Fourth of July Creek (56 page)

Pearl stepped inside, closed the door, and inspected the room. Opened the broom closet, the bathroom. Studied the street through the window, flush to the wall. Then pulled down the blinds and sat. He didn’t look like Pearl at all. His viscous naked face shone with sweat. Where it didn’t glow nearly red from what must’ve been a crude and rushed shave with an old razor and creek water was stippled gunmetal blue. The coveralls were coated in vermiculite dust, and he must’ve grabbed them off some miner’s back step or pickup.

“You’re going to take me to my son.”

He produced a .38 from inside his pocket.

“Jeremiah, I know what Sarah did.”

Pearl’s beardless face gave Pete access to a startling gout of disordered thoughts. Anger. Racing fear. Then a brittle conviction. Pearl closed his eyes. A long time. Pete could’ve taken the gun.

“They were sick and you were going for help. She thought they’d been poisoned and she—”

Pearl’s eyes snapped open.

“They
were
poisoned,” he hissed. “How does every one of them get so sick like that . . . ?”

The thought guttered out like a candle. Like an old lie. They sat facing one another for a long time, as though at a card game that had taken a strange turn, and neither one quite knew the rules. Then Pearl leveled the pistol at Pete’s face, looking almost surprised at this outcome himself.

“Take me to my son.”

Pete thought he’d be scared in such a moment as this, if it ever came. But he wasn’t. Whatever fear nested in him dissipated the moment Pearl lifted the gun.

“Taking you to him, right now, like this,” Pete said, “would go against everything that’s sacred to me.”

“I will kill you.”

“I know what it’s like, Jeremiah. Losing a kid. I know some of your pain. I’d do anything to get Rachel home. So I
understand
you, but I will not hand over your boy at gunpoint.”

Pete stood slowly and wasn’t killed. And he wasn’t killed when he fetched out the black case and the box and carried them onto the table. Pearl sat with the pistol in his palm and watched Pete open the case, set up the projector, and thread in the film. Pete told him he’d asked his mother-in-law if he could borrow these. Pete didn’t look at Pearl as he turned out the lights, nor when he flipped on the projector. A square of white on the bare wall over his bed and then the children. Out of focus and waving. With Sarah in a green canoe on a stony shore. Little feet off the edge of a dock. Pearl himself in cannonball. Holding a Coke. Holding a cigarette, no, a piece of chalk, that he uses to trace the shapes of his children on the pink wall of a quarry. Their outlines. Their faces so close now. Their very freckles. A campfire, a snake in a bucket, a reaching hand. A motorcycle burns rubber, Sarah waves the smoke away from the baby—

The film slaps the projector. The fan. The glowing white square in the wall.

Pete threads in another film.

A baby bottle. Sacks of candy. A baptism in a flashing river.

Every lovely silliness composed of light, every good coin of time in Pearl’s life.

It is dark out when they’ve finished the box. Pete turns off the projector and the fan quits, leaving them in a novel quiet. Pete opens the shades to let in a little streetlight, winter’s stillnesses.

“You weren’t sure. You argued. As the kids got sicker. You wanted to take them to the hospital.”

Pearl turns his head and looks out the window. He says her name.

Sarah.

That is all. Just her name.

“When you saw your baby boy was dead, you quit arguing, and you went to get a doctor.”

“I wanted, I wanted . . .” Pearl touches his chest with his fingertips and then lets fall his hand into his lap. “I couldn’t put all those sick kids in the bed of the pickup. They weren’t . . . they couldn’t . . . Esther’s neck was so stiff, she couldn’t move her head and . . .”

Pearl takes a deep breath and a single sob falls out of him like an ingot thudding on the table. He breathes unevenly, like the air won’t take.

“You didn’t think she’d do that, Jeremiah. You never thought that. How would you?”

Pearl is leaning forward, whispering. As though the opinions he has are secrets. He whispers that he still loves her, can you believe that, after what she’s done. That he misses her yet. His helpmeet. His one. That if she walked in the door right now, even now, he’d sit with her and start over with her. Whispers how pathetic that is. How evil. He whispers he misses his children, that of course he misses his children. He’s failed his children. He’d as killed them himself. That he doesn’t deserve them. Because of her. Because of a love that does not see madness.

“My God,” he says. He takes his head in his hands and kneads it like a foreign object, some tumor he must get the feel of, that he might remove with his bare hands.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I were you—”

Pearl looks startled, alarmed to be here. He sweeps himself up. He turns in the apartment, still holding his head like a person in thrall of migraine, someone insane with auditory hallucinations. He leans over to vomit but nothing comes up as he seizes. He keeps bending over into empty retching.

“Jeremiah, it’s okay.”

It is through wasted eyes, red and scalded round, like he’d been all this time staring into a white sun, that Pearl at last sees him. The man is burned through, cauterized, a scar, and for all that, familiar as whatever it is Pete sees in any mirror. Pearl is Snow is himself is everyone.

When he went to look, did he sob there and ask her why? And did he hold her yet?

Or did he bound into the night? Did he rend his shirt? Did he hear his own strangled sobs and sorrow echoing off the shallow mountainsides? Did the pine martens and hares flee his screams?

Did he run up a fallen log and squat there and hold his knees like he would explode if he let them go?

Did he search his heart and ask what he’d done? Did he wonder was the universe a cruelty?

And did he put the children in the cellar alone or did Benjamin help him?

Did they roll the stones and how long did it take?

Were they still doing it even now?

For this were they chose out?

Chose out for this?

For this?

This?

