Going to Bend (7 page)

Petie could sure be tough on a man. She always knew her mind, for one thing. Eddie didn’t always feel a certain way about a thing; he might have two or three different thoughts in the same half hour, and then again he might not care enough to have any thoughts at all. Petie was always thinking, always deciding on stuff for herself. Secretly he was proud of her, but she was a hardship sometimes. Jeannie Fontineau used to call her a tough little bit. Poor old Jeannie Fontineau, she’d gotten so fat and sloppy. If there was one thing he couldn’t abide, it was a fat sloppy woman. You might not have much in this life, but pride was free.

Eddie squatted down and peered for several minutes at the carcass of his latest dirt bike, which was lying on its side in the hard-pack of the side yard. It had given up its life on a nasty little jump on Peach Tree Hill. It would cost as much to fix the bike as it would to buy another one, which was just the excuse Eddie had been looking for. Ron Schiffen had exactly the bike he wanted. Schiff was suddenly claiming the bike wasn’t for sale, but Eddie had heard him talking to Dooley Burden about it at the Anchor yesterday, so he was probably just trying to jack up the price by sparking some competition, knowing how much Eddie wanted it. That was Schiff, always looking for the best angles. Eddie was going to
talk to him about setting up a delayed-payment, delayed-possession deal where Schiff would keep the bike until Eddie got a job, but Eddie would have sole dibs the minute things turned around for him. It was the last week of October, and good mud-riding weather was right around the bend; Eddie couldn’t stand the thought of not having a bike. Besides, he’d promised Loose he’d start teaching him some things, and he didn’t want to disappoint the boy.

Eddie pulled a black plastic sheet over the twisted remains and went inside for his truck keys. The kitchen was humid with the smells of soup and bread, but everything was quiet. Petie and Rose were making their run to Souperior’s with the day’s haul and the boys were in school. Eddie snuck some beer money out of the peanut butter jar where Petie kept change and headed for the Wayside. He’d heard Christie had come back to town yesterday, and chances were Eddie would find him there.

When Eddie arrived Jim Christie was sitting at the bar listening to a couple of the old boys off the charters that had already come in with their loads of green tourists and bottomfish. “Guy keeps insisting he’s got something big on his line, you know, big, and I keep telling the fool it’s only a dang rockfish,” one of the men was cackling as Eddie approached.

Eddie clapped Christie on the shoulder. “Hey, bud,” he said. “Long time.”

“Hey,” Christie said, clasping his hand. Christie’s palms were hard and rough, working hands, outdoor hands. He was in his late forties and looked older. His face had turned to hide and his eyes were small and bleary from squinting into bad weather. He wore a cap that said
F/V Betty Oh
, the boat he’d just come off. The only time Eddie had ever seen Christie with out a cap was at an old mate’s funeral. A wide white strip of untanned skin had stretched across his forehead like a bandage.

Eddie got a beer from Roy and he and Christie headed for a table. “So are you down for a while?” Eddie asked.

“Couple of months, three or four, maybe. Same as usual.”

“Good money this season?”

Christie shrugged. Rumor had it that he was loaded, had a hundred grand, two hundred grand, a quarter of a mil stashed away in a bank up
in Dutch Harbor. Rumor had it that he didn’t have a penny, gave it all away every year to an old Aleut woman and her retarded son up there. When it came right down to it, no one knew a damn thing about Jim Christie, much as he was welcome in Hubbard anytime.

“Rose tell you about me yet?” Eddie asked.

“Yeah. Bad break.”

“Petie wants me to do this pest control thing.” Eddie shook his head.

“Good money?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“You going to take it?”

“Nah.”

Christie nodded, rubbed the condensation off the side of his beer bottle with his thumb.

“What about you?” Eddie said. “You got something lined up?”

“Not yet. I’ll see who’s got charter work. Something to keep me out of trouble.” Christie drained the last of his glass. “You want me to put you in if something comes up?”

Eddie pulled his beer a little closer. This was what he had come for. “Yeah.”

Bud Hollings and a couple of the other fishermen who’d worked out of Alaska this year, too, came in and spotted Christie at the back table. They brought their beers around and soon were talking about boats and people Eddie had never heard of, strutting and kicking the old table legs with their big heavy work boots. It was time for Eddie to leave. He was out of beer money, anyway. “Later,” he said to Christie.

