AT THE end of that afternoon in the Coolbaugh kitchen, with clean shelf paper lining all the cupboards and Eula slumped pale and exhausted at the table sipping coffee spiked with Jim Beam against the pain, Petie had asked her what she should do. About Old Man, about the truth, about all the things she’d unloaded onto Eula’s thin, tough shoulders. “Just go on,” Eula had told her. “One day by one day, just like you’ve been doing. Marry Eddie. Have some babies. Grow older. Don’t look too hard for joy. Don’t stay too long where there’s sorrow. Love whenever you’re able.”
And over the years Petie had tried to do what Eula said, and mostly it had worked. Old Man had come around sometimes, especially at the end of the month when his Social Security was gone, and Petie didn’t talk to him much but she let him stay to eat if he was reasonably sober, because the boys didn’t have any other old family and because they were boys, not girls. He sat on a tree stump in the yard and picked his ears and smelled of cigarettes and old beer and age, and they didn’t really like him much but they didn’t bother to dislike him, either, because they didn’t pay enough attention.
And then Old Man had died. Together Petie and Rose had gone up to the twelve-foot trailer up there in the woods next to state land. The trailer was beige and aqua, filthy with blown pine needles and dirt and rust, round-shouldered, squat, hunkered down like a crazy old hermit between a couple of big spruce trees. In the six years since Petie had set foot inside, the trailer had started returning to the earth. Pill bugs inched their way across the floor, balled up and died on the little table and on the sleeping platform. The wood floor was rotten, and pushed up black and soft between cracks in the linoleum. The place stank. Petie had only stayed long enough to find and retrieve a rusty fishing tackle box holding forty-two dollars and twelve cents. Rose found under the mattress an old pair of work pants, three socks, a brown plaid shirt with no elbows and four Marlboros in a plastic bag. They also found one spoon, a can opener, a pot, a jar of instant coffee, a can of pork and beans, a can of roast beef hash and twenty-four empty bottles of beer. There was nothing else. They closed the door and walked away, and as far as Petie knew, the trailer was sitting there still.
She wondered how anyone could live so long and come to so little, and not just in material ways. At his funeral and at the Wayside afterwards, where most of Hubbard’s old guard went in his honor, no one could remember much. Had he ever been a Lion, an Elk, active with the VFW, helped with the annual salmon bake, any of the kinds of clean civic things you tried to remember about somebody at his funeral? No. John Stewart Tyler had been born and raised in Hubbard, never a resident of anywhere else except for three years during the war, and no one could remember shit. But that was because they were thinking in the wrong places. As they drank a few beers on Petie’s forty-two-dollar-and-twelve-cent tab, they started telling the honest stories, the ones about Old Man drunk, swearing at the tourists butchering bottomfish down at the charter boat tables; about him falling asleep and snoring through every single city council meeting for the last nine years. And the favorite of them all, the one everyone knew, about Old Man’s eye. He had lost his right eye in an accident years ago, before Petie was even born, and had been fitted with a glass eye. But he used to remove it from time to time, and at some point had dropped it and knocked a chip out of the white part. Even before Petie’s mother got sick he’d been cheap, so he’d never bothered to replace the thing, just stuck it back in, chip and all, so that it glinted sometimes in the light. When he got really and deeply drunk, he would rub the eye absently with his shirt cuff until it was pointed somewhere crazy, straight up at the ceiling like he was witnessing God descending, maybe, or into the bridge of his own nose like a lunatic. For years old Boyce, who’d tended bar at the Wayside until Roy took over six years ago, would tap Old Man on the shoulder when it got too bad, or when someone from out of town wandered in and stood to be frightened. “Eye,” Boyce would tell him, and Old Man would feel around with his thick cracked fingers until he’d located the chip, and then he’d twirl the eye around until it was right again.
