Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451)

by Henderson, Smith

  EIGHTEEN

  A case had in fact been opened on the Pearls by his predecessor. Pete found it in the files in his office, but there were no notes and the forms were empty save an address: 22,000 Fourth of July Creek Road. Pete had gone up to see the place but couldn’t find the turnoff and gave up. But when the snow melted, he hazarded up Fourth of July Creek one last time. He passed by Cloninger’s house on the way and waved at him standing in his yard with a hammer. Cloninger only seemed about to recognize Pete and didn’t have time to wave back, and might not have in any case.

  This time he found the turnout, but the road was impassably muddy. He parked and hiked up through the old snow and cedar and larch, through the calling finches and kinglets to a meadow that gave onto a view of a large rock bench and atop it, a kind of house. The aluminum roof gleamed violently in the sun as he approached. All about the crude structure was the sound of melting snow weeping from it. The windows fogged gray with dust. He guessed it was a good thirty miles from the place in the woods where he’d first taken the boy. As the crow flies. They weren’t crows. They walked all that thick, ragged country. He wondered where they wintered. How. Where were the others, the mother, sisters, brothers.

  He decided to go back to the place where he’d first met the Pearls, up the unmarked Forest Service road. The hike past the gate was no less difficult, the kernel corn snow over his ankles, and on the last stretch he slipped on almost every step. When he made the ridge, he sat on the wet rocks, sweating under his coat until he was cold again. From where he was, the fabric of the clothing he’d stuffed under the ledge was visible, but he went over anyway and pulled everything out. It had been jammed back in a disordered mess. Not the way he’d left it. The bottle of giardia medication was still there, but not the plastic bag in which he’d wrapped the vitamin C. He searched through the clothing and felt around under the ledge for it. He searched the ground nearby.

  “You fuckers,” he said, smiling.

  He stuffed everything back and hiked down to his car.

  The next day, he returned with more vitamin C and a bottle of regular vitamins and several chocolate bars and cans of beans and chicken soup. He folded everything up together and replaced it in the crevice. He stepped back from the cache and then snapped his fingers and put the jeans in front so they’d know he’d been by.

  Three days later he spotted the coat under the ledge instead of the jeans. He whooped and hoped they were somewhere about, to hear him. The vitamin C and all the cans were gone. He replenished the soup and beans and added some canned vegetables. He ate a bar of the chocolate himself.

  “Hot damn,” he said.

  The boy came along about when Pete expected. Middle of the day. Some distance from wherever they were camped. He loped up out of the golden currant brush, glanced around, nearly missed Pete sitting twenty feet away. He ran. Pete waited.

  In forty minutes, he could just hear the boy coming up the hillside behind him.

  “You come alone,” the boy asked or said, it was hard to tell.

  The kid’s face was gaunt. No child’s fat. Mildly ghoulish cast to his skin.

  “You take that vitamin C?” Pete asked.

  The kid walked past him to the ledge and began to fill his canvas bag with cans. He put the chocolate in his coat.

  “I’d like to come with you.”

  The boy looked down the hill.

  “My dad,” the kid said by way of explanation.

  “I’d like to talk to him. There’s got to be an easier way for me to help than leaving the stuff under a damn rock way up here.”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “Where does he think it comes from?”

  “I go to town sometimes.”

  “The IGA?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And shoplift.”

  The boy sighed impatiently, worried a hole in the sleeve of his sweater with his thumb.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  The boy hiked his bag up his shoulders and started down the hill. Pete followed through a thickness of broken cedar, new lime green ferns, and livid mosses. The child’s wet warren. They trod into some new country, a stand of towering ponderosas. The long brown needles sounded softly under their feet. Cold breezes trundled invisibly over the moist and vacant understory of the trees.

  The kid stopped walking. They leaned against pines, facing one another. The boy regarded him.

  “You can’t come.”

  “I know you’re worried something will happen,” Pete said.

  “Something will happen. To you.”

  “Do you really think he will harm me?”

