Sweet Creek Page 5

She hated to owe the man—and Chick would have her head for making things worse. Breathe, Chick would tell her. She added a skirting of tape around her first seal and signaled Jeep, who gave a cheer as the truck started right up. Johnson, leaning on his Blazer, arms folded, looked smug.

  Relief replaced anger. “Thank you,” she told the man, which should have been enough. Why couldn’t she leave it alone? “Duct tape,” she laughed. “Think we could mend this little town with duct tape?”

  He started jiggling his foot again. “It’s not the town that needs mending.”

  Donny wiped her hands on her lavender bandanna over and over, looking toward the heavens for gumption without anger, because she knew she was nothing but a coward unless she was spitting mad. “Tell you what.” She dredged up words from some deep pocket of hope, maybe channeling Chick. “I appreciate your help. You and the little woman stop by the store for some of the best coffee and pastries you ever tasted. On the house.”

  His eyes said, “That’ll be a cold day in hell.” As she drove away he got smaller in her rearview mirror, but he never budged.

  Chapter Five

  The Last Forever

  “I admired Donny for months before she’d even notice me,” Chick said, ladling thick rosemary-scented pea soup into flower-patterned bowls. She kissed Donny’s head as she passed her a steaming bowl.

  She was with Donny and Jeep in the huge kitchen upstairs from Natural Woman Foods where daily Donny baked, cooked gallons of vegetarian soups, and squeezed fresh carrot juice. Downtown Waterfall Falls was quiet outside save for an Astro gas station, an occasional vehicle on the freeway, and a steady light rain on the roof. When Jeep had arrived half an hour ago, skateboard under an arm, tiny hailstones fell from the top of her crew hat, shoulders, and violin case.

  Donny sliced a loaf of zucchini bread. “You never let on to me.”

  “You were playing hard to get, good-looking. I did everything but take my clothes off to attract your attention.”

  “I know, I know, I was there. I had to take them off for her,” Donny joked to Jeep. “You know The Devon Avenue Neo Diner?”

  Jeep ate like she did everything else, fast, earnestly, by turns nervously focused or at a dead stop, dreaming, her spoon midway to the bowl. “Chicago’s ultimate dyke dive? Katie was jazzed about taking me there when she interviewed for some Chicago station.” Jeep spoke with such enthusiasm she propelled her spoon, soup and all, across the scuffed oak table Chick had nabbed at a yard sale. “Oh my god. I am such a slob. Let me—” She knocked over the salt, pepper, and garlic shakers in her haste to mop soup with her napkin.

  Donny whipped a lavender bandanna from her overall pocket.

  “Thanks, honeybunch,” Chick said, adding it to the clump of napkins. “No harm done, Jeep.” The poor child, she was one of those women who didn’t think about things, just did them, landed on her feet, and wondered how she got there.

  “But I never got to the diner,” Jeep told them as the mess was cleared. “We were going to celebrate her getting the job, only she hated the interviewers. Get this—they wanted to know if she was married and when she said she wasn’t, if she was gay. They’d recently cut loose a guy who was caught with little girls and didn’t want another scandal. She was way past corporate games by then. We got the hell out of Dodge and came directly here.”

  Chick smoothed her long corduroy jumper under her as she sat. She knew she didn’t easily draw the attention of the boyish types she liked—whether Donny at fifty-five or Jeep at twenty-four—so she allowed herself a secret feeling of joy at the little crush that gave Jeep ten thumbs. Donny’s eyes were as confident as ever. “Of course they all want you,” Donny had once told her when Chick asked if she felt threatened by the occasional admirer. “You know I’ve got good taste in women.”

  She leaned back and fingered the small crystal necklace Rattlesnake had given her the first time Chick went to Spirit Ridge to drum. Listening to Jeep she remembered that she and Donny had talked long into the night about this young woman. Jeep was still having a time of it trying to earn her rent in Waterfall Falls. Her rebellious buzz cut had grown into a shaggy homemade do. They fed her whenever she had nothing left to swallow but her pride, and they wondered what kept her in Waterfall Falls.

  Loopy barked in the yard. “Hush up down there!” called Donny.

  Chick felt the stab of anxiety that had visited her all too often recently, and went to look down at the street. No one there. She exhaled.

