Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

  He hadn’t looked fine, but Rae let it pass.

  Marv Vernon, the dealership owner, pushed through the showroom door, portly, hale, big-eared, small-time, brimming with satisfaction at the world over which he found himself lord. He held out his hand to give Hack a hearty handshake, then nodded at Rae. She wouldn’t let him kiss her cheek, and he refused to shake her hand.

  “So, boys and girls,” he said. “It looks like a fine day to buy a car!”

  He always said that. Rae smiled weakly.

  “Is there coffee, hon?” he asked her.

  There was coffee.

  “Good girl.” Then he put his arm around Hack’s shoulders and took him across the showroom to the coffee station, talking business in a conversation that wouldn’t include Rae if she stayed here until she was a hundred, as might happen. Sam, a native San Franciscan and stranger to any small town, found that the way of life here suited him. He loved knowing everyone and being known by them. He relished the hands-on contact with clients who considered him just one step from God—or, equally gratifying, from Satan. Here, in this town no one had ever heard of, balanced on the lip of the sea, he was a man of learning, a person of station and substance. His clients liked his modest manner and easy handshake, his genuine interest in their families, businesses, and politics, his ability to make sense of incomprehensible laws and legislation. There was a certain Jimmy Stewart ingenuousness about him, a lack of lawyerly smarminess, that they trusted. Several had begun hinting that he might consider running for state representative; the office cried out for a man of his training and temperament. He admitted to Rae that he was taken with the idea of running for an elective office, though even as recently as three months ago it had never crossed his mind. Didn’t small towns and provincial backwaters need educated leadership as much as major cities—arguably, more than major cities, where the talent pool was already teeming? Here he could make a difference. Rae was forced to agree that he and Sawyer, in the most improbable way, were a perfect fit.

  A young couple came into the showroom, stamping the rain off their shoes. They brought in on their clothes the yeasty, sulfurous odor of the pulp mill on the edge of town. Rae guessed the boy had probably just gotten off the graveyard shift. She knew about these things now: swing shift, graveyard, day. The girl whose hand the boy held was six or seven months pregnant and still wearing a regular T-shirt, which strained across her belly. Through the taut cloth Rae could see she was wearing regular jeans too, unzipped all the way and held together by a piece of basted-on elastic. She couldn’t be older than eighteen; the boy, twenty, at the most. Both had the pasty, unhealthy pallor of the coast in winter, forsaken as it was by the sun between October and May. In Rae’s opinion, the sheer numbers of sex crimes, petty burglaries, assaults, batteries, and alcohol-related incidents supported the reality of seasonal affective disorder.

  She smoothed her skirt and stepped forward to greet the couple.

  “Is there a salesman here?” the boy asked.

  “I’d be glad to help you,” Rae said.

  The couple looked at each other.

  “Oh.” The boy broke eye contact. “Well, maybe we’ll just look around, if that’s okay.”

  “Of course.” Rae made a stiff about-face, clicked into her cubicle in her expensive Italian shoes, and sat staring at her computer monitor. Several minutes later she heard the couple leave the showroom as quietly as they could, so she wouldn’t notice. She knew how it would go from here. They would come back this afternoon, and Hack, not Rae, would greet them, and he would joke and schmooze and close their car or truck purchase as easily as you’d slip into an old jacket. The thought occurred to her that the only thing worse than working for a car dealership was being fired by a car dealership. The whole six months she’d worked here, she’d sold only a dozen vehicles, and most of those were when Hack had been away deer hunting for a week.

  While she was ruminating, another young woman came in, this time a tough-looking girl with back-combed hair and Tammy Faye eyes. She was holding the hand of a little girl wearing a pink plastic Barbie raincoat. She knocked on Rae’s cubicle and, cracking a small piece of gum, said, “I’m looking for my dad.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Bob Simpkins. I didn’t see him out in the service department.”

  “Oh! You must be Doreen. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “Yeah.” Doreen snapped her gum deftly. “So have you seen my dad?”

  “No, not since he came in this morning.”

