Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451)

by Henderson, Smith

  A thunderstorm trekked in on gray curdled clouds, and the rock wall at the back of the shelter wept with rainwater. Pearl warmed his hands by cupping the lamp and he darkled the shelter, made capes of shadow on the walls.

  All evening he worked his little mint on a round in the corner. Over and over, he’d set a penny on a railroad fishplate and with a punch and hammer knock a hole through Lincoln’s temple, then chuck the coin into a coffee can. He did this to a few more presidents and then put a thin blade through the hole of one of them and affixed the blade and coin to a small jeweler’s saw. He carefully adjusted the screws so as not to break the blade. Pete could see he only had a few of them left in the cardboard drawer. He waxed the blade with a small bar of yellow wax and then set the coin over the crotch of a wooden V-shaped bench pin and began to saw, turning the coin or the bench pin to suit the angles of his imagination. When it was done, he unscrewed one end of the blade from the saw and slipped the coin into his palm and held it up to the lantern, casting a watery pentagram on the back wall. All of it accomplished much easier by Pearl than the pawnbroker had thought possible.

  Pete asked to see. The coin was warm, a perfect five-point star in the copper of Lincoln’s head.

  Pearl held up a paper sack of coins.

  “I will have these punched and scored by tomorrow.”

  He tossed another sack made of felt and full of coins to Pete and told him to put the penny in with them. Pete dropped it in and fingered through the others. More stars and exclamation points and question marks and swastikas. Clovers. What looked like a scythe.

  “I’d like you to disperse them,” Pearl said as he threaded another coin onto the blade and then screwed it shut. “You can travel more widely than we can.”

  “I thought you were finished with the coins,” Pete said. “Just a whimper, you said.”

  “This is it.” Pearl rubbed his finger on the fishplate and his finger turned gray with the dust of the coins he’d vandalized. “The last money I’ll ever touch.”

  He began to saw the next coin, a soft almost pleasing sound that for Pete immediately recalled Rachel pulling the zipper on her jacket up and down. Sitting in his car. Waiting for the light to change.

  “Why do you want me to distribute these?”

  “It’ll be over soon.”

  “What will?”

  Benjamin picked dirty sap from his hands.

  “They will come and kill us.”

  “No one’s coming to kill you—”

  “Someone shot the president, Pete.”

  “So?”

  “The Secret Service is an arm of the Treasury. They have two missions: keep the president alive and protect the integrity of the US dollar. And the latter, I assure you, is more important than the former. They know all about me, Pete.”

  “That’s pretty grandiose, don’t you think?”

  “Obviously, I do not.”

  Pete looked at Benjamin, who continued to pick at his palm. A completely normal conversation.

  “I won’t take the coins,” Pete said. “I won’t take part in this.”

  “You’ll do it,” Pearl said, sawing into the coin. “And I know you’ll do it because you don’t want anything bad to happen to us. To him. And you’ll do it because if you don’t, you’ll never see us again. And you’ll do it because you believe you’ll talk us out of these mountains and back into that society of yours. Because you’re the nice face of things. The kind, caring face.” Pearl stopped sawing, fixed his dark eyes on Pete. “The devil, I know how he comes. With cans of food and fresh clothes and coloring books.”

  “I’m just a person, Pearl. You gotta stop with all this paranoia.”

  “I’d ask you to entertain a notion for a little bit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’d have you consider that I might not be as stupid and backward as you think.”

  “I don’t think you’re stupid.”

  “Then I’d like you to be sincere in your desire to help us, and do what I’m asking of you rather than what you think is best for us.”

  Benjamin had ceased picking at his hands.

  “Where’s the rest of your family, Jeremiah?”

  At this, Benjamin turned over in his sleeping bag away from them.

  “Where are your other children?”

  Pete swung the sack back to Pearl and it landed with a heavy plash of metal.

  “Well now,” Pearl said, “there’s the difference between you and me. I can answer that question, and you cannot.”

