Fourth of July Creek (30 page)

“She ran away from her mother’s. I can’t find her.”

“How old?”

“Fourteen.”

She pulled on her cigarette and looked into her glass and if she had a thought for him, she didn’t share it.

“We’re shitty parents. Her mother is just over at her house getting drunk. And I’m sitting here getting drunk. But there’s nothing we can do. I’ve looked everywhere.”

“You check the Drag?”

He nodded. “We were young. We weren’t ready for a kid. No one tells you that the mother of your child will resent the child and resent you. I am saying what you are not allowed to say: we did not love our child enough. God, I didn’t protect her. I didn’t protect her from us. I go into homes all the time and I save children. It’s what I do for a living, you see? And I didn’t save my own daughter.”

The woman had sat up, and now she went inside. She came back out with the bottle of rye. She squeezed his wrist as she filled his glass.

“Beau will be back soon,” she said. “We’ll all feel better in a little bit.”

When they returned, Beauregard oiled the party into Pete’s motel room and dialed in some music on the clock radio. He jiggered at the tinny sounds from the tiny speakers. Douglas removed a length of glass the color of maple syrup from his pants and Beauregard removed a pocket of foil from his shirt, folded it open, and plucked out a white pellet that Pete thought was a pill that the woman smoked. She sat serenely and Beauregard took the pipe from her open palm and bent to kiss her. She blew the smoke into his mouth. When he exhaled, she grabbed the back of his head and kissed him and pulled him onto the bed, wrapping her stained leg around him. Douglas shared with Pete a look of approval, of arousal. Beauregard disentangled himself and rose with the foil and the pipe. He loaded it again and handed it to Pete.

They called it base. Pete set down his cigarette and drink, and took the hit. He was unprepared for the exhilaration and he laughed ferociously. His vision filled with bright magnesium fires. He immediately wanted another one and finished his drink and cigarette waiting for the pipe to come around. It did. He and Douglas now became bosom. The music was soulful and invigorating. They spoke and spoke and spoke, most of it lies and heightened opinions. When the time came, Pete handed over some of his money, and Beauregard and Douglas left again. He and Sharla watched television, as quiet as people waiting in an ER. Douglas and Beauregard returned, the room filling with sound.

The hours shriveled into new smallnesses.

The rye was gone, they were out of cigarettes. Douglas had disappeared. Beauregard and Sharla argued about a scab she was picking at on her leg. They seemed to have forgotten they were in Pete’s room. He stepped between them to get his wallet and his keys, and still they argued. He went outside. He walked up the empty street. A strip club, railroad tracks. A police car sped by. He walked the tracks and then down a causeway to and around the shore of a pond.

He sat on the limestone in the dark. Felt the notches carved by water into the rock. He’d have wept but for the cocaine and the numbness and the queer sensation that the stones all around him were subtly shifting position. The very ground seemed to writhe. Nearby something slipped into the water. He wondered was he both seeing and hearing things. He’d had so little sleep. No more than an hour at a stretch since Beth had called.

A foot away a rock shuddered. He reached a shaking hand to the stone and it collapsed a half inch, socketed into the ground. He wondered was he going crazy. Had he already gone crazy. He touched the stone and the grooves on the dome of it—

A fucking turtle. Dozens of them all around. A bale of turtles crawling to water.

Two days later he came back to Beth’s house with her car and her keys but not with her little girl. Not that she expected him to. She didn’t hear him pull up or climb onto the porch. He sat exhausted against the wall and was out of her sight and he listened to her shuffle on flip-flops into the living room. He was about to call to her when she started to cry. She bawled so hard he felt witness to a vile pornography of grief and then he wondered was she crying because the cops had found Rachel’s body or a piece of her clothing in the water or were the dogs searching the fields or were divers dredging the river. Fear paralyzed him, he didn’t want to know. And then her sobs puttered into a soft blubbering and she lit a cigarette.

She came onto the porch and into the muggy afternoon, bugs screaming something terrific in the trees, coming and going in waves, he didn’t know they were cicadas or how loud they were, just that some incredible call-and-response was at work, a crackling choir that reminded him of baseball cards in bike spokes. She noticed him there and started crying anew.

“What is it?” he whispered. “What’s happened?”

He cringed as though waiting for her to hit him with a hammer.

“Nothing’s happened,” she said. “She’s still just gone.”

His relief was itself almost sickening and he wondered would this be the shape of his life. Constant worry. Images of her foot tangled in river flora, her contused and naked back, her hair in the dirt. Her teeth. Would these pictures forever turn on the carousel slide projector of his mind.

“Where have you been?”

“Everywhere. San Antonio. Just driving and looking and asking. I talked to kids all over the city, Beth. If she’s here . . . Hell, she’s not here. Or she’s . . .”

“Pete, don’t.”

“. . . or she’s in a hole . . .”

He wept on his knees like a man begging for his life. She pulled him inside and held him, swaying under the ceiling fan until his grief emptied out. She took his head and looked at him and said I know I know I know honey. It was he who kissed her. She tasted like salt and beer. She led him into the bedroom through the stages of their disrobing. He wasn’t tender with her, but neither was he rough. The lovemaking was necessarily urgent, ashamed. They would not have been able to abide another moment’s reflection. They were too sore, and there was no longer much surface to them, just a thin layer of skin and the raw pith beneath. If fucking could be frank, this was, and so was everything they said afterward. She exclaimed with some woe and wonder that this was how Rachel came to be. With these two people here.

