Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451)

by Henderson, Smith

  Shelby was east.

  Cecil was on his way.

  “Well done, Pete,” he muttered. “Well fuckin done.”

  Pete went to his car and got his flask from the glove box. Then he opened the trunk. Cecil’s air rifle was in there next to some blankets, stuffed animals. He reached under a shovel into a bag of clothing. Felt around for the bottle, looked this way and that, and then dunked his torso into the trunk and took a long pull. His throat burned and hot fumes ran out his nose and burned his eyes. He took another drink, and then filled the flask and put it in the interior pocket of his coat. The world clicked up into place when he closed the trunk. He felt all right. It’d be all right. The boy ran. He’d call it in, someone would pick him up sooner or later. No big deal.

  From within the restaurant the hostess tapped the window and pointed back at the register. The big old rancher who’d been pumping diesel had Cecil in a standing full nelson just inside the door.

  “Huh,” Pete said.

  He walked through the gale to the restaurant. His arrival occasioned deeper interest among the customers, arms crossed and so on.

  The hostess said, “There he is.”

  The rancher turned around with the boy. Cecil’s arms splayed out, and his head was forced down under the man’s laced fingers. The man’s liverspotted skull was red with effort. The two of them breathed heavily, twitched as they strained against one another.

  “This yer boy?” the old man asked.

  “I’m his caseworker,” Pete said, reaching out for a handshake. The rancher forced a grin onto his granite face, as if to ask if Pete thought he was an idiot. Pete dropped his hand.

  “Are you responsible for him or not?” the rancher asked.

  “Yes,” Pete said. “I’m taking him up to Shelby.”

  “The hell you are. I got a mother up in Shelby.”

  Pete nodded. Conveyed that he was listening, that the man had his complete attention and respect.

  “I seen him run outta here, you know. And you go after him. Seen him sneaking up there to my truck when I was paying for gas. Little shit had the gall to fight me too. This young girl here talked me into waiting a minute to see if you come back before we call the cops. She said you’s his parole officer.”

  “I said you worked for the state, that you were like a parole officer or something,” the hostess clarified.

  “Well, I thank you both,” Pete quickly offered. “You did a good thing, waiting for me. I appreciate it.”

  The man grunted as Cecil squirmed.

  “He about got himself tore up from earhole to asshole.”

  “I’m sure. I’d have not been able to restrain myself like you did. What say you remand him to me now?”

  “Remand?”

  “I can take him.”

  The rancher took long measure of Pete, his hands laced over the boy’s nape like knurled stocks. Wondering should he trust Pete, whether Pete looked capable. Cecil tried to twist and slip free but the rancher simply clenched the boy all the more tightly, lifted him up onto his tiptoes.

  “Just hold still, Cecil,” Pete said.

  “It don’t look to me like you finished the job correcting this boy. Course the government ain’t been any good at fixing anything, has it? Probably had him sitting on his ass all day, didn’t ya? Hold still, godamnit.”

  Pete and the man at the crux now. How long until the boy raises his arms, drops, and wheels free. Or kicks the old man in the nuts with his heel.

  The rancher looked at the top of the boy’s black thatch of hair as though he could derive an intent from it. A bead of sweat traced the ridge of his nose and fell from the tip.

  “Take him before I change my mind,” he said as he unthreaded his fingers, sprung loose his arms, and Cecil stumbled forward. He remained arms out, head down, like a mold of the old man’s action on him. He smirked up at Pete.

  “He’s bleeding,” someone said, and the hostess ran outside after the old man with a dishtowel. Behind the big man’s left ear was a long fresh scratch, the rust-colored blood from it in the forking wrinkles at the back of his neck. They all watched her call to the old rancher and point at his head. The old boy touched his neck and grimaced at the blood on his fingers. He snatched the towel from her and stormed off to his pickup with it pressed to his wound.

  Pete thanked the hostess when she returned, waved vaguely at the patrons. Everyone looked on Pete and his cretinous ward with annoyance approaching disgust. Muttering anew. Pete yanked Cecil out of the restaurant backward.

