Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451)

by Henderson, Smith

He stayed in a small hotel and the next day rented a car. First he tried to find out who had called him from the Child Welfare Office, but in the massive warren of cubicles there seemed to be neither accountability nor culpability, and from every nook emanated some sob or outrage or pleading that seemed to literally hover in a physical murmur over the cubicles and, condensing on the fogged windows, ran in beads like tears. The shift managers couldn’t help him, no one knew who contacted him, and they all had calls to make themselves.

  He located his poster of Rachel on the bulletin board, her face obscured by a new notice. He pulled Rachel’s down and tacked it on top of the others and made for downtown. A few hours of walking and a few hours by the fountain at the base of the sailors and soldiers monument, watching the cars and the people go round the roundabout. He cruised the city, the clapboard neighborhoods and tenements and downtown alleys. Into the wholesale district. He saw vagrants of every age and description around the old Union Station. He parked and circled the abandoned brick and granite structure. Stern bartizans like watchtowers. The voices within. He went around the corner and knocked in the plywood over a broken window and pulled himself inside. He tread over a rime of pigeon shit on the ornate marble floors, footsteps echoing throughout the barrel vaults and so did his voice calling out for Rachel, for Cheatham. People hid in here and he said that he was just looking for his daughter, did they have any sympathy at all. He called out that she was with someone named Cheatham. Or Booth. Whispers carried on the dusty claustral air. Someone tell me something, he said.

  A bottle shot over the iron railing toward him with a tail of dregs and exploded with a terse pop and fanned across the smooth floor in thousands of discrete shards around and between his feet with the fineness of rock salt.

  He was a few days in the hotel, going crazy. He didn’t drink, he didn’t leave the room, he let the television talk at him. He wasn’t going to lose it. He wasn’t going to kill himself. He wasn’t going to give up.

  But what was there to do. Useless.

  He went to a liquor store and bought a handle of bourbon and then to a grocery and fixed himself up with a packet of razors and a six-pack of Coca-Cola. He filled the ice bucket. He observed the television like a foreigner. He made a drink and the inanities of the game shows began to wear on him. When he looked away from the screen and out the window, the glass warped and rainbowed in his vision like a huge soap bubble and he realized he was hallucinating or crying or both. He took long drafts from the bourbon at the sink. He drew a bath. He wiped away the steam and regarded the man behind it, thin and pale, the maculate sunken eyes. It had grown dark. The water was lukewarm too, and he had lost hours and he was sure that he’d gone insane.

  He climbed into the tub in his clothes. He drank and fumbled open the razors from their cardboard box. He practiced cutting through his jeans into his thigh. He felt nothing. A small pink bloom in the water.

  Do it.

  I can’t.

  Do it.

  He leapt out of the tub and flung himself down the hallway into the raining night and through the parking lot, his wet feet slapping the pavement and on into a copse of trees where he fell and started pounding the mud with his fists like something might be accomplished this way and then screamed at the weeping sky what am I that I want to die. The leaves like shuddering lids of tin and razors of lightning and how could anything be okay in all this, the world is a blade and dread is hope cut open and spread inside out.

  He woke to conversation.

  “Door was open.”

  “What’s that all over him?”

  “Mud.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Wake up, mister.”

  “Look at his knuckles.”

  “That lamp is smithereens.”

  “Get out,” Pete said.

  “It lives.”

  “GET OUT!”

  “Box the motherfucker’s car in. He ain’t going nowhere till he pays for this shit.”

  It occurred to him to look at a map. Gnaw Bone, Indiana, was only an hour away.

  It was scarcely a place at all on the way to Bloomington. A few houses, a closed barbecue joint, and a scrap yard with a man sweeping out front. He asked the narrow-faced proprietor was there a family by the name of Pearl in the area. The man said the only Pearls left a few years ago, but the missus had some people up the Clay Lick Road and gave Pete directions.

  The house sat among blooming tulip trees. He was met at the screen by a compact barefoot woman in jeans and a stained sweatshirt. Pete said he was a social worker from Montana and just happened to be in the area and wondered if by chance anybody on the property was kin to Jeremiah Pearl or his wife.