  In the morning they got ready to set out and Pearl and his son went together onto the ledge and when they came back in Benjamin’s nose was running and he’d been crying. He bravely told Pete it was good to see him and thanked him for the things he’d brought.

  “You’re not coming?”

  “He’s headed in the other direction,” Pearl said. “Dry up,” he told his son.

  The boy wiped his nose.

  “I’ll come see you again,” Pete said. “Okay?”

  The boy nodded at the floor.

  “Let’s go,” Pearl said.

  They descended one after another down the ladder and into the late April rainwater that was now up to his thighs, the boy’s waist. It was cool and overcast. The boy didn’t climb along the walls, and when they got out of the water he was shivering and chattering on the opposite bank.

  “So long, Pete,” he said.

  “You’re freezing,” Pete said.

  “He’ll be all right,” Pearl said. “Now, go on.”

  Ben disappeared into the brush.

  They walked all day and didn’t say a word, even when they stopped to eat or rest. When evening fell they kept marching and Pete had no idea where they were in the trim and waxing moon. It was some deep middle of the night when they made a road that stood out chalky in the dark.

  “You’re just down there,” Pearl said.

  They were barely able to see one another.

  “Give me the coins,” Pete said.

  Pearl dug them out of his small canvas bag.

  “I’m gonna come up here in a week. I’ll bring some more fruit and dried beans and rice.”

  Pearl said all right. Then he did a peculiar thing. He clapped his hand on the side of Pete’s neck and touched their foreheads together.

  “I’m praying for your family,” he whispered before he turned around and loped up the road.

  Where did she find Cheatham?

  He found her. Sitting with her backpack at a taco stand in East Austin.

  How was she?

  She was sick. It hurt when she peed, probably because of the guy at the party. She felt like this meant she’d lost Cheatham. She didn’t want to lose him. She just wanted to be someplace else. She just wanted to go. With him. Nobody else.

  Did she tell him?

  Are you kidding?

  What did they do?

  They looked at each other a few minutes. They ate and talked. She asked did he love her, and he said he didn’t know. She asked did he want to find out. She wanted to find out.

  They stayed at his place a few weeks, a bedroom in a house he shared with three other musicians. The walls were spray-painted silver.

  She stayed in hiding, in plain sight. Afraid her mother would roll up Congress or the Drag by UT where Cheatham would go to play his guitar. She avoided cop cars like she was holding, like she was a fugitive, which of a sort she was.

  Did she pester him to leave town?

  No. A little.

  When did they go?

  When his friends started calling her Lines.

  As in?

  State Lines. As in don’t take a minor across them. When they started calling him Chuck.

  As in?

  Chuck Berry. A musician who took a girl across state lines.

  Where did they go?

  Oklahoma.

  He came from some money. Was independently wealthy for a nineteen-year-old dropout. His father owned dealerships or gas statio
ns. He had friends all over the lower Midwest. From Arkadelphia to Nashville.

  What did they see?

  They saw county fairs. Prize-winning hens and pumpkins and hogs. Quilts and lace and art made of construction paper and painted macaroni. They saw panoplies of whirled lights. Barking underweight carnies. Racing horses yearning against the lash and the night.

  The saw kicked-up chaff on the horizon like the froth on a beer. Purple thunderheads opening up like head wounds, violences of wind and rain. A gray tornado made of hailstones and earth, of trailers, stock animals, and tractors.

  They saw trees wrapped by corrugated siding like the signage of the route to ruin.

  Was ruin what they came to?

  Of a kind.

  What kind?

  Indianapolis.

  TWENTY-TWO

  He called Beth to see had she heard anything, but she wasn’t home or didn’t answer, and listening to her phone ring and ring he felt how strange it was that she and he and Rachel had been scattered and sent off, aliens to one another, a broken valence, who knew a family was so fragile as that. And his father and mother gone, and his brother off in Oregon, and he was alone and he left work for Missoula to see Mary to see her to have her to be with her it was something at least.

