petie said. “It’ll cost you less.” She fingered some thirty-packs of Life Savers, like you’d buy to stock the candy shelf at the Quik Stop. She flicked the little handi-paks of Tylenol, Bufferin, Advil on a Li’l Drug Store display. You’d have to be in pain to buy this stuff. Even wholesale the little ten-packs of aspirin cost almost as much as a bottle of fifty in a
regular store. Nadine probably bought things like that; her purse was probably full of little travel packs of Kleenex and pocket-sized potpourris and rose-hip essence and shit.

Bob watched her for a minute sympathetically, crossed his short arms with difficulty across his big chest.

“You don’t have any job openings,” she said.

“Afraid I’m full up. My boys tend to stick around, the Lord only knows why. Probably my magnetic personality. Your man still out of work?”

Petie nodded. “He’s looking, though. How’d you know about that?”

“Rose told me. She worries.”

“She talks.”

“Nothing wrong with being out of work, Petie. It happens to a man sometimes.”

“Well,” said Petie. Bob didn’t know Eddie Coolbaugh, didn’t know about the seven jobs in six years. Rose wouldn’t have said anything about that. Petie sure wasn’t about to.

“These things just take time, sometimes,” Bob said reassuringly.

“Well, if something does come up, though, could you call me? Or you could just call Eddie.”

“I’ll call you first thing,” Bob said, and patted her shoulder.

Bob went off and Petie cruised the aisles slowly. She put on the Souperior’s account whole wheat flour, cracked wheat flour, stoneground flour, cornmeal, oatmeal and yeast; a brick of lard, a tub of shortening and an industrial-size bottle of parsley; a twelve-pack of peanut butter and eleven pounds of quick-frozen breaded chicken breasts for home; and a yo-yo for the boys that Bob let her have for nothing because it had gotten loose from its shrink-wrapped pack. Bob pretended he didn’t notice she was buying for home and Petie believed in taking what was offered without worrying too much about the fine points. In her experience, pride only took you so far before it turned into stupidity. Old Man had turned stupid years ago and he and Petie had been hungry in that camp trailer more often than she could remember. The rest of the time they ate poverty food: boxed macaroni and cheese,
canned meat, canned hash, hot dogs, all fixed on a hot plate. At school Rose brought or bought enough food for them both, and Petie took it.

After the Cash ’n Carry she decided to stop by the State Employment Division to look at the job listings. Maybe something new had come in since the last time she’d checked. She left the car under a tree to give her frozen chicken breasts every advantage.

The Employment Division was in an old cement block outbuilding of the county’s mental health and family services. It was gloomy inside and smelled like work clothes and cheap perfume and Xerox copiers. Listed in the lobby on an enormous white board were all the current jobs. Grill cook, prep cook, carpenter, maid, waitress, waitress, paralegal, clerk. Delivery driver, cannery worker, bartender, nurse, bookkeeper, dishwasher, pest control … pest control. Petie approached a pretty girl standing behind a window at the counter like a bank teller. She had long pink Barbie doll nails and matching pink top and pink plastic earrings.

“Can you tell me anything about that pest control job?” Petie asked.

“Oh! Let’s see. That’s one we don’t have much on.” The girl paged through a ring binder efficiently with her pencil eraser. “We’re listing it, but we don’t have it in our files. It just says here”—the girl traced the words with one pink fingernail as she read—“ ‘Pest inspection/sales. Climbs under houses, in attics, crawl spaces looking for possible pest infestation, rodent nests, etc.’ ”

“What does it pay?”

“It looks like one thousand five hundred per month, plus commissions.”

“So you find bugs and then sell people a plan to get rid of them.”

“And provide relief for the guys who spray, but that’s probably only during vacations and sick days and stuff. I mean, that’s what I’m guessing. Like I said, we don’t have much here on it. I could give you a number to call, though. Or would this be for you? I could try and set up an interview if you wanted.”

“That’s okay,” Petie said. “Maybe I’ll take the number, though.”

The girl wrote it out on a little slip of paper in big round letters. “If you change your mind about an interview or you need anything else, my
name is Toni and I’m here to try and help you.” The girl gave Petie a nice smile.