  The kid pulled puzzle pieces of bark from the tree and flicked them through the air, sailing like blades. The distances he achieved. So much time in these woods.

  “I talked to a guy who ran into you two after all the ash came down.”

  The boy’s eyes flashed up at Pete.

  “It sounds like you guys were pretty scared. Your old man thought the world had about ended.”

  The boy broke a stick with his foot.

  “But it didn’t, did it?”

  The kid’s lips constricted over his teeth. He scratched his cheek, but then resumed debarking the tree, sending the pieces whistling through the air.

  “I don’t want you guys to feel like that anymore. Like you’re all alone out here. I can help you and your mama and your brothers and sisters.”

  Pete crouched against the tree trunk so he was at eye level with the boy. He leaned in the direction of the child’s gaze to achieve some eye contact.

  The kid turned and ran.

  Pete’s posture against the tree—his back wedged against it, no leverage—put him at an immediate disadvantage. He took a moment just standing upright, and when he started after the boy, he slipped on the slick carpet of pine needles. By the time he was at a jog, the kid was gone. The big pines weren’t especially thick—not compared to the cedar—but after the quick fifty feet the boy put between Pete and himself, he’d disappeared. Or he was hiding. Pete slowed, searching this way and that, expecting to come across the child hiding behind one of the huge boles. No luck. If the kid kept at a dead run, looking for him this way only made his escape certain. Pete ran as fast as he could in the direction he guessed the boy had gone.

  “Benjamin!” he shouted. “Come on! Let me just talk to you a minute!”

  There was a blur ahead of him and to the right, some sixty yards away. Or it was his own movement shifting something up there in parallax. He broke after the figment anyway. Through his heavy breathing he could hear water. He stopped and listened, holding his breath. His heart throbbed. A creek somewhere ahead babbled. A snap, shuffling. Pete ran toward the water. He budged through the brush. The bank dropped suddenly, soil and rocks giving way until he had dropped into the drink, a knee-high pool that bloomed darkly with dirt.

  The boy was upstream of him in the middle of the creek, a couple yards from the other side, stepping gingerly across a riprap.

  “Ben!”

  The kid glanced back at Pete, unhalting, and then leapt up onto the opposite bank and disappeared.

  Pete slogged out of the pool and headed straight upstream, the creek shallows flowing around his ankles, walking the cold stones, arms out like a tightrope walker. He slipped on the tails of virid moss, vivid to glowing in the overcast. A thin sleet fell on him from the unobstructed sky. He made for the shore opposite to get under the trees, but it was all cutbank and deep eddies and he’d have to go where the boy had crossed or just about to exit the water.

  He tottered upstream, ankles rolling like a child on ice skates. He slipped again, but close enough to the shore to reach for an overhanging branch of larch to halt his fall. It gave and gave under his weight as he pulled on it hand over hand, stripping away new needles, tipping and twisting backward until it gently, almost kindly baptized him into the water. He let go when his back was soaked and dropped into a four-foot pool. The cold evicted his brea
th and when he tried to rise, he slipped and fell again up to his neck and flipped over onto his knees and pulled himself up by the roots on the bank and stood. Stunned and dripping for a long moment. He moved upstream along the bank by handfuls of earth and flora like a man traversing a cliff face, until he arrived a few yards down from where the kid had crossed. There was a single wet footprint on the rock and then nothing, just thick green alder. He listened for anything at all, but there was only the water moving behind him and dripping off of him, and the whispering down of the sleet. He began to shiver. He pulled off his jacket and wrung it and wrung the shirt on his body and walked back across the creek. The going much easier this time because he was already soaking wet and angry.

  When he got out of the water and back among the ponderosas the sleet had turned to rain. He trotted to warm up. His hands were bright red, his ears too. The long hair at the back of his neck was soaked through and like an icepack on his nape. He began to jog faster and his side ached but it was too cold to give a shit. He crashed the cedar, all numbness and genuinely worried he would get turned around and freeze himself to death. He wondered did the boy hear him fall. Was the boy following him now. Was his old man.

