Fourth of July Creek (6 page)

Behind the bar Neil unloaded a box of beer into the cooler.

“Drink?” he asked, seeing Pete.

“Dyson been in?” he asked.

“Nawp.”

Pete went out the front door and looked across the street at the courthouse. The light in the judge’s office was out, but Judge Dyson and another man stood under a maple on the courthouse lawn talking politics in the light of the moon. The judge gestured animatedly. Dyson the old Democrat, fighting the good fight for the sinned-in-his-heart President Carter. Pete had read the race was close, but it wasn’t close here in Rimrock County. The people who lived up in the Yaak in their tar paper cabins and half-finished log homesteads weren’t political—they were perfect anarchists. Most of them lived here because the government was a negligible presence. They cut down their own trees for firewood. They hunted and fished whenever they wanted. Most trucks had a snowplow. Some even objected to the delivery of mail.

Dyson could generate a plurality of straight-ticket Democratic votes with state and federal employees and union guys, but he only prevailed on Election Day because the better part of the county actively avoided voting or mocked it, submitting
Mickey Mouse
as a write-in candidate.

But this year something was off. Hand-painted
REAGAN COUNTRY
signs had bloomed up in the pastures along the highway. Places that weren’t even hamlets, just little outposts of fierce individualism. The people the judge tried to cajole now didn’t care how long he’d been in the legislature, what committees he’d been on, or what pull he may or may not still have. They may have liked him personally, but not his pedigree.

Now the judge talked with his hands, threw wide his arms, touched the man’s chest, and pointed at his open palm. Pete willed him to ease off. But the judge now buttonholed the guy—literally hooking his fat finger through the man’s open buttonhole—as though turning this man alone would deliver Rimrock County to President Carter.

Give it up, Judge, Pete thought. We need to keep our heads down. We need us a stiff drink. The man spoke and the judge crossed his arms and tilted his head back in a mime of listening. Pete had seen this move in court and it always preceded a redoubled harangue.

Could be hours.

Pete went back inside. Neil had his foot all the way up on the cooler and leaned over it shelling peanuts, watching the television over the end of the bar. The president and Reagan behind their lecterns. Reagan’s wrinkled cheeks ruddied with makeup. Carter and those outrageous lips.

Pete put his hands on the bar and leaned in.

“Do me a favor and turn it off? I don’t want to hear from him all night about what a Republican dupe you are.”

Neil smiled and got up on the cooler and flipped the channel. The debate was on all of them. He killed the sound and climbed down.

“You want a drink?” he asked.

“Better get me a boilermaker. It’s been a long-ass day.”

Neil selected a bottle, held it up. Pete nodded that it was fine as he took out a twenty.

“When the judge comes in, bring the bottle over before he can give you any money.”

Neil clucked his tongue and took Pete’s cash.

A couple of the judge’s friends along the wall held up their beer cans in greeting, and Pete settled into a booth at the back of the bar. A quiet night. The poker table was covered with a black blanket. Pete sloshed his whiskey around, watched it cling like oil to the side of the short glass, and then took a drink. Hot and lovely. He quickly finished the whiskey, drank his beer, then got another from Neil, and when he’d finished that one, the judge came in fuming. Pete called, and the judge stormed over and slid into the booth, his gut taut against the table. Pete nudged the table away so the man could fit in. The judge frowned at him for it.

“Apparently we got us a real problem with welfare queens,” the judge said.

“Is that right.”

“You can’t throw a stone without hitting one. Even out here in Rimrock County if that sumbitch Johan is to be believed.”

Neil came up with the bottle and a glass. The judge grabbed them away from Neil and poured and then reached into his suit coat for his billfold.

“This goddamn Reagan—Where you going, Neil?”

The judge held up a bill. Neil pointed at Pete, and the judge scowled at him and put the money on the table.

“I drink your good stuff all the time,” Pete said. The judge took a sip, held up the drink to say thanks, but left the bill on the table. Then he narrowed his eyes at Pete, studying him up and down as one might a horse or an engine block. He reached across the table and pinched some of Pete’s hair between his fingers.

“Get a haircut,” he said, tossing it away. “Why do these people let you into their homes, I have to wonder.”

