Going to Bend (30 page)

“Jesus, Petie.”

“What.”

“I try to be nice and you get all nasty on me.”

“Turnabout’s fair play, bud.”

“Meet me somewhere. Say yes before Bev comes back.”

“No.”

“Yes. It’s a small word. Some people use it all the time. Say it. Yes.”

“No.”

“You’re damn tough, you know?”

“Don’t think I don’t work at it, though,” Petie said.

Bev had come back. Schiff could hear her lower her broad haunches onto her squeaky desk chair.

“Gotta go, muffin,” he said.

Petie hung up on him without a word.

“That Randi,” Schiff said to the air. “Who would have ever guessed she’d turn out to be such a good kid.”

P
ETIE SAT
back and regarded her latest creation, a line drawing of a spoon, a whisk and a double boiler. She only had two more illustrations left before she was done. It astonished her that she could be paid for doing something she’d do anyway for the love of it alone. Rose was trying to convince her to go see Pico Talco and show him her work. He owned a successful art gallery down on the south end of town.

She picked up the phone and dialed the Pepsi distributorship. Mercifully, Schiff answered the phone himself.

“Yes,” she said.

“What?”

“Yes. When and where?”

“The reservoir in half an hour?”

“Bye.”

Another crime committed.

T
HE RESERVOIR
was way back in a valley outside the Sawyer city limits, a place that was used like a park in the summer but deserted in the winter except for the fishing line, bobbers and lures that festooned the overhead power lines like bunting. Petie drove to a spot she and Schiff had found where they weren’t especially visible from the road and had a view of the water—as though the surroundings were what they came here for. Schiff arrived while she was shutting off her car engine.

“Hi, peaches,” he said, throwing open his passenger door for her. “Hop in.”

She dragged with her a bag of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He had a six-pack of cold Pepsi. “What made you call?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“My magnetic personality.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Your
magnetic personality?”

“Give me a break,” Petie said.

“Anyway, I’m glad you did.”

“Yeah.”

They ate in silence, listening to each other swallow.

“Did you ever want something you were pretty sure you weren’t supposed to have?” Petie said after a while.

“You,” said Schiff.

“No, I mean it.”

“So do I.”

Petie shot him a look out of the corner of her eye. “I want to try making money painting.”

“That shouldn’t be too hard. Paul knows a painting contractor over in—”

“No, I mean painting pictures. Illustrations. Like I’m doing for Rose’s cookbook.”

“I didn’t know you did that.”

“Gordon’s paying me for it. I’m nearly done.”

“So find another book.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Maybe Gordon knows someone else.”

“Yeah,” Petie said, chewing thoughtfully. “When you were young, when you were a kid, did anyone tell you that you could be president?”

“No one even told me I could graduate high school,” Schiff said.

“I don’t believe that.”

“My mother’s nickname for me was Dumb Stuff.”

“That’s awful.”

“She was an awful person.”

“Mine wasn’t. She just died too soon,” Petie said.

“Of cancer.”

“Of cancer, of misery, of hopelessness. It’s hard to know. I used to think she left me on purpose, because she seemed so glad to be going. The only time I can remember her being happy was the last two months she was dying, when she looked so bad Old Man finally gave up and left her alone.”

“My mother’s probably still out there someplace, drinking. Drinking and screwing guys for a few bucks left on the bar.”

“Did she keep men around when you were growing up?” Petie asked.

“You mean the ones who came more than once or twice? A couple. One was a deadbeat. Leroy—used to steal tips out of my mother’s purse when she was sleeping off a long night. We never had enough to eat, I mean
never
, and this jerk was rolling in cigarettes and beer, plenty to go around and then some.” Schiff chewed reflectively.

“Who was the other one?” Petie asked.

“What other one?”

“I don’t know. You said there were two.”

“Yeah, well, he was a prick, that one. Herbert Parr, Pastor Herb to you—a man of God. Christ, there’s a joke. My brother damn near killed him one night.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say he had a pair of hands,” Schiff said.

“Hands?”

