“You shouldn’t have tricked him. He trusted you enough to call you and you lied to him. You don’t know what that does to people. People who already don’t have enough people they trust. Just because you were ultimately right doesn’t make the way you went about it okay.”
“All right.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“I hear you. I could make excuses, but you’re right.”
She looked sidelong at him.
“What are your intentions with me?” she asked.
“My ‘intentions’? What are you, your own father?”
“Pretty much, yeah. Yes, effectively, I am my own father. I was—”
“Look, I know. About you. What your background is. It’s out. People know.”
She laughed. A hard bark of laughter that doubled her over when she looked at him.
“Everybody knows, Pete. I told Jim in my interview. All my professors knew, all my papers were about it, my thesis. It’s not a dark secret.”
“Okay.”
“I am not ashamed of myself. It’s not my fault.”
“Of course not.”
“So then don’t treat me like I’m a crazy bitch for asking you what’s up with us.”
He told her he was smitten with her. He said: “Let’s call it smitten, what I am.”
“Okay then. That sounds pretty good.”
“Can you bail on your people tonight?”
“I don’t want to go to the bar.”
“Okay.”
She told him he drank too much. He said for her to tell him something he didn’t know.
The waitress brought coffee, and Mary turned some cream in her cup with a spoon. The waitress brought the pie. Two forks, just in case Pete changed his mind, she said. She put a fork in front of him, and when he didn’t pick it up, Mary cut a bite with her fork and put it into his mouth. And it was good pie, and she was there, and he felt better. Simple.
She said he could take her somewhere, but it had to be somewhere special.
By the time they made it onto Highway 12 it was full dark, the motes of snow firing out of the black as though they were vaulting through stars. He pulled into an empty turnaround and took her across the still and empty blacktop and into the lodgepole forest and helped her up the trail slick in places with ice. The snow falling on the trees was a sound itself, so faint that it could be heard if they held their breath, and then lost in the thrum of their hearts and their panting as they hiked the grade. They found their way by his flashlight, and shapes of steam from the hot pools sifted lazily through the wet pines like robed ghosts of a sudatorium. Lurid mosses and mustard lichens grew here as in the rain forests of Washington, the near rain forest of the Yaak. They undressed on the wet rocks and put their clothes in a garbage bag. Flakes of snow alit on their bare shoulders, and he took her hand, and they stepped gingerly over the slick stones and down a few crude steps into the hot pool.
“Jesus,” she said, wincing at the heat.
“Come on. All the way. There’s a bench over here.”
She took a breath, slid down to him with a slow gasp that whistled over her teeth, and joined him on the stone that sat them in water up to their necks.
“Nice, huh?”
“If my skin doesn’t boil off.”
“Come on.”
She tilted her head back onto the rim of the pool and sighed, her breath convening with the cloud steaming over them.
“Yeah.” She sighed. “Okay. I get it.”
Pete reached for the flashlight and shined it around the boulders and trees.
“This would be a good place to spend the winter.”
She laughed.
“Seriously. You got hot water. You set up your camp down near the creek. You could make it out here okay.”
“If you don’t mind all the naked people coming and crashing your camp.”
“Well, not here. Something like this up around Glacier.”
“Tenmile getting a little crowded, is it?”
“Not me. I was just thinking of this case. This kid. Sorry. I didn’t mean to talk about work again.”
“Get it off your chest.”
She beckoned him to speak with her fingers. Pete took them, kissed them.
“This boy and his family are living somewhere in the sticks, and I was trying to figure out where they might be holed up for the winter. How in the hell they’ll make it. Something like this would be prime. But I don’t think there’s any hot springs up there.”
Her eyes were closed, and beaded water was already running down her neck to her clavicle.
“You have no idea where they are?”
“Not really.”
“Do they have any previous cases on file?”
“Pearl’s more the kind of guy you read about in the paper.”
“You should check.”
“I should’ve already. I’m losing my knack for this.”
