Fourth of July Creek (25 page)

Pete asked quietly how she did this.

“Acupressure,” she said. “There are points on the body where the tension is physically stored.”

“You know, I could use a little of that.”

“Stop it.”

“Serious. I got a lot of tension stored up in this one spot—”

She threw a straw at him. The children laughed. He made a face at them and invited a fusillade of french fries.

At Christmas he sent Rachel a box full of things he feared were all wrong. A gross of jelly bracelets and three pairs of earrings. Sunglasses. A belt. A book of e. e. cummings and
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
and
Lord of the Flies.
A short letter explaining that her grandfather died and saying how much he loved her. He wrote Mary’s number and said if she couldn’t reach him at work to try him there.

He finally wrote Luke too. One draft explaining that the old man had died that he pitched into the fire because he could not calibrate the voice or sentiments. His own corrosive thoughts. He wrote another short note just telling him to come in, get it over with and then on with his life. That there was bad news and that he loved him. To just come back.

Mary worked Christmas but came to his cabin the days after. Fingers of ice from the eaves. Opening gifts, many of them bottles, batches, vintages. A kind of hibernation. New Year’s in Missoula. They skied Lost Trail. Hot cocoa and Rumple Minze on the lift, the sun shattering off the sheets of snow.

Then the succinct gray days of late January, February. The Yaak socked in with banks and clouds and cold. Shots of terrible arctic air, the useless sun. Everything under a nap of snow, and yet curiously alive. A fox hopping after bunnies or mice in the meadow beyond the trees. A stillness at the heart of things, between the beats.

Spring. Come March 1981 a spell of warm weather set the snow melting, everything dripping. Water running under the ice, the ice white and slick as enamel.

The temperatures squatted in the low fifties when he went to Butte for St. Patrick’s Day. Pete and his friends woke midday with heroic hangovers and dragged themselves into the pitched revelry already spilling into the streets. A carnival of motorcycle noise and nakedness to rival anything in Sturgis, anything in New Orleans. The whole town a red-light district, funny, hinging toward ugly. They watched fights that Shane ushered to completion with his meaty fists. They arrived at a house party where a crowd of leathery enthusiasts watched an old slattern tug on a pair of thin cocks attached to two men as pink and shiny as basted hams. Pete had only just wheeled outside to retch when Shane walked out as calmly as a sheriff, punching the head he had cradled in his armpit. A skinny witch rode his back and tore at his ears as he stepped off the porch and dropped the man he was beating into the grass. He seemed surprised to find he couldn’t work the gate latch with his broken hand, and once again they made for the ER, stopping for a six-pack, as if on the way to an afterparty.

Did she receive Pete’s gifts and letter?

She did. She didn’t read the books or wear the bracelets or the earrings or the belt, just the sunglasses and read the letter about her dead grandfather to her mother.

You should see if he left you anything. Son of a bitch was rich.

There’s another number here he wants me to call him at.

You can call him if you want.

Her name is Mary.

Whose name is Mary?

The number.

Let me see that.

Did her mother read the letter?

Just the last part with the number. The other woman’s name in Pete’s handwriting.

Mary
, she said.

That was it?

She had people over that night and got rip-roaring after her shift. Then divorce papers. She would sit and regard her daughter in the sunshine on the porch that cut through the leafless live oaks, it was still warm enough to sit outside, and announce that she wasn’t going to say mean things about her father to her. That she would find out on her own that he was cold. That there was something broken in him. That she would see for herself what a wreckage he was, how incapable he was, just like how he would forget her birthday, just watch, he will forget. You’ll see.

And did he forget her birthday?

She didn’t care. She was all about Cheatham by then.

Cheatham?

A college dropout who’d come over with some friends some Friday her mother was working and the first one she said to herself she wanted. Yes, she had been boy crazy before, but this was different she wanted to hit him and bite him and crawl up him and chew his ear off. She couldn’t understand these violent feelings, but there they were she was nervous the whole night she actually drank and went up to him and said this was her house did he want to come inside and have a look around and he said he was okay on the porch having a cigarette and someone handed him a guitar and his long brown hair fell over his face as he played and she waited on him all night and two weeks later when he came over she made him walk with her around back of the house and then she climbed up him and kissed him and it was love he was nineteen she scared him but her birthday had happened and she said it was only five years’ difference now but he wouldn’t touch her anymore. He came by another time with some other people but didn’t talk to her at all really and then a time after that around Thanksgiving or Christmas and her mother threw a party on New Year’s and they did it in her room at last he had to leap under the bed when someone stumbled in and she screamed bloody murder and whoever it was slammed shut the door and she laughed at Cheatham for being so scared.

Was he sweet?

He really was. He wrote her a song and sang it in a whisper. A song about soft birds. He was worried it was so so so wrong for him to have slept with her.

Did she intend him to take her away?

Yes.

Did her mother suspect she was planning to leave?

Almost every night now it was a carnival of drunks and weed dealers and some speed dealers and these long-hair stoner guys and guys on motorbikes and artists and all sorts. Cheatham didn’t stand out. Her mother was distracted by bar people, by new prospects herself. She’d lost weight doing the hours on her feet, doing some coke, staying up all night, her voice was reedy and hoarse as she was herself in the throes of something fresh and almost teenaged. Having her own crushes from those in the aforementioned carnival. She and Rachel passing one another in the hall like roommates, not mother daughter, not that they were fighting yet either but in a kind of mutually agreed improximity like two north-poled magnets, never to touch, to close, even side-hugging when they were out together and someone said they looked so much alike, side-hugging like rival sisters made to stand for a picture.

