Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451)

by Henderson, Smith

  So she gave up on Cheatham?

  He was the one who ran off, not her. What’re you gonna do, a person doesn’t want to get found?

  TWENTY-FOUR

  He had a lead in Reno. The cops stopped a car near Lake Tahoe, the youngest girl inside went by the name of Heather but was the spitting image of the girl in his flyers. When she called, the social worker said she’d put a Polaroid of the girl in the mail. Pete didn’t wait. He drove sixteen straight hours to the Washoe County Department of Family Services office and told them who he was and waited in the lobby, studying the stains on the carpet through bloodshot eyes. The blotches on the fabric pulsed in his vision, in his road-weary exhaustion, like amoebas, split and divided in a hallucination of life.

  The social worker he’d spoken to emerged from the plantation of cubicles and introduced herself—“Jenny Lovejoy,” she said—and then asked was he all right.

  “Not exactly,” Pete told her. “I mean, you can imagine.”

  She cocked her head.

  “I drove straight down.”

  “Right,” she said. “Why don’t you ride with me.”

  She was thin and tired-looking herself and drove him to the Plato House emergency shelter in a silence that may have been respectful of him but was probably for her own benefit.

  When they got out of the car, the sunlight shimmered off the hoods and Pete thought he might fall over. He leaned against a pickup and scalded his elbow on the fender. The woman was already at the door and she came back across the skillet of pavement and asked him again what was the matter. He said everything was the matter and that his father had died. Everything was the matter. She was quiet like she didn’t know what to say or perhaps had just employed a therapeutic method or was quite simply annoyed. The way she squinted in the sun, her hooded eyes like caves. I’m goin crazy, he thought.

  “It’s so hot,” he said.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  “I don’t think I can take it if it isn’t my daughter in there.”

  She looked in the direction of the building, the windows palely mirroring back the scorched tableau of the two of them, the lot, the untouchable cars.

  “There’ll be a picture in her file. I’ll get it. That way you don’t have to go in.”

  The unceasing sun coruscated off the windows of the buildings and the chrome and even the heat-hammered pavement that shone in places around the lot like slicks of hot oil. He paced out the few minutes it took the woman to come back. She handed the picture to him, the same featureless squint making her face look like it had melted some. He cupped the photo in his palm. The girl looked exactly like Rachel. They could pass for sisters.

  He spent Saturday, the Fourth of July, in the casinos, earning comps right at the bar. Idly selecting lucky integers on the number pad beneath the smoky glass under his drink. He slipped coins by the handful into the machine and sometimes some of Pearl’s coins, which the machine spat out in the metal tray at his knees. In this way he left all manner of Pearl’s scrip at a few bars in Reno. It was something to do and then it felt like he was doing something. Like he was really sticking it to somebody.

  At a hotel casino, a lank guard confronted him about the coins.

  “You the one leaving these in the machines?” he asked, holding up one of Pearl’s quarters.

  “Yes.”

  “You need to come with me,” the guard said.

  Pete took his drink with him and sat in a plush chair waiting for the casino manager to come.

  The man arrived toting a tank and breathed from an oxygen mask for a few minutes before he croaked out that it was against the law to put anything but legal tender into the machines.

  “Those are real coins.”

  “They are . . . marred. You . . . need to . . . leave.”

  “The hotel too?”

  “Reno.”

  “You can throw me out of your joint, but not town.”

  “What . . . are you even . . . doing . . . here?” the man asked, sucking oxygen and regarding Pete with a measure of interest. The coins. He had to wonder what Pete was trying to accomplish with the coins.

  “That’s a good question,” Pete answered.

  Three days later, he was sleeping under the stars, deep in the Yaak with Jeremiah and Benjamin Pearl.

  They were all out poaching together. Pearl made a crude blind in a thicket of thimbleberry upwind of a muddy meadow while Pete and the boy walked a little farther to a shaded spot where they could bugle in some elk. Pete knew the elk weren’t in rut and would, if anything, wonder what the hell all the hollering was about, but he kept his mouth shut. Maybe they’d get lucky.

