Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451)

by Henderson, Smith

  Cops coming and going stopped by the television asking was there any news. Asked how the president was doing and where they were keeping this Hinckley piece of shit. Could they somehow finagle him into the basement of the Dallas Police Department and put a Jack Ruby on him.

  The plainclothes detective came back. There were no Booths in the book.

  Pete checked into his motel. He’d been wasting time with the cops. If Rachel was still in Austin, she didn’t run to the guy who’d busted into her room. More than likely the guy was just a drunk. Pete had let his anger at Beth muddy his thinking. He wondered what else he was fucking up. What crucial thing he wasn’t doing this very minute.

  He contacted Child Protective Services and Austin Children’s Shelter, explained who he was, who he was looking for, and asked where the runaways congregated. With the overnight lows in the sixties, he was told, she could be anywhere. Hanging around downtown or in any number of uninhabited lots overrun with bamboo. She could be sleeping in Pease Park down along Shoal Creek or staying in one of the run-down Victorian houses in West Campus. They said to bring a picture. They said to ask around. The kids on the picnic tables in the park. The bums in the bamboo.

  He didn’t have a car so he took a cab back to Beth’s and let himself in. A man with long braids and aviator glasses sitting on the couch stood up and asked him what the fuck he was doing barging in like this.

  “I’m Beth’s husband.”

  She stepped in from the kitchen. She swallowed in advance of saying something. He grabbed her car keys off the table.

  “I need your car.”

  “I called around to some of her friends from school again,” she said. “No one’s seen her, Pete. No one.”

  Her chin creased like a ball of paper and her eyes sank to the floor.

  “Give me their numbers. I’ll go see if I can find out anything.”

  When he told the woman who he was, that he was looking for his daughter, Rachel, and he’d like to ask the woman’s daughter a few questions, a quiet worry flitted across her face and then she stiffened and let him in. Her daughter was due back from track practice in a little bit. She asked did he want some sun tea.

  She filled a glass with ice and poured him tea from a jug in the window, and when she turned around there was a fresh resolve in her face to say something frank.

  “Thank you,” he said, taking the tea. “Now go ahead and tell me what you want to tell me.”

  “I want to help. I want you to find your daughter, but I don’t know why you’re here. Why her mother called. I forbade Kristin from going over there weeks ago.”

  “Why?”

  The woman plucked a dead frond from a fern by the window.

  “Her mother. There is alcohol and drugs all over the place. People there all hours of the night. How did you not know this?”

  Pete set down the glass of tea. Gazed into it.

  “Heather’s mom said the same thing.”

  “Kristin says she hasn’t been in class since February.”

  “Well, where the hell has she been?!”

  The question shot out of him unbidden, and he immediately murmured an apology and stood to go. She’d taken a step back, but now she gripped his forearm.

  “When you get her, you keep her.”

  He said he would. He said he was sorry for disturbing her afternoon. He thanked her and he left.

  He drove the city, searching all the places the social workers said to search and then the youth homes and runaway centers, showing skeptical staff his Montana DFS badge, more than a few of them asking him wasn’t he way out of his jurisdiction. He said it was his daughter and to a person they turned remorsefully accommodating. A large-bosomed Texas matron offered to print him a ream of flyers if he’d leave her the picture he had of Rachel. She said a lot of the runaways could be found on the main drag near the University of Texas, panhandling and busking near campus and lying to cops.

  His shirt soaked through walking the Drag. He made no progress whatever, the kids had never heard of her, the trail was as cold as the weather was hot. He didn’t eat or drink, and by evening a headache cleaved his head into discrete lobes of pain. He sat outside a run-down three-story house where he’d seen college kids and younger go in and out. Visits of five or six minutes. None of them Rachel, each tiny teenage girl among them causing a hope to crest and crash in his heart.

