Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451)

by Henderson, Smith

  Pete put her to bed himself, and sat on the floor next to her and petted her hair. He found it incredibly difficult to leave her side. When he closed the door behind him and went down the hall, he couldn’t help feeling like he’d forgotten something in the room where she was. He even patted his pockets.

  He wanted her. For a moment he even entertained the idea. She could live with him in his cabin.

  “You okay?” Cloninger called from the easy chair in his living room, and Pete was startled, as if caught out at something suspicious. He grinned sheepishly and said he’d better be going.

  Cloninger joined him in the foyer, and inspected a loose coat hook made of antelope antler and tightened it to the one-by-four in which it and several other coat hooks were affixed. The hooks were waist-high and homemade by Cloninger himself for his children.

  “You don’t look so hot, Pete.”

  Pete grinned again, looked at his shoes, and scratched behind his ear.

  “I’ve been better.”

  Cloninger asked if it was the drug raid that was on his mind. Getting arrested. It’d been in the little Tenmile paper, talked about on the porches and storefront galleries. His name.

  “Oh sure,” Pete said, as if to say his arrest was but one of many things bothering him.

  Cloninger clasped his hands together below his belt buckle, as though expecting Pete to say more, but Pete did not.

  “We’re getting a few more crazies every year,” Cloninger offered. “But don’t you forget that you’re about the only one who’s up here helping out. The kids especially.”

  “You help too.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  Out the screen door and across the road, the forest was alive with wind, pine limbs waving in all directions like a distressed band of tree people.

  “A lot of folks come up here to get away,” Pete said. “I know I did. But most of us just wind up bringing our particular trouble with us.”

  Cloninger nodded gravely, even though Pete was trying to joke.

  “I’s more talking about guys like that Jeremiah Pearl we had living up there,” Cloninger said, pointing a thumb up the dirt road that ran past his house and toward Fourth of July Creek.

  Pete’s mouth fell open. He could kick himself for not asking Cloninger earlier. If things hadn’t gone south with Cecil, if he’d just visited to patch things up—

  “You know the Pearls?”

  “Oh sure. He and his family’d come down. Supper or to work on his truck or something. We’d run up there from time to time too. Helped roof his house.”

  “Fuck.”

  Cloninger pursed his mouth. Pete apologized.

  “Sorry. I just should’ve asked you sooner,” Pete said. “So you know the whole family.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you have any idea where they are now? The wife and the other kids, I mean.”

  “They talked about heading to Alaska after he and his wife were arrested.”

  “They told you about that?”

  Cloninger laughed.

  “It was about the only subject of interest to Jeremiah. But they ain’t up at their place now, are they?”

  Pete explained how Benjamin had wandered into a school. Just the boy alone. He told Cloninger how he’d managed to get Pearl to trust him enough to let Pete check on them, but not enough to tell him where the rest of his family was.

  “That’s strange,” Cloninger said.

  “Why?”

  “You don’t think it’s strange?”

  “Yes, of course I do. When was the last time you saw them?”

  Cloninger gazed up toward the brim of his John Deere cap, trying to remember.

  “A couple weeks after he and Sarah had been arrested, I reckon. Pearl brought an elk he poached down to butcher. The whole lot of them come down because our storage freezer had about ten inches of ice built up in it, and Sarah and her kids set what all was in the freezer out on the garage floor and then she put ’em all to work chipping ice out of it.”

  Cloninger hit Pete on the shoulder with the back of his fingers, amused at something.

  “They even made snow cones. Got some of them paper oil-change funnels I had laying around and chipped ice into ’em and shook a little Kool-Aid from the packet. Presto.”

  “And this is when they said they were going to Alaska.”

  “Oh, I dunno. That was just something they was liable to say. Maybe it was that time, maybe another.”

  Just then there was a noise from the back of the house—a bump, a voice—and Mrs. Cloninger got up from her sewing machine at the kitchen table and went to check on the children.