By the end of the evening it was the kind of funeral party Old Man himself would have liked, with everyone getting a little toasted, telling stories and eventually wandering on home feeling sentimental and kindly about the deceased, now that the pain in the ass was no longer around. And Petie hadn’t been sorry to have him gone, not by a long shot, but she hadn’t been joyful either, not the way she’d always thought she’d feel.
Petie wondered what Eula would think of them now—did think of them, if she was in fact up there floating above their heads like she always threatened Eddie she’d be. What kind of stock would Eula take of him, with his great new job driving a Pepsi truck, wearing a little blue-and-white-striped uniform shirt with Eddie stitched in fancy script over his breast pocket, goofing with the clerks and checkers in the markets and restaurants from ten miles south of Sawyer to thirty-five miles north of Hubbard, flashing his little clipboard and smiling, smiling? And yet, never mind Jeannie Fontineau, never mind the other places he’d driven into with that hood ornament of his. He did work, even though it never lasted, even though he didn’t like to very much and wasn’t very good at anything he’d tried. He wasn’t like old Dooley Burden, who hadn’t held a job since he lost his boat to the bank in 1983, who let his sister Connie support him by working the early morning shift at the Anchor, hoisting and lofting those trays even with bursitis so bad she couldn’t tie her own apron in back. Eula would likely say Eddie was doing all right, although it was nerve-wracking as all hell being along with him for the ride. And she might say Petie didn’t make things easy, and she would be right—especially now with Ron Schiffen.
And what about Ryan? Would he be turning out any better if he had Eula to run to on a bad day, when Petie was edgy and Loose was picking on him and Eddie was nowhere to be found? Eula would have welcomed the boy into her kitchen and made him a cup of sweet hot cocoa, served up in one of her thick chipped blue-and-white-striped mugs. She would have sat him at her table and told him something practical: Hon, the problem with you is, you register every little gust and breeze that blows by. It’s no wonder you’re always spinning around. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to toughen you into a sturdier tree. And then she’d give him projects he could succeed at, preferably intricate ones that would take him a long time, distract him from his latest failure. Taking apart the egg timer, rewrapping all the pans under the stove burners in tinfoil, tracing all the dead ivy trailers back to the main vine and clipping them. Projects Petie rarely had the energy or time to invent, and never within a haven like Eula’s kitchen.
Then there was Loose, who was beginning to show not just a temper but a mean streak. It was true he picked on weaker older boys like Ryan, but he was starting to pick on younger ones, too. She had had another call from school, had been advised to set up an appointment for him with a counselor except she hadn’t gotten to it yet. The thought filled her with dread. Wasn’t it good that he was gutsy, that he could stick up for himself? Wouldn’t the rest even out after a while—wouldn’t he learn to use all that energy for something better? And yet, who would teach him, Eddie Coolbaugh? Eddie knew hurdling and dirt bikes and women, and that wasn’t enough, not nearly enough to fill up someone like Loose. Could it possibly be that, even with the little contact he and Loose had had, across the yard and while he had apparently swayed and dozed, some of Old Man had rubbed off?
And what would Eula have thought of Petie herself? It seemed to her that as most women got softer with age—Rose, for instance, got lovelier every year with her pretty bosom, her hands that looked as plump and young as they had in high school—she, Petie, got harder, stringier, tougher. When she looked in the mirror she thought she looked stunted and sexless, like Peter Pan, only meaner. A tough, bandy little person, a scrapper; someone who, when cornered, would bite. Surely not the sort of person—sort of woman—who would, in two hours, be slipping off to Sawyer to meet Ron Schiffen for lunch.
