He eased the truck over the smoothest parts of the road, steering carefully. “Eddie said you were laid off,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“So what will you do?”
Petie shrugged, not looking at him. He could just make out the hard little edge of her shoulder through her denim jacket. “I don’t know. I can keep doing the bread, if I want.”
“What’s it pay?”
“Couple of bucks a loaf for twelve loaves. Not enough.”
“Jesus. I’ll say.”
“It’s probably more than she can afford, though.”
“Yeah, right. Two hotshots cash out everything and move up from L.A.? They’re both younger than I am, plus the guy doesn’t seem to work at all. C’mon. There’s a lot of bucks there. They just want you to think they’re broke so you’ll work real cheap.”
Petie shrugged noncommittally and squinted through the windshield as they drove into a little squall of rain. “I’ll probably go back to the Sea View,” she said.
“You think they’d take you back?”
“Yeah. Business is lousy but they’re not real happy with Rhonda. Marge’s been talking about letting her go and filling in herself, but they want to go down to Tempe and see their grandkids for Christmas.”
“Didn’t they get new beds in a few months ago?” Schiff cocked a suggestive eyebrow, but Petie was focused on something else.
“Listen,” she said. “How solid is Eddie with you?”
Schiff frowned. He didn’t joke about business. “He’s solid if he don’t screw up. He’s a good driver, and my customers like him.”
“Screw up like how?”
“I don’t know. Drive the truck into a ditch, deliver the wrong orders, forget to come to work. Steal. Stupid stuff.”
“He wouldn’t do those things.”
“Nah,” Schiff agreed, although privately he wasn’t so sure. How many jobs had Eddie Coolbaugh had just since Schiff came to town seven years ago? The guy was nice but he was a loser just the same, the purest one Schiff had met in a long time.
“So, good,” Petie said. Suddenly she looked better. Seeing her brighten, Schiff pulled the truck off the road into a recent clear-cut, nothing for miles around but stumps and rubble. The ground bogged slightly under the tires, but it would hold, and if it didn’t he could always winch himself out. He loved his truck. In it, he was capable of greatness.
“So, let’s get to it,” he said. He switched off the engine and settled himself against the door, his arm reaching her way across the seat back. Petie narrowed her eyes at him; inside her jacket pockets he could see her hands ball up. She was plenty capable of decking him. God, he loved this; it reminded him of high school. He smiled at her good-naturedly, let a few beats go by. “Lunch.” He gestured towards her bag on the floor.
Petie colored, crossed her legs tightly from ankle to thigh and pulled up a paper bag, setting it between them. There was plenty of room; the seat was wide as a bed, unyielding as a pew. Deftly she spread out between them five peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, two Hostess Ding Dongs, two boxes of apple-raspberry juice. The sandwiches were tiny, hardly larger than cigarette packs, and were made on anadama bread Petie had baked for Souperior’s that morning.
“Has Carla ever worked except at the Anchor?” Petie said, leaning lightly on the name, divvying up the sandwiches: one for her, four for Schiff. A Ding Dong and juice box apiece.
Schiff eyed the little sandwiches skeptically. He was going to go back to work hungry, he could tell. “Nah. And the Anchor’s just for beer money. I’ve told her she doesn’t have to work.”
“She and Rose sure never got along too well.”
“Carla don’t get along too well with anyone, especially women. She’s mean.”
“She’s okay.”
Schiff shrugged, and popped half a sandwich in his mouth. He didn’t really want to be talking about Carla, it was depressing. He chewed, swallowed, looked out the window and suddenly said, “Sometimes I wonder how the hell it happened, you know? God, when I first met her she was sweet all the time, and she looked so good you could watch her walk away forever.” He felt Petie next to him, listening. “She still looks good walking away, only she keeps on coming back, you know what I mean?” He cracked a thin smile, polished off the other sandwich half, subsided pensively. Carla had been fun once, too. Back then, that high thin whinny of hers hadn’t sounded witchy when she laughed. And she had long beautiful fingers she liked to run lightly over his arms and chest as she got sleepy, which made him break out all over in ecstatic goose bumps. Hers were the fingers of a goddess, a queen, a courtesan. A trickster. She hadn’t touched him voluntarily, except for show, in years. God almighty, how was he supposed to have known she’d turn out to be so awful?
