Fourth of July Creek (3 page)

It wasn’t yet noon and no one was much about on the square in Tenmile or around the Rimrock County Courthouse or the shops. The only person they saw as they drove across the tracks and then the river was a man pumping gas at the station on the way out of town. They were soon in a narrow alley of serried pines that gave way to mowed pastures. Pete turned onto an unsurfaced road that was shortly a ruck of graded dirt and vibrated them silly in their seats until they pulled in front of a white ranch house. Their flesh and ears buzzed in the sudden stillness. Out of sight atop the flagpole before them snapped an American flag in the wind.

The ugly pumpknot on Cecil’s head glowed like an ember. His nose whistled. He gripped the air rifle. Pete had agreed to let him take it, just to get him out of the house.

“You can’t bring that here with you,” Pete said.

Cecil stared straight ahead.

“Now look,” Pete said. “This isn’t permanent. You’re going back home.”

“Like hell.”

“You mother is your mother.”

“I’ll cut her cunt out. How’s that sound?” Cecil asked.

Pete rubbed his face.

“It sounds damn awful, Cecil. You can’t talk like that. Not here.”

“Like what?”

“Like a psycho.”

“I ain’t a psycho.”

“All right, look. Look at me.” Cecil turned. “I need to know that you’ll be good to these people. They don’t want no trouble and I don’t want to bring them any. They wanna help.”

“Just drop me off on the highway.”

“You know I can’t do that. Let’s just get you and Mom apart for a little while, and see if we can’t get things figured out when everybody’s cooled off a little bit.”

Cecil raised his palm. Whatever. Fuck you, Pete.

Pete got out. The house was set back from the fence and the flagpole, and in back were outbuildings and beyond them an empty pasture. Cecil stayed put. Pete went through the gate and then up the path through a trellis to the house. A regal old hound brayed responsibly at his approach but didn’t get up from inside the doghouse. Pete was almost to the front door when an older man came out of the garage, wiping his hands with a red rag, which he stuffed in his back pocket before he pumped Pete’s outstretched hand. The man’s great white mustache twisted out like longhorns. He and Pete exchanged greetings and were now looking over at the boy.

“Thanks for this,” Pete said.

“Not a problem.”

The aproned missus stuck her head out the front door, ruddy and cheerful as a gnome, and said howdy and that she couldn’t come out, they were just about to pour the jam into the jars, but would Pete want one. Pete said of course, and turned back to Cloninger.

“There he is there in the car,” Pete said.

“We looking at a shy fella or a tough guy?”

“Around grown men, he’s pretty docile. But him and his mom are in a bad way.”

Cloninger laced his fingers together, hung them below his belt, and tilted his ashen head at Pete.

“He’s got priors, but they’re
sneaky
priors. Arson. Breaking and entering. He was with those kids that were busting into pickups outside the basketball game last spring,” Pete said. “He’s older and bigger than that Rossignol kid you took in last time, but I think he’s more bark than bite. That said, you never know. He might could be a handful,” Pete said.

“I see.”

“Really, I just don’t know how he’ll act in a different environment. Probably quiet for a few days and then we’ll just have to play it by ear?”

“They Christian?”

“Not even close.”

Cloninger nodded.

“I hate to ask this, but what’s the longest you can have him?” Pete asked.

Cloninger unlaced his hands and pulled out a small black calendar and a small pencil from his shirt pocket. He thumbed through the little book to the place he needed. He squinted without his glasses.

“We’re going to Plains in two weeks. Marta’s sister. If he gets along, he can certainly come with.”

“Nah. I’ll get something sorted out before then. There’s an uncle. I just didn’t have time.”

“Okee-dokee,” Cloninger said, putting back his calendar and pencil. “Let’s get him set up.”

“One thing,” Pete said, touching Cloninger’s elbow. “Obviously, he isn’t going to be grateful for your hospitality. But please do accept my gratitude.”

Cloninger clapped Pete on the shoulder.

“We’ll feed and shelter him, body and spirit.”

From the car, Cecil observed the man holding Pete’s shoulder and bending his head at him, like they were praying with one another. Then Pete and the man were at the car and opening the door, Cecil going along with it, handing Pete his air rifle, shaking the man’s hand, and then already in his house which was a cloud of sweet moisture and the dog was sniffing his groin, and the mother squeezed his hand, and their children lined up to greet him too, and this was really happening. Pete was already out the door with a jar of jam, and Cecil was shown a spare bed and where to put his things. Then they were sitting down to eat. He was just in time for lunch, they said like it was pure kismet, and the dog would not quit sniffing his pant legs under the table even though he moved his feet and tried to shoo him with his hand.

What was her name
?

Rachel Snow. But she wanted to change it.

To what
?

Rose. “Rose Snow” said something deeply true about her. About her soul. She was a frozen flower. It was so sad, her almost-fourteen-year-old heart throbbed with feeling. Gushed.

And there was this bitch at Rattlesnake Middle School named Rachel.

This other Rachel.

Why’d she reach over with her foot and stomp on the gas as she and her mother idled at a light?

Because her mother was taking too long.

Because she couldn’t stand the way she drove.

Because she didn’t know why, all right?

Because she just always felt now like she needed to go go go everything was taking too long she was missing it all. She was thirteen already and she was missing everything.

Everything.

Did they nearly have an accident?

No.

Did her mother slap her?

She tried, the bitch. Just caught a bit of her hair.

Did her mother say that this was it? That she could go live with her father she was gonna act like this?

Bitch always said that.

What did Rachel think of going to live with him?

It’s Rose.

What did Rose think of going to live with her father?

She thought, whatever. That it was all talk.

A
break
they called it. Hilarious. He bought a house up in the woods.

No, she didn’t even consider it a possibility.