  “Shit. If you see him, I need him to call me.”

  “Of course. Is there something I can help you with?”

  Doreen assessed Rae with sullen eyes. “Do you have ten grand?”

  “Not on me, no,” Rae said dryly.

  “Guess you can’t help me then.” Doreen reset the strap of her purse over her shoulder and turned to go. Her little girl was playing with a stack of sales literature, pretending the ratty teddy bear she was carrying could read. Doreen pulled her away with a swat at her backside. “ Leave those. You’re not supposed to touch stuff. Didn’t I tell you not to touch anything?”

  “Oh, she’s fine,” Rae said. “Really. We have about a million of those brochures.”

  Doreen looked at her with frank dislike and hauled the little girl out of the showroom roughly by one arm. The child started to cry, and to her horror, so did Rae. She hated this fucking place, hated the weather, the small-mindedness and bigotry, the way everyone thought they were better than she was, hated, most of all, that she was beginning to believe they might be right.

  Hack came banging through the showroom door fifteen minutes later, whistling tunelessly. First giving her mascara a quick look in a pocket mirror, Rae walked across the showroom to meet him.

  “Bob’s daughter, Doreen, was here a little while ago, looking for him. Is he here?”

  “Just got back. I took him out to coffee.”

  “He looked as if he could use it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, maybe you should go out and tell him she was here,” Rae said. “She seemed on edge.”

  “Hell, Doreen’s always on edge. Anyway, she found us at the Bobcat. Danny’s in jail.”

  “Danny? Is he her husband?” Rae was a diligent student, committing the names of Hack’s many Hubbard friends and family to memory. That way, when faced with one of Hack’s interminable stories about dirt bike riding or the conversation over that morning’s coffee at the Anchor, she could pretend she knew them too.

  “Yeah, Doreen’s husband.” He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time that day. She stood up a little straighter in her pumps and silk suit, trying to pull the shreds of her dignity around her. With his eyes Hack licked her from head to toe. She could feel a familiar, confused flush begin.

  “Hi, baby,” he said softly.

  “Hi.”

  “You look so good.”

  Rae dropped her head in an agony of longing and embarrassment. Hack stood still, perfectly at ease, drawing that look out into a soliloquy of steam and funk, sinking his hands deep into his pockets. She might as well be turning on a pin.

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  “Do what?” His voice was bedroom low, bedroom intimate.

  “That. Looking at me.”

  “I like to look at you.”

  “Yes, I know.” She could feel his eyes burning away, until she could feel the flush between her legs. It was indecent in this workplace, this mundane public fishbowl. “Are things okay at home again?” she asked, having calculated the likely effect of this on his latest seduction.

  “Home?” As she’d expected, he shot back to the surface. “Why wouldn’t they be?”

  “Me. The phone call.”

  He looked mildly annoyed. “She’s fine.”

  He never referred to his wife by name, at least not with Rae. Just she.

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Fine.”


  “I am now,” he said, sliding his eyes around her collarbone, but the moment had passed. He winked—winked—and went to his office to answer the ringing phone she’d never even heard.

  She walked to her cubicle, dizzy with desire. Urban sophistication, academic degrees, and eloquence counted for nothing here. With all the finesse of a tacky 1960s action hero Hack Neary was leading the lamb of her morality to slaughter, and there didn’t seem to be a thing she could do to prevent it.

  Out in the filthy service department toilet, Bob vomited up the last of his coffee and scotch. Hack had handed him a flask at the Bobcat, hair of the dog that bit him. Looked like he was going to sober up, though, whether he wanted to or not. And he definitely did not. Anita was watching him all the time with hawk eyes, Doreen was busting his chops because he didn’t have ten thousand bucks—ten thousand—to bail out Danny, and Crystal was bouncing among all of them like a pinball. Little girl damn near broke his heart, she was so smart and pretty, just as smart and pretty as Doreen had been when she was little, though there wasn’t much sign of it in her anymore with that sticky makeup and nasty mouth of hers. The other evening, when Crystal had come out to say good night to him and Anita in her little Cinderella nightgown, he’d seen a ring of bruises circling her arm, and they had Doreen’s fingerprints all over them clear as day. He’d hated giving her back to Doreen this morning—Crystal had come over from Hubbard with Hack and Bob, barely able to see over the dashboard of Hack’s big pickup, singing “The Wheels on the Bus”—but what could he do? Anita had gotten a call to be a substitute chambermaid at the Lawns Motel and Tourist Cabins, and she’d gone. They needed the money. They were going to need it a fuck of a lot more before it was all over.

