Fourth of July Creek (55 page)

He guns the engine, rattles down through the trees.

Mama leans against the cold black stove. She sets the baby by like a piece of firewood, sits there with her palms open in her lap. Head thrown back. Exhausted. It’s quiet. There’s peace.

Then she moves to her knees, pulls herself up, stands on knocking legs. She takes a rifle from the wall. The barrel swings down, pounds the floor like it weighs a hundred pounds. It takes all her strength to bear it.

Ben watches through the unfinished walls, through the two-by-fours, as she staggers to Esther’s bed. She coaxes her to sit up. Esther’s shivering as they head out together and Mama stumbles back for a blanket. Esther is working her jaw around something that she might say, but she doesn’t. Ben calls her name. Mama looks over, says,
Shut up, Benjamin Pearl. Just shut the hell up.

She explains that they are already dead and she can’t let them fall into the hands of . . . she gestures down the mountain.
Them
, she says. Does he understand.

He says
I let in the poison.

Yes yes you did.

The first time, the rifle spins her around and she lands on it like a crutch. Jacob is led out by the wrist, takes the steps like a baby colt. Jacob’s bare feet stepping in place in the moonlight. A hoot owl after Mama kills him. When it’s Ruth’s and Paula’s turn, they clasp hands. The afghan spread over Esther. Shells spill out of Mama’s pockets and she has trouble closing the bolt. She says for Ben to sit down next to the others.

She says,
Waitaminute no. You’re chosen out. Go inside.

There’s one more shot and then no more shots.

What film played behind the boy’s eyes, Pete could not guess. But his eyes ranged across the bed and the walls as though he were witnessing everything afresh.

“What happened when your father came back with a doctor?”

It seemed it took a moment for the boy to even hear the question.

“He didn’t bring a doctor. He come back up to the house when he was stopped at the highway. Heard the rifle all the way down there. Didn’t make it back in time.” The boy’s eyes were tethered to some section of the blanket, that far-off night. “He went up and looked. And then come back and sat on the ground with me.”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t think we said nothing.”

“I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how scary that was.”

“Naw. She did what God said to. Papa was wrong to go to the doctor. She’d put it in God’s hands and he and I’s what made her have to do it. It’s why we were chose out.”

“No.”

“Yes. We were chose out.”

“The ice,” Pete said.

“What?”

“The ice from the freezer. You didn’t have any. Neither did your father.”

He left the Libby hospital and drove to see Pinkerton. To explain. But because of the shooting, the headquarters was a slew of flashing squad cars, paramedics, and every stripe of law enforcement taking pictures and making notes or just standing around fuming. An officer in front of the command centered regarded Pete angrily. Glass spangled and crunched underfoot, and he could just make out a long brown bloodstain on the tile inside.

“This is a crime scene now,” the officer said. “You can’t stand here.”

Through a plywood gap Pete could see ATF agents giving interviews to FBI agents. A spot of hair on the floor that Pete only in his waiting realized must be part of someone’s skull.

“I need to see Agent Pinkerton.”

“You gotta clear out.”

“Look, I have information about Jeremiah Pearl.”

“Go to the police station, give your statement there.” The officer shoved Pete off the curb and took his position back in front of the building. Pete loitered, but then word got around that the shooter was holed up in a barn and the place cleared out in a mass. If Pinkerton left with them, Pete didn’t see him go.

He went back to the hospital, but visiting hours were over. He dozed in the lobby and paced and smoked outside and in the morning, the cop with the Billy Graham book was gone. And so was Benjamin.

T
he standoff at the barn failed to occur. If the shooter had been there at all, he slipped away just as quickly as they’d cornered him. The collective wisdom around the bar at the Ten High was that Pearl would never be caught either. It was surmised he’d left the boy and lit out for Canada or an unreachable remove deep in the Yaak, which was more like a rain forest, a jungle really, only partially known even to locals. He was long gone.

That the feds should leave was just as plain. They were licked and nothing good would come of staying, billeted in the town like an occupying army. Locals getting pulled over at checkpoints. Made a person want to have done something to deserve it. That’s why the dynamite and the riot and now the shooting at their headquarters. And whatever was next.