“At least you have a beautiful cock.”
She didn’t look at him or move, but a sleepy grin cracked across her face.
“I’m gonna have to wash your mouth out,” he said.
“I can’t help it. I’m just a product of the system,” she said, tilting her head slightly in his direction. “I had a lot of foster daddies,” she whispered gravely.
Her eyes were half closed and in the deep darkness he could not see what kind of craving rode in them, so he swallowed and took her outstretched hand.
She slid up to his ear, whispered, “A lot of staff who would check on us at night,” and bit his ear. He wondered was this flirting. She grinned. Flirting. Should he play along. Could he play along. Did she think this would arouse him. She stirred vaguely under the water, and a grenade of lust boomed in Pete’s chest.
“They took advantage,” she whispered.
He got in front of her, and pinned her to the edge of the pool.
“They—”
He put a finger over her mouth to shush her, and she nodded and put her body to him as if to say she understood, yes, but would he still please, would he still.
For a period of weeks things were as good as ever between them. They took a drive to Livingston for interesting gourds from Hutterites, and on Halloween they handed candy to the few children living in the Wilma who raced the floors for treats in plastic costumes.
In mute astonishment they watched Reagan get elected on the television at the Union Club, where the Teamsters Local 400 had gathered to observe, crush their hats, and get mournfully plowed. When someone put on the jukebox, Pete and Mary turned slow circles on the dance floor and went home in a sleety snowfall that soaked and chilled them on the three-block walk to her apartment. An errant shout that might have been joy at the election’s outcome redounded off the empty streets, and then it was quiet, as though all was well in the Republic.
“The judge is gonna be a mess,” Pete said. “I should go home and check in on him.”
“Take me,” she said.
It was nearly 4:00 A.M. when they arrived in Tenmile, and the judge was heaving in his booth with Neil and the sheriff keeping watch. He had wept openly in the preceding hour. He’d been telling stories about the old days, outraged yarns of cattlemen riding up on shepherds and slaughtering the offending stock, hanging rustlers and innocents alike, and terrorizing the state generally. He inveighed against the Copper Barons. He sang the Montana state song and then a few bars of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” drumming his tobacco-stained gut in a tuneless rage, cracked verses spewing from his voice box. Pete took a shot of bourbon with him and the judge agreed to let the sheriff drive him home.
Pete drove Mary up to his place and lit the fire as she looked the cabin over. Maybe wondering what it might be like to live there. What kind of husband he would be. He knew what kind of husband he had been, but felt—watching her touch his fishing pole, run her finger down the spines of his books, and idly inventory his cupboards—that he might be a different kind of husband now. She asked what happe
ned to the window and when he said a bear is what happened to the window, she didn’t believe him, and when she saw he was serious, she stayed close to him. He dragged the mattress out by the fire. The sun rose on the Yaak and they went to sleep.
He would take off to do his cases and come back to Missoula to be with Mary whenever he could. Long weekends. The days were shorter now. Colder. Days he cut work like he’d cut high school geometry, realizing with a soft embarrassment that he did so with no fear of consequences. That old Snow sense of entitlement. But this too: DFS could not fire him any more than they could hire someone to help him. He was as good as it got, and for the most part that was pretty damn good.
He watched it snow from her window, falling pink embers in the evening neon of the marquee. Nothing accumulated and the cars swished by in the street below as if it had rained. He napped on the couch like a hot cat and woke and moved away from the radiator and into the cool of the bedroom. He smoked in her groaning brass bed reading her books and it was usually dark when he finished. For hours he merely listened to the traffic down below, people about their business, utterly reft of his enjoinment, his sage advice.
It’s almost as if they don’t require your assistance at all. Imagine that, Pete.
It would be dusk. The lock would click open, she would come into the bedroom with a cup of wine, disrobe, slide into bed, and they would begin to harvest orgasms.
