How is Austin?
It is a cute little bungalow in a funny neighborhood of hippies and college kids. A room for each of them and their things and otherwise furnished throughout, colorful towels and antique furniture, cacti and pots and pans and spices. A cat that comes and goes. Bright Mexican tile. Tins and colored glass in the trees. A bird feeder and hummingbirds.
It’s shining water at Barton Springs, the two of them lazing on the grass, marveling at this Texas October.
It’s brunch. Huevos and tortillas.
It’s her mother leaving at four in the afternoon to work her shift at the bar and not coming back until three in the morning.
Is Rachel alone?
There’s a deal. Her mother calls at ten to see that she’s going to bed. Says, You better be getting in bed.
I will if you let me off the phone.
You have school in the morning. You can’t skip tomorrow.
You’re the one who always wants me to stay home with you.
What?
Nothing. Good night.
Go to bed.
That’s what I said.
What?
Good night.
Are there already people at the house?
Not yet. But in the coming weeks there will be. She is getting good at this.
At what?
At making introductions, fast friends. At playing host. At pretending the place is all hers. At kicking everyone out at two in the morning and cleaning up.
Covering her tracks.
Yes. She won’t drink. She will hold the same can of Lone Star all night. She likes being part of something, even just a party, a clique. But of her choosing. Not just mother, father.
Does she think of her father?
Yes. Certain guys will remind her of him. A laugh. A build.
Does she miss him?
She will remember with a certain curiosity that she used to.
In Waco?
Before that.
When he went to Tenmile.
Before that.
When she was a little girl. She used to favor him, the way girls sometimes favor their fathers over their mothers. She would pine for him when he was gone all day and into the night. And later, when she was older and started to understand what he did for a living, she would wonder why does he help these other families when I miss him so much when I need him here why does he have to be the one?
Does she feel that now?
No. She quit a while ago.
When?
When she realized that he chose the job, that he wanted to be there for the other families. That he didn’t want to be there for the one he had.
That’s not true. Does she really think that?
What else could she possibly think?
FOURTEEN
They often slept deep into the day so complete was the dark, but come this morning bars of light cut the room and woke him. Ell was sitting cross-legged in front of a guy, a skinny blond guy with a wispy dandelion mustache and beard, tattoos on his long fingers, fingers that were feeling her arms, her hair, her face. Cecil stifled a cough. Ell looked over. Then the guy, slowly turning his head to Cecil but not looking away from her until the last second.
“Bear, this is Cecil,” she said.
“Cool,” he said.
Bear had a little money. They went to the Safeway for donuts. Bear and Ell ate on a spot of grass by the road and held hands, and from time to time Bear put his head on her belly and listened. He cupped his hands over her bump and spoke into them and tapped out soft beats on his baby’s entire world. He tickled her. The leaves were quitting the trees.
Cecil was scared. He knew they were going even before Ell asked did he want to come with them to a place out in Hamilton. A little house they could stay in. They were set for a few months there if he needed a place. Bear was rubbing her neck as she explained these things and his fingers made her eyes roll back in her head like she was a puppet. This was distracting. He wanted Bear to quit touching her and knew he had no right to want that. Still, it didn’t seem okay that you could touch a person and they’d be helpless to it.
The taste of his mother’s mouth, wet burned peppermint, was always on his tongue.
“I think I might just stay in that spot of yours, try my luck here in Missoula. I’m gettin’ the hang of downtown,” he said, spitting onto the curb.
“You sure?”
He nodded. She smiled dimly at something Bear did behind her ears.
“Bear and I think you should come,” she said. “You don’t got anybody here.”
“Neither do I got anybody in Hamilton.”
That this hurt her feelings was plain, which made him feel better, briefly. Then mean.
“I met you,” he offered. “I bet somebody else turns up.”
She went into the grocery. He and Bear stood together, not much looking at one another, let alone saying a word. She returned with a pen and came back with an address written on a piece of sack paper.
“It’s not far,” she said. “You can catch a ride out there and find us, you want to.”
Bear shook his hand and thanked him.
“I owe you,” he said.
Cecil asked for what, but Ell hugged him, said something in his ear, but he was too far gone to hear it.
Cecil watched the department store ladies undress the mannequins in the windows of the Bon Marché. They took off the arms and set them on the floor. An old hunched cowboy walking spraddle-legged with his wife winked at him and jerked a thumb at the nude armless bodies in the window.
Cecil walked along the river, down through a tangle of brush for want of anything at all to do. He came upon a pair of men at something by the water, but it wasn’t fishing. One spotted him upstream on the broken concrete and rebar that made the upper shore of the river. The men spoke and then they both stood watching him. Cecil was afraid they would follow him if he left, so he hazarded a mild nod and squatted and looked innocently out over the water.
One of the men called out something Cecil couldn’t hear. The man said it again or something else entirely. Cecil shook his head no, and started to climb back up through the Russian olive and bullrush. He heard the man shout and he scampered up the rocks and flailed through the small trees and didn’t stop running until he made West Broadway and all the traffic there.
