Fourth of July Creek (34 page)

He felt sick. Then he kissed her. The mouth that had just had the lawyer’s cock in it and the rivalry inherent in that. She was caught off guard and perhaps felt guilty or obliged, and he knew there was no affection or desire to win her back in this kissing, now on her neck—she sucked in air through her teeth like his lips were ice, as if this were all some kind of dare—and he thought to fuck her right there on the floor in the broken glass, but something subtly shifted between them and the spell or whatever it was was broken.

She let go of his hand, stood, and veered into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. From over the refrigerator, she got a pack of cigarettes and waited for the electric coil on the stove to light it. She seemed to be barricading herself in there. He kicked closed the front door.

Then she came out of the kitchen. She’d acquired a new self-possession. Even her posture was frank. She said she wanted to talk. Would he listen.

She said she needed things in her life to be separate. That she had a way she organized herself. Would he just listen. Would he just shut up a minute and listen.

Did he have any idea how many times she’d been raped. What a number it did on her mind. How much she’s just out there coping. And the way she copes is, she’s a bureau. Like a dresser.

Would he please just shut up for a minute.

There was this old couple. There was a room the old man took her in. An old-time dresser in there, like an apothecary cabinet. Dozens of little drawers. She wasn’t allowed to play with it, it was antique. She wasn’t even allowed in the room. But the old man would take her in there. She’d watch the dresser. Think about what was in the drawers.

She knows it’s a totem. A way of organizing her life. But it was useful to see how the things that had happened and were happening to her could be sorted. When the man was on her, she said,
This just goes in that drawer there. . . .

She put the bad things in those drawers, like little buttons. Then the good things too. She knows it’s just a metaphor or symbol. It’s just an organizing principle. It’s repression.

She had this therapist who tried to get her to describe the drawers, what was in them. He made her do it. And all the drawers fell open and the buttons spilled all over the floor and by the time she got home, she was worse off than before, buttons everywhere. She had to pick them up one by one and put them all back. Took her two years. Ninety minutes with a psychiatrist and she’s out two years, sometimes getting more new buttons faster than she can put the old ones away. These rugby players, for instance. Reno, for instance. The Wind River Facility in California, for instance.

Would he look at her. Would he see she’s telling the truth.

There was a time when a guy like him would be somewhere on the floor. Lost there for a long while. She’d forget who’d come to see her. Wouldn’t be able to tell the one who had money from the one who had drugs from the one who liked to dance from the one who liked to make her feel like shit from the one who was kind and only ever pulled her hair, and even only when she needed him to.

She said she had a drawer for guys she could love. A few buttons in there. And he’s in that drawer. And when he comes over, she gets so excited to open that drawer and take him out—

The lawyer is from a kind of bad drawer. Not the worst drawer. A bad one.

No, he doesn’t hurt her. Not in a typical way. What he does is between him and his conscience. It barely has anything to do with her. In a way.

Would he look at her.

She does, she does probably love him like a normal person might love someone. But he’s on the floor. And he has to get back in his drawer. The good drawer. Would he please just get back in his drawer. Just pretend this didn’t happen. That it doesn’t happen. Please.

He stood up.

“Mary,” he said.

“What.”

He opened the door.

“Fuck you.”

He left.

Bender.

The shit they pulled.

Spoils on the curb explaining things to the cops. A man wants to knock out the windows of his own car, it’s his business, Spoils says. Glass and blood all over Pete’s file folders. The cops checking his license and registration, uncuffing him, telling Spoils to take him on home.

Pete on the dog-smelling bed with all the dogs and waking among the dogs and throwing up, and the dogs sniffing it and not hazarding to even taste it, these fine mongrels.

A call came from Indianapolis that social services there had picked up a girl that met Rachel’s description. Pete drove eighty-five the whole way to Spokane and rode a red-eye to Salt Lake, slept in the terminal and touched down in Indianapolis thirty-six hours after he got the message. He took a taxi to the Child Welfare Office and was referred to a shelter on the north side of town, an ugly pale building shoved among the brick houses. A black man sitting on a bucket smoking looked down his nose at him.

