Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451)

by Henderson, Smith

  “Thanks for clearing that up.”

  “You’re pretty punchy today aren’t you?”

  “Interesting word choice.”

  “Why?”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  Pinkerton leaned back, holding the armrests of the chair, and sighed at the ceiling.

  “The people in the house, they were clients of yours.”

  Pete nodded.

  “You didn’t know the guy who was killed.”

  “I have no idea who you killed.”

  “Speed supplier out of Denver. Two years of DEA work and no conviction because the fucker wouldn’t stand down.”

  “My condolences.”

  “But you were just there to check on the girl.”

  Pete sighed.

  “What’s gonna happen to her?” Pinkerton asked. “I mean, now that her mother is in custody.”

  “Someone will call my office and wait for me to come and get her.”

  “They won’t call someone here in Kalispell?”

  “I’m the someone in Kalispell. This is my region.”

  “From Tenmile all the way to here? That’s a lot of area for you to cover.” Pinkerton chewed his cheek. “So, you need to get out of here. To help the girl. Maybe we can make a deal so you can do that.”

  The desk officer returned with two coffees, and Pinkerton sipped his. He spat it back into the cup and set it on the floor.

  “I don’t know where Pearl is,” Pete said.

  “Do you know where we can get something that isn’t burnt and lukewarm?” he asked.

  Pete swirled the brown water in his cup. He didn’t want to drink anything. He was tired, very tired.

  “Come on, Snow. Take me somewhere and hear me out.”

  Pinkerton got up to call the FBI agent and explain what cafe they were in. When he came back to the table, he waved the waitress over and ordered a slice of meringue and asked did Pete want anything.

  Pete said he was fine.

  “Get some fries or whatever. On me. You haven’t even touched your coffee.”

  “It hurts to drink.”

  “You have a cavity or something?”

  Pete gingerly brushed his stomach with his fingertips.

  “Heartburn?” Pinkerton said. “I get that.”

  “One of your colleagues kicked the shit out of me on the way here. But thanks for asking.”

  Pinkerton looked Pete up and down.

  “He was careful,” Pete said, lifting his shirt, “just to beat my guts all to hell.”

  Grayish bruises along the ridge of his ribs stood out in the last of the evening light through the windows. Pinkerton sighed.

  “You want to get that checked out?”

  “I wanna take a pipe to that piece of shit.”

  The waitress had returned with the pie and looked askance at Pete.

  “Fair enough,” Pinkerton said. “Thanks, hon.”

  He cut a piece of pie, put it in his mouth and chewed. He took a swallow of coffee.

  “I can make this go away, but you and I have to come to an understanding.”

  “Make what go away? I haven’t done a goddamn thing.”

  “That’s not how we’re gonna see it. But if you and I come to an understanding . . .”

  “About?”

  “Jeremiah Pearl.”

  “What exactly do I need to understand?”

  “Well, first you need to know what happened up there,” he said, chewing, his voice thick with yellow meringue.

  How did she meet Pomeroy’s girlfriend?

  At the bus station in Tacoma they went to get into a locker where he’d put his watch, some hairspray, his brass knuckles (he showed her these for some time, fondled them), and a carton of Pall Malls. They’d hitchhiked down from Seattle in a semi with a blockhead truck driver who kept eyeing her legs. Later in the bus station, he said she could have made him quit that looking if she just gave him what he wanted.

  What?

  You could just put your little paw on his meat and he’d prolly cum in two seconds, he said, going through his things.

  She stood. He smelled a shirt from the locker and shoved it into his duffel.

  Fuck this, she said. She strode out and among the buses idling in the station, felt then how meager was her freedom, that no one worried over her.

  What about her mother and father?