  He left the keys in the ignition unturned while the wind buffeted the car. He turned to say something. Cecil held a single middle finger in his palm, lifted it before him like he’d found it on the floor and showed it to Pete.

  “Back at ya, buddy,” Pete said.

  Cecil took back his finger, set it in his hand, and regarded it crazily. Pete started the car.

  They went along the southern border of Glacier Park, followed the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. Turquoise pools and red and rusty railcars curling out of tunnels. Just over Logan Pass Pete spotted a pair of mountain goats at a mineral lick and pointed them out to Cecil, but the boy was having none of it. Fuck him then. No idea how good he had it. The pines shifted in the wind up to the tree line where great escarpments loomed gray and black. Past the Silver Stairs chuckling out of the mountains like mercury. Through East Glacier and out of the mountains and onto the endless plains of the Montana Hi-Line. Winter wheat chaff and dirt conjured up into curling sheets across the stubbled fields in five kinds of brown.

  Up a rise, the Sweet Grass Grain silo peeked over at them. Tucked in hills the color of toast, Shelby spilled up in intervals. They descended into the town proper and passed a church where parishioners milled and children ran orbits. Another and another church. Mighty silos, a water tower, and they climbed another hill to see the rail yard.

  Pete checked a piece of paper on the dash, turned at the next light, and headed north, scanning the right side of the road for the relevant mailbox. It was a trailer, once red, sunscalded pink. He stopped at the gate and got out, opened it, drove through, got out, and closed it.

  In the large outbuilding Cecil’s uncle knelt next to a snowmobile. A dog on a chain strained and leapt at the edge of the stamped earth circle around the stake to which it was leashed. Silently gnashing the air ten feet from where they parked. Pete caught himself rubbing his bandage. The animal’s vocal cords were cut. Docked like its tail.

  “Howdy,” Pete called to the outbuilding, fetching his jacket from the backseat. The man looked up, stood, and wiped his hands on his jeans as he strode out to meet him. His hair was shaved into a flattop and he had the look of large, hale men who shoot straight and mean well, but probably nurse a good many resentments. They shook.

  “I’m Pete. From DFS. Spoke to your wife.”

  “Elliot,” he said, peering over Pete’s shoulder at Cecil still in the car. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nervous, I suppose.”

  “Is he gonna get out?”

  “Let’s give him a minute.”

  “Because he don’t have to be here. Favor to his mother is all this is. He don’t like it, he can shove off.”

  “He’ll stay.”

  They started for the house. There was an add-on covered in tar paper at the back. The fence terminated in a stack of posts some ways off and added to the air of incompletion about the place. A thin woman emerged from behind the screen door. She leaned on the porch railing, shielding her eyes from the sun, and peered toward the car trying to get a look at Cecil.

  “There’s the wife,” Elliot said gruffly.

  They went over together. She was a hard thing, taut in her arms and in her face. She was cross, at Elliot or the situation, maybe perpetually. She looked older than her husband. Wind-chapped lips. She nodded toward the car.

  “What’s with him?”

  “A little cold feet. He’ll come around.”

  “This is a favor to hi
s mother. He don’t like it here, he can shove off,” she said, just like her husband.

  “He’ll warm up to it,” Pete said. “He’s at that age. Wants to get out on his own. But most of all, he needs stability.”

  She looked meaningfully at Elliot. She was about to say something—probably about the boy’s mother—but the car door opened and Cecil climbed out. The dog lunged against its chain, whining airily, as the boy walked just at the edge of the animal’s limit up the drive. Pete called to him, but Cecil ignored him and went into the outbuilding.

  “Let me talk to him,” Pete said.

  “Hold on, mister,” the woman said. “You got our check?”

  Pete was already on the steps, and he turned to face her.

  “You know, I didn’t get your name,” Pete said pleasantly.

  “We was promised two-fifty a month for him.”

  “The stipend. Yes, they will send a check just as soon as the paperwork is processed and everything. No more than a week or two.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?”

  “How’s that?”

  “How is what?”

  “I mean, what are you asking.”

