Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

  “Why?”

  “No reason. I just thought I would.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “It was a pretty day for a drive, so I just . . . drove,” he said.

  “You could have stopped here on the way,” Bunny said. “I would have come with you.”

  He hadn’t wanted to stop. He hadn’t wanted her to come with him. “Yeah, I guess I didn’t think you’d want to,” he said.

  “I would have, though.”

  “Well.”

  “So is she there?” Bunny said.

  “I don’t know. I’m stuck in fucking rush-hour traffic.”

  “How do you know she’s even home?”

  “I don’t, Bunny. Call me crazy, okay? I just thought the kid might like a visit. That’s all.”

  “She’s a young woman now,” Bunny said. “She’s not going to want you up there all the time.”

  “I’m not up here all the time.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Hack didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to know what she meant.

  “What will you do if she’s not there?” Bunny said.

  “I’ll drive home.”

  “And if she is there?”

  “I’ll take her to Elmer’s or something and then drive home.”

  Silence.

  “Look,” Hack said. “I called you, didn’t I?”

  Bunny sighed.

  “So, anyway,” Hack said, “I’m getting off the phone.”

  “Wait, wait a minute. I went over to Anita’s today. I think something’s wrong.”

  “Here we go again.”

  “No, I mean, really wrong. She didn’t seem right. She’s got this, I don’t know, this rash or something. And she’s lost a lot of weight.”

  “Hell, throw a party.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Bunny said. “I was going to ask you to go by there and see what you thought. I guess that’s out, though.”

  “She’s forty, for God’s sake. She’s a big girl.”

  Bunny wrapped the noose of recrimination around his neck. “I should have known you wouldn’t understand,” she said.

  “Fuck that, Bunny. Just fuck that, you know? You think you’ve got me by the balls like some giant kite, like you can give me so much string and then—yank!—you can reel me back in again? Well, just fuck that. Fuck that, and fuck you too.”

  He slammed down the phone.

  Now he’d gone and done it.

  Oh, Buddy.

  Yeah.

  Vinny’s car was parked in the driveway when he got back to her house. He pulled up to the curb but didn’t turn the truck off right away. He watched through the living room window as Vinny walked through the room with a towel wrapped around her hair. Even years ago she was the hair-washing queen. She was dressed, though, so she’d probably put her head in the kitchen sink, not showered. She did that sometimes.

  He turned off the truck and picked the wrapped book off the dashboard. She answered the door immediately, as he’d known she would.

  “Hey, Vanilla Sundae,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He couldn’t tell whether she was pleased or not. “I ran away from home,” he said.

  “Does Mom know?” Still standing in the doorway, she took off the towel and shook out her wet hair.

  “Yeah. She just chewed me a new asshole.”

  Vinny rolled her eyes. “Well, come on in.”

  “Is it okay?”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” She closed the door behind him. “God, the thing is, though, it’s a mess. I wished I’d known you were coming. I mean, everyone’s been real busy.” She gestured broadly at the room, with its unfolded clothes and dishes and glasses and empty soda cans. Neither of them sat down.

  “You eat yet?” Hack said in what he hoped was a light tone.

  “The thing is, I’m going out in a couple of minutes. Someone’s coming to pick me up.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. So what are you doing in Portland anyway?”

  “I had an errand to run for the dealership,” he lied.

  “That’s a pretty long way for them to make you drive for an errand,” she said.

  “So anyway, I brought you something.” He held out the gift-wrapped package.

  “Oh, how sweet!” She tore the wrapping off. Inside, as he’d suspected, was the book of children’s poetry.

  Vinny looked up uncertainly and then brightened. “Oh! I know—was this one of my favorite books when I was little or something?”

  “No,” Hack said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Oh, Buddy.

  He made up something about getting two gifts mixed up— hers had been a new chemise, but he must have left that at home—and in minutes he was back in his truck, shaking so badly it took several minutes just to get the key in the ignition. As he pulled away from the curb, a car pulled into his place and a boy jumped out: a kid about the age Hack had been when it had all come apart. Vinny’s date.