  She was too busy crying to think of them. They would have ruined the perfect lonesomeness that she felt seeping into all her past—this was the story, she was always ever alone even at home—and her prospects too. She wyomed on the aluminum side of the bus and left swells of breath there. Riders watched her. A driver was behind her asking did she need any help, what was the matter, he could help figure it out. But she was embarrassed to have run out because she was a proud and independent girl, and said she was fine and paced among the rumbling, idling buses not yet going anywhere. She took a look at herself in the windows of the station. Her hair a shag, and she was wearing a blue ski jacket and a white denim skirt and how she looked was the only thing she had going on. When she went back inside the girl straddling Pomeroy spotted her right away and chewed on his ear and then said something into it. She was stunned. Not really jealous. Just surprised. She knew she looked better than this girl, who was at once used up and flush with youth. She had baby fat in her face and a small tire around her belly like she’d had children at a young age. Pomeroy leaned back to see Rose and called her over, and said, This is my old lady, Yolanda.

  I thought you didn’t have a girlfriend.

  Come off it.

  You can call me Yo, Yo said.

  She went back out to the buses again. She had fourteen dollars in her pocket. It wasn’t enough to go anywhere for real. Her legs were cold. At least it wasn’t raining. She made up her mind, but this time she really thought about what she wanted and what she had to do and what was the best thing between those two poles.

  Where did the three of them go?

  They rode to Seattle in a car that Yo had borrowed from an old homo named Jorge. They drove through a city like a gray and linear crystallization of the raw slab of clouds overhead. It was going on night when Yo killed the engine, let the car roll, and parked in front of a house on Capitol Hill. Yo said to just get out and not close the doors. Then Yo quietly clicked the car doors closed herself, and snuck up to the house. Pomeroy took Rose across the street.

  Jorge didn’t give her permission, did he?

  Pomeroy smiled. That Yo.

  The house was reached by a row of concrete steps that went up from the sidewalk, and Yo looked especially squat sneaking up them, slipping in the front door.

  Yo’s pretty, she said. Sounding his feelings about her, the depth of them.

  She has nice lips.

  And nice eyes.

  They’re slanty. She’s a little Eskimo or something.

  Yeah.

  Yolanda slunk down the stairs in her purple flats, slapping across the street to them. She said to walk, pointing up the street. She got between them and put her arms through theirs and they trundled down the hill, past the wrought-iron fences and Victorian houses, on into the night traffic at Highway 5, under the highway and into a liquor store. Street kids and castoffs and whatever miscreants had called out Hey Pomeroy! and Pomeroy sashayed for them and when he had his bottle, shared and shared alike with a group of slack kids drinking beer and smoking weed in a small lot on Thomas Street.

  That’s Dee and Jules and Custer and there’s Kenny and Curt, Yolanda said, and they nodded at her and checked her out. Yolanda turned her into the light and said, You look about like Sissy Spacek to me, but with darker skin tone, and Rose asked was she the coal miner’s daughter, and Yo said yep.

  A cop rolled past and no one hid the bottle. That was exhilarating.

  What’s happening tonight?

  The kids looked around as if something might be evident in their immediate surroundings and finally someone said they were thinking of heading t
o the Monastery later.

  The bottle had gotten to Rose. Someone had lit a joint and it was going around too. The Talking Heads hiccupped out of a passing car. One of them—Kenny—was a tall black kid who looked at her with vague intensity. She tugged on Yolanda’s arm, but Yolanda was talking to someone and just handed her a cigarette.

  You gonna drink from that or what, girl? Kenny asked her.

  She clutched the bottle to her mouth—it was heavy as a brick—and took a swallow and passed it on. Kenny kept his eyes on her, half-listening to Pomeroy.

  Yo headed off giggling with Dee and Jules, so Rose went over to Pomeroy’s side with a cigarette in her mouth and let him light it, and felt in her silence quite adult. Kenny offered her the joint, but she held up her cigarette to say she would smoke this instead. Again, adult. She tucked in under Pomeroy’s arm and murmured just loud enough for him to hear that she was cold. He let his arm go around her and nobody noticed her there, the slight thing. A soft bird she felt like. Not even Yolanda really noticed her when she came back—she just took the cigarette from her and dragged off it and gave it back, and then complained about the assholes on Pike, and told Dee and Jules to watch themselves down there.

  Let’s go, Pomeroy said.