  As it turned out, Benjamin was pretty good with the bugle, better than Pete at achieving the breathy moan that curls at the end into a lonesome scream of the rut. The sound put him in mind of his father. At the bugle. Blowing. Watching through the binoculars. A time he and Luke are hunting with the old man, them elk’ll be right over this ridge, you two be ready and sure enough there stands a royal bull, his breath in thick handkerchief exhalations. Something aristocratic about the animal, as though it might slap you with a glove and challenge you to a duel. They all quietly kneel and aim and shoot at once and the bull’s forelegs drop and then the rest of it, and when they get to the animal, steam and pink and bubbles issue from a hole no bigger than your pinkie finger and the elk is very neatly dead, and only one of them hit it, no one can take credit.

  But the old man says, Nice shot, Luke.

  And you, you still remember this slight.

  Of course, Benjamin called in no elk or other animals, though several large creatures of opportunity—vultures, hawks—gripped the power lines running from a metal tower that bisected the meadow. When Jeremiah gave up on the elk, he let Ben run over to gawk at the tower. The boy was only gone a few minutes when he shrieked, and Pearl and Pete looked at one another and sprinted toward him, both hollering that they were coming.

  The scene at which they arrived was macabre. The boy stood at the edge of an area no bigger than a patio where the grass had been walked flat, and on which several dead animals lay in a writhing smoke of flies. There lay a turkey with a parcel of naked black skin near what looked to be the desiccated corpse of a raccoon. Not far away a deer with its throat ripped open lay next to a coyote. The coyote on its side like an exhausted, sleeping dog. Next to it a fox. Strangest of all, the black bear. Flat on its back, legs and arms spread wide, as though it were playing dead or at a kind of profane joke. Huge bluebottle flies worked over everything and the air hummed with them, the air was charged as by a television picture tube with the sound all the way down.

  Pearl squatted near the turkey and plucked a loose feather from the bird, the feather’s vane burned away.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Pete said. He put his palms in the air in front of him. “You feel that?”

  Pearl stood. Gripped Ben. A power line snaked down from the tower into the grass and Pete pointed to it.

  “That’s a line down.”

  “Ho shit, let’s step back, Benjamin,” Pearl said.

  They paced backward the way they came, but this time gingerly as sappers, and stopped and looked back and talked animatedly about the electrocuted animals and then retreated to the far side of the meadow and up the hill to a naked outcropping where they could watch what might happen next. The turkey vultures turned in slow circles, black and cruciate, waiting for them to leave. The men and boy were as giddy as princes.

  “It seems cruel to watch,” Pearl said, chuckling.

  He pulled the binoculars from his eyes and handed them to Benjamin.

  “You ever seen such a thing?” Pete asked. “This is nuts.”

  “Here they go,” Benjamin whispered, as the first of the vultures landed and waddled awkwardly toward the carcasses. Drawn by their own natural valence toward death. Several more landed in proximity, and immediately the birds began to jostle for position, all six or seven of them hopping and striving, at last perchi
ng on the bear, the coyote, their wings folding in and fanning out like black umbrellas triggered to open according to their enthusiasms.

  Pearl took the binoculars from his son.

  “Maybe they shut off the power.”

  “Nah. You could feel—”

  There came the flash and a millisecond later the air clapped with electrocution as two of the vultures stiffened in attitudes black and fixed as logos before they fell over smoking. The remaining birds heaved into the air. The Pearls and Pete gasped at one another like twelve-year-old boys. Then they rollicked with laughter. They waited a half hour for the vultures to land again, and though the birds circled in the air and perched and longed from the tower, they seemed to have learned their lesson. What a thing to see, Pete, Pearl, and the boy were saying as they headed back to camp, and when the evening air cracked again they laughed again too and wondered aloud were vultures that stupid or what manner of opportunist had been killed this time.

