Fourth of July Creek (5 page)

The boy stood and tugged a sapling from the side of the hill and beat the dirt out of its roots. Pete looked around. He’d scarcely noticed that they’d walked into an area that had been replanted in the summer. Waist-high green pines grew up and down the hillside. The Pearls had chosen a good place to be away from society. The traffic up here—from the timber company at least—would be minimal for some years.

“Why’d you go into the school today, Benjamin?”

“I dunno.”

“Just sort of wandered onto the playground?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what were you doing in town?”

“Getting some things.”

“What things?”

“Food and things.”

“You have a house or some friends in town or something?”

“No.”

“Dumpsters?”

The boy pulled another sapling out of the ground.

“They throw a lot of perfectly good stuff away behind the grocery stores, don’t they?”

The kid shrugged and beat the dirt out of the sapling and tossed it over his shoulder. He pulled on another. It was almost as tall as he was.

“I don’t think Champion Timber’d be crazy about you doing that.” The boy had no idea what Pete was talking about. Pete said they should get going.

“He’s coming.”

“Your father? Where? Here?”

“He’s been watching the whole way.”

Pete turned in a full circle, looking in the short trees for some sign. Again, it was well thought out. There was cover in the saplings, but they were short enough to provide ample sight lines from any of the surrounding ridges and peaks. The revelation of his own exposure annoyed Pete.

“Let’s go meet him then. It’s getting dark.”

The kid started up the draw from where the water washed out the road. They climbed up over stumps and rocks and the water ran under kernel-corn snow that was a year old and knee-deep in this hillside cavity. They achieved the rim and walked it, slipping on icy hidden roots. They rested and went on in the falling dark at last arriving on the ridge. There was starlight to the east. A dark vista of trees and still more trees.

Pete massaged his side. An ache there. He was cold and short of breath in the lashing wind, and his eyeballs floated in little pools.

“So,” he panted. “Where the hell. Is he?”

A deafening crack drowned out the boy’s answer. A flash, a light in his eyes. Pete crouched in a beam of light and the gunshot was echoing back off the mountains. The light remained in his eyes like bear spray, and finally the shot died out and still he hunched and covered his eyes against the light. He looked over and the boy stirred on the ground. He thought the child had been shot.

“Get up,” a man said from behind the light.

Pete splayed his fingers in front of his face as if to filter out some of the glare, but it fired into his eyes all the same, and many-colored coronas burned in his vision when he looked away.

The boy started to walk toward the light, and Pete was trying to decide if he should reach for him, hold him back—
of course not, you’ll be shot
—when the man spoke: “Stay right there.”

“Papa, I—”

“Stay right there!”

The voice boomed of its own signal magnitude, a thunder.

“Mr. Pearl? I’m from the Department of Family Services.” His voice sounded high and fearful in his own ears. He carried on and hoped that his timbre would improve: “I’m not law enforcement or anything like that. May I show you my badge?”

The light offered no response.

“I just come across Benjamin in town and he said you all were living up here and so I brought him back.”

The light swept over to the boy.

“Take off those clothes,” the man ordered. Benjamin immediately complied and the light swung back into Pete’s eyes.

“Wait,” Pete said. “It’s gotta be thirty, forty degrees out. There’s nothing wrong with the clothes. They’re
new
. Look, you’re not on the hook for them. They’re gratis. Free.”

“I know what
gratis
means.”

“Of course. I just meant that it’s my job. I have a budget for this sort of thing.”

The boy had dropped the coat and the shirt into a pile in front of him and was undoing the pants. An insistent logorrhea poured out of Pete as the kid pulled off a brilliant white T-shirt.

“Look, if it’s a matter of you wanting to not take a handout, that’s fine. I can certainly arrange to, you know, accept payment for the clothes. I, I didn’t mean to offend you or overstep my bounds. Benjamin didn’t ask for the clothes. I
insisted
that he take them.”

The boy unlaced and kicked off his new boots and tugged off the new socks and then pulled down his pants and stepped out of them onto his wounded bare feet.

“Mr. Pearl. Please. He’s just a boy out here in the cold. I wouldn’t have—”

The light swung over to the boy and then back into Pete’s face and stopped him short. The boy stepped gingerly in place on the pine needles, wincing.

