Fourth of July Creek (49 page)

Wes pointed the pistol at Pete again, his wide eyes glassy with shock or pain or perhaps something only known to the nearly dead. Then the man’s head yanked backward as if on a string. A red cataract flipped out behind his ear. He toppled down.

Pete spun around. To yell at Pearl to stop. But there was only the boy in the upstairs window, a ghost of smoke there. Pete looked at Wes helplessly. Through the open front door he heard Ben bound down the stairs. He paused at the doorway to look out at what he’d done, and his father yanked him down the hall, toward the back. Another moment and they were headlong to an old broken fence. Pearl ran and the boy chased after.

Hearing himself shouting at them.

Feeling himself neither going after them nor staying put, just moving about within his senseless, ceaseless invective.

Hearing himself asking them what did they do, what did they do. Why. Why didn’t they let him take care of it. He would have taken care of it.

Benjamin stopped at Pete’s garbled screaming and turned around. Pearl had made the fence and seeing that his son had lagged, ran back and plucked Ben by the ear and led the crying child in front of him and fairly barked at him until the boy began to run.

All was quiet save the gentle aspiration of the man on the ground. Pete went to where he lay faceup, his eyes partly shut like someone squinting at a menu. His plaid shirtfront black with a saucerful of blood. He called to the Wes within the body, and inspected him to see what could be done. A good portion of the man’s skull and brains were gone. Yet he breathed. Wet, thin breaths that spoke to the suddenness and inappropriateness of his death stealing over him.

Pete felt a cold churning in his bowels and his testes, and he moved some feet away. He guessed there was no remedy, and then thought maybe he should gather the pieces of bone and brains, but he knew he was just torturing himself.

He steeled himself to sit next to this person he’d known as a boy, went to him. He took his hand and told him it was all right to go on and that he was sorry and asked him why he had been such a stupid son of a bitch, was it worth it, of course it wasn’t.

This was September. Autumn was gathering itself up and the feeling all around was of happy things departing.

Sometime later it occurred to Pete that Wes could perhaps be dying for days. He thought of President Lincoln, breathing unbidden a whole night, and much older than Wes when he’d been shot. He thought about Benjamin becoming a murderer. A boy that age.

When it had gotten dark, the man choked but would not die. Suffocating but not yet dead. It was unbearable to hear, and finally Pete palmed the dying man’s nose and mouth, thinking, I’ll bear some of this, some of this is my fault, maybe the better part of it. But when the man’s breathing ceased, nothing stirred in the woods, and Pete was even more profoundly alone. That was unbearable too. But there was nothing to do about it.

H
e left the man’s body in the night. He worried someone would see the judge’s car at the trailhead. In the dark he trod the old Deerwater road where wagons would haul ice, ice cream, lamp oil, and prostitutes. He mused idly on whether Wes was the last murder in this town or were there a few more unlikely deaths yet making their way here.

A pale fingertip moon eased up over the tree line. A spotlight. A night for bandits.

In the morning, he waited for Neil to open the Ten High. Neil sipped coffee watching Pete drink beers.

“You want anything to eat?”

“No thanks.”

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“That question’s bigger than I can properly answer right now.”

Neil watched Pete’s hands run along the bar like he was admiring the tail fin of an old Chevy.

“Mind I put the TV on?”

“No.”

“Will you stop that?”

Pete put his hands around his beer. Neil shook his head and turned on the television with a pool cue cut down for the purpose and watched the morning news with one foot high on the cooler and the other on the duckboards. From time to time he glanced at Pete.

The judge waddled in shy of noon, waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, and then went straight for Pete.

“The police are looking for you.”

“That was quick.”

“What happened?” the judge asked. “Fuck off, Neil.”

Neil shot the judge a wounded look and then went out from behind the bar, got a broom from the closet, and went out front to sweep.

“They came to my house, Pete. Everybody knows that car is mine.”

“Who found him?”

“Couple kids cutting class.” He waited for Pete to say something. “What the hell happened?”

“He’s the one burned down my house.”

“Jesus Christ. Where’d Neil go? I want a drink.”

The judge went behind the bar, poured himself a rye and then another one.

