Homesick Creek (12 page)

After she and Anita made up the bed with Vinny’s old twin bedding, they found Hack in the living room. He gestured for them to approach quietly.

“Are you kidding?” said Anita out loud. “He passed out right after he talked to you. He’s not going to come to for hours.”

They all regarded Bob, still perfectly upright in his chair, though unconscious.

“You think he’ll just stay like that?” Bunny asked doubtfully. “He must be really well balanced, to sit right up like that.”

Anita shrugged. “If he tips over, I already moved the coffee table out of the way. Only thing he’s going to hit is the carpet.”

“If you’re sure,” Bunny said.

“I’m sure.” Anita walked them to the kitchen door, turning off the living room lights behind her until the only light left in the house came from the clock above the oven and one small lamp down the hall in Anita’s bedroom. Bunny gave her a quick hug at the door, and she and Hack ducked out into the rain.

“Don’t you think it’s creepy?” she asked Hack as they drove home.

“Think what’s creepy?”

“Her leaving him there like that, in the living room.”

Hack shrugged. “What else are you going to do with him?”

“I don’t know. Leave a light on at least.”

“What for? He won’t come to before morning anyway.”

But that wasn’t it exactly; it wasn’t Bob she was thinking of at all. It was something else. It was the thought of Anita sleeping in that broken-down old house with Bob bolt upright and insensible in his chair in the pitch dark. It would be like sleeping in a house with a dead man.

chapter seven

Two weeks after returning from Portland, Bob made the mistake of getting lastingly sober. With sobriety, swifter than vengeance, came the atom bomb truth that he and Warren were going to die, and so, in all likelihood, was Anita. For two weeks he’d insisted they were okay, had let himself
believe
they were okay, but in his heart he knew that was bullshit. Over the last fourteen days, in the privacy of their home and the warmth and safety of their marriage bed, he had knowingly planted the seeds of Anita’s death. More than once in the week since then he had looked at her and felt a scream rising from his soul like gall.

It was ten o’clock in the morning of the day his test results would be in. What he wanted to do, ached to do, was drink. What he did do was push himself farther under the Bloom family minivan and concentrate on diagnosing what Faye Bloom had described as a periodic, wracking cough. Faye claimed to hear her engine talking the way other people heard voices. He remembered when she was just a little girl with freckles, baby fat, and a whinny. She’d had something wrong with her that made her run funny, stiff-legged and slower than shit. Thinking on it, Bob realized that she probably had mild cerebral palsy, but back then no one had put a name to it or told them it wasn’t her fault that she ran funny. All the kids ragged on her about it. Every year when the President’s Fitness Program came around again, Faye Bloom was fucked anew. Plus Bob could still remember the look that came over her when they chose up sides for dodgeball. But she never cried. He couldn’t remember a single time when she was chosen anything but last, but she never cried once. No one had thought much about it then, or at least no one except Faye. Bob noticed only because he was usually standing right beside her, since he was invariably chosen next to last, either him or Warren.

Bob and Warren. They had been Bob-and-Warren since almost as far back as he could remember, back to when they were six. They had sat beside each other at school, had eaten from the same paste pot clear through third grade, staunchly defending each other when questioned.
No, ma’am
, they’d say.
If he was eating,I woulda seen him, and I didn’t see nothing, I swear
.

They’d both lived in the Eden’s View Trailer Park out back of the First Church of God, and it was generally acknowledged that they were the poorest kids at Hubbard Elementary, and that was saying something, Hubbard’s being a poor town to begin with.

Everybody had a story. Bob’s began when his mother, Vivian, ran away the day before Bob’s fifth birthday and his father dumped him on Vivian’s sister, Bets, with the promise that he would repay her with a lifetime of free auto repairs. It hadn’t been much of a deal to begin with, his father being an indifferent mechanic, but then he died two months later in an accident at the mill involving caustics and a loose valve. People said by the time someone could get to him, he looked like raw meat weeping. It took him a couple of days to actually die, but that was just a technicality.

After that it was him, Aunt Bets, and a one-eared tomcat named Pretty Boy. Bets doted on the cat, fed him choice scraps she brought home from work at the Sentry Market over in Sawyer. Pretty Boy ate pork loin and sirloin and prime ribs of beef, salmon and halibut and albacore tuna. Bob ate Wheaties and milk and occasionally a pork chop when Bets could be bothered to fix one. Sometimes when her back was turned, Bob would sneak some scraps from Pretty Boy’s bowl, trading the cat for his leftover cereal milk. He and Pretty Boy generally banded together when Bets was in one of her moods, and she was often in one of her moods, seeing as how her feet were always killing her from standing up at the Sentry, running a cash register all day long. She packed a wallop for someone four feet ten. She slapped and she hit and one time she bit him. Bob and Pretty Boy both stayed out of the trailer most of the time and no matter what the weather.

