Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451) Page 8

  He laughed outright now. Looked at her and cackled again.

  “Is something funny?”

  “I’m actually DFS. Out of Tenmile.”

  “Oh God.” She covered her mouth. She blushed and was altogether fetching that way. “I’m sorry, I didn’t . . .”

  “It’s okay. I know I look like hell. I’m Pete.”

  “I’m so embarrassed.”

  He stuck out his good hand. She took it. He held up his other hand.

  “I’ve had a rough couple days. Dog bit me. Visiting a client.”

  She took his bandaged hand and inspected the filthy thing.

  “Did you see a doctor?”

  “No.”

  She pulled him into a harshly lit break room that smelled of the melted plastic someone had burnt in the ashtray. He sat in the chair she pulled out for him. She got a first-aid kit out of a drawer and sat in front of him.

  “Take it off,” she said.

  He tore away the bandage with his teeth. The black arc of punctures against the white of his hand. His yellow bruises smelled like wood smoke. She sucked her teeth and looked hard at him.

  “You didn’t even wash it out?”

  “Sure I did.”

  “Well, now it’s infected.”

  He cowered mildly at the reprimand in her voice. Rather liked it.

  She ripped open a bag of cotton balls, soaked one with iodine, and sopped the back of his hand. He gazed at the ceiling, breathing through his mouth. She opened a sterile gauze pad, cut it to fit, and taped it in place. Told him to get to a doctor for antibiotics.

  “Thank you.”

  She gave him a curt nod.

  He could smell himself, a tinge of dirt, sap, sweat, and beer. How repellent he must be. He started in chuckling again. She quit putting the first-aid kit back together and crossed her arms.

  “Stop laughing at me.”

  “I’m not. I swear.”

  She searched his face, like she wondered was he telling the truth. He thought perhaps she liked him, might at least be intrigued despite his foul fettle.

  Then she stood to leave.

  “Hey. Wait. I’m sorry. This was real nice of you. I just came in to tell Jim I gotta take some time off. I didn’t expect all this.” He held up his fresh bandage. “So thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mary.”

  “I’m Pete.”

  “You said.”

  “I wasn’t laughing at you.”

  “I’m not bothered.”

  “Sure you are.”

  Mary touched her throat, then noticed she’d done it, and abruptly shook Pete’s good hand.

  “You want to have lunch? The Palace.”

  Her turn to laugh.

  “Ouch.”

  “You’re all bandaged up. You’ll be all right.”

  “Still.”

  She stood and looked at him a minute and then shook her head. He thought maybe she was deciding to join him, but then she said it was nice to meet him and that she’d tell Jim he’d been by.

  Two cops standing outside squinted at him for a moment like he might be their man. He loped across the courthouse lawn, then crossed Broadway straight for the Palace. Cafe, bar, and poker joint. Many small hours in here playing cards. Old boys on fixed income who sat lively as stones. Guys who sheriffed every hand because they couldn’t stand to be bluffed and the pushovers who quit at the sight of a raise. The guys who didn’t say a thing and felt acutely some mistake they’d committed in antecedent games or hands, and who now played with premonitions of coming disaster. A percentage at every table arrived simply to do some sort of penance. They shot hot racing glances around the table that would only mellow with muted relief when you took their money. Some drunk freshmen. Some lawyers. Saps who paid for Pete’s books, his rent. Diapers and burp cloths. Because, above all, poker is a congress of punishment.

  ONE WINTER PETE is playing every night. He has a job as a janitor on campus and is making up the difference here. Rachel is about two or three.

  His father appears in the doorway of the Palace, and the cold air blows in around him such that everyone in the place turns and says to get in or get out. He steps just inside. The snow clots to his cowboy hat red and obscene in the neon. He takes the hat in his hands, brushes it off. He peers into the gloom. Can’t see that Pete’s at the rear table, by the wall, waiting to fold.

  But Pete sees him, sees everything in the poker room.

