And sometimes, during these last nights, his speech would become thick and his gait lopsided and Petie blamed it on cowardice and beer, not blood clots. He cringed before her, whining on until she dozed in her sleeping bags with the knife held tight in her fist.
When he came out of rehab five months after the stroke, he came to Eula Coolbaugh’s first, holding his ball cap in his hand, hangdog and shaky. Petie was there, listening from another room. “Eula,” he said, “I’m grateful to you for taking in my daughter. We’ve had tough times, I expect you know that, but I’m better now and I can take her back.”
“I don’t think so,” said Eula.
“No?”
“No.”
“Well, I expect she’s talked about me to you,” he said, his voice catching. “I expect she’s told you some things.”
“Yes, she has told me some things,” Eula said evenly.
“A lot of things?” he said.
“Quite a few, John.”
“Well, she’s always had a burr up her butt where I’m concerned. She lies, you probably found that out already. She lies all the time. That’s why I had my stroke, you know. Trying to figure out all those lies.”
“I’ve never heard Petie lie,” Eula said.
“Well, she’s a clever girl, probably been real careful with you, real nice so you’d let her stay. She’s not nice to me. How long was I in that place, and the hospital before that, and she never brought me nothing. That’s the kind of girl she is, takes after her mother’s family, shifty values. Well, you probably remember that from when we were kids, Eula, all that talk.”
“That was a long time ago, too long ago to mean anything. Now you listen to me, John. I don’t care how repentant you are, I don’t even care if you’ve sworn to God Himself that you’ll behave. That child is not going anywhere with you, and if you fight me or lay a hand on her, I’ll get a lawyer. There are a few things a judge might not be real thrilled to hear about you, you understand me?”
“That’s no way to talk. I don’t deserve that kind of talk, I come to your house real nice.”
“And I appreciate that, John. I know you’ll leave the same way.”
And, nonplussed, he had.
In a town the size of Hubbard, it was inevitable that he and Petie would run across each other now and then. He always asked her for money and she always gave him what she had, figuring it was well worth it if he just stayed away from her the rest of the time. She’d married Eddie right out of high school, and then Old Man had nothing on her anymore. But by then it didn’t really matter: she hated him less as the fire of her anger died, and she saw in him the sick, smelly old man he’d become. She had no intention of going out of her way to see him, but she didn’t avoid him anymore, either. More than a few times, she drove down to pick him up at the Wayside when Roy called to tell her he’d fallen dead asleep on the bar.
Hating just took too much energy.
Petie bumped and lurched along the potholed logging road for half an hour, lost in both thought and actuality. As she was beginning to consider turning around and driving all the way back to the reservoir, she saw the siding of a house or shed briefly through the trees—a flash of aqua and it was gone. She rounded one more bend and found herself emerging from the woods at the top of Chollum Road. The aqua she’d seen was the side of Old Man’s trailer, still where she and Rose had left it years ago, only cleaner.
Beside the trailer was Jim Christie’s truck.
And from the trailer itself, as she neared it, Petie first saw Carissa step out, and then Jim Christie himself. Startled, Petie met Christie’s eyes through the windshield.
He didn’t look away.
Chapter 15
WAIT IN the truck,” Jim Christie told Carissa. He didn’t take his eyes off Petie Coolbaugh again or offer her the advantage of his turned back. Once Carissa had closed the truck door, she took a step or two closer to him. “What are you doing?” she said. Her voice was tight and low.
He set his feet. “I come up here sometimes.”
“Why?”
“It’s quiet.”
“Isn’t it quiet at the house?”
“Man needs his own place sometimes.”
“Is this your place?”
“I use it sometimes. Never seen anybody else here.” He watched Petie’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall.
“So what do you do here when it’s quiet?”
“Smoke. Read.”
She looked over his shoulder at Carissa, hunkered down in the truck. “Doesn’t look to me like you were reading.”
“She comes up sometimes. She knows she’s not supposed to, but she does it anyway. Nothing I can do to stop her.”
“Does Rose know?”
“You think I’m doing something wrong, you’d better just say it.” Christie had seen polar she-bears with the same look when they thought their cubs were in danger. There was nothing you could do to reason with a she-bear when she had her blood up, and it looked like the same thing with this scrappy little woman. She’d think what she’d think; nothing he could say would change that. And he didn’t especially care for the thing she was thinking. Young girl like Carissa with an old fisherman like him, barely tame.
She said, “I don’t know what you were doing. But it doesn’t look good to me, I’ve got to tell you. It doesn’t look good.”
“You saying I did something to her?”
“It happens.”
“You saying it happened with me?”
“I’m saying I hope to God it didn’t,” Petie said. She approached the truck, rapped on the passenger window and gestured to Carissa. The girl slipped out of the truck, meekly following Petie to her car. They drove off without a word.
Christ.
Christie wrenched open the creaky passenger door of his truck and rooted around until he found a fresh pack of cigarettes, then ducked inside the cripple-backed trailer as hailstones began ricocheting like grapeshot off the aluminum. He shook off his cap, reseated it on his head and sat down in his camp chair sucking smoke.