  By the time he made it to his car, his jeans were stiff down at his ankles, but he was basically warm, if winded. He turned on the engine and cranked the heat and held his palms to the cold air blowing out of the vents. He blew on his hands and looked in the glove box. He turned off the engine, got out of the car, and went and unlocked the trunk. He squinted at the sliver of rusty Canadian whiskey, swallowed it, and tossed the empty bottle into the weeds.

  The snow fell and fell and with it every fool’s hopes for an early spring. Pete worked a few cases in the eastern part of his region. Hard-gotten-to cabins in the Flathead where the grim occupants paced and fumed like bulls at the sight of him. He had lunch with Cecil’s sister in her school. He gently culled from Katie her and her mother’s recent whereabouts. They’d taken a road trip down to Denver for reasons unknown to the girl. When he visited Debbie, he didn’t even bother to try and get the whole story, just informed her that Cecil was in Pine Hills. She pantomimed indignation about Cecil’s incarceration, but Katie was genuinely worried when Pete told her, asking was he okay and how long would he be in jail. He promised he’d get Cecil out as soon as he could.

  When he got back to the courthouse, Benjamin Pearl was in his hallway, standing outside his door.

  “My papa’s gone blind,” the boy said in a papery voice. He paced, and his words sluiced out faster than Pete could gather them up, all out of order.

  The old man’s screaming, hot pokers grinding in his sockets. They try water and he shrieks and writhes on the cold ground. He runs away. Ben has to go look for him. He’s in the woods struck blind. Come morning his eyes are sealed shut swollen. It’s snowing again. The snow’s all over. Ben wants to know if this is his fault. He says God doesn’t need to answer, Ben knows the answer already. He has to fix this. He finds Pete’s card and leaves, his father calling after him, where are you going. Where do you think you are going. Can Pete help, he has to help.

  This camp, yet another, was four miles in from the National Forest Development Road #645, most of it uphill and by Pete’s reckoning not all that far from Separation Creek and his own house. Maybe a day’s hike to the old logging road that wound out of the empty wilderness down to his place.

  Jeremiah Pearl wasn’t in the camp—a canvas tarp that disappeared into a hillock of young, dense alder, a few packs, some bedrolls, and a fire pit—but sprawled on his back near the runnel of a small headwater. Stones placed on his eyes for the cool in them. Pete searched for signs of the other Pearls, the sisters and brothers and mother, but there were none.

  “Papa?”

  The man sat upright and the rocks fell away. His eyes surely throbbed under their swollen lids, even at a distance a raging shade of red.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I—”

  “Get over here, damnit.”

  The boy came forward and his father had him by the arm and gripped his head and appeared about to do some punishment to him, but just grabbed him all over to feel that he was whole. A thing he could accomplish in a glance that assumed a new depth of expression by hand. The boy threw his arms around him and held him, as his father patted him.

  Suddenly, the man shot up, pulling the child behind him, and still gripping his boy by the shoulder.

  “Who’s that?”

  Pete hadn’t stepped or moved at all, but the man perceived him just the same.

  “Mr. Pearl, it’s me, Pete—”

  “You get the fuck out of here,” he said. His face glistened with water, with tears. Suppurating pus hung like a maggot at the corner of one eye.

  “I brought you some medicine.”

  “There’s no remedy for God striking you blind, you fool.”

  “I’ll bet you’re just snow-blind,” Pete said. “A real bad case from the looks of it.”

  “I’m not snow-blind! You ass!” He took a step, stumbled, and gripped the boy to regain his balance.

  “There’s snow all up here in the high country, Mr. Pearl. Not a lot, but everything’s covered. You were out in an exposed area for a few hours the other day, I’m guessing.”

  Pearl’s eyes moved about, unseeing.

  “It doesn’t have to be very bright out. Really,” Pete said. He sat down and began to pull items from his backpack. “My daughter and I went cross-country skiing a couple winters ago. Completely overcast. You could make out the shape of the sun behind the clouds, but just barely. It was hours afterward when things went blurry. By supper we were basically blind. You don’t need any direct sunlight, is my point. Fact is, it was probably worse on us because we weren’t even squinting all day.”