Why not?

She just didn’t.

Why?

This wasn’t why, but you wanna know something? What she remembers about him? Like an oldest memory?

Yes, of course.

A party at Greenough Park. Her father and mother and uncle Shane and some of their other friends. Uncle Spoils makes his dogs take a bath in the creek, coaxing them into the cold water. Working the clots of hair. He slips, goes all the way under and when he pops up he’s yards downstream and only just manages to get to his feet and clamber out. Coughs up sprays of water, eyes wild with fear. Walks sopping wet back up to his dogs barking and nipping at him in their excitement, and says you kids stay away from the water. It’s too high to play around. Don’t go near it. Go on. Go play over in them trees or somewheres.

He’s from Butte. He’s totally hilarious. Big ears and a big nose and big eyes. Mustache, hair like red straw.

So later. It’s almost dark and time to go home and her daddy is calling for her and she goes. She’s five or maybe six. And he’s in a hurry about something, about getting Mommy home, they had a fight because she was being foolish. Daddy had begun saying that sometimes about her, that she’d get foolish at parties, sometimes grown-ups acted silly he was saying, no, not like Spoils silly, but Mommy has her own kind of silly, it’s—we gotta hurry. And he says come on, the bridge is too far, the car is right over there, the lot is across the creek, come on. And he picks her up and they go into the dark water. And she tells him Spoils said to stay out and he wasn’t being hilarious—

They are already up to his waist.

He’s breathing hard, straining against the water. Footing the rocks now, slow steps. The water is cold through her shoes. She says she’s scared Daddy and it’s cold Daddy and she pulls her feet out of the water and it changes his balance and he stumbles and she clutches and screams.

He stops in the middle of the stream. Says for her to be quiet.

Be still.

He’s breathing heavy.

Water’s not that deep, not over my head, but it’s fast, okay, he says. You gotta just hold on. I got you. His breath burns her nostrils and the smell of his sweat is bitter.

She realizes much later—when she got that bottle of crème de menthe with Kim and Lori from Lori’s dad’s liquor cabinet—that he was drunk. But even at the time she thinks I don’t trust him, I don’t believe him.

He doesn’t have me.

And the next step, he slips, they go over into the roar and churn and she’s so shocked by the cold and the outrageous fact of this even happening that she isn’t even upset, she’s just this thing being acted upon, totally helpless as a dolly, that it isn’t until he’s got her at a cutbank and pushes her up through the brush, handfuls of wet dirt falling away, shoving her into the poking sticks that then, right on the heels of relief, she is so so so mad. She slaps him when he comes out after her.

That your daddy could drown you on accident. She’s shaking with the cold and the last of her fear and then her warming anger, her daddy almost killed them both.

Come on, Applesauce, he says. You’re okay, he says.

And when he touches her, she won’t let him, she says you’re foolish too you’re foolish Daddy too.

T
enmile was set in a triangular valley at the confluence of the Kootenai River and Deerwater Creek. A ghost town shared the creek’s name, a settlement abandoned in 1910 when the last of the fifty thousand ounces of copper had played out. Before that, gold and silver. Miners by the hundreds and then the thousands blasted it free with dynamite and high-pressure water hoses, melted the mountain into muddy and runneled hillocks that from the bird’s eye would have looked like a red and brown cavity furiously attended by denim-blue ants. Deerwater was never easily gotten to, and the town of Tenmile sprung up, first as a canvas-tent trading station the name of which was lost to memory but eventually became known as Tenmile because of its distance on the perilous switchbacks from the mining camp.

By the time the last of the miners left Deerwater’s muddy sluices, Tenmile boasted a town square with an area for a courthouse. The town swelled to 3,500 souls. The citizens incorporated and sent money to the legislature to be named the county seat and within the year broke ground on a courthouse and jail. Timber and the vermiculite mine in the nearby town of Libby kept Tenmile populated through the world wars and well into the 1960s before the grown children began to move away, the elders started to die, and the town settled at a suspect equilibrium of about 2,500 people in 1975.

It was home to many loggers and around a hundred men working at the mill. A few guys made more than fifteen dollars an hour at plumbing, machine work, and sporting goods. A used-car dealer did fair competition with his rivals in Troy and Libby. There were a pair of service stations and two churches (both Protestant), four steamy cafes, and ten bars. About three hundred citizens made the haul to Libby for the third shift at the vermiculite mine and came back looking like they were dipped in flour, bloodshot in the eyes. Fervid coughs kept their wives and children up nights.

There was a single lawyer who handled all the defense work, a rotund judge named Dyson, and a profoundly alcoholic district attorney on whom even the old sots looked down. Two pastors and two pastor’s wives and a gaggle of ever-present old ladies threw bake sales for various charities and gossiped about everyone in sight. Self-important nepotists manned the fire department and police station, the kind of men who sometimes turned handily heroic in the histories of other small towns and were no different here, having thwarted a bank robbery in 1943 that could be pointed out in places where ricocheted bullets had lodged around the square. There was even a piano instructor who lived in a small, well-kept cottage that looked like it just might house a piano teacher and from which issued an incompetent plinking that proved it. And there were twenty-plus teachers in the town and all were women save the gym instructor and the principal who managed the elementary and adjacent high school.

The children were like children from anywhere, maybe a little less so. Which is to say they watched very little television and lived in trailers and cabins. In the main, they behaved themselves, but that didn’t mean all of them were suited for much more than seventh or eighth grade. Nurturing a child’s intelligence was still considered a bit indulgent—the sooner they got to work, the better. It was well known that Principal Pemberton didn’t brook troublemakers—he simply expelled them into the meager economy. So it was something of an intrigue when Pemberton called and asked if Pete could come down to the school right away.