  SHE HAD ALWAYS liked to dance. Pete would strike up a beat on his chest, lap, or the walls, and she would twirl her arms and stutter-step in place like a miniflapper all of eighteen months old. She loved pears and ate fistfuls of scrambled eggs and was practically famous to all the tenants in their apartment building. Everybody knew everybody. The tenants decorated each floor on holidays, mainly for her, as there were no other children in the building among the minimum-wage earners and single widowers and working college kids like Pete and Beth. Such a pretty picture Rachel, Beth, and Pete made, as ideal as a water molecule, hydrogen, hydrogen, oxygen. Complete and entire.

  The tenants would leave their doors open to her, and Pete would sit at the top of the stairs to make sure she didn’t topple down them, and she ran from apartment to apartment and now he wondered did she trust the whole world because of that and did she think she could dance just anywhere at fourteen and it would be safe, and he wondered was she so foolish as that, and he thought of course she was, she has me for a father and Beth for a mother.

  Long nights with thin, wakeful sleep, thick sluggish days driving around in Beth’s car, walking creek beds and cemeteries and waiting on picnic tables in disheveled neighborhood parks and traipsing through bamboo warrens and squatting among the wary homeless and asking did they see a girl about fourteen, yay-tall, real cute, curly hair. They said no they didn’t. Or they said yes they did because he as much as described any and all white girls who were in this kind of trouble. And among this population of the peculiar and outright insane were more than a few who Pete suspected were capable of virtually anything and he was leveled by the naked fact that there was nothing that could not happen to his little girl. Everything was permitted. This was real, not a fiction or mere case he was working at some remove from his heart. And he said to himself all these days, Oh Christ what have I done, I have let her down in every meaningful particular, above all failing to love her enough that she knew his love and would come to him.

  Times he entertained the idea she was en route to Montana. Times he swore oaths, promised to die if she would come back—I’ll die. I’ll suffer anything but this, her absence. Her silence.

  Not knowing where she was. Oh my God. An untold sorrow. He’d seen so much suffering, but he’d only ever suffered it secondarily. To have it fresh and his own. The scope of it. He’d had no idea. He’d known nothing.

  Times he was sure she was dead. Times he spotted her body in city creek beds and ditches, in among the weeds at the shore or floating out in the river. He walked the muddy beds. Flotsam and detritus from floods, garments strung up in creek-side flora like scarecrows. Snakes and fleet lizards and spiderwebs the height of him. Insects of incredible size and speed. Nothing like home. This wasn’t home.

  He harbored the hope that she’d headed north. He wrote it on a piece of paper and kept it in a shirt pocket close to his heart.

  He visited Rachel’s school, her teachers, trying his best to appear . . . he didn’t know how to appear. Professional or insane with worry. He went to San Antonio, which was much larger than he’d expected, and stayed a few fruitless days showing flyers, hanging them in shelters, giving them to anyone who’d take one.

  Staying next door to him in the motel was a bickering couple at whom he more than once pounded on the wall. It rained one evening and when he returned from scouring the city, he found them sitting out front of their doorway sipping pleasantly from tumblers under the awning in the evening cool. The man’s name was Beauregard and he gave the impression he was awaiting a call or a ride, even as he pressed a glass of rye into Pete’s hand and introduced
his wife. Sharla or Sharlene or Darla. She smoked and forced something short of a greeting out of her mouth when Pete held up his glass.

  They were between jobs. They asked was he staying alone. Pete said he was. Beauregard removed his cap, as if to distract from his agenda in asking about Pete, and Pete’s hackles went up, but the rye went down and his wariness leveled off with a companionable drink, the pleasant coolness of the rain, and the overcast sky. A birthmark ran up the inside of the bored woman’s leg to an unknown terminus, like she’d pissed or bloodstained herself. He wondered who were these people really. Not just here, with him, but the world over. He saw them every day in his work and had yet to know why there were so many.

  With Beauregard and Sharla, he let down his guard, come what may. He wondered was his daughter in some place similar doing something as foolhardy. More foolhardy. He found himself deaf to whatever Beauregard was saying and, sizing him up, wondered could Rachel evade such a man, the ropy muscles of his bare arms in his tank top.

