Sweet Creek Read online

  “We played doctor.”

  Donny gave her a soft slap on the hand. “This store was one of the first places we’d seen, but we thought we wanted to be farther off the beaten track. When we came back to check it out again, the sellers convinced us we had to be near I-5 to get the business we’d need. And they said the fishing was good.”

  Chick spread her arms. “Can you believe we had no idea about all the women’s land around here?”

  “This was Lesbianville West,” Donny exclaimed. “You can’t tell me we settled here by chance.”

  “You think the area is like, a dyke vortex?” Jeep asked, her eyes wide. “We passed signs for some kind of backwards-running creek or something on the way up. I’ve been here for three months now, and I keep finding more dykes. Maybe the inverted energy draws us.”

  “A dyke vortex. I like it.” Chick made a mental note to suggest it to the sheriff, a native who was completely baffled, and not particularly pleased, at the disproportionate numbers of lesbians in Elk County. “Lesbians are supposed to flock to urban areas.”

  “Cool beans! I moved to the poor dyke’s Palm Springs.”

  “Yeah,” added Donny. “We don’t golf, we fish.”

  Chick laughed. “And eat what you catch, too.”

  Jeep, with her straight-faced humor, said, “You can’t chew golf balls.”

  A timer went off and Donny leapt up again. “Damn, you made me forget those cookies.”

  “Molasses, from the smell.”

  “Double-molasses coconut date. You like them hot, Jeep?” A horn blared as it passed the store. “I need to find out who’s making that racket out there about every night. Did you hear it at two this morning, Chick?”

  She shook her head, but she was lying. The car horn had woken her up, and she had lain there petrified with fear for nearly an hour, listening to Donny struggle to get back to sleep. She knew who it was, and she knew the horn was meant to disturb her, to make her aware that he was out there.

  Donny brought a tray from the oven, and Jeep looked as if she was going to cry. She took one, studied it, then broke off bits with her lips and seemed to suck the flavor out. “These are as good as Sarah’s. Better than my mom’s. Mom never could cook. The best we got was when my little sisters baked chocolate-chip cookies with that ready-made refrigerator dough.”

  Chick encouraged Jeep to take another cookie. “You’re not homesick, are you, Jeep?”

  “No! Well, maybe a little. Well, I kind of miss my family, and Sarah, but I kind of ran out on them all without any notice so…you know what they say about how you can’t go home again.”

  “Not true,” Chick advised. “Things may not be the same, but your family would rather have you than lose you.”

  “That I doubt, but if they did, I’d want them to move here. There were things I loved about Reno. I loved the neon at night, living by the railroad tracks, a clear view of stars, but it’s getting bigger and bigger and, with global warming, hotter and hotter.” Jeep licked crumbs from her fingertips. “It’s not where I want to be. I never learned music so I could play in casinos. I’d rather keep doing this landscaping work than do music like that.” She took another cookie and, typical of her habit of deflecting attention from herself, said, “So you got to Waterfall Falls and there were, like, no sundown laws?”

  With customary quick jaunty grace, as if moving to some inner music—probably an early sixties girl group, Chick thought—Donny had cleared the table of everything but their mugs and a platter of the dark sugar-shiny cookies. Then she sat, took one and said, “Waterfall Falls is a mixed bag. Descendants of a black cowboy own the huge sheep ranch east of town. The barbershop’s always belonged to a Latino family. The Job Corps Center contributes all the colors of the ex-city kids who’ve gone native and their mixed-blood babies are all grown up now. There’s leftover hippies from sixties communes. We have a Japanese-American dentist, a motel owner who immigrated from some little Middle Eastern village, and a sprinkling of people left from the days when the railroads and gold mines exploited the Chinese. And suddenly the Native Americans are God’s gift because they built a casino that pays living wages. Gays are the last minority here struggling for at least token acceptance. Yet we stay scattered. I don’t kid myself that the straights would welcome a real melting pot. They’re still the majority and like it that way.”

  Jeep always joked about singing for her supper. She wiped her fingertips and reached for her fiddle case, asking Donny, “So how did you figure out that Chick was the one?”