  She wasn’t me, Buddy. She was never me.

  You think I don’t know that?

  I think you didn’t know it. Now you do.

  Yeah. Now I do.

  So what will you do?

  I don’t know.

  It’s cold here.

  Yeah.

  It was one o’clock in the morning, and Hack was sitting at the overlook near the top of Cape Mano, looking at the halogen lights of the fishing fleet winking like stars out to sea. Jesus, he was cold. He’d started shivering halfway back from Portland, and he hadn’t stopped since, not even after he’d cranked the heat up to high. Shit, maybe he should just light a small fire on the floorboards and warm himself that way. He could use the poetry book to get it started. Then he’d go ahead and add his marriage license and his house keys and his electric garage door opener. He’d toss in Bunny’s Hack Neary Voodoo Bunny doll and a bunch of her other rabbits, and then maybe he’d add the goddamn piano no one knew how to play, and how about their bed, while he was at it? Now, that would be a thing to see. He got some satisfaction from picturing the refuse from all those years going up in a single whoosh and tower of sparks. A conflagration, one of the Katydid’s thousand-dollar words. Why do you talk like that, use a word no one but you can understand? he used to ask her.

  Because it means what I mean.

  The Katydid always knew with crystal clarity what she meant. He used to envy that.

  Hack thought about Minna Tallhorse. If she were here, what would she tell him? To buck up, probably; to pull himself together and move along. She never had had any patience for sloppy thinking or self-pity. She and the Katydid had had that in common. Thursday night dinner conversations with them were like sparring matches, requiring muscle and agility.

  You should find her, Buddy.

  No.

  Maybe she could help you.

  The only thing we ever had in common was you.

  That’s not true.

  Sure it is. You should have seen us, after—After. You weren’t here. You don’t know.

  I couldn’t help not being here, Buddy.

  Yes, you could have.

  How?

  I don’t know how. Somehow.

  Is that really what you think?

  Yeah, that’s really what I think.

  Oh, Buddy.

  Then he was sitting in the front seat of his truck at two o’clock in the morning, sobbing.

  Bunny was afraid of the dark. She’d never admitted that to anyone, not even to Shirl, but it was true. Whenever Hack was away, she slept with the hall light shining in her eyes like a beacon. Tonight even that wasn’t enough. She lay in bed as clenched as a fist, rigid with despair. Hack wasn’t coming home, and he might never be coming home again. She’d tried to prepare herself for this moment for sixteen years, more strenuously in the last six months, and here it turned out she still wasn’t ready.

  If she’d kept her mouth shut this a
fternoon on the telephone, would it all have worked out differently? Probably not. Even if the blowup hadn’t happened now, it would have been soon. He’d been coming apart for months; she’d seen it day by day. His step was a little heavier, his smile a little tighter, even sex was a little flatter, like he’d lost the joy of it—and it had always been his joy, even in bad times. When he was younger, he used to whoop like a rodeo rider when he came, lusty and transported to someplace where Bunny couldn’t follow but didn’t mind, because he was inside her, and that was worth something too. She used to come home all the time with abrasion burns from the thin, starchy sheets at the Patio Courts over in the Valley when Hack was especially keen, but she hadn’t minded that, either. As long as she could do that for him, he would stay. When had she first forgotten that? Jesus, how could she have forgotten something like that?

  Without Hack, who would she be? Who had she been, years ago, before Hack, before JoJo even? She’d just been Shirl’s kid, Fanny’s little sister. She was nobody at all, a student who wasn’t good enough or bad enough to be noticed in school, nobody’s girlfriend for the longest time, until nasty little JoJo started to come around, and even that wasn’t worth much. The night Vinny was born, JoJo never even showed up, so Bunny had had the baby alone except for a pair of mean obstetric nurses and a doctor who’d arrived after the show was over. Maybe he’d been drinking at the same bar as JoJo. He’d stunk of whiskey, shoved his hand up inside her like she was some kind of cow, and withdrawn it only when one of the nurses cleared her throat extraloud and told him the child had already been born.

