Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451) Read online

  “Now, I could put both of ya’s in jail. I oughta should.” He winked at Pete. “But, uh—”

  “Pete.”

  “—Pete here says you’re good folks having a spot of trouble is all, and I should be lenient.”

  He uncuffed them, the mother first. The boy rubbed his wrists. The shamed woman’s chin quivered, but she didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t wanna come back, you hear? If I do, somebody’s going to jail. And I mean if I come back tomorrow, or next week or next month. I don’t ever want to come back, you understand?”

  The woman nodded. Cecil seemed transfixed by the indentures on his wrists.

  “You all right here?” the cop asked Pete.

  “Yeah. Thanks, Eugene.”

  The cop tipped his hat, and walked to his car, lighting another cigarette. When he left, a thick cloud of dust bore up from the road and washed over the porch and enveloped them. Pete covered the girl’s face and went inside.

  Pete had come up from Missoula to work in Tenmile a little over a year before, in the fall of 1979. Most of the people he actually knew in the town and in the region were his clients. In Tenmile everybody knew everybody else or at least one of their kin or where they liked to get good and peppered on a Friday night. Thus far, Pete had maintained a low profile. Anyone who met him outside of work knew only that he had an office at the courthouse, maybe something to do with easements or water rights. Some kind of comptrollery that went on in the basement.

  But his anonymity would not last for long, he knew that. The past Saturday night he’d seen both the boy and the mother out and up to no good, Cecil in the bed of a pickup with a broken baseball bat, and Debbie on a stool at the Dirty Shame bar in an open-backed top that exposed her razorous shoulder blades and a dense constellation of moles. He’d managed to avoid speaking to either of them, but Tenmile shrank with every case.

  Debbie followed him inside the house, dropped onto the couch, and commenced quietly sobbing. Pete sat on a wooden chair by the door. The room stale with the smell of flat soda and body odor. The mother glanced at him in intervals. Pity me. Poor me. Angling for his sympathy.

  Let her dangle a minute. Let her see how well that works.

  He got up and carried Katie into the kitchen, still nuzzled to his chest. He didn’t even know if her eyes were open. He tried to catch their reflection in the window, but couldn’t make her out. Five years old and light as a toddler. He might have been holding a long doll for all she moved or weighed.

  “You hungry?”

  She nodded against his chest. Plates crusted with dried mustard and mayo and ketchup crowded the countertops like discarded palettes. Fruit flies teemed over a bowl of old fruit, fruit he might’ve brought two weeks ago. Jesus, it was the fruit he’d brought. For fucksake. You try and help and she doesn’t even give them the fruit. She doesn’t even pretend. You put the fruit in the bowl for her and you say to her to make the kids eat it and she nods vigorously like she learned to in school, in detention, at what few jobs she’s had, she’s only ever learned to nod and say yes. Fucksake. You could picture her getting pregnant that way. Yeah, sure, it’s not my time of the month, don’t worry about it, I ain’t getting pregnant. I do too much speed. My ovaries are broke.

  There was cold pasta in the sink that looked halfway fresh. He touched it and it was still moist. It smelled okay. He set the girl on a plastic lawn chair by the table. She watched him fetch a bowl from the stack of dirty ones and wash it with hot water and a bar of soap from the windowsill. He washed a fork the same way, grinning at her. He sniffed the noodles again, and then forked the stiff spaghetti, but it came out of the colander like a halved basketball, and so he rinsed it and pulled it apart with his hands into a saucepan. He searched the cupboards and fridge and at last simply emptied a ketchup bottle over the pasta, and put the red mess on the electric stove. The girl tucked her knees up under her armpits, gazing at him as he turned the noodles in the heat. When the pasta sizzled, he carried her and the steaming bowl out to the living room. On his lap she blew on it, ate, and was otherwise silent.

  The mother had ceased crying and stared at him grimly.

  “I just can’t get you all off my back,” she said.

  “I’m not on your back, Debbie. You told the cop to call me.” He covered the girl’s ears. “I’m nowhere near your damn back.”

