Fourth of July Creek (23 page)

They had outside time in a pavement play area where the staff tried to engage him in small talk, things about his family, did he have any brothers or sisters, and large talk, was he angry about anything, did he feel like hurting himself. He provided terse answers.

He felt guilty about his sister alone up there with his mother. When he was at his uncle’s, he was actually angry at Katie that she could stay home, that she had all her things, that her life was less broken than his own. But now, he worried. Maybe Ell and Bear would take her too? Or he would go up to Tenmile and murder his mother himself—suffocate her with a pillow or push her down the basement stairs so it looked like an accident—and then Pete would have to let Katie come stay with him and Bear and Ell. They could both help take care of the baby.

One day the matron of the place had him pack his things and wait in the lobby for Pete or someone else, it wasn’t clear. After a while, they were talking about him, he could hear his name, his fate partially announced in snatches as her door opened and closed. They brought him supper in the lobby and the heater made him painfully drowsy. He knocked his head against the wall steadily to stay awake, and the matron came out to see what was the matter. He tried to grin pleasantly. She told him to go watch television. He watched cartoons with the other kids asking him was he leaving or not. He ate in silence.

A new resident had taken his bed. He was to sleep in a cot.

A few days later, Pete arrived. He asked if Cecil had any idea where his mother might be. He’d been by the house a couple times, no one there. Katie hadn’t been in school.

“There you go.”

“There you go?”

“I’m abandoned,” Cecil said. “Just send me to Ell and Bear’s.”

Pete rubbed his mouth in a gesture of feigned contemplation. There was something made up about his mind, you could see it. And Pete wasn’t happy about it.

“What is it?”

“Okay, look,” Pete said. “I went and checked them out. They’re nice enough people, but Bear doesn’t have any work and Ell’s about to have a baby—”

“They said I could live with them!”

“Calm down. I have to think about what’s best for everybody. Even them. If I put you in a bad situation, that’s on me—”

“My uncle’s was a bad situation.”

“No, that was a
good
situation. Which you messed up. And now they won’t take you back.”

“So, what, I’m gonna live here for the rest of my life?”

Pete looked Cecil in the eye.

“We’re gonna go see your father.”

“Why? I can’t live with him.”

“Obviously. I talked to the judge up in Tenmile, he’s a friend of mine, and he says if I’m gonna put you with somebody like Bear and Ell, I gotta get at least one parent to sign off. So.”

“You go.”

“It’d be good for you to see him.”

“You talked to Bear and Ell?”

“Yes.”

Cecil stood.

“Fine. Let’s go to the prison. Let’s get his signature.”

“There’s something else. Sit down a minute.”

Pete pointed at the seat and Cecil fell into it.

“Ell told me about your mother.”

“What about my mother.”

“She molested you.”

“Fuck that. She did not.”

“She did. Or Ell’s a liar.”

“Ell’s a liar.”

“And you want to go live with someone who lies about you?”

Cecil narrowed his eyes and clutched the edge of the table.

“I ain’t dumb. I see what you’re doing,” he said.

“What am I doing, Cecil?”

“You know.” He looked down at his hands, let go of the table, crossed his legs, and thus composed, said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Pete slid back his chair and put his hands together and wedged them between his straightened legs in a kind of countermove. They sat like this for a long moment.

“If Ell’s telling me bullshit, how can I trust anything she says when I let you go live with her?”

Cecil closed his eyes just so he could avoid having to look at Pete anymore. When he opened them Pete was still there. Waiting.

“Come on.”

“Oh my God, if you don’t quit asking me this, I’m gonna lose it. For serious.”

Pete and Cecil stood in the lot outside the prison. In the burnt dusk the black mountain horizon glowed like a hunk of charcoal. Two men exited the front of the building and walked purposefully toward the car. Pete got out, went around and opened Cecil’s door, and clapped him on the shoulder. The men walked straight at the open car door. White, short-sleeve shirts, plastic ID badges. Cecil realized this could not be good.

“Where are we?”

“Pine Hills. It’s a juvenile facility. I gotta put you in here for a little bit.”

