Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451) Read online

  They are already up to his waist.

  He’s breathing hard, straining against the water. Footing the rocks now, slow steps. The water is cold through her shoes. She says she’s scared Daddy and it’s cold Daddy and she pulls her feet out of the water and it changes his balance and he stumbles and she clutches and screams.

  He stops in the middle of the stream. Says for her to be quiet.

  Be still.

  He’s breathing heavy.

  Water’s not that deep, not over my head, but it’s fast, okay, he says. You gotta just hold on. I got you. His breath burns her nostrils and the smell of his sweat is bitter.

  She realizes much later—when she got that bottle of crème de menthe with Kim and Lori from Lori’s dad’s liquor cabinet—that he was drunk. But even at the time she thinks I don’t trust him, I don’t believe him.

  He doesn’t have me.

  And the next step, he slips, they go over into the roar and churn and she’s so shocked by the cold and the outrageous fact of this even happening that she isn’t even upset, she’s just this thing being acted upon, totally helpless as a dolly, that it isn’t until he’s got her at a cutbank and pushes her up through the brush, handfuls of wet dirt falling away, shoving her into the poking sticks that then, right on the heels of relief, she is so so so mad. She slaps him when he comes out after her.

  That your daddy could drown you on accident. She’s shaking with the cold and the last of her fear and then her warming anger, her daddy almost killed them both.

  Come on, Applesauce, he says. You’re okay, he says.

  And when he touches her, she won’t let him, she says you’re foolish too you’re foolish Daddy too.

  TWO

  Tenmile was set in a triangular valley at the confluence of the Kootenai River and Deerwater Creek. A ghost town shared the creek’s name, a settlement abandoned in 1910 when the last of the fifty thousand ounces of copper had played out. Before that, gold and silver. Miners by the hundreds and then the thousands blasted it free with dynamite and high-pressure water hoses, melted the mountain into muddy and runneled hillocks that from the bird’s eye would have looked like a red and brown cavity furiously attended by denim-blue ants. Deerwater was never easily gotten to, and the town of Tenmile sprung up, first as a canvas-tent trading station the name of which was lost to memory but eventually became known as Tenmile because of its distance on the perilous switchbacks from the mining camp.

  By the time the last of the miners left Deerwater’s muddy sluices, Tenmile boasted a town square with an area for a courthouse. The town swelled to 3,500 souls. The citizens incorporated and sent money to the legislature to be named the county seat and within the year broke ground on a courthouse and jail. Timber and the vermiculite mine in the nearby town of Libby kept Tenmile populated through the world wars and well into the 1960s before the grown children began to move away, the elders started to die, and the town settled at a suspect equilibrium of about 2,500 people in 1975.

  It was home to many loggers and around a hundred men working at the mill. A few guys made more than fifteen dollars an hour at plumbing, machine work, and sporting goods. A used-car dealer did fair competition with his rivals in Troy and Libby. There were a pair of service stations and two churches (both Protestant), four steamy cafes, and ten bars. About three hundred citizens made the haul to Libby for the third shift at the vermiculite mine and came back looking like they were dipped in flour, bloodshot in the eyes. Fervid coughs kept their wives and children up nights.

  There was a single lawyer who handled all the defense work, a rotund judge named Dyson, and a profoundly alcoholic district attorney on whom even the old sots looked down. Two pastors and two pastor’s wives and a gaggle of ever-present old ladies threw bake sales for various charities and gossiped about everyone in sight. Self-important nepotists manned the fire department and police station, the kind of men who sometimes turned handily heroic in the histories of other small towns and were no different here, having thwarted a bank robbery in 1943 that could be pointed out in places where ricocheted bullets had lodged around the square. There was even a piano instructor who lived in a small, well-kept cottage that looked like it just might house a piano teacher and from which issued an incompetent plinking that proved it. And there were twenty-plus teachers in the town and all were women save the gym instructor and the principal who managed the elementary and adjacent high school.