  He could feel the girl chewing under his palms.

  “You let things get so out of hand, the cops come? Jesus, Debbie.”

  Her chin crumpled like a can again. He uncovered Katie’s ears and whispered he needed to talk privately to her mother, and she nodded and blew on her food. Lovely girl. He’d take her. He would. He covered her ears again.

  “I know. I know. Just nothing works out for me.” She picked through the junk on and around the coffee table for something—a cigarette probably—and knocked a metal pipe to the floor.

  “We talked about that.”

  She nudged the pipe under the couch with her foot.

  “About self-pity,” he said. “Not the pipe you’re trying to hide.”

  “You said you’d help me,” she said, searching the cluttered table with roving hands.

  “What do you think I just did with that cop? That’s helping. That’s exactly helping,” he said.

  She found an empty pack, and crushed it, sighing hugely.

  “Not enough it ain’t.”

  She looked at the cuff-welts on her wrists and started in crying again. Katie twisted spaghetti around her fork.

  “Debbie. You’re not the only one to ever fuck up. Everybody’s got their troubles.” Pete kissed Katie’s hair. “Even me. I got problems just like you do. I mean, hell, I’m only up here in Tenmile because I needed to get away from some bullshit where I was at.”

  At this, Debbie looked at him.

  “Just take him away.” She tried to work up some tears. “He’s an ungovernable.”

  “You can parent him, Debbie.”

  “I got a note from his school that he ain’t been for weeks.”

  “We can deal with that. Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on here at home.”

  She rubbed her face. She was coming off of whatever she’d been on and her spindly hands worked her head like they were trying to dig into her skull. Her legs quietly pistoned.

  “You know what all goes on. He’s crazy.”

  “I’ve made numerous appointments to get him in to see the psychiatrist in Kalispell—”

  “He won’t go! What am I supposed to do? He’s biggern me!”

  “You can hold your own, Debbie—”

  “He hates me.”

  “He doesn’t hate you.”

  He hates her, Pete thought. I hate her.

  She balled her fists and crushed them into her eyes. For several moments.

  “Okay, Deb. Why don’t you take it easy on your head there?”

  “What?”

  “Your head. You’re digging into it.”

  She set her jaw and shook her head.

  “Take him. Just take him.”

  “Where? Where am I supposed to take him, Debbie?”

  His hands had slipped off Katie’s ears.

  “Wherever you take kids when you take them. Ain’t that your job? I’m asking you to take him. Do your fuckin job. I’m a taxpayer.”

  Katie twisted around to see him, alarmed. A touch of want in them too. Would he take her away. Take her with him.

  “Nobody is going anywhere.” He put his hands back over her ears. “I don’t know what you think I do, but let me tell you, the world is not filled with people waiting to raise your children.”

  “His uncle then.”

  Just then, Cecil entered. Air rifle in hand. Pete shunted the girl into the recliner and stood. The boy leaned the air rifle onto the couch. He wore a backpack and was expressionless and heavy-lidded and it occurred to Pete that Debbie was probably a raging drunk when she was pregnant with him. Had to name him Cecil of all things. And no
w this mess of a person.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. “You can forget about me.”

  “Hold on—” Pete started.

  “Go already!” Debbie screamed, outsized for the situation. “Just leave me! Leave me here with no man in the house!”

  “Debbie . . . ,” Pete said.

  “You ungrateful piece of shit!”

  “Fuck you!” Cecil roared, and he slipped by Pete and had his mother by the hair. Both of them shouting, Debbie kicked him in the groin, and he let out a low moan, released her, and fell to his knees.

  “All right, all right, enough!” Pete hollered, but the boy quickly stood and punched her in the face. She wheeled backward arms flailing, and tripped into the television, which fell onto the corner of the flagstone fireplace and cracked open like an egg. A snotty tendril of smoke rose out of the picture tube. The boy lunged, but Pete pushed him down and pressed his knee into the middle of his back.

