Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451)

by Henderson, Smith

  “The one who murdered his mother and brothers and sisters? That father?”

  Pete handed Pinkerton some papers from his dash.

  “Pearl didn’t kill his kids. She did it. The mother.”

  Pinkerton read the first page, looked at Pete.

  “Lister . . .”

  “Listeriosis. It’s a disease. They got it from eating contaminated ice chips from a freezer. Probably from deer blood according to the doctor. What you have there is a description of the symptoms.”

  Pinkerton read.

  “It had to be something in the ice. Pearl and Benjamin were the only ones who didn’t eat the ice chips.” He watched Pinkerton read. “You hear of people getting sick from deer blood. But with listeriosis, you get all sorts of nasty shit. Read the next section on meningitis.”

  Pinkerton flipped the pages.

  “Jesus.”

  He told Pinkerton what happened. How Pearl went for a doctor and she, feverish and paranoid, took the kids outside, shot them one by one, before killing herself.

  Pinkerton covered his eyes.

  “Jesus. The kid told you this? He saw his own mother—”

  “He needs therapy. Let’s get him out of a motel room and with some real people.”

  “I told them.” Pinkerton tossed the papers onto the dash. Then he punched it. “Goddamnit! I told them Pearl wasn’t anybody. We never should’ve built a case. . . .”

  “Just go, then. Shut it down.”

  Pinkerton wasn’t listening to him. He picked the papers back up, read them again.

  “You’re losing,” Pete said. “You’re making more enemies than friends out here as it is. Get your guys to draw down.”

  Pinkerton chuckled morosely.

  “What?”

  “You’re talking like this is up to me, Pete. Or anyone.”

  “Someone’s in charge.”

  “That’d be Jeremiah Pearl. And he wants to die up here. And for some reason we’re unable to not oblige him.”

  They watched it rain.

  “Can he live through the winter, you think?” Pinkerton asked. “Christ, I don’t wanna spend Christmas up here. I got kids too—”

  “Can I have the boy or not?”

  Pete carried Ben’s bags to the car. The federal agents had given him sacks of toys, unopened packets of race cars and action figures.

  They sat in the car a minute. Pete didn’t know exactly what to do with him. Or he knew exactly what to do with him, which for the first time made him uneasy. Because he wanted to do something else. He kept wanting to take these kids home. An urge to atone for Rachel.

  “Are we going to see Papa?”

  “He’s not . . . I don’t know where he is.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s still out there. People are trying to find him. Trying to get him to come in.”

  “He won’t.”

  “I know.”

  “So where are we going?”

  Pete gripped the wheel. Turned to face the boy, his coat groaning against the leather upholstery. He didn’t want to be in this priesthood anymore.

  “If you had a choice, would you rather stay at Cloninger’s or . . . ?”

  Take him, Pete thought. Take him to your home . . .

  “Or what?”

  . . . your shitty little apartment over the bar where you get pasted every night.

  “Never mind. The other thing won’t work.”

  The boy tucked his new tennis shoes under his corduroy pants. His oversize ski jacket engulfed him.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “You look like a tortoise in that coat.”

  “It’s warm.”

  “You all right with staying at the Cloningers’?”

  “Will Papa know I’m there?”

  “I’ll tell him when he turns up.”

  “I dunno.”

  “I’ll do everything I can. Anything I can. If I can get him to you, I will.”

  The boy looked hard at him.

  “You fuckin promise?”

  “I fuckin promise.”

  He faced forward. In profile, the child looked older.

  “You ready?”

  The boy nodded. Somehow he was.

  THIRTY-SIX

  He visited the Cloningers. Benjamin and Katie had settled in nicely, Katie more so. Benjamin wouldn’t even enter the living room where the television was. Wouldn’t play with the toys. The missus had him at multiplication and reading the Bible, and besides that he would go out and watch the animals hours at a stretch and not really play so much as tolerate the play going on around him.

  They walked through the snow in the pasture, the sun hammering their eyes squinted shut. The kid turtled up into his great red coat. They arrived at the creek, water tumbling under the sheen of ice. Ben stood at the water’s edge, his hood up, remote. His breath on the air.

  “What’s gonna happen to me, Pete?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How’s he gonna find me?”

  “He has to come out of the mountains first.”

  “Where will we go? Where will we live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He shoved his hands into his coat and burrowed deeper into it.

  “Maybe . . . I was thinking if you wanted, we could try you living with me,” Pete said, but Ben had already started back for the house and if he heard Pete’s offer, he didn’t care.

  Winter was sudden, the snowfall fat and heavy. The judge called Pete to come shovel his roof before the whole thing caved in. Believing that the Monte Carlo entitled him to Pete’s labor. Pete was hot and coatless and in the perfect quiet of the day wondered where everybody went. Then the judge emerged from inside and told him to hurry up, he wanted to get to Tenmile for a drink.

  All that remained of the federal presence was a skeleton crew of agents who sipped coffee in the Sunrise and read newspapers they had sent from back east. A fool calling himself a bounty hunter came and chatted up the old boys at the counter, and soon they were mutually flattering one another.