By now coming on evening, the sun sidling and flashing up the windows under the discouraging clouds. Somehow he knew she wasn’t going to be there, that it wouldn’t be her, or that she’d be gone.

The shelter hadn’t admitted anyone by her name, and when they escorted him through the wing of teenagers no one had seen a girl by the name of Rachel. He showed the staff a picture, and a savvy black girl slipped over to them and said she knew Rachel and said she knew where she was and could take him there right now. Soon all the girls said they saw her, lying to him, every last one. Their black city speech rushed by his Montana ears like freeway cars and he realized that if he was himself a country mouse what a small and bewildered thing Rachel must be.

The first girl was saying she did so see Rachel, fuck y’all, she did so see the girl, the girl was in here two weeks ago, had her hair cut all stupid with short bangs and long bangs like it didn’t grow out at the same speed. The other girls’ insults and insinuations redounded and amplified off the concrete walls, and the girl said Rachel was let out three days ago and wouldn’t shut up about some dude, name of Cheatham.

“Cheatham? Cheatham what?”

“Last name.”

“Rachel was with a guy named Cheatham.”

“Yes. But she didn’t say her name wasn’t no Rachel. But that was her. In yer pitcher.”

“What did she say her name was?”

“Shit, I dunno. It just wasn’t no Rachel,” the girl said.

The staff muttered to Pete that the girls were all liars.

“Wait. I think it was Rose. Yeah, it was Rose.”

The wing manager wouldn’t let him look at the intake books and smirked at his request in such a way that said the books were themselves a bit of a shared joke. Then a girl came in with a square of naked, bloody scalp and they said Pete had to go, meaning this was his fault, he’d riled the girls and their rickety routine, he’d taken staff from the floor and now look.

He stayed in a small hotel and the next day rented a car. First he tried to find out who had called him from the Child Welfare Office, but in the massive warren of cubicles there seemed to be neither accountability nor culpability, and from every nook emanated some sob or outrage or pleading that seemed to literally hover in a physical murmur over the cubicles and, condensing on the fogged windows, ran in beads like tears. The shift managers couldn’t help him, no one knew who contacted him, and they all had calls to make themselves.

He located his poster of Rachel on the bulletin board, her face obscured by a new notice. He pulled Rachel’s down and tacked it on top of the others and made for downtown. A few hours of walking and a few hours by the fountain at the base of the sailors and soldiers monument, watching the cars and the people go round the roundabout. He cruised the city, the clapboard neighborhoods and tenements and downtown alleys. Into the wholesale district. He saw vagrants of every age and description around the old Union Station. He parked and circled the abandoned brick and granite structure. Stern bartizans like watchtowers. The voices within. He went around the corner and knocked in the plywood over a broken window and pulled himself inside. He tread over a rime of pigeon shit on the ornate marble floors, footsteps echoing throughout the barrel vaults and so did his voice calling out for Rachel, for Cheatham. People hid in here and he said that he was just looking for his daughter, did they have any sympathy at all. He called out that she was with someone named Cheatham. Or Booth. Whispers carried on the dusty claustral air. Someone tell me something, he said.

A bottle shot over the iron railing toward him with a tail of dregs and exploded with a terse pop and fanned across the smooth floor in thousands of discrete shards around and between his feet with the fineness of rock salt.

He was a few days in the hotel, going crazy. He didn’t drink, he didn’t leave the room, he let the television talk at him. He wasn’t going to lose it. He wasn’t going to kill himself. He wasn’t going to give up.

But what was there to do. Useless.

He went to a liquor store and bought a handle of bourbon and then to a grocery and fixed himself up with a packet of razors and a six-pack of Coca-Cola. He filled the ice bucket. He observed the television like a foreigner. He made a drink and the inanities of the game shows began to wear on him. When he looked away from the screen and out the window, the glass warped and rainbowed in his vision like a huge soap bubble and he realized he was hallucinating or crying or both. He took long drafts from the bourbon at the sink. He drew a bath. He wiped away the steam and regarded the man behind it, thin and pale, the maculate sunken eyes. It had grown dark. The water was lukewarm too, and he had lost hours and he was sure that he’d gone insane.

