Fourth of July Creek (28 page)

He marched back to the Wilma. The elevator operator said she was in.

“No shit,” Pete said.

She was fresh out of the shower. In her robe, steam coming off her wet black hair like a smoldering tire. He wondered did she look through the peephole to see was it him. Was it a surprise to find him there. They spoke, but beyond the usual pleasantries he could not say what of. He slipped into the bedroom as she bent over and towel-dried her hair in the bathroom. The bed was made. He smelled the linens. She spoke to him from the bathroom and he searched the wicker baskets. Her underthings. Shirts missing buttons. He searched the floor for used condoms. For a cuff link or billfold. A gray hair.

There was nothing. He thought of loose buttons.

Of Beth.

This was about his wife, about her fucking someone else.

Mary came in swabbing her ear with a Q-tip and wearing the towel on her head. He set a wicker lid back on one of her wicker baskets.

“What?” she asked, her head tilted sideways as she worked at her ear.

“I didn’t say anything.”

She righted her head and asked him what the matter was.

“Nothing.”

“Why are you digging through my shit?”

He made an innocent gesture that asked what on earth could he be looking for.

“I’ve been in more group homes than I have fingers and toes, Pete. I can tell when my space is being . . .
inspected
.”

“Who was that guy?”

“What guy,” she fairly growled. Her face said he better have a pretty good answer. A whole detailed explanation.

Is one woman all women, he asked himself. Do they know what they do to us. Do they try on cocks like shoes, and keep some of them and put back others. Is she Beth again.

She is.

“The fucking suit who came out of your door just before I got here.”

Her mouth fell open, only just.

She blinked.

“Pete, I’m gonna say this once because I can tell you’re angry and it’s freaking me out: I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Bullfuckingshit. Elevator Man said you were out. Wouldn’t let me up.”

“I
was
out. Asshole. I just got home, showered, and I just got out when you knocked,” she said. She shook her head, as if to clear it.

“I saw him come out of your room, Mary.”

“Who?!”

“The suit! Not thirty minutes ago.”

“Wait a minute. How did you get in?”

“Fuck you is how.”

“Stop it.”

“Just tell me who he is. Don’t lie to me.”

“Okay, look—”

“Are you a prostitute?”

For a halted moment she looked like she was going to cry. Then she stepped aside and pointed at the door.

“Get out.”

“Are you Iris?”

Her fists were like billiard balls. She was naked and the towel on her head unwound and fell over her eyes and he had her by the wrists, but only for a moment as she bit his hand. He had her hair, briefly. Something hard struck his temple, and he let her go, and again his head rang and he found himself marveling that she’d acquired a hammer. She reared away from him, and he could only see through one eye and double at that. The heavy ashtray hit him square in the sternum and he doubled over.

She sobbed behind the bathroom door. He looked in horror at the strands of hair laced through his fingers and shook his hands in the air like the hairs were spiderwebs. Knots bloomed all over his skull.

She stood in the bathroom doorway. In her robe. Maybe an hour had gone by, sitting in the ashes and cigarette butts on her floor.

“I’m not Iris.”

“I know what I saw.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“You went through the door off the balcony.”

“So what?”

“Pete. You were on the wrong floor.”

“You have to be fucking kidding me,” he said.

“Asshole! Listen! You started on the second floor, you went up the stairs, but you counted from street level. You went up two flights to the
fourth
floor. Ass. Hole.”

She closed the bathroom door. His head tingled as a fresh draw of foolishness rolled over him.

“Mary.”

He heard water running and knew she couldn’t hear him. Would that he’d never come. If he could take back the past couple hours. He sat on the bed and, when she returned, stood up and told her he was sorry. That he was an utter shit.

“That was fucked up, Pete.”

“I know. I don’t think that way of you—”

“I don’t like being accused of things.”

“Nobody does.”

“Especially not me. Half my life I’ve been blamed for shit I didn’t do. It got to where I was used to it. I carry that with me all the time. This guilt, Pete. Even now. Fuck. Fuck you.” She pointed to the window, the world outside of it. “For you to come in here . . .”

