Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451) Page 7

  “Chop chop,” Pete said.

  The man poured another, and Pete burped silently and drank under the man’s gaze. The bartender went to the small cutting board near the griddle and cut onions and came back wiping his hands on his apron and filled Pete’s beer and held up a bottle from in front of the mirror. Pete nodded. He poured them each a shot. Glasses clinked, the liquor hot and smoky. The bartender sucked the bourbon from his mustaches and then cooked Pete a burger and put the paper plate in front of him. Said for him to eat something.

  “That’s all right,” Pete said.

  “It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, pal. Eat something, you’re gonna drink like that in here.”

  Pete swallowed the last of his beer and slowly fingered out his change to the man, and told him he’d take a pint of Redeye. The bartender just stood there. Pete took a bite from the burger and chewed enormously. The man fetched down a pint bottle from the shelf, sleeved it in a paper sack. He snatched it back when Pete reached for it.

  “I don’t want to see you in here again. Not today.”

  On the sidewalk he looked around for a place to open the bottle. He turned and went to where Ryman Street quit in a parking lot by the river. He hopped down the riverbank clutching the alders for balance and pushed through a brake of Russian olive. He perched on a stripped cottonwood worn smooth by the water, the wood warmed by the sun. The Clark Fork River churned heedlessly past. Paper litter garlanded the thin trees nearby. A rufous barrel shipwrecked on the rocks. He uncapped the bottle and drank from the sack, visible in his seething to the pedestrians and the cars crossing the Higgins Street Bridge. Kingfishers chittered. Water skippers skated on a puddle by his feet.

  There was a time with his wife on this river or a river just like it, it can’t be this river, but in his memory it is this one. A time on a wash just like this where he lay shirtless with her shivering in the August night, jeans pasted dark and wet to his knocking legs, his torso white to glowing in the moonlight. Her hair tendriled and framed about her face like an outlandish black tattoo. Her wet dress like a sleeve of molting skin, which of a sort it had been that whole night in their dancing. Her heart in its red and white cage knocking just inches from his own, like two young prisoners tapping out simpleton Morse I am here I am here I am here. Here I am for your pleasure for you forever. On a river like this where he impregnated her. A river promise too, he said I love you I love you. Seventeen years old. A pleasure so total that even then he knew he had mortgaged years to her and he did not care.

  A derelict who was either Indian or sunburned so often that he looked like one emerged from the foliage downstream, togaed in an unrolled sleeping bag. This man nodded at Pete like he recognized in him a shared trouble, and came over and sat on the fallen tree next to him. Pete willed him away, but the man didn’t move or speak. Pete drank. The man leaned over to say something, but stopped, leaned away. He leaned over again, and back again, as if there was some confidence he could not evict from his brain.

  “Get away,” Pete grumbled.

  The man stood. Outrages having little to do with the present situation beginning to roil his features.

  “Wait. Sit down.” He patted the log. “Sit down.”

  The man dropped and Pete handed over the bottle. The man drank and then began to stutter out whatever it was he’d been trying to say.

  “Just let’s be quiet a minute,” Pete said.

  In Flipper’s Casino, Shane, Spoils, and Yance hunched around the machine where Spoils was on a tear at nickel keno. Laughing among pale patrons on the stools in front of the machines arranged along the walls. Not a soul played pool or sat at the tables or ordered or ate any food. All perched like ghouls in front of their machines.

  Pete now deep in his cups stumbled in and sidled up to them, and Shane doubletook him and said, “Holy shit, Petey!” and grabbed him with his big hands. He shook him and hollered joyfully in his face. An ugly, gap-toothed, red-haired giant.

  “Where you been, professor?” Shane asked.

  Pete grinned. He smelled of the river water and whiskey he’d been in.

  “Over . . . ,” he mumbled, throwing a thumb above his shoulder. “You know. Down by the river.”

  “Drunk by the river,” Shane said proudly to Spoils and Yance. “Old Pete. Lookit you.”

  Shane’s paws on his shoulders held him forth to Spoils and Yance, who took turns looking him close in the face to see his eyes swimming and dishing like half-full shot glasses.