  “Step outside with me a minute?” Pete asked. “I don’t want Katie to know I’m still here.”

  Cloninger opened the screen door for them and they went out and crossed the yard to the gate and then through it to where the judge’s car was parked. The American flag whipped in the wind. A thunderstorm was coming on, and a churned gray wave of clouds banked and bunched over the mountains. A tumult of thunder within them grumbled throughout the racing air.

  “So when was this?” Pete nearly shouted over the wind. “When you saw them, I mean.”

  Cloninger started to take down his flag, the pulley knocking against the flagpole like a bell tone.

  “Spring before last. Maybe April. We didn’t hear from them after that. It was probably almost fall when me and the kids drove up to see how they was doing. The place looked cleared out. Everything grown over. No vehicles. The windows all dusted up. The wife, she kept a clean house, so we knew they’d been gone awhile.”

  Cloninger unhooked the flag and nodded for Pete to take up the end with the stars. They folded the flag in half lengthwise.

  “They didn’t say anything about their plans? What they were going to do about the court case or anything?”

  “Fold it in half again.”

  Pete did, and then Cloninger took one corner on his end and neatly folded it over.

  “They didn’t say they had any plans. It was a good day. The kids played together. Pearl got his elk butchered and put in the freezer and we cooked up some steaks.”

  Cloninger folded the flag corner by corner until he arrived at Pete and then took the flag from him and folded it into a tight triangle and tucked it under his arm.

  “You might be the last one who saw them before they cleared out,” Pete said.

  “I s’pose so.”

  Cloninger shifted the flag under his other arm.

  “Is there anything you remember about that last visit?”

  “Not really.”

  “Any fights or discussions—”

  “The younger boy, Benjamin, got in a heap of trouble with his mama. He was watching TV with Toby. The Pearls don’t allow TV. No cartoons or nothing. She paddled him and made him sit out here on the fence, and he didn’t get a snow cone. That was about the high drama of the day.”

  A limb cracked somewhere in the woods, and the wind sounded all around like a great surf. Cloninger clapped Pete on the shoulder.

  “Well, better get out of this before it rains.”

  “Sure. Thanks again for taking Katie.”

  They shook.

  “I should thank you. We’ll keep her. Long as you need. We got her.”

  “I’ll check back.”

  Pete climbed in the Monte Carlo. Compared to the mess of his own car, the inside of the judge’s vehicle seemed almost naked. Pellets of rain spotted the dusty hood and windshield. Cloninger was now coming back out of the house, jogging toward the drive. Pete started to get out.

  “Is Katie asking for me—?”

  “Nah,” Cloninger said. “I just remembered something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I saw the boy. Benjamin. After the last time.”

  “Where?”

  “He come down for something. Just him. A cup of sugar, like. But not that. Something for his mama, he said. Some herb or something. Like Epsom salts, but not that.”
r />   “Just him?”

  “Yeah. It was honey maybe? Something like that. I’ll have to ask the missus.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Hold on.”

  “What?”

  Cloninger looked at the churned sky, frowned.

  “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  “It’s all right. Call me if you remember.”

  Cloninger lit up. The sky cracked open and started to dump on them, pounding on the car, the woods, and Cloninger’s roof and drive.

  “Oil!” Cloninger shouted.

  “Oil?”

  “He said his mama wanted olive oil!”

  And when he was sure Pete heard him, Cloninger slapped the hood and ran inside.

  When did she realize that Pomeroy would make a whore of her?

  By the time she got back from the Safeway with the dye, a loaf of bread, and a carton of cigarettes. She stopped in the middle of the stairwell, saying to herself you’re so stupid. A heavy door some floors below opened and closed. She left the groceries on the floor. She sat across from the Golden Arms on the curb.

  A few minutes later Pomeroy was outside, shivering in his short sleeves, crossing the street right for her.

  This was as far as I was gonna look. Yo said to go after you, but I was just gonna walk around and tell her I couldn’t find you.