  Did Pomeroy keep her under his arm all the way down Minor as they moved through the night in this bouncing, laughing pack, sometimes harassing passers-by for spare change and getting none because they didn’t conceal their happiness, even though they were to a person underfed and a little sick with inflamed lungs or swollen glands or limped a little on thin shoes and worn socks, and the girls flirted like they were the age they were and the boys were the grossest things they knew about, and the most pretty boy, Pomeroy, squeezing her close, so close, even Kenny who now looked a little jealous of Pomeroy with her under his arm the whole way did he keep her there?

  Yes. And Rose wondered did Yolanda care and wondered when she herself wouldn’t care, wouldn’t feel a hot spot in her chest and her arms go a little numb when Yolanda would kiss him again, which she surely would.

  And they passed a girl talking on a pay phone. The coiled metal cord in a loop under her bare arm, and the way she was or had been crying, her foot in its checkered sneaker on the glass, and her fist on the glass.

  Was the girl talking to her daddy?

  Rose thought maybe she was.

  Was there a dull thudding of music and purple lights from the bell tower, from this white clapboard church on the corner of Boren and Stewart throbbing within?

  Like some kind of demented midnight mass. The lot filled with cars and milling kids.

  What is this? she asked.

  The Monastery, Yo said.

  Bearded ladies came through the lot in pink tutus and wands and sparkling blue and green eye shadow, footing steadily on shaven monkey legs in heels across the littered lot. Nigh a parade of apish slatterns and ladyboys and mustached musclemen in denim and sport socks. A lesbian sauntered by in a zoot suit. And milling all about them like fruit flies were these street kids in ski jackets and sweaters, dressed for the cold. The steady pulse of disco and Pomeroy peeled his arm off Rose and strode to the front step.

  Where’s he going? Rose asked. She felt unsafe without Pomeroy, unchaperoned.

  Yo pulled her aside and gave her another cigarette. They shared it awhile before they spoke, Rose’s eyes flashing from time to time at the door. Yo sat on the hood of an old Cadillac and beckoned Rose up there and they perched together, passing the smoke and watching the new arrivals dash around. They looked as young as twelve, some of them. They wore hooded sweatshirts and some were done up in cheap costumes, cardboard wings and tiaras and halos of tinfoil and other such getups as you might find at a school play. They shrieked and clutched one another in hysterics, in greeting. Everything was amplified. The music, the lights, these outlandish children.

  See? Yo said. It’s all right. Everybody around here is cool. Everybody knows everybody.

  Rose folded her legs under her and sat full on the hood of the car. She was so thin now that she didn’t dent the hood.

  You don’t have to go with me and Pom. You find some other people you want to hang with, that’s cool.

  Oh, I like you guys fine, she said meaningfully. A skosh of worry in it. Really, I like you and Pomeroy a lot. I’m not jealous of you two or nothing.

  Yo exhaled smoke and smiled.

  We like you.

  You do?

  Yeah. I knew I would from the way Pom was telling me about you. It could be weird or it could be cool, and with Pom it’s always cool.

  Rose didn’t know what to say or to ask.

  You want a beer?

  Yes.

  Yo ran off. Rose rubbed her legs. Yo returned with a number of girls and they gave Rose beer from a sack, Yo making introductions, the girls checking Rose out. The night turned cold as they spoke about people Rose didn’t know and places she hadn’t been.

  And when Pomeroy came back out, a few hours later, pink in the eyes, and aweave in his foot placement, and grinning, colliding gently into the coterie of girls around the car, what did he do?

  He threw up, nearly on Kenny. A short bolt of laughter escaped Rose that she clipped off when Kenny looked to see who it was.

  Yolanda took him off through the lot and Rose hurried after. They dropped next to a chain-link fence that jangled where Pomeroy fell into it, laughing himself. It was moist in the weeds from the nightdew.

  I’m cold, Rose said.

  Too much beers, Pomeroy muttered. I’m about like to trip out.

  He had to arc up his ass to get his hand into his jeans pocket—Rose resisted the urge to touch his naked stomach—and pull out a plastic Baggie. The light on it fairly glowed white and illicit in the dark.

  Was it coke?

  No.