“Yeah. Wandering hands. Wandered my way one night when I was twelve or so, Jesus, I woke up and there he was, the fucker—pardon me,
Pastor
Herb. He used to call me ‘my son’ if you can believe
that
. No one, princess,
no one
, should ever wake up like that.”

“I woke up like that,” Petie said.

“You?”

Petie cleared her throat. “I was fourteen and Old Man and I were going on four years living in that piece-of-shit trailer up in the woods. He worked down on the docks most nights, but this one night he came back early because he’d lost his beer money on some stupid-ass gamble
about who’d bring in a bigger catch, the
Lenny Hector
or the
Seabird
. Anyway, he was pissed off and sober, and there I was, sleeping like I always did in about three old sleeping bags to stay warm, which you could never do no matter if you had a pile of a thousand blankets, Jesus, I’ve never been as cold as I got in that fucking trailer, I didn’t know you could
get
that cold and still wake up in the morning. Anyway, Old Man must have been looking for someone to take his bad luck out on, and it turned out to be me. He put his hand—”

“Wait.”

“He put his hand under the blankets—”

“Wait.”

“—and he slid it down real slow and real nasty until he got between my legs and that’s how I woke up, to the feel of a little hangnail he’d been picking at all day scratching the inside of my thigh. The thing about it was, I had a knife all ready.”

“Jesus,” Schiff said respectfully.

“I got him in the arm first, deep, but he was a tough old bastard and it just made him mad. He came back at me and grabbed. I stuck the knife into his shoulder that time, right up to the handle, and I heard somebody yelling, yelling real loud, and it was me, and then he started screaming, too, and I got out and ran. I ran as hard as I could but here was the worst part, the
worst part
. I couldn’t figure out anyplace to run to. I went to Rose’s house but it was only three in the morning and they didn’t wake up. You know, it’s not that easy to wake people up when they have a good place to sleep at night.”

“So where did you go?”

“No place. A tree. I went to a tree in the yard of a house we lived in once, a tree I’d buried something under a long time ago. I held on to that tree until daylight, thinking that God Himself, if He was just, would come down out of the heavens for me and take me home, but He didn’t. He didn’t do a goddamn thing. It got light after a while and I just got up and walked to Rose’s house like it was any other day. No one noticed anything. After school that day I went home with Rose and peroxided a
white stripe down the middle of my hair like a skunk. I don’t know why. Old Man beat hell out of me for it, but he never tried anything else again. A couple of months later I went to live with the Coolbaughs.”

“Jesus.”

“You know something else? He healed right up, the son of a bitch, all neat and sanitary just like surgery. The only people who ever suspected anything were the nurses at the emergency room the night Old Man had his stroke. They guessed, at least I think one of them did, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it even if he’d wanted to, which I don’t think he did.”

“Aw, princess. Jesus.”

Petie shrugged. “No one knows. I told Eula the summer before she died. Now you know.”

“Rose?”

“Just you.”

“You won’t have to kill me now, will you?”

Petie cracked the smallest hint of a smile.

“Why me?”

Petie’s hands gripped each other in her lap. “Don’t you ever get tired?”

“Of what?”

“Of carrying it all.”

Schiff blew out a long slow breath. “All the time, princess,” he said softly. “All the time.”

Rain began drumming lightly on the truck’s windshield. Paula had once told Petie that raindrops were the Lord’s tears when someone told a lie. She’d never believed it until now. She hadn’t lied, exactly, but she’d left out some things. There was the part about having to pretend she had her period all the time so she could get excused from gym class, because if she’d undressed in public the bruises would have shown. There were the back-of-the-leg-with-an-ax-handle bruises and their cousins, the broom-handle bruises. Old Man especially liked to lay them down when Petie hadn’t kept dinner warm for him until he came in just after last call at the Wayside. Man had a right to his dinner, he’d
bawl at Petie, and it never mattered that it was one o’clock in the morning, or that she’d spent most of the evening huddled over a little fire in the woods because Old Man had forgotten to buy propane again.

And there were the buttocks bruises, same weapons, different crimes-failing to keep beer in the cooler for him, failing to wash his clothes, failing to look at him with the right combination of fear and obedience.

