Fourth of July Creek (26 page)

“Benjamin!” he shouted. “Come on! Let me just talk to you a minute!”

There was a blur ahead of him and to the right, some sixty yards away. Or it was his own movement shifting something up there in parallax. He broke after the figment anyway. Through his heavy breathing he could hear water. He stopped and listened, holding his breath. His heart throbbed. A creek somewhere ahead babbled. A snap, shuffling. Pete ran toward the water. He budged through the brush. The bank dropped suddenly, soil and rocks giving way until he had dropped into the drink, a knee-high pool that bloomed darkly with dirt.

The boy was upstream of him in the middle of the creek, a couple yards from the other side, stepping gingerly across a riprap.

“Ben!”

The kid glanced back at Pete, unhalting, and then leapt up onto the opposite bank and disappeared.

Pete slogged out of the pool and headed straight upstream, the creek shallows flowing around his ankles, walking the cold stones, arms out like a tightrope walker. He slipped on the tails of virid moss, vivid to glowing in the overcast. A thin sleet fell on him from the unobstructed sky. He made for the shore opposite to get under the trees, but it was all cutbank and deep eddies and he’d have to go where the boy had crossed or just about to exit the water.

He tottered upstream, ankles rolling like a child on ice skates. He slipped again, but close enough to the shore to reach for an overhanging branch of larch to halt his fall. It gave and gave under his weight as he pulled on it hand over hand, stripping away new needles, tipping and twisting backward until it gently, almost kindly baptized him into the water. He let go when his back was soaked and dropped into a four-foot pool. The cold evicted his breath and when he tried to rise, he slipped and fell again up to his neck and flipped over onto his knees and pulled himself up by the roots on the bank and stood. Stunned and dripping for a long moment. He moved upstream along the bank by handfuls of earth and flora like a man traversing a cliff face, until he arrived a few yards down from where the kid had crossed. There was a single wet footprint on the rock and then nothing, just thick green alder. He listened for anything at all, but there was only the water moving behind him and dripping off of him, and the whispering down of the sleet. He began to shiver. He pulled off his jacket and wrung it and wrung the shirt on his body and walked back across the creek. The going much easier this time because he was already soaking wet and angry.

When he got out of the water and back among the ponderosas the sleet had turned to rain. He trotted to warm up. His hands were bright red, his ears too. The long hair at the back of his neck was soaked through and like an icepack on his nape. He began to jog faster and his side ached but it was too cold to give a shit. He crashed the cedar, all numbness and genuinely worried he would get turned around and freeze himself to death. He wondered did the boy hear him fall. Was the boy following him now. Was his old man.

By the time he made it to his car, his jeans were stiff down at his ankles, but he was basically warm, if winded. He turned on the engine and cranked the heat and held his palms to the cold air blowing out of the vents. He blew on his hands and looked in the glove box. He turned off the engine, got out of the car, and went and unlocked the trunk. He squinted at the sliver of rusty Canadian whiskey, swallowed it, and tossed the empty bottle into the weeds.

The snow fell and fell and with it every fool’s hopes for an early spring. Pete worked a few cases in the eastern part of his region. Hard-gotten-to cabins in the Flathead where the grim occupants paced and fumed like bulls at the sight of him. He had lunch with Cecil’s sister in her school. He gently culled from Katie her and her mother’s recent whereabouts. They’d taken a road trip down to Denver for reasons unknown to the girl. When he visited Debbie, he didn’t even bother to try and get the whole story, just informed her that Cecil was in Pine Hills. She pantomimed indignation about Cecil’s incarceration, but Katie was genuinely worried when Pete told her, asking was he okay and how long would he be in jail. He promised he’d get Cecil out as soon as he could.

When he got back to the courthouse, Benjamin Pearl was in his hallway, standing outside his door.

“My papa’s gone blind,” the boy said in a papery voice. He paced, and his words sluiced out faster than Pete could gather them up, all out of order.

The old man’s screaming, hot pokers grinding in his sockets. They try water and he shrieks and writhes on the cold ground. He runs away. Ben has to go look for him. He’s in the woods struck blind. Come morning his eyes are sealed shut swollen. It’s snowing again. The snow’s all over. Ben wants to know if this is his fault. He says God doesn’t need to answer, Ben knows the answer already. He has to fix this. He finds Pete’s card and leaves, his father calling after him, where are you going. Where do you think you are going. Can Pete help, he has to help.