“Later.”

S
UNSET WAS
Nadine’s favorite time at the cafe. The last rays lingered over her ferns and tablecloths, warmed the wood of her benches and floors, offered irrepressible hope, though no doubt unfounded. Dinner at Souperior’s was a chancy business. Some evenings the place was full, others it was a wasteland. If the ebb and flow of customers had anything to do with the weather, Nadine couldn’t see what. If
it had to do with the days of the week, she hadn’t figured that out, either. The only thing that seemed to make any predictable difference was advertising, so she sat on a high stool in the failing light and drafted next week’s copy.

We take soup a step beyond
, she wrote.
Sumptuous, scrumptious, simply delicious. In fact, souperior
. She copied down the next week’s menu and ended with,
Simply souperb, seven days a week at Souperior’s. In Hubbard
.

Copy complete, Nadine sniffed her pencil eraser and mulled. By her elbow was a fresh cup of coffee, which she drank way too much of and always swore she’d cut back on and then didn’t. The caffeine might or might not contribute to how much she worried. Right now she worried not only about customers, menu choices and advertising strategies but also about Petie and Rose, who were working for dirt and seemed so unstable, at least Petie. Privately Nadine had decided that if business got much softer as winter arrived, she would have to let one of them go, even at their minimal wages, and pick up the slack herself. The one she’d lay off would be Petie, and she would do it badly. So she worried about that, too.

But most of all what she worried about was Gordon. His T-cell count had fallen to 130 and he had started having drenching night sweats, bad enough for him to buy a waterproof mattress pad and two extra changes of bed linens. Then there was the increasing fatigue and the more frequent bouts of what they euphemistically referred to as flu, on top of the chronically swollen glands, of course, old and familiar as cranky cell mates after two years. Was it all just more of “the process” the doctors were always referring to in L.A.? Or were they ominous portents, signs that Gordon’s decaying immunological system was about to come completely unstrung and pitch him headlong into the ranks of the fullblown? If so, the whole thing was going too fast, years too fast. Hadn’t Johns Hopkins released the statistic only recently that only fifty-three people out of one hundred would have broken through, a full ten years after seroconversion? Hell, look at Magic Johnson; doomed, obviously, but still playing exhibition basketball after learning of his own positive status.

Nadine couldn’t tell whether Petie or Rose had figured it out yet. In a city like L.A. or San Francisco, there’d have been no hiding Gordon’s HIV status, but here the plague was a distant thing happening someplace else, like famine in India. She and Gordon had agreed that they would keep his illness to themselves as long as possible, knowing that once he was widely identified as HIV positive, his involvement in the cafe would have to stop. But they had also agreed not to launch some humiliating obfuscation campaign. Both Gordon and the disease deserved greater respect than that.

Nadine took a deep breath and hopped down from her stool to put on another pot of coffee. Gordon often chided her for these kinds of fretful ruminations. Better to put the effort into solvable problems, like the fact that if the Hubbard locals would only accept Souperior’s as well as the tourists did, her troubles would be over. But they seemed to be an uncrackable nut. They liked what they liked, which is to say they liked the things they’d always had. The women had contributed all the recipes, but the men didn’t seem to want to come in and eat them. A few times she’d joked with Gordon that if she could figure out how to make a fried soup with brown gravy, they’d be rich.

Visibility—Souperior’s needed visibility. That’s what advertising did, but on Nadine’s limited budget she couldn’t afford more paid advertising. On the other hand, Gordon had offered an interesting idea last night. Christmas was coming, with all those people looking for gifts. They could put together a Souperior’s cookbook, maybe call it
Local Flavor
. They wouldn’t give away all their recipes, of course, but they’d use a lot of them, even a couple of the best ones, and attach the recipe’s author’s name so the local people who’d contributed them would feel famous and buy copies for gifts. Maybe they’d even do another contest for a New Recipes section. If they desktop-published the book on Gordon’s computer, had it cheaply printed in Sawyer and did the spiral binding themselves, they could make a slender profit even on a small run of, say, two hundred and fifty copies. And if they didn’t sell all the books by Christmas they’d just give them new covers and offer them to the summer tourist trade. Nadine could talk to the other Hubbard merchants
about carrying the book in their gift shops, maybe even featuring it in their windows. She’d bring up the idea at the next meeting of the Hubbard Chamber of Commerce. It was worth a try.