  He pummeled his worry down with another glass of rye. It got hotter as the sun set.

  A black man arrived, thin, with large eye whites like boiled eggs. Pete looked the man over not in wariness or anxiety but in undisguised curiosity. He’d never seen someone so jet-black, skin glistening in the increasing humidity like a wet stone. Beauregard introduced them, and the man asked Pete what the fuck he was looking at. Sharla snorted. It seemed for a moment there’d be trouble as Pete stammered out that he wasn’t looking at anything. Pete was ashamed and said he was sorry and that he’d better be heading in to hit the sack. They just looked at him like he was crazy saying that, and Beauregard said for Pete to wait with Sharla, he and Douglas here had to go on an errand and he sure as shit wasn’t leaving Douglas alone with Sharla. It wasn’t clear that this was a joke or at whose expense if it was.

  They were gone an hour. Pete and the woman smoked, not a pleasantry passing between them.

  “My daughter is missing,” he said.

  The woman looked at him with no compassion whatsoever.

  “She ran away from her mother’s. I can’t find her.”

  “How old?”

  “Fourteen.”

  She pulled on her cigarette and looked into her glass and if she had a thought for him, she didn’t share it.

  “We’re shitty parents. Her mother is just over at her house getting drunk. And I’m sitting here getting drunk. But there’s nothing we can do. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  “You check the Drag?”

  He nodded. “We were young. We weren’t ready for a kid. No one tells you that the mother of your child will resent the child and resent you. I am saying what you are not allowed to say: we did not love our child enough. God, I didn’t protect her. I didn’t protect her from us. I go into homes all the time and I save children. It’s what I do for a living, you see? And I didn’t save my own daughter.”

  The woman had sat up, and now she went inside. She came back out with the bottle of rye. She squeezed his wrist as she filled his glass.

  “Beau will be back soon,” she said. “We’ll all feel better in a little bit.”

  When they returned, Beauregard oiled the party into Pete’s motel room and dialed in some music on the clock radio. He jiggered at the tinny sounds from the tiny speakers. Douglas removed a length of glass the color of maple syrup from his pants and Beauregard removed a pocket of foil from his shirt, folded it open, and plucked out a white pellet that Pete thought was a pill that the woman smoked. She sat serenely and Beauregard took the pipe from her open palm and bent to kiss her. She blew the smoke into his mouth. When he exhaled, she grabbed the back of his head and kissed him and pulled him onto the bed, wrapping her stained leg around him. Douglas shared with Pete a look of approval, of arousal. Beauregard disentangled himself and rose with the foil and the pipe. He loaded it again and handed it to Pete.

  They called it base. Pete set down his cigarette and drink, and took the hit. He was unprepared for the exhilaration and he laughed ferociously. His vision filled with bright magnesium fires. He immediately wanted another one and finished his drink and cigarette waiting for the pipe to come around. It did. He and Douglas now became bosom. The music was soulful and invigorating. They spoke and spoke and spoke, most of it lies and heightened opinions. When the time came, Pete handed over some of his money, and Beauregard and Douglas left again. He and Sharla watched television, as quiet as people waiting in an ER. Douglas and Beauregard returned, the room filling with sound.

  The hours shriveled into new smallnesses.

  The rye was gone, they were out of cigarettes. Douglas had disappeared. Beauregard and Sharla argued about a scab she was picking at on her leg. They seemed to have forgotten they were in Pete’s room. He stepped between them to get his wallet and his keys, and still they argued. He went outside. He walked up the empty street. A strip club, railroad tracks. A police car sped by. He walked the tracks and then down a causeway to and around the shore of a pond.

  He sat on the limestone in the dark. Felt the notches carved by water into the rock. He’d have wept but for the cocaine and the numbness and the queer sensation that the stones all around him were subtly shifting position. The very ground seemed to writhe. Nearby something slipped into the water. He wondered was he both seeing and hearing things. He’d had so little sleep. No more than an hour at a stretch since Beth had called.