She reached for a glass on the bedside table and drank. She handed it to him. It was bourbon and melted ice and still cool and watery and almost slaking.

“I keep calling the police station,” she said. “They sent an officer over. He said it sounds like she’d run away, not been kidnapped. I think she ran away, Pete. I think she ran away from me. I let her get away with everything and then when I tried to rein her in, she bolted. I think she’s okay.”

She turned and grabbed his chin to have him look at her. “Right? She’s just run away, right?”

“I’m sorry I left,” he said.

“I’m sorry too,” she said. “I am. I drove you away. I did it knowing that.”

“I think I knew what you were going to do. When you got dressed that night, when you went out.”

She sat up.

“I knew too,” she said. “I knew that you’d leave if I slept with someone. That you’d go exactly like you did. Pack a bag and vanish. Why did I do that?”

She reached over and took two cigarettes from the pack and lit one for him and handed it to him and then one for herself. She got out of the bed and walked naked into the hall and returned with a bottle. He felt the force of this uncanny tableau. As though they had no child. As though this were a different version of things. He took a small comfort that somewhere such an iteration as this one existed, where Rachel had never been born and the only damage he and Beth did was to each other.

“I was already gone,” Pete said.

She poured him a glass, and he took it and drank.

“You were. Why were you already gone, Pete? What happened to us?”

He held up the glass of bourbon.

“I don’t know. I’m an alcoholic, Beth. You’re an alcoholic. Shit, I smoked
cocaine
the other night. I take kids away from people like us.”

“We’re not that bad. People fuck up. They get forgiven.”

She frowned into her drink. She set it on the dresser and went to him on the bed and took his hand. Up close he could see the gray stretched rays on her little paunch and breasts. How her body had served their child. And her habits.

“I’ve been thinking of something,” she said. “But I don’t want you to laugh at me.”

“I’m not capable of laughter now.”

She took his hand into both of hers.

“I think we should go to church.”

She waited for his reaction.

“I know, with your family and everything . . . that you feel like it’s bullshit.”

She waited again. He wondered did she know his father was dead, had she read his letter to Rachel. Did Rachel read it. He told her it was okay to say what she wanted to say. She folded her legs under and took his hand.

“I’ve been feeling, like, this hole inside? For a long time now. I don’t think we have a center. The other day I was here all by myself and I was waiting for you to come. I had all these pills and I was thinking of taking them. So I knew I had to get out of the house. And I went out and was walking around, and I dunno, I was already kind of fucked up. And I came by this church and I thought I’d just feel it out. And the people in there were singing and this lady in the back row sees me and she pats the pew and scoots down for me. But I knew if I sat still a minute I’d lose it. I’d embarrass myself even worse than I normally do.”

She pushed her curls behind her ears.

“I feel like I’ve been busted. Like the cops have pulled me over. Like God has pulled me over and I got to sit here with my hands at ten and two. And I got to get right or something is gonna happen to Rachel—if it hasn’t already. It’s God who’s the social worker, Pete. And he’s taken our kid away, you know?”

She squeezed his hands and trembled.

“You probably think it’s stupid.”

Pete closed his eyes and thumped the headboard and when he opened them she looked terrified that he was going to say something hurtful. This shamed him more than she could know.

“It’s not stupid,” he said.

She took a shuddering breath.

“Will you go to church with me?”

She took his silence for assent and kissed his forehead. She said she’d take a bath and then maybe they could eat and then they’d go find a service.

He was frightened for her and what was about to happen to her and felt the fullest burden of the fact that he was indeed a thing that had happened to her too and was happening to her yet and would be for a long time to come.

He listened to the water run and when he was quite sure she was in the tub, he dressed, walked up the street to the convenience store, and called a cab.

Did Booth rape her?

Who?

The guy who broke into her room, the night she ran away.

No. He just kept saying
Hey, hey . . .
like he wanted to wake her but at the same time not.

It was a million degrees already in March. She slept in her underwear and a tank top, no blanket, no sheet. She fell asleep to the hum and thump of some corn-fed redneck noise, a breaking glass, and laughter.

Booth going
Hey, hey
, and she woke up to his hand on her thigh and she shot up and out into the hall screaming and crying, and Booth came out shielding his eyes in the light because he must’ve been in there a long time just looking at her, maybe touching her, his hairy arms, his stubbleblue sweaty shamefaced face. She wouldn’t stop screaming until they dragged him out of the house. She slapped her mother, slammed her door, started to throw her things into a bag.

Was Booth just a pretext?

A what?

An excuse. To run away.

Yes.

Where did she run away to?

Cheatham, ultimately. But first a party in South Austin looking for him. A few of the wrong kind of high school girls knocked around the room as invisible as moths. Guys who knew their inhalants.

She literally had nowhere else to go. The party at its embers. Kids splayed in shadowy attitudes of sleep all over the floor. She had a cigarette with a boy on the back step. She could barely see what he looked like. The cars shook with the sex happening inside them.

Did he use a condom?

No.

Did he hurt her?

A little. She bore it with what felt to her like a mixture of grace and sophistication. She pushed out shame, brooked no doubts.

What was its main consolation?

Feeling grown. To have had a second lover.

What about Cheatham?

She found him the next day.

T
here were a few skirts of snow up around his house, but the larch needles had come in, neon green and soft to the touch. Raccoons meandered around his property for a few days but couldn’t get in the house and moved on.

His bank account was nearly empty and he thought he might have been fired, but his check was in the splay of mail shoved under his door at the courthouse. It didn’t matter if he was at work or not. He had no minders.