He climbed into the tub in his clothes. He drank and fumbled open the razors from their cardboard box. He practiced cutting through his jeans into his thigh. He felt nothing. A small pink bloom in the water.

Do it.

I can’t.

Do it.

He leapt out of the tub and flung himself down the hallway into the raining night and through the parking lot, his wet feet slapping the pavement and on into a copse of trees where he fell and started pounding the mud with his fists like something might be accomplished this way and then screamed at the weeping sky what am I that I want to die. The leaves like shuddering lids of tin and razors of lightning and how could anything be okay in all this, the world is a blade and dread is hope cut open and spread inside out.

He woke to conversation.

“Door was open.”

“What’s that all over him?”

“Mud.”

“What should we do?”

“Wake up, mister.”

“Look at his knuckles.”

“That lamp is smithereens.”

“Get out,” Pete said.

“It lives.”

“GET OUT!”

“Box the motherfucker’s car in. He ain’t going nowhere till he pays for this shit.”

It occurred to him to look at a map. Gnaw Bone, Indiana, was only an hour away.

It was scarcely a place at all on the way to Bloomington. A few houses, a closed barbecue joint, and a scrap yard with a man sweeping out front. He asked the narrow-faced proprietor was there a family by the name of Pearl in the area. The man said the only Pearls left a few years ago, but the missus had some people up the Clay Lick Road and gave Pete directions.

The house sat among blooming tulip trees. He was met at the screen by a compact barefoot woman in jeans and a stained sweatshirt. Pete said he was a social worker from Montana and just happened to be in the area and wondered if by chance anybody on the property was kin to Jeremiah Pearl or his wife.

His eyes adjusted to the low light in the house. An older, papery version of the woman at the door heaved herself from a recliner.

“Has something happened to my Veronica?” she asked, mashing out a cigarette on an ashtray by the door. The woman’s daughter pushed open the screen and the thin old thing stood in the doorway and searched Pete’s eyes for what he knew.

“I don’t—”

“Something’s happened. What’s happened?”

“I haven’t seen anything. I haven’t seen her. But I have seen Jeremiah. And Benjamin.”

“Benjamin,” she said, as if the thought of the boy pained her.

“Yes.”

She gathered the wattles of skin at her throat and looked liable to cry. She forced a grin on her face. It wouldn’t be polite to do otherwise. Then she said for Pete to come in, and he followed her into the house.

He spoke with the woman and her daughter for several hours. They gave him strawberry soda. The women had sugar diabetes and couldn’t have more than a sip, so they split a can three ways and the women sipped and smoked, the older through wrinkled and furry lips. They got out an old scrapbook and showed him pictures of the family.

V
ERONICA AS A CHILD
and then as a blurry teenager, she hates having her picture taken. A healthy girl, handsome rather than pretty, country-pious, more than her sisters or mother or her father. God bless him. Heart attack last fall.

They showed him young-man Pearl, what he looked like without a beard. Doughy, pudging out around the belly. Given to spells of talk that end in sheer drops of hours-long silences. Times you can’t shut him up, times he’s stone still. He claims to have been a Green Beret but was in fact only a truck driver in Vietnam. He seethed in that heat and came back ginned up to do something with his life now that the war wasn’t going to do it to him or for him.

He meets Veronica on a hayride of all goddamn things. At this point a woman of twenty. Not yet severe and with all the personality of a hatchet, but she has had religion since a tent revival four summers previous.

At the drive-in, she asks is he saved. Does he want to be. He answers sincerely. He’s just out of the army and accustomed to being told what to do, craves it in fact, but couldn’t take orders from a body as fucked up as the US Army, and sure as shit no church.

But Veronica, he’d eat glass for her, he says.

She tells him to come see her when he doesn’t have the beer on his breath.

They are engaged inside of ten days and married when he has enough for a gold band and a down payment on a little place in Gnaw Bone. They don’t answer their phone. Her family hardly sees her anymore, except at the movies. They are always at the movies. He meets her after work and they neck in the back of the theater or in the front seat of his convertible on summer nights, the grasshoppers leaping away from the headlights as they drive in the dark fields to the quarry to night swim and sleep under the stars.