Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451)

by Henderson, Smith

  I can keep those animals away, he said.

  But who’ll keep you away?

  She was teasing him and he didn’t care for it. He sat up.

  I said I don’t have girlfriends. You do me if you want. If not, you don’t.

  She wrapped herself around his torso. He smelled like black dye. Like a blot. Like black water. Wet hot water. She asked him how old he was.

  Twenty. Go get them cigarettes.

  She was all the way over at the table, naked and dribbling his cum out of her before she realized she’d just hopped to when he said so. He said wait let’s have a look at you and flipped on the bulb. She covered up with her hands and then dropped them so he wouldn’t have to ask her to and also because it felt immature to cover up and she wanted to be sophisticated. And it didn’t bother her, him looking her up and down a moment, nodding like he liked what he saw or just that she’d grown up in that moment. She didn’t care, or she told herself she didn’t care, if there was a difference, which perhaps there wasn’t. Men were supposed to look at women. They were supposed to.

  Christ, he said, reaching for the smokes.

  What? she said, horrified. Looking herself over.

  He explained that she was so damn fine his heart did backflips. Shit her not.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  He went to visit Cecil’s mother, intending to get him back into her home. There were so many cars parked on her block, he thought maybe she’d died, that he’d happened upon her wake. But of course there wouldn’t be anyone at her wake.

  And Katie. Was she eating. Had she been to school at all this spring. Was she alive.

  He parked and mounted the steps to the front door. A balding man with a mustache and a polyester brown suit cornered the house and climbed over the railing with a black single-barrel pump-action shotgun. He put a finger to his lips, pointed at the ground, smoothing his tie back into his coat. Pete looked dumbly at where he’d pointed and then started to back away. Several things occurred at once. Men in suits and tactical gear with pistols and submachine guns streamed through the tall grass toward the front porch. Pete’s knees buckled and the back of his hand was wrenched up between his shoulder blades by someone who’d come from behind.

  He started to protest, but the man with the shotgun punched the stock into Pete’s gut, and he doubled over on his way down, his face striking the porch. His teeth rang in his skull like tines of a tuning fork as a couple hundred pounds compressed into a single kneecap in the middle of his back. He coughed and gagged at once and thought he was suffocating as someone cuffed him. Now someone straddled him. There were shouts from inside the house.

  “There’s a kid in there!” Pete croaked.

  “Shut up!”

  “I’m a social worker! There’s a CHILD in there!”

  The world rang and spangled. Something hard as iron had struck the back of his head, smashed his teeth into the porch again. Blood, metal, salt, a hot pain radiating from a point on the rear equator of his skull. He was collared up onto his knees, his head rolling, lifted to his feet. From within the house there were shouts, there were shots, quick POP-POP-POPs, and he was kicked back down. Boots on the porch all around him. Screams. Scuffles. He lay still, gonged and wincing.

  From the back of the unmarked sedan in which he’d been placed, he could see plainclothes cops, cops in DEA jackets, and local law enforcement. Pacing in and out of the house, puffed up in their adrenaline and bulletproof vests. All this contemptible hard-assery. An ambulance at last arrived and weaved among the cars flashing its lights. Paramedics rushed inside.

  The back of Pete’s neck was moist with blood. Indentures of his teeth scored the inside of his lips. The cuffs cut into his wrist bones. He was by now half-crazed with worry about Katie. Had she been shot. Hurt in any way whatsoever. He should’ve removed her from the home too. Instead of Cecil. She was the one he should’ve taken to the Cloningers.

  He’d gotten it all wrong. Once again.

  Idiot.

  Is there anything you touch doesn’t turn to shit.

  He knocked his head against the rear window. A nearby cop turned around, looked at him, shook his head no, and resumed speaking to his fellows.

  “Fucker!” Pete shouted. He pounded his head against the window. To break it if he must.

  The balding cop who’d hit him with the shotgun flung open the door.