He pulled himself together. “Nah,” he said, “Carla, she’s okay. She just gets bored. I mean, that’s the thing about Carla, now that Randi’s growing up. When Randi was little they were always doing stuff together, sewing and baking and shit. Carla, she thought Randi would always be her best friend. But then Randi left her in the dust a couple years ago, and Carla didn’t see it coming. And it isn’t just that Randi’s got other stuff to do, you know, it’s that she dumped Carla because Carla’s old. You know how kids are. Carla can’t stand that. So now she goes to the Wayside and plays video poker all afternoon.”
“I heard she was down there a lot.”
“Yeah, well, she’s cutting back, though.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know what the fuck difference it makes, really.”
“Well.”
They both sat quietly for a minute.
“So, I didn’t think we’d be out here talking about Carla,” Schiff said.
“What did you think we’d be talking about?”
“Sex?” Schiff said hopefully.
“Give me a break. So why do you stay, anyway?”
Schiff shrugged. “Maybe I’m just too old to get cleaned out again,” he said. He didn’t feel like talking about it anymore. He polished off the last of his sandwiches, popped an entire Ding Dong in his mouth, took a sip from his ridiculous juice box, wiped his beard neatly with his fingertips. “So how’s Christie doing?” he said. “He settled in?”
“He’s fixing up Rose’s car. He told her he’s going to have a surprise at Christmas. Maybe he’s going to turn it into some kind of low-rider. Wouldn’t that be something? He could do it. He’s a good body man.”
“He’s not the only one.” Schiff leered absently while he watched Petie put away the plastic produce bag in which she’d brought their sandwiches. She smoothed it flat with her quick little hands, then folded it in half, then in half again, then tucked it inside her purse. Schiff wouldn’t let Carla reuse anything, not even Ziploc bags. His mother, slovenly in so many ways, had been obsessive about husbanding kitchen materials. He and Howard had had to wash out plastic wrap, save margarine tubs, reuse paper bags until they were soft as felt. Delia had cuffed their heads hard if they threw out any reusable piece of aluminum foil bigger than an index card. He still couldn’t stand the rotten feel of reused foil.
Frowning a little with concentration, Petie stowed the last bits of their trash in her paper bag and set it on the seat between them. She held out her hand and Schiff passed over his empty juice box obediently. He pictured her moving around her house that way, quick and commanding, absorbed in tasks, all her toughness evaporated into the safety of home. And now, for an instant, here, too. Schiff liked that.
“So what was the deal with your first wife?” Petie asked, settling back again on the seat, not quite as far away as she had been.
He considered the question. “Mary. She was mean, too, meaner than Carla by a mile, meanest woman I ever met. She was an Indian girl, Nez Perce, but small, even smaller than you, and beautiful, she looked just like a doll. She stabbed me one time for coming home from work late. That was down in Klamath Falls, when I was working for a mill. They
call a union meeting, I stay, and bam! I come home and she stabs me in the arm with a meat fork. Said she knew it wasn’t a union meeting, said I’d been out with some girl from the A&W down there. I told her if I was going to step out on her, for Christ sake, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to stop for a quickie on my way home from work. I told her if I ever decided to fool around, she’d never know about it.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Fool around on her.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, she did,” Schiff said, looking out the window. “I get all these nice letters from her in Vietnam because she figures what the hell, I’m probably going to die over there anyway. Then I get home and find out she’s got a kid. She’s been humping my best buddy my whole last tour. Says it wasn’t her fault, because I’d been away so long and didn’t come home on leave. It’s my fault.” Schiff flipped the windshield wipers on, switched them off. “So, you know, some homecoming. My first night back I drove my car through the front window of my buddy’s gas station. Broke one of my kneecaps in four pieces, dislocated the other one. He drove me to the hospital. It was good to see him.”