Pete was two days trying to find out where Benjamin Pearl had been taken. He wasn’t in the Tenmile jail, so there was no telling in what vague lawyerless custody he was secreted. It was only when Pete trolled the motels looking for vehicles bearing federal plates that he finally sussed the boy’s whereabouts. He noticed a television on the patio in back of one of the ten cabins of the Sandman Motel. A man with a chest holster and service revolver answered his knock.

“Where’s Pinkerton?” Pete asked.

“The hell are you?”

“The boy’s social worker.”

The agent moved his gum to the other side of his jaw and resumed chewing.

“What boy?”

“Tell Pinkerton that Pearl didn’t kill his kids.” Pete pointed over his shoulder. “See that Monte Carlo? I’ll be waiting right there.”

A few hours later Pinkerton pulled in and walked into the motel room from his car. Pete watched him tug aside the curtain and look out, and then come alone, hunched into his thin windbreaker against the mist and new slivers of rain.

“Jesus, it’s freezing. Can you turn on the heat?”

“This is nothing,” Pete said. “Where you from?”

“Virginia. What do you want?”

“To put Ben in a foster home.”

Pinkerton fingered the upholstery.

“New car?”

“Loaner. Since you have mine. You can’t just keep him in a hotel. He’s still just a kid for fucksake.”

Pinkerton’s finger stopped. “Pearl didn’t shoot that PO,” he said. “Did he?”

“He did.”

“Forensics, Pete. We have the kid’s rifle.”

“They must’ve swapped at some—”

“You know the kid did it. You were there.”

Pete’s skin hummed. Wondered how much trouble the boy was in. “Look, the boy tried to protect me. Wes had his pistol aimed at me—”

“I were you, I’d shut up. You’re gonna need a lawyer before we have this conversation.” Pinkerton blew on his hands. “Turn on the fucking car.”

Pete started the engine, turned up the heat, which blew cold, then lukewarm.

“Maybe Pearl will cop to shooting a parole officer when we catch him,” Pinkerton said. “Then your . . .
version
of events will hold up. More than likely, he’ll get himself killed. And again, your version will stand.” Pinkerton cupped his palms over the air vents. “But as far as I’m concerned, that kid’s just as dangerous as his old man.”

“He’s not like that. His—”

“He sits in that motel room and doesn’t say a word. He’s been
trained
, Pete.”

“He’s terrified! He’s stuck in a motel with armed federal agents. The only adults he trusts are me and his father—”

“The one who murdered his mother and brothers and sisters?
That
father?”

Pete handed Pinkerton some papers from his dash.

“Pearl didn’t kill his kids. She did it. The mother.”

Pinkerton read the first page, looked at Pete.

“Lister . . .”

“
Listeriosis
. It’s a disease. They got it from eating contaminated ice chips from a freezer. Probably from deer blood according to the doctor. What you have there is a description of the symptoms.”

Pinkerton read.

“It had to be something in the ice. Pearl and Benjamin were the only ones who didn’t eat the ice chips.” He watched Pinkerton read. “You hear of people getting sick from deer blood. But with listeriosis, you get all sorts of nasty shit. Read the next section on meningitis.”

Pinkerton flipped the pages.

“Jesus.”

He told Pinkerton what happened. How Pearl went for a doctor and she, feverish and paranoid, took the kids outside, shot them one by one, before killing herself.

Pinkerton covered his eyes.

“Jesus. The kid told you this? He saw his own mother—”

“He needs therapy. Let’s get him out of a motel room and with some real people.”

“I told them.” Pinkerton tossed the papers onto the dash. Then he punched it. “Goddamnit! I told them Pearl wasn’t anybody. We never should’ve built a case. . . .”

“Just go, then. Shut it down.”

Pinkerton wasn’t listening to him. He picked the papers back up, read them again.

“You’re losing,” Pete said. “You’re making more enemies than friends out here as it is. Get your guys to draw down.”