“You got cause now. Heat-of-the-moment kind of deal. A jury would—”

“I didn’t kill him. I was there, but I didn’t kill him.”

“Luke?”

“No.”

“Who then?”

Pete leaned over the bar and filled his beer from the tap, sipped off the foam.

“I need you to find someone for me.”

Pete had a few more big swallows of beer. Burped. The judge took it from his hand and set it aside.

“The cops are going to talk to you any minute. Don’t say shit. I already called Jim Uhlen. You’ll probably want to get somebody better, this goes to trial. But he’s already on his way from Kalispell.”

Pete grinned somberly.

“You’re welcome, Pete.”

“I don’t need a lawyer.”

“Yeah. You fuckin do.”

“There’s this ATF agent I need you to find for me. Name of Pinkerton. He’s the one I need to see.”

Trucks and vans full of armed federal agents, marshals, and officers commandeered Pearl’s house and set a pair of snipers on the cliff. They ran dogs. The once-impregnable mountain meadow was taken without a shot fired in defense of it.

Pete rode in a helicopter, pointing out as best he could the places where they’d camped, but the Yaak was virtually impenetrable from the air. He showed Pinkerton where he’d cached food and clothes for the Pearls, and tried to discern on their topo maps all the places he’d been with them. He’d covered a lot of ground with them, and Pete was sure he hadn’t seen the half of it. They traipsed the Purcells, Whitefish, Salish, and Cabinet mountain ranges. They slipped into Glacier Park, maybe Canada. When he’d first met them, they’d been having a rough go of it, and the wilderness was winning, but with a little help from Pete they’d gotten healthier. He assured the feds that they had provisions, first aid, medicines, plenty of bullets, and in the thick forests and untracked roadless areas of the Yaak in particular, they were virtually invisible.

Nights he sat on the porch of the house, half-wishing Pearl would shoot him from somewhere in the trees. Agents inside smoking, talking about their kids, about professional football, the Soviet Union. Worlds and worlds away from here.

He felt an odd but true yearning to apologize to someone. For what was happening. What all he’d done wrong.

His life.

The wardens from Fish, Wildlife, and Parks had jurisdiction but handed it over to the FBI and ATF. The Tenmile police interviewed Pete, but mostly, it seemed, to satisfy a morbid curiosity. Even a brief meeting with his lawyer only amounted to Pete again sharing his story and the man sharing his business card. As far as everyone was concerned, Wes had followed Pete up to Deerwater and touched off a confrontation with a mountain lunatic who’d begun to trust Pete and reacted violently to the appearance of an armed agent of the state. And except for the fact that it was the boy who’d fired the shots, all of what Pete said was true.

But the Department of Corrections was still institutionally convinced that Pete was hiding his brother, and one windy day the judge and a man from Corrections sat down at Pete’s table in the Sunrise Cafe. The winter cold had come early and fierce—no snow, just an unceasing front of arctic air—and when the judge opened the cafe door people jumped at the cold as though he’d laid on a car horn. A family decamped with their French dips and grilled cheeses for warmer reaches near the kitchen.

The man from Corrections introduced himself, but Pete was far gone within his thoughts and immediately lost the man’s name. He said that although it was generally believed that Pete was telling the truth about who had killed their colleague, it was hard to ignore Officer Reynolds’s own documented opinions on the matter of Luke Snow’s whereabouts.

“I won’t speak ill of the dead,” Pete said.

“I’m not asking you to. But you should tell me where your brother is. Wes was certain that you know.”

Pete had Luke’s address in his wallet when he said he hadn’t the slightest idea where his brother was. The man from Corrections put his cowboy hat back on, slid out of the booth, and walked out the door. The judge remained, didn’t even bid the man good-bye, and quietly stirred his coffee.

“You hell-bent on going to jail too?”

Pete looked through the fractals of frost on the big front window and out on the deserted square.

“Everyone goes to all this trouble to find a degenerate like Luke or track down some madman in the woods,” Pete said, “but no one can tell me where Rachel is.”

The judge took in his haggard face, but couldn’t look Pete long in the eye.

“Right now, where the hell is she?”