  The elevator in the Wilma was open and empty. No car, no cables. Pete leaned in and looked up the shaft to see the bottom of the car, lit from below by an open door several floors up. A repairman in a leather belt came down the stairs with blackened hands and said it was stuck, everybody’d need to use the stairs.

  Mary’s door was ajar. He rapped it with his knuckle. It swung open and gave onto a view of her fellating the lawyer in the kitchen. The man he’d followed. His eyes were closed and he clutched a juice glass. A hiccup of laughter from Pete put a halt to everything. She rose and spoke, pulling closed her shirt. The lawyer replaced his cock in his boxers and zipped up and tucked in his shirt and, thus composed, affected nonchalance. He drank from the glass, set it in the sink. Mary was saying something to the lawyer now and then they were both looking at Pete, and he realized that they were waiting for him to leave or move out of the doorway, and he wondered what expression he wore that made them stand in abeyance like that, what feelings authored this expression. He wondered did the lawyer recognize him, was Pete being made a fool of. He punched a framed picture several times, and it shattered and fell to the floor. Mary and the lawyer didn’t move. He sat against the wall in the broken glass.

  The lawyer could leave. The blow job was over. This was Pete’s. It was over with Mary, but this moment was his. He realized he was saying these things aloud. The lawyer was asking Mary did she want him to stay. Then he was stepping around Pete and out the door. She reached the doorway of her apartment, asking was Pete quite finished. Her neighbors were in the hall, onlooking. He’d been yelling, he supposed.

  She told him he was bleeding. She left the door open and a balding layabout in a stained T-shirt grinned at him as Mary went to the kitchen for a rag. She returned to him like she might a wounded animal, low-toned, flat-affected. She gingerly took his hand and plucked the glass from his knuckles and winced as she did so. It began with tending his hand, and it would end with tending his hand.

  He felt sick. Then he kissed her. The mouth that had just had the lawyer’s cock in it and the rivalry inherent in that. She was caught off guard and perhaps felt guilty or obliged, and he knew there was no affection or desire to win her back in this kissing, now on her neck—she sucked in air through her teeth like his lips were ice, as if this were all some kind of dare—and he thought to fuck her right there on the floor in the broken glass, but something subtly shifted between them and the spell or whatever it was was broken.

  She let go of his hand, stood, and veered into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. From over the refrigerator, she got a pack of cigarettes and waited for the electric coil on the stove to light it. She seemed to be barricading herself in there. He kicked closed the front door.

  Then she came out of the kitchen. She’d acquired a new self-possession. Even her posture was frank. She said she wanted to talk. Would he listen.

  She said she needed things in her life to be separate. That she had a way she organized herself. Would he just listen. Would he just shut up a minute and listen.

  Did he have any idea how many times she’d been raped. What a number it did on her mind. How much she’s just out there coping. And the way she copes is, she’s a bureau. Like a dresser.

  Would he please just shut up for a minute.

  There was this old couple. There was a room the old man took her in. An old-time dresser in there, like an apothecary cabinet. Dozens of little drawers. She wasn’t allowed to play with it, it was antique. She wasn’t even allowed in the room. But the old man would take her in there. She’d watch the dresser. Think about what was in the drawers.

  She knows it’s a totem. A way of organizing her life. But it was useful to see how the things that had happened and were happening to her could be sorted. When the man was on her, she said, This just goes in that drawer there. . . .

  She put the bad things in those drawers, like little buttons. Then the good things too. She knows it’s just a metaphor or symbol. It’s just an organizing principle. It’s repression.

  She had this therapist who tried to get her to describe the drawers, what was in them. He made her do it. And all the drawers fell open and the buttons spilled all over the floor and by the time she got home, she was worse off than before, buttons everywhere. She had to pick them up one by one and put them all back. Took her two years. Ninety minutes with a psychiatrist and she’s out two years, sometimes getting more new buttons faster than she can put the old ones away. These rugby players, for instance. Reno, for instance. The Wind River Facility in California, for instance.