  What a thing to see.

  Pete had brought a cloth checkerboard, and Pearl allowed him to teach the boy to play, as it didn’t seem to represent anything except for war, and war was what Pearl was teaching Benjamin. Pearl was all right with war in the abstract. Chess, with its icons of castles and knights, was out. Checkers, okay. Pure.

  Pete showed Benjamin the rules, how to avoid getting jumped. It was a wonder that the boy had never played it. But consider the child’s abbreviated understanding of the world, the fences round his experience. He’d heard that men had gone to the moon, but only in passing and said he did not believe it. He believed that demons coursed through the woods but were drawn to the cities, where they mostly performed their devilry among the coloreds and people who worked for the government and spoke foreign languages in their homes. He could count very high and spell a great many words, but he knew better all the apostles and the books of the Bible in order. He’d never stepped foot inside a public school classroom. Homeschooled, he never played with a child outside his immediate family or the families of various churches they’d gone to, and even then it seemed obvious that his shy and ponderous nature prevented him much interaction with anybody, young or old. Except for the time, the one time, he’d gone to the school in Tenmile.

  The boy studied the board in the dirt by the fire.

  “Hey, Ben. Can I ask you something?”

  Benjamin nodded.

  “Why’d you go into that school that day?”

  The boy leaned over to examine his positions on the board.

  “The lady on the playground said I had to.”

  “But why were you on the playground?”

  “I dunno.”

  Benjamin jumped one of Pete’s pieces.

  “You can keep going,” Pete said, showing where he could jump again.

  “That’s all right. I don’t want to take all your pieces.”

  “I think you have to, if you can.”

  Pete moved the piece for him and set another red checker in the boy’s hand. Benjamin stacked them neatly with the others.

  “Did you find your little girl?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  “I’m sorry, Pete.”

  “Thanks.”

  They played a few minutes more, and Benjamin glanced in the direction of the creek where his father had gone.

  “I ran away this one time,” Ben said.

  Pete folded his arms and asked was that so.

  IT WAS A SUMMER CAMP at Hayden Lake, Idaho. He didn’t want to go, but Mama and Papa made him and his brother and sisters too. The camp is all right. Games, and you can earn candy if you do your chores and all your Bible lessons. Songs around the campfire. Fishing the lake. Tubing the ice-cold creek.

  One afternoon they are made to hike up to a clearing with only the pastor to hear some more about Chinese Communists. How they kill little girl babies and how the people are rounded up into camps, not like this camp not at all, but like—

  The pastor is interrupted as men on horseback come from every direction firing guns in the air, throwing smoke bombs. Some of the older children laugh, stand up. The little girls are crying before the pastor is dragged away, hollering, kicking up dirt. Now all the girls scream and the littler boys too. At the edge of the clearing, just before the trees, the pastor gets loose. He’s at a dead sprint and one of the men pulls a pistol out from under his duster and everybody screams and he is shot and falls and now everybody is grabbing everybody else and bunching up like spooked sheep.

  The men’s bandanas cover their yelling mouths. There’s smoke coming from somewhere, everywhere. The horses step in place at all of this carrying-on, the children dashing around, huddling, the young ones by now blubbering. Then a pickup and trailer come barreling through the meadow and more men get out and order the children to climb in back.

  Ben’s big brother Jacob breaks for it. His sister Esther screams for him not to, but he’s running across the meadow. Two men on horseback go after him and sweep him up and for a moment he dangles in the air between the two horses his legs pumping, it looks almost like they’d tear him in two. Then he is thrown across a pommel and taken to the trailer. Ben’s big sister Esther is already lifting his little sisters Ruth and then Paula into the trailer. She reaches for Ben, says to come on. It’s just pretend, she says. The smoke has cleared and she points to where the pastor is pulling on a duster, covering his face with a bandana. It’s okay, she says.