  “You got a puddle down around your feet there, Pete,” Yance said.

  “So I do.”

  “Oh, you are good and peppered.”

  “Been in the river, have ya?”

  “Old Pete. Gosh.”

  “Get him to a table.”

  “Whishkey.”

  “Get him a beer. You need to sober up a skosh.”

  Spoils printed out his ticket, and together they led Pete over to the cage, where Spoils collected his winnings and then to the bar where he ordered a pitcher. They sat at a crooked table that spilled the heads off their beers. A thing you couldn’t rest your arms on. The beer in eight-ounce plastic mugs.

  “Easy Pete, the table’s crooked.”

  “My arm’s . . . my arm’s all wet.”

  “Look at this guy. Grab another table, Spoils.”

  “Isss all right. I’m a keep my beer in my lap.”

  “You still up in Tenmile?”

  He gestured in some way that suggested he was indeed still in Tenmile.

  “You okay, Pete?” Spoils asked. “He don’t look good.”

  “No he don’t.”

  “M’aright.”

  “Your eyes are a couple of setting suns, professor. Here, drink your beer. Gotta get some fluids in you. There you go.”

  A cadaverous good-timer of the sort usually clutched to the back of a motorbike appeared in the door. She sized up the room and beelined for Pete. She put her arm on his neck and began to deposit herself in his lap. Her elbow was like a shiv in his breast. He dropped his beer.

  “Fuck, lady. You spilled his beer,” Shane said.

  Shane pulled on her, but she wrapped her arm around Pete’s neck. Yelling commenced. For her to get out of here. Pete still wondering who this guy was.

  The crone snarled at him as the bartender lifted the hinged section of the bar. Her fingers dug in when the bartender and Shane tried to unhook her from Pete, and he cackled until she cut off his air. He yelped when she had a fist of his hair.

  “She ain’t lettin go. Come on, bitch, let go.”

  Yance handed him a fresh beer and he took it as though he might simply observe these happenings. She yanked and Pete dropped his cup. He swore then and took the woman’s fist full of his hair and mashed her knuckles into his own skull until she cried out and let go, a technique he’d been trained to deploy with raging children. Muscle memory. Shane and the bartender dragged her out, kicking the whole way like a dancing skeleton. Violent promises exchanged in the entryway by the gumball and cigarette machines. Shane returned, utterly unfazed, so happy to see him. Saying his name over and over. Pete, ol Pete.

  The keno music dinged idiotically. Spoils counted his money.

  “It’s a good thing I did so well at keno today. I was about busted.”

  “Get a fuckin job, dummy.”

  “I have one. A couple three days a week for that fencing outfit in Lolo. I don’t get paid shit.”

  “Why in the hell are you working three days, Spoils?” Shane asked. “Goddamn.”

  Spoils did numbers with his thumb and forefinger, some math that involved his knuckles. Shook his head.

  “Shit. I don’t think I can get by on just two.”

  They laughed at Spoils who didn’t let on whether he was sincere, and there was shoving at the doorway where the bartender still argued with the woman, and in spilled Gator and Kev with three gals laughing through squinched faces and tottering on high heels. Tight jeans sideseamed to their legs. Gator and Kev goi
ng “Ho! Pete!” and slapping his back and making fond introductions. Ursula, Kimmie, and some girl else. Ursula’s T-shirt lashed across her tremendous boobs, reading I WISH THESE WERE BRAINS. Kimmie spanked her eyelashes at Pete, and he lit up from within and resolved to fuck the first thing that would let him. Kev pulled Kimmie to the pool table. Ursula and the other one weaved through the crooked tables to the bar. Little rosy bottles fetched up out of the cooler and spiffed open. Pinkies aloft, the ladies sipped fancily.

  Shane took the back of Pete’s neck in his palm.

  “We need to go to a bar bar. Liquor.”

  Pete nodded loosely.

  Time began to pass unheeded.

  They assembled themselves giggling in the backseat of a Plymouth Gran Fury. Ursula settled onto his lap. He spread his legs some to accommodate her.