  “There’s a little girl—”

  The cop punched him in the mouth. He toppled backward, stunned and squirming.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Slam went the door. Pete turned over onto his knees and watched the runnel of blood out his nose splotch the fabric of the backseat. This was a nice sedan with a cloth interior, not some county squad car of vinyl. He blew blood all over the upholstery. He sat up and spat at this road show of federal law enforcement, and a bubbly red slug drew down the window.

  They searched Pete’s car, set things from his glove box and passenger seat on the roof. For no ostensible reason a federal agent removed the cardboard Pete had taped over his broken window. Just being thorough. A file folder opened in the breeze and several sheets of paperwork blew away. The citizens standing across the street taking everything in picked up the loose papers and inspected them.

  “Shit’s confidential,” Pete hollered. No one heard him or looked his way if they did. When the cop emptying his glove box discovered it, he opened and took a sniff from Pete’s flask, capped it, and set it on the folder.

  A Tenmile police officer emerged from the house with Katie in his arms, and the girl rode him in mute shock to the squad car parked alongside the one Pete was in. He could see someone put a blanket around her and then stand next to her where she sat, legs out the back door. She was eye level with Pete and when she saw him she knew him, and he said to her it was okay it would all be okay though she couldn’t hear him. She locked her eyes on his. She tethered herself to him in this way, and he could see her wonder why he didn’t come out of the car for her, why he was so very bloody too. He said he was very, very sorry. Someone nudged her over into the seat and got in back with her, and the car pulled away.

  Debbie out the front door now, performance in full, leaping and arching her back against her captors and handcuffs and falling backward into the arms of the cop behind her. T-shirt torn at the neck and sliding over her shoulder, a sagging tit flopping out as she twisted and dug in, her feet running halfway up the porch post. For a moment she strained perpendicular to the floor like a bow aimed at the sky before another cop took her by the feet and with the one holding her by the armpits bore her snapping, kicking, and squirming, and quickly folded her into a sedan. Then it pulled away too.

  The fed who’d had the shotgun opened Pete’s door. He double-took the bloody mess on Pete’s face, parted his jacket and set his hands on his hips.

  “Jesus,” he said, and took a handkerchief from his jacket. “What did you do to my car?”

  Pete edged away from him.

  “Fuck off, pig.”

  The fed tossed the handkerchief at Pete and closed the door.

  They were soon on Highway 2, heading east into a brilliant day, clear skies, warm.

  Pete asked who got shot. It occurred to him that if Cecil had been there, he’d be dead. Maybe he had been there. Maybe he’d been released. Pete asked was it a teenager they’d shot.

  The fed glanced in his rearview at Pete but didn’t say anything.

  “You realize I’m their social worker, right, dipshit?”

  The agent drove in silence. Pete sat back. His head throbbed, front and back, bulbs of pain like a flashing string of Christmas lights around his skull.

  “I know my rights. And you straight fucked up.”

  The fed adjusted his mirror and tried to settle in for the drive, but Pete harried him with insults. He asked how long the DEA had been hiring retards. Was it a quota thing or was there a special squad of them. He complimented the man’s comb-over. He asked was he philosophically a fascist or was t
his just the consequence of being hung like a thumb. Was he missing a testicle like Hitler. What it was like to have been aborted. Was his mother a good kisser. Was his father. Did the little fellas he fellated mind his mustache.

  Pete flew into the side of the door, struck his head against the window as the fed suddenly turned. They rumbled over gravel and then skidded to a stop and the fed killed the engine. In the brief subsequent silence Pete could hear the man breathe through his nose, the very dust settle. Then the fed got out. Pete heaved himself up and his door was open. The fed grinned. He took a handful of Pete’s long hair and yanked him out. He stood Pete in front of the rear tire and most officially slugged him in the stomach. Pete pitched forward. The man caught him, and Pete could smell his lunch. Meat, gravy, bitter coffee.

  He slugged Pete under the opposite rib and standing so close kept him on his feet as he pumped fists into his guts dexter and sinister and when he stepped back, Pete dropped to his knees and then onto his side convulsing and cacking on the gravel. His breath croaked to and fro, like it wouldn’t take, like he was trying to find a way to breathe sideways.