“You’re kidding.”
Schiff cracked his window open. Petie was turned to him, her eyes bright and sharp. He ran his fingers absently through his beard. When was the last time someone had listened to him? “I ended up going back with her for a while—a year and a half. The kid turned out to be great. Her name was Angela, except everyone called her Angel. She looked like one of those kids in the paintings with the big eyes. We were buds, I took her everywhere. I’d put her way up on my shoulders and she’d hold on to my hair with both hands, never said a word, eyes as big as baseballs. The day I left she just stood there in the window watching me. I still dream about that sometimes. Neither of us had told her anything, but kids, they know what’s going on. I could tell Mary was trying to make her come away from the window, but Angel, she just stood there. I left a thousand bucks in a savings account for her but Mary probably spent it all on herself the first month. I heard Mary married some rancher out in eastern Oregon after a while. Couple of years ago I thought about looking for the girl, but Carla didn’t like it. Hell, she’s probably already married by now with her own kid.”
“I guess she hasn’t tried to find you.”
“Nah.”
“So why didn’t you come back when you got leave over there?”
“There were some things I had to see.”
“Like what?”
“Singapore. Thailand. They were the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.”
For a while it was quiet in the truck.
“If I’d known,” Schiff said softly, “I never would have come back.”
“Known what?”
He looked at her almost tenderly. He could have wept. He cleared his throat instead, switched on the ignition and put the car in gear. “That you wouldn’t sleep with me,” he said, and turned the truck around for home. Neither of them spoke again until they reached the outskirts of Sawyer.
“They really don’t have any money,” Petie said then, as though there had been no lapse in the conversation.
“Who doesn’t?”
“Nadine and Gordon. They really don’t. The only thing that’ll keep them from going under is if they get more local business.”
“So?”
“Well, Rose would be out of a job, for one thing. Plus I like them. They’re weird, especially Nadine, but they’re good people. I mean, they’re trying hard. It would be real good, Schiff, if they could keep the place.”
“I’ve never heard anyone say they were that great.”
“I’m saying it.”
“They canned you.”
“They should have done it a month ago.”
Schiff pulled the truck alongside Petie’s car. “So, what are you saying?”
Petie gathered up her purse and her junk and opened the door halfway. “I’m saying you know a lot of people. Just talk the place up. You could do that. Hell, take Carla and Randi there for dinner one night. Or maybe the dirt bike club could meet there this month. You know Rose is a good cook, so no one’s going to get poisoned or anything, and it would help. It really would.”
“Jesus.” Schiff held up his hands. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”
Petie gave a curt little nod and hopped out. She was so small she disappeared from view completely once she’d slammed the door. Schiff was just about to pull away when the door was yanked open again.
“Hey,” Petie said. “Thanks.”
“Yeah.”
JUST AS she reached the outskirts of Hubbard the storm that had been building over the horizon for the past hour broke through like a bad head cold. Hailstones big as BBs stalked down the highway, dogged by rain. The boys would be just about to start walking home. Petie turned the nose of the car into the squall; the car hesitated, coughed and began favoring its bad wiper.
Petie had heard that turkeys were so stupid they drowned by opening their mouths during rainstorms. Most children, in her opinion, weren’t a whole lot better off. As she pulled up to the curb they poured out of the elementary school in the usual states of joyful unreadiness—no jackets at all, or jackets without hoods. All winter the school smelled muggy and sour from so many soggy children.
