Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451)

by Henderson, Smith

  They drive on. It’s too hot to even muse. The children doze through a short cataract of rain, a rough draft of a storm. When they wake, they bicker. The mother has migraines along with her visions, and the children’s voices are like trumpet blasts, the wind a plague of static in her ears. Her mind becomes a slide of falling boulders, and all at once she’s gripping his arm, telling him to pull over. She runs barefoot over the sharp macadam and up a berm to retch and roll onto her back in a brief respite. She casts up her eyes and sees a baleful gray skein of movement that at first she takes for geese or ducks in flight but which turn in her painful gaze into a field of hammers. A sky full of hammers. The pounding behind her eyes begins anew.

  Jeremiah helps her back to the car.

  Gassing up in Sioux Falls, she pumps down the window and calls for him, and thrusts out her hand, fingers bloody to the palm. He is alarmed, of course, wondering what fresh evil is this.

  She hasn’t menstruated in over a year. A little spotting some months between miscarriages, not enough to even keep any pads in the house. She was a different woman the last time she had an honest-to-God flow. They were a different family then. They didn’t observe the Law. Back then they didn’t know any better. But now they know that she cannot be among the children and her husband as she is unclean.

  She says for Jeremiah to get her to a hotel. She sits alone in her room and bleeds. She ponders the sky full of hammers. She listens to her children splash in the pool and calls Jeremiah on the phone next door. He worries. They are almost out of cash. They will need to sell some of the gold. She says the money doesn’t matter, how they are all going to have to go through these tribulations, how she can take it, all of it, anything Satan wants to throw at her. Cover her in boils. Take her sight. Pester her with lice and fleas. But the children are our true treasure. Promise me, she says, they stay with us until the end.

  They pass by Mount Vernon and White Lake, which are neither mountain nor lake but a gas station and the interminable field of quietly steaming corn, worms turning in the hot loam and humus. None of these places have pawnshops to trade Pearl’s gold sovereigns.

  Now the tank is nearly empty. In the town of Kimball, Jeremiah unloads the trailer to get at the safe and opens the safe to get the gold coins. Takes a few inside to show the old crone behind the counter. He explains that taken together they are a bit more than a troy ounce of gold. He opens the McEwan’s Index of the London Fix on her counter. He explains that he will let her have these for last year’s price, that she can see for herself right here that they are worth at least ten dollars more right now.

  The woman’s face goes cross as she pats herself for her reading glasses and she screws up her face looking at the figures, her bottom lip out over her furry old chin. She asks him does he really expect her to give him a hundred thirty dollars for those gold coins. She says this here’s a gas station.

  Pearl asks is she reading the papers. Does she know that the dollar will be worthless with what is coming to pass? Precious metal will be all that’s left for Christians to trade.

  She looks askance. She whispers to him does he have no cash whatsoever.

  He digs a dollar and eighty-five cents out of his jeans. Says, Look here at these dimes. What are they worth? What are they made of? Copper sandwiched between zinc and tin alloy. Money of tin, can you believe it? In and of itself virtually, literally worthless. It’s just scrip, he tells her. Company scrip.

  She looks at him a minute and then at his children outside in the lot and in the store. She tears a piece of paper from a pad nearby and writes her name and address on it and slides it to him.

  No charity, Jeremiah tells her, but she says she’s turning on the pump, he likes it or not. She ain’t interested in buying no coins.

  Jeremiah beside himself at the woman’s insanity. After all that he’s just explained. Can she not see. Can she not hear.

  She asks him does he want the gas or not. Well, does he.

  Pearl asks Charlie can he believe this. Charlie is at this juncture quite confused as to Pearl’s point. If there is a point. The rain abates somewhat, and inside the damp and stinking tent there is no answer to Pearl’s question from Charlie or the others. Pearl says that the irony is not lost on him, coming all this way and having all this gold and no one with whom to trade. Incurring a gas tank of debt. He says he’d come to understand that it was already under way.

  What is? Charlie asks.

  The war, Pearl says.

  Pearl is quiet now, grinning faintly it would seem like a man partway into a good drunk. In any case, Charlie offers him a belt from his flask. Pearl’s eyes flash at some memory of whiskey, and he nods yes he would like a drink.

