Fourth of July Creek (4 page)

S
OME OF THE OLDER
children said they’d seen the boy on the playground but no one talked to him as he edged his way along the fence to watch the kids on and around the jungle gym. He sat on one of the halved dump truck tires in the wood chips, bonging his enormous boots against the rubber. The kids who noticed the boy didn’t speak to him.

Some thirty minutes later Principal Pemberton found him on the second floor, outside Ms. Kelley’s art class. The nurse was with the child now. Pete and Pemberton regarded them from behind the glass of the door.

“He turned to run, I grabbed his arm, and he bit me.”

Pete looked at Pemberton. He showed Pete his hand.

“Didn’t break the skin.”

Pete looked through the window at the kid. He wore brown camouflage pants that were rolled at the cuffs to fit him and a darker brown sweater that hung on him holey as netting. Leaves and pine needles stuck to the wool and his knit cap. His eyes scanned the room, lighting on Pete behind the glass only long enough to look away and study the nurse or the room.

“I got him wrapped up, but just barely,” Pemberton said. “The kid’s strong for his size.”

He tapped on the glass and the nurse came out.

“He’s got bloody gums,” she said to Pemberton. “I think he has scurvy?”

“No one’s seen him before,” Pemberton told Pete.

“He reeks,” the nurse said.

The boy stood with his hands on his hips. He ran a sleeve under his nose. His movements were swiftly mannish, as though he were another species and full-grown for it, a pygmy or some other reduced people.

“Get a name off of him?”

“No. He wouldn’t tell me.”

“How’s he been?” Pete asked the nurse.

“Sweet as a little bell.”

“And no one has any idea where he’s from? None of the other kids know him . . . ?”

Pemberton shook his head.

The boy sat back on the exam table and unlaced his enormous boots, and after he pulled them from his feet, plucked out the rags balled into each to fill the space after his toes ended. He sniffed the second of these rags like it held some information, shook it out as he had the first one, and laid it to the side of him. He tugged off cheesecloth socks. His bare feet were sickening. A thin flap of soleskin hung from his foot and he pulled it off like a piece of wet sack paper. He smelled this too, held it up to the light, and tossed it onto the floor, where it set like a gray cold cut. The rest of his foot like an etiolated stem, a rotten tuber or root.

“My word,” the nurse said.

The boy looked up at their blanched faces and resumed the crude debridement of his feet.

Pete opened a notepad and wrote down the name of a pediatrician, tore off the paper, and handed it to Pemberton.

“This guy’s retired and a little deaf. Let it ring and he’ll eventually answer. Ask if he can come down.”

Pete opened the door and went in. The nurse was about to follow, but he asked her to let him see the boy alone. The boy glanced up, but kept picking at his feet. Pete took a chair across from him.

“Hi. I’m Pete.”

Pete leaned down and saw the gray sags under the child’s eyes on an otherwise clean pale face. There was a taupe grime of dirt and ash all over his clothes. He smelled like a burnt match and salted fatback. His chopped hair shot out in brown shocks.

“What’s your name?”

“Benjamin.”

“Mind if I ask how old you are?”

“Go on ahead.”

Pete grinned.

“How old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“Really? You don’t look more than eight or nine.”

The boy licked his fingers and seemed to be pressing loose skin in place.

“Where’re you from?”

The kid tossed his head.

“In town somewhere?”

The kid shook his head no.

“Where’s your mama and daddy?”

The kid began to roll down his long socks. Light could be seen through them.

“Your feet hurt?”

“Not bad.”

“You must’ve walked a long way for them to get like that.”

The boy pulled on the socks and then began to stuff the rags back into his boots. A vinegar odor wafted across to Pete.

“Listen, I’m from DFS. I can take you home.”

The kid pulled one of the great black boots onto his foot and began to lace it.

“Sorry. Department of Family Services. That’s what the letters mean. I’d like to see if you and your family need anything. Help with groceries or maybe some medicine or something.”

The kid tugged on the other boot and laced it.

“What do you think?” Pete asked.

The boy stood on his newly booted feet and rocked in place on them.

“I gotta shit,” he said.