Two nights later the board to his building had fallen. He held the bag of produce he’d selected from a Dumpster and stood in the alley facing the building for some time, unsure what to do. His blankets and few utensils. He set the sack under a small tree and crept to the hole. The board had been put aside and shadows wavered in the laughter of the men who made them.
He walked up and down the tracks working up his courage. The men went quiet before he reached the hole, were already regarding him with candlelit bearded faces, hazardous eyes.
“Hi. I left some things . . .”
The men drank from their beers. None spoke.
“I think I left some things in here.”
“Come in and have a look around,” one of them said.
Cecil hadn’t thought that far ahead. How he’d negotiate his things out of the room. If objections arose. You go in, you might not ever come out.
He trotted away. They didn’t even laugh, he was so insignificant.
He went up Orange and over to Higgins heading toward the river again. It was cool, might not be too cold to find a spot under the bridge. He eyed fire escapes, the unlit windows of the offices above the street. Then he spotted Pete and a pretty woman inside the Oxford at a poker table. He couldn’t believe his luck, was in fact afraid to mess with it, and so he just looked through the window at him, but Pete was hunched over his cards, the woman talking in his ear. A cup of coffee appeared at his elbow, and he drank it and never once looked out the window. At last Cecil opened the door, but the bartender happened to look up from his wiping and shook his head no at him.
He waited outside in the blue neon of the beer signage, watching
an old drunk wrapped in a sleeping bag shout absurdities at passersby. I am that guy, he thought. Far as anyone else is concerned, just another guy on the street, nowhere to go, no one to go to.
When Pete didn’t come out after a time, Cecil returned to the window. Pete and the woman were gone. He remained in front of that window like a dog. Then he searched around the side of the building. There was an exit there that Pete may have used. He scoped around the place some more. Looked in the window. By now no one was on the street.
He slept a few hours in the window well of a church on Myrtle before the frost came, and then he rose and walked across town to Buttreys. Pissed at this point, just furious. He loaded a cart full of things he had no intention of buying and made sly egress through the loading bay in back of the place with a loaf of bread and a summer sausage.
Not a soul truly saw him, maybe not that whole day.
Come dark he’s full of meat and bread. He walked by the Oxford again and waited, but Pete was not there and did not pass on the street. He walked to the university campus and admired the people dining with utensils in the cafeteria. In the commons among the smoking and reading students, he warmed up, wondering what on earth they could be reading for so long. He found a room with long low couches and slept on one until the building was closing.
He asked a college kid on the footbridge how far it was to Hamilton. The kid said it was maybe forty miles. Forty fuckin miles down Highway 93. The wind out of Hellgate Canyon was a rapid, cold astonishment to him. He hurried across the bridge to at least get in the lee of the houses and buildings. He thought about trying doors, explaining his pitiful state.
He found himself back downtown watching the high school kids cruise Higgins Avenue. It was a Friday night, and they drove up and down the street, up and down, their engine racket rebounding off the bricks. Small crowds spilled in and out of the bars and a carnival mood prevailed despite the cold. He’d been in Missoula for some weeks but never downtown at this hour on a Friday. The giddying spectacle of cars sometimes speeding by, the girls inside shrieking, girls calling out to him as he walked alone. Something that radiated off him from his few weeks of vagabondage, a new way he bore himself up. A vague optimism overtook him.
Near the old train depot the cars turned around and headed back down the street. Some parked on a gravel lot, idling or barely rolling in the cold, and teenagers clung to and ran between them. He watched from across the street, wondered what kinds of lies he could tell that would get him to Hamilton. He settled on a few of the less outrageous, took a deep breath, and started to cross. He shoved his hands in his pockets and sauntered over like they’d called him by name.
FIFTEEN
Pete kept an ear to the ground for the Pearls, but heard only rumors. He called the pawnbroker from time to time, but Pearl had not been by, and the pawnbroker said he didn’t expect him. Nevertheless, Pete asked around in truck stops and cafes, and nearly always someone knew who Pearl was or something about his coins, but of the man’s whereabouts, nothing. There were rumors and apocrypha. He was dead. He lived with a band of Métis Indians in Canada. The government had disappeared him. But never an eyeball on the man personally, save the dope farmers and the pawnbroker.
A bitterly cold day with two new calls, one in Trego and the other up someplace called Thirsty Creek. There was no one at the former and he couldn’t locate the latter. When he returned to his office, there was a message from a logger by the name of Vandine. The man had had an encounter with a boy and his father up at a place called Freckle Creek or Tinkle Creek or some such. Pearl. Pete rang up the man at home, and learning that he lived in Libby, asked if he could come down.
Vandine was slick to the elbows in engine grease and he apologized, said he was just about done lubing his self-loader, would Pete mind waiting inside, his old lady’d put some coffee on. Pete went through the crooked picket gate to the house and no one answered the door, so he smoked on the two-by-four stoop in front of the trailer until Vandine was finished. When Vandine saw him still there and coffeeless, he grinned succinctly, stepped inside, and shouted at his wife for not fixing Pete anything, for not answering the goddamned door goddamnit. Pete waited among the motor parts the man had set on newspapers for later tinkering. Vandine beckoned him into the kitchen and scrubbed his hands at the sink, a five-minute job with gritty pink soap that dripped from his elbows as he looked about in increasing irritation for a towel. He yelled for his old lady, and Pete stood against the wall as they argued again.