  “I’m not too heavy, hon?”

  He patted her leg to say no, she wasn’t.

  “I’m crushing this poor thing, Nancy. With my big fat ass.”

  Nancy ceased cleaning Gator’s ear with her tongue.

  “He looks all right,” she said.

  “Something better than all right,” Ursula said to him.

  Shane fired up the engine. A leonine roar and they reversed and screamed out, tires and women both.

  Ursula pushed his hair behind his ears. His chin pillowed on her perfumed tits. A bitter smell from her armpits. We’re all animals. Just dancing bears in tutus and monkeys with cigarettes. Painted up and stuffed into clown cars.

  “You’re a handsome thing,” she whispered. “Is your dick skinny? I bet you have a fat one.”

  Even in the depths of his stupor, Pete blushed. She tilted his head back and kissed his face and then deposited a sluggard tongue in his mouth. She moved the lukewarm thing about and detached herself and checked for the effect on him. This close she was rather unlovely, but he took a handful of her tit and groped for an elusive nipple under all that fabric of shirt and bra. “My” she breathed, and slavered about his mouth almost like she was looking for something. Gator watched, his woman constantly turning him by the chin to kiss her. The one named Kimmie over with Kev or maybe Spoils too, who could tell, the whole backseat a rolling cart of near to fuck.

  The pop and ping of gravel. Skid. Shane killed the engine, and they tumbled out of the car and into the sun rebounding off the white gravel.

  “Have a pull of this here, Pete.”

  Palming the flask, and taking a swallow, he retched it all burning back into his mouth. He spat into the weeds in back of the Eastgate Bar expecting them to ignite. Pivoted gracefully and went through the open door. The inside was as cool and dark as they were loud. He hopped onto a plush green stool and drank all that was proffered him. The candy cinnamon Hot Damns! that coated his lips and little glasses of Redeye that stripped his throat. The jukebox glowed green, red, and lurid blue. When a bass line curled out, Ursula pulled him up. He lay into her bosom as they slow danced among the squat tables. Knocking the candles in their red beaded teardrop holders to the carpet. She straddled his leg and ground herself on him. The girl behind the bar told them to get a room, that that wasn’t dancing. They groped against the wall yet. He ran his hand between her legs. It came away hot and moist as something from an oven. The girl behind the bar said she was calling the cops, they didn’t knock it off.

  “You’re pale.”

  “M’aright.”

  “Where you going, baby?”

  “Minute.”

  This moronic sunlight. Pete wheeled around the side of the building away from the dinnertime traffic on Broadway and leaned his head against the building, his arms quivering, and opened a faucet of rainbow vomit. The earth misted through his tears. Great sweeps of his head, steps taken, keeling into the backseat of the Gran Fury. Nodding out on warm Naugahyde, he had dreams of little narrative or figure or action. Colors. A whorl of sickened faces. The sense everybody needed his help.

  He is lifted by his armpits out of this car. Steps less articulate than a puppet’s. Coming to. His feet furrowing the dirt, bouncing over tree roots, dragging pinecones. Darkness. Smoke.

  “Here you go, buddy.” A can set in his lap. Somehow he’s been shaped cross-legged by the campfire. Shane opens the can, squeezes his hand around it. Man is clay, he thinks.

  “A couple sips of that’ll bring you around.”

  “Man is clay.”

  “He sure as shit is, buddy.”

  Every pained divot in his crushed and wasted features he can feel. He sets the can by and crabs behind him and draws himself against a stump.

  A body between him and the fire now.

  It is Great Ursula, hands on her hips.

  “You dance with me, baby?”

  “Just let him alone, Ursula.”

  “You just stay right there, honey,” she says to him. “I’m a dance for you.”

  Great Ursula standing in front of him, a black amphora against the fireshards, the upflung sparks. She tells no lie. She is dancing.

  SIX

  He woke in the dark, sat up, and wondered where he was. He recognized the orientation of the windows in the walls but was for a moment lost in a rough draft of a place dear to him until he remembered all that had happened. Missoula. This, the cottage they shared. Where they tried to stay married. The place was empty. Beth had cleared out already, taken Rachel.