  Would he look at her. Would he see she’s telling the truth.

  There was a time when a guy like him would be somewhere on the floor. Lost there for a long while. She’d forget who’d come to see her. Wouldn’t be able to tell the one who had money from the one who had drugs from the one who liked to dance from the one who liked to make her feel like shit from the one who was kind and only ever pulled her hair, and even only when she needed him to.

  She said she had a drawer for guys she could love. A few buttons in there. And he’s in that drawer. And when he comes over, she gets so excited to open that drawer and take him out—

  The lawyer is from a kind of bad drawer. Not the worst drawer. A bad one.

  No, he doesn’t hurt her. Not in a typical way. What he does is between him and his conscience. It barely has anything to do with her. In a way.

  Would he look at her.

  She does, she does probably love him like a normal person might love someone. But he’s on the floor. And he has to get back in his drawer. The good drawer. Would he please just get back in his drawer. Just pretend this didn’t happen. That it doesn’t happen. Please.

  He stood up.

  “Mary,” he said.

  “What.”

  He opened the door.

  “Fuck you.”

  He left.

  Bender.

  The shit they pulled.

  Spoils on the curb explaining things to the cops. A man wants to knock out the windows of his own car, it’s his business, Spoils says. Glass and blood all over Pete’s file folders. The cops checking his license and registration, uncuffing him, telling Spoils to take him on home.

  Pete on the dog-smelling bed with all the dogs and waking among the dogs and throwing up, and the dogs sniffing it and not hazarding to even taste it, these fine mongrels.

  A call came from Indianapolis that social services there had picked up a girl that met Rachel’s description. Pete drove eighty-five the whole way to Spokane and rode a red-eye to Salt Lake, slept in the terminal and touched down in Indianapolis thirty-six hours after he got the message. He took a taxi to the Child Welfare Office and was referred to a shelter on the north si
de of town, an ugly pale building shoved among the brick houses. A black man sitting on a bucket smoking looked down his nose at him.

  By now coming on evening, the sun sidling and flashing up the windows under the discouraging clouds. Somehow he knew she wasn’t going to be there, that it wouldn’t be her, or that she’d be gone.

  The shelter hadn’t admitted anyone by her name, and when they escorted him through the wing of teenagers no one had seen a girl by the name of Rachel. He showed the staff a picture, and a savvy black girl slipped over to them and said she knew Rachel and said she knew where she was and could take him there right now. Soon all the girls said they saw her, lying to him, every last one. Their black city speech rushed by his Montana ears like freeway cars and he realized that if he was himself a country mouse what a small and bewildered thing Rachel must be.

  The first girl was saying she did so see Rachel, fuck y’all, she did so see the girl, the girl was in here two weeks ago, had her hair cut all stupid with short bangs and long bangs like it didn’t grow out at the same speed. The other girls’ insults and insinuations redounded and amplified off the concrete walls, and the girl said Rachel was let out three days ago and wouldn’t shut up about some dude, name of Cheatham.

  “Cheatham? Cheatham what?”

  “Last name.”

  “Rachel was with a guy named Cheatham.”

  “Yes. But she didn’t say her name wasn’t no Rachel. But that was her. In yer pitcher.”

  “What did she say her name was?”

  “Shit, I dunno. It just wasn’t no Rachel,” the girl said.

  The staff muttered to Pete that the girls were all liars.

  “Wait. I think it was Rose. Yeah, it was Rose.”

  The wing manager wouldn’t let him look at the intake books and smirked at his request in such a way that said the books were themselves a bit of a shared joke. Then a girl came in with a square of naked, bloody scalp and they said Pete had to go, meaning this was his fault, he’d riled the girls and their rickety routine, he’d taken staff from the floor and now look.