  “Get out!” he yelled at Debbie. “Go!”

  She cupped her eye as though the pain had at last occurred and further enraged her. She stepped back to take a run at kicking her son in the head. Pete grabbed at her leg, but she skipped out of range. Pete pointed toward the rear of the house.

  “Get out, goddamnit, or I’m calling the cops.”

  “You piece of shit!”

  “Debbie! Go or the cops again! Your choice.”

  She wasn’t listening. Cecil struggled and yelled, and Pete jammed his knee in harder—but then Katie gathered her mother’s long fingers and tugged on her, and Debbie followed her out of the room calling Cecil a sonofabitch, sonofabitch, holding her crying eye.

  It wasn’t yet noon and no one was much about on the square in Tenmile or around the Rimrock County Courthouse or the shops. The only person they saw as they drove across the tracks and then the river was a man pumping gas at the station on the way out of town. They were soon in a narrow alley of serried pines that gave way to mowed pastures. Pete turned onto an unsurfaced road that was shortly a ruck of graded dirt and vibrated them silly in their seats until they pulled in front of a white ranch house. Their flesh and ears buzzed in the sudden stillness. Out of sight atop the flagpole before them snapped an American flag in the wind.

  The ugly pumpknot on Cecil’s head glowed like an ember. His nose whistled. He gripped the air rifle. Pete had agreed to let him take it, just to get him out of the house.

  “You can’t bring that here with you,” Pete said.

  Cecil stared straight ahead.

  “Now look,” Pete said. “This isn’t permanent. You’re going back home.”

  “Like hell.”

  “You mother is your mother.”

  “I’ll cut her cunt out. How’s that sound?” Cecil asked.

  Pete rubbed his face.

  “It sounds damn awful, Cecil. You can’t talk like that. Not here.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a psycho.”

  “I ain’t a psycho.”

  “All right, look. Look at me.” Cecil turned. “I need to know that you’ll be good to these people. They don’t want no trouble and I don’t want to bring them any. They wanna help.”

  “Just drop me off on the highway.”

  “You know I can’t do that. Let’s just get you and Mom apart for a little while, and see if we can’t get things figured out when everybody’s cooled off a little bit.”

  Cecil raised his palm. Whatever. Fuck you, Pete.

  Pete got out. The house was set back from the fence and the flagpole, and in back were outbuildings and beyond them an empty pasture. Cecil stayed put. Pete went through the gate and then up the path through a trellis to the house. A regal old hound brayed responsibly at his approach but didn’t get up from inside the doghouse. Pete was almost to the front door when an older man came out of the garage, wiping his hands with a red rag, which he stuffed in his back pocket before he pumped Pete’s outstretched hand. The man’s great white mustache twisted out like longhorns. He and Pete exchanged greetings and were now looking over at the boy.

  “Thanks for this,” Pete said.

  “Not a problem.”

  The aproned missus stuck her head out the front door, ruddy and cheerful as a gnome, and said howdy and that she couldn’t come out, they were just about to pour the jam into the jars, but would Pete want one. Pete said of course, and turned back to Cloninger.

  “There he is there in the car,” Pete said.

  “We looking at a shy fella or a tough guy?”

  “Around grown men, he’s pretty docile. But him and his mom are in a bad way.”

  Cloninger laced his fingers together, hung them below his belt, and tilted his ashen head at Pete.

  “He’s got priors, but they’re sneaky priors. Arson. Breaking and entering. He was with those kids that were busting into pickups outside the basketball game last spring,” Pete said. “He’s older and bigger than that Rossignol kid you took in last time, but I think he’s more bark than bite. That said, you never know. He might could be a handful,” Pete said.

  “I see.”

  “Really, I just don’t know how he’ll act in a different environment. Probably quiet for a few days and then we’ll just have to play it by ear?”

  “They Christian?”

  “Not even close.”

  Cloninger nodded.

  “I hate to ask this, but what’s the longest you can have him?” Pete asked.