But though these were the brightest bruises, they were not the deepest. Those were the ones Old Man left when he lay on her back with his hand across her mouth, pushing into her. She had made the rape sound like it had only happened once, but that wasn’t true. For two years he had laid down on her like that. She wore choking amounts of perfume she had found in a thrift shop over in Sawyer, but it didn’t make much difference. Every day that she lived in that trailer she wore Old Man’s stink like a robe. At Rose’s on bad mornings she rubbed herself raw with Comet cleanser. Once she tried gargling with diluted bleach. And of course there was the peroxide with which she’d ruined the hair he used like reins, pulling back so hard sometimes she was sure her neck would snap. He’d beaten her bloody for that.

She didn’t remember exactly when she’d come upon the little hunting knife in the woods, her savior and salvation. She’d seen the glimmer of steel under leaves near the dirt bike path and uncovered it. The knife was a pretty thing, new and brilliant, and the blade folded smoothly into a handle made of horn or bone. Petie had drawn the blade thoughtfully across the ball of her thumb to test its edge, and watched with approval as blood sprang into the cut the knife laid open like a scalpel.

For two weeks she’d slept with that knife under her pillow.

She would never forget the perfect contact of steel on bone when she buried the blade in Old Man’s shoulder—a shoulder he would never regain full use of. God may not have lifted her up in her hour of need, but He had done the next best thing by bringing her that surgical blade and the ferocity to use it.

·   ·   ·

S
CHIFF FLIPPED
down his visor and removed the postcard. “Run away with me,” he said, holding it out.

“Where to?”

“Bend. Two nights, three days free.” He pointed to a happy couple holding hands and walking on a perfectly manicured golf course. “This could be us.”

“That could never be us.”

“Why not?”

“We’re damaged goods. There’s not a resort on earth desperate enough to use people like us in their sales brochure.” Petie took the postcard from Schiff and examined it more carefully. “Jim Christie got one of these a couple of months ago.”

“They going?”

“Nah. You know him. He’s only half tame. Make him go to a place like that and he’d chew off his own foot to get away. He said we could use it, though. Rose and me and the kids.”

“Not Eddie?”

Petie shrugged.

“Go with me, then,” Schiff said.

“Would you ask if you thought there was even the slightest chance I’d accept?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, God love you for an honest man.”

“Don’t tell anyone. It’d spoil my reputation.”

H
ONEY, EULA COOLBAUGH
used to tell Petie,
I always wanted a daughter and all I got were sons, so you must be my reward for putting up with those boys. I wouldn’t have missed you for the world
.

Petie kept her room spotless, did her own laundry (a washer, a dryer!) and cleaned up every night after dinner (a sink! running water!). She was given a desk for doing schoolwork, but she always sat at the kitchen table instead, that island of warmth and safety from which she
could keep Eula firmly in her sights in case, like smoke, she began to thin and fade.

Eula told her what she knew about Paula Tyler’s family.

“Oh, they were a big clan once, way back in the hills, everyone knew about them. Rumor was, they’d even found silver once and had a mine that was all camouflaged, ‘course no one’s ever found it,” she said, sitting at the table across from Petie on winter afternoons, nursing a cup of coffee. “They homesteaded that land. They were supposed to have been good blood once, but by the time they got to your mama’s generation I guess they’d curdled. We all heard the stories.

“Your mama had seven brothers, big dark men, drinkers and fighters. Some of them died logging and some of them went up to Anacortes to fish and never came back. I don’t know what happened to your grandmother. Some people say she died after having a baby, a stillborn one, but I don’t know anything about that. At any rate, your mama was the last living child and the only girl. I met her when she was fifteen. She was a year older than me, but much smaller. She reminded me of a bird, small-boned that way, smaller than you are now.”

“Why’d she come to Hubbard?”

Eula squinted at Petie closely through the smoke from her cigarette. “We never really knew, hon, but there were stories. Some people said she got pregnant up in those hills, that she had a baby before she ever came to town for high school, but I don’t know about that, either.”