  His old man slaps the hat against his thigh, comes in palming it to his chest. Pete’s not exactly avoiding him. Just wants to see how he acts. And he acts like he’s been in a place like this, but never for long. He frowns at the scoundrels and when he’s about ready to give up, Pete chucks his cards and stands. His father sees him then, and Pete points to an empty booth up front. They sit together. His father observes Pete, these surroundings.

  His silver hair glistens with pomade. His father looks older, and Pete realizes that it’s been a couple of years. Since Rachel’s first birthday. His father deigns to undo the top button of his coat. He’s sweating. A couple drunks neck in the booth behind Pete and the old man frowns.

  I see you’ve found your level, he says.

  Got rent to pay.

  As though it were some surprise.

  I thought you wanted me to go to college.

  And here I did not realize this was a class.

  This is how I’m doing it.

  My understanding is that people finish school.

  I’m in graduate school.

  Graduate school.

  Yes. Jesus, what do you want?

  Tell me the degree I paid for.

  Liberal arts.

  Tell me what does a person do with a degree in liberal arts?

  He gets a graduate degree.

  The old man shakes his head demonstratively. Pete wonders what Ma ever saw in him, if ever he was so much as pleasant.

  And I don’t suppose you have any concern whatsoever about that child of yours.

  We can’t all be paragons of fatherhood like you.

  The old man’s eyes flame up like they’d been blown by a pair of bellows.

  Let me just write that down. He takes out his little Moleskine, the black pencil. How do you spell it?

  Pete tells him.

  And it means . . . ?

  Model of excellence.

  The old man jots this down and condescends to grin at Pete. Garlands and tinsel and blinking Christmas lights play on the wall behind him. Crude cartoon Santas on the windows. Reindeer play poker.

  What do you want?

  His father reaches into his coat and slides forward a check. A great sum.

  Your little brother worked summers. In high school he worked the whole school year.

  He’s been arrested three times—

  Just for fighting. And he never asked for a dime of bail.

  No, you’re right. He’s a perfect angel.

  Are you bitter that you’re the oldest? Is that it? Do you tell yourself I was too hard on you?

  Pete doesn’t answer. He won’t say shit. Let the old man figure out what went wrong. Pete takes a cigarette from inside his coat and lights it with a match.

  Your mother heard you were playing cards for money. He taps the check. About put the old gal into a tailspin.

  Just then Spoils comes over, almost on cue. The guy can smell money, it’s why they call him Spoils, even though it goes through him like beer. Oftener as beer. He greets the old man who doesn’t remember him from the wedding, and says he hates to ask, but does Pete have a dollar. Pete and the old man enter a silent exchange about this. Then Pete says to go over there on the table, go on over. Pete waves to the dealer that it’s okay, and Spoils takes up a chip and shuffles over to the cage. The old man’s burning up in myriad objections.

  Pete slides the check back toward him.

  I don’t want it.

  The old man smiles.

&n
bsp; Oh, I ain’t giving it to you. I come to see you tear it up.

  You came all the way from Choteau to—

  So I can bring the pieces of this check back to your mother. Yep.

  I won’t disappoint you.

  That would be a refreshing outcome.

  Pete rips the check in half, rips the halves in half, and snows the table with them. Then he heads back to the poker table, back to work.

  The bell over the door tolled her unexpected arrival. He kicked out the chair in front of him.

  “Have a seat, Mary.”

  She looked at the chair a moment.

  “Have lunch with me.”

  “There was a call.”

  “Look, I think you’re very pretty and I can tell already you’re interesting as hell. Just sit down.”

  She grinned and shook her head at some thought and glanced at the door. As if debating something. Maybe she was thinking of her boyfriend.

  “Soup,” he said, opening his hand over his bowl like he was teaching her the word.

  “There was a call. From Tenmile. Somebody named Cloninger. He says the kid you left with him isn’t welcome anymore.”

  What was it like on the way to Texas?

  It was Wyoming, which means to drive forever through ugly scrubscape the color of dirty pennies.