  But he didn’t want to think about that, so he turned his attention to rebuilding Merle Stanley’s carburetor. He’d always found peace among car parts. Merle’s old Fairlane was obviously terminal, but Merle was so cheap she’d drive it until her ass was dragging on the pavement. And the way the rust was creeping up the chassis, a butt-busting breakthrough might not be too far away. Bob found the thought of Merle’s withered old haunches hanging an inch above the asphalt faintly amusing. Not that he wished Merle any harm, of course; he meant no one any harm, never had, tried to give everybody just what they wanted, all of it good. Maybe that was why his life was such a fucking mess. Maybe right there he had the reason. There had to be some reason, and it was the first one he’d thought of yet that made any sense. And he’d been trying to make sense of what he knew since he drove home from Portland four days ago, where he’d been handed the proverbial truckload of shit.

  What he found out up there was that Warren Bigelow had AIDS.

  Bob didn’t know much about AIDS, but from what he did know, it had always sounded like somebody else’s problem, him and Warren being sole playmates and all. They’d been playing together—he couldn’t say fucking, he didn’t think of it as fucking—since they were little kids living in the Eden’s View Trailer Park out behind the First Church of God in Hubbard. It was their secret. Nobody needed to know, especially with Warren marrying Sheryl and Bob marrying Anita right out of high school. Neither of them was a faggot, was the thing, or at least that’s what Bob had always thought—hell, still thought. Except somehow Warren had come up with AIDS because Bob sure as hell hadn’t started it. No, Warren must have lied to Bob all those times he’d sworn that it was just the two of them, he’d never do a thing like that with anyone else. He was a married man, wasn’t he? Sure, he liked girls just fine.

  But up in Portland this time Warren had lifted his shirt and shown Bob a couple of red spots no bigger than doll’s eyes, except Warren said they were cancer. They hadn’t looked like much to Bob. He’d had a couple of warts burned off a couple of years ago; he bet you could do the same with those little spots, and he told Warren so. But Warren just started crying, saying once you got those little cancers they spread; he’d seen men covered from head to toe, until it made people puke just to look at you. How was he going to tell Sheryl? What would they do? He’d never get life insurance now, and when the produce company he worked for found out he was sick, they’d fire him on the spot, him being a food handler, even though you couldn’t get AIDS from food. So don’t tell them, Bob had said, but Warren just shook his head and said it didn’t work like that, at least not toward the end, when you were so sick and maybe blind or crazy. He’d already seen men die of it.

  “Jesus Christ”—he’d wept—“no one should have to go that way. You think God’s punishing us?”

  “Nah,” Bob had said. “We haven’t done anything wrong; we just had a little fun. God don’t frown on fun. Besides, you think He sees us down here? Shit, He’s too busy to see us, two little specks down here just doing what feels good with what He’s given us. Besides, how come He waited this long to strike us down?”

  “They say you can have it for ten years before you ever get sick. He could have struck us down in 1980. We’d already done plenty by then.”

  “Well, you think what you want,” Bob had said, “but I don’t think God’s got a damn thing to do with it.”

  Except that now, four days later, he wasn’t so sure. When his aunt Bets was going through her short-lived religious period, she used to tell him, God’s watching everything you do, kiddo, every littlething. He’s just biding His time till Judgment Day. Then He’s going to hold you to a full accounting, and you better be ready, you better be clean and pressed and wearing your best suit. He’ll forgive you your transgressions, but only to a point, bub. Only to a point.