This camp, yet another, was four miles in from the National Forest Development Road #645, most of it uphill and by Pete’s reckoning not all that far from Separation Creek and his own house. Maybe a day’s hike to the old logging road that wound out of the empty wilderness down to his place.

Jeremiah Pearl wasn’t in the camp—a canvas tarp that disappeared into a hillock of young, dense alder, a few packs, some bedrolls, and a fire pit—but sprawled on his back near the runnel of a small headwater. Stones placed on his eyes for the cool in them. Pete searched for signs of the other Pearls, the sisters and brothers and mother, but there were none.

“Papa?”

The man sat upright and the rocks fell away. His eyes surely throbbed under their swollen lids, even at a distance a raging shade of red.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“I—”

“Get over here, damnit.”

The boy came forward and his father had him by the arm and gripped his head and appeared about to do some punishment to him, but just grabbed him all over to feel that he was whole. A thing he could accomplish in a glance that assumed a new depth of expression by hand. The boy threw his arms around him and held him, as his father patted him.

Suddenly, the man shot up, pulling the child behind him, and still gripping his boy by the shoulder.

“Who’s that?”

Pete hadn’t stepped or moved at all, but the man perceived him just the same.

“Mr. Pearl, it’s me, Pete—”

“You get the fuck out of here,” he said. His face glistened with water, with tears. Suppurating pus hung like a maggot at the corner of one eye.

“I brought you some medicine.”

“There’s no remedy for God striking you blind, you fool.”

“I’ll bet you’re just snow-blind,” Pete said. “A real bad case from the looks of it.”

“I’m not snow-blind! You ass!” He took a step, stumbled, and gripped the boy to regain his balance.

“There’s snow all up here in the high country, Mr. Pearl. Not a lot, but everything’s covered. You were out in an exposed area for a few hours the other day, I’m guessing.”

Pearl’s eyes moved about, unseeing.

“It doesn’t have to be very bright out. Really,” Pete said. He sat down and began to pull items from his backpack. “My daughter and I went cross-country skiing a couple winters ago. Completely overcast. You could make out the shape of the sun behind the clouds, but just barely. It was hours afterward when things went blurry. By supper we were basically blind. You don’t need any direct sunlight, is my point. Fact is, it was probably worse on us because we weren’t even squinting all day.”

While Pete spoke Pearl rubbed his sockets with fingers of one dirty hand. The effort of it wrenched his face, and a guttural
gah
issued from his throat as he twisted his head in pain and tried to shake off the torment like an animal.

“Don’t touch them. Please, Mr. Pearl. I have the eyedrops the doctor gave my daughter and me for the pain and some ointments too. There’s no reason to think anything’s amiss.”

Pearl swagged from side to side.

“Papa,” Benjamin said.

“You shut up,” Pearl muttered.

“He’s been leaving us the food, Papa. He’s been helping us already!” His father turned and the boy slipped free of him.

“Don’t be mad at your son, Mr. Pearl. It was my fault. He was just trying to make sure you and your family”—Pete glanced back toward the camp, wondering where he thought he might see the rest of the children—“were all right.”

“Let him help you,” Benjamin begged. “He’s okay, Papa.”

The man touched his temples with his fingertips and began muttering. Then he smiled, some teeth shone out from the thatch of his beard and he began to speak, and Benjamin knelt with him. To pray, Pete realized. They clasped their hands and hung their heads. Pearl spoke to God directly, asked was it His will for him to go blind or was it not. Would the restoration of his vision allow Pearl to enact His will, or was this thought vanity. Was this another in the series of tests, he asked, in a rueful half-grin like a man who’d won a bet with a good friend. Pearl stiffened and said he could take what God would dish out. That God must know this. That Pearl would reach into his mouth right now and wrench out his teeth was it His holy will. That He need only speak. One word.

They remained on their knees. Then Pearl raised his head and seemed to be at some long thought or perhaps trying to see Pete.