The crowd thinned, but neither Ryan nor Loose appeared. When the last straggler had emerged, Petie switched off the engine and sprinted inside the school’s front door, where all the smells reached out and seized her, as they always did. This had been her school, too, hers and Rose’s, and it had looked and smelled pretty much the same then as it did now, except for newer desks and chalkboards: the same uneven, well-worn fir floors, the same construction-paper alphabet circling the ceiling, the same cheap Pilgrim and Indian and turkey cutouts taped on the walls. You could almost see their ghosts sitting in the second row of the first-grade classroom, sweet-faced Rose still years away from her pretty breasts, scrawny Petie full of ribs and knees and elbows sharp as hairpins, friends at first through an arbitrary seat assignment. It was the last year they were too young to pick out who was poor, whose mother was a slut, whose father was drinking, who was getting hit. But even through fourth grade they were happy years of hot school lunches and Dixie cups of stale ice cream you ate with flat wooden spoons and pennies-for-Unicef boxes Old Man raided and gave back to Petie half full, to turn in on the morning after Halloween. Turkey years. Then Petie’s mother had died.
No one was in the first-grade classroom, but Petie could hear voices down the hall, from the gym. She was drifting that way, woozy from sensory flashbacks, when suddenly a small boy burst past her, a first or second grader, in tears. An instant later a woman appeared in the doorway, put her hands on her hips and sighed. The child disappeared into the boys’ bathroom. Seeing Petie, the teacher pressed her lips together and shook her head. Petie didn’t recognize her.
“We have got to get more supervision in here, we’ve just got to,” she said, as though someone had been arguing with her. “Do you have children in Latchkey?”
“No, but sometimes they hang around until I come pick them up, when the weather’s bad.”
“Well, it’s a fiasco, plain and simple. Good Lord, look in there! We don’t have a program anymore, we have bedlam. Two-thirds of our students can’t go home after school, and they don’t have anywhere else to go so they’re staying right here. We’re not set up for this. Ten kids, maybe fifteen, yes. Forty, no way.” The woman suddenly stopped and then smiled ruefully at Petie. “Wow. Sorry. It’s not like it’s your fault.”
“It’s okay.”
“I should go after that child, but I’m the only one in here and I’m afraid to leave them alone.”
“I could watch them for a minute.”
“I wish, but I don’t think it would be legal. You could check on the boy, though. That would be great. His name is Harry Reilly. He’s one of
our smallest boys, so he gets picked on.”
“Okay. Just tell my kids I’m here, if they start to leave. I’m Petie Coolbaugh—Loose and Ryan’s mom.”
“Oh. Yes, I know them. Well, thanks. Try and get Harry to come back to the gym with you. Tell him he can’t stay in the bathroom for the whole afternoon.”
Petie found the boy sitting beneath the row of small sinks, his knees pulled up under his chin. He was frail, like Ryan had been when he was six and he had the same shocky, hunted look.
“Hey,” said Petie, easing herself under the sinks near Harry. She smoothed out the wrinkles in her jeans, retied her shoes. “Want a Life Saver?” She fished around in her purse and brought out a linty roll she always kept on hand in case she needed to bribe the boys into submission. The child nodded, and Petie peeled down the paper. “Red or pineapple?”
“Red.”
Petie handed it to him. “I never liked the pineapple ones, either. Let’s throw it away. It’s got fuzz on it, anyway.” Petie gave the Life Saver a free throw into the metal trash container on the far wall. It rebounded off the tile wall and dropped in. “All right.”
The boy watched her doubtfully, sucking prodigiously on his Life Saver. He’d probably used a pacifier until he was four. He had the overbite for it. Petie stowed the Life Savers back in her bag. The boy stared at his feet.
“So what happened in there? Did some kids gang up on you?”
Harry shook his head.
“Someone hit you?”
He shook his head again.
“Did you get called a bad name?”
No.
“Did they tell you not to tell?”
Yes.
“Was it a bunch of people? Just one? What grade, third? Second? First? First. Oh, no. Let me guess. Was it Loose Coolbaugh? It was. It was Loose, wasn’t it?”
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