  She shot Elliot a look, and he bowed his head. “We’re flat broke is what I’m asking. That kid don’t live on grass is what I’m asking. Elliot ain’t had no shifts since he got out of the National Guard is what I’m asking.”

  “And I got until Christmas to decide to re-up or not.”

  “He might have to re-up,” she said with a practiced outrage.

  “I’ll contact the folks in Helena just as soon as I get back to Tenmile,” Pete said.

  She crossed her arms like she didn’t believe any of it.

  “Maybe they can put a rush on that check.”

  “Maybe they can put a rush on it,” she said to Elliot, and then to Pete, “You ain’t hearing me. We ain’t made of money. Of any money.”

  Pete looked over at the garage for some sign of Cecil.

  “I oughta go get him,” he said.

  “And when you get him, you can put him back in that car,” the woman said.

  Pete looked from Elliot to his wife. She turned to go back into the house. Pete raced through the things to say, resisted the urge to ask why the hell they had him come all the way out with Cecil if they were going to commence with this horse-trading bullshit.

  He felt his pockets.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I got about fifty bucks in petty cash left from taking him out here. What say I give you that, put a rush on the check—pay my own way back to Tenmile, mind you—and you all write me a check for the fifty, which I’ll cash once you get your check.”

  “We don’t use a checkbook,” she said.

  “Not for bills or anything?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe,” Elliot said, “this ain’t such a good—”

  “Look,” Pete said. “Fifty is all I got. You can have it.”

  The woman shook her head. She and Pete both wiped their hair out of their eyes. Even this seemed to annoy her—that it was windy, that Pete had long hair.

  “That kid’s as weird as a three-dollar bill. A couple Christmases ago he’s riding his cousin’s tricycle like he was five. Carrying on like a retard. Wouldn’t give it back when he was told to, neither.”

  The door slammed behind her, and the breeze through the cheatgrass filled the silence, and there wasn’t anything else to blow over that would make a sound, not a tree or clothes on the line or anything.

  “Maybe this deal ain’t such a good idea,” Elliot said, looking off across the yard. The dog turned in concentrated circles before he set in the dirt. Pete reached into his wallet and pulled out the cash.

  “I got forty-eight here,” he said, pressing the money into the man’s hand and folding closed his palm. Elliot took a pack from his front shirt pocket and shook out a smoke and offered it to Pete. Pete took it and Elliot took one for himself and they each lit them and smoked together without talking.

  “I’m a see what he’s up to,” Pete said.

  He jogged across the yard, past the lunging silent dog. He felt light-headed from the cigarette, and when he got to the doorway of the huge outbuilding he was panting. A rusted combine filled the main area. A snowmobile was off to the side. Cecil sat on a big round of pine. His hand fell gently from his face. He held a filthy red rag in his hand, and a bright red plastic gas can sat hard by. The boy’s huge dumb grin. Eyelids half closed like broken window shades.

  Pete stepped into the outbuilding and the aluminum walls all around ticked in the wind like a cooling engine. He spat at a copper pipe, and it toned back at him for a long moment. The boy’s eyes lolled.

  “You would love it at the treatment facility,” Pete said.

  Cecil licked his lips as he turned toward this voice from the ether.

  “They knock you out for days in that place. Just have to kick or hit or bite somebody. Whip out your dick. I know it. I seen it. And when you come to all groggy and fucked-up, they just wait and see if you do it again. And you will. They all do.”

  Pete peeked out the doorway to see that Elliot still smoked on the porch of the house. From inside his pocket, Pete removed his tiny flask. Finished and replaced it and approached the boy.

  “You know the worst part about treatment facilities, Cecil? The freedom. It’s what they call a paradox, Cecil. No longer being afraid of ending up there is what makes you free to do anything. And all the anythings you can learn. How to fight with a toothbrush or a spoon. All the drugs there are to take. How to molest other kids. You won’t believe the appetites you got inside.”

  The kid snorted or choked a little or coughed. From the stump Pete lifted Cecil, who swayed and giggled. His actual breath stank of gasoline.