The kid walked bowlegged and with his chest forward like he was breasting his way across a river, observing with badly concealed interest the panoply of animals and plants cut from construction paper and taped to the walls. He looked through an ajar door at a classroom taking a quiz and at the lockers and up into the staircase with the mute fascination of an ambassador. In the bathroom, the boy entered the doorless stall and regarded the sculpted porcelain a moment before locating the upright seat and pulling it down. He shat with Pete watching, shameless as a dog. When he washed his hands, he lathered promptly, and then rinsed with wary pleasure, turning his hands in the hot water and looking at Pete in the mirror as if he had to keep an eye on him, and not the other way around.

The child didn’t have hot running water. And he’d never set foot in a public school.

The boy wouldn’t let the doctor examine him, but the doctor said scurvy was certainly possible. Said to check his belly and legs for liver spots, if the boy’d ever let him. He told Pete to get him some vitamin C, asked after the boy’s stool, and when Pete described the quality of it, wrote a prescription for the giardia he’d probably gotten from drinking the mountain water.

There was no trace of the boy’s earlier violence against the principal. If anything, the child radiated studied calm. He spoke in the clipped cadence of a POW, announcing at one point that he’d renounced his citizenship. He stated plainly that he’d kill anyone who stuck him with a needle.

Pete took the boy with him into the pharmacy for the medicine and vitamin C. The kid suffered a few stares for his clothing, the lengths of tattered sweater hanging off of him like witch-hair moss. His ears turned red. Pete took him around the corner to Jessop’s Sporting Goods and by eye sized a winter coat, jeans, and a pullover because the boy wouldn’t try anything on. He bought him socks, a bag of undershirts, and a pair of boots. For good measure, he grabbed a first-aid kit with gauze, bandages, salves, and aspirin, and had the clerk fetch a bottle of iodine tablets.

He half-expected the child to run, but he followed Pete faithfully.

When they got to the Sunrise Cafe, Pete guided the boy into the bathroom and set the sacks of clothes on the counter. He pulled out the bag of T-shirts and opened it and tore the tags off the pants.

“Let’s get you in these new duds, huh?”

The boy swallowed, regarded the clothes like a person might a growling dog. With stillness and fear.

“Nuh-uh,” the kid said.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I need to go home.”

“And I’ll take you. But you could use some new clothes and something to eat. Then we’ll go right home.”

Pete picked up the shirt and started toward the boy. An outsized fear gripped the child and he backed into the wall and slid down against it and closed his arms around his head.

“Hey, hey it’s all right,” Pete said. “I’m not gonna hurt you. Here—”

But when Pete set the shirt on the tile before the kid, he clutched himself, pressed his face in his folded legs. Pete stepped back.

“Come on,” Pete said. “You’re wearing rags.”

The kid didn’t move. Five minutes like this. Ten. Flatware clapping together in the kitchen. Someone tried the door and Pete shouted that the bathroom was out of order.

The kid muttered into his legs.

“I can’t hear you when you talk into your lap like that.”

The kid looked up at him. “I can’t.”

“Sure you can. Then we’ll eat—”

“He won’t . . .”

“Who won’t? Your father? He won’t want me helping you and your family?”

The boy traced the lines of the grout in the tiles between his legs.

“Does he hurt you?”

“No.”

“Does he hurt you mother?”

No answer.

“Look, Benjamin. Let me tell you what I see. I see a kid who’s sick and small because he hasn’t been getting fed enough. And now you’re telling me that you can’t put on some new clothes. I’m starting to wonder if it’s
safe
for you to go home—”

“You’re not gonna take me home?!” the kid screamed. “You can’t keep me! You have no right!”

“Whoa!” Pete shouted. “Just calm down. I’ll take you home. But I want you to—”

Pete was going to tell the child to just take the clothes home with him, but the boy tore off his sweater and began unbuckling his belt.

They lived in the woods some ways north of Tenmile in the rolling and dense forests of the Purcell Range. The boy didn’t know the way to town by any of the county roads or which logging road he crossed coming down from their camp. He emerged from the forest behind the IGA grocery. Beyond that was an uninterrupted series of ascending ridges bisected by an old railroad track that was no longer in use. The kid said he went along the backbone of the ridges until he descended to and crossed a creek and then finally up a logging road. Determining what logging road was the problem. Pete had an idea from his map in the glove box, but it was old, and the new roads were not on it.