The only other hurdle was editing the recipes, simplifying them and checking them for consistency. That, and getting a local name on the cover. Nadine picked up the phone and dialed. If Rose would help her for free, Nadine would make her associate editor.

In an hour, she and Rose and Gordon were seated in a back booth, hands folded around fresh cups of coffee, alone in the deserted gloom of afternoon. She did most of the talking. This was customary. Gordon rarely came forward except in a shy, apologetic way. He was diffident, balding, crumpled, brainy, afflicted with a mild stammer; graced with a certain softness, a delicacy of manners and approach. His eyes were as light and clear as swimming pool water.

Rose leaned far over the table, trying to follow them. “You mean you want Petie and me to write a cookbook?”

“Well, we want you to help edit one,” said Nadine. “It would just be you, since Petie’s already so busy with her bread and everything. And you don’t need to write it, exactly, at least not from scratch, because of course we have all the recipes already. Just choose, say, twenty-five. And write them down the way you cooked them, make sure they have good simple directions, what order things need to be prepared in and that. From your experience.”

“We haven’t followed a single recipe,” Rose said.

“What?”

“Well, we’ve stuck to the main parts, but we’ve adapted some things because we thought they’d taste better.”

Nadine and Gordon exchanged a look.

“Won’t it make people mad if they read we changed things?” Rose asked. “If you’re going to use their names, I mean.”

Nadine ran her hand through her hair. Sometimes she imagined she could feel the gray multiplying day by day. One morning she’d wake up and find she’d gone pure white. “We think it’s very important to use
their names,” she tried to explain. “It would help in marketing the book locally, at any rate. Okay, let’s do this. You could just edit the recipes like they were written originally, like they were submitted. Even if they won’t taste quite as good.”

“You mean you just want me to copy them down.”

“Well,” said Nadine. “Just edit them, you see.”

Rose shifted uncomfortably. “I guess maybe I don’t understand what you mean, edit.”

Gordon nodded: he’d finally gotten it. “Where it says ‘teaspoon,’ you put ‘tsp.,’ where it says ‘one-half cup,’ you put ‘1-slash-2 cup.’ Like that, you just make all the measurements and abbreviations consistent, make sure the instructions make sense, so all the cooking steps are represented. And give everything the same format—the same look.”

“Oh!” said Rose, flushing. “I guess I feel stupid. That’s not hard.”

“No, it shouldn’t be,” Nadine agreed. “And then when you’re done, Gordon will put it all into his computer, and out will come a book.”

“Are you putting any of your salads in there?” Rose asked. “The cold salmon, dill and onion, maybe, or the crab and feta?” Three months ago Rose had never even heard of feta, but she knew what she liked.

Nadine frowned. “I hadn’t thought about anything but soup. What do you think?” she asked Gordon.

“She’s right. A few, though. Not enough to eclipse the soups. The soups should be the main thing.”

“And a few of Petie’s breads,” said Rose. “Maybe five of them. And five desserts.”

“All right,” said Nadine, enthusiastic now. “Yes, I think so.”

“Okay,” said Rose.

Nadine shot Gordon another look. “There are two more things, though,” she said. “The copy—the editing—needs to be finished in three weeks, if we’re going to get this done in time. And we can’t pay you.”

“You mean do it for free?”

Now Nadine flushed. “I’m sorry, Rose. We can’t afford to pay anything at all. We’re doing this as a way to make more people aware of us,
to try and get some more local people in here. But you’ll be listed as editor on the cover. Everyone in town will see that. I’m sure Carissa will be very proud.”

Rose looked from one anxious face to the other. They were good people, she thought. They weren’t lying; they really couldn’t afford to pay. And if they didn’t get more people to eat here, they couldn’t afford to stay in business, either. Petie would never have done it, in Rose’s place, but Rose decided to help them. It might be fun. It might even work.

“All right,” she said. “Yes. All right.”