  It was just wyoming along. They were wyoming forever. You could wyom all day and not make any progress. To wyom was to go from nowhere to nowhere. Through nowhere. To see nothing. To do nothing but sit. You turn on the radio and wyom through the dial slowly, carefully in search of a sliver of civilization only to find a man talking about the price of stock animals and feed. You listen to a dour preacher wyoming about your bored and dying and wyoming soul.

  Did her mom wyom too?

  Mom wyomed all through Colorado. She smoked, she drank coffee and Tab and then beer, wyoming her fingers on the wheel sometimes and stopping to wyom to someone on the pay phone, maybe Daddy but probably that friend in Texas. The truck driver.

  Is he your boyfriend?

  It’s an old friend, Rachel Leslie.

  She said Rachel’s name to annoy her.

  Old friend from when?

  From when I worked at the trucking company. He’s a trucker.

  Is that why we’re going all the way to Texas?

  He said we could stay with him, yes.

  What’s his name?

  Jimmy.

  How do you know him?

  I told you. From when I was a receptionist.

  Did you do it with him too?

  What is that supposed to mean? Him too what?

  Come on. I know why Daddy left.

  Did her mother hit her or pull over or give her some kind of talking to?

  Worse.

  What did she do?

  She cried. Drops big and quiet racing down her face.

  Did it unnerve Rachel?

  Rose.

  Did it unnerve Rose?

  Yes.

  Why?

  Because her mother’s heart was wyoming, it was wyoming hard, and she was days and years and maybe forever from a good man.

  SEVEN

  Sexual deviancy came as little surprise anymore. Nymphomania, satyriasis, pedophilia, coprophilia, telephone scatologia—there wasn’t a particular paraphiliac that hadn’t crossed Pete’s path at one time or another. He’d worked with a six-year-old girl who’d been so sexualized that she would grab at passing groins, grope and cop feels like a brazen pervert, and could never be left alone with other children.

  At first, he was shocked to discover whole rings of kids who practically orgied in group homes and psych wards, doubly shocked to find out how uncommon it wasn’t. There were kids he worked with who’d routinely been molested by parents, teachers, and staff at various institutions, as if some dark chaperone escorted them from consort to consort. He’d worked with panty thieves, serial peepers, and Lolitas who found and fucked Humbert upon Humbert on the way to school. Not a few of them touching him on the leg, trying to tongue his ear.

  So Pete had no trouble imagining Cecil squatting over the Cloningers’ dog, reaching under it, and asking the dog how was that, and the dog yelping and then licking his hand, and Cecil doing it again, getting the casing between his fingers and expertly coaxing the lean member out.

  The dog barking in earnest now.

  And Pete had no trouble imagining old, kind Cloninger peering around the upraised hood of his truck to see what all was the rumpus, seeing the dog drop its front paws and bark a question mark—a sound Cloninger had never heard his dog, any dog, make—and the boy crabcrawling on the grass around the animal. And this time the dog being into it. Whatever it was. Cloninger’s eyes, they could not yet see this thing entirely new to his experience, there being no word for what was occurring.

  And then all at once he understood. The coolness of his reddening face, a bracing ice water outrage, and he charges into the yard where the dog is now on its back, and there on the step are Cloninger’s dumbstruck daughters and his squinting dim son, and Cloninger kicks the dog, who snarls in alarm and then slinks off in shame or even guilt, because dogs, they do feel guilt, yes they do, they may not have souls but they have one point on the moral compass, the due north of masters like Cloninger, so the dog now goes to the ground low and backward-glancing. And Cloninger takes great heaving breaths just to keep from laying Cecil out, saying you’re gone, go get your things.

  Pete and Cecil had lunch at the Seven Feathers Truck Stop outside of Columbia Falls. The kid said he had to take a piss, slid out of the booth, and slouched off to the bathroom. Pete could tell immediately that he was going to run. When the boy slunk out of the bathroom, he broke for the front, hitting the postcard rack next to the register. It pinwheeled over, spraying cards.