A long tear ran down her face and to her chin and fell to the floor. The soft pat of it on the hardwood over the traffic, the creaks of this old building. An untroubled expression of resignation on her now. She wiped her nose.

“I’m a fuck,” Pete said. “I’m hammered dogshit over here.”

A slight grin at his choice description.

“I’m so sorry. It was a misunderstanding.”

She wiped her eyes and swallowed and waited for him to go on. He didn’t want to go on. He had to go on.

“My wife fucked this . . . guy.”

“She did?”

He gestured away all the particulars.

“So I think that I’m half-expecting you to screw me over. Nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with your shitty background. Mary, I . . . I
marvel
at you. I know what your life was like, and I sit
in awe
of you.”

She told him to shut up. He said he meant it.

There’d been too little praise in her life and she didn’t know what to do with the degree of his compliments. His sincerity, he could see, was difficult for her. Her chin vibrated, her whole body then as well. And he could see how she coped when she came over to him, put her hands inside his jacket and her tongue inside his mouth and touched him down onto the bed with a fingertip to his bruised sternum. She undid his pants and pulled them and his underwear down and kissed his cock and she slipped out of her own panties and ground her confusing feelings into a slick pair of orgasms that she summoned for them with hot words into his ear like a filthy spell. And his joy ebbed into a ruminating silence, realizing that half of what she’d been saying to him these past months was expressed with her body, a restless logorrhea that betrayed depths of her that she could not put into words, whole anguished diaries she’d yet to write if ever to write if ever if ever . . . and Pete felt party to a conspiracy to keep her mouth shut against her own ears, and it wasn’t that he suspected her of cheating on him that made him sorry and silent, but that what they’d been doing together all this time was not grow closer to each other so much as keep her at a safe remove from herself.

Her hair was still damp, and when she lifted her moist cheek from his chest to have a look at him it sounded like a good-bye kiss. She got up and went into the kitchen and then he heard music, and the sounds of her cooking put him in mind of his childhood, times he could hear his mother at the dishes. His father would be braiding leather at the table and occasionally they’d have a few words between them and their being there was a lullaby and how reliable was this lullaby.

A grim dream that he’d actually harmed a child. Furious digging into the hillside. He half-buried the marbled white body.

Mary shook him awake.

“Sorry,” he said. “Nightmare. Was I talking?”

“It’s for you,” she said.

“What?”

“The phone,” she said, slipping back into bed.

“What time is it?”

“Three something.”

“Who the hell is calling me here?”

“Your wife,” she said, tugging the covers back over her body.

He touched her shoulder in abstract apology, padded out to the living room, and picked up the phone.

“What is it, Beth?”

“Oh Pete.”

“Look, I know it’s late, but I did put a check in the mail yesterday. I tried to call the other day. You guys don’t pick up.”

“We moved to Austin, and—”

“What? Austin? When?”

“Pete, it’s been four days—”

“Why? What happened in Waco?”

“—and I’m calling you now because I’m real scared, Pete. It’s never been four days in a row . . .”

“Are you drunk?”

He heard a lighter flick and another voice in the room with her.

“It’s been four days, Pete.”

“What’s been four days?”

“Rachel.”

“Rachel and four days what, Beth?”

“She’s
gone
, Pete. I think she’s been . . . I can’t say it, but I can’t stop thinking it. Jesus, Pete. I need you to come. Please come. Just come.”

W
hen his flight touched down in Austin, the pilot announced that the president had been killed. Gasps hissed throughout the cabin, then angry murmurs. The passengers debarked, and in the terminal men with coats folded over their arms consoled weeping women, lit their cigarettes. A somber crowd assembled around the television in the bar, watching the news. The president hadn’t been killed after all, someone said. They watched Reagan get shot on the screen over and over. A little old lady with wads of folded skin around her eyes, a little hat on her head just so, a print dress, took Pete’s hand and smiled gratefully. Across from him stood more people holding hands. Before Pete realized what it was, the prayer circle closed as a man took Pete’s left hand, barely glancing at him before he bowed his head. Pete was obliged to pray for Reagan.