At last Pearl stood. He said it was all right for Pete to give him some medicine. What did it matter, what could any remedy accomplish if God didn’t will it.

Pete had listened closely because he couldn’t see, couldn’t tell if Beth was paying attention as the doctor explained how to apply the drops and ointments. Hospitals made her nervous, and when they got home, he was right to have memorized what the doctor told them to do. But that was two winters ago.

He removed a canteen of distilled water from his bag and the packet of gauze and the scissors. He set these on his coat, which he’d spread open on the ground. He rolled up his sleeves and washed his hands with a fresh bar of soap and rinsed with the distilled water and dried them on a little towel from the bag. There were two ointments and a bottle of drops. One of the three was for pain. The drops. The doctor had said white pus meant the infection was bacterial. He said to use one of the ointments in that case. The antibiotic ointment. Or the other.

Pearl sucked air through clenched teeth at a fresh wave of pain.

Pete asked Pearl to lie down and rest his head in Benjamin’s lap. He told him he was going to pour water into his eyes and wanted to flush them as clean as possible. Pearl did as Pete told him. He told Pearl to try and blink. The man’s eyelids were swollen shut, and when he opened them they split like sausage casings, fat pus dribbling out. Pete poured water into his eyes and the man arched in agony, but he did not cry out. Pete told him he had drops for him that would ease the pain a great deal. He said to stay still, and firmly wiped away the pus so that he wouldn’t have to do it again. The man whimpered. Pete told him he was going to pull his eyelids open and put in the drops. Pearl barked for him to do it already. Pete pried one eye open with one hand, the gummy lashes like a flytrap, and saw only the black sightless centroid of his pupil. He squeezed a drop onto the eyeball. Or not. He wasn’t sure, the eyelid clapped shut and the man strained away despite himself. Pete said let’s try the other eye, and the pupil was rolled up when he opened the lids and this time he saw the cool drop hit the ball. The man’s breath heaved into and out of him. Benjamin ran his hand over his father’s head as the drops did their work. Pete explained what the ointment was for, but as the pain diminished Pearl went pliant and let him run the ointment along the bottom of his opened eyelid like a line of white frosting.

They watched the agony go out of him. Melted excretions ran down his temples like white tears, but the man was still and Pete thought maybe he’d passed out—he’d been awake for two days in great pain—but he took Pete’s hand and patted it. The boy sniffed and grinned gratefully at Pete. Pete went to the fire and let the two of them alone.

He was two days with the Pearls. The first night he cooked hot dogs but they refused them. The boy said they didn’t eat swine. The pork and beans were out too. Pete ate the hot dogs himself and gave them buns and cheese and small tins of fruit cocktail. The man was sound asleep and snoring minutes after they wordlessly ate. They sat by the fire some, and Pete suggested the boy go to bed and then rolled a cigarette and sipped from his flask. He caught the child looking at him from inside his bag. They grinned mutually. Then the boy turned over toward his father.

On the first morning, the man’s eyes were crusted shut and they performed the same ablutions, applied the drops and ointment. He sighed at the fresh relief and let the boy stroke his head.

Pete got up and stretched his legs and observed the campsite. They’d dug out and flattened the earth on a hillside that wasn’t far from a good view of the canyon and which was only a short hike from the ridge that looked out on the northern approach to their position. They were close to fresh water, close enough that a blind man in agony could find it.

Pete inventoried their things, the collapsible cups and lightweight aluminum plates, forks, spoons, knives, a few small pots. They’d slept in the open air, but the area they’d dug out went some ways into the hillside. The shed they’d constructed of small logs was about four feet high on each side with a good yardage of canvas stretched taut over it. Pete spotted fishing poles, rifles, and a mishmash of garments, hats, unmatched gloves through the flap.

The only thing missing was the rest of the Pearls.

At supper the man sat up, beckoned his son, and softly said something to him. The child went into the shelter and returned with a bag he handed to his father. The man groped for it, set the bag in his lap, felt among the coins inside, and fetched one out.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Over here,” Pete said.

Pearl tossed the coin to him. It landed between his legs where he squatted. It was about the size of a nickel, pure gold, with an antelope on the back. An aristocrat on the obverse.