She would tell him stories sometimes of the group home. How the kids were, how the staff was. Times she snuck out. A time she ran away with another girl, hitched a ride from Spokane. They stayed with a Boeing executive for a few weeks. He gave them presents and money for letting him masturbate onto them. They stole his wallet, got picked up on Capitol Hill, sent back to Spokane.
On Thanksgiving Day, Mary needed an assist and a second car to do a removal, so Pete went with her. They rescued the kids simply enough. The jittery mother appeared almost relieved, saying to take ’em just take ’em, and the children were in various states of comprehension as Mary and Pete helped stuff what clean clothes and toys they had into duffels, and then through the yard muddy with snowmelt to the cars. But as they left, the guilt did a sudden number on their mother and she raced down the mountain after them, laying on her horn, flashing her lights. The kids bawling at the sight of her reaching for them at the stoplights in town. Pete pulled into the parking lot of the Kmart while Mary ran in and called the cops, and the kids howled against the windows of the cars, hysterical and hyperventilating, until the cops took their mother away. But then a slobbery, sniffling quiet and anesthetic relief washed over them, and they sagged like they’d been drugged. Some even dozed.
Pete and Mary shuttled them like their own harried brood into JB’s Big Boy, and they ate burgers and shakes, and colored on the place mats. With nourishment came new anxiety, where were they staying, what will happen to us, and Pete and Mary could only give immediate answers.
The attention home.
Yes it’s nice there.
Yes you’ll all be together.
No we don’t know about after that.
Someplace better.
You haven’t touched your fries.
The eldest girl, at Pete’s elbow, began to sob quietly and he was unable to soothe her dismay. Mary nodded at him to get out, and she slid in next to her, took the girl’s wrist into her own long fingers and began to turn magic circles on the bones of her hand and then on her other hand. Her crying ceased, and in time the girl’s eyes rolled, her head fell against Mary’s shoulder, and Pete saw or imagined a ghost swim like a flagellate out of the little girl’s forehead, a departing devil. Mary coaxed deep mind-wiping breaths out of this girl and she nuzzled against her in this warmth and peace.
Pete asked quietly how she did this.
“Acupressure,” she said. “There are points on the body where the tension is physically stored.”
“You know, I could use a little of that.”
“Stop it.”
“Serious. I got a lot of tension stored up in this one spot—”
She threw a straw at him. The children laughed. He made a face at them and invited a fusillade of french fries.
At Christmas he sent Rachel a box full of things he feared were all wrong. A gross of jelly bracelets and three pairs of earrings. Sunglasses. A belt. A book of e. e. cummings and Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Lord of the Flies. A short letter explaining that her grandfather died and saying how much he loved her. He wrote Mary’s number and said if she couldn’t reach him at work to try him there.
He finally wrote Luke too. One draft explaining that the old man had died that he pitched into the fire because he could not calibrate the voice or sentiments. His own corrosive thoughts. He wrote another short note just telling him to come in, get it over with and then on with his life. That there was bad news and that he loved him. To just come back.
Mary worked Christmas but came to his cabin the days after. Fingers of ice from the eaves. Opening gifts, many of them bottles, batches, vintages. A kind of hibernation. New Year’s in Missoula. They skied Lost Trail. Hot cocoa and Rumple Minze on the lift, the sun shattering off the sheets of snow.
Then the succinct gray days of late January, February. The Yaak socked in with banks and clouds and cold. Shots of terrible arctic air, the useless sun. Everything under a nap of snow, and yet curiously alive. A fox hopping after bunnies or mice in the meadow beyond the trees. A stillness at the heart of things, between the beats.
A night he came home from work to fresh tire tracks leading up the road to his place, but stopping short of his drive. Footprints going to and coming from the cabin. As he made a fire, he discovered the cup with a puck of frozen coffee on the table. His brother or his brother’s parole officer. He wasn’t sure which. Didn’t care much, one way or the other.
Spring. Come March 1981 a spell of warm weather set the snow melting, everything dripping. Water running under the ice, the ice white and slick as enamel.
