Fourth of July Creek (16 page)

He grinned and took her cold hand and rubbed it and told her that he’d never been with anyone from the office.

“I haven’t so much as kissed one of them under the mistletoe.”

He took a hand away to sip his coffee and held hers with his other one.

“I’m not a jealous person,” she said. “But people talking, I hate it. I need things to be separated. Work. Life. Separated.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t even care if you have somebody else in your life—”

He’d let go of her hand.

“Do you have somebody up in Tenmile?”

“I left my wife a while ago.”

He sipped his coffee. Before he could set it down, she took it from him and had a drink too.

“A wife.”

“She went to Texas.”

“Texas.”

“You’re repeating me.”

“Sorry.”

“Now you’re apologizing.”

“Fuck you.”

“Now you’re swearing.”

She set his cup back down in front of him.

“Do we need to talk about her?” he asked.

She scratched behind her ear. Smiled when she looked at him.

“No.”

He sipped his coffee and she took it from him again.

“Let’s go to this party.”

“It’s not for a while.”

He slid out of the booth and stood.

“Let’s go to this party slowly.”

They are drunk when they arrive, an almost empty fifth of Montana Redeye. She climbs a wrought black spiral staircase ahead of him, he keeps trying to put his mouth onto her lovely ass as she ascends before him. The lively throng upstairs. So much cigarette smoke the house may be afire. A guitar boils out a crude blues through overworked speakers. She leads him to a card table sagging under bottles, faceted half-empty goblets of red wine, and a fondue pot with a burping neon orange skin. Someone has placed olive eyes in the thing. Pete pumps a spittle of froth from a keg floating in a garbage can of ice water and gives up. Faces spin out of the mass to recognize him and shake his hand and say things to him he cannot hear.

Now Mary is gone.

He wheels into the kitchen to find her. People he knows from work, guys from the Attention Home slap his back.

“Pete, my man. What’s that you’re drinking?”

Pete hands the bottle over. Accidentally knocks a playcastle of cans off the counter.

“Christ, Pete. Nobody actually
drinks
this.”

Pete shrugs dreamishly, coughs creamishly, hawks into the sink.

“Got a cold there?”

“I’m runnin’ a temperature, all right.”

“How’s the wife?”

“Texas.”

“What?”

“We’re splits.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No one quits a good thing,” Pete said.

A loud record now, something new from the plinky tinny keyboard sound of it. Mary dances in the living room. Alone. Swaying about in that dress, a satiny red and white thing that fits her all over.

“That Mary is just . . .”

“Yes. Yes she is.”

Someone hands Pete a can with a screwdriver stabbed into it.

“Did you hear about her?”

“Hear what?”

“Shotgun that thing already.”

Pete removes the screwdriver and puts the can to his face. A cold bubbling snake liable to choke him. A long foaming burp. He sets the empty by. Burps again.

“Hear what?”

“She has a file. Jake come across it. She was in and out of foster homes and state hospitals her whole life. And it wasn’t no good run neither. Fuckin bonkers. One placement, they kept her in a goddamn closet most of the time. This was two years. Two years of getting beat and raped. All before she was twelve years old. And the shit at the state hospital? With the guards fucking the girls? She was up there too. It’s still like a goddamn brothel up there. I
never
send a kid there, I can help it.”

She dances, and Pete is not the only one watching.

“Looks great on the outside, but under the hood. Another story.”

She touches her stomach with a palm and closes her eyes and sets her hips in a pendular swing as though her pelvis depended from a point somewhere near her heart.

The system knows this girl.

Which is to say that you know this girl.

All her homes are group homes and all her sisters and brothers are fosters in placements, her fathers and mothers are social workers, and when she ages out of care, she ages into the job. Your job. Only she gets inappropriate and benched, or no one trusts her with any real cases and she sits in the break room rearranging packets of Sweet ’n Low.

She is proof that there is nothing that cannot happen to someone. That the world doesn’t need permission, that there is no novel evil it won’t embrace.

And so you’re in a mood now, watching Mary dance and taking shotguns of beer and then riding in a car with her and people from the party and you’re both too drunk to notice the other is too drunk and you’re kissing in the flicker of a dying neon sign, hiccupping, kissing hard and sloppily, teeth clacking together, inexpert, tyro.

Innocent, be untroubled a while longer.

He hurt all over, the sunlight frying him through Mary’s window.

He thought he should just quit. The job or drinking or both.

Her note said she had drawn a Saturday shift and so he quaked alone in his hangover among her spider plants and wicker, staring for some time at the phone or the number Beth had scribbled on a scrap of envelope. He’d memorized it by the time he folded the scrap into his shirt pocket and went to Al’s and Vic’s. He took the beer the bartender pulled for him and watched him clean glasses and left when his head quit pounding.

He went to the Army Navy store for a new pair of bootlaces, to the bookstore, and for lunch. Didn’t speak to a soul. It was two o’clock when he finally returned to the Wilma. He lay down on Mary’s couch, couldn’t fall asleep.

It was five when he woke.

He pulled the phone onto the coffee table and regarded it, muttering. Then he dialed and it rang twice and he was about to hang up when she answered.

“Hey, Applesauce, it’s Daddy.”

“Why don’t you have a phone at your house?”

There was music in the background and people talking and Beth too, he thought. Her laughter.

“It’s Dad,” she said to her mother.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Mom says to tell you to send some money.”

“Okay. I will. How are you?”

“Sucky. I hate it here.”

“You’ll meet some kids your age. It’ll get better.”

“I don’t like kids my age.”