On her way out Petie took an Employment Division registration form. Of course the girl was smiling. She had a job.

E
DDIE COOLBAUGH
was in the side yard soaking car parts in an old coffee can when Petie got home. Loose was stirring them around with a stick while Eddie worked on a transmission coupling with a toothbrush. They were completely absorbed; they barely looked up when she pulled in.

“Hey,” she said in their direction, struggling to drag the twenty-five-pound flour sacks out of the backseat. “Hey!”

“Go see if your mom needs help,” Eddie told Loose.

“I’m doing this,” Loose said.

“Well, stop doing it and help your mom.”

“She doesn’t need any help.”

“Like hell I don’t,” Petie said menacingly. “Get over here and take the other end of this thing.”

Loose shuffled over and lifted a corner of the flour sack between two fingers.

“Come on, Loose, will you give me a break? Try just a little bit.”

“I can’t. It’s too heavy,” he whined. He tried, and it was.

“Come on, Eddie, do you think you could put that junk aside for just five minutes and give me some help with this stuff?”

Eddie set the coupling down on a clean flannel cloth and sprang to his feet. There were still times when his bones seemed filled with air. He had been one of the most gifted hurdlers Sawyer High had ever seen. They used to joke that his legs were better than Petie’s, and she had very nice legs even though she was so small.

“Think you got enough stuff there, or were you thinking of going back for a second load?” he said as they muscled two of the flour sacks out the door together.

“Funny.”

“Hell, at least we’re not going to go hungry,” he said. “Look at all this shit. You could open a bakery.”

“What do you think I’m doing in the kitchen at three o’clock every morning? Clog dancing?”

Grunting, they wrestled the load through the mudroom and into the kitchen. Petie lined up the flour sacks in the broom closet beside her ancient Hoover.

“You’ve got to give the old place credit,” she said, panting and giving the kitchen wall a pat. “I wasn’t sure the floors had it in them to stand up under this kind of weight.”

Eddie smoothed back his hair, tucked in his shirt. Even in work clothes he took care with himself, fussing over missing buttons and shrunken sleeves. “Where’s Ryan?” she asked. Eddie pointed at the ceiling.

“Ryan!” she called up the stairs. “You okay?”

A muffled yes came down. Hiding from Loose again.

“I stopped at the employment office while I was over there,” she said.

“Yeah?” Eddie considered her with a minimum of interest and no enthusiasm.

“They’re looking for someone to do pest control. It might be decent money.”

Eddie looked at her.

“I brought you an application form. We could fill it out after the kids are in bed.”

“You want me to get cancer?”

“Not right now, because we’ve only got forty-two dollars and eighty-six cents. And I just got paid the day before yesterday. C’mon, it’s not going to give you cancer. You could at least look into it. It sounds like it’s probably more sales than spraying and stuff, and anyway if it’s hazardous it probably pays more. Plus nothing’s that dangerous if you’re careful. And you wouldn’t have to stop looking just because you had the job.”

Loose came slouching into the kitchen, dripping the oil stick all over
the floor. “Aren’t you coming back out? You said we were gonna rebuild the transmission.”

“Out,” Petie yelled. “NOW!”

Loose shuffled out, twirling the stick and dotting the walls with oil.

“You’re worried about some harmless household chemicals but you let a five-year-old boy play with that shit,” Petie said.

Eddie left the kitchen without a word. Petie heard Loose start crying, and when she looked out the kitchen door Eddie was ripping some part out of the boy’s hand and heading for his workshop around back.

“Crap.” Petie walked out into the yard and put her arm around Loose’s shoulders as he stood sobbing over the coffee can of stewed parts. “Come on in, Loose. I’ll fix you a nice piece of bread.”

Loose drove his elbow into Petie’s side and ran to the workshop.

“Damn it,” Petie whispered, but her heart had gone out of it. She went back into the kitchen and dialed Rose’s number. There was a God: Rose was home.

“I think there’s good money in pest control. He thinks there’s cancer,” Petie said, describing the blowup. “Plus I charged some stuff on Nadine’s account and I don’t have the money to pay her back.”