The temperatures squatted in the low fifties when he went to Butte for St. Patrick’s Day. Pete and his friends woke midday with heroic hangovers and dragged themselves into the pitched revelry already spilling into the streets. A carnival of motorcycle noise and nakedness to rival anything in Sturgis, anything in New Orleans. The whole town a red-light district, funny, hinging toward ugly. They watched fights that Shane ushered to completion with his meaty fists. They arrived at a house party where a crowd of leathery enthusiasts watched an old slattern tug on a pair of thin cocks attached to two men as pink and shiny as basted hams. Pete had only just wheeled outside to retch when Shane walked out as calmly as a sheriff, punching the head he had cradled in his armpit. A skinny witch rode his back and tore at his ears as he stepped off the porch and dropped the man he was beating into the grass. He seemed surprised to find he couldn’t work the gate latch with his broken hand, and once again they made for the ER, stopping for a six-pack, as if on the way to an afterparty.
Did she receive Pete’s gifts and letter?
She did. She didn’t read the books or wear the bracelets or the earrings or the belt, just the sunglasses and read the letter about her dead grandfather to her mother.
You should see if he left you anything. Son of a bitch was rich.
There’s another number here he wants me to call him at.
You can call him if you want.
Her name is Mary.
Whose name is Mary?
The number.
Let me see that.
Did her mother read the letter?
Just the last part with the number. The other woman’s name in Pete’s handwriting.
Mary, she said.
That was it?
She had people over that night and got rip-roaring after her shift. Then divorce papers. She would sit and regard her daughter in the sunshine on the porch that cut through the leafless live oaks, it was still warm enough to sit outside, and announce that she wasn’t going to say mean things about her father to her. That she
would find out on her own that he was cold. That there was something broken in him. That she would see for herself what a wreckage he was, how incapable he was, just like how he would forget her birthday, just watch, he will forget. You’ll see.
And did he forget her birthday?
She didn’t care. She was all about Cheatham by then.
Cheatham?
A college dropout who’d come over with some friends some Friday her mother was working and the first one she said to herself she wanted. Yes, she had been boy crazy before, but this was different she wanted to hit him and bite him and crawl up him and chew his ear off. She couldn’t understand these violent feelings, but there they were she was nervous the whole night she actually drank and went up to him and said this was her house did he want to come inside and have a look around and he said he was okay on the porch having a cigarette and someone handed him a guitar and his long brown hair fell over his face as he played and she waited on him all night and two weeks later when he came over she made him walk with her around back of the house and then she climbed up him and kissed him and it was love he was nineteen she scared him but her birthday had happened and she said it was only five years’ difference now but he wouldn’t touch her anymore. He came by another time with some other people but didn’t talk to her at all really and then a time after that around Thanksgiving or Christmas and her mother threw a party on New Year’s and they did it in her room at last he had to leap under the bed when someone stumbled in and she screamed bloody murder and whoever it was slammed shut the door and she laughed at Cheatham for being so scared.
Was he sweet?
He really was. He wrote her a song and sang it in a whisper. A song about soft birds. He was worried it was so so so wrong for him to have slept with her.
Did she intend him to take her away?
Yes.
Did her mother suspect she was planning to leave?
Almost every night now it was a carnival of drunks and weed dealers and some speed dealers and these long-hair stoner guys and guys on motorbikes and artists and all sorts. Cheatham didn’t stand out. Her mother was distracted by bar people, by new prospects herself. She’d lost weight doing the hours on her feet, doing some coke, staying up all night, her voice was reedy and hoarse as she was herself in the throes of something fresh and almost teenaged. Having her own crushes from those in the aforementioned carnival. She and Rachel passing one another in the hall like roommates, not mother daughter, not that they were fighting yet either but in a kind of mutually agreed improximity like two north-poled magnets, never to touch, to close, even side-hugging when they were out together and someone said they looked so much alike, side-hugging like rival sisters made to stand for a picture.
Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451) Page 19