  His eyes adjusted to the low light in the house. An older, papery version of the woman at the door heaved herself from a recliner.

  “Has something happened to my Veronica?” she asked, mashing out a cigarette on an ashtray by the door. The woman’s daughter pushed open the screen and the thin old thing stood in the doorway and searched Pete’s eyes for what he knew.

  “I don’t—”

  “Something’s happened. What’s happened?”

  “I haven’t seen anything. I haven’t seen her. But I have seen Jeremiah. And Benjamin.”

  “Benjamin,” she said, as if the thought of the boy pained her.

  “Yes.”

  She gathered the wattles of skin at her throat and looked liable to cry. She forced a grin on her face. It wouldn’t be polite to do otherwise. Then she said for Pete to come in, and he followed her into the house.

  He spoke with the woman and her daughter for several hours. They gave him strawberry soda. The women had sugar diabetes and couldn’t have more than a sip, so they split a can three ways and the women sipped and smoked, the older through wrinkled and furry lips. They got out an old scrapbook and showed him pictures of the family.

  VERONICA AS A CHILD and then as a blurry teenager, she hates having her picture taken. A healthy girl, handsome rather than pretty, country-pious, more than her sisters or mother or her father. God bless him. Heart attack last fall.

  They showed him young-man Pearl, what he looked like without a beard. Doughy, pudging out around the belly. Given to spells of talk that end in sheer drops of hours-long silences. Times you can’t shut him up, times he’s stone still. He claims to have been a Green Beret but was in fact only a truck driver in Vietnam. He seethed in that heat and came back ginned up to do something with his life now that the war wasn’t going to do it to him or for him.

  He meets Veronica on a hayride of all goddamn things. At this point a woman of twenty. Not yet severe and with all the personality of a hatchet, but she has had religion since a tent revival four summers previous.

  At the drive-in, she asks is he saved. Does he want to be. He answers sincerely. He’s just out of the army and accustomed to being told what to do, craves it in fact, but couldn’t take orders from a body as fucked up as the US Army, and sure as shit no church.

  But Veronica, he’d eat glass for her, he says.

  She tells him to come see her when he doesn’t have the beer on his breath.

  They are engaged inside of ten days and married when he has enough for a gold band and a down payment on a little place in Gnaw Bone. They don’t answer their phone. Her family hardly sees her anymore, except at the movies. They are always at the movies. He meets her after work and they neck in the back of the theater or in the front seat of his convertible on summer nights, the grasshoppers leaping away from the headlights as they drive in the dark fields to the quarry to night swim and sleep under the stars.

  He buys a Super 8 camera and they make little films. Goofy, typical stuff. People waving at the camera as they fix hot dogs. Kids flying off the rope swing into the shining river. Fireworks. Snow angels.

  Twenty months later, two little ones, and she is a third time pregnant. They announce this at a barbecue of her extended family, hardy Irish farmers. Catholics. An uncle jokes, Christ, it’s a womb not a
clown car. They have to use tweezers to remove the bits of his eyeglasses from his eyebrow. The way her cousins hold Jeremiah back, Veronica’s about sick with love for him. She doesn’t hate her uncle, but that Jeremiah would kill for her seems to please her in an unhealthy way.

  The next time Jeremiah and Veronica visit they come with a film projector and boxes. Her whole extended family on folding chairs set up in the living room, smoking, drinking a little beer, thinking they are about to watch some home movies. Veronica sets out mixed nuts. Soap and sundries. American Way—Amway, for short. Jeremiah explains the versatility and breadth of the brand. He goes to her mother, sisters, and aunts, squirting dollops of milky lotion in their palms. The men notice his light feet, his mincing step. He is not yet at ease with himself as an orator. He explains how such a tiny amount of this here soap will clean a whole load in the Kenmore. Try the mixed nuts. Now lookit the business plan. When he glances at her, Veronica gestures for him to mop his brow with his handkerchief and then she nods—he’s doing just fine—to go on. He draws closed the jalousies and plays them the promotional film. A great opportunity to get in on the ground floor. A good start would be only a thousand dollars, maybe two.