Cecil looked at the grim brick building, the flags snapping in the wind, the men advancing, with sickening incredulity.

“No fucking way. Just take me somewhere. Let me out on the side of the road.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“You can sign the papers. You can do it.”

“There’s no papers to sign, Cecil.”

“You said I could go live with Bear and Ell!”

“You gotta go in juvie until you have your day in court. I can’t keep you in the attention home. I got nowhere else I can put you.”

“You fucking asshole! You fucking dick! You lied to me!”

Pete reached for him, and he knocked his hands away, slid over.

“This isn’t my fault!” he shouted. Pete stood back, hands up.

Cecil was crying now. It was shameful to him, but the shame only made the sobs come thicker. Something burned in his stomach.

“You know that if you put me in there, you’ll never get me out!”

He looked around, out the back windows, for somewhere to run.

“You’d make it as far as the gate.”

“You’re a lying asshole bitch! You just tricked me into coming up here so you could throw me away! I never should have trusted you!”

Pete squatted down in the open door in front of him. Cecil could launch himself at him. He could get him by his pretty blond hair and do some real damage. He searched Pete’s face, imagined tearing it to shreds. But that was all he did, imagine it.

“I need you to calm down. Right now.”

There were pins of light in the blackness around Cecil’s vision.

“You’re hyperventilating. Just calm down, and listen to me. You’re not staying here. This is just where I gotta put you. I’ll see if I can find someplace permanent. Some program. I’ll find you something.”

“Ellll . . .” It came out ragged, like the words were serrated.

“You gotta forget that. It ain’t happening.”

“My uncle’s then!”

“It’s too late, Cecil.”

He fell against the dash, sobbed there.

“I’m sorry. I won’t . . . I won’t be bad . . . Oh God.”

He flopped back in the seat. Either Pete beckoned them or the men knew just when to grab him. He screamed, but was too stunned to really fight. They were firm, the way they had him by his arms and torso and were extracting him from the vehicle. An excruciating pressure on the back of his hand and he couldn’t hold on to the steering wheel and he immediately knew their competence, their experience, his own weakness. He sobbed anew as they walked him to the door. He tried to break for it, but so halfheartedly they simply steered him into the building.

They entered a small foyer that was filled with desks, and people in different uniforms watched him come in and even them looking on him made him cry that much harder and it was difficult to see in the wash of tears. The smallness of him. The smallness of his heart. No courage whatsoever.

“Can I stay with you? Pete?”

“It won’t be so bad.”

“That’s not what you said. You said it would be very bad!”

“It’s gonna be all right, Cecil.”

Someone said for Pete to go ahead and leave.

“Pete!”

“I gotta. You’ll be all right.”

“No. No. No no no no no no . . .”

Pete was gone and Cecil panicked, he strained against several arms for a door, the door he must have gone through, and he was adrift in terror then, bleached with fear, a brine in his throat at the terrific realness of this. Someone had him down on his back. Blue black stubble against his forehead as they held him. They carried him deeper into the facility. He made out the metal beds. The boys in them. Pointing, crowding round like pigeons at feed, he’d seen pigeons in Missoula, sleet of white feathers falling from the underneath of the Higgins Street Bridge. The brake lights strung out like bulbs along an awning, and the cold and the feathers snowfalling down.

No.

I’m not staying.

I ain’t gonna spend Christmas in here, I’ll die first I fuckin promise.

Y
our caseload is brutal and will get worse as the holidays steadily advance on the poor, deranged, and demented. Kids waiting with cops in the living room or the front seat of the squad car to stay out of the cold until you arrive. You run the children down to the crisis shelter in Kalispell. There aren’t many beds. You have twenty-four hours to find a placement. Fortunately, the emergency placements that were so scarce in summer sprout by the gross come Thanksgiving. People ashamed of their good fortune come the holidays, meaning well.