  And Jesus, having Vinny had hurt. Bunny had pushed and pushed and pushed against this stranger who hadn’t wanted to leave, who’d wedged herself in Bunny’s birth canal for the longest time, hours and hours. Push, the nurses kept snapping at her, like it was all her fault, and she pushed, and they told her, Push harder, and she pushed harder, but it was only when she started cursing JoJo at the top of her lungs that the baby had finally uncorked herself and shot from between Bunny’s legs like a cannonball.

  That was the last time in her life that Bunny had really been in the limelight. Right from the get-go, Vinny had been prettier than Bunny ever was. Shirl told Bunny that; Shirl’s mother, Mayette, told her that; Bunny’s father, Jack, told her too: God almighty, girl, your head looked just like a squash when you come out of Bigger, there. I never saw anyone living or dead who looked uglier. Course, after a while you got better. Vinny had been everyone’s darling, a pleaser who learned early how to ask for things and get them. Bunny had always had to fight like hell for what she wanted.

  At one o’clock in the morning she got up, turned on all the lights in the house, and went into her sewing room. She was working on a fairy godmother rabbit, one with spectacles and a white mohair wig and a little magic wand. It was a variation on a figure she’d created over and over, a kindly soul whose job it was to fix other rabbits’ problems. Who knew? Maybe it was God Himself in disguise. Bunny didn’t know much about God, and none of that firsthand, but she certainly believed in some force that was out there granting incredible good fortune to people with flimsy prospects. How else did you explain why some people won the lottery, beat terminal cancer, reunited with long-lost twins or parents, stumbled upon fame? Call it magic or luck or Jesus, but it was real. She pieced the rabbit together with tiny stitches and the greatest skill she could muster, the muslin parts trembling in her hands like living things. She stuffed the limbs, rouged the cheeks, looped the wire spectacles behind the bunny ears, and as she worked, she offered up a fervent prayer: Allow me to keep my life, O Lord, and I will put joy before envy, adoration before need, and love before judgment.

  At six o’clock in the morning, the telephone rang. Bunny nearly came out of her skin. She’d fallen asleep with her head on her sewing table, a rabbit arm still grasped in one hand to keep the stuffing from coming out. She picked up the wall phone in the kitchen, her heart in full flight.

  “Do you know where Mom and Dad are?” It was Doreen, and the girl sounded panicky. “They aren’t here. I don’t think they’ve been here since yesterday. Did they tell you anything?”

  “I haven’t heard from them, honey,” Bunny said, coming instantly awake. “I saw your mom yesterday morning, and she didn’t say a thing about a trip.”

  “Well, they’re gone,” Doreen said, and started crying. “I can’t take this. First Danny and all his crap and now this.”

  “Are you sure they didn’t leave a note?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You looked everyplace? Did you look in the refrigerator?” Anita had left a note for the girl once inside the refrigerator, put it there when she was assessing groceries and then forgot to take it back out.

  “Everywhere. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  “Is the car there?”

  “No. They better not be gone. If they’re gone, I’m going to just lose it. I am. What am I supposed to do with Crystal? It’s Saturday. There isn’t even Head Start. I have to be at work in an hour.”

  “Is Crystal still asleep?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. I don’t work today, so I can take her if your mom’s not back when you need to leave. I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

  “Shit,” Doreen said, and hung up.

  Bunny set the receiver in its cradle gently and sat down at the kitchen table, where she noticed that she still had a rabbit arm clenched in her fist. Maybe the whole world had just gone crazy.

  Two hours later Bunny heard the garage door open. She held her breath until she heard Hack’s truck come all the way inside and the garage door close behind him. Crystal was watching Sesame Street on television and didn’t even look up when Bunny left the room.

