Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451) Read online

  The wheels slipped on the wet dirt road heading into Billie Gulch and slipped again up the steep drive to the Short house. The drive was as pitted as a shell range. A pollarded goat drank from a halved oil drum and watched through its rectangle pupils the car slowly pass by and was trotting after when Pete glanced in the rearview. He leaned forward to get a better look at the house and when his car dipped into a severe pothole, Pete stamped his chin on the steering wheel. The car stalled out fifty yards from the place. His tongue throbbed and smarted sharply at once. It hurt so badly, he shuddered. He looked in the mirror, and the gaps between his teeth turned bright red.

  Pete climbed out of his car and weaved up the drive working his jaw, which was sore too, and the ram trailed after, its yellow demon eyes unnerving him. He shooed it away. He said something like “Muthathuck,” and spat blood. The goat nickered at him and stopped to sniff where Pete spat and it ate the dirt, saliva, and blood, the godawful animal.

  The Shorts kept a brace of black and tan Rottweilers, which were the nicest things they owned and that now lifted slobbering heads and growled in a low rheumy register in near harmony. They had met Pete, but always with Tony Short. Now Tony Short was nowhere about. They watched Pete sway heedless through the thin, gray mud, spitting blood. To the dogs he was merely some bent and slipping man, muttering and scraping off his shoes on the edges of the flagstone approach to the fence, now walking upright to the open gate. He was thirty, forty feet away from the porch when they barked. Pete halted, regarded them, and clapped his hands, beckoning them to heel. They might have recognized him. They might have not. His voice was suspiciously garbled. He might have sounded wounded. Definitely hinky.

  He peered around and over them at the windows, what trodden hardpan littered with broken toddler bikes and rubber toys that passed for a lawn. Now the Rotties barked in unison and stood. They took quarter steps in his direction, quivering, teeth bared forth in the slow peeling back of their faces.

  They had Pete’s full attention, and he tingled up and down his back. The air between his skin and his shirt was charged, as was his entire torso. He wondered did the dogs sense his electric fear.

  “Eathy boys, ith me,” he said, and they charged, brimmed hearts pounding, hot throats open. Pete yelped and swung closed the gate, and they slammed into it. The latch rattled but the gate held. They fell over one another and clambered up snarling, spittling and furious. Pete backed away, palms up, and they reared hindlegged at the gate like dwarf landlords, upright dogmen now whimpering in fury. Pete halted his retreat. It was okay. He was okay. He grabbed his own chest in relief. Heart still rattling in its shallowed brisket.

  Their barking continued unbroken, and they seemed to need no breath to do it. Pete flipped them off. He turned and walked back to his car, dodging puddles, happily hopping over them, quite giddy at this point, coulda shit myself, sweet Jesus that was close—

  Of hot white sudden he realized that the barking was halved, that the rhythmic tread of dogfeet was at least one of those fine animals loose and headlong at him.

  He didn’t even look.

  He leapt potholes to where his car had died, yanked open the door, and flung himself inside in terror just as the dog hit the open door, skidded past and immediately recovered, lunging, snapping at his hand before he could close it. For a moment the dog just barked at him as he dared not reach for the door handle. Then he did reach. The dog clamped its watering maw onto his outstretched hand. He yanked it free of the animal’s mouth, but the dog was able to budge into the car with him.

  From the yard, the less clever of the two animals stood and barked in high agony, completely forgetting the gap in the fence. The vehicle rocked at the combat within it, and the dog watched the man spill screaming out the passenger door, and leap atop the car. The Rottie followed him out, ran back into the vehicle, and out the driver’s side door, bewildered that it didn’t somehow arrive on the roof.

  Pete quaked and nearly retched with fear as he checked himself. Dark blood pooled in his palm and dripped out the back of his hand. Abrasions seethed under his coat. A long tear in his pant leg where the dog’s jaws had snapped closed like a sprung trap. Which the animals were. Hatred for Tony Short swelled in his breast. Fucking hill people and their fucking dogs lying around like loaded guns.