  The customers at the counter ceased sawing into steaks and chicken-fried specials, set their silverware, wiped their chins, and regarded the boy’s flight with interest. He careered into the parking lot, was nearly struck down by a skidding compact, and alighted running on the pavement, skittish and bantam as all get-out. He juked as if someone were in hot pursuit and sprinted around the gas pumps. The folks at the counter leaned to watch him disappear from view.

  “The meat loaf wasn’t that bad,” the plump waitress said to laughter. The cook taking a smoke break at the counter said to go on and just keep it up, and they all laughed again. The other waitress came out from the kitchen and asked what was so funny.

  “That kid he was with”—the first waitress nodded toward Pete—“just took off like a maniac,” she said to the other. Then to Pete, “Your son, or . . . ?”

  “I’m from DFS,” he said.

  “DF whatnow?”

  Everybody in the place was watching Pete.

  “I’m his caseworker,” Pete said. “Department of Family Services.”

  Some silence. A coffee cup set back in its saucer.

  “Well,” the waitress said, stuffing her pad into her apron and taking up plates. There was a low mutter somewhere along the counter, and a muffled, snorting laugh.

  “You just gonna let him run wild?” someone asked. They looked at Pete, this Long-Haired Organ Where Their Tax Dollars Go as he crammed a cold handful of the boy’s fries into his mouth. They waited for him to do something.

  “You want I should call the highway patrol, hon?” the waitress asked.

  “Let’s not throw our skirts over our heads just yet,” Pete said. There was no good in letting her or the truckers, loggers, and farmers think this was an emergency, because it wasn’t.

  The folks mumbled, resumed eating, lit cigarettes. The hostess at the register gathered up the postcards that had fallen into a harlequin floor mat of glaciers, geysers, jackalopes, and cottonwooded sunsets on the Missouri Breaks. She set them on the counter and righted the display. Pete pinched a toothpick from the dispenser when he paid. He silently burped and picked through the cards.

  She gave him his change. One of his nickels had a hole bored
into it. She began sorting the cards. He showed her the nickel.

  “You want a different one?” She opened the register. She was annoyed about the postcards.

  He knelt and gathered up the remaining cards and set them on the glass countertop.

  “No, it’s all right.” He pocketed the coin. “I’m sorry about the mess.”

  A cold gale ripped at him when he stepped out and the high thin clouds marbled the sky where the sun was placed in the middle of it like a heatless, gaudy stone. Pete leaned into the wind and started in the kid’s direction. He passed the convenience store adjoined to the diner, peering through the tinted windows for any sign of the boy’s passing, for fallen and spilt things, someone on the floor being told to just lie still.

  Pete moved on and nodded howdy to an old rancher pumping diesel into his dually. He wasn’t near enough to ask about the kid. He surveyed the rest of the empty plaza, passing by the air pump, the pay phone, and restrooms. Cecil couldn’t have gotten far.

  He cornered the building and came on a small herd of diesel trucks idling in the cold norther. Chromed long-haulers glinted like showgirls among logging trucks caked in oatmealy mud, white exhaust thrashing flamelike in the wind from their silvery stacks. Pete unfolded his shirt collar up around his neck and stuffed his jean pockets with his fingers. Cecil would be chilled by now in only the T-shirt. Pete wondered would he sneak into a cab to hide. Was he that brave. Was he otherwise inventive.

  Wending through trucks, Pete crouched at intervals to look underneath for the boy’s shoeprint, a handprint on a cab door or in the road dust on the perforated stack sleeves. Nothing. He stopped near a livestock trailer and was startled to see himself in the black orb of a beef cow’s eye. The animal nudged its stanchions.

  He went where the timothy swayed around a sagging, nominal fence and behind there the furrowed land, a cutbank striated by crimson bands of clay. It was Saturday and out there on the prairie somewhere were hunters. It would be a trick figuring how much to compensate in all this shifting wind. But with the noise and the scent-clearing gusts, you might could get right up on a deer, an antelope.

  A long squeal of tires. He ran to the front of the truck stop. A green pickup westbound on the frontage road kicked up a huge pennant of dust.