  She and Hack reached the kitchen at the same time, each from a different door. He looked like hell, and so did she. They both stopped just inside their doorways and stared at each other across the no-man’s-land of the kitchen floor.

  “Looks like a shoot-out at high noon.” With the greatest effort, Hack managed a smile.

  “I don’t see any guns.”

  “Well,” said Hack, “it never was about guns.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Then what was it about?” Bunny said, feeling her way.

  “Ghosts,” Hack said. “It was about ghosts.”

  chapter seventeen

  Bob had taken it slow yesterday, steering the old car down the logging road at fifteen miles an hour to avoid the ruts and potholes. It had been late afternoon, the time of day when a drunken man could forgive himself his lesser sins, knowing he still had hours to drink away the greater ones. Anita slumped on her side of the car, wrapped in an afghan she had made a long time ago, during one of the kids’ bouts of chicken pox or the flu. It was a soft and stretchy thing, shapeless after how many years and knitted with odds and ends of yarn bright as a carnival. He remembered her knitting it, sitting in a chair by the window— which window? which house?—listening to her children breathe in the night. He recalled the click of the needles in the darkness—she knitted by feel and sound alone—safe in the knowledge that she was watching over them.

  Now she was precious cargo, breathing heavily in the seat beside him. He’d told her he had a surprise for her, and at first she’d protested, but he’d worn her down. He fed her toast and aspirin and bundled her into the car. He’d found an old spool-turned rope bed at the thrift store just the day before yesterday, and a mattress with hardly any wear that fitted it just right. The house was ready at last to receive her.

  When he rounded the final turn in the logging road, he whispered her name, but she’d fallen asleep, and he had to shake her shoulder gently to bring her around. Her forehead and cheeks and chin were livid pink. Her fever was on the rise.

  “Nita,” he said again, and pointed. The homestead was laid out below them like a dream, neat and tidy, half of it still glowing with sunlight, the other half already in the shadow of the steep valley wall.
>
  “Where are we?” Anita had said, groggy with fever and sleep.

  “Home,” Bob said. “We’re home.”

  “No. This?”

  “Yup,” he said proudly.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been working on it for months, darlin’, just for you. Me and Warren fixed it up some when we were kids, but not like this. Not finished like this.” Bob’s voice caught with emotion. “It’s yours.”

  Anita just looked at him with fever-dulled eyes. This wasn’t the reaction he’d anticipated for so long and so often, but he’d show her the inside, and then she’d recognize his accomplishment. He pulled into the yard, rounded the car, and helped her out, looping the extra length of the afghan over her arm like the train of a wedding dress.

  “I’m so sick, honey,” she said. “Take me home.”

  “I have.”

  “I don’t know this place.”

  “You will, though.” Bob opened the front door for her and led her in. She saw now; he watched her see.

  She looked at the furniture he’d found, and the walls and floors and windows he’d whitewashed and sanded and cut and installed with so much love, and said, “We aren’t supposed to be here.”

  “Sure we are.”

  “It’s Weyerhaeuser land.”

  “That’s the beauty part.” Bob lied nimbly. “I told them this homestead had been in my family for seventy years, and they said in that case we could just go right ahead and live here as long as we wanted.”

  Anita bought it. She walked through the front room, the kitchen, the little bathroom—not fancy but adequate, judging by the fact that she closed the door gently and peed into the sickroom commode he’d brought in just yesterday. Bob listened to the sound and felt a lump rise in his throat. He had done this. He had done all this for her, and now she was here.

  “Please take me home,” she said, with him again. The afghan had slipped off all but one shoulder and was dragging on the floor. He draped it more securely and led her into the bedroom by the elbow. “We don’t have to,” he said, and patted the bed invitingly.

  “Please.”

  “You can lie down right here.”

  “Does Doreen know where we are?”