The heat outside smothered him. The cabbie asked if he’d heard the news. Pete said he had. The cabbie said to watch out, we’d probably be at war with Russia by nightfall.

The neighborhoods teemed with black people and then with Mexicans and bright red and yellow businesses, and people went out in the heat in short sleeves and pants, and young girls in hardly any clothes at all, and boys in nothing but black shorts. The cabbie took him downtown along Sixth Street. At a major intersection hippies in flip-flops milled among the muttering homeless at the bus stops, and Texans in whole suits and ties strode along the pavement in waves of heat.

Beth’s place was across a large river or lake. Even in the shade of great oaks Pete sweltered. The brightly painted clapboard houses silently quaked. Welded statuary and mobiles of glass shards, amalgamated junk pressed into the service of whimsy. The toilet flower box just made him mad. He wondered where was Rachel in this astonishing heat. It was only March. He wondered what was this place Beth had brought his daughter to. What kind of people these Texans were.

Through the screen door he saw box fans blowing. He pulled his hair back and knocked again.

Beth emerged from a back room, threw open the door, and cascaded onto him, hand, arm, whole body, her head notched in his sweaty neck as in the old days. A single sob juddered out of her like an engine turning over. When she pulled away, snot and tears ran from his shoulder to her face, and she grinned in embarrassment and wiped his shoulder and her nose, and wiped his shoulder some more. Touched his shoulder. She smelled like herself. He held her here, and he missed her.

It was hotter within her house and he set down his army duffel. She went into the kitchen and returned with two bottles of beer, both pressed to her neck, and handed one to him. She was in scarcely any clothes at all. Cutoffs and a tank and no bra. She’d lost weight and her breasts sagged down her chest some, but the thinness made her beauty stark.

“I don’t want a beer,” he said. “I want to find Rachel.”

“Just sit. Pete.”

There was a fan trained on the couch and he sat in its stream and put the unopened beer on the coffee table next to some empties. Bottles were serried atop the mantel and ashtrays everywhere and clothes and Styrofoam containers.

“Stop it,” she said. “A week ago the place was spic-n-fuckin-span.”

She drank from the bottle. He left his sweating on the coffee table. She’d been to the police, she said. She’d called all the hospitals and shelters and everyone she knew. Everyone Rachel knew. The school, her teachers, everyone.

“I’m going to visit them myself. When did you last see her?”

“Five days ago.”

“What time?”

“Bedtime.”

“Bedtime when?”

“Late.”

“How was she?”

Beth sat in a plastic folding chair and leaned forward and swung the bottle between her legs from her fingertips.

“She was fine.”

“Was anything going on?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, Beth. Anything that . . . I mean she left under her own power, right?” He looked around the place. For broken glass or something, a sign of something. “No one busted in and carried her off, right?”

She drank. There was something she didn’t want to say.

“Beth.”

“There’d been a party. The night before. Supposed to be just a few people from work.”

“What work?”

“The bar.”

“What happened?”

“It just got to be a lot of people. Like some of the afterparties we’d have back home. Nothing out of hand. Just some people from the neighborhood.”

“And . . . ?”

“Girls her age . . .”

“She’s thirteen.”

“She’s
fourteen
now.”

“Shit. That’s right.”

She set the bottle on the floor and rubbed her face all over.

“Tell me what happened.”

She enfolded herself within her arms, and girded up to tell him.

“This fucking guy went into her room and he . . .”

“He
what
?”

“He just kinda scared her.”

“Jesus, Beth.”

“Nothing happened! I heard her yelling and I went back there—”

“Why was she yelling? What was he doing?”

“Look, I couldn’t get a straight story out of her—she said he was on her bed.”

“Jesus! Did he hurt her or touch her or . . . ?”

He couldn’t finish the question. His mind couldn’t complete the idea.

“I think she was just surprised. She didn’t say he
did
anything.”