Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451) Page 5

  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.

  FOUR

  Pete’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.”

  Luke rubbed his face, pulled his hands across his eyes.

  “I know. You’re right. You’re right. I can be frustrating.”

  “At this point, even Jesus and Satan just wish you’d choose a fucking side.”

  Luke uncrossed his arms and nodded. Ran his hand through his hair and then remembered that he wanted it flat, and pressed it back down.

  “I know.”

  Pete abruptly went inside. He returned rolling a cigarette.

  “How’s your old lady?” Luke asked.

  Pete pointed a wooden match at him.

  “Leave it alone, Luke.”

  Luke sat up straight and looked off into the woods. There was nothing out here except trees and stones and animals, and though the forest was alive with the sound of those trees swaying in the wind and the small critters moving in them, you could tell he was bored already of it. The woods made him antsy. Land and nature gave him no peace. Never did.

  “It’s nice out here,” Luke lied. “I wish I’d have gotten my shit together to get a place like this.”

  Pete turned a large piece of firewood on end and sat unsteadily on it.

  “Bullshit. You hate it in the sticks.”

  “So do you.”

  “What do you want?”

  Luke grinned a private grin that Pete knew hid a secret he was about to hear. Something Luke connived.

  “Should I bother asking?”

  “Bunnie wants you to come out to the house. Dad’s been sick. That cough.”

  “Gosh, he has a cough? Why didn’t you say something?”

  “You should go see him. Bunnie and him.”

  “Let me just get my coat,” Pete said, dragging on the cigarette.

  “You need to check up on them,” Luke said.

  “You check up on them.”

  “I ain’t going back that way.”

  “Here it comes. I fuckin knew it. What’d you do?”

  Luke ran his hands over his thighs, his fingers arched into tines. It was something bad.

  “I knocked out my parole officer.”

  Pete began to cough, he was laughing so hard. So hard he dropped the cigarette and stepped off the porch and gripped his knees.

  “I had a knife on me that I’m not supposed to and Wes saw it and started talking all this shit. ‘Serious violation of my parole.’ Fuckin asshole. Way up in my face. Way up, Pete.”

  “So you clocked him.”

  “I beat the lovin hell out of him. I couldn’t stop my fists,” Luke said, holding up his hands with some wonderment.

  “You dipshit.”

  “Stop laughing. I had to spend two nights in the damn woods. It ain’t funny.”

  “Yes it is. Yes, it truly is.” Pete got back up on the porch and just beamed at his brother. “This beats everything.”

  “I ain’t going back. I can’t do no time again, Pete.”

  “Shit, it can’t be that bad. Eighteen months? What are you gonna do instead?”

  Luke stood and rocked back on his heels.

  “Right. You have a plan,” he said.

  “I need someone to know where I am. In case anything happens. With Dad.”

  “Nothing’s gonna happen with Dad.”

  “You really need to go see them, Pete.”

  “I said I would.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Well, now I have.”

  “This week?”

  “Where you gonna run to?” Pete asked.

  Luke reached around to his back pocket and handed Pete a slip of paper. Penciled onto it was an Oregon post office box and a map with directions to a spot not far from the coast.

  “What’s this?”

  “He’s a decent guy. Met him at church. He was coming through giving a pretty interesting lecture.”

  “Sounds like you got everything under control.”

  Luke smiled
the beneficent little smile he’d acquired with religion.

  “You should go sometime. It’s done me a world of good.”

  “That’s evident. Nobody would debate you.”

  “Sarcasm is just anger.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “Pete.”

  “I got your information here.” Pete held up the paper. “Anything else?”

  “I don’t think there’s a phone, but if there is, I’ll call your office.”

  Pete mashed out the cigarette smoking on the porch with his bare heel. He didn’t feel anything but a small spot of warmth.

  “Give yourself up, Luke.”

  “I have, my man.” He pointed upward.

  “To the Teton County sheriff.”

  Luke put a hand in the air, his eyes floating off, a helpless expression on his face, and paid out a long sigh, that taken together meant that Pete was right, and running was foolish and would just escalate things, but also that Luke had made up his mind and there was no talking him out of it.

  “I got to get away from this trouble,” he said. “It’ll blow over.”

  Luke stretched out his hand for Pete to shake and to the surprise of both of them, Pete took it.

  “It ain’t gonna blow over, Luke. Not this time.”

  Luke pumped his brother’s hand and pulled him in, clapped his palm onto his neck, and hugged him. Then he bounded into his truck, waved, and backed out. He turned around on the dirt road and then trundled down the mountain. For a long time Pete could hear him going.

  He drove his Corolla with the windows down, but pumped them back up when mammatus clouds popcorned over the Flathead Valley and gumdrops of rain began to splash his windows. He turned onto Highway 28 and the clouds quit raining altogether and shortly thereafter broke up like a crowd after a fistfight. He drove into mature afternoon sunshine. The yellow valley slicked and glistening where the haymows stood in the fields like wet yurts. Coveys of birds rose in folding fans and closed to the ground, pecking where the rainwater had flushed up worms and bugs. The highway bore south, and at Paradise, Montana, he crossed just down from where the Flathead joined the Clark Fork River candescing in the sun like a sheet of copper tapering off up the valley toward Idaho. He eased along the water and rolled down the windows again. The cool fresh air poured in. The papers in his car fluttered like a rookery.