The wind was picking up, another storm front on the way, a spring storm. Three more weeks, four at the outside, and he’d need to be back in Dutch Harbor looking for a boat to crew. Some of the men at the Wayside were already heading up. You could tell who they were by how nice they were being to their wives and girlfriends, buying them sudden foolishness like perfume and cheap gold rings to make up for another three, four months of being dumped. Christie himself had courted that way once when he was still a young man. He had a woman named Tina Bea Martin he liked well enough, met her up in Anacortes, Washington—small town, tightly packed and full of fishermen. Tina Bea had been trying to get him to anchor himself in her harbor and nearly succeeded, got him as far as buying her a Black Hills gold earring and pendant set at the jewelry store closest to the harbor, the one he’d been told favored fishermen. The jewelry was in the shape of a whale and he thought she’d like it, not that he knew anything. Hell, he’d been afraid to even touch it, it looked so fragile, like spiderwebs on a sunny day. Someone’s getting something special, the salesgirl had teased him in a voice that made him break into a light sweat. Lucky her.
And Tina Bea had liked them just fine, too, but somehow he’d never gone back to Anacortes. He heard in Dutch Harbor that Tina Bea had married a skipper the next year, captain of the Flying Dutchman. Christie knew him: good skipper, good man. As for Christie, he didn’t have a special woman again until he met Rose. He’d come down to Hubbard with a deckhand from the Phoebe K., nice kid who was swept overboard the following year, never found. They’d made it as far as Hubbard and stopped at the Anchor Inn for lunch. Rose had served them, with her pretty smile, sweet round hips, bosom like perfection. She’d asked where they were from and where they were headed and Christie had said, Here. We were headed here. When the kid pulled out of town an hour later, he pulled out alone. Christie took a job on a charter boat and stayed until the following March. Slept in a campground on the ou
tskirts of town for the first week, at Rose’s after that.
It frightened him sometimes, how good she looked to him. She sucked the air out of a place, made him light-headed and stupid, same thing drinking had done when he was young and still a heavy drinker. Drunk, he could take on the world if he had to; sober, he was nothing but a tired man who just wanted to get out of the season alive and without owing. And when he did get out the last two years, money in his pocket and a month of sleep coming to him, he hitched a ride down Hubbard way and dreamed of Rose.
And yet, he’d been able to quit drinking.
PETIE DROVE Carissa home in silence. The girl kept her head down, examining her fingernails. In the driveway Petie turned off the ignition and turned to face her. “Do you know about that trailer?”
“Is it the one you used to live in?”
“Yes.”
“We didn’t hurt it or anything.”
“You couldn’t hurt that trailer if you hit it with a ball peen hammer.”
“Why are you mad, then?”
“Am I mad? I’m not mad.”
“Yes you are.”
Petie sighed. “Why were you up there, ’Rissa?”
Carissa shrugged miserably. “I don’t know.”
“Did you walk there on your own?”
“Yes.”
“Do you go there often?”
“I go there sometimes.”
“Why?”
“I like Jim,” the girl whispered.
“I know you like him. Does he like you?”
“I don’t know. I think sometimes he does.”
“How does he show it?” Petie asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Does he give you compliments, maybe tell you you’re growing up, tell you you’re pretty? Does he touch you?”
The girl turned a deep crimson and bolted from the car.
PETIE DROVE her little car straight into the teeth of the latest squall, driving blindly. She needed time to think. The wind was already strong enough to be pushing gobs of spindrift across the road, and night was coming on, black as a blindfold. Out of habit she looked at the Wayside parking lot as she passed it and saw Schiff’s pickup. For the first time in weeks, she had no desire whatsoever to see him. Some of the other Wayside regulars were there, too: Dooley Burden, Connie, a couple of others. Not Jim Christie.
What in hell was she supposed to do about Jim Christie? What did Rose know? For that matter, what did Petie know? Maybe nothing; maybe something. She turned her car around and drove back to Rose’s house. The lights were all dark, and there was a note on the kitchen table telling Rose that Carissa had gone next door. Beside it was another note, written on a piece of paper torn out of one of Carissa’s school notebooks.
Rose,
I’ve gone north. Don’t know what boat I’ll be on or where I’ll be staying, but I’ll send word when I can. You’re a real nice lady and the only woman I ever really felt for. I want you to know that, no matter what you hear about me and in case I don’t come back. You and Carissa, you stay safe. Maybe you could think about me sometimes.
Jim Christie
Petie left the notes where they were and ran back to her car. At the top of Chollum Road she set off through the trees. But this time there was nobody there, not even ghosts.
I DON’T understand,” Rose kept saying the next morning across Petie’s kitchen table. Her eyes were swollen from crying, and she was still wearing yesterday’s clothes. She’d sat up all night hoping Christie would come home, but he hadn’t. There wasn’t so much as a sock left in the house to show he’d ever been there. He’d up and disappeared like the thinnest smoke. “Why would he just leave like that? Tell me again what you saw.”
