Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

  “C’mon now, Anita, you know I can’t let you bring a kid in here,” Roy said with embarrassment. He knew how things were with them.

  “Is Bob gone?” Anita retreated to the open door, as though their being on the threshold would do Roy any good if an Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent came by.

  “Yeah. Hack took him home.” Roy held out the Caprice’s car keys.

  “How bad was he?” Anita asked, taking them.

  Roy shrugged. “He was walking.”

  “He didn’t leave any money behind by any chance?”

  “No. I’m sorry, Anita.”

  Anita shrugged, trying to look like it didn’t make a difference. Roy knew it made a difference, but she had her pride. “That’s okay. Would you give these to Dooley?” She handed the Subaru keys to Roy. Dooley was nowhere in sight, but Anita figured he was there someplace; his habit of spending huge amounts of time on the toilet working his crosstiks was legendary.

  “Sure thing,” Roy said. “You be careful out there.”

  She led Crystal over to the Caprice. It looked like there wasn’t going to be any ice cream this evening. Anita would figure some way to make it up to the child. If they were lucky, Bob would already be passed out in the bedroom, sleeping it off. Anita reached over to fasten Crystal’s seat belt, bowled over by the smell of mildew. The fucking car leaked like a sieve, and the air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror was pure wishful thinking.

  Anita drove up Chollum Road, past Bunny and Hack’s house, past Adams Street and Washington Street, then turned left into the spotty gravel and deep potholes that passed for Franklin Court. In their side yard she yanked on the emergency brake with all her strength. Two days ago the car had slipped out of park for no reason while she was under the carport hanging out laundry. The Caprice had rolled halfway down to the corner before she could catch it and haul up on the hand brake. It might be a piece of junk, but they sure as hell couldn’t afford another one if something happened to it. Bob was supposed to take a look at the transmission, but there was an excellent chance hell would freeze over before he got to it—that or pigs would fly. For some reason the thought made Anita smile. She must be getting punchy.

  Anita hurried Crystal to the kitchen door, and when she opened it, a gust nearly blew it off its hinges. Anita yanked the door closed as fast as she could, but the floor was scattered with pine needles she’d clean up later. A needlepoint sampler hung on the kitchen’s far wall, GOD WATCH OVER THIS HOUSE AND ALL WHO LIVE WITHIN. It was a wedding gift from Anita’s grandmother. Privately Anita had her doubts about whether the Lord was keeping up His end, but she wasn’t about to voice them; they had problems enough as it was. Her mother used to tell her, If you don’t see the Lord’s handiwork in everything around you, for heaven’s sake keep it to yourself.

  But maybe there was something to it after all, because there were four overflowing grocery bags sitting on the kitchen table. Bunny or Hack had been here. Anita’s eyes teared up, and she reached blindly to help Crystal take off her raincoat so she wouldn’t break down right there in her own kitchen.

  “I can do it, Grammy,” the child said. She removed her coat with the greatest care and handed it to Anita to hang on the peg by the door.

  Anita cleared her throat and said, “Look, honey, I think the Food Fairy’s been here.”

  Crystal clapped her hands and helped Anita unpack two roasts, potatoes, carrots, celery, apples, oranges, Saltines, coffee and coffee filters, Oreos, pudding mix, rice, Potato Buds, milk, Campbell’s soups, hot dogs and hot dog buns, Life cereal, oatmeal, raisins, brown sugar, Kraft dinner, margarine, a dot-to-dot book, a Cinderella coloring book, a fresh package of crayons, and—here Anita broke down entirely and wept—a carton of Marlboro lights.

  Crystal stood beside her, patting her hand over and over. “It’s okay, Grammy,” she said gravely.

  “How did you know?” Anita said when Bunny answered the phone.

  “Dooley talks.”

  Anita clutched the receiver between her shoulder and chin, setting a plate of Oreos and a glass of milk on the table for Crystal. “I’ll pay you back,” she said.

  “Sure,” Bunny said, as though Anita ever had. “So is Doreen okay?”