  The fed panted from his efforts and asked Pete whatever had happened to his smart-ass mouth. Then he spat onto Pete’s face and fetched his handkerchief off the ground where it had fallen and knelt in front of him. He sat Pete up, spat into the handkerchief directly, and wiped Pete’s face clean. He said it was a good old spitwash like Mama used to do. He asked could Pete believe the pain he was in. He pulled up Pete’s shirt and exclaimed, my, what little indication there was of any assault. How long it would take before he would bruise there if at all.

  He stood Pete up. By now, the handkerchief was covered with blood. He spat on Pete’s face directly again and used his thumb to clean the last bit of dried blood from the grooves around his nostrils. Tilted Pete’s head this way and that, pulled back Pete’s lips to have a look at his teeth and gums. Like a man inspecting a horse or hunting dog. The cop’s bitter breath reeked all over Pete’s face. He stepped back, had a good look at him, and asked Pete had he had quite enough.

  Pete closed his eyes and hung his head yes. His rearranged guts churned.

  The fed straightened him, said that was too bad, and whaled on him a little more.

  The basement of a post office in Kalispell. They uncuffed him and deposited him in a chain-link cell in the corner that was concrete walls on two sides and a few folding chairs and that was all. A metal desk stood outside the makeshift cell and a map of Tenmile was taped to a free-standing chalkboard on wheels.

  Debbie’s high hysterical voice cantered behind a door across the room. After a while the cops ushered her upstairs and she looked at Pete as if she couldn’t quite place him.

  The sole remaining DEA agent removed his gun, put it in the drawer in his desk, and commenced with paperwork. Pete asked could he have something to drink. The officer trudged upstairs, came down with a Coke, and forced it under the chain link with his foot. Just drinking made Pete’s stomach quake. Even sips. He pounded the cola anyway and burped in a novel kind of agony bent over on his folding chair. He lay flat on his back and still his insides ached all the way through to his spine.

  It was too cold in this basement to sleep through the hours. There were no windows to tell the time by, and when Pete asked him, the agent would not tell him.

  “That woman you got, she’s too fucked up to be whoever you think she is.”

  “And who exactly do you think we think she is?” the agent asked, not turning around.

  “Fuck if I know. Some kind of kingpin, by all the heat you brought. Unless that was for whoever you shot.”

  The agent kept at his paperwork.

  “And killed?”

  The agent moved some papers into a manila folder, stood, and left Pete alone.

  Two agents came downstairs and let themselves into the cell with Pete. One of the men was clean-shaven and serious and wore a dark suit and carried a briefcase that he set on the concrete floor next to him. FBI, Pete guessed. The man crossed one leg over the other, pants pressed and neatly creased, and regarded Pete, mildly bouncing his dangling foot in its wingtip.

  The other man wore jeans and a black jacket with an ATF badge sewn over the zipper pocket. He took off his black baseball cap and scratched his thinned hair and fixed the hat back on his head. He was sitting on the chair backward and, at a gesture from the man in the suit, reached into his coat pocket and dropped Pearl’s sack of coins on the floor. The sack that had been in Pete’s car. The man in the suit smirked at whatever Pete’s expression said. Then he uncrossed his legs, leaned over, and opened the sack. He fingered through the coins and picked one shot through with a swastika.

  “Lovely,” he said of the coin, holding it up to the fluorescent light. He had a wry and cocksure expression that would irritate anyone at all.

  “Where did these come from?” the ATF agent asked.

  Pete decided he wasn’t going to say a thing. He said, “I’m not saying shit about shit until I get a lawyer.”

  He coughed. His stomach muscles convulsed painfully. He held his side wincing.

  The suit’s mouth turned up at its corners in an expectant grin.

  Pete said again that he wanted counsel.

  “Been to Reno recently?” the suit asked.

  From the agents’ expressions Pete was certain that his face showed that he had. He swallowed, winced again. Shit. He swallowed and he winced.

  “Lawyer,” he croaked.