  “What kind of dog is that silly Loopy?” Jeep asked.

  “Who knows,” she answered. “I think she’s a Lab-loopy mix.”

  “Lupe like in wolf?”

  Donny laughed. “No. Some little kids brought her by the store when she was about six weeks old. They had a purebred Lab, but she’d gotten away from them for a few days and then this litter came along. Some of her siblings have major curl to their coats. Hers is a little long. You can see she’s slighter and more long-legged than most Labs. Anyway, the kid said she had the most Lab in her of all the siblings, but was a little loopy. So we call her half-Lab, half loopy. They were desperate to find homes for them before their father took them to the county.”

  “And you were desperate for a puppy.”

  “More like desperate to save a puppy,” Chick said.

  “So you met at the Neo?” prodded Jeep, her little round glasses steamy from blowing her second bowl of soup cool. “This is outstanding grub.”

  Donny was only halfway through her first bowl. Chick had long ago decided the woman was as skinny as she was because she never sat down long enough to eat a full meal. “Chick was the hungriest woman I’d ever seen. Spent more time making me feel like some fine chef than she did waitressing.”

  “Honeybunch, I’d still be cleaning houses if the smell of your baking didn’t draw every passerby off Stage Street. And a lot off the freeway too. We do pull in the dykes, don’t we?”

  “Remember the two who had a restaurant in New England? Nellie and Rusty?”

  She smiled. Donny’s memory was shaking loose. “Diner, not restaurant. And it was Dusty and—give me a second—Elly. They were from Connecticut and driving the coast from Seattle to San Francisco on a vacation, but came inland to check us out. I’m not likely to forget that Dusty any time soon.”

  “You’d do well to forget her right now, babe.” Donny gave her that warning smile that set her blood coursing. She blew Donny a kiss. “They sent us Jody,” Donny went on. “She’s this cross-country truck-driving dyke. She parks her rig by the park and comes in to shoot the shit when she’s in the neighborhood.”

  “We get them from Montana, Florida, Texas. We’ve even had dykes from Amsterdam come through. We list in Lesbian Connection so we net all the lesbian voyagers.”

  “And California,” Jeep pointed out. “I’m a voyager to your space station too.”

  Donny cocked approving eyes at Jeep. Chick was pleased that Donny had taken Jeep under her wing; it was time she got to act the lesbian elder. “I’d worked for the owner of the Neo off and on over the years at one restaurant or another,” Donny said. “And after I retired from my security job at the museum I went full-time for what—four years? When I got roaming feet, I put my savings into a seventeen-foot trailer. You’ve seen it parked out in front of the trailer park on North Stage Street. The tiny orange one. Miss Chick volunteered to help drive west.”

  “I hadn’t crossed the country since my hippie days. I wanted to do it sober. Besides, I was sweet on this tough-talking, playful butch.”

  “We were just friends,” Donny emphasized.

  “We saw every wonder west of Chicago,” Chick said. “The Painted Desert—”

  “West Hollywood—”

  “The Grand Canyon—”

  “Castro Street—”

  “Donny hadn’t been anywhere. You should have seen how excited she was. Watching her discover the rest of America, I finished falling in love.”

  “Not me,” Donny said, pull
ing the woodstove fire forward, adding two new logs, and clanging the iron door shut. The rain had turned to hail and back again.

  “You fell for the road.” Chick gave Jeep a look intended to unmask silly Donny’s years of denial. “Or so you thought.”

  “Then Chick decided she wanted to stay out West.”

  “I was flirting with adventure.”

  “You were flirting with danger. That town had a sundown law. I don’t think they’d be able to think up something ugly enough to do to gays.”

  “Seventy years back.”

  “I wanted my homegirls—bulldaggers and queens who didn’t take no mouth off nobody.”

  “She left me behind,” Chick said, forcing away the drowning feeling she’d had, stranded in that rainy lonesome town an hour south of Waterfall Falls all over again. She slipped the crystal between her lips and rolled it.

  Donny looked defiant every time they reminisced about those days. “You wanted to come for the ride. The ride was over.”

  Chick drew Donny between her legs, pressed her cheek against that little belly she loved, trying to press the sadness away. She was perfectly happy. Where were these feelings of despair coming from? “The Goddess and I had a long talk when Donny left.”