  Was it MDA?

  Maybe.

  What was it?

  What it was was Yolanda taking a sniff off a matchbook and shaking her head and handing the Baggie to Rose who looked at it and then over among the cars where there was a scuffle happening and then toward the street and then back into the Baggie and taking it up like she’s seen Yolanda do.

  What it was was a sweet knife of tingling and then a slow drip of jitters, and handing it back to Pomeroy who was vaguely nearby asking for it and the sound of him taking a short blast and saying oh man and hot rushes up and down her arms that she imagined was Braille, some text in her body, but was only goose bumps.

  What it was was Yolanda laughing and standing and Rose was up and standing and walking as liquid blurs slithered past.

  What it was was they were in the Monastery now. Pomeroy had her by the wrist as they birthed themselves again and again through the wet and heated throng. A strobe froze each posture in giddy eternities, a mandarin and a geisha with elongated faces. Sparkling beards. Howling caryatids of pale shirtless boys. Dark gauntlets. What it was was an arm thrown round her shoulder and pulling her up under her armpit to bounce, and Rose lost Pomeroy’s grip and gave over to the mass of arms and sweat and stomp. Completely naked men on the speakers, the small gyre of their cocks as they danced. She was hefted up, passed from fag to fag and deposited in a bank of airline seats.

  She could not stop laughing.

  A furry animal tossed up and down in the lap of the man next to her.

  She tapped his arm. He didn’t look over.

  You have something there! she yelled.

  The man opened his eyes and smiled at her and said, Yes, yes I do.

  She looked again and the man clutched the animal and it was a human head giving him head. There was a bottle under her. She unscrewed the cap and drank hot fire and nearly threw up. She stood and heaved herself back into the mass. Disappeared into it.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Pinkerton had met Pearl at a loggers’ swap meet in the Idaho woods. He was undercover, had been coming and going in the area for the past three months by the name of Joe Stacks. He’d done odd jobs—every man was a handyman up h
ere—and lived in a cabin the ATF had bought just the other side of the Montana border in Boundary County, Idaho. He’d gone to the meetup with a swarthy dimwit by the name of Ruffin, a big-talking hyperactive conspiracy freak.

  This is where he meets Pearl, a country roundup where the folks in the region trade stories and sell chain saws, rhubarb, and crafts made of pie tin and rope. There was nothing inherently political about the gathering, just rumors that so-and-so was Posse Comitatus, Truppe Schweigen. Or not. And among the people Ruffin introduced Stacks to was one Jeremiah Pearl. The real deal, Ruffin says. Tribulation-ready, Race War–ready. Set up to handle the National Guard, the Shit-Covered Fan, the feds, the unraveling of the social compact.

  Pearl introduces the missus, the kids. Missus is rubber-gloved to the elbows stirring a pot of preserves over a campfire. Grins wanly, waves. A quiet, serious woman. Gorgeous kids, knees as ruddy as red apples. They sit arrayed around Pearl in the pickup bed like a kinder court. The baby boy in Pearl’s lap and little Paula and Ben right close, and Ruth and Esther sitting beside him and the oldest boy, Jacob, standing on the ground between where his father’s legs dangle off the tailgate. It was like Pearl drew some strength from the brood, the way they climbed on him, the way he goosed them.

  Joe Stacks, Pearl says. That’s an interesting name. Asks is it a nickname.

  Pinkerton says No, no it isn’t. Asks does Pearl want to see his driver’s license.

  Pearl says not unless you’re in need of someone to cut it up for you. Smiles.

  Pinkerton’s bosses want informants. The Truppe Schweigen did the synagogue job in Portland, blew the front wall and doors into kibble, killed three. Pinkerton is to run down every last lead, even though he knows Ruffin and Pearl aren’t involved with anything. Ruffin’s a dipshit, and Pearl, he’s got all those kids. It’s just obvious that he loves his family too much to get into that kind of trouble. But the ATF wants somebody inside, inside of something, anything. It’s a pissing contest anyway, the Department of Treasury vying with the FBI. The ATF wants somebody up fucking in there. Yesterfuckingday.