“Please, sir.
Mr. Pearl.
Your son’s got giardia poisoning from drinking out of the streams up here. I figure you and your family might have it too. I have some medicine here in my jacket. Enough for all of you and I can bring some more. In fact, I was hoping that you might let me bring up some oranges. He’s got bleeding gums and we think . . .”

He trailed off. Benjamin was naked. All knobs and knots, white and gaunt, and he put Pete in mind of creatures that lived in caves, albino spiders and eyeless fishes and newts. A white boy with purple and brown bruises and dirt and pink scar tissue and all those jaundiced whorls, all of the colors so faint in the whelming whiteness of him. He was nacreous, mother-of-pearl, this son of Pearl. And about his thighs and stomach a leopard dappling of liver spots, his penis scotched in his new pubes like a gray node. You thought not of flesh at the sight of his body, but minerals. It was a small astonishment that he was mobile, that this pearlescent boy clutched himself with bony arms.

“This isn’t necessary,” Pete said. “There’s no reason he needs to suffer.”

“You go,” the light, the elder Pearl, said. “You come back, you can expect a fatal wrath. You tell the same thing to the feds.”

“The feds? Nobody’s coming. Nothing like that is going on here.”

“You’ve come, haven’t you?”

The fact that the man spoke settled Pete’s nerves some. He could interact. Pete could do his job.

“I’m just returning your boy. I’m not bringing any trouble. All my job here is to help.”

“You come clothed in weakness, but I know what stands behind you. You insinuate yourself among good people and you rot them from the inside with your diseases and mental illnesses.”

Crazy talk. What to say? You don’t push him. You don’t test him.

“You need to put these clothes back on this boy,” Pete said plainly, astonished at the brazenness of it. Despite the rifle, the light, his fear. “If I thought you were going to make him strip naked in weather like this, I wouldn’t have brought him back at all. And if you think I’m just going to allow this boy to
freeze
—”

The beam shot into the trees and Pete followed it as it skittered to rest and lanced the black canyon, realizing too late that the man had simply dropped the light and was coming at him. Before Pete could recover his vision, Jeremiah Pearl was on him, had him by the jacket and was lifting him with one arm and pitching him backward to the ground. Pete lay there stunned. His vision a waterfall of sparks. His head rang. Those black angry eyes, even now striking fear into him. Pete threw up his arm helplessly and scuttled backward into a tree.

He now made out Pearl squatting right over him with his rifle in one hand. The man’s breath, body, and beard stunk like a smudge pot.

“I’ll put one in that boy’s brain before I let you have him. That is a
solemn
fuckin promise.”

He leaned forward. Pete flinched. The man spat on him. Then he whipped around and heaved his naked son up onto his hip and jogged into the brush.

Pete could still hear them moving across the mountainside and the boy sobbing, and Pearl saying something to him, not harshly, something firm and measured. Pete’s impression of it was that they were very scared, as if they’d had the same nightmare and he was assuring the boy that they were awake now, that everything was okay.

He listened until they were gone. Then he gathered the clothes, folded them, put a business card in the pocket of the pants, and set them under a cleft in a rock where they would be dry and could still be seen. He walked carefully down through the dark woods to the road and to his car.

Another day at the office.

P
ete drove west into Tenmile out of the absolute black behind him where there were no lights or residences in the Yaak Wilderness, where only a black horizon rose up unevenly to the constellations that pulsed from their cupola over the lightly spangled valley bowl below. Tenmile’s scarce illumination—neon bar signage, a few porch lights, the four streetlights flashing yellow—could not dim the stars in this plain and blank night country.

And though Pete was from another small town, or rather, a ranch outside of one, he liked it in Tenmile.

That is, he liked particular places in Tenmile.