  When Pete sat, the waitress asked was the judge joining him for lunch. He told her to bring two coffees just to be safe, and when she did, he stirred in creamer and listened to the bounty hunter tell lies. Pete ate lunch listening to the badinage, paid, and asked the waitress to tell the judge to come get him at his apartment.

  He’d just lain down when the judge knocked at his door.

  But it wasn’t the judge. Some wild-eyed vagrant stared back at him, clothed in too-large miner’s coveralls. The man’s face was splotched red in places with gin blossoms or bad chilblains under a trucker’s hat.

  “Jeremiah,” Pete whispered.

  “Where’s Benjamin?”

  “Come in.”

  “My son, Pete.”

  “He’s fine. He’s safe.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. Come in and sit down.”

  Pete threw wide his door and went and sat at the little table in the middle of the studio apartment.

  Pearl stepped inside, closed the door, and inspected the room. Opened the broom closet, the bathroom. Studied the street through the window, flush to the wall. Then pulled down the blinds and sat. He didn’t look like Pearl at all. His viscous naked face shone with sweat. Where it didn’t glow nearly red from what must’ve been a crude and rushed shave with an old razor and creek water was stippled gunmetal blue. The coveralls were coated in vermiculite dust, and he must’ve grabbed them off some miner’s back step or pickup.

  “You’re going to take me to my son.”

  He produced a .38 from inside his pocket.

  “Jeremiah, I know what Sarah did.”

  Pearl’s beardless face gave Pete access to a startling gout of disordered thoughts. Anger. Racing fear. Then a brittle conviction. Pearl closed his eyes. A long time. Pete could’ve taken the gun.

  “They were sick and you were going for help. She thought they’d been poisoned and she—”

/>   Pearl’s eyes snapped open.

  “They were poisoned,” he hissed. “How does every one of them get so sick like that . . . ?”

  The thought guttered out like a candle. Like an old lie. They sat facing one another for a long time, as though at a card game that had taken a strange turn, and neither one quite knew the rules. Then Pearl leveled the pistol at Pete’s face, looking almost surprised at this outcome himself.

  “Take me to my son.”

  Pete thought he’d be scared in such a moment as this, if it ever came. But he wasn’t. Whatever fear nested in him dissipated the moment Pearl lifted the gun.

  “Taking you to him, right now, like this,” Pete said, “would go against everything that’s sacred to me.”

  “I will kill you.”

  “I know what it’s like, Jeremiah. Losing a kid. I know some of your pain. I’d do anything to get Rachel home. So I understand you, but I will not hand over your boy at gunpoint.”

  Pete stood slowly and wasn’t killed. And he wasn’t killed when he fetched out the black case and the box and carried them onto the table. Pearl sat with the pistol in his palm and watched Pete open the case, set up the projector, and thread in the film. Pete told him he’d asked his mother-in-law if he could borrow these. Pete didn’t look at Pearl as he turned out the lights, nor when he flipped on the projector. A square of white on the bare wall over his bed and then the children. Out of focus and waving. With Sarah in a green canoe on a stony shore. Little feet off the edge of a dock. Pearl himself in cannonball. Holding a Coke. Holding a cigarette, no, a piece of chalk, that he uses to trace the shapes of his children on the pink wall of a quarry. Their outlines. Their faces so close now. Their very freckles. A campfire, a snake in a bucket, a reaching hand. A motorcycle burns rubber, Sarah waves the smoke away from the baby—

  The film slaps the projector. The fan. The glowing white square in the wall.

  Pete threads in another film.

  A baby bottle. Sacks of candy. A baptism in a flashing river.

  Every lovely silliness composed of light, every good coin of time in Pearl’s life.

  It is dark out when they’ve finished the box. Pete turns off the projector and the fan quits, leaving them in a novel quiet. Pete opens the shades to let in a little streetlight, winter’s stillnesses.

  “You weren’t sure. You argued. As the kids got sicker. You wanted to take them to the hospital.”

  Pearl turns his head and looks out the window. He says her name.

  Sarah.

  That is all. Just her name.

  “When you saw your baby boy was dead, you quit arguing, and you went to get a doctor.”

  “I wanted, I wanted . . .” Pearl touches his chest with his fingertips and then lets fall his hand into his lap. “I couldn’t put all those sick kids in the bed of the pickup. They weren’t . . . they couldn’t . . . Esther’s neck was so stiff, she couldn’t move her head and . . .”

  Pearl takes a deep breath and a single sob falls out of him like an ingot thudding on the table. He breathes unevenly, like the air won’t take.

  “You didn’t think she’d do that, Jeremiah. You never thought that. How would you?”

  Pearl is leaning forward, whispering. As though the opinions he has are secrets. He whispers that he still loves her, can you believe that, after what she’s done. That he misses her yet. His helpmeet. His one. That if she walked in the door right now, even now, he’d sit with her and start over with her. Whispers how pathetic that is. How evil. He whispers he misses his children, that of course he misses his children. He’s failed his children. He’d as killed them himself. That he doesn’t deserve them. Because of her. Because of a love that does not see madness.