  “Look,” the suit said, “every bank in the country is watching for these coins. They get one, they call the Secret Service. The Treasury Department runs it down to Jim here and Jim calls me. I’m FBI. So you got Justice and Treasury crawling up your ass right now. You and Jeremiah Pearl and the Posse Comitatus and Truppe Schweigen have the federal government’s full fucking attention. Congratulations.”

  “You lost me,” Pete said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The suit opened his briefcase and removed a file folder and handed Pete a photograph. A burnt-out armored truck. Another color photo of two dead security guards prone in livid pools of blood. He handed over another and another, told Pete of the robberies depicted in them, and also of bombings and murders. A synagogue. A little girl who bled out from the holes made by the nails and screws of a pipe bomb. He told Pete about Posse Comitatus, the separatist organization behind it, about the clandestine arm or offshoot called Truppe Schweigen, which was German for “Silent Corps” and which specialized in the financial activities, mainly counterfeiting. Piles of phony tens and twenties. They defaced currency and clogged the courts with spurious liens.

  Pete looked from the ATF to the FBI agent and snorted weirdly in astonishment.

  “You really think I’m one of these guys?” Pete asked. “I’m a social worker. That fucked-up woman you got, I’m her social worker.”

  “But how do you know Pearl?” the ATF agent asked.

  “How do you think? I’m a social worker. He has no job and many kids.”

  Pete thrust the pictures back, but the suit wouldn’t take them. Pete turned them over and dropped them on the concrete.

  “Why were you in Texas the day the president was shot?” the suit asked him.

  “What? How did you—?”

  “Just answer the question. What were you doing in Texas?”

  “This is insane. I want a lawyer.”

  “And Indiana? Did you visit Pearl’s family in Gnaw Bone? Or is Jeremiah Pearl hiding somewhere in Gnaw Bone right now? Is that why you went there?”

  The agents both watched him impassively. The suit leaned forward with his hands on his knees.

  “You already admitted to leaving a hundred of these coins in Reno, which you know is illegal—”

  “No, I don’t know that’s illegal—you can flatten a penny in one of those machines down in Yellowstone and stamp a buffalo on—”

  “Nobody tries to pass one of those. You put dozens of these coins in the slot machi
nes down there—”

  “And they fell right through into the tray—”

  “So you were in Reno.”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “You can get five years for this.”

  “Counsel,” Pete said flatly.

  The FBI agent cleared his throat and sat up.

  “Why don’t you have a case on Jeremiah Pearl in all that paperwork in your car?”

  “Counsel.”

  “I’ll be honest,” the FBI agent said. “You don’t look like a neo-Nazi. You don’t look like a gunrunner. But you do look like a goddamn hippie anarchist. The hair and the jacket and the fuckin attitude. And here you are swept up in an amphetamine bust, and . . . I just don’t know. What the hell are you, Peter Snow?”

  Pete stared at the floor, thinking, concentrating on the idea that there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. Do not be scared. It’s not like you knowingly did anything wrong. Assuming it was illegal to pass Pearl’s fucked-up coins. Five years. That couldn’t be right. Fuck this guy. Fuck him all day. They’d have to be crazy to think you’re moonlighting as some kind of separatist. You’re a social worker.

  “I want a lawyer.”

  Several moments passed.

  The suit bent over and plucked the photos off the floor.

  “Come on, Jim,” he said.

  “Be a minute,” the ATF agent said.

  The suit shrugged and left the cage, and the ATF agent and Pete sat together in silence until the suit departed up the stairs. The desk agent returned and began hunting and pecking at a typewriter. Each keystroke shot off the concrete walls and floor. The ATF agent stood, went to the cage door, and asked the desk agent if he would mind grabbing them a couple coffees. The man sighed heavily, pushed himself up, clomped to the door, and left them alone.

  The ATF agent returned to his chair.

  “My name’s Jim. Jim Pinkerton, Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Division of the Treasury. I am the liaison to the Secret Service on all matters regarding currency as it pertains to Jeremiah Pearl.”

  “I’m delighted all to pieces, Jim.”

  “The point I’m making is I have nothing to do with the investigations regarding his threats to the president.”