  “I went to Reno,” Donny said.

  Jeep cried, “My hometown! Maybe I saw you!”

  “I like that Reno doesn’t pull up its sidewalks at six. And my black money was as good as anyone’s.”

  “It’s a weird town, Reno,” Jeep said, frowning. “Too weird for me. It’s like, everything’s for show, for the tourists. There were so few people there who I could relate to. I don’t know, maybe someday I could go back there, but, like, my family fits right in and I don’t.” She seemed to return to them, fully engaged, but the lost look had returned to her eyes. “So you came back broke?”

  “Hell, no! I came back a rich woman.”

  “Don’t you exaggerate, Della Donalds.”

  “I’m not just talking money, babe.”

  Chick forced lightness into her voice. “Doesn’t she say the sweetest things?”

  “After Reno I had $53,284.76 in my pocket after gas and groceries.”

  “No shit,” Jeep whispered.

  “I bought a fancy pair of cowboy boots to wear when I blew into the Windy City. I was going to show the old gang a good time.”

  “Then,” Chick pushed the last of the bread toward Jeep, “the Goddess kept her promises.”

  “The damn $300 boots hurt my feet.”

  Chick pulled Donny onto her lap, running a palm across her grizzled hair. She forced a smile although the plains wind had found all her chinks and was wafting in. Had trouble passed outside? Maybe M.C. was chalking up their sidewalk again. Someone kept doing it, writing “queer-owned,” “les be friends,” and other dumb remarks. Donny had been going out even on days she wasn’t baking and using a wet push broom to scrub the words off. She suspected it was the man she’d been shocked to run in to at the pharmacy.

  No one had liked M.C. back in San Francisco, least of all her. He’d thought it was his privilege to treat the women in her little circle of friends as his private harem because he was their dealer. He bothered her even more than he did the others because he knew she was gay. Not only did she resist him, but he considered her competition. One of her friends told her that M.C. liked to talk about Chick and what she couldn’t do that he could when he was having sex. Chick and M.C. had had a showdown one day, in front of everyone, in which he’d apparently felt humiliated. After that, their group started buying from someone else. She’d never seen him again until that run-in at the drug store, a few months back. M.C. had apparently settled in peaceful Waterfall Falls. The chalking had started soon afterwards, and she’d caught him more than once following along in his pickup as she walked down Stage Street, making kissing sounds from his open window. Now, it seemed, he wasn’t after sex, but some kind of revenge. And her world lost its light when she thought of him.

  She forced her attention back to the kitchen. Donny was still telling Jeep tales of Chicago. “I kept thinking that the old gang wouldn’t be the same without Chick, but then I saw we could be our own gang—with Chick I was homegirl enough, bulldagger enough for me. I came to see that I didn’t need any street-wise crazy-ass sidekicks egging me on. Only I still do miss those queens.”

  “Point of clarification,” said Jeep, who talked like the college graduate she was when she wasn’t trying to impress her hero, Donny. “A, why didn’t you tell me you have so much influence with the Goddess, Chick? B, didn’t you live in San Francisco? How did you come to be working in Chicago?”

  Chick laughed, partly to recapture the lightness she’d felt earlier. “I moved back to Chicago when my mother got sick. There was no one to take care of her. I tried working in jobs my two-year social service degree got me,” she told Jeep. “I made better money waitressing, to tell you the truth. Social service work, as far as I can tell, has become the job of an accounting clerk. I know I did more good in an apron than I would have behind a desk filling out papers for people who needed money.”

  “She was always taking strays home from the diner,” Donny said.

  “After she died, I stayed on at my mother’s apartment, the same one I grew up in. It had two bedrooms. Even I couldn’t take up that much space.”

  “Was Donny one of your strays?”

  “You must be wigging out!” Chick answered, laughing at the thought and surprised at her laugh. The wind was withdrawing.

  “She stole me away from—”

  “I didn’t steal you, Donny, you jive-ass little bulldagger!” She laughed again and felt like she was developing the consistency of lemon meringue, all airy and light. Thank you, Goddess, she thought.

  “Hush, now, my sweet chickadee.”