  “Excuse me.” Chick felt herself color. She always got teary-eyed at this part. She took another cookie and bustled away from the table to fill the sink with sudsy water.

  “Once upon a time I thought love happened between the sheets,” Donny said, shaking her head. “It happens when you’re stripping wood floors side by side, and on your way to meet with your small business advisor, jittery as June bugs against a screen.”

  “You think?” Jeep asked. “I’ve been thinking that myself. It’s like, with that varmint Katie, I was all of a sudden on fire for her. I couldn’t stand it sometimes, I was so charged. But with Sarah, well, we did strip the floors in our apartment. And sat and watched TV at night with that wood glowing up at us. I miss that. I don’t miss the all-nighters with Katie one bit.”

  “There you go,” Donny said. “The next one, you ask her to strip. If she takes her clothes off, run the other way. If she knows where to rent a floor-stripping machine, you’ve hit pay dirt.”

  Jeep’s laugh was shy, but unruly. Chick had wondered if it was the reason she was so serious most of the time—to muzzle that laugh. It was infectious, though, and Chick joined in as Donny helped the string mop do a little strip tease.

  “I’m so glad you’re in our lives, Jeep,” Chick managed to say. “We must have had a very boring time of it before.”

  The kid looked at them, said, “That I doubt too,” and launched into a galloping tune. Usually Chick and Donny just listened, but tonight Donny whirled her, sudsy arms and all, around the round oak table while Jeep’s violin drowned out the sounds of the rain.

  A minute before, she’d wondered how she would manage to drag herself to bed when Jeep left because she felt so drained. Now she was flushed with the music and ready for more. But, she worried, what would she feel ten minutes from now? If only she could dance with Donny forever so this endless sadness would never cascade over her again.

  Chapter Six

  Honeybee Dance

  Jeep and Donny straddled the rough pole railing on the porch outside of the Grange Hall and watched women hug and eye new arrivals. Donny was doing a running commentary, as if this were a night at the Oscars. These were, Jeep supposed, the town’s dyke celebrities, so she’d better take notes and do a who’s who for—for herself; who else was there? She imagined pointing everyone out to Sarah. By the time the movie started, Sarah would have invited half the audience to dinner. Funny, Sarah was kind of like Chick that way.

  Chick was inside popping corn for the Monthly Movie Mixer. She could smell the stuff out here. This was too weird. “Is this for real?” she asked Donny. “Dykes meeting in an all-American Grange Hall? I thought these things were reserved for Future Farmers of America.”

  With a chuckle, Donny said, “Takes me back to Black Panther days when the white liberals were falling all over each other to hold fund-raisers in their fancy houses. I’d go along just to be a black bulldagger in a radical’s beret, drinking Chablis from a long-stemmed crystal glass in the billiard room, or whatever they called those fancy rooms bigger than the whole apartment I grew up in.”

  “I remember reading about the Black Panthers in a twentieth-century history course I took. You were one of those?”

  “You could say I was in the gay ladies’ auxiliary. One of my gayboy friends took me to a couple of the happenings as his home squeeze. I didn’t have to dress in girl-drag because I was a revolutionary. He couldn’t let on that he really wanted to be one o
f the brother’s ladies.”

  “Cool.” She felt her awe of Donny go up another notch.

  They watched the crowd a while longer. It looked like the hellos were the deal here, not the film. As usual, most of the women ignored the misting rain and stood out there unprotected. She noticed a woman striding across the lot, thumbs hooked in her belt loops, a light nylon jacket flapping open. Instead of hugging her, the other women seemed, without looking, to move back to let her pass. Jeep nudged Donny.

  “Single,” Donny muttered. “Name’s Cat.”

  “Single? Total babe. Dish, Donalds—what’s her fatal flaw?”

  Donny elbowed her. “She’s too hot for anyone around here to handle.”

  Jeep straightened, jingled the change in her pocket, wished she had cash for a class haircut, and caught the babe’s smiling eyes. “Anyone?” she asked Donny. Donny looked like she knew something and wasn’t talking. “She’s not traveling with the Birkenstock Brigade?”