  The children were like children from anywhere, maybe a little less so. Which is to say they watched very little television and lived in trailers and cabins. In the main, they behaved themselves, but that didn’t mean all of them were suited for much more than seventh or eighth grade. Nurturing a child’s intelligence was still considered a bit indulgent—the sooner they got to work, the better. It was well known that Principal Pemberton didn’t brook troublemakers—he simply expelled them into the meager economy. So it was something of an intrigue when Pemberton called and asked if Pete could come down to the school right away.

  SOME OF THE OLDER children said they’d seen the boy on the playground but no one talked to him as he edged his way along the fence to watch the kids on and around the jungle gym. He sat on one of the halved dump truck tires in the wood chips, bonging his enormous boots against the rubber. The kids who noticed the boy didn’t speak to him.

  Some thirty minutes later Principal Pemberton found him on the second floor, outside Ms. Kelley’s art class. The nurse was with the child now. Pete and Pemberton regarded them from behind the glass of the door.

  “He turned to run, I grabbed his arm, and he bit me.”

  Pete looked at Pemberton. He showed Pete his hand.

  “Didn’t break the skin.”

  Pete looked through the window at the kid. He wore brown camouflage pants that were rolled at the cuffs to fit him and a darker brown sweater that hung on him holey as netting. Leaves and pine needles stuck to the wool and his knit cap. His eyes scanned the room, lighting on Pete behind the glass only long enough to look away and study the nurse or the room.

  “I got him wrapped up, but just barely,” Pemberton said. “The kid’s strong for his size.”

  He tapped on the glass and the nurse came out.

  “He’s got bloody gums,” she said to Pemberton. “I think he has scurvy?”

  “No one’s seen him before,” Pemberton told Pete.

  “He reeks,” the nurse said.

  The boy stood with his hands on his hips. He ran a sleeve under his nose. His movements were swiftly mannish, as though he were another species and full-grown for it, a pygmy or some other reduced people.

  “Get a name off of him?”

  “No. He wouldn’t tell me.”

  “How’s he been?” Pete asked the nurse.

  “Sweet as a little bell.”

  “And no one has any idea where he’s from? None of the other kids know him . . . ?”

  Pemberton shook his head.

  The boy sat back on the exam table and unlaced his enormous boots, and after he pulled them from his feet, plucked out the rags balled into each to fill the space after his toes ended. He sniffed the second of these rags like it held some information, shook it out as he had the first one, and laid it to the side of him. He tugged off cheesecloth socks. His bare feet were sickening. A thin flap of soleskin hung from his foot and he pulled it off like a piece of wet sack paper. He smelled this too, held it up to the light, and tossed it onto the floor, where it set like a gray cold cut. The rest of his foot like an etiolated stem, a rotten tuber or root.

  “My word,” the nurse said.

  The boy looked up at their blanched faces and resumed the crude debridement of his feet.

  Pete opened a notepad and wrote down the name of a pediatrician, tore off the paper, and handed it to Pemberton.

  “This guy’s retired and a little deaf. Let it ring and he’ll eventually answer. Ask if he can come down.”

  Pete opened the door and went in. The nurse was about to follow, but he
asked her to let him see the boy alone. The boy glanced up, but kept picking at his feet. Pete took a chair across from him.

  “Hi. I’m Pete.”

  Pete leaned down and saw the gray sags under the child’s eyes on an otherwise clean pale face. There was a taupe grime of dirt and ash all over his clothes. He smelled like a burnt match and salted fatback. His chopped hair shot out in brown shocks.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Benjamin.”

  “Mind if I ask how old you are?”

  “Go on ahead.”

  Pete grinned.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Really? You don’t look more than eight or nine.”

  The boy licked his fingers and seemed to be pressing loose skin in place.

  “Where’re you from?”

  The kid tossed his head.

  “In town somewhere?”

  The kid shook his head no.

  “Where’s your mama and daddy?”

  The kid began to roll down his long socks. Light could be seen through them.

  “Your feet hurt?”