But as always the calls are mostly bullshit. Ninety-five percent. Landlords ratting out noisy, alcoholic tenants. Divorcees fighting over Christmas-morning custody. Visit the little studio apartments or a trailer or a yurt up the sticks, confirm that there are Cheerios in the cupboard, frozen juice in the freezer, blankets, winter coats, and mittens in the hall closet. Ignore the bong hastily covered by a bandana and write out an action plan and get the hag with stained teeth and her balding homunculus to sign it and fare-thee-well out the door. Don’t even bother with the paperwork for the state office because by noon there are three more new cases to replace that one. Just shove your pink copy of the action plan in a folder marked with the month and leave it at that because paperwork’s the single least important thing you can be doing. You have a backlog of real cases to work into your real rotation, cases that are as slow to close as infected wounds. Like the real sweet twitchy and dysarthric kid with a miserable and uncomplaining nub of a mother, a woman so ashamed of any aid that you come by at night and park around the block where the neighbors won’t see your car. You do her paperwork for heating assistance, Medicaid. Apply her for every program there is, because the doctor bills and insurance eat through her last motel-clerked penny like acid. Yes, you have bigger fish to fry than potheads and mileage reimbursement. Newly suicided fathers and their wreckage. The mother who calls your office wondering if you could take her child, God is telling her to kill him, you better hurry. Cecil in the fresh hell of Pine Hills. His sister, Katie, out there somewhere God knows, you can’t think about her, but you do think of all the magnificent horrors that can befall a child in the shabby motel rooms and concrete rest area bathrooms frequented by her mother, her mother’s shifting partners and adversaries, and the errant unattached freaks in those orbits.

You have what feels like an ulcer.

And the Pearls. Living on pinecones and squirrel gizzards waiting for Armageddon with their coin-scoring, apocalyptic old man.

And again circle back to your own life, like a pair of headlights in the rearview late at night, some trouble tailing you on the black highway. A brother on the lam in Oregon. Luke, you fool, just come take your medicine.

A daughter in Texas at an address where you send the checks. Should something happen to her, you know you underwrote it. You call but she doesn’t much want to talk or there’s no answer. After the holidays, this stretch, and it will slow down. You resolve to call. You don’t as much as you should. Wonder how you’re supposed to have a relationship at such distance. You worry.

You think,
No news is good news
. You think,
That’s always true.

At a court appearance in Missoula, Pete gave curt and frank testimony stating to the judge that the woman in question had not kept a single appointment with him in the three months she’d been in his district. The woman yowled like he’d stuck her, but all it meant was she couldn’t have her kids back yet. The judge told her to quit it, and she fell to a stammered jag of weeping that had no effect on the proceedings’ outcome. When Pete left the courthouse, she leered at him from her car but didn’t say or do anything as he crossed the lawn. The groundskeepers bagged the leaves.

Mary wasn’t in the office, so he walked to her place. The elevator operator at the Wilma wouldn’t let him upstairs because she wasn’t in.

“Come on, you know me.”

“You have to be on the lease.”

“This a new policy?”

The elevator operator sat on his stool, caring for his nails.

Pete waited outside the theater smoking. The wind poured out of the mouth of Hellgate Canyon and eddied where Pete idly paced on the tiles in front of the box office. The breezes sketched up little twisters of brown leaves and a puppetry of paper. The elevator man was watching him through the glass door and Pete opened his palms, as if to ask what his problem was. The operator drew back.

He went for coffee up the block and had just sat down when Mary strolled by wearing a long coat and a look of wry expectation. She was headed downtown—instead of coming from—and her expression seemed like that of someone who knew she was going to her own surprise party. He grew jealous of whatever was on her mind. He rapped the glass, startling her. She covered her chest and smiled when she saw him, kissed him when she came in.

“I was wondering if I’d see you again.”

He put his hand under his T-shirt and made like his heart was visibly pounding. He could feel her smile like a heat lamp on his person. Anyone would suffer corny sentiments in her presence, she was that dear, that comely.

“You went by my place,” she said.

“I had a court date. I just stopped off for coffee.”

She set her hands on her hips and looked at him skeptically.

“Here. On the block where I live. You stop for coffee.”

He scratched behind his ear and admitted the elevator man wouldn’t let him in.