  The vehicle shook under him as the dog began tearing the upholstery. The second Rottweiler had found the hole in the fence now, and sprinted over and joined the other in the car, and from the sound of it, the two of them fought one another for a moment. Then they circled Pete’s car and Pete on top of it, heaving themselves up, whining and smiling at him, circling, until at last one attempted to scramble up to him, claws slipping on the bumper and hood as it slid off with a grunt. It would not be long, though, before one of them simply leapt onto the hood and drove him off the roof and into the jaws of the other.

  The moment to move was now.

  Now.

  Okay now.

  They’re going to get up here, you don’t do something—

  Pete slid over and shut the passenger door from above, and the dogs closed in on him, jaws clacking at his hand, and then he flung himself over to the driver’s side, dropped off the car, sprung into it, and slammed closed the door.

  The Rottweilers scratched at the door and window, and then snapped at one another again, hindlegged in an outraged dance. The gnashing inches from him on the other side of the window like something you wouldn’t even see at a zoo. Buffeting the car with their muscle, Pete’s keys jangled in the ignition.

  He opened the glove box and soaked up blood from his hand with a paper napkin. He grabbed a flask and opened it against his chest with his good hand and dribbled liquor onto the holes in his bad hand. It burned, and he winced hugely. He pressed the saturated and ripping napkin against his hot wounds until it finally stanched the bleeding and clung poulticed to his palm. The dogs crazed and slicking his window with slobber the whole time. He yelled at them, but naturally they could not leave him be.

  He dropped his head back and tried to cease shivering. Pictured the Short house in flames. How he’d do it. He didn’t even care about the Shorts’ children anymore, children who’d turn out just like Tony or get pregnant by guys like Tony who bought and bred dogs for sheer destructive power. Raze the thing. Scatter the Shorts to the winds.

  He grabbed their case file from the seat, and bloodied the case log:

  The Shorts breached their agreement with Agency and were again (fifth time) absent for a previously scheduled from this agent. Agent believes that the Shorts are evading inspection as ordered by the Rimrock County Family Court and Rimrock County Office of the Montana Department of Family Services and may again be involved in criminal activity (see log 7/30). Agent was unable to survey house due to attack by the Shorts’ wild dogs who were left unsupervised at home location and may pose considerable danger to Short children. Agent was bitten on the hand and—

  Pete set the paperwork aside. He reached into the open glove box, fetched the canister from within it, and cracked the window. He paused a moment in sympathy for the guileless animals, genuinely touched by the raw beauty and ideal breeding snarling wildly at the inch-wide gap in his window. Then he maced one dog square in its snapping face with exquisite joy. It bucked back and twirled coughing, fell, scrambled up in the mud, and then careened blind until it collided into a metal shed at full speed with an explosive bang. For a time it did not move. The second bore into the field after Pete sprayed it, simply trying to outrun the hot torment. Peace settled over the scene. The hornless billy chuckled like an amused codger. Pete stashed the spray and wrote some more:

  Agent recommends to the Court that the children be remanded to their aunt’s (Ginny Short) until such time as Crystal and Antonio Short can demonstrate their willingness to work in good faith with the State of Montana and as per their plea agreement with the District Attorney’s Office and the Office of Child Protective Services.

  —Agent P.W.S.

&n
bsp; Did her father call?

  Yes. She’d answered the phone assuming it was Kim or Lori and hoped maybe but probably not Kevin calling her back.

  God, if it was Kevin. A soph-oh-more. Yes, more please.

  Hey Applesauce, her father said.

  Oh.

  Yeah, hi.

  Hi.

  Look, I can’t make it down today. I’m really sorry. I got bit by a dog. I need to have it looked at—

  She asked him did he even have any idea what was happening.

  He said what, what was happening.

  She said she couldn’t believe he didn’t know. She wanted to get back at him. Intuited that she had some power in knowing what he didn’t: her mother was in her bedroom, shoving clothes into garbage bags.

  What is it, honey? What’s going on?

  What is wrong with this family?