  But Ben drops and crawls under the trailer, his belly wet from the grass, and then to the hitch and no one has seen him and he keeps on crawling, under the truck and out from under the front of it. He’s almost to the forest by the time anyone spots him, but in no time, hoofs fall behind him, all around him. He feels a hand on his back, he’s lifted by his shirt. He throws up his arms and slips out and keeps running. He doesn’t know how he knows how to do this, he just does it. He scampers into the trees and into the brush cutting at him and the horses don’t or can’t follow, not directly. He’s hopping and tripping down a ravine and into some more brush. He drops flat onto the ground. Pine needles all in his chest and neck and chin. Panting on the ground, trying to be quiet. Dirt in his mouth. The fat of his palms bleed. The men are distant. Esther yells for him. Hoofs pound by a few yards away, go far, swing near again. He’s breathing heavy and trying not to breathe heavy. He stays put. Horses charge past. Men say Get him! and Gotta find that boy! and such things.

  He tucks his knees under him and peeks through the brush. Now he knows it’s not real, but he’s afraid of getting into a different kind of trouble. He hears the truck leave the meadow. But the men on horses still search for him. They ride through the woods. They ride right by. They call to him. It’s okay, they tell him. It’s just a lesson. The other kids are okay. Nothing bad is gonna happen to him.

  He doesn’t move. He can hear them talking about him. What a little bugger he is. He knows it’s safe, it’s okay to come out, but he don’t want to. Maybe it’s bad of him, but really it’s not bad because even when he wants to get up, he can’t.

  He can’t make himself obey.

  He realizes then what all his mama and papa have been talking about all these years. How they will be hunted down and killed and what that will be like, and it’s okay because what comes after is heaven and they’ll all be together it’s not for us to question only to obey. He is an obedient boy. Obedient to God. He knows what he’s supposed to do.

  Now the men are on foot and Benjamin is standing there waiting for them. The man’s bandana is around his neck, and his chin and jaw are almost blue where he shaves them. The man has Ben’s shirt, and when Ben goes to him, he helps him on with it. They give him some water from a canteen, and the man lifts him onto the horse and climbs up into the saddle behind him. They ride slowly across the meadow, the man’s hand on his belly. He’s never been on a horse, and the animal swaying under him and the grasshoppers leaping away from the footfalls of the horse steady his heart. Everything runs from a horse.

  Pete said that so
unded like it was scary.

  Pearl returned with a tarp, fishing line, and a needle. He sat within earshot and began to mend a hole in the canvas.

  The boy was quiet, but maybe not because of his father. This was the longest he’d ever spoken to Pete and he seemed depleted. He told Pete it was his turn.

  They jumped one another’s pieces until only a few kings remained on the board.

  Benjamin sat cross-legged with his chin in his hands.

  “Do you miss her?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Why did she run away?”

  Pearl glanced up, but didn’t say anything.

  “It’s sorta complicated.”

  Now the expectant boy was looking at him.

  “She and her mother went to Texas,” Pete said.

  “How come?”

  “Her mother and I weren’t getting along.”

  “How come?”

  “Benjamin,” Pearl said.

  “It’s okay,” Pete said. “Her mother did something she oughtn’t have, and it made me really upset.”

  “Was she bad?”

  “Benjamin, leave him alone,” Pearl said.

  “It’s all right, Jeremiah,” Pete said. “She did a bad thing. She’s not a bad person.”

  “Sometimes God needs you to do a real bad thing, only it’s not a bad thing when He wants you to do it, because nothing that God commands you to do is a bad thing. Was it like that?”

  Pearl had stood. From where he was, he couldn’t see Benjamin’s face. Neither, for that matter, could Pete. The boy’s eyes were trained on the board. Pearl was waiting to hear what the boy would say next. Just then, Ben looked up at Pete, a whorl of notions spinning behind his eyes. Things he’d seen and done and had happen to him.