But when Bob turned six, the Lord must have heard his prayers, because Warren Bigelow and his family moved into the dump next door. Warren’s father gambled for a living, but he’d been on a losing streak since the year before Warren was born, so the family mood was generally sour. They yelled a lot, everyone in the family except Warren, who never said anything to anyone unless he absolutely had to. He claimed he hadn’t talked at all until he was four years old, and Bob believed it. For the first week that Warren lived next door, Bob thought he was retarded or maybe deaf, but it turned out he was just careful. When it came to making up his mind, Warren believed in taking his time, but when he was good and ready, he talked to Bob all right, and after that he never stopped. He’d talk about anything: airplanes and death and car wrecks and the way his mother hit him with a slotted spoon once so hard that he had striped bruises for a month. Another thing about Warren was he ate dirt. He’d take up a pinch like fine candy and pop it into his mouth. He told Bob he’d always been a dirt eater. Bob couldn’t see it himself. He tried it once, but it tasted like shit, plus he kept thinking of all the banana slugs that had oozed over it. He told Warren that, but Warren only shrugged and went right on eating dirt, a little every day.

Warren was the most beautiful person Bob had ever seen. His eyes were so dark they were almost black, and his hair was the exact color and sheen of a crow. He was pale, though, paler than anyone Bob had ever seen, which was saying something, all the people in Hubbard being pale from the never-ending rain. You could see all his veins winding around under his skin, headed for his heart, and he had a cleft in his chin and dimples when he smiled. The other boys said he looked like a girl, but Bob always thought he looked more like an angel. He’d never seen a dark-haired angel, of course, but he was willing to allow as how Warren might be the first, especially since he’d never actually seen a blond-haired angel either.

The two boys took to each other like salvation. Around Hubbard they were commonly acknowledged as strays, but since they didn’t cause trouble and had each other for ballast, they were given a wide berth. They ate hot lunches for free thanks to the unspoken largesse of Bea Jones, the cafeteria cook, and were encouraged to wash their faces and hands in the boys’ bathroom every morning by Mrs. Norris, the school nurse, who kept washcloths and towels there just for them. She also checked them regularly for head lice, which were found on neither of them or on both. A number of families left secondhand clothes for them with Mr. Deloitte, the principal of Hubbard Elementary in those days. Say what you would, Hubbard took care of its own.

Being neither missed nor mourned in their respective trailers, every summer the boys took to roaming the three hundred thousand acres of Weyerhaeuser timberland that stretched back of Hubbard into the low Coast Range mountains. At first all they found were unceasing fir trees, but when they were ten, they discovered a derelict homestead in a little valley choked with alders. There was a cabin, a fallen barn, leaning fences, and an overgrown pasture on a tiny stream they named Homesick Creek—the spare remains of lives that had guttered out or moved on ten or fifteen years before.

Warren was the first inside, pushing the cabin door open wide and slow, so if there were any ghosts in there, they could leave in an orderly fashion instead of running over the top of him and Bob. Warren claimed to have trafficked with a ghost or two, and in this, as in much else, Bob took him at his word.

Inside, the cabin walls were stained a rich tarry brown, the color in the bowl of a well-loved pipe, and rich with the odors of loam and smoke and dereliction. They found a primitive bedstead in the front room, its mattress ticking carefully rolled back and still stuffed with hay, though now old and rotten. The fireplace had been swept clean, as if someone had loved the place enough to leave it tidy even at the moment of abandonment. The roof was in better condition over the front room, but even so, daylight came through in dozens of places. Birds and rodents had made nests in the corners and low rafters of the place, and the windows were as empty as missing eyes. A quick search of the yard and overgrown kitchen garden yielded an old iron skillet, a kettle, and a stoneware crock, cracked but still watertight.

“Why do you think they left?” Warren said, standing in the middle of the front room again, shivering in the gloom and the spookiness and damp.

“Something bad,” Bob said.

“Bad?”

“Like maybe a wolf attacked their cow or something.”

“Are there wolves here?” Warren said with apprehension.

“Well, coyotes.”

“Coyotes can kill a cow?”

“Sure,” Bob said.

“Can they kill people?”

“Nah, but they can gnaw your leg pretty good, I bet.”

Warren shuddered. “Maybe someone came back here and killed everyone.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Maybe there was gold.”

“Maybe they all got sick,” Bob said.

“Sick?”

Bob shrugged. “Could have. Smallpox, maybe, or yellow fever.”