  He doesn’t say how they made it. Perhaps he thinks it and thinks he says it. There is more than paranoia at work here. His mind isn’t right. He bobs to the surface of human connection but resides mostly just under like waterlogged driftwood. Steadily saturating and sinking. He drinks again, wipes his beard with his dirty palm.

  Every place is an East Berlin, he says. A Russia, and there is no West to be gotten to. Only these mountains, this Masada. He says he is dreaming of the Jews in their mountain caves, the Romans implacable as Romans building their siege embankment. I’m the kakangelist, Pearl says. Bringer of the bad word. The plague has come and the war is here.

  Charlie knows a lot of religion, was himself taught by nuns, but these rantings amount to nonsense. He asks Pearl what he wants.

  He says he wants to be understood.

  Understood about what?

  Pearl says he wants his efforts to be perfectly clear.

  What efforts? Charlie asks.

  Pearl says that Charlie and his partners undertake their enterprise in a war zone and he will require payment in gold to protect it.

  They smile. At last a joke. He must be joking.

  He is not.

  Pearl is told he can go fuck himself. Get the hell out of here.

  What thought makes the queer expression on his face is not clear. Is it sheepishness that the gambit has failed? Is it malevolent calm? Is it keeping his anger in custody?

  He leaves in a slighter rain than the one that gave him up.

  Pete sat up. Charlie went quiet. The fire had burned down to white flaky ulnas. George rose and disappeared into the encroached dark and fetched some lightwood and stirred the coals with a stick and put the sticks in. The flames danced up. He left the noose of new light again and Pete quietly worried what he might return with, he was such a long time gone.

  “I should go.”

  “I’m not done,” Charlie said.

  “I need to go.”

  George returned with firewood proper. He fed the fire, warmed his hands at it, and sat back down.

  “You’re scared of us,” Charlie said.

  “I feel like you’re keeping me here.”

  “It’s Pearl you should be afraid of. I’m trying to help you.”

  Pete gazed grimly into the flames. The moose was gone.

  “Did you ever see him again?” Pete asked.

  Charlie looked at the others, back at Pete.

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  THE RAIN ABATES. The soil drains, dries out, Charlie and his partners till and plant. They prepare another small field in another small meadow and yet another. Then they go home, back to their regular lives. Charlie washes trucks in Libby. Theirs is not a sophisticated operation that reaps a high-grade product. They plant, and Charlie or one of the others checks the crop when it suits him.

  A few weeks later, he goes to see one of the small fields, takes a fishing pole by way of a disguise for game wardens, Forest Service, whoever. He arrives at a field of yellow knee-high stalks, dead and dying. He turns the soil. It’s been salted, literally salted with rock salt. He knows it is Pearl, and is certain when he gets back to his car: three quarters, evenly spaced on the front bumper of his van. A coin for Charlie and each of his partners. A hole in each temple.

  Charlie i
s angry. This motherfucker. He doesn’t own the wilderness. Who does this cocksucker think he is.

  A hole in his windshield. He’s still inspecting it when the report of the rifle washes through the air. There’s another and another and another, each only as loud as an egg cracked on a skillet, and he’s just hit the dirt when the shooting is over, the reports echoing off the mountains. He cowers a good ten minutes before crawling in the back doors of the van. Pale yellow mushrooms of stuffing out the back of the seats. He leaps behind the wheel. Keys, ignition, backing out, gas pedal to the floor. The windshield is so spiderwebbed he has to drive with his head out of the window to see his way home.

  “Pearl could’ve dropped me at any time,” Charlie said. “He wanted me to know that.”

  Pete looked at the quarter in his palm. The hole was neat, perfectly round, with a barely flared lip on the reverse. The exit wound.

  If you asked around in Tenmile and Libby and in the offices of the statehouse in Helena and the professors of wildlife biology and the forestry departments of the universities, you would find men and women who had received these coins in the mail, Charlie said. It was in the paper. That they were in circulation meant that Pearl had declared war on everyone.