Chapter 5
WHEN THE people of Sawyer tucked into a meal or a snack, seventy-two percent selected a Pepsi product to go with it. Their consumption of Ocean Spray drinks and bottled Lipton teas was also rising sharply, and it was all Schiff’s doing. When you helped yourself to a 20-ounce cup at the Quik Stop’s fountain service, when you wheeled your shopping cart around the handsome pillars of alternating Pepsi/Diet Pepsi/Pepsi cases at the end of Safeway aisle 8B, you were enjoying a little piece of Schiff’s handiwork. Right now, just this week, he was sponsoring two grand openings (banners, cups, special discount on 24-ounce servings), two high school ball fields (painted signs behind the infields, portable Pepsi cart at home games) and a special two-day building supplies exhibition (portable Pepsi cart, disposable Pepsi painter’s caps to the first fifty people). Schiff’s profile had never been higher. In Harrison County, anyway, Pepsi was king.
But Ron Schiffen hadn’t always been so lucky, not by a long shot. His mother’s term of endearment for him when he was growing up had been Dumb Stuff. Jeez, it’s a good thing you’ve got looks, she’d tell him, because you haven’t got a hell of a lot else working for you, do you, kid.
It was true that Schiff had done badly in school from the get-go. He’d been hungry, for one thing. He’d never been sure if that was because they didn’t have any money or because his mother was lazy and never bought or cooked enough for them. Her name was Delia and she worked as a bartender at the Elks Lodge in Rose Briar, Arizona, and she slept all day when other mothers shopped and cooked. It didn’t matter that much; school had bored him. You had to sit still for long periods of time, and you had to pay attention, two things Schiff wasn’t very good at. So he and his brother, Howard, had scavenged food, backed each other up in school yard fights, and beat feet out of town just as soon as they were old enough—eighteen, for Schiff, nineteen for Howard, who had waited for him. They both went into the army. Schiff did three tours in Vietnam—three tours—and lived. Howard did six and a half weeks in Stuttgart, Germany, and was run over by a truck. All these years later, Schiff still missed him.
Once, before he and Howard took off, they were sitting in a lopsided little piece-of-shit tavern twenty miles or so from home. They were big boys, Howard especially, and no one messed with them about IDs or any of that. They were putting down a couple of cold ones when an old man, dusty and dry as a summer ditch, came in and sat down with them. They got to talking—not Howard, Howard didn’t talk, but Schiff and the old guy—and the old man told the boys he’d been witching for water, thought he’d probably found some just before dark. Water was more precious than gold in that part of the country, and much scarcer. Said he thought he’d found a big underground feeder, might be the one that would open up that part of the desert. Boys want to go in on it with him? Nah, Schiff had said. They were only weeks away from enlisting out of that hellhole, and besides they didn’t have money. Too bad, the old man said. Missing a big one, boys. And Howard had sat over the bar, rubbing water beads off his beer bottle with his thumb, and after the old fellow had downed a beer and gone he’d said, I got a feeling. We should have given him what we have.
Nothing is what we have, Schiff said. Your car. My pay from the grocery. Anyway, he was a loser, didn’t you see his eyes? Squirrelly, Howard, squirrelly as they come.
Yeah, Howard had said. But a good witcher. I heard of him.
Schiff had laughed, but now that part of Arizona, that exact spot, was covered by an eighteen-hole golf course, condos, foo-foo clubhouse, and fancy light posts and shit. Development as far as you could see. The old man had probably spent his last days gumming his food in the best nursing home money could buy.
No, Schiff hadn’t always been lucky.
But today, dreamy-eyed with prosperity and expectation, Schiff propped his boots up on his execu-desk in his private office in one corner of his snappy red-white-and-blue corrugated steel Pepsi distributorship and surveyed a dangler. Danglers were little cardboard and string constructions that suspended soda cups over fountain services so everyone could see them and the coupons or promotional deals they advertised. This one was a honey, tying into Seton County’s sesquicentennial. Classy. Covered wagons and pioneers circled the cup and plodded on across the dangler. People were going to love it. He’d order an extra fifty thousand cups from Portland when he got back from lunch.