He liked the Sunrise Cafe for its coffee and smoky ambience and the way his arms stuck to the cool plastic tablecloths in the summer and how the windows steamed, beaded, and ran with tears when everyone got out of church and came in for breakfast on a cold morning. He liked how Tenmile smelled of burnt leaves for most of October. He liked the bench in front of the tobacco shop on the square and how you could still send a child to buy you a pouch of Drum from inside with no problem from the proprietor. He liked the bowling alley that was sometimes, according to a private schedule kept only by them, absolutely packed with kids from the high school and the surrounding hills who got smashed on bottles of vodka or rotgut stashed under their seats and within their coats. How much a girl was always a girl and would turn bonkers when the correct boy took her coat, how she would bend over at the waist like she could not move her feet, as if she were rooted to the spot, desperate for him to come back and take something else so she could squeal again. How much that was like a pheasant flopping on the ground as it tried to lure you away from her hatchlings. How much biology throbbed and churned here—the mist coming off the swales on the east side of town and a moose or an elk emerging as though through smoke or like the creature was itself smoking. How the water looked and how it tasted right out of the tap, hard and ideal, like ice-cold stones and melted snow. How trout looked in that water, brown and wavering and glinting all the colors there were and maybe some that didn’t really exist on the color wheel, a color, say, that was moss and brown-spotted like peppercorns and a single terra-cotta-colored stone and a flash of sunlight all at once. That color existed in the water here.

There were also people here with secrets. A thief. A homosexual. People who mistreated their children, and whose houses stood out in Pete’s mental map of the town like amber beacons because he knew. Their secrets he kept.

The judge—a fat man named Dyson who recalled President Taft with his gray mustache, vest, coat, and pocket watch—knew Pete’s family back from Broadus (before Pete was born) and then Choteau where they now lived, and he introduced Pete to the town’s luminaries, the business owners, and the local color when Pete took the open position in the western half of Service District One. Pete met them all, the president of the Cattlemen’s Association, the union rep for Local 292, and a series of thin cowpoke noblemen who all shook his hand and said howdy when they saw him at the little Safeway or at the Sunrise. It might be years before they really felt they knew him, before they talked familiarly with him.

But the bars. In the bars was another class of people, fast friends who came in for a dollar burger and a fifty-cent beer and free peanuts for lunch, and sometimes blew off the rest of the day and just got wrecked. There was Ike who had a glass eye that would often as not be in somebody’s beer glass. Jerome and Betsy who fought, made up, fought, and let Pete crash on their couch if he wound up there for a nightcap. Demented Harold who always needed a ride home. The other Harold, a Blackfoot Indian they sometimes called “Indian Harold” who was always good for a round, no one knew where he got his money.

You went to the Fizz if you wanted to see Ike and his glass eye, and laze about at the low tables and plush chairs on rollers. You went to Freddie’s for burgers and beer, the long black griddle shimmering behind the bartender, and the War Bonnet for fishbowls of an unholy red concoction that was ice, liquor, and lurid grenadine. The Nickel was only just wider than a restroom stall and the bar ran the length of the place, and you peed out back into a cement trough that the gutter ran into. You drank elbow to elbow, and when a fight broke out, you couldn’t see it because of the narrowness of the chute you were in, and people climbed on the bar to get a look and the ceiling fan knocked off your hat. And at the Ten High time stopped and at some point you toppled over, and when you stood your back glinted with pull tabs and peanut shells and people sometimes cut their hands wiping you off. And, like tonight, it was dark when you were done with your work, and to get there you drove by the dimmed hardware store—the bags of lawn seed under the awning next to the lawn mowers padlocked to one another—the Dairy Queen, the firehouse, and onto the square proper, past the Ten High, then right on Main and into the dark alley behind it.

Tin gutters rattled in the wind and voices rebounded from the alleymouth, their figures already past when Pete looked up. He pulled on the back door of the bar and entered. In the hall, wainscoted with laminate tile, starkly lit by a bare bulb he flashed on a memory of himself from when he first moved to Tenmile, passing in and out of awareness, holding a Blackfoot woman fast by the waist, his head buried in her pure black hair. Where they ended up, what became of her, he couldn’t recall.

He pushed through the swinging doors to the bar proper. Old men chatted at a back table, a few more shot pool. A pair of the decrepit in their fine suits of polyester, brown and powder blue with matching vests and white piping, sat by watching from sunken eyes, sipping red beers on a row of stools along the wall. They leaned in to listen to what was said, pulling the toothpicks from their mouths as if that might help them hear.