  Anita lit a Marlboro and inhaled deeply with closed eyes, as discerning as a connoisseur of fine wines. God, but she’d always loved Marlboros. She let the smoke leak out her nose. “Danny got arrested again,” she said.

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “For what?”

  “Drugs. Meth lab. Apparently he’s been helping a buddy do some cooking.”

  “She ought to just get out before he involves her.”

  “I know, but try telling her that,” Anita said.

  “Did you bring Crystal back?”

  “Uh-huh. She’s right here, eating the cookies and milk the food fairy brought us.”

  “Is she okay?”

  Anita shrugged, as though Bunny could see her. “You know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You opening up again tomorrow morning?”

  “No,” Bunny said. “Beth Ann’s better.”

  “Thank God for small mercies,” they both said in unison.

  “All right,” Bunny said. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  “Yeah. Love you, honey.”

  “You too.”

  After Anita had hung up, Crystal said, “Is Granddad here?”

  “Can’t you hear him snoring?” Anita said. “Holy cow.”

  Crystal giggled. “He’s loud.”

  “Yeah, he’s loud. Sometimes it makes the walls shake.”

  Crystal looked at the walls in alarm.

  “Gram’s just pulling your leg.”

  Crystal looked at her leg.

  “It’s just an expression, sweetie.” Anita sighed. “It means Grammy’s just teasing you.” Didn’t Doreen ever talk to the child?

  “Oh.” Crystal wiped her hands on her shirt. Anita let it go. Crystal had had enough to deal with today, plus the shirt was a rag anyway; it looked like it had belonged to six other kids before it came to Crystal. Doreen would never wear secondhand clothes herself. Her things all came from Wal-Mart, fresh off the rack and in the latest style. She’d always been like that, too good to wear other people’s things. She was appalled that Anita got most of her things from the thrift shops. Anita didn’t know where she got such a high horse.

  She took three cookies from the bag, dunked them in Crystal’s milk, and savored the taste, her head blissfully empty of thoughts for the first time all day, even thoughts about Doreen and Danny. A kitchen full of food could do that. She smiled at Crystal. “Good?” she said.

  “Good,” Crystal said, licking milk off her last cookie before popping it whole into her mouth.

  “Let Gram clean your hands and then how about we go into the living room?” Anita said, getting a dish towel wet and mop-ping at Crystal’s hands. Crystal bounded into the living room before Anita had even hung the towel back up, running straight to the toy chest Bob had made for her. Inside, it was packed with toys Anita picked up at Goodwill: dolls with both eyes and most of their hair, stuffed animals, a toy school bus with two toy children, wooden puzzles with only one piece missing, a plastic pork chop, plastic slices of bread, plastic peas, and a wedge of a plastic banana cream pie.

  Anita switched on the television, grateful that the cable was still hooked up. Their bill had to be at least twenty days past due, and the cable company would be cutting them off anytime now. She turned to 60 Minutes. She loved Morley Safer, thought he was the most gentle-looking man she’d ever seen, not like that Mike Wallace, who kept punching questions at people until they either said what he wanted them to or looked like liars, one or the other. She thought Morley Safer probably treated his wife real nice, brought home flowers for her, or gave her diamond earrings as a surprise. Anita had always wanted a pair of diamond studs the size of raisins, sparkling away so everyone could see. She’d bought a pair of
zircon earrings at a flea market once, but they hadn’t fooled anyone, and then one of them dropped down the drain in the kitchen sink.

  “Honey, do you have Head Start in the morning?” Anita asked Crystal. She’d forgotten to check with Doreen. Doreen worked in the hospital laundry part-time.

  Crystal shrugged, busy with the school bus.

  “Well, we’ll ask when Mommy calls.”

  Meanwhile, Diane Sawyer was interviewing some crook who’d stolen money from a lot of old people by pretending he was a big-deal real estate developer. They’d caught him in Mexico, living in some fancy house with about five swimming pools and a bunch of gardeners and chefs and laundresses. The old people he’d tricked mostly lived in double-wides and trailers. On the other hand, they’d had money to invest, so Anita didn’t feel totally sorry for them, except for one old couple who sat all hunched up inside themselves in the very middle of their sofa, holding hands. Anita knew that hunch; it was the hunch of people bound for bad weather with no shelter in sight. Anita had been sitting like that off and on for years.