  “Not bad.”

  “You must’ve walked a long way for them to get like that.”

  The boy pulled on the socks and then began to stuff the rags back into his boots. A vinegar odor wafted across to Pete.

  “Listen, I’m from DFS. I can take you home.”

  The kid pulled one of the great black boots onto his foot and began to lace it.

  “Sorry. Department of Family Services. That’s what the letters mean. I’d like to see if you and your family need anything. Help with groceries or maybe some medicine or something.”

  The kid tugged on the other boot and laced it.

  “What do you think?” Pete asked.

  The boy stood on his newly booted feet and rocked in place on them.

  “I gotta shit,” he said.

  The kid walked bowlegged and with his chest forward like he was breasting his way across a river, observing with badly concealed interest the panoply of animals and plants cut from construction paper and taped to the walls. He looked through an ajar door at a classroom taking a quiz and at the lockers and up into the staircase with the mute fascination of an ambassador. In the bathroom, the boy entered the doorless stall and regarded the sculpted porcelain a moment before locating the upright seat and pulling it down. He shat with Pete watching, shameless as a dog. When he washed his hands, he lathered promptly, and then rinsed with wary pleasure, turning his hands in the hot water and looking at Pete in the mirror as if he had to keep an eye on him, and not the other way around.

  The child didn’t have hot running water. And he’d never set foot in a public school.

  The boy wouldn’t let the doctor examine him, but the doctor said scurvy was certainly possible. Said to check his belly and legs for liver spots, if the boy’d ever let him. He told Pete to get him some vitamin C, asked after the boy’s stool, and when Pete described the quality of it, wrote a prescription for the giardia he’d probably gotten from drinking the mountain water.

  There was no trace of the boy’s earlier violence against the principal. If anything, the child radiated studied calm. He spoke in the clipped cadence of a POW, announcing at one point that he’d renounced his citizenship. He stated plainly that he’d kill anyone who stuck him with a needle.

  Pete took the boy with him into the pharmacy for the medicine and vitamin C. The kid suffered a few stares for his clothing, the lengths of tattered sweater hanging off of him like witch-hair moss. His ears turned red. Pete took him around the corner to Jessop’s Sporting Goods and by eye sized a winter coat, jeans, and a pullover because the boy wouldn’t try anything on. He bought him socks, a bag of undershirts, and a pair of boots. For good measure, he grabbed a first-aid kit with gauze, bandages, salves, and aspirin, and had the clerk fetch a bottle of iodine tablets.

  He half-expected the child to run, but he followed Pete faithfully.

  When they got to the Sunrise Cafe, Pete guided the boy into the bathroom and set the sacks of clothes on the counter. He pulled out the bag of T-shirts and opened it and tore the tags off the pants.

  “Let’s get you in these new duds, huh?”

  The boy swallowed, regarded the clothes like a person might a growling dog. With stillness and fear.

  “Nuh-uh,” the kid said.

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “I need to go home.”

  “And I’ll take you. But you could use some new clothes and something to eat. Then we’ll go right home.”

  Pete picked up the shirt and started toward the boy. An outsized fear gripped the child and he backed into the wall and slid down against it and closed his arms around his head.

  “Hey, hey it’s all right,” Pete said. “I’m not gonna hurt you. Here—”

  But when Pete set the shirt on the tile before the kid, he clutched himself, pressed his face in his folded legs. Pete stepped back.

  “Come on,” Pete said. “You’re wearing rags.”

  The kid didn’t move. Five minutes like this. Ten. Flatware clapping together in the kitchen. Someone tried the door and Pete shouted that the bathroom was out of order.

  The kid muttered into his legs.

  “I can’t hear you when you talk into your lap like that.”

  The kid looked up at him. “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. Then we’ll eat—”

  “He won’t . . .”

  “Who won’t? Your father? He won’t want me helping you and your family?”

  The boy traced the lines of the grout in the tiles between his legs.

  “Does he hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “Does he hurt you mother?”