And Petie explained again, with great patience, the moment when Jim Christie and Carissa had stepped out of the trailer together, and what had happened afterwards.
“But that doesn’t mean anything!” Rose cried.
And Petie said what she’d already said over and over. “If it didn’t mean anything, then why did he leave?”
“I just can’t believe that. I can’t. He always took such care with her, like he was afraid she could break. Carissa said nothing happened between them. I asked her very carefully, Petie, and she said nothing ever happened between them. Why would she say that if—”
“I always said that about Old Man,” Petie said.
“Old Man?”
“I always told you we were doing okay.”
“Oh, what’s that supposed to mean?” Rose cried.
“It means that girls don’t always tell the truth when they think the truth is rancid meat.”
“What?”
“Things weren’t fine then. They might not be fine now.”
Rose began to cry. “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand what you’re talking about, or why you said what you did to him.”
Petie sat rooted to her chair, twisting around her finger the cheap wedding band Eddie had given her so many years ago. “Can you listen?”
Rose blew her nose on a soggy square of toilet paper.
Petie took a deep breath. “Old Man fucked me two or three nights a week for two years. And every morning I came to your house and every morning you didn’t know a thing.”
Rose watched her with horror. “Jesus Christ, Petie.”
“What I’m saying is, some things can’t be said, not even if they’re true and not even if you’re honest.”
“Oh my God.”
“Two years. Two years,” Petie hissed. “Do you remember the day I bleached my hair?”
Rose nodded.
“The night before, I stabbed him.”
“What?”
“I had a knife and when the bastard tried to get on me I stabbed him.”
Rose stood up and walked to the kitchen window, looking out as though she could see something through the streaming panes. “I can’t think,” she said.
“The point I’m trying to make is that Carissa may or may not be telling the truth.”
“But why?”
“Because she loves him. Because if something did happen, even something awful, she would think it was her fault.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“But I’d know if he was capable of doing something like that. Wouldn’t I know?”
“Maybe.”
Rose crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “So what should I do?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what am I supposed to tell Carissa? She thinks she’s the one who made him leave. She feels responsible. What am I supposed to say to her?”
Petie sighed and swirled the half inch of coffee left in the bottom of her cup. “Just walk away. Help her walk away, too.”
“I don’t want to walk away,” Rose cried. “Why should I? Nothing’s changed.”
“What’s your other choice? The man left.”
Rose hung her head. “I know.”
“So? How much did he love you if he could do that?”
“I hate the things you’re saying.”
“I know that, but you need to hear them. Has it ever occurred to you that he might not be the man you thought he was? Carissa may need help.”
“Or maybe not. She’s not you, Petie. She isn’t you, and Jim isn’t Old Man.”
“I know that,” Petie said softly. “Don’t you think I know that?”
Rose abruptly picked up her coat and purse. “I can’t stay anymore. I’m sorry, Petie, but I can’t. Yesterday everything was fine, and now it’s all gone. If what you’re saying is true, I should be grateful to you, but I’m not.”
Petie set her jaw and watched Rose go. When the noise of her car faded away, she grabbed the phone and dialed the Pepsi distributorship. Talking fast, she left a message, then grabbed her purse and car keys, rounded up all the money in the house—twelve dollars and a fistful of change—and bolted out the door.
· · ·
SCHIFF PULLED his truck off the
reservoir road and waited. Petie arrived in less than five minutes. He hopped out of his truck with a sheaf of maps and spread them out on the hood of her car: Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska. He’d marked the way to Anacortes, Dutch Harbor and Kodiak with a highlighter—all the places Christie might be headed for.
“You know this is a bad idea, princess,” Schiff said.
She waved him away. “Did you get hold of Eddie?”
“Yeah. He’ll pick up your kids at three-fifteen, just like you asked.”
“And you told him I was going to be home late?”
“Honey, going to Alaska isn’t exactly coming home late,” Schiff said.
“I’m not planning to go to Alaska. I’ll find him before then.”
“You’re not going to find dick by driving the interstates,” Schiff said.
“What the hell else am I supposed to do, Schiff? You tell me what I’m supposed to do, and I’ll do it.”
Schiff put his arm around her. “I don’t know, princess.”
Petie. shrugged him away impatiently.
“Do you have any idea what you’ll do if you find him?” Schiff asked.
“No.”
“Look—”
“I’ve got to go,” Petie said. “If I don’t go now I might never go, and if I don’t go, I’ll never get over it.”
Schiff stepped aside wordlessly and let Petie pass around to the driver’s side of her car. The muffler was going, the fan belt squeaked and the car favored a bad wiper. Not a car meant for long distances. Schiff said, “Listen, princess. There’s a Motel 6 right off I-5 in Portland. If you don’t find Christie first, check in there for the night. I’ll make a reservation for you there as soon as I get back to work.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Just do it, okay?”
· · ·
PETIE LIT a cigarette just north of Hubbard and didn’t stop smoking until she got to Portland three hours later. At that rate, if she didn’t find Christie she’d come back with emphysema.
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