  My God, someone whispers loud enough for everyone to hear, they want us to sell this shit.

  A winter later, they give silver coins for Christmas. Only precious metals ever keep their value, what with oil prices and the dollar, which buys less every year. The fiat dollar he calls it. The government’s taken all the silver out of new coins, don’t you know. Replaced it with the copper sandwich, don’t you know. There are pamphlets out in the car, just a second.

  Then for a few-month spell, all this money stuff seems like a phase. He gets a job at the Cummins plant. A damn good wage. Just the phrase good wage passing his lips is astonishing. He drinks beer, smokes cigars, wears cologne. They buy a Z28 and a pair of motorcycles. She gets a big TV and Kenmore appliances. New cameras. Polaroids and long-lenses and tripods.

  “The movies,” the sister said. “That’s what did it.”

  Pete asked did what.

  “She comes over crying her eyes out one day. The lab that develops all their film called. Said they didn’t want her husband’s money, that they are good Christians over there. Veronica knows immediately why. He’s been taking ‘private’ pictures of her. I tell her not to worry about it, but when she goes home, they have this big fight. A couple days she sleeps in her old room here at the house. Leaves the kids with him and everything.”

  “And then . . .”

  “He bought her a car.”

  The old woman nodded and the sister went for another strawberry soda and poured them new pink portions. After the car, something else happened, she said. Pete asked what.

  JEREMIAH COMES ACROSS A stack of Jack Chick comics and a copy of The Late Great Planet Earth in the break room at the plant. He has a feeling he should take them home, and home they go, where Veronica devours them in a day. He returns from the graveyard shift the next morning to a wife afire with the Spirit of the Lord. Everything is in place for the Tribulation, she says. So much has been predicted, so little has yet come to pass. She talks about the things that she will talk about constantly from now on. The Six-Day War and the consolidation of Jerusalem. How the oil crisis of 1973 was predicted by Zachariah. How Israel will become a burdensome stone. The Antichrist is probably alive right now. Right now, she says.

  Half the time no one knows what the hell she’s talking about. Except Jeremiah. They come over and put on coffee. Want to talk to the whole family. He holds her a minute as it percolates. She fairly vibrates in his arms. It’s like with Amway, the Tupperware, only it’s the both of them going a mile a minute about the End Times and Revelations. Like they’re on uppers. At some point, Jeremiah’s outside with her father. The father, he’s never bought into a single line of this stuff. He tells Jeremiah flat out that this is bullshit. That there’s something wrong with the two of them. In the head. Jeremiah isn’t upset by this. He hears the old man out. Then he says, Either there is something wrong with her or there is something wrong with the world. I choose the world is wrong.

  Everybody else in the family quickly has it up to their eyeballs, this holier than thou and the politics. The sister, she plays along, just to keep them close. She attends church with them from time to time. But they have trouble finding a congregation with any fire to it. They go to tiny, weird churches in Ogilville and Walesboro led by emaciated unkempt burnouts and longhairs. They attend services for alcoholics and the homeless in a repurposed movie theater in Edinburgh. Drunks throw up in the pews and ask parishioners for money directly. A certain disheveled preacher in downtown Indianapolis shows them his .22 pistol under his corduroy jacket and asks can’t they find a service for normal people, don’t they see his flock is demented. They spend a few Sundays at a house-basement ministry in Bedford. The naked bulb, electric keyboard, handwritten hymnals, and fresh supply of drunks largely mumbling to themselves on the metal folding chairs. Invalids and muttering halfwits pass the empty plate.

  For a time they don’t even go to church, and take their cues from Hal Lindsey’s book, and from the Bible directly. They give up shellfish and Christmas.

  Christmas! With all those children they have now.

  Then they remove all the images from their house. The teddy bears and television go on the front lawn for the trash pickers. Her mother hears what she is doing and rushes down for the picture albums, and Sarah sends her back with them and the cameras, and too the nice china, the flatware with the images of the Clydesdales, and the paintings of covered bridges.

