Fourth of July Creek (36 page)

Guy by the name of Stussel has a fantastic book laying out the whole conspiracy. You have to do a little research, John. Just because they give you a shit sandwich to eat doesn’t mean you put it in your mouth.

Why you—I sat in frozen mud for six weeks getting shot at by murdering Krauts and you want to tell me I don’t know what I saw with my own damn eyes?! I was there—

Look, I’m no Nazi. But—

—and I know what I saw, and—

—you got to understand that if you make a country’s money worthless and let the banks control everything, some people are going to stand up to keep what’s theirs—

I had friends killed by those Nazi sons of bitches and I’ll be goddamned if you’ll shit on their memory! I ought to kick your ass! Get up! Get up right now!

Just then Veronica says to come inside.

The old man is quaking and nearly plum with rage.

Veronica calls him again.

He squeezes the bridge of his nose. He squeezes his legs and stands. Says the way Jeremiah is talking, somebody is gonna get hurt.

So be it
, Jeremiah says.

You’re insane.

Some people won’t see the light until they feel the heat, John. It’s just the way it is.

The old man is asking what the hell does that mean, but Veronica is pulling him into the house, sitting him down with a plate of pie.

Jeremiah and his friends are quiet a minute.

Then you hear Jeremiah say,
The thing that needs to get done is someone needs to kill the Supreme Court.

They insisted Pete eat. They made him a baloney sandwich and chips and more strawberry soda, they couldn’t get enough of the stuff. It had gotten on to dark and fireflies sparked outside the window. He’d never seen them before and the mother and the daughter were amused that he went out to watch.

When he came back inside, the daughter had set up the projector. There were boxes and boxes of film. They screened a few of the Pearls’ movies before the old woman snored in her chair and the daughter took her up to bed and left him alone to watch. There was no telling what was on any of the reels. He just put them on and let them play. Canoes on the water. Parades. A great many people balancing on things, sticking out their tongues.

Then reel after reel of babies, toddlers, children. Pearl walking them, dancing with his little girls. Veronica with a sleeping newborn, blushing. Blushing alone. Her naked shoulder. A short clip of Uncle Sam on stilts, and then nothing but her skin. Her brown thigh and her belly and the between of her breasts. The ridge of her collarbone and valley in her neck. Pearl’s country, his homeland.

Where’d Cheatham go?

Knoxville to see a cousin.

Why didn’t she go too?

He’d been moody going on a few weeks now. They would hit a truck stop cafe and he wouldn’t talk to her through the meal. He’d brood at the windshield for the whole day. They’d pull into a KOA and he’d set up the tent and say he was going to get something to eat or a six-pack and he’d come back long after she’d not fallen asleep.

What did he smell like?

Like brown. Like whiskey, tobacco, and river water. He’d sleep until noon and then play his guitar all morning, and when she asked him could they go or was there anything to eat, he’d punish her another day with utter silence.

Then what?

Then of a sunset or a morning hard-on he’d finally try to kiss her, and she’d push him away, and he’d go sweet, and she’d give in, and he’d be happy and funny, and she’d be afraid to say anything about his deserts of inattention for fear of visiting another one.

And Indianapolis?

They got a motel. She sat by the pool some. He watched television and smoked and plucked at the guitar. She said she was bored, what was he doing, weren’t they going to do anything besides sit in this hotel and not even talk to each other.

He put his guitar in his case and said he was going to go play outside for a while and that when he came back they could go get something to eat.

But he didn’t come back.

Nope.

What did she do?

She wyomed. Hard. For a few days.

Did she call her mother?

She was thinking about it. Thinking about could she stand to go back. Thinking about how she preferred this freedom to that not-freedom, even though she was abandoned, but also it wasn’t like she wasn’t basically abandoned at home anyway.

She was holding the phone when the motel manager knocked on the door and then asked through the door if she was going to check out and she wouldn’t answer. He left, came back, and opened the door with a master key. She said she needed to stay a few more days. That Cheatham had just stepped out and would be back. The manager said he needed payment, and she started crying and said Cheatham would be back and she couldn’t see his expression with the sun silhouetting him like that, but he left.

Did the manager return with a police officer?

Yes. She tried to run, but the manager grabbed her arm and when she hit him the cop arrested her. She had no identification.

When did she go to the shelter?

After a night in the juvie jail. The black girls explaining their contempt of her to her. A couple of them pulling her hair, trying to get her to fight back. She just cornered herself, tucked herself into a ball.

How long was she at the shelter?

So briefly. Two days. It was a joke.

A fight in the cafeteria, the clatter of trays and silverware on the concrete floor, the staff rushing in, she wedged a fork in the closing door, waited for the commotion to crescendo, and slipped into the hall. A row of doors. Offices. Someone talking on the phone. Somehow she knew to simply walk to the end and out the back door onto the concrete patio where the staff smoked and up the alley onto the street, unhurried.

Did it work?

Of course.

But then what?

She walked an hour in what she hoped was the direction of the motel and then another hour when she started to recognize the surroundings.

Did she find Cheatham?

She scanned the lot for his car. She wyomed for a while in the grass.

Did she think of going home?

She did. And if she had the coins to make the call, she would have.

Her mother or father?

Her mother, probably.

What did she do instead?

She waited for an unfamiliar desk clerk to come on shift. By then it was dark. She asked was there a Cheatham checked in here. The clerk said no, but was she Rose. There was a letter for her.

From Cheatham?

Yes. A letter she couldn’t finish through her wyoming. She threw the letter away and pocketed the cash.

What did she do?