  Donny chuckled. “Doesn’t fit in. She works full-time at the grammar school. Phys ed. She doesn’t have time to play at lesbian utopia.”

  Jeep smiled. “Play” wasn’t exactly the right word to use for the land women. Some of them didn’t have jobs, but they built their own little cabins, learning from each other, from books, and by trial and error. They grew some of their own food, kept their roads in reasonable shape, produced their own entertainment, cooked and cleaned in primitive conditions, and sometimes held a job or started small businesses to support themselves. Yet she kind of knew what Donny was saying. The life was pleasant compared to, say, working retail where you were on your feet all day with no time to run to a bathroom, a line of impatient customers, and someone on your video screen acting like a shoplifter while you wondered if the security people at their videos were watching you not catch him. But play? She guessed maybe some of them.

  “You don’t think much of the land women, do you?” she asked Donny.

  “Deep down, Jeep, I’m a practical person. I saw what happened to black folk who thought they could change the world. Burned out in Philly. Suicided in Guyana. The brightest and strongest—like Eldridge Cleaver—locked up, or like Angela Davis, making her way telling it like it is again and again to white college kids. Sooner or later you’ve got to get real before reality gets you.”

  She wanted to ask Donny a thousand questions about how she should live her own life, how she could have a relationship like Donny and Chick’s, but she didn’t even know enough to frame the questions. She skipped back to what she did know. “She looks better than any gym teacher I ever had.”

  “Have many?” Donny joked.

  Jeep felt her hands start to glow with the warmth of embarrassment, but she grinned. Donny was so cool for an old dyke. “Not enough,” she answered, working at being cool back.

  “Look at that parking lot,” Donny said, pointing to the two rows of vehicles arranged on the pot-holed gravel and along the verge of the road. “It’s practically split, half nineties Hondas and Subarus, half clunker pickups. And one bike couple.”

  “The Honda girls are closet city and the Subarus are out?”

  “Some are, some aren’t. They’re alcohol counselors and teachers. Find the Forest Service workers.”

  “No-brainer. That row of dirty mini-pickups with the federal parking stickers and big dogs in the cabs. Is that the third half?”

  Donny laughed and said, “It’s what makes us dykes, that third half.”

  “Like the extra chromosome that makes us gay?”

  “Is that what does it?”

  “Sure. Gay guys are XYY and dykes are XXX.”

  “Triple-X rated! I like it!”

  “You ought to see the K-Ys!”

  The woman who’d parted the crowd moved into sight again when she stopped to talk with a small animated woman. “What does Cat drive?” Jeep wanted to know.

  “Guess.”

  “The little LeBaron convertible?”

  “You read that one wrong. Try the old yellow Ford F-150 that looks like a classic pickup freak refinished it this morning.”

  “No way. She’s too much of a girl.”

  “A girl from a tough pioneer family that settled this valley. She’s got her feet so solidly on the ground they’re a root system. Look, there’s her dog. George is Loopy’s sweet, cuddly little pit bull pal. Cat named her after some girl in a kid mystery book. That is the best trained dog I ever saw.”

  The woman was petting and talking to the brown and white dog in the cab of her truck, and Jeep felt herself falling in—in love? That wasn’t it, exactly, though she’d let herself in a flash. More like in admiration. The thought of love put her in mind of Sarah again. Maybe tonight when she got home she’d write to her. But where to send it? She could start with their old apartment. Was Sarah still coming home every day to the honey-colored sunlight on their old wooden floor? She felt a tug of anxiety. Coming home to their apartment with another woman?

  “Does Cat live with anyone?” she asked.

  “She’s all alone in that big old house her greatgranddad built. She’s asked us to keep an eye out for the perfect roommate. Someone pleasant and steady who can help her around the place without coming on to her and who’s independent enough not to make a lot of demands. Oh, and maybe has a kid or two. She likes kids.”

  “So why doesn’t she fill the house with her own?”