  I wanna talk to Yo.

  Fine. She’s right up there. Talk your fuckin head off. I’m going to the bar.

  She marched up the stairs and found Yo making a sandwich.

  I’m not doing it. Not what you do.

  Yo put down the knife and leaned against the counter.

  No one asked you to.

  I’ll do something else.

  Okay.

  I’m afraid Pom’s gonna kick me out.

  You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Yo said.

  You don’t sound like you mean it.

  Yo shrugged and started eating.

  Did she panhandle down along the waterfront and inside the Pike Place Market, a little cup in front of her?

  Yes. And the old men who worked those plum spots ran her off, and she found herself talking to a cop at an on-ramp to I-5, asking her what the hell she thought she was doing working that intersection. The cop himself calling what she did work.

  So she found herself down between Second and First streets with the other panhandling kids and the young hookers, the old buskers who caterwauled over four-string guitars like outraged leprechauns. People who slunk into the night with huge boom boxes and strutted for one another, watching unbothered when the paramedics rolled up and tended to a freshly wounded girl who screamed and denied herself care until the pigs showed up and forced her into the ambulance.

  Can’t they see a girl was raped? Can’t they see her date took a tire iron to her? Why they gotta make her say it? Yo would ask, and Rose would not know the answer or what Yo was expecting her to say.

  Did she see when Pomeroy barreled up the block and knocked the shit out of some street rat named Vince for trying to roll Yo five weeks before? Did he come out of nowhere while Rose was hitting up strangers for nickels and dimes and take Vince by the hair and slam his face into a light pole to the surprise and muted evasion of all the civilians coming out of the fish market?

  And when the cops were coming, she took him by the hand and moved him off a ways, sitting him on the curb, and then sat herself on his lap, commencing to make out with him so that the cops didn’t think he was the one who’d left the street rat bloody and knocked out there on the ground.

  Did Pomeroy ask if she had any money?

  She left her cup over on the sidewalk and it was filched and long gone.

  I forgot it when I saw you. I just came running over. I was trying to help you.

  You know how to help me, he said, and he strode away.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Cecil had been living in a canvas tent with three other boys, digging trails and putting in fence under the direction of a ranch manager who was not employed by Montana Corrections, but rather worked for a friend of the warden and who had for years used the young men at Pine Hills as a private labor force. Those chosen for this detail were considered lucky. Fresh air and three squares. They were offered a cigarette every evening just after supper, and hot coffee, bacon, and eggs at dawn. The property was bordered by a dry creek bed just outside of Box Elder with the Rocky Boy Reservation on the other side. They worked miles from anything except coyotes, gophers, scrub brush, and the few dilapidated trailers and corrugated shacks that dotted the chalky wasteland reservation to the east.

  The other three boys were Indians or half-Indians and shared a laconic humor that Cecil couldn’t penetrate, and were in any case not disposed to proffer him any kindness. Cecil had by now acquired a reputation for viciousness, and was considered in the small violent society within the institution to be something of a comer, a real hard case who didn’t give a fuck. The Indians called him No Fuck, he said it so much. Cecil called them stupid prairie niggers, and if they’d been inside, he would’ve been obliged to fight them all. But the boys worked in the hammering summer sun all day chopping at the hillsides with pickaxes and shovels while the ranch manager watched them from the shade of his pickup. By bedtime they promptly passed out, and at dawn their backs ached from nape to asshole and they were sore everywhere else.

  There was also a straw boss on the ranch, a kid about their age. He had a contempt for Cecil and the Indians born most likely of a significant wonder of what it was they’d done to wind up here. He supervised their efforts from his horse. He chewed tobacco, spitting poorly so that his blue shirtsleeve was constantly stained. The Indians quietly joked that he wiped his ass with his shirt cuff.