  It had grown quite cold, and even near the fire the chill wrapped around the better part of him and Pete had to turn his back to the fire and then his front to stay warm. Charlie sat hatless loading the pipe again.

  “How did you meet him?” Charlie asked.

  Pete told him about finding his son in a school, taking him to his father. The pipe went around again. Charlie said he was damn lucky to be alive.

  “What about you? You’re still out here.”

  Charlie toked thoughtfully on the bowl, the smoke leaking out his open mouth like a gun barrel. He explained that they’d moved off some thirty miles or so and hadn’t known Pearl was about until Pete came along.

  “Fuck it,” Charlie said. “We’ll go back and get the rest of the crop tomorrow.” The prominent cartilage in his throat was like an arrowhead that hadn’t made it all the way through his neck.

  “Pearl might not believe in the dollar,” he added, gently tapping the ashes out of the pipe into his palm and then blowing them away. “But I sure as shit do.”

  TWELVE

  It was an empty rail yard building. She’d pried away a plywood board and then hacksawed all but one of the nails away, leaving the zinc heads on the other side so that the board still looked like it was nailed fast though it clung from a single nail in the middle. You slid it up to the side and climbed in. There was batshit and birdshit, and mice crawled in the walls, but it got them out of the schizoid weather here in the Missoula Valley, good grief it couldn’t make up its mind, cold, warm, colder, freeze your nuts off, warm. They covered the gaps in the boards with rugs, old carpets, packing material, and a foam rust-stained mattress, and the room just about warmed up from their body heat in the pitch-black alone.

  Their busking, pathetic as it was, brought in about a buck and a half a day, sometimes more. Sometimes they begged outright and sometimes that worked better.

  So, sleeping together: one night she coaxed Cecil under her blankets.

  “No funny stuff,” she said.

  He slid out and took his blankets back to the discarded rug he slept on. She said don’t be weird, who wants to mess with a pregnant lady anyhow. He said it wasn’t about that. Or her. Or whatever she was thinking. He was an inarticulate person. An angry person. She said what’s eating you. Chrissakes. He said there was this other time. He was quiet. She waited.

  The building was right where the trains joined up and they crashed outside tremendously, unexpectedly.

  He said to never mind.

  They were quiet.

  She said she could feel the baby inside her now. Moving a little bit. She said Bear was the first and only one she’d ever been with and it could’ve been the first time they’d done it she’d gotten pregnant.

  Cecil had sat up in the pure dark.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I wanna have a baby. I don’t care I’m young. The clinic lady said they could take care of it for me and it took me a minute to get she meant to kill it. I said that don’t sound like taking care of it at all.”

  Two train cars coupled outside with a boom that rattled the walls, sent down little bits of plaster or bird droppings. Times it was like being trapped in a collapsing mine.

  “Why don’t you get over here in these blankets and help make us warm enough we can sleep?”

  He didn’t move. Not yet.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “My old man Bear—you’ll meet him when he gets out—he knows I love him and nobody else. He won’t care about you and me. It’s not like you’re some sketchy dude’d pull something.” She snorted a weird laugh. “He’d open up on a guy like that something wicked.”

  “I can be pretty sketchy.”

  “You’re as sketchy as a daffodil.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You’re probably a virgin anyway.”

  He lay down.

  “I’m joking. It’s okay you’re a virgin. If you are. It don’t matter.”

  She asked him was he gonna be like that. She said she was cold.

  They listened to one another ball up in their blankets alone. She said he was being an idiot. He felt tough and that to go to her would be weak and he wouldn’t know what to do with himself in any case.

  It was a whole week. But it got so cold. He didn’t want anyone touching him, but it was freezing and now she was angry at him wasting his heat like that, enough to throw him out maybe. They didn’t have enough covers to be fucking around like this. He finally took his blankets over and they snapped them out one at a time over them. He made her promise to keep her hands on his shoulders, not any lower. There were things happened to him just by getting in bed, things that spread out and changed ugly colors in his brain. To be honest, he was afraid he would hit her. He said so. He faced away from her and couldn’t sleep and started talking, he didn’t know if she was listening, he just went on about it.

  “Might as fucking well tell you.”