  The phone rang just as the old man started to cry. The old woman patted his spotted hand to reassure him. Doreen was on the line, sounding sullen.

  “I can’t get Danny out tonight,” she said. “It looks like he’s going to have to stay overnight.”

  To Anita, keeping Danny in jail for a night seemed like a good idea, and keeping him longer sounded even better. Maybe it would make him start taking his life more seriously for a change. “How’s he doing?” Anita asked, but it was mostly for form’s sake. She didn’t really care how he was doing.

  “He looks like shit, plus they’ve got this Mexican guy in with him who doesn’t speak English, and he’s been talking the whole time even though Danny can’t understand what the fuck he’s saying. Danny told him to shut up, but it didn’t make any difference.”

  “Well, it would be scary to be locked up in someone else’s language.”

  “I guess.” Doreen wasn’t interested in that, though. She said, “You and Daddy don’t have any money, do you? Bail is ten thousand dollars.”

  “Give me a break,” Anita said—as though they could even get their hands on ten dollars right now.

  “Danny’s family isn’t going to help either,” Doreen said bitterly. “He didn’t do it, you know. You’re all assuming he did, but he said he just stopped off at Bruce’s to see if he could borrow his car and next thing he knew there were a bunch of squad cars and police dogs. He said one of the policemen wrenched his arm around behind him so hard he might have torn something in his shoulder. He could sue, probably.”

  “Honey, my advice is to take a warm bubble bath, open a beer or a wine cooler if you’ve got one, and call it a night. There’s nothing anyone can do until morning anyway.”

  Doreen suddenly deflated. “Yeah, I guess. I just can’t believe this shit, you know? First they accuse him of stealing, and now this drug thing.”

  “He’s fucking up, honey,” Anita said quietly. “You better face it now, because it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to face later. The boy is bad for you, and he’s bad for Crystal.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “You’re going to have to talk about it one of these days.”

  “I’m going to hang up,” Doreen said.

  “Did you want to talk to your daugh—”

  But Doreen had hung up. Anita smoothed the straining placket of her shirt. If Doreen thought she was going to beat the bushes to find someone with ten thousand dollars, she was wrong. Hack could probably come up with that kind of money, but why should he, even if Anita asked him—and she had no intention of asking him? Danny was bad news, and the sooner Doreen figured that out, the better. Anita wished someone had talked to her that frankly when she was Doreen’s age. Maybe they would have talked her out of Bob, and she’d be married to someone like Hack now instead, someone with money and smarts who gave her nice presents and was only a little unreliable.

  “Grammy, it’s dinnertime.” Crystal approached with a plastic pork chop sandwich on a plate and handed it to Anita.

  “Why, honey, that looks just wonderful,” Anita said, reaching out and accepting the fake meal that could almost, if you wished for it hard enough, be mistaken for real.

  chapter four

  Rae Macy was a born pleaser, a woman who, at twenty-nine, still made a point of smiling at road crew flaggers and postal workers, who exchanged pleasantries with checkers in supermarkets and with fellow shoppers waiting in long department store lines. It was a small act of perfection: the slight, ironic smile, the gentle headshake of collusion that suggested, at least we’re in this together. Born a good girl, she had become a nice young woman who remembered special occasions with greeting cards, who listened to other people’s stories with unfeigned interest, who was well liked by her superiors. She dressed tastefully, did her work capably, was still the straight-A student she had been not so long ago. She held a bachelor’s degree from UC Davis and an MBA from Stanford; she was a gifted amateur cellist and spoke fluent Italian. In San Francisco she had held increasingly responsible managerial jobs in US Bank’s marketing department, where she was told that her future looked bright.

  But here, in this foul little town overhanging the indifferent Pacific Ocean, here in this hell, she sold pickup trucks. A compulsive achiever, she now lived in a place where her accomplishments meant nothing. What was a poem in the Seneca Review when no one had ever heard of it? What was an essay, intricately crafted over weeks and sometimes months, when the best-selling periodical here was Guns? A year ago Rae would never have guessed that purgatory was a car lot, but now she knew it was so.