Pete smiled and poured more into his and the judge’s little glasses.

“Because they know I’m not a cop.”

The judge smirked into his whiskey, then swallowed. Asked how was business. Pete told Judge Dyson about the boy he’d taken to Cloninger’s.

“Got ’em a Reagan sign up in their yard?”

“Not that I saw.”

The judge took a fresh can of snoose from his vest pocket and snapped it in his hand while Pete told him about the Pearl boy and the gunfire and his father.

“These people,” the judge muttered, more about the general electorate than Pete’s clients.

“The guy made his kid take off the clothes I bought him. I’m not sure what to do now.”

“Let them rot, the ungrateful sons a bitches.” Dyson ran a fingernail around the diameter of the can, and twisted it open.

“Noble sentiment there, Judge.”

“You go back up there, you’ll get yourself hurt.”

The judge took a pinch and tucked it in front of his bottom incisors. He licked his fat lower lip, picked black motes off his tongue.

“If I go alone,” Pete said.

“You’ll get some deputies hurt then. Just help the ones you can. It’s not like you got nothing else to do.”

Pete went and retrieved a coffee cup from Neil for the judge to spit in. The judge turned the cup handle away and aligned the can of chew next to it and his glass. He was not as neat a man since his wife had died, but habits remained.

“I seen your father’s new old lady . . .”

“Bunnie.”

“That’s right, Bunnie. When I was in Great Falls a few weeks back,” the judge said.

“How was that?”

“Evangelical. No match for your mother, rest her soul. The judge raised his glass and they sipped. “Bunnie had a couple bags on her arm. I assume that means the ranch is still doing okay.”

Pete scoffed. “That ranch is a hobby.”

“Your old man makes more of his hobbies than most people do with a whole career.”

“He’s just mean, is all.”

The judge was going to say something about this, but Neil came over to check on them, and the judge shoved a fat finger in his face.

“Don’t let this guy buy my drinks, Neil.”

Pete slid out of the booth and the judge grunted his way out too. They watched the debate on television for a minute. Carter’s sallow aura was evident, more so with the sound down. Reagan’s turn to talk. He shook his head, said something to his lectern, looked up and smiled at Carter like he’d turned over a royal flush in a movie. It occurred to Pete that no one wins a close hand with a royal flush in real life. Ever. But in the movies, royal flushes were always coming to the rescue. These remarkable turnabouts, reversals on the turn of a card.

The front door boomed open. The judge scurried through it on his fat furious legs.

P
ete’s cabin sat on five acres in the Purcell Mountains fifteen miles north of Tenmile, a two-mile walk from some decent fishing in the Yaak River. He’d put down two thousand dollars and made payments to the doddering codger who’d built it and now lived with a sister in Bozeman. A kind old guy who showed him all the little kinks of the place, what doors wouldn’t latch, which window wasn’t true. White sandpaper stubble and watering eyes when he left.

Think of getting old.

Think of being only thirty-one yourself and having gotten so much already dead fucking wrong.

Pete had running water and was to have electricity in the spring if the county could be believed. He had a new water heater from Sears on the porch, still wrapped in plastic, which he couldn’t install yet; unlike the electricity, it was unclear when or if the county would bring gas, but he got a deal on the water heater. He’d hoped some surveyors he’d seen farther up Separation Creek were in the employ of developers, but a Forest Service truck met them and he couldn’t be sure the men weren’t from Champion Timber Company. He foresaw another year showering at the courthouse.

Next to the water heater was a nearly spent stack of firewood, but he had a pile of rounds out back of the house that he could split to get through the spring. The layout inside was simple, ample. A bedroom where for now he chucked his empty cardboard boxes, a front room with his bed, a leather chair, a kerosene lamp and an electric lantern, two shelves of books, and a bureau. An olive canvas bag half-full of clean or dirty clothes for the Laundromat in Tenmile. In the kitchen a separate woodstove cooked his meals just fine, and a hatch in the floor led into a root cellar where he kept his milk, beer, and vegetables. Problem bears broke into places up around here, but he hadn’t had any trouble. The very idea of problem bears. A problem for who. Did the bears talk about problem people.