A
case had in fact been opened on the Pearls by his predecessor. Pete found it in the files in his office, but there were no notes and the forms were empty save an address: 22,000 Fourth of July Creek Road. Pete had gone up to see the place but couldn’t find the turnoff and gave up. But when the snow melted, he hazarded up Fourth of July Creek one last time. He passed by Cloninger’s house on the way and waved at him standing in his yard with a hammer. Cloninger only seemed about to recognize Pete and didn’t have time to wave back, and might not have in any case.

This time he found the turnout, but the road was impassably muddy. He parked and hiked up through the old snow and cedar and larch, through the calling finches and kinglets to a meadow that gave onto a view of a large rock bench and atop it, a kind of house. The aluminum roof gleamed violently in the sun as he approached. All about the crude structure was the sound of melting snow weeping from it. The windows fogged gray with dust. He guessed it was a good thirty miles from the place in the woods where he’d first taken the boy. As the crow flies. They weren’t crows. They walked all that thick, ragged country. He wondered where they wintered. How. Where were the others, the mother, sisters, brothers.

He decided to go back to the place where he’d first met the Pearls, up the unmarked Forest Service road. The hike past the gate was no less difficult, the kernel corn snow over his ankles, and on the last stretch he slipped on almost every step. When he made the ridge, he sat on the wet rocks, sweating under his coat until he was cold again. From where he was, the fabric of the clothing he’d stuffed under the ledge was visible, but he went over anyway and pulled everything out. It had been jammed back in a disordered mess. Not the way he’d left it. The bottle of giardia medication was still there, but not the plastic bag in which he’d wrapped the vitamin C. He searched through the clothing and felt around under the ledge for it. He searched the ground nearby.

“You fuckers,” he said, smiling.

He stuffed everything back and hiked down to his car.

The next day, he returned with more vitamin C and a bottle of regular vitamins and several chocolate bars and cans of beans and chicken soup. He folded everything up together and replaced it in the crevice. He stepped back from the cache and then snapped his fingers and put the jeans in front so they’d know he’d been by.

Three days later he spotted the coat under the ledge instead of the jeans. He whooped and hoped they were somewhere about, to hear him. The vitamin C and all the cans were gone. He replenished the soup and beans and added some canned vegetables. He ate a bar of the chocolate himself.

“Hot damn,” he said.

The boy came along about when Pete expected. Middle of the day. Some distance from wherever they were camped. He loped up out of the golden currant brush, glanced around, nearly missed Pete sitting twenty feet away. He ran. Pete waited.

In forty minutes, he could just hear the boy coming up the hillside behind him.

“You come alone,” the boy asked or said, it was hard to tell.

The kid’s face was gaunt. No child’s fat. Mildly ghoulish cast to his skin.

“You take that vitamin C?” Pete asked.

The kid walked past him to the ledge and began to fill his canvas bag with cans. He put the chocolate in his coat.

“I’d like to come with you.”

The boy looked down the hill.

“My dad,” the kid said by way of explanation.

“I’d like to talk to him. There’s got to be an easier way for me to help than leaving the stuff under a damn rock way up here.”

“He doesn’t know.”

“Where does he think it comes from?”

“I go to town sometimes.”

“The IGA?”

“Sometimes.”

“And shoplift.”

The boy sighed impatiently, worried a hole in the sleeve of his sweater with his thumb.

“You don’t have to do that.”

The boy hiked his bag up his shoulders and started down the hill. Pete followed through a thickness of broken cedar, new lime green ferns, and livid mosses. The child’s wet warren. They trod into some new country, a stand of towering ponderosas. The long brown needles sounded softly under their feet. Cold breezes trundled invisibly over the moist and vacant understory of the trees.

The kid stopped walking. They leaned against pines, facing one another. The boy regarded him.

“You can’t come.”

“I know you’re worried something will happen,” Pete said.

“Something will happen. To you.”

“Do you really think he will harm me?”

The kid pulled puzzle pieces of bark from the tree and flicked them through the air, sailing like blades. The distances he achieved. So much time in these woods.

“I talked to a guy who ran into you two after all the ash came down.”

The boy’s eyes flashed up at Pete.

“It sounds like you guys were pretty scared. Your old man thought the world had about ended.”

The boy broke a stick with his foot.

“But it didn’t, did it?”

The kid’s lips constricted over his teeth. He scratched his cheek, but then resumed debarking the tree, sending the pieces whistling through the air.

“I don’t want you guys to feel like that anymore. Like you’re all alone out here. I can help you and your mama and your brothers and sisters.”

Pete crouched against the tree trunk so he was at eye level with the boy. He leaned in the direction of the child’s gaze to achieve some eye contact.

The kid turned and ran.

Pete’s posture against the tree—his back wedged against it, no leverage—put him at an immediate disadvantage. He took a moment just standing upright, and when he started after the boy, he slipped on the slick carpet of pine needles. By the time he was at a jog, the kid was gone. The big pines weren’t especially thick—not compared to the cedar—but after the quick fifty feet the boy put between Pete and himself, he’d disappeared. Or he was hiding. Pete slowed, searching this way and that, expecting to come across the child hiding behind one of the huge boles. No luck. If the kid kept at a dead run, looking for him this way only made his escape certain. Pete ran as fast as he could in the direction he guessed the boy had gone.