  Still, she and Sam had moved to Sawyer with their eyes open. Sam Macy had gone back to law school at thirty-two, only to graduate in a time of glut. His choices, they quickly found, were to be unemployed, abandon his new career, or accept work in a less competitive backwater where others were reluctant to go. Eventually the balance of supply and demand was bound to right itself, and as soon as it did, they could return from exile.

  And so Sawyer—three hours from a major airport, two and a half from a decent bookstore, two from a shopping mall, and as many from any institution of higher learning. They lived in a condominium on the beach—the pound of flesh Rae had exacted for coming to Sawyer—which turned out to house an ever-changing cast of tourists who assaulted the premises with vigor and noise.

  She and Sam had been married for six years, long enough for Rae to know not just the obvious things like how he coughed and the way he read a newspaper but the composition and location of each dental filling. Yet familiarity was not the same thing as intimacy; they had somehow devolved since their wedding from husband and wife to brother and sister. Was this decaying of passion inevitable, like some law of marital physics?

  Rae had met him in Stanford’s student union, waiting in line for a coffee machine that turned out to be broken. After that he turned up everywhere she went. He was thoughtful to his clients and acquaintances, endlessly patient with the elderly, a gifted extemporaneous speaker much in demand by Sawyer’s Rotary, Kiwanis, Optimist, and Lions clubs as well as the Chamber of Commerce. But for all that, she couldn’t remember the fever of an early passion, only a mild annoyance at his persistence. They had never used pet names or terms of endearment, and her heart did not beat faster when she caught sight of him on the street; she at no time longed to be taken into his arms. Was there in her character a deficiency of desire? Yet there was her humiliating longing for Hack Neary, a yearning as strong and confounding as bewitchment.

  Through the showroom window she watched Jesús, the lot man, pick debris off the inventory: fir twigs, coffee cup lids, Mc-Donald’s french fry envelopes. He was a good man with a gold-toothed smile and many young children in frilly dresses and western wear. Rae liked asking him about his wife, to whom he was devoted. La reina, he called her: the queen. The queen was four feet ten, stout, fecund, twinkling with good humor, in po
ssession of not a single word of English. She called Rae Señora Ray.

  “Like the ray of the sun,” Jesús had explained.

  “¿Como están los niños?” she asked him now as he cut through the showroom to get a leaf blower from the service department. “How are your children?”

  His face lit up like Christmas. “Muy bien, gracias,” he said. “They are very good, thank you. ¿Donde está señor Neary?”

  “No sé.” Rae sighed. “Señor está tarde.” He was ten minutes late. Hack was never late. She felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. Somehow, in what had to be the joke of an unjust God, she was in thrall to a man of dubious intellect and limited sagacity whose conversations she couldn’t remember even fifteen minutes later. Yet there was something winning about him, something deeply appealing, a spiritedness, an almost childlike desire to please, to be liked, that shone unbroken through his shield of glib talk, double entendres, and incessant small lies. Now she had incurred the wrath of his terrible wife, with her nylon waitress’s uniform and sagging face, her teeth drawn and claws bared to fight for her man. It was too awful.

  “Aquí. Señor está aquí,” Jesús said, pointing to Hack’s truck just pulling in. Rae turned in time to see him dismount from his pickup, beautiful as any prince, green-eyed, neatly coiffed and bearded, graceful. Jesús smiled at her as though Hack’s arrival were their doing, a conjuring act, and removed himself and his gleaming tools into the gloom of the service department.

  Bob emerged from the truck’s passenger side, looking greenish and frail. Hack said something to him, slapped him on the back, and split off to come into the showroom.

  “Hey, beautiful!” he called to her, smiling his best Cheshire cat smile, his normal good mood evidently restored after yesterday’s disaster. “And how am I this morning?”

  Señor was, indeed, aquí. Somehow she never remembered the full extent of his obnoxious good nature until he was in her presence.

  “Bob okay?” she said.

  “Yeah, he’s fine.”