Fourth of July Creek (53 page)

An inexplicable gratitude swells. The floor pulls away from your crossed legs, but it’s just a light-headedness. Of late you’ve been through so much. More than can be borne. You’d seen a man die. You’d learned your daughter was a prostitute. And as the weak sunlight went darker yet in advance of another rainstorm, you find yourself in the midst of a strange peace that seems to emanate from the middle of your chest, a warm spot that reminds you, to your mild amusement, of peeing in a pool or wetting the bed or wetting the diaper and finally, of course, of being in your mother’s womb. Even the thought of your mother and father buried in the ground doesn’t trouble the serenity that now strobes in the atmosphere around you.

You see your daughter now in toto, from a vantage not even fatherhood has given you, a new place. You don’t know her trajectory, weren’t meant to know it, because of her or by circumstance. You simply wish her well. A voice in you is saying to keep her safe, warm, to light her way, for her to know little fear and to have bravery and joy.

After a while it occurs to you that this is a prayer.

How did she set up Pomeroy?

She watched for the van and when it came around again, she ran up, startled the driver into rolling down his window, and told him that she would call them at the pay phone on Second and Pike. When she did, it’d be to tell them where Pomeroy was.

Why did she run from her father?

She was surprised ashamed couldn’t go back wanted to die rather than have him see her like this wanted to go south, she had it all set up.

Set up with who?

. . .

Did she leave Seattle right away?

She went to see Pomeroy first.

Would Seattle General let her?

No, so she waited until the nurse changed shifts, stole a large duffel from one of the rooms, and told the new nurse her name was Rose Pomeroy, that she just rode in from Spokane to see her brother.

Pomeroy had two arms in casts and one leg was elevated, and bandages covered the top of his head. He looked like a purple infant, his face was so swollen up. She pulled a stool over and sat down. He didn’t move when she spoke to him. She put herself up to his ear and said that he shouldn’t have treated her that way. He shouldn’t have made her fear for her life.

Did she hurt him?

She found a place on his arm where the bandages ended just above his elbow and wanted to bite into his flesh, she wanted to gnaw until she tasted blood.

Instead?

She kissed his wrist. A small shudder passed over him.

Did it feel good to still have her kindness?

It did. Very much so.

And Brenda, what became of her?

The girl Pomeroy brought up from Sacramento? The reason they’d nearly killed him?

Yes.

The Sound. They pulled her from the Sound.

D
inner with Spoils and Shane and Yance and sundry women from Butte, from Wyoming, from the university. An artist who smokes and speaks at length of an encounter with Bob Dylan at last pins Pete to the wall and in the small hours fucks him on the stairs. She goes upstairs to douche, his head sloshing from his spent efforts. He tumbles outside, falls, and somehow makes his feet, the sidewalk, his way, almost by feel through the snowy blue and gray tableau, across the Clark Fork River on the Higgins Street Bridge. The Wilma looms up on the north shore of the river like a hewn obelisk. He hollers for Mary, once, twice.

He is shook.

He is in another room.

He is peeing in a closet.

He is peeing on someone’s bed.

He is peeing into a bottle in a car, missing, pissing on the floor.

He is among many angry strangers.

He is walking on the roadside under a transom of falling stars, the sky streaked in a kind of agony, white grooves, his eyes can’t brake their casters.

There are stories of hens laying fewer eggs. Things out of place up at lakeside cabins. Unexplained spikes in electric usage. Break-ins where the thieves only make off with boots, ammo, and maps. Near a residence up Question Creek a dog keeps finding pelts, a beaver, a coyote, many rabbits. This same dog is discovered dead near a bowl of sweet lime green antifreeze. A snowshoer comes across a few wet quilts and sleeping bags hung up to dry, stiff and frozen in the cold. A hunter comes across an ember and turns over a hastily buried campfire with his boot. He swears later he felt crosshairs on him. He walks backward twenty feet, turns, and runs back to his car.

All of these are attributed to Pearl. The assumption is that he’s close to Tenmile, slipping into town as needed. Dogs and horsemen from the Department of Corrections are brought in. They find a shelter a couple miles from the highway made of planks and plastic, and they surveil it, but only arrest a pair of poachers who camp there.

After they hand down an indictment for the murder of Wes Reynolds, they begin to buzz the woods where they think Pearl’s hiding with helicopters and C-130s. The people who live in the cabins complain.

Demented Harold goes down to Kalispell with an idea etched on a napkin and comes back with fifty T-shirts that say
JEREMIAH PEARL: HIDE AND SEEK CHAMPION 1981.
The ATF guys buy out his stock and he comes back with fifty more and another fifty that have a quarter with a hole in it and read
RUN, JERRY, RUN!

A throng gathers up at Fourth of July Creek and then a permanent camp of neo-Nazis and Christian Identity and various bands of separatists and sympathizers. There are new protocols for going up that road. There are complaints in the local paper about the federal occupation. Some graffiti. Some leafletting. Some media from the smaller stations in Idaho and eastern Washington. A combative Jewish reporter from New York appears and promptly disappears after a brick goes through his car window. The motels and cabin rentals do brisk business and the Sunrise hires a fourth waitress. Helicopters continue to hazard the crisp night air.