Calling over his shoulder to his secretary Bev, Schiff left the distributorship and dragged his soles cheerfully through the gravel he’d had refreshed just that week. He pulled his truck keys from his pocket, but only through habit; it would be better to arrive at The Recess on foot. His truck was a big studly silver thing, the only one like it in either Sawyer or Hubbard, and under certain circumstances that could be a liability. Eddie Coolbaugh, he knew, was up north where Schiff had sent him, but he couldn’t so precisely pinpoint Carla’s whereabouts, although he’d given her a friendly call at the Wayside ten minutes ago to be safe. And of course there was always Randi the Makeup Queen, who was supposed to be in school, but who knew?
The Recess was a block away from the county courthouse, and catered to the legal and paralegal crowd—one of the few circles left in which Schiff was relatively unknown. The restaurant, which did not use Pepsi products, wasn’t his kind of place—all ferns and little watercolor paintings and drawings and shit where you couldn’t even get breakfast after nine-thirty—but he hadn’t chosen the place for the food or the atmosphere. He scanned the gloom for Petie, but he was ten minutes early—he prided himself on being punctual—and she hadn’t arrived yet. She’d come, though.
He chose a table in a back corner, where the traffic would be light and the lighting would be nil. No sense in adding to Petie’s skittishness, plus he wasn’t as fond of a risk as he used to be. In fact, it had been a very long time since he’d taken any, much as his reputation had it otherwise. He didn’t really know why that was. He wasn’t nearly the cad women seemed to want him to be, hadn’t been in a long time. There must be something about the look of him, despite the little gut he carried now. He did have a mouth, he’d grant you that. But he didn’t mean anything by it; these days, talking dirty was just something to pass the time.
Suddenly Schiff heard a woman talking about penises. He was sure of it. She was talking quietly, but Schiff had excellent hearing and knew how to use it. She sat two tables away from Schiff’s, with a very young man whose back was turned.
“No, no, a plethysmograph. A penile meter. They put it on the defendant’s penis and then show him pictures to see what gets him aroused.” Schiff saw the edges of the young man’s ears get pink. A penile meter, for Christ’s sake.
Then they started talking about something else, something about law school, and Schiff got bored and stopped listening. He hated lawyers, anyway. All they wanted was money. Then again, sometimes he thought maybe he’d become a lawyer himself, so he could sit around all day fast-talking for big bucks. He’d never met a lawyer yet he thought was any smarter than he was. A penile meter—who thought up shit like that? He actually felt sorry for anybody who was perhaps at that very minute hunched miserably in some dingy courthouse room with his poor middle-aged dick stuck up some kind of tube or encircled by a tape measure or something. On the other hand, he had no use whatsoever for people who messed with kids. Schiff had woken up one night when he was nine or ten to find one of his mother’s boyfriends working his hand under Schiff’s covers while Schiff slept. Schiff had kicked him in the chin and the guy had beaten the crap out of him. But he’d never tried anything again, not with him or with Howard. For a long time after that Schiff had slept with scissors under his pillow.
A waitress approached Schiff’s table with water and silverware. Lemon slices floated around inside the water pitcher like pond scum; no ice. The waitress had on a long droopy black dress, black canvas kung fu shoes and a leather thong that looked like it had been around her neck since sometime in the late sixties. She wore a bleary, stoned expression. “And how am I today?” S
chiff asked her as she poured him a cloudy-looking glass of water.
“Fine—what? Oh.” She looked annoyed and walked away shaking her head. Schiff loved that line, he really did. It threw them every time. He grinned and relaxed back in his chair to wait.
PETIE CIRCLED the block three times before she pulled the car up to the curb outside The Recess and punched down the door locks. As though anyone would steal the poor thing, especially a half a block from the courthouse. Still, Eddie had put in a new radio only a couple of weeks ago, celebrating the first payday on his new job, and she’d hate to have it ripped off before they’d even made the first payment. She got out of the car, stamped twice to get her jeans seated over the instep of her boots, and shouldered her purse. She’d eat lunch, she’d go home. People did it all the time.
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