Pinkerton chuckled morosely.

“What?”

“You’re talking like this is up to me, Pete. Or anyone.”

“Someone’s in charge.”

“That’d be Jeremiah Pearl. And he wants to die up here. And for some reason we’re unable to not oblige him.”

They watched it rain.

“Can he live through the winter, you think?” Pinkerton asked. “Christ, I don’t wanna spend Christmas up here. I got kids too—”

“Can I have the boy or not?”

Pete carried Ben’s bags to the car. The federal agents had given him sacks of toys, unopened packets of race cars and action figures.

They sat in the car a minute. Pete didn’t know exactly what to do with him. Or he knew exactly what to do with him, which for the first time made him uneasy. Because he wanted to do something else. He kept wanting to take these kids home. An urge to atone for Rachel.

“Are we going to see Papa?”

“He’s not . . . I don’t know where he is.”

“Oh.”

“He’s still out there. People are trying to find him. Trying to get him to come in.”

“He won’t.”

“I know.”

“So where are we going?”

Pete gripped the wheel. Turned to face the boy, his coat groaning against the leather upholstery. He didn’t want to be in this priesthood anymore.

“If you had a choice, would you rather stay at Cloninger’s or . . . ?”

Take him
, Pete thought.
Take him to your home . . .

“Or what?”

. . .
your shitty little apartment over the bar where you get pasted every night.

“Never mind. The other thing won’t work.”

The boy tucked his new tennis shoes under his corduroy pants. His oversize ski jacket engulfed him.

“What are you laughing at?”

“You look like a tortoise in that coat.”

“It’s warm.”

“You all right with staying at the Cloningers’?”

“Will Papa know I’m there?”

“I’ll tell him when he turns up.”

“I dunno.”

“I’ll do everything I can. Anything I can. If I can get him to you, I will.”

The boy looked hard at him.

“You fuckin promise?”

“I fuckin promise.”

He faced forward. In profile, the child looked older.

“You ready?”

The boy nodded. Somehow he was.

H
e visited the Cloningers. Benjamin and Katie had settled in nicely, Katie more so. Benjamin wouldn’t even enter the living room where the television was. Wouldn’t play with the toys. The missus had him at multiplication and reading the Bible, and besides that he would go out and watch the animals hours at a stretch and not really play so much as tolerate the play going on around him.

They walked through the snow in the pasture, the sun hammering their eyes squinted shut. The kid turtled up into his great red coat. They arrived at the creek, water tumbling under the sheen of ice. Ben stood at the water’s edge, his hood up, remote. His breath on the air.

“What’s gonna happen to me, Pete?”

“Nothing.”

“How’s he gonna find me?”

“He has to come out of the mountains first.”

“Where will we go? Where will we live?”

“I don’t know.”

He shoved his hands into his coat and burrowed deeper into it.

“Maybe . . . I was thinking if you wanted, we could try you living with me,” Pete said, but Ben had already started back for the house and if he heard Pete’s offer, he didn’t care.

All that remained of the federal presence was a skeleton crew of agents who sipped coffee in the Sunrise and read newspapers they had sent from back east. A fool calling himself a bounty hunter came and chatted up the old boys at the counter, and soon they were mutually flattering one another.

When Pete sat, the waitress asked was the judge joining him for lunch. He told her to bring two coffees just to be safe, and when she did, he stirred in creamer and listened to the bounty hunter tell lies. Pete ate lunch listening to the badinage, paid, and asked the waitress to tell the judge to come get him at his apartment.

He’d just lain down when the judge knocked at his door.

But it wasn’t the judge. Some wild-eyed vagrant stared back at him, clothed in too-large miner’s coveralls. The man’s face was splotched red in places with gin blossoms or bad chilblains under a trucker’s hat.

“Jeremiah,” Pete whispered.

“Where’s Benjamin?”

“Come in.”

“My son, Pete.”

“He’s fine. He’s safe.”

“Let’s go.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Come in and sit down.”

Pete threw wide his door and went and sat at the little table in the middle of the studio apartment.