  He got up and rinsed his face at the kitchen sink.

  Spoils snored on the living room floor. In a sense, his last friend, the last one who thought of him dearly. Shane, Yance, and the others—they missed him, but they didn’t know him.

  Nobody knows me but me. Where had he heard that. Was it true.

  Spoils awake of a sudden and peering up at him.

  “How you doin, professor?”

  Pete coughed. Bolts of phlegm rattled loose and he spat them onto the wall and sat on the carpet with Spoils.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “I said I’d stay out here with you. Almost left you on account of you were punching at anybody’d touch you.”

  “I got hammers in my head.”

  “It’s good to see you, Pete,” Spoils said.

  Pete nodded.

  “Where’s Beth?”

  “She’s going to Texas.”

  “Texas?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jeez. But Rachel . . . ?”

  “Yup.”

  Spoils sat up against the wall.

  “We seen him at the Stock’s one night. Playing poker.”

  “I ain’t even mad at that fucker.”

  “Shane kicked his teeth in anyhow.”

  “I didn’t ask him to do that.”

  “You’d a done it for him.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Well, Shane, he does like to pound a motherfucker.”

  They sat in the squares of streetlight and looked at one another like a pair of prisoners in a cell.

  “What are you gonna do, Pete?” He nodded toward the door.

  “About Beth and Rachel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I dunno. I should go get ’em. I just don’t know how.”

  Pete’s eyeballs throbbed in this screaming gale of a hangover, of a life. He said to himself to quit feeling sorry for himself. Bed, lie in it.

  “It is real good to see you, Pete.”

  “You too, Spoils.”

  It was five in the morning. He told Spoils to go back to sleep and he sat in back of the cottage listening to the river behind the bushes, slowly deciding things. Deciding to quit his job and chase down his wife.

  At least get Rachel back.

  Something. He wasn’t sure what.

  Just quit the job first.

  He entered an annex of one of the county buildings, and through a door into Western Service District Headquarters of the Department of Family Services regional offices. Three rows of cubicles under low-hung ceilings the color and texture of saltines. The only person around on this Saturday was a woman nursing a
baby from a bottle in a chair in the middle row of cubicles. She lit a cigarette, then hefted the child over her shoulder to burp it, turning her head to exhale smoke away from its face. Under a nearby desk, a boy turned over. Asleep too. From somewhere in a rear office another woman emerged with papers and went into the cubicle where Pete couldn’t see her. A moment later the mother toted the baby down the divide between the cubicles toward the front door. The social worker woke the child under the desk. The boy sat up dazed, then fearful and unrecognizing. She coaxed him out, took his hand, and walked him toward the front door after his mother. The boy, now alert, inspected Pete as he passed, whose own attentions had drifted to the social worker guiding and coaxing the child along.

  She was someone new to the office, or new to Pete at least. Long dark hair done in a loose ponytail. A warm grin spread over her open and pleasing face as she led the child, and noticing Pete, she asked him would he wait, said she’d be right back. He said he would. Thinking I’d set a car on fire if you asked me nice. I’d eat a shotgun shell.

  He sat on the plastic chair near the door. His hand throbbed and itched under the filthy bandage gone brown with dirt, blood, and discharge and he scratched the wound absently. The dog bite had begun to heal, but after a few days the pink folds of skin around the scabs had turned bright red and hurt to touch.

  He watched through the blinds as the social worker put the woman and her kids into a cab, and then met her at the door when she came back in. Smiling, her hands shaped into a little basket. She asked what she could do for him.

  “I’m looking for Jim,” he said.

  “He’s the supervisor.” She glanced at his bandage. “Are you working with anyone? Or is this a referral?”

  He chuckled. He had not showered. The awful bandage. He said that no, he wasn’t working with anyone.

  “Maybe I can help you.”

  He noticed then that a pine needle was suspended in a tangle of his long hair. He hadn’t shaved, hadn’t so much as glanced in a mirror. He surely looked as sorry as anyone who’d been here for services.

  “Are you all right?”