  By now they’re hardly talking to anyone. They’ve started in with a new church, raving about Pastor Don, and you never see them.

  And she’s not Veronica anymore.

  “I can imagine,” Pete said.

  “No, I mean she’s changed her name. She’s Sarah now.”

  “Her middle name,” the mother said. “More biblical, she says.”

  “Pastor Don?”

  They didn’t know much about him. He led a small church outside of Martinsville. But they loved the congregation. They gave away dog-eared copies of books. The sister went to a shelf and pulled a few paperbacks down for Pete. Coin’s Financial School by William Harvey. America’s Road to Ruin by Chet Hart, The Startlingly True Visions of Isaiah by Jan Meyer. In the back you can see how to order still more.

  VERONICA—SARAH—IS MAKING pen pals with like minds, every week an obscure new tome in the mail, some of them ditto-copied in aniline blue and lashed together with rubber bands, dog-eared and coffee stained.

  Some of them have swastikas.

  You talk to her now and half of what she says is out of the King James. She says she feels pristine, original. That is, the book and the reading of the book answer an unput-to question that has been rattling around inside her for years, a doubt and anxiety that she was too late for everything, that history was over, that the era of miracles was past, that the world was altogether discovered.

  But now is the beginning of the End. Now is the At-Hand Completion. Now the evening news reveals the great engine of His devise. When the Israelis are murdered at the Munich games there is riveting horror to be sure; but you can feel another piece of The Plan slide into place too. Armageddon unfolding right there on the Wide World of Sports. What dazzling events gestate, what will come, befall, occur, what is yet is only just yet.

  Selah.

  Now.

  They fall out with Pastor Don’s congregation. Their circle shrinks.

  She’s been having these grave headaches that she says go off like bombs behind her eyes, and there are times she has to rush to the sink or the toilet to throw up they are so bad. Times she is in her terry cloth robe on the bathroom floor, palms up, weeping at the ceiling and the kids pee outside on the side of the house. Days at a stretch she hides in the murk of her bedroom, afghans nailed over the windows, talking in tongues and singing only to emerge pale and quaking on stilte
d legs, begging their father to take them all, all of the children, just away for a few hours, each discrete noise is like a gun going off, and her ears are ringing, Jeremiah, just take them somewhere, just for a little while please I got to get a little sleep if I can. If I can.

  A summer day the sister drops in, finds Veronica on the kitchen floor, flushed and nearly gibbering. Her dress is sodden with sweat and urine. She’d been putting clothes on the line, so many clothes now with the five kids, another—Ethan—on the way, when a headache crept on, a dull and growing throe in the meat of her skull, and it pulsed behind her eyes. She fell in the hugeness of it. She concentrated on her breathing. She was terrified something was terrifically wrong. There was a blade of grass in her narrowed field of vision and on the blade was a droplet of dew. The sunlight shattering through the tiny bulb of water. Too much.

  She clambered inside, pulled closed the curtains, and sat in the cool of the open refrigerator. The phone rang, and she ripped the cord out of the wall. All her senses were fire. The hot, the bright. This is crazy, I’m goin crazy. She tried to pass out. She prayed to pass out. She prayed to die. She prayed to take her children, her husband, make everything ash, just stop the pain.

  I made a covenant with death, she says to her sister.

  The sister asks what the hell she is talking about.

  Veronica says, With hell I am at agreement.

  She babbles about a vision, a vision that came in the cool wake of the fire she passed through, everything scorched away. The fire was a siren, His way of getting my attention. She saw mountains. She saw such privation. Hardship. It was the Tribulation.

  Let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains, she says. We must go.

  A month later, they are headed to Montana.

  Pete took a sip from the syrupy soda out of politeness and then reached for one of the albums asking “May I?” and flipped to the pages he was looking for. Pictures of Veronica’s mother and father with the kids in the woods. Five kids, and the baby.

  “Is this in Montana?”