P
ete’s brother stood some ways off, showing Jeremiah Pearl the teepee that he and the boy would live in. Pearl walked around the structure, looking off into the trees, the area around, warily. Luke beckoned him into the tent and he smiled back at Pete and the boy, and took Pearl inside.

“My brother’s a pretty nice guy,” Pete said.

Ben sat on the back porch next to him. The sky was heavy with dark clouds and it rained a lot here, but things could be gotten used to.

“Will you visit?”

“Of course.”

“When?”

“Sometimes. I’ll just come out.”

He put a piece of grass in his teeth.

“Papa looks weird.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I want him to grow it back.”

“Maybe he will. Think you’ll like it here?”

“I dunno.”

“I think you will.”

“Do you have to go right away?”

“Later. I got a long drive back to Montana.”

“Can we play checkers?”

“I think the board is still in the car,” Pete said.

The kid scampered around the house. Pete was alone a moment, the heel of his palm against his eye. The other heel, the other eye. Pete removed his hands and the gray sky shuddered in his vision, a dread pulsing of his blood, his ichor. He turned and there was the boy inside the back door, profoundly alive, saying the board was on the table. To come inside and play.

P
ete drove by the camp twice before he spotted the car, the green tarp deep in the ninebark. An early spring cold front bore down, and when he walked off the main road above them and down through the brush to where they were parked they didn’t hear him in the wind. The man stood and then the woman when they saw him. Their unsmiling mouths looked like they’d been hacked into a flat and uncomplicated wariness by a dull knife. Their boy sat a few yards away in fine sand by the water, and a silent infant lay in a stroller held level by a stone where a wheel was missing. A tarp stretched out from the back of the station wagon and was tethered to a couple of trees. A thin fire in the fire pit burned clear and orange, and a pair of fishing poles against the tree suggested how they got by.

“Howdy,” Pete said.

“Howdy,” said the woman and the man both, and they looked at each other as if they’d already done something they hadn’t intended and needed to look at one another to remind the other of the plan or contingency.

“My name’s Pete. Just right up front, let me tell you I’m not a police officer or anything like that, and the last thing I want to do is cause you any trouble.”

They looked at each other again, and then the man said, “Okay.”

Pete took out his badge.

“This says I’m with the Department of Family Services for the State of Montana.”

At this the woman covered her mouth. The man set his hands on his hips as Pete came forward. Pete showed the badge to both of them and they looked at it and nodded, the woman still covering her mouth. The man and boy had upshot hair, and when he got closer they smelled of kerosene and trout. The woman uncovered her haggard downslung mouth and wiped her eyes.

“So we got a call that there might be some folks staying down here.”

“What call?” the man asked.

“Just someone who seen you down here,” Pete told him.

“Who was it?”

“It was anonymous. I just get the information to check out the situation.”

“Because we haven’t bothered anybody,” the woman said with a voice that crackled with shame. She had by now gotten close to her husband and wrapped her arm around his, and looked back at the boy who was sitting by the fire with a toy truck watching to see what would happen next.

“I’m sure you haven’t bothered anyone,” Pete said. “Looks to me like you are making out fine here. It’s just when there’s a call it means somebody’s concerned—”

“Why are they concerned?”

The man seemed genuinely surprised that someone would look upon this situation as odd.

“Mind if I have a look around?” Pete asked.

“Suit yourself.”

Pete stepped over to the fire. The boy watched him. The mother went nearby, which Pete took as a good sign. Protective. He squatted down. The boy had no marks other than an old scratch on his arm. It was cool, but he was in a vest, shoes and socks.

“Hi,” Pete said warmly, stirring the fire with a stick and then tossing the stick onto the coals.

The kid mutely stood and went to his mother and grabbed her leg.

“How old?” he asked the mother.

“This one’s four and the little one is eighteen months,” she answered. “Do we need to go somewhere else?”

Pete stood.

“No. Like I said, I’m not a police officer. Now, I’m not sure what the law is about staying right here, but
I’m
not telling you that you need to go.”

“It’s just if someone called, maybe someone else will call the police.”

Pete had worked his way over to the baby in the stroller and he leaned to have a look at her, and the mother came over with the boy. The baby’s blue eyes were in themselves an astonishment, as lovely as anything in creation. A too-big sweater enveloped her and there was a blanket over her. Her snot ran clear. No infection.

“She’s really lovely,” Pete said. “What’s her name?”

“Erin.”

He touched her on the nose and stood next to the car to see in back. Paper sacks of clothing. Playing cards. A ukulele. A box of cereal, hot dog buns, and a jar of peanut butter.

Pete stood away from the car to have a look at it.

“Is this a Buick Sport Wagon? They have a little something under the hood, don’t they?”

“She runs.”

The man had his hands in his jeans and was watching his wife when Pete turned to them.

“You were asking a question about the cops,” Pete said to her.

Her nod chopped the air. She shook. He tried to sigh warmly, nonchalantly, as though there was nothing to worry about, but couldn’t tell if it helped or not.

“I don’t know that someone won’t call the cops to come out here and give you a ticket or something. I don’t know if this is anybody’s property.”

The boy wanted up, and she lifted him onto her hip and how her skirt hiked down revealed the upper bones of her pelvis. She was pretty, overrun and weary, like a pet come in from the weather.

“So where you guys out of?” Pete asked.

“We don’t have to tell you anything, do we?” the man said. Pete turned full to him and the man was holding a stick. Pete glanced at it, and the man tossed the stick aside.

“Of course not. I’m just here to see that you’re okay. That’s all.”

“We’re okay.”

Pete put his hands together.

“Sure looks like it. Why don’t I go on and get out of your hair.”

He shook the man’s hand and waved at the children each and then the mother. He stopped at the hood of the car.