  Cloninger unlaced his hands and pulled out a small black calendar and a small pencil from his shirt pocket. He thumbed through the little book to the place he needed. He squinted without his glasses.

  “We’re going to Plains in two weeks. Marta’s sister. If he gets along, he can certainly come with.”

  “Nah. I’ll get something sorted out before then. There’s an uncle. I just didn’t have time.”

  “Okee-dokee,” Cloninger said, putting back his calendar and pencil. “Let’s get him set up.”

  “One thing,” Pete said, touching Cloninger’s elbow. “Obviously, he isn’t going to be grateful for your hospitality. But please do accept my gratitude.”

  Cloninger clapped Pete on the shoulder.

  “We’ll feed and shelter him, body and spirit.”

  From the car, Cecil observed the man holding Pete’s shoulder and bending his head at him, like they were praying with one another. Then Pete and the man were at the car and opening the door, Cecil going along with it, handing Pete his air rifle, shaking the man’s hand, and then already in his house which was a cloud of sweet moisture and the dog was sniffing his groin, and the mother squeezed his hand, and their children lined up to greet him too, and this was really happening. Pete was already out the door with a jar of jam, and Cecil was shown a spare bed and where to put his things. Then they were sitting down to eat. He was just in time for lunch, they said like it was pure kismet, and the dog would not quit sniffing his pant legs under the table even though he moved his feet and tried to shoo him with his hand.

  What was her name?

  Rachel Snow. But she wanted to change it.

  To what?

  Rose. “Rose Snow” said something deeply true about her. About her soul. She was a frozen flower. It was so sad, her almost-fourteen-year-old heart throbbed with feeling. Gushed.

  And there was this bitch at Rattlesnake Middle School named Rachel.

  This other Rachel.

  Why’d she reach over with her foot and stomp on the gas as she and her mother idled at a light?

  Because her mother was taking too long.

  Because she couldn’t stand the way she drove.

  Because she didn’t know why, all right?

  Because she just always felt now like she needed to go go go everything was taking too long she was missing it all. She was thirteen already and she was missing everything.

  Everything.

  Did they nearly have an accident?

  No.

  Did her mother slap her?

  She tried, the bitch.
Just caught a bit of her hair.

  Did her mother say that this was it? That she could go live with her father she was gonna act like this?

  Bitch always said that.

  What did Rachel think of going to live with him?

  It’s Rose.

  What did Rose think of going to live with her father?

  She thought, whatever. That it was all talk.

  A break they called it. Hilarious. He bought a house up in the woods.

  No, she didn’t even consider it a possibility.

  Why not?

  She just didn’t.

  Why?

  This wasn’t why, but you wanna know something? What she remembers about him? Like an oldest memory?

  Yes, of course.

  A party at Greenough Park. Her father and mother and uncle Shane and some of their other friends. Uncle Spoils makes his dogs take a bath in the creek, coaxing them into the cold water. Working the clots of hair. He slips, goes all the way under and when he pops up he’s yards downstream and only just manages to get to his feet and clamber out. Coughs up sprays of water, eyes wild with fear. Walks sopping wet back up to his dogs barking and nipping at him in their excitement, and says you kids stay away from the water. It’s too high to play around. Don’t go near it. Go on. Go play over in them trees or somewheres.

  He’s from Butte. He’s totally hilarious. Big ears and a big nose and big eyes. Mustache, hair like red straw.

  So later. It’s almost dark and time to go home and her daddy is calling for her and she goes. She’s five or maybe six. And he’s in a hurry about something, about getting Mommy home, they had a fight because she was being foolish. Daddy had begun saying that sometimes about her, that she’d get foolish at parties, sometimes grown-ups acted silly he was saying, no, not like Spoils silly, but Mommy has her own kind of silly, it’s—we gotta hurry. And he says come on, the bridge is too far, the car is right over there, the lot is across the creek, come on. And he picks her up and they go into the dark water. And she tells him Spoils said to stay out and he wasn’t being hilarious—