Snow falls in white floc like the ashy precipitate of a yonder fire, in discrete spirals and helixes on a haphazardry of vehicles, squad cars, and motorcycles on the way to Fourth of July Creek. A man wearing a turtleneck, pince-nez, and a sidearm like some kind of Nazi intellectual runs a Confederate flag up the flagpole on his motor home. A cameraman from a Spokane television station films him from just across the way atop his own news van. And a cordon of police stand down a mostly shouting rabble of unemployed loggers and handymen, denimed teenagers with domes shaved and naked in the vailing snow. They holler. Angry women quote scripture and legal precedent and jeer the cops, calling them pigs and jackbooted Nazis with no irony whatever.

Some one hundred of them, now closing the gap toward the line of police. The cops retreat uphill toward an area cleared of trees, a muddy, rooty, churned-up scar of soft Yaak earth. Behind them, several vans and motor homes constitute the federal occupation of Fourth of July Creek, the source of all this outrage.

Shattered chants and ceaseless invective morph into a nearly simian cacophony of hoots and throaty shrieks as a white cloud of gas composes and insinuates itself into the small crowd that yet churns forward from the rear and backward from the front as the agitators break into two scattering bodies, fanning and choking and wild-eyed, coursing up and down the road. In the close quarters the cops swing batons at the remainder of the mob recalling, strangely, a swath of Hutterites scything a field of grain. A man bursts from the crowd covering his eye, blood running from his ear, and caroms into the parked cars and falls over like a windup figure. The batons keep on until there remain only pockets of conflict. A woman flashes by with a baby pressed to her chest. A cop appears, swings his baton between a biker’s shoulder blades, and sends him to earth with a sad thud. Another cop sweeps down to help beat him.

The cameraman, from atop his van, captures it all.

There is a thwarted bombing in Libby—a patrolman stops a Truppe Schweigen member with a box of pipe bombs on his pickup bench seat—and then an unthwarted bombing at the federal courthouse in Spokane.

There are death threats, and every so often Pete must evacuate his office and stand outside in the cold with Judge Dyson muttering and complaining as the meager Tenmile police sweep the building. It gets to be silly.

One morning a madman tosses a stick of dynamite into the post office. The windows blow out and a postman is killed, and another man stumbles outside burned and bleeding and naked save the tops of his overalls that hang on him like a denim bib. He staggers across the street holding his insides inside. He makes the courthouse lawn just in time for Pete to exit his office and see what’s the matter. Then he pitches over, smoking, dying from his injuries on a thin crust of rime and old snow.

People appear from all over, go to the man. A woman runs to her car and comes back with a quilt, and a doctor arrives, addresses the man’s injuries for a time, and then covers his head with the blanket. The shock is palpable. Weeping. The brick post office is still somewhat afire but only somewhat, as a volunteer fireman puts out most of it with the Sunrise Cafe’s kitchen fire extinguisher. A squad car races up the street, presumably hard after the terrorist. The mayor and the judge consult with the chief of police not twenty feet from the dead man. Clerks and secretaries hold closed their coats, waiting to be told what to do.

Pete crosses the street to the Sunrise. Old boys stand outside smoking, darkly delighted that something so outrageous has occurred. Even they are doing their part, comparing it to the bank robbery of 1905, contextualizing this event in the history of the place, making the first stabs at rendering it for all time.

Pete sits in a booth by the window. His finger idles around the tabletop a nickel with a swastika in it when the waitress at last comes over with a water, a place setting, and a menu. She observes the paramedics loading the dead man’s body into an ambulance.

“I heard he’s dead.”

“I believe that’s right.”

“I could just spit.”

“I bet you could do better’n that.”

She has had a hard life—you can tell from the way her face has aged, the frowns etched there—but Pete’s remark elicits an endangered smile. He’s recognized her, something deeply true about her, and it is a pleasant thing to be seen and for her toughness to be acknowledged.

“Yeah, I could do better than that. What’ll you have, hon?”

P
inkerton was sitting in a wooden chair outside of Pete’s office. He had his hat in his hand. He stood when Pete came in.

“We got the boy. I want him to see you when he wakes up.”

He’d been standing in the middle of the highway. The semi driver slammed on his brakes and the trailer skidded around parallel to the cab, but the whole assemblage managed to stay on the road and halt just a few yards in front of Benjamin. He was in a fever. He didn’t seem to recognize he’d almost been crushed by tons of firewood, rubber, and metal. The trucker chewed him out, then saw how sick he was and took him to the hospital in Libby.

The ATF found a lean-to shelter in the catface of an enormous larch. A burn scar tall enough to stand in, not far from the highway. A small cook fire had burned itself out. There was a sleeping bag, a sack of cooked rice, and a thermos full of an awful-smelling tea. The boy’s rifle stood at hand.

The ATF set up a perimeter to wait for Pearl. It snowed and they saw things all night, none of them materializing into the man. Come morning, it felt palpably obvious he’d been spooked and wasn’t coming back. They left Pearl a note that they had taken his son. Pinkerton said he went up there personally and shouted into the trees the same thing.

Still. It was still.

A fat deputy sat backward on a folding chair reading a Billy Graham paperback. Pinkerton showed the deputy his badge, and they went in. Benjamin slept on the hospital bed. An IV of clear liquid ran to his arm. There were scabs everywhere on his body, small cuts from running through the brush, clambering up clattered rockslides, and sleeping under cedar. His eyes moved under their lids and cracked as they flashed partly open. He murmured hoarsely. Pete touched his hair, and the boy tilted his face toward the contact. The heart’s living tropism. His eyes stopped moving as his dream ceased or the pictures on his eyelids turned pacific.