The man wiped down his thick and poorly inked arms and went out, and Pete followed him down a trail to a shed where a box of cold Rainiers sat in the dark. Vandine turned over two buckets in the doorway and handed Pete a beer unbidden. He cracked his own, threw the tab in a jar of them, and sucked down half of it before Pete had even situated himself on the bucket.
He said cheers and tapped Pete’s freshly opened beer with his own, and began to explain that the pawnbroker over in Columbia Falls was an in-law, and that they’d had supper the other week. When Vandine and the in-law got to talking about what happened, the pawnbroker said there was a social worker who would be plenty interested in what he, Vandine, had to say.
“About what exactly?” Pete asked.
Vandine placed his hands on his knees and looked between them a moment. He eventually made a small preamble about how he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be sharing this story with Pete, because it didn’t reflect well on him. He looked up and said that there were legal ramifications.
“You ain’t a police officer or anything right?”
“No.”
“Do we have confidentiality?”
“Yes.”
“Gene says you folks’ll take information anonymous.”
“Absolutely.”
Vandine ran his hand through his black and white hair deciding.
“Truly,” Pete said, “if the police need to get involved I will say I got an anonymous call.”
Vandine scowled like someone fresh out of choices. He dangled the beer can between his legs.
“We was going through a rough patch last spring. Financially. I have to tell you this because it’s why I didn’t go to the cops about it.”
He took a long draft on his beer, observing that Pete did not sip his own. Pete drank then.
“Tell me what happened, Mr. Vandine.”
“I’s up on Tickle Crick, where Champion was cutting a new logging road,” he said. “Maybe I was up there making off with the right-of-way logs.”
“Right-of-way?”
“The ones they cut down to make the road. They leave them alongside of the road there. You seen my self-loader.”
“Right.”
Just then Vandine’s wife called out to him, and he hunched his shoulders at the incoming artillery of her voice. She shouted his name some more, and when they heard the wooden screen door clap shut, he sat upright again.
“So it’s May eighteenth I’m up there. You remember what happened last May eighteenth?”
“Mount Saint Helens.”
“Exactly. Ash falling on Tickle Crick and I had no idea what it was. This weird gray snow coming down. You remember.
“Well, my partner—the son of a bitch shall remain nameless—jumps on the CB and all the truckers are saying get indoors and don’t breathe it, it’s toxic. And don’t run your vehicles in the stuff, the air filters can’t take it. They’re saying to wait until it’s all done falling. Well we don’t want to get waylaid, not up there, so we decide to park, hump it down to his pickup, and leave my logging truck for when it all blows itself over.”
Vandine swirled the dregs of his beer in the can.
“Next day everything’s covered in ash, and I got a truck up Tickle Crick where it ain’t supposed to be. Day after that they’re still saying don’t drive if you don’t need to. It’s the next next day and I’m still up there with my dick hangin out. So by now I figure I better haul ass and get my truck down before Champion sends someone up there to check
on the Cat and skidder they got up there. If they ain’t already. If they ain’t got my license plate and calling the cops already. You couldn’t be more red-handed than we was. But my alleged partner won’t go because they’re saying we ain’t supposed to be driving except for emergencies. I says it is a emergency. Not to me it ain’t he says. I says I get in trouble so do he, I says. That got him moving. So next day we get up early and head out.”
Vandine polished off his beer and fetched another one. He was slow to getting back into the story. As though he were sorting through the events.
“What happened?”
“My brother-in-law says you’re looking for this guy, name of Pearl?”
“Him and his son, yes.”
“The boy,” Vandine said, shaking his head.
“Yes. You saw them?”
“Matched my brother-in-law’s description in every detail.”
“Where?”
VANDINE SAT UP and explained what happened. The timber country all around coated gray and otherworldly and looking like a tintype or a still from an old western. Feels like you’re smack dab in a John Ford movie. And Vandine’s on a long dirt road straightaway and nearly misses in his rearview the waving hand in the truck’s wake of ash. He just sees an arm swallowed in a cloud the color of cigarette smoke. He says, Didja see that? Partner says, See what? Vandine stops the truck. Somebody come out of the woods, Vandine says.
Vandine pulls over, gets out. The kicked-up ash a red fog in his brake lights and out of it emerges somebody, this boy, bandana over his face, coughing. Vandine reaches in the cab and kills the engine and as the truck dies, he hears the click of a cocked gun right behind his left ear. A voice tells him, Don’t fuckin move. He glances over at the passenger seat and his partner’s eyes wide as dollar coins at whoever’s there behind him. The voice says for Vandine to move over and put his hands on the hood of the pickup and for the partner to get out and come around front of the truck or Vandine gets it in the back of the head.
The partner slides out real slow. Vandine can tell he’s thinking of running. Don’t do it, Vandine says.
Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451) Page 16