  “You laugh? Go on. But let me tell you a secret. Kids like you, they become the worst ones. Maybe because it’s too late to send in someone your age. I dunno. But something just quits in kids like you and you become bad men. You go in wild ungovernables and you come out bad men.”

  Pete balled a fist and slugged Cecil in the gut and as he doubled over Pete grabbed his face with his right hand and hit the boy again just under the opposite rib, dropping him to his knees. On the ground, the boy quietly kecked. Pete knelt.

  “You can’t believe it, can you?” he asked. “How could this be, you ask yourself.”

  Cecil looked up at him, flushed and gagging. Pete had never laid a finger on a client before. Not once done a thing in anger. And he wasn’t angry now. He was as astonished as the boy.

  “All right,” Pete said. “Quit moaning. You’re all right.”

  He lifted him up and brushed the pebbles and twigs from both their knees. He straightened Cecil’s T-shirt and met his tearing, enraged eye.

  “Your mama doesn’t want you anymore. The Cloningers are good people and you ruined that. Maybe for other kids too. But you have this uncle. So I want to know: will you stay here?”

  Cecil balled and unballed his fists. Bewildered and scared and angry.

  “Look, I ain’t the one that hit you,” Pete said.

  The kid blinked at the naked lie.

  “I ain’t,” Pete repeated. “Those punches sure as shit come through me but they were not mine. As meant for you as they were, they were not mine.”

  “Fuck you, man,” Cecil whispered.

  “I am not just an agent of the state. I’m an agent of your future. I’m a goddamn time traveler. And, I promise you, that little tune-up was just a preview.”

  Elliot was lighting another butt off his second or maybe third cigarette when Pete got to the porch. He let the man take the reins of the situation, handing off the boy to him like a half-broke horse. He fetched the boy’s things from the car and followed them through the house as Elliot’s wife crossed her arms and asked why he smelled like gas. Cecil glowered at her, hunched and miserable. Elliot patiently showed Cecil where he would sleep and keep his things, as patient as a man taking his sister’s son, at le
ast as patient as a man who needs money to do such a thing.

  The kid might run. Pete might have to find him again and bring him back. You couldn’t know.

  Pete crossed the brown and blasted grass. The dog heaved up at him, wheezing through the cut cords of its voice box. The chain went taut. The animal’s pads rose and patted the hard dirt. Its teeth snapped in the air.

  Pete sat in the utter quiet of his car but for the fond wind and the ringing of the animal’s chain.

  Was Jimmy nice enough with a big harmless face and so excited to see them that he’d ordered pizza and beer and Cokes?

  He called them Cokes, but they were 7UPs, said would you like a 7UP Coke, I also have some Dr Pepper Cokes. Rachel was confused and said she’d have whatever kind of pop he had and he looked funny for a minute and checked the freezer and said they could run out for pops or ice cream after dinner.

  What were pops?

  Popsicles.

  And pops were called Cokes?

  Or sodas, yes.

  Did Rachel and her mother and her mother’s “friend” go out for Popsicles?

  They were gonna. They didn’t. They got to talking and talking and Mom laughing at every last thing he said and drinking Lone Stars and him showing them the tub where he kept his turtles and saying he just showered with them or in the truck stops mostly but he was fixin to have to get them an aquarium on account of them staying with him, staying with him he called it, not moving in and it was obvious from the get-go.

  What was obvious from the get-go?

  They weren’t staying.

  Why?

  Because. You could tell.

  How?

  He was terrified of them. Him asking did they want to see the inside of his semi-truck, and they all climbed in, and Rachel crawled into the sleeper cab and he turned on the lights and said he’d sleep in the truck, there was a room for Rachel and Beth could sleep in his room, and her mother said he didn’t need to do that, but he went ahead and did it anyway.

  Was there a room for them?

  There was a room for her and a fold-out couch and a dresser a closet half-full of boxes of Jimmy’s things about a hundred sweat-stained baseball caps and some old calendars of women splayed over machines, and in the middle of the night as she tried to sleep her mother went out to the truck. Rachel pretended to be asleep when her mother came in to check on her and kissed her good night with beery tobacco lips before she went to Jimmy’s bedroom.