“So do you think anyone else knows about this place?”

“Don’t look like it,” Bob said. “I say it’s ours.”

“Can we do that?”

“Why not?”

Warren grinned. “Hey, we’ve got a house!”

“Except we can’t tell anyone.”

“I swear,” Warren said gravely. If there was one thing they understood, it was the worth of a house.

“Me too,” said Bob. “Shake.”

They shook hands with great solemnity.

“So now it’s ours?” Warren said.

“Yup.”

And it had been. Many times in summer they stayed overnight, lighting a fire of twigs and branches, huddling together on the mattress ticking they’d made. In sleep they would often spoon up like puppies, Bob gratefully accepting the heat radiating from Warren’s perpetual sunburn. Sheltered from the ocean winds, they often shucked off their clothes and spent the days naked. It had been Warren’s idea at first, but Bob had taken to it happily. They were Indians; they were heathens; they were in the Garden of Eden, where Warren usually consented to play Eve. But mostly they were settlers facing scarlet fever, crop failure, ax injuries, plague. By the end of August they both had perfected dying. Warren worked up to a series of twitches and spasms, as though he were being electrocuted or eaten alive from the inside out. Bob’s interpretation was less showy, involving massive paralysis followed by a single convulsive tic and the crowning touch, a trickle of drool out of one corner of his mouth.

It had all been so long ago and started so well.

Bob pushed himself out from under the Bloom minivan. He had found nothing wrong, of course, so he changed out filters and belts, not wanting to disappoint Faye. If he began to make up to her for all the cruel things the kids had done to her with this admittedly small act of kindness, maybe God would look down on him with pity. It was a long shot, a very long shot, but it was worth floating out there. You never knew who might be watching, God or even a lesser angel.

It was one forty-five. He was due at the health clinic at two.

He could hear his pulse hammering in his ears.

Fuck.

In the bathroom he cleaned his hands as well as he could and wiped down his face. The way he figured it, you shouldn’t go to the health department in less than excellent condition. Otherwise you were giving them a chance to blame you for whatever it was they found wrong. Telling Francine he was taking a late lunch, he grabbed his jacket and walked the plank of the dealership parking lot to the Caprice. Fucking car leaked like a sieve; a new puddle mocked him from the passenger seat. Some mechanic he was, owning a car the color of a used sanitary napkin and worth about as much. Somehow the money just went, and the best he could manage was trading one beater for another. He knew Anita wanted a nice car, nice like Hack’s LTD: landau roof, leather upholstery, radio that worked, power windows, power steering, seats as comfortable as old armchairs. It wasn’t going to happen, though, not now.

At the clinic he was told to have a seat and someone would come out for him shortly. Why was it that government offices made you wait, often for a long time, even when there was just one other person in the waiting room? Did they sit back there and linger over an extra cup of coffee, just so you’d know they were better than you? He didn’t keep people waiting at the dealership. It wasn’t that hard to be on time.

He sat in one of eight molded plastic seats bolted to an aluminum frame—like anyone would steal the ugly pieces of shit if they were separated. Across the room, in a beat-up wooden teacher’s chair, a young woman with stringy blond hair and a hooded sweatshirt two sizes too big rocked a screaming baby in her arms. Hell’s lobby must be like this place, an ugly, down-at-heel room where they handed out faulty vaccines and notices of impending death.

“I didn’t know if I should feed her before they gave her the shots,” the girl across the room apologized to Bob over the screams of the baby, looking like she might start crying, herself.

A nurse appeared in the doorway. “Dorothy? Come on back.”

“I didn’t know if I should feed her before you gave her the shots,” she said as she followed the nurse through the door.

Bob looked at his hands, back and front, at the broken nails, at the old grease that would never come off if he washed a million times with pure Comet cleanser, at the wedding band he hadn’t taken off once in twenty-one years. He and Anita had picked them out at a jewelry store over in Sawyer: nineteen years old and getting married. Kids. He had still been boy-skinny, barely bearded, cock of the walk, marrying a girl he couldn’t believe he’d landed.

“Bob?”

The woman who’d drawn his blood last week stood in the doorway in a white nurse’s smock, wise-eyed and weary, her skin softly furred. It occurred to Bob as he stood that she might be the last person who would ever see him as a man with a future, as the person he had been and assumed he always would be. She knew his test results; she might already know that she was looking at a dead man.

He was scared. He was so goddamned scared.

They walked down a short hall decorated with posters from Al-Anon, AA, a breast cancer support group, the La Leche League. She showed him into a small, cluttered office and indicated that he should sit in the visitor’s chair. She took her own seat on the other side of a beat-to-death old wooden desk.