She quit wyoming and went after him.

P
ete had begun to feel like he was being watched. Glancing up on more than one occasion expecting his office doorway to darken, to hear a knock. He’d get home and think things had been moved on his porch. At night, he’d hear footsteps outside his house, an approaching car that never came up the road. He wondered was it his daughter was it his brother was it a ghost of his dead father his dead mother. Was it Pearl or his son.

Then sitting on the gallery at the Yaak country store he realized that if it was anyone, it was probably his brother’s parole officer. The mercury had topped ninety and Pete drank an orange soda enjoying the heat and the shade when Wes Reynolds pulled up in his pickup. He put his sunglasses up under the visor, got out, and joined Pete on the bench. They watched the kids leaping from the bridge into the freezing Yaak River.

“You’re pretty far afield of Choteau,” Pete said.

“I followed you up here.”

“The hell for?”

“You ain’t been home for a while.”

“I don’t know where Luke is, Wes.”

Wes grinned. His tooth was still chipped.

“Who said anything about him?”

“It’s what you’re doing.”

“Why are you way up here in the Yaak?”

“Work.”

Wes stood away from the railing and hooked his thumbs in his jeans and spat.

“What work?”

“I have clients . . . damnit, it’s confidential. Quit snooping around my house. He ain’t there. He ain’t here. He ain’t anywhere I know of.”

“Fucker jumped me in the parking lot,” Wes said. “He put me in the hospital.”

“I’m gonna put you in the hospital too, you don’t stay away from me.”

“You know where he is, Pete.”

“Fine, Wes. I do. I do know.”

“Tell me where.”

“Let me be perfectly clear: I’m
never
going to tell you. And you’ll
never
find him, I’ll make sure of that.”

Wes stared at Pete a minute and then shook his head and ejected a laugh.

“You just fucked up, man.”

“That some kind of threat?”

Wes got in his truck.

“Enjoy your pop.”

Pete held up the bottle, took a swig, and with Wes watching him, walked down to river, disrobed to his underwear, and jumped off the bridge into the water.

The cold shocked him, but he swam down to the bottom and pulled himself along the rocks and moss. He lay in the long grass and warmed in the sun. Dragonflies hovered over him. In the shade of the gallery, drinking another pop, he was pleasantly chilled, smelling of river water and sunshine.

For a minute, he forgot all about Luke, but then he thought of Rachel—the way one might remember the disease ravaging his insides—and was compelled to get up and go to his car and do something, anything. He drove east, first for no reason, and then on to Pine Hills, as though it were on some calendar that he had just consulted. Ah yes, go see Cecil.

Pete again wasn’t allowed to visit Cecil, so he asked to talk to the head of the facility, explaining that he was the boy’s social worker and wanted to speak with him in order to file updates on the case. The facility head had the ashen pallor of someone very ill, someone no longer in possession of the will to resist requests like Pete’s. Though they both knew that once Cecil was in the facility Pete’s role in the boy’s life was effectively finished, everyone answered to their paperwork.

They took him through an increasingly loud and scuffed series of halls and locked doors until they reached a kind of dayroom. Concrete tables and concrete chairs, concrete shelves. A pitted drain in the middle of the floor. Shelves held duct-taped board games and 1960s editions of
Boys’ Life
. Many pristine Bibles. Around the octagonal space were arranged two floors of rooms, a high railing. The whole place was empty. The guard said everyone was at activity and Cecil would be sent for.

The fluorescents hummed. There were small windows in the concrete cupola and even those had chicken wire in them and only pale blue sky could be seen without, the sky itself perhaps a pane of paint.

A different guard escorted Cecil in, set him at the table, and stood by the door from the hall. Cecil’s head was freshly shaved and pink and stippled black, and he had a black eye with an areola the color of margarine.

“Christ, what happened, Cecil?”

“They give me an X-ray. It ain’t fractured they said.”

“You in a fight?”

Cecil smiled. Nodded back toward the guard.

“He did that?”

The guard could hear them.

“You did this?” Pete asked. “Did you hit him?”

The guard removed a stick of gum, threw the wrapper on the floor, and said to Cecil that he had three more minutes.

“Bullshit,” Pete said. “I’m his case worker.”

The guard blew a bubble.

Cecil leaned forward, spread his fingers over the concrete, appeared about to say something, but didn’t.

“This is fucked up,” Pete said. “I had no idea it was like this.”

“This is exactly what you said it was like,” Cecil said. “Remember? I was gonna turn into a ‘bad man’? Or did you forget the talk you gave me at my uncle’s?”

“I barely slugged you. I didn’t nearly fracture your face. I was only trying to get through to you—”

“He was only trying to get through to me too,” Cecil called over his shoulder.

“Tick tock,” the guard replied.

Cecil smiled, scratched his skull, picked at some scab, and then inspected the nail.

“Look, I came a while ago, but they said I couldn’t see you,” Pete said.

“I got in trouble.”

“For what?”

“I burned somebody.”

“Excuse me?”

“I saved my chocolate and I burned the shit out of him.”

“Why’d you burn this guy?”

Cecil stared dementedly at the table.

“There’s this microwave in the kitchen,” Cecil said. “And I was on dishes and I put my commissary chocolate in a cup and microwaved it. And when he come up to turn in his tray I threw the hot chocolate in his eyes, man.”

“Jesus.”

“Fucker’s face looks like a melted candle.”

“Jesus.”

“Get a chance, I’ll have to kill him.”

“No.”

“No?” Cecil grinned.

“Cecil, look. I’m gonna see about getting you out of here. This is—”