  “My God,” he says. He takes his head in his hands and kneads it like a foreign object, some tumor he must get the feel of, that he might remove with his bare hands.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if I were you—”

  Pearl looks startled, alarmed to be here. He sweeps himself up. He turns in the apartment, still holding his head like a person in thrall of migraine, someone insane with auditory hallucinations. He leans over to vomit but nothing comes up as he seizes. He keeps bending over into empty retching.

  “Jeremiah, it’s okay.”

  It is through wasted eyes, red and scalded round, like he’d been all this time staring into a white sun, that Pearl at last sees him. The man is burned through, cauterized, a scar, and for all that, familiar as whatever it is Pete sees in any mirror. Pearl is Snow is himself is everyone.

  When he went to look, did he sob there and ask her why? And did he hold her yet?

  Or did he bound into the night? Did he rend his shirt? Did he hear his own strangled sobs and sorrow echoing off the shallow mountainsides? Did the pine martens and hares flee his screams?

  Did he run up a fallen log and squat there and hold his knees like he would explode if he let them go?

  Did he search his heart and ask what he’d done? Did he wonder was the universe a cruelty?

  And did he put the children in the cellar alone or did Benjamin help him?

  Did they roll the stones and how long did it take?

  Were they still doing it even now?

  For this were they chose out?

  Chose out for this?

  For this?

  This?

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Pete’s brother stood some ways off, showing Jeremiah Pearl the teepee that he and the boy would live in. Pearl walked around the structure, looking off into the trees, the area around, warily. Luke beckoned him into the tent and he smiled back at Pete and the boy, and took Pearl inside.

  “My brother’s a pretty nice guy,” Pete said.

  Ben sat on the back porch next to him. The sky was heavy with dark clouds and it rained a lot here, but things could be gotten used to.

  “Will you visit?”

  “Of course.”

  “When?”

  “Sometimes. I’ll just come out.”

  He put a piece of grass in his teeth.

  “Papa looks weird.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I want him to grow it back.”

  “Maybe he will. Think you’ll like it here?”

  “I dunno.”

  “I think you will.”

  “Do you have to go right away?”

  “Later. I got a long drive back to Montana.”

  “Can we play checkers?”

  “I think the board is still in the car,” Pete said.

  The kid scampered around the house. Pete was alone a moment, the heel of his palm against his eye. The other heel, the other eye. Pete removed his hands and the gray sky shuddered in his vision, a dread pulsing of his blood, his ichor. He turned and there was the boy inside the back door, profoundly alive, saying the board was on the table. To come inside and play.

  EPILOGUE

  Pete drove by the camp twice before he spotted the car, the green tarp deep in the ninebark. An early spring cold front bore down, and when he walked off the main road above them and down through the brush to where they were parked they didn’t hear him in the wind. The man stood and then the woman when they saw him. Their unsmiling mouths looked like they’d been hacked into a flat and uncomplicated wariness by a dull knife. Their boy sat a few yards away in fine sand by the water, and a silent infant lay in a stroller held level by a stone where a wheel was missing. A tarp stretched out from the back of the station wagon and was tethered to a couple of trees. A thin fire in the fire pit burned clear and orange, and a pair of fishing poles against the tree suggested how they got by.

  “Howdy,” Pete said.

  “Howdy,” said the woman and the man both, and they looked at each other as if they’d already done something they hadn’t intended and needed to look at one another to remind the other of the plan or contingency.

  “My name’s Pete. Just right up front, let me tell you I’m not a police officer or anything like that, and the last thing I
want to do is cause you any trouble.”

  They looked at each other again, and then the man said, “Okay.”

  Pete took out his badge.

  “This says I’m with the Department of Family Services for the State of Montana.”

  At this the woman covered her mouth. The man set his hands on his hips as Pete came forward. Pete showed the badge to both of them and they looked at it and nodded, the woman still covering her mouth. The man and boy had upshot hair, and when he got closer they smelled of kerosene and trout. The woman uncovered her haggard downslung mouth and wiped her eyes.

  “So we got a call that there might be some folks staying down here.”

  “What call?” the man asked.

  “Just someone who seen you down here,” Pete told him.

  “Who was it?”

  “It was anonymous. I just get the information to check out the situation.”

  “Because we haven’t bothered anybody,” the woman said with a voice that crackled with shame. She had by now gotten close to her husband and wrapped her arm around his, and looked back at the boy who was sitting by the fire with a toy truck watching to see what would happen next.

  “I’m sure you haven’t bothered anyone,” Pete said. “Looks to me like you are making out fine here. It’s just when there’s a call it means somebody’s concerned—”

  “Why are they concerned?”

  The man seemed genuinely surprised that someone would look upon this situation as odd.

  “Mind if I have a look around?” Pete asked.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Pete stepped over to the fire. The boy watched him. The mother went nearby, which Pete took as a good sign. Protective. He squatted down. The boy had no marks other than an old scratch on his arm. It was cool, but he was in a vest, shoes and socks.

  “Hi,” Pete said warmly, stirring the fire with a stick and then tossing the stick onto the coals.

  The kid mutely stood and went to his mother and grabbed her leg.

  “How old?” he asked the mother.

  “This one’s four and the little one is eighteen months,” she answered. “Do we need to go somewhere else?”

  Pete stood.