Pete was already up in the freshly broken dawn boiling water and watching out the window for whatever was there. There were times he saw down through the tamarack to the meadow a whole gang of elk, steam and reedy cries issuing from their throats as they moved through the sheets of mist. He scanned the woods, the morning light not yet lancing through, the tree boles black in the dark morning. No elk. No bears, problem or otherwise.

A time in his childhood when he went to Yellowstone Park. His father paid for them to sit on a bench in front of a dump with about fifty other people. The garbage trucks rumbled up and emptied themselves, and the grizzlies lumbered out of the woods one by one or paired with cubs to nuzzle through the trash. Their tongues scoured the insides of tin cans. They devoured cardboard boxes whole for what had once been inside. Sometimes they scuffled explosively, their fur coats shuddering as though they could throw off their carpets of fat, and thus disrobed show what bears looked like underneath all the garbage they’d been eating. No one said these bears had problems.

The kettle whistled. He turned to get it and when the whistle died, he heard a truck clattering up the road. He went to the kitchen window to see it was his brother coming. He set the kettle on the counter and massaged his face. The things his brother kept in the bed rattled and the diesel engine knocked as it quit.

They met one another out front, Pete on the porch in a T-shirt and robe, his brother down from it, in a plaid jacket and his hair combed flat across his skull like he was just from an interview or court date. The porch boards were cold on Pete’s naked feet.

“What do you want, Luke?”

Luke smiled. It was Pete’s smile—Pete’s body just about too, the same wiry frame and rib cage and the same derelict heart underneath.

“I need a little money.”

Different kinds of dereliction.

“Fuck you.”

“I’m kidding. You gonna let me in?”

“No.”

“C’mon. I ain’t high or nothin.”

Luke pulled at the skin under his eyes to show Pete the whites.

“You don’t need to be high to steal.”

Luke shook his head and smiled with one side of his mouth and frowned with the other, wry and bittersweet.

“Why don’t you just get yourself back in that truck,” Pete said, but Luke slunk up onto the porch, made for the front door. Pete intercepted him. Luke grabbed Pete’s hand where it pressed on his chest. They were identical in height, but Luke was bigger in the arms from mending fences, bailing hay, and other handywork. Jobs he could land on parole.

“I about kicked your ass last time, big brother,” Luke said.

“But you didn’t.”

“I’m feeling spry this morning.”

Luke poked Pete in the gut smiling. Pete knocked away his hand, and Luke tried a short roundhouse that glanced the back of Pete’s ducking head. Pete slugged him in the ribs, and Luke gasped and jabbed Pete square in the face, setting him back, and then Pete charged at him, robe billowing out behind him like a cape. Neither landed a good blow in the following short volley. They breathed heavily a moment, and then Pete closed on his brother, shoved him into a porch post, palmed his brother’s entire face, knocking his head against the support. Luke had gotten his hands onto Pete’s head and endeavored to peel away his cheek like one might a rind. A coffee can of nails went over into the dirt. Pete yanked himself free of Luke’s grip and they got one another by the nape, their heads joined at the ears like a pair of hung-up deer. They panted there. Pete’s face was numb on the one side.

“Will you just get back in your truck and go?”

Luke twisted away, and they stood apart, each of them trying not to show how winded he was, rolling his head on his shoulders, shaking out his arms, sideways to his brother like a pair of prizefighters. Then they slowly lowered their arms. Luke pressed his mussed hair flat against his skull. Pete pulled his robe back around his shoulders. He searched for the belt like a dog after its tail, and angrily knotted it after he found it. They panted still. Regarded one another across the six feet that separated them.

“May I sit on that milk crate at least?” Luke asked.

Pete kicked the crate over. Luke sat, yolky sunlight leaking through the trees now.

“There’s two reasons you ever come to visit,” Pete said, breathing heavily. “To get something out of me . . . or to tell me about Jesus and get something out of me.” He paused to catch his breath. “Even though I ain’t interested in neither one.”

“I know it,” he said. “Mine’s been a crooked path.”

“Don’t romanticize it. You’re just another asshole—”

“Pot, meet kettle.”

“—and a thief. I told you we were done. I meant it.”