“What does that mean?”

Beth was talking to her.

“Mom wants to know if you’re going to send at least two hundred dollars.”

“Tell her I’ll talk to her in a minute.”

His daughter covered the mouthpiece, and then it flooded with sound again.

“Pete?”

“Damnit, Beth. Put her back on.”

“I need that money right away. At least a couple hundred.”

“Yes. Put Rachel back on.”

“Your
daughter
needs things. Shoes. School clothes. Notebooks and shit.”

“Beth. Put Rachel back on.”

“You don’t have any right to talk to her if you aren’t gonna support her.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

A hand cupped the receiver and it sounded full of ocean, full of Texas. Thirty seconds he watched the clock. A minute. He wanted to pitch the phone at the window, but it was Mary’s window, Mary’s phone.

“Mom says I only have a minute because of the long distance.”

“I’m the one who called, Rach. It’s my bill.”

“Daddy?”

“What?”

“Can I come live with you?” she whispered. “I won’t need a lot of room and I’ll be good, I promise. I hate it here. It’s hot. It’s fall and it’s still hot. Hot hot. Like a thousand degrees.”

“It’ll cool off.”

“I
miss
you.”

“Honey, I miss you too—”

“I hate it here! There’s all these people over and I don’t like any of them—”

“What people?”

“I want to come home!”

“Rachel, listen to me. I’ll make you a deal. Just try it out for a couple months.”

“A couple whole months?!”

“I want you to try. We all need to try. And then if you still don’t like it, we can talk about you coming back up here.”

“You hate me! Why don’t you just say it? You hate me and Mom.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“You hate Mom.”

“I don’t hate your mother.”

“This is so fucked.”

“Come on, Applesauce—”

The line clicked.

“Rachel.”

The line clicked again. Then the doleful dial tone.

What the hell happened? Wasn’t she starting to make friends?

She made a lot of friends. The older kids in the woods. But she made enemies too.

Who?

Goody girls. Cheerleaders and bitches like that. Teachers asking was everything all right at home.

Was everything all right at home?

What home? Jimmy’s trailer? That wasn’t their home.

Is that why she wanted to go back to Montana?

She didn’t want to go back to Montana.

Then why did she ask to live with her father?

Because her mother was letting her have friends over and of course the kids wanted to drink beer and her mother would be having people over too and there was this one perfect night when her mother didn’t stop any of them from getting beers from the cooler and nobody got in trouble or called the cops or anything, but the next day she was being such a bitch and said they couldn’t do that again.

Because it was inappropriate. Because she was her mother, not her friend.

Because she was hungover. Because she was jealous, to be honest.

Of the attention Rachel was getting?

Rose.

What kind of attention?

Just looking at her. Not looking at her mother. Talking to her. Jimmy always finding an excuse to lean over her just to get something from the shelf, rub against her in the narrow hall. One time fetching her a beer even though she didn’t really drink that much, she didn’t like being drunk and sick, she could nurse a beer for hours or pour it half out when no one was looking she was drunk enough on the attention the attention the attention like a drug.

So she liked Jimmy?

Ick.

The attention then.

Yes. The older guys in the woods, car stereos blasting. She knew the girls didn’t like her that much, but she didn’t care, she just talked to the guys, her mother’s friends, a suntanned blond saying they should go to his boat. Guys her dad’s age. Her whole life became more interesting. Every minute charged with her new participation in it.

But her mother, she hated this.

Jealous.

Surely it was more complicated than that.

They’d shared cigarettes and talked about men. They’d cried when they talked about Pete and Jimmy and what were they gonna do now, they couldn’t live here. Waco was terrible. They were broke. They were friends. Her mother didn’t know how to navigate backward to motherhood.

Or Rachel wouldn’t return to being a daughter.

She ran away. Two days.

Where did she go?

None of your business.

The Waco cops spotted her after curfew smoking at a Dairy Queen picnic table? She didn’t run?

No.

Why not?

She thought maybe her mother would be so glad to see her that she would let her get away with anything.

Was she?

She slapped her. Right in front of the police. Then kissed her and held her and cried and asked why and answered her own question that she was a bad mother and they needed to leave this place, they needed a fresh start and in a week they were headed to Austin where she had a job waiting for her.

What job?

A guy knew a woman who had to go back to Charlotte and needed someone to sublet her place and even better would Beth take her shifts at the bar down there, it paid good enough, hell yes.

What did they tell Jimmy?

They just left.

H
e went back to work. He visited the Shorts armed with mace for the Rottweilers (gone), called Cecil’s uncle Elliot to check in on them (no answer), and paid a visit to Cecil’s mother, Debbie (skittish, defensive), and Katie (hale), but Pete was distracted. His mind kept turning to the Pearls, the boy, the coins. He watched for coins.

The cache of clothes and medicine was as he left it in the cleft of the rock. He sat listening to the forest, the chipmunks scurrying over the duff, the sky yellow with thin clouds and high smoke from a forest fire in Canada.

On his way down, Pete encountered a man dragging a travois of marijuana plants out of the cedar. When he spotted Pete, he dropped the plants and marched straight up the road toward him. Pete’s only options were up or down the mountain, or back up the grade behind him. He took his hands out of his pockets and waited. Told himself the guy just wanted to check him out. Tried to appear harmless and fearless at once.

The man was a panting six foot five, two-fifty. Not exactly fit, but formidable and aptly paranoid. He’d stripped his torso to a sweat-stained thermal undershirt. He wore leather gloves and a three-day beard and he looked like he meant business a little more than Pete expected.