Of course, the kid had no idea how you drove there, didn’t know if it was a Forest Service road or a Champion Timber Company road or what. It was coming on evening and they had been all over looking for any markers the boy might recognize. Outcroppings of rock. But there were only trees, miles and miles of green larch.

“Maybe this one,” the boy said, pointing to another turnoff marked with two yellow reflectors a mile or so from where Separation Creek joined the Yaak River. The child had eaten lunch, drunk a large glass of orange juice, and even smiled at some of Pete’s jokes.

They went up a disintegrating road, grown over with timothy and cheatgrass. The potholes were disguised by banks of unmelted snow at the higher elevation.

“This road’s gonna swallow my car.”

There was a closed gate ahead.

“That’s the gate there,” the boy said. “It’s got that dent in it.”

Pete stopped the car and turned it off. The engine ticked under the hood. The larches and pines sighed.

“How far?” Pete asked.

“A ways.”

“A couple miles, what?”

The boy didn’t know. Pete told him to wait in the car and got out and began to inspect the area around the gate. There would be a key somewhere around here. There always was—biologists and surveyors for the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and Champion Timber were always coming and going. He looked in the crooks of trees at about eye level and under stones that were about the right size. He heard the kid get out of the car.

“Just wait,” Pete said. “I’ll have this gate open in a minute.”

Pete spotted a flat rock that sat conspicuously atop another one the size of a dinner plate. Bingo. He turned the top rock over. Nothing. He looked under the plate stone. Nothing.

“The key’s gone,” the kid said.

Pete stood.

“Papa throwed it in them bushes over there, but good luck finding it.”

Pete looked up the ragged road. He couldn’t even see the first switchback. He looked up for the sun, which had already ducked into the trees.

“How far are you up this road?”

“I dunno. A ways.”

“A ways,” Pete said. He ducked under the gate and told the kid to come on.

The sky and the snow they walked over turned everything the sleepy blue of evening and the gelid air burned cold into their lungs. Pete’s lungs at any rate. You’re in terrible shape, he thought. The boy trudged just ahead of him and by the second switchback could have bolted and Pete wouldn’t have pursued him. But instead, the kid stopped against a stump where the road was half washed out and a steady trickle of water ran down a gut carved into the dirt.

Pete gripped his knees gratefully. Walking he’d pondered what he would say to the boy’s parents. He’d tell them that he brought Benjamin back just as fast as he could, that nobody wanted to mess with them or their boy. He was working on what he’d say about the clothes, the prescription, and the vitamin C. But as he played out the scene his positivity set with the sun, and his decision to take the kid up here seemed more absurd. Then fully stupid. Pete had been motivated by a certainty that keeping the kid overnight was not an option. He had no place to put him. Cecil was at the Cloningers’, and he couldn’t ask them. There was nowhere else.

But Pete still felt a surging anxiety as he sat there, then a dread realization of the possibilities, in particular the chance that the boy’s father would put a bullet in him. Violence became in his mind an ever-likelier outcome. There was the shelter in Kalispell. Pete could’ve run the kid down there. At least called around.

The boy watched him, and for a moment it seemed he’d been reading Pete’s thoughts.

“What’s your last name?” Pete asked.

“Pearl.”

Pete had caught his breath but wasn’t ready to start hiking again. He didn’t even want to know how much farther. His legs knocked. He squatted.

“Benjamin Pearl. That’s nice.”

“Mama said our name reminds us of how rare we are.”

“What’s her name?”

“Sarah. Before that, it was Veronica.”

“Before what?”

“I dunno. Just before.”

“And your daddy?”

“Jeremiah Pearl.”

“You got any brothers and sisters?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Five.”

“Five? Wow. That’s a lot. Are you the oldest?”

“Nah.”

“What are their names?”

“Esther, Jacob, Ruth, Paula, and little Ethan. I come before Paula and after Ruth.”

“I see. Are they up here with your parents?”