  HIS MOTHER WHINING for hours in her bed, calling for him as he passes the door. She’s all fucked up. He finally goes in. Cmere baby. Cmere in here with Mama I’m so sad.

  “I understand what happened,” Ell says.

  She says, Mama needs someone to hold her no one ever holds her. And so he does. He has his arms around her. She sleeps. He falls asleep. He comes to and she’s facing him crying, the whole pillow is wet and she’s stroking his face, My sweet sweet boy, she says, and he pretends to sleep, and she kisses him on the forehead, then on his lips. She’s tongue kissing him. Then she’s touching him all over, his stomach and his legs. He’s not wanting to, but he’s responding. His body is. He isn’t. He isn’t not. He’s just there. Then it’s going. It’s happening. He doesn’t want to but she’s pulling him into her, she smells like those peppermint cigarettes.

  “How old were you?”

  “Twelve.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Like hell it is.”

  “No, it’s okay right now.”

  “I know it is.”

  “I mean it’s okay to tell me.”

  “It ain’t the worst thing I did.”

  “You did? Who said it was you that did it? You think it’s only rape if a guy does it?” she asked.

  She put her hand on top of his, he took a breath through clenched teeth, tensed his muscles. Then she said soft nonwords, and he released, went slack. After a while he said this is okay. She murmured that yeah it was, already half asleep.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  He told her about Cloninger’s dog. He’d been wondering what the dog would do, wondering if all animals were helpless when it came to their peckers. That’s why he did it. He had no idea it was illegal. It seemed strange to be illegal when you thought about it. No one was getting hurt, least
of all the dog. It was an experiment. But he supposed that he knew it was wrong in his conscience. Or was there something broken about his conscience if he still didn’t think it was wrong.

  “What do you think, Ell?”

  She’d fallen asleep.

  He was all right with that, too.

  THIRTEEN

  He’d driven down to Missoula to see Mary, but she wasn’t in, so he called Spoils. He wandered up to the Oxford to wait for him, drank beer with a rotating company of sidling inebriates, and hale, well-met drunks. A table of businessmen slumming it. Eventually Spoils.

  Someone gripped Pete at the elbow, chilled the nerve in his arm all the way up his neck. A short old man with his hat in his other hand. Familiar. Pete searched for the man’s name. An old cowboy from Choteau. Name of Ferguson. Part-timer on the ranch. Had a good arm, played minor league baseball in the 1950s. Could hit you with a coal of horseshit from twenty yards.

  “Mr. Ferguson,” Pete said, slipping out of the man’s grip, standing, and shaking his hand.

  The man’s eyes were wet and he was moving his jaw around like he had taffy stuck in his molars.

  “You tell your family how sorry I am,” he said. “He was a helluva man.”

  Pete felt behind himself for a barstool and dropped onto it.

  “Thank you,” Pete said.

  Ferguson panted out a few sentiments that Pete couldn’t really hear for the rush of blood in his head and then Ferguson was shaking his hand again, replacing his hat, and heading out the front door.

  “What is it, Pete?” Spoils asked.

  He walked out without answering. He couldn’t form the words to say that his father was dead.

  Charles (never “Chuck” or “Charlie”) Snow had been a respected if not especially liked hard-ass in and around Choteau, Montana. He hated Communists and liked to talk about Communists. He felt like there should be more ICBMs in the idle land to the east of Malmstrom Air Force Base and would arrange his business so he could drive out that way to be among the ones that were there. He had worked hard and married when he was good and goddamn ready at the age of forty. She had only just turned sixteen, but this was no scandal in 1947. He kept her in sea-foam and turquoise polyester dresses and made sure she didn’t have to smell of horseshit or hay like the other ladies in town. By the time his sons were out from under her skirts, he had settled into a considerable cowboy barony, an outfit that used to have about two hundred head called the Purple T. He preferred work over every endeavor, and never really acquired a taste for the company of others. He had a stake in more than his share of things (timber, car dealership, and lately, natural gas leases) and never let a person forget it. He made rivals to vanquish. He’d seemed only able to stand people when they came hat in hand. For the most part, people mildly hated him but never said so to him and only rarely among themselves, which only fueled his misanthropy.