  No answer.

  “Look, Benjamin. Let me tell you what I see. I see a kid who’s sick and small because he hasn’t been getting fed enough. And now you’re telling me that you can’t put on some new clothes. I’m starting to wonder if it’s safe for you to go home—”

  “You’re not gonna take me home?!” the kid screamed. “You can’t keep me! You have no right!”

  “Whoa!” Pete shouted. “Just calm down. I’ll take you home. But I want you to—”

  Pete was going to tell the child to just take the clothes home with him, but the boy tore off his sweater and began unbuckling his belt.

  They lived in the woods some ways north of Tenmile in the rolling and dense forests of the Purcell Range. The boy didn’t know the way to town by any of the county roads or which logging road he crossed coming down from their camp. He emerged from the forest behind the IGA grocery. Beyond that was an uninterrupted series of ascending ridges bisected by an old railroad track that was no longer in use. The kid said he went along the backbone of the ridges until he descended to and crossed a creek and then finally up a logging road. Determining what logging road was the problem. Pete had an idea from his map in the glove box, but it was old, and the new roads were not on it.

  Of course, the kid had no idea how you drove there, didn’t know if it was a Forest Service road or a Champion Timber Company road or what. It was coming on evening and they had been all over looking for any markers the boy might recognize. Outcroppings of rock. But there were only trees, miles and miles of green larch.

  “Maybe this one,” the boy said, pointing to another turnoff marked with two yellow reflectors a mile or so from where Separation Creek joined the Yaak River. The child had eaten lunch, drunk a large glass of orange juice, and even smiled at some of Pete’s jokes.

  They went up a disintegrating road, grown over with timothy and cheatgrass. The potholes were disguised by banks of unmelted snow at the higher elevation.

  “This road’s gonna swallow my car.”

  There was a closed gate ahead.

  “That’s the gate there,” the boy said. “It’s got that dent in it.”

  Pete stopped the car and turned it off. The engine ticked under the hood. The larches and pines s
ighed.

  “How far?” Pete asked.

  “A ways.”

  “A couple miles, what?”

  The boy didn’t know. Pete told him to wait in the car and got out and began to inspect the area around the gate. There would be a key somewhere around here. There always was—biologists and surveyors for the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and Champion Timber were always coming and going. He looked in the crooks of trees at about eye level and under stones that were about the right size. He heard the kid get out of the car.

  “Just wait,” Pete said. “I’ll have this gate open in a minute.”

  Pete spotted a flat rock that sat conspicuously atop another one the size of a dinner plate. Bingo. He turned the top rock over. Nothing. He looked under the plate stone. Nothing.

  “The key’s gone,” the kid said.

  Pete stood.

  “Papa throwed it in them bushes over there, but good luck finding it.”

  Pete looked up the ragged road. He couldn’t even see the first switchback. He looked up for the sun, which had already ducked into the trees.

  “How far are you up this road?”

  “I dunno. A ways.”

  “A ways,” Pete said. He ducked under the gate and told the kid to come on.

  The sky and the snow they walked over turned everything the sleepy blue of evening and the gelid air burned cold into their lungs. Pete’s lungs at any rate. You’re in terrible shape, he thought. The boy trudged just ahead of him and by the second switchback could have bolted and Pete wouldn’t have pursued him. But instead, the kid stopped against a stump where the road was half washed out and a steady trickle of water ran down a gut carved into the dirt.

  Pete gripped his knees gratefully. Walking he’d pondered what he would say to the boy’s parents. He’d tell them that he brought Benjamin back just as fast as he could, that nobody wanted to mess with them or their boy. He was working on what he’d say about the clothes, the prescription, and the vitamin C. But as he played out the scene his positivity set with the sun, and his decision to take the kid up here seemed more absurd. Then fully stupid. Pete had been motivated by a certainty that keeping the kid overnight was not an option. He had no place to put him. Cecil was at the Cloningers’, and he couldn’t ask them. There was nowhere else.