  “I didn’t see Denise Clinkscales jumping into your trailer to join your odyssey. I don’t imagine she was crying her eyes out in Chicago at the thought of you traveling with me, the way I cried my eyes out here imagining you going back to Chicago and her.”

  Jeep’s mouth was open in the way Chick noticed when the kid was trying to keep focused. Her blue eyes went from one of them to the other, her hands across her lap as if to hold in all the dinner she’d eaten.

  “The woman was no good for my Donny,” Chick explained. “She was still married.”

  “But I thought she’d tear down Chicago she was so mad when I told her I was leaving town with you.”

  “She had no right to a good steady woman. Either stay married or claim the prize.”

  “You got the prize all right!” Donny declared, leaping off Chick’s lap and beyond arm’s reach.

  “So you’ve been together how long now?” asked Jeep.

  Donny returned and stood behind Chick, playing with her hair. “Not long enough.”

  “Listen to her, trying to prove what a prize she is. It’s been a little over eight years, hasn’t it, honeybunch?” Chick felt Donny’s hand, out of Jeep’s sight, sneak under and cup her bottom like she owned it. She gave a quiet little purr for Donny’s ears alone. She’d purred like that for the first time the day they’d finally gotten it together. She let herself remember the surprise and desire it had brought to Donny’s face. And she did remember it—every detail, she liked to think, of the hot fury of love that marked their first time.

  She’d felt so cold while Donny had been away, as if the chill Midwest winds were blowing across the plains and valleys of the country and finding her, desolate in the mountains she’d wanted to share with Donny. Her little apartment, half of an old mill cottage someone had renovated, was poorly insulated if at all, and the electric heater was a bust. She’d hugged herself night and day until she found the job at the old-fashioned drugstore that drew travelers and townies alike. She worked the soda fountain, laughing with the customers and feeding them sweets, while the serious business of the pharmacy went on a few counters away. She made good tip money from the tourists, but mostly she took their war
mth. She grabbed it from their laughter hanging in the air like her own hot hopes; she took their jokes and thank yous, and she wrapped them around her shoulders, wearing them home where they turned to vapor and drifted away.

  Like Donny had done. Then Donny had called her, once from Las Vegas where she said she was just passing through, and once from Chicago where she sounded like she’d been drinking for a while and the sounds in the background convinced her that Donny had been swallowed up in the bar life again. Donny, she’d wanted to cry, get your shit together. You don’t belong in that threadbare world where girlfriends wear out and you poison yourself with booze to survive. She’d been so sure there was more to Donny, that given a hothouse she’d bloom, given a devoted woman who wanted to do more than look pretty on her arm, handsome Donny would be the most steadfast and solid citizen on earth, more than a good catch, a mate. Chick had known by then that she wanted a woman who could take care of herself, who would find it a luxury to be fussed over, and who would do some fussing over Chick herself, in her own way.

  Oh, Donny, she thought, watching her teach Jeep how to tie a fly. Chick had despaired of ever getting the home, the woman, the work she wanted, and had shivered even under the covers at night, covers she’d thought she’d be sharing with Donny.

  In those early months on the rural West Coast, she had made ends meet by cleaning rental units for a property management firm out of Greenhill. That had been a scary yet freeing time for her. She’d known it wouldn’t last forever and had waited, excited, for her new life to take shape.

  And then Donny had called from another pay phone at a campground in Iowa. She’d left Chicago and was once again heading west. She’d called again from Wyoming. It was still winter in the valley, but Chick had felt trickles of spring in her blood. She realized she’d been making plans for Donny’s homecoming all along. She knew immediately what to do. That big old mill town would never be warm enough for her, even with Donny, and on her days off she rented a little pickup truck, the cheapest thing available, from Bargain Wheels near her rental and drove to explore every little name on a map, checking out the forgotten towns that no one cared to retire to, that tourists only passed through. Most were nothing but two-block main streets or a cluster of offices and a general store around a storefront post office. The bright local boys stayed and proudly took to logging like their daddies rather than learn a new trade they could ply only in the cities. Girls who wanted to act and sing would find places in the local theater and chorus, or return from college with a husband who would eventually leave her and the kids behind in her momma and daddy’s house. But Chick had seen that a handful of hardy newcomers would settle in each of these outposts, learning and loving the land and fitting themselves in with people who only understood family and adopted their friends for life.