  He said Rachel. He said come on Applesauce. He said to put her mother on the phone.

  She placed the phone on its silver cradle. She ran her hand through her hair over and over and hated her tiny head in the reflection of the toaster. The phone rang again. She stood from the table and walked on the balls of her feet to her bedroom. Her mother said for her to get it, but Rachel closed her door.

  Jesus, Rachel!

  YOU GET IT! she shrieked. I’M PACKING LIKE YOU TOLD ME TO! GOD!

  An empty suitcase. She heard her mother’s voice veer into a fighting pitch on the phone. She opened a drawer and pulled out an armful of shirts and threw them onto the bed. In the back of the half-empty drawer was a saddening fifth of vodka.

  Was it for a party? Was it for showing how grown she was and practically sophisticated?

  Yes. It was for sitting with Kevin. She’d seen his stomach once. His bare stomach.

  God.

  Soft. But hard.

  Oh.

  More.

  It ached to think about.

  Was that so over now?

  Duh.

  FIVE

  He drove four hours to the city of Missoula to see his wife. He didn’t eat or stop for gas. No radio. Like when you were a kid. The old man treated every road trip like a moon shot. You brought your grub for the trip or you went hungry. You held it or you pissed in the milk carton. Wasn’t anything on the radio anyway.

  He took Orange Street under the railroad and went up Front. It was strange visiting the city again, their city. The specific feeling of this small western city geography. He’d done his undergraduate at the university. A liberal arts degree in seven semesters. He’d done three semesters of grad school before he couldn’t afford it anymore. All of it right out of high school with a wife and newborn daughter. No small pride in that.

  There were cars around and people on the sidewalks. Buildings higher than two stories. He’d grown acquainted with smaller rhythms.

  He turned onto his wife’s street and parked near their cottage apartment by the river. Her apartment now. Late morning now and the sun had warmed off the frost except in the shaded lee of things. The aluminum screen was propped open with a broken brick, the door ajar. An open U-Haul trailer sat hitched to her little pickup, and his wife’s clothes, his daughter’s box spring, and even some of his old things were visible in it. A fierce hammering commenced in his chest and temple at the sight of his leather chair. He started up his car and then turned it off.

  When she saw him come in, she set down a cardboard box, took the bandana off her head, wiped her brow, and put it in her back pocket. She already had a beer on the floor near her that she picked up and drank. Put her palm on her hip. The loose beauty about her—the way her smile cracked across her face, her wide lopsided curls rigged into a bun that seemed liable to topple down—reminded him of a tooth about to come out, a button about to fall off. Everything about her always on the verge of falling down or out. Made a body want to screw her heart out. Even now. Even after she’d cheated on him and even though it still hurt like a purple bruise, he could see falling into bed with her. Just look at her. The beer, eyebrow cocked, her condescending grin.

  She said his name plain. Even that ached.

  What it must be like to go about in that body, to think with that mind. It occurred to him that even if he didn’t forgive her, it was possible to not blame her. Some narrow country existing between recriminations.

  “Fucking Texas?” he asked.

  He looked about. Bright squares of fresher paint where the pictures had been removed. Indentures of the couch feet in the rug.

  “Yeah, Pete. Texas.”

  “And you don’t ask me.”

  “I don’t gotta ask you where I can live.”

  “The hell you don’t, Beth. She’s my daughter.”

  “You’re welcome to take her up into the woods with you. If she’d go.”

  Backlit from the sunlight in the kitchen, his daughter appeared or might have been in the doorway the whole time. Nearly featureless in the shadows, a cutout. Knobbed at the knees, holding her kindling arms across her. Knowing if he went toward her she’d bolt to her room and slam the door, but he did anyway and she did, of course, run to her room.

  “Applesauce, come on.”

  She was thirteen. She hated him.

  He stood in the kitchen. Beth’s keys were on the table. She saw him looking at them and she picked them up and chucked them at his chest.

  “Keep us in the pumpkin shell. Right?”

  She crossed her arms. Dare-faced.

  He shot out the door with the keys.