  Shit. Still, God could wait. Right now what he was worrying about was Anita. What the fuck was he going to do about Anita? Warren had told him he needed to wear a condom from now on if he slept with anyone, so he didn’t pass the disease along. Me and Sheryl, we don’t do it anymore, haven’t in nine, ten years, so she’s okay, thank God, he’d said. But you’ve got to look out for Anita. Not that it made a hell of a lot of difference now, from what Bob could see. She probably had the disease already, anyway, like him. And how the fuck was he supposed to explain about wearing a rubber, Anita having had her female parts taken out ten years ago, no more birth control needed? Until he figured things out, he wouldn’t sleep with her at all, even though he normally liked to after his little play weekends, to remind himself that he was a man, not a fairy. But he couldn’t stay away from her forever, and even if he could, she was going to want to know why, him normally being highly sexed and all.

  Then there was the question of being tested. He didn’t think it really mattered, for him. He’d been playing with Warren right along, for years. If he hadn’t caught the thing one time, he’d have gotten it another. Plus Warren had described some of the symptoms to him, so he’d know when he started getting them. No, it wasn’t him that needed testing; it was Anita. If she didn’t have it, that would ease his mind, even though it still left the rubber question, and if she did have it, that would at least solve the rubber question. But how the fuck was he supposed to sneak some of her blood without her knowing? And them without health insurance to cover any of it. They might as well just wait. If she started getting sick, he’d know what was what, and they’d deal with it. It wasn’t like you could cure the fucking thing. It wasn’t like there was a way out. That was the thing. You couldn’t cure it. You died. Warren Bigelow was going to die, and so was he.

  Him and Warren had gone and fucking done it this time, they really had. Goddamn son-of-a-bitch bastard.

  He sank down beside Merle Stanley’s piece-of-shit 1972 Fairlane and wept.

  Rae Macy pushed through the service department door. She had fielded a question from one of the dealership’s car owners about whether an air filter had been replaced on his Escort. She’d pulled his file, and the most recent job ticket said nothing about it. She took the ticket with her to Bob’s work bay; the car had been in just a week ago, and there was a good chance he’d remember. To her astonishment she found him on the floor, keening, pale-faced, crazy-eyed,
clammy.

  “My God,” she said, “are you all right?”

  He jumped up and wiped his face with a greasy rag from his coverall pocket. “Yeah. Got something in my eye, burns like a son of a bitch.”

  Like hell. But since Rae couldn’t think of any more appropriate response, she pressed on. “We’ve got a customer asking about whether we changed out an air filter.” She extended the folder lamely. His hands were shaking, but he appeared to be sober, or at least nearly sober. He looked at the folder blankly.

  “Guy’s a dick,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Tell him I changed it out. Or, I don’t know, maybe I didn’t. What the hell difference does it make? He can get along with a dirty air filter; it’s not going to fucking kill him. Tell him it’s not going to fucking kill him.”

  “He didn’t say it was going to kill him,” Rae said softly. “He just asked if the work had been done.”

  Bob subsided. “Yeah. Well, have him bring the car in, and I’ll change it out if I didn’t already do it.”

  “That’ll work.”

  “Yeah.” He handed the folder back to her and then stood there, staring at her. There was something going on behind his eyes, something not necessarily friendly.

  She shifted her feet uneasily. “What?”

  “Nothing. You look real healthy,” he said.

  “Look, is there something I can do for you? Shall I get Hack?”

  “No.”

  Rae walked back to the showroom and straight into Hack’s office, where she closed the door.

  “Ooh, this could be nice,” Hack said, sliding his eyes all over her. “I like it when you close the door.”

  “Stop,” Rae snapped, sitting in the visitor’s chair next to Hack’s desk. “Look, I just found Bob out there crying. There’s obviously something wrong.”

  Hack leaned back in his desk chair, folding his arms across his chest and regarding her. “Yeah, well, him and Anita have some financial problems. Things are a little tight.”

  “He didn’t look like someone with financial problems. You don’t drop to your knees and weep in a service bay with grease all over you just because you have financial problems.”