  “Says she’s not ready for that.”

  “She doesn’t want a girlfriend?”

  “Long story, Jeep. One I’ve been told not to pass on.”

  “Oh.” Cat was making her way to them.

  “How old is she?”

  “I don’t know exactly, maybe late twenties, early thirties.”

  “Like Katie, only from here she feels older somehow. Like she was born knowing how to get along.”

  “I believe some people are. And Cat may be one of them.”

  “The sheriff feels kind of like that too, but I thought it had to do with her job.”

  “Could be people with something to teach—and good cops like Sheriff Sweet have taught me a thing or two—are drawn to those occupations.”

  “No wonder I never wanted to be a teacher.”

  Donny looked at her. “You just think you’re a know-nothing. You’re learning quick.”

  “Me? I feel like I know less every day.” It was true. She’d be feeling good and then all of a sudden it was like the ground went out from under her feet. It didn’t take much either. A Saturday night alone, bad news on the radio, a stupid letter from her mom nagging about getting a phone or e-mail when she didn’t have money for an ISP connection, much less a phone line or a computer. She’d left her computer in Reno, but had used Sami’s, then Katie’s. She asked Donny, “When am I going to know what I know so I can use it?”

  With a laugh, Donny said, “I never knew till one day I looked over my shoulder and saw my backside running from trouble, trying to push me along. That’s when I realized I just had to listen inside myself. What else are you needing to know about life?”

  Jeep laughed too. “What to do when trouble catches up.”

  “You stand aside and get out of the way. If you’re on the tracks when the train comes through, it’s nobody’s fault but your own.”

  She had a feeling she wouldn’t understand that one for a long time. The porch had become too crowded to rag without being heard, so she just watched. A place could not be more different from San Francisco.

  Her time in San Francisco had been like its strange weather. Even when the sun showed up, the air always felt chilly against her skin, kind of like wearing short sleeves while hugging a tuba in a Thanksgiving Day parade. She’d done that once, learned to play tuba so she could go to Indianapolis for the regional championships with the band. It had been an extremely cold experience. In San Francisco she often wished either the sun would shine or it would rain, she didn’t much care which. She went from hot Sami to cool Katie like the city changed weather.

/>   Sami had this killer apartment on the top floor of the building the shop was in. Not an easy thing to find, but Sami had connections. In this case, she traded the building’s owner maintenance for the apartment. Then Sami traded stuff out of the shop for someone to do the work. Musicians all over the Bay Area bought used gear at Muse Music, which Sami’s father had started as a head shop called Muse back in the mid-sixties. Later, he’d gone into some kind of stock and bond work and turned over the shop to Sami, but he couldn’t be getting much money out of it with all the bartering Sami did.

  She had been down to Reno on a buying trip when they met, and Jeep had hitched a ride west with her, taking along only her fiddle, last paycheck, some extra clothes, and her skateboard. She hadn’t been into waiting around for Sarah, to discuss splitting; Sami’s van was loaded and idling out front. She wanted to kiss the bricks of their building goodbye, one by one. But then she was in the van, and before leaving felt real to her Sami was driving, one hand on the steering wheel, one on her.

  Nothing but a crappy little Post-it note for Sarah. She hadn’t known what she was doing, so what could she write? Sami was six foot, one inch and hauled heavy amps and stage monitors around like they were feather pillows. Jeep was a little flattered and a little repelled, but Sami was wonky about music and thought Jeep was a genius as well as adorable, so she had let herself be hauled away too.

  Before long, she was ready to pack it in with Sami. Maybe the hardwood floors in Sami’s apartment reminded her too much of the place she’d had with Sarah. Maybe Sami’s pawing was getting real old. For a while, she stayed on mostly because she didn’t have a clue where to go.

  “Dude,” she’d said to the guy in dreadlocks who came in the shop door during the week that would turn out to be her last with Sami. She even remembered the music that had been playing because that was the day she’d discovered Aaron Copeland’s clarinet concerto. The thought of that music gave her chills down to the calves of her legs. Why did they call them calves anyway?