  While Pete spoke Pearl rubbed his sockets with fingers of one dirty hand. The effort of it wrenched his face, and a guttural gah issued from his throat as he twisted his head in pain and tried to shake off the torment like an animal.

  “Don’t touch them. Please, Mr. Pearl. I have the eyedrops the doctor gave my daughter and me for the pain and some ointments too. There’s no reason to think anything’s amiss.”

  Pearl swagged from side to side.

  “Papa,” Benjamin said.

  “You shut up,” Pearl muttered.

  “He’s been leaving us the food, Papa. He’s been helping us already!” His father turned and the boy slipped free of him.

  “Don’t be mad at your son, Mr. Pearl. It was my fault. He was just trying to make sure you and your family”—Pete glanced back toward the camp, wondering where he thought he might see the rest of the children—“were all right.”

  “Let him help you,” Benjamin begged. “He’s okay, Papa.”

  The man touched his temples with his fingertips and began muttering. Then he smiled, some teeth shone out from the thatch of his beard and he began to speak, and Benjamin knelt with him. To pray, Pete realized. They clasped their hands and hung their heads. Pearl spoke to God directly, asked was it His will for him to go blind or was it not. Would the restoration of his vision allow Pearl to enact His will, or was this thought vanity. Was this another in the series of tests, he asked, in a rueful half-grin like a man who’d won a bet with a good friend. Pearl stiffened and said he could take what God would dish out. That God must know this. That Pearl would reach into his mouth right now and wrench out his teeth was it His holy will. That He need only speak. One word.

  They remained on their knees. Then Pearl raised his head and seemed to be at some long thought or perhaps trying to see Pete.

  At last Pearl stood. He said it was all right for Pete to give him some medicine. What did it matter, what could any remedy accomplish if God didn’t will it.

  Pete had listened closely because he couldn’t see, couldn’t tell if Beth was paying attention as the doctor explained how to apply the drops and ointments. Hospitals made her nervous, and when they got home, he was righ
t to have memorized what the doctor told them to do. But that was two winters ago.

  He removed a canteen of distilled water from his bag and the packet of gauze and the scissors. He set these on his coat, which he’d spread open on the ground. He rolled up his sleeves and washed his hands with a fresh bar of soap and rinsed with the distilled water and dried them on a little towel from the bag. There were two ointments and a bottle of drops. One of the three was for pain. The drops. The doctor had said white pus meant the infection was bacterial. He said to use one of the ointments in that case. The antibiotic ointment. Or the other.

  Pearl sucked air through clenched teeth at a fresh wave of pain.

  Pete asked Pearl to lie down and rest his head in Benjamin’s lap. He told him he was going to pour water into his eyes and wanted to flush them as clean as possible. Pearl did as Pete told him. He told Pearl to try and blink. The man’s eyelids were swollen shut, and when he opened them they split like sausage casings, fat pus dribbling out. Pete poured water into his eyes and the man arched in agony, but he did not cry out. Pete told him he had drops for him that would ease the pain a great deal. He said to stay still, and firmly wiped away the pus so that he wouldn’t have to do it again. The man whimpered. Pete told him he was going to pull his eyelids open and put in the drops. Pearl barked for him to do it already. Pete pried one eye open with one hand, the gummy lashes like a flytrap, and saw only the black sightless centroid of his pupil. He squeezed a drop onto the eyeball. Or not. He wasn’t sure, the eyelid clapped shut and the man strained away despite himself. Pete said let’s try the other eye, and the pupil was rolled up when he opened the lids and this time he saw the cool drop hit the ball. The man’s breath heaved into and out of him. Benjamin ran his hand over his father’s head as the drops did their work. Pete explained what the ointment was for, but as the pain diminished Pearl went pliant and let him run the ointment along the bottom of his opened eyelid like a line of white frosting.