  A foot away a rock shuddered. He reached a shaking hand to the stone and it collapsed a half inch, socketed into the ground. He wondered was he going crazy. Had he already gone crazy. He touched the stone and the grooves on the dome of it—

  A fucking turtle. Dozens of them all around. A bale of turtles crawling to water.

  Two days later he came back to Beth’s house with her car and her keys but not with her little girl. Not that she expected him to. She didn’t hear him pull up or climb onto the porch. He sat exhausted against the wall and was out of her sight and he listened to her shuffle on flip-flops into the living room. He was about to call to her when she started to cry. She bawled so hard he felt witness to a vile pornography of grief and then he wondered was she crying because the cops had found Rachel’s body or a piece of her clothing in the water or were the dogs searching the fields or were divers dredging the river. Fear paralyzed him, he didn’t want to know. And then her sobs puttered into a soft blubbering and she lit a cigarette.

  She came onto the porch and into the muggy afternoon, bugs screaming something terrific in the trees, coming and going in waves, he didn’t know they were cicadas or how loud they were, just that some incredible call-and-response was at work, a crackling choir that reminded him of baseball cards in bike spokes. She noticed him there and started crying anew.

  “What is it?” he whispered. “What’s happened?”

  He cringed as though waiting for her to hit him with a hammer.

  “Nothing’s happened,” she said. “She’s still just gone.”

  His relief was itself almost sickening and he wondered would this be the shape of his life. Constant worry. Images of her foot tangled in river flora, her contused and naked back, her hair in the dirt. Her teeth. Would these pictures forever turn on the carousel slide projector of his mind.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Everywhere. San Antonio. Just driving and looking and asking. I talked to kids all over the city, Beth. If she’s here . . . Hell, she’s not here. Or she’s . . .”

  “Pete, don’t.”

  “. . . or she’s in a hole . . .”

  He wept on his knees like a man begging for his life. She pulled him inside and held him, swaying under the ceiling fan until his grief emptied out. She took his head and looked at him and said I know I know I know honey. It was he who kissed her. She tasted like salt and beer. She led him into the bedroom through the stages of their disrobing. He wasn’t tender with her, but neither was he rough. The lovemaking was necessarily urgent, ashamed. They would not have been able to abide another moment’s re
flection. They were too sore, and there was no longer much surface to them, just a thin layer of skin and the raw pith beneath. If fucking could be frank, this was, and so was everything they said afterward. She exclaimed with some woe and wonder that this was how Rachel came to be. With these two people here.

  She reached for a glass on the bedside table and drank. She handed it to him. It was bourbon and melted ice and still cool and watery and almost slaking.

  “I keep calling the police station,” she said. “They sent an officer over. He said it sounds like she’d run away, not been kidnapped. I think she ran away, Pete. I think she ran away from me. I let her get away with everything and then when I tried to rein her in, she bolted. I think she’s okay.”

  She turned and grabbed his chin to have him look at her. “Right? She’s just run away, right?”

  “I’m sorry I left,” he said.

  “I’m sorry too,” she said. “I am. I drove you away. I did it knowing that.”

  “I think I knew what you were going to do. When you got dressed that night, when you went out.”

  She sat up.

  “I knew too,” she said. “I knew that you’d leave if I slept with someone. That you’d go exactly like you did. Pack a bag and vanish. Why did I do that?”

  She reached over and took two cigarettes from the pack and lit one for him and handed it to him and then one for herself. She got out of the bed and walked naked into the hall and returned with a bottle. He felt the force of this uncanny tableau. As though they had no child. As though this were a different version of things. He took a small comfort that somewhere such an iteration as this one existed, where Rachel had never been born and the only damage he and Beth did was to each other.

  “I was already gone,” Pete said.

  She poured him a glass, and he took it and drank.

  “You were. Why were you already gone, Pete? What happened to us?”

  He held up the glass of bourbon.

  “I don’t know. I’m an alcoholic, Beth. You’re an alcoholic. Shit, I smoked cocaine the other night. I take kids away from people like us.”