There was nothing to say. The waitress came and the judge ordered. When his food arrived the judge split a dinner roll with his red fingers and spread butter into the steaming innards and shoved half the thing into his mouth, chewing with his eyes closed. He drank from his coffee, and Pete sat with him, and then they went to the Ten High for drinks, and Pete listened to him tell broad lies. Late afternoon the judge went back across the street to practice jurisprudence.

September gave over to October. Still no snow. Pinkerton came calling on him, knocking on Pete’s office door. He stood in the doorway holding his cap and wore an unhappy expression like he’d come to evict someone.

“You got a little bit to take a ride?” Pinkerton asked.

Pete asked him what happened. He asked had they found Pearl, the boy. Pinkerton ran a finger along the brim of his hat.

“You’re just gonna need to see.”

They drove through Tenmile in silence, then out of town. They turned on the road to Fourth of July Creek. As they passed Cloninger’s place, Pete watched for him and for Katie but they were not anywhere abroad the property nor together astride one of Cloninger’s horses, which of late Pete had seen them doing. Sometimes clopping through town. He hoped she was well. He knew she was. That was something good.

They rounded a corner and nearly struck a pickup barreling down the dirt road.

“Fuck you,” Pinkerton said, pumping closed his window as they sped into the truck’s cloud of road dust. “You people drive like shit up here.”

He was about to blow past the Pearls’ and Pete said so. He skidded to slow down and make the turn.

“Thanks.”

“It’s easy to miss.”

They went back and forth up the rucked drive and then cut through a swath of sawn saplings and truck-trampled ninebark. They pulled up through the uneven meadow, which was now filled with unmarked cars and a few trailers with federal acronyms.

“I said for you to leave the Pearls alone,” Pete said, taking it all in. “If I’d listened to my own advice, none of this would be happening.”

“You didn’t cause any of this.”

“A social worker darkens your door, you hightail it out the back.”

Pinkerton didn’t smile, didn’t wander his eyes from what was ahead on the road.

An ATF agent assembled an Uzi submachine gun. Others spoke on walkie-talkies. Pinkerton escorted Pete up behind the house and the chicken coop. A cold dry wind bore out of the north and through the trees with a wrathful noise, and tarps held to the ground by stones puffed up where the wind shucked under them so they rose into blue pontoons and deflated and rose again like some kind of industrial bladders. The rock pile behind the chicken coop had been removed from the front of what was now revealed to be a cellar dug out of the mountainside just to the left of the cliff. Lights flared in the cellar—flashbulbs, Pete realized—and a moment later a man backed out with a gurney, and he and the man on the other end of the gurney set it down on the ground next to the tarps.

Pete didn’t understand what he beheld.

The agent with the camera exited the cellar, bent, and then knelt taking pictures. Pinkerton had gone over to the tarps, but Pete found that he could not. Pete saw the sole of a child’s nylon sock, and even from several yards away that it was darned and pushed down around the ankle bone and he had the tremendous urge that someone—not him but someone—lift it up. He couldn’t go over until someone pulled it up. Instead, the men covered the gurney with another tarp.

Pinkerton realized then that Pete had not come with him, that he was sitting on the hillside overlooking the meadow and all the police vehicles and the federal police, and went over to him.

“I knew they were dead. Ben said the baby wouldn’t wake up and the others were acting funny, like cartoons, he said—”

“They were executed, Pete.”

Pete turned around.

“That’s not true. Jeremiah wouldn’t have—”

“Every one of them.” Pinkerton gestured toward the tarps. “Go see for yourself. Shot in the temple.”

“Fuck they were. They were
sick
.”

“Sick with what?”

“I don’t know. They were just sick. And I’m sure they . . . they were afraid to come to town to the doctor. Because of the arrest. They—”

Pinkerton grabbed Pete’s arm.

“Come on. Come see. With your own eyes.”

Pete yanked his arm free but went with Pinkerton to look. At impossibly small wrist bones and metal zippers and plastic barrettes. Everything of cotton was gone to decomposition, but the cotton-polyester pajama top, the nylon yarn socks, the buttons all remained.

They were so exquisitely little.

“I didn’t bring you here because I’m morbid, Pete. I wanted you to see who you were dealing with all this time. A man who killed his own wife and children.”