“You want some help?”

“Not yet. It’ll probably be another three weeks or something before she gets the bill.”

“Well, the good news is, she said Souperior’s had a waiting line for a little while at lunch today,” Rose said. “We got mentioned in the
Oregonian
travel section. Wait a sec.” She put down the phone; Petie could hear rustling. “Here, listen. ‘Delightful atmosphere, spectacular view, an excellent if limited fare,’ ” Rose read. “ ‘Souperior’s is a welcome way station for anyone passing through this tiny coastal community.’ Sounds pretty good.”

“Thank God. If that place goes under right now I can’t swear to the safety of the dog.”

Rose snorted over the receiver.

“You think I’m kidding,” said Petie darkly.

“Oh, Petie, you don’t even have a dog.”

“Well, at the rate things are going, I might have to get one, a nice fat tender one. Where the hell is Christie, anyway? Isn’t he taking a long time coming back?”

“God, it sure feels like it. I thought he’d be down by now for sure.”

“Are you getting worried?”

“No, he’ll be here.”

“Well, I wish he’d hurry. I need someone to bail out Eddie, because I’m not getting anywhere for shit.”

“So what are the boys doing?”

“Loose is sulking and Ryan’s hiding. Just another fun afternoon at home.”

“Is Eddie there?”

“So far.”

“Then let’s go for a beer, my treat. Carissa’s next door, she won’t be back for an hour.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll meet you there,” Rose said, and hung up.

T
HE WAYSIDE
was a small rickety wooden box with a front door, a delivery door, and nothing else, not a single window. At high noon it was dark as dusk inside, a place where you could have a serious drink at 9
A.M
., and many did. No booths, either; people sat right out in the open at the scarred old carved-up tables (
White Lightning, Mugsy & BooBoo, ’Nam in ’63, All Bikers Go to Heaven
) and took the company as it came. If you wanted to put a move on someone you went down the street to the Anchor and drank cocktails in the tuck-and-roll booths beside the tourists and the electric organ with Pinky Leonard at the keyboard.

Ron Schiffen, a regular for coffee at the Anchor and manager of the Pepsi distributorship over in Sawyer, was standing alone at the bar. He had one foot up on the rung of a barstool, and all the time he drank his beer and neatly stripped chicken wings between his teeth he absently ran the sole of his boot over and over a protruding nail. They were the
slick, tooled boots of a hustler or a pool shark. At any given time he owned two pairs, his old boots and his new boots. Right now the old ones had needle-sharp toes, were scuffed to the point of colorlessness and were so perfectly broken in that each one caressed his small foot like a cheap date. The new boots, which he now wore, were oxblood with inset medallions and black-threaded swirls. They were a gift from his wife Carla and Schiff’s distaste for them was absolute. It wasn’t the flamboyance he minded—his favorite pair of boots ever had been an ostrichskin pair with burnished lizard toes—but the fact that they were not a man’s boot; they were the sort of foo-foo boot a woman would pick out for a man, saying, “Look, hon, aren’t they
pretty
?” However, when Carla had bought them Schiff had been in the doghouse for something—he couldn’t remember what, he was always in the doghouse for something—so he’d praised them to the heavens and continued to wear them every day like a hair shirt. He shuffled deeply whenever he passed through the jagged gravel of the Pepsi distributorship’s parking lot.

He looked up from his beer and his ruminations about his boots when he saw Rose come in. The sight of her perked him up. He liked Rose, and missed seeing her at the Anchor, waitressing every morning. She was an easy-tempered, warm-eyed woman who knew when to pour a man a cup of coffee and how to set down a plate of eggs, a rare combination.

“Hey, Rosalie.” He always called her that although her name wasn’t Rosalie, just plain Rose.

“Hi, Schiff.”

“You going to brighten up my afternoon?”

“Why, do you need cheering up? Is something wrong?”

“Nah. Just the four o’clock Thursday blues. I got sick of the office, I’m in trouble at home, I’m getting old.”

Rose hopped up on a barstool a couple down from Schiff and his tidy pile of clean-picked chicken bones. “Why’s Carla mad this time?”