  The straw boss, this nephew or some relation to the owner of the property, asked Cecil what the Indians were saying about him. Cecil told him. The next day, the straw boss didn’t chew any tobacco and looked at the Indians like he dared them to say anything. Come late morning, they obliged him with some muttering and small trickles of laughter.

  “What did those fuckin Indians say?” the straw boss asked Cecil.

  “I didn’t hear,” Cecil said.

  The kid rode up and asked them did they want to go back to the prison, he could arrange for that, and when they looked at him with faintly disguised indifference, he rode off to visit the ranch manager, who was dozing in his pickup a half mile away. They all watched the kid ride his horse up to the truck and then lean over and talk with the foreman. Then the pickup started up and crossed the uneven earth to where they stood by a pile of fence posts. It seemed the boom was about to come down, the way the manager exited the pickup and slammed the door and hiked his belt and marched at them bandy-legged and swole up. But the ranch manager was utterly unequipped to deal with bickering boys, was in fact astonished that these kids had any time at all to mess around talking, much less arguing, and it was immediately evident that he was as disgusted with the straw boss as with any of them.

  He checked their progress on the fence. He asked Cecil to show him how he was using the posthole digger. Before Cecil could finish, the man snatched the tool from him and demonstrated a few tips toward using it more efficiently, as though that were the source of all the trouble. Then he got back in the truck and watched them return to work.

  The straw boss sat on his horse, seething.

  That night, the straw boss sent the Indians to bed early. Alone with his one white prisoner, he said his name was Jeremy.

  “Do you want to escape?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “We can take the pickup. It’s mine to inherit anyway,” he whispered over the fire. “All this property belonged to my daddy before he died and my uncle took over. He acts like it’s his, but it’s mine. But he can fuckin have it. I hate it out here. I hate fuckin Indians especially.”

  He spat, wiped his lip with his finger, wiped his finger in the dirt.

  “Do you have anywhere we could light out
to?”

  The spikes of campfire stabbed at the dark as Cecil contemplated this plot and this would-be coconspirator.

  “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “What is?”

  “Two of us against them three insubordinate Indians,” he said. “Only a matter of time before the dirty fuckers slit our throats.”

  Cecil pokerfaced his skepticism.

  “You just wait, friend,” Jeremy said.

  At last, Cecil said that yeah he had a place they could go. But the next day Pete showed up and took him to Tenmile for his mother’s funeral.

  It was two weeks to get the necessary paperwork filled out and the approval for Cecil to attend the service. Pete had to ask Judge Dyson to call the Kalispell morgue to keep Debbie’s body on ice, then to transfer it to the Libby morgue, then for the Libby morgue to hold on to it for another few days. Ultimately, none of this was necessary as there was no grave plot for her and she had to be cremated in Missoula anyway. Her ashes hadn’t even been returned in time for the small service in the Tenmile funeral home. Her brother Elliot sent flowers and a note that curtly informed Pete that he and his wife wouldn’t take either of Debbie’s children.

  Only Cloninger, Katie, Cecil, and Pete attended the service. Katie sat with Cloninger, resting her head on his arm. When Cloninger gave Cecil his condolences, the boy suggested he go fuck himself. Katie put her hand inside Cloninger’s to take back his attention and shot her brother a quick raspberry.

  The reverend said a few words about redemption and what a trial Debbie’s life was. Her childhood in Colorado and a variety of military bases in California and Texas and how she settled in Tenmile with a man who’d run out on her and her children. He’d gotten the biography from Pete, but even Pete wasn’t sure how much of it was true and wondered if Debbie was telling lies to the very last.

  The reverend invited anyone to say anything about her, share a memory or funny story. There were no such stories. Cecil blew out a long sigh. Pete stood, pushed his hair out of his eyes, and said she was trying to get her life together, she was always at least trying. Katie cleaved to Cloninger and cried some. Cecil didn’t show the slightest distress, save looking toward the door, as if someone coming for him was about to enter or so that he might flee at the first opportune moment during the service.