  “Ah hell, Pete!” Beth yelled.

  She pursued him around the house, and catching him just as he reached the lilac bush, landed small blows to his head with her little pool-ball fists, and then all atangle they trundled through the brush and down the sharp incline to the rocks by the river. She clung to his arm so that he couldn’t get a good throw, and the keys plunked into the water not far from the shore. He shucked her off. She pelted his back with river rocks, and he climbed the bank wincing, and sprinted to the house, flung open the back door, and strode down the hall and into his daughter’s doorway.

  Rachel folded clothes kneeling on the floor, stacking them in little piles. Sparkling denim skirts. Striped shirts the colors of candy. She shoved things into a neon grip. She wore lip gloss and blue eye shadow, and her thin wrists were bangled with colored bands.

  “Tell her you don’t want to go,” he said.

  Homosexuals postered to her walls in blouses and fishnet gloves pouted at him. She stood up and walked calmly to him on flounced pink socks. Almost balletic in the precise placement of her feet.

  “Come here,” he said, throwing his arms wide. The contempt shimmered off of her like actual heat, as though he’d opened a furnace.

  She closed the door on him. The small clatter of the hook-and-eye lock.

  He was muttering promises against the door when Beth’s tennis shoes slapped on the kitchen tile. She could see him in the hall from where she sat at the kitchen table, little puddles at her feet.

  “You’re a son of a bitch, Pete.”

  She pulled off her wet shoe with effort and chucked it at him.

  “You buy her all that makeup?”

  “And beer and rubbers.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “Christ, Pete.”

  “Not much. You’re not kidding very much.”

  “You don’t get to social work me!” she yelled. “You just don’t. You split. It got rough here and you went to live in Tenmile. That was your decision.”

  “You made decisions too.”

  She threw her other shoe at him. He leaned away and it spanked the wall.

  “I’m not apologizing again. I’m not. I’m done trying to get your forgiveness. And I tried, Pete. Oh, I tried and tried and tried. I called you and called you and we went up there to see you. And what happened when we went up there to see you, Pete?”

  “Just don’t go,” he said to the floor.

  “Did you come out of that shitty cabin? Did you come out and see yo
ur own daughter, Pete?”

  He looked up at her.

  “You’re like an accident,” he said. “You’re like I was hit by a truck.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I’m not looking at a person right here in front of me. You’re more like a bad thing that happened to me.”

  Her laugh was sharp, a bark.

  “That’s really deep, Pete.”

  She grabbed some mail from the table and went through it, tossing what was addressed to him at his feet. Then she tore a bill open and wrote on the inside of the envelope and handed him the scrap. She said it was the address in Waco. That he could write to Rachel if he wanted. That he could start to send money if he was worth a shit at all.

  The bartender at the Stockman’s knew him, and Pete turned around and exited onto the street to avoid him. He was so inconsolably angry. He crossed the street behind a truck stamped FISH and was nearly hit by a Chrysler Imperial that screeched to a stop kissing his hip. Pete leered through the windshield with his hands on the hood of the car, the occupants dimly cognizant of his rage. He went up the block on Higgins scarcely aware of the foot traffic, the few ladies window-shopping the jewelry at Stoverud’s, a pair of businessmen slapping shoulders. He ducked up the alley and tried the back door of the Missoula Club, but it wouldn’t open for him. He scowled at the backside of the Howard Apartments. Some windows thrown open to the warmish noon, revealing the top of a television and a pair of naked feet a floor up. An argument broadcast from another of the upper rooms. Pigeons cooed and shook and bickered in the brick eaves and let fall a sleet of white shit and feathers. He pounded until a grim aproned barkeep unbolted the door. They looked at one another with mutual irritation.

  “You open or not?” Pete asked.

  The man stood aside and let him in. Pete sat at the bar and fingered the coin-scored divots in the pine, waiting for the bartender to pull his beer. He had most of it pumped down his throat by the time the man had extracted his change from the old-fashioned black niello register. Pete left the money where the man put it, and slid the glass at him. The bartender chewed his cheek.