Fourth of July Creek (11 page)

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.

Shelby was east.

Cecil was on his way.

“Well done, Pete,” he muttered. “Well fuckin done.”

Pete went to his car and got his flask from the glove box. Then he opened the trunk. Cecil’s air rifle was in there next to some blankets, stuffed animals. He reached under a shovel into a bag of clothing. Felt around for the bottle, looked this way and that, and then dunked his torso into the trunk and took a long pull. His throat burned and hot fumes ran out his nose and burned his eyes. He took another drink, and then filled the flask and put it in the interior pocket of his coat. The world clicked up into place when he closed the trunk. He felt all right. It’d be all right. The boy ran. He’d call it in, someone would pick him up sooner or later. No big deal.

From within the restaurant the hostess tapped the window and pointed back at the register. The big old rancher who’d been pumping diesel had Cecil in a standing full nelson just inside the door.

“Huh,” Pete said.

He walked through the gale to the restaurant. His arrival occasioned deeper interest among the customers, arms crossed and so on.

The hostess said, “There he is.”

The rancher turned around with the boy. Cecil’s arms splayed out, and his head was forced down under the man’s laced fingers. The man’s liverspotted skull was red with effort. The two of them breathed heavily, twitched as they strained against one another.

“This yer boy?” the old man asked.

“I’m his caseworker,” Pete said, reaching out for a handshake. The rancher forced a grin onto his granite face, as if to ask if Pete thought he was an idiot. Pete dropped his hand.

“Are you responsible for him or not?” the rancher asked.

“Yes,” Pete said. “I’m taking him up to Shelby.”

“The hell you are. I got a mother up in Shelby.”

Pete nodded. Conveyed that he was listening, that the man had his complete attention and respect.

“I seen him run outta here, you know. And you go after him. Seen him sneaking up there to my truck when I was paying for gas. Little shit had the gall to fight me too. This young girl here talked me into waiting a minute to see if you come back before we call the cops. She said you’s his parole officer.”

“I said you worked for the state, that you were
like
a parole officer or something,” the hostess clarified.

“Well, I thank you both,” Pete quickly offered. “You did a good thing, waiting for me. I appreciate it.”

The man grunted as Cecil squirmed.

“He about got himself tore up from earhole to asshole.”

“I’m sure. I’d have not been able to restrain myself like you did. What say you remand him to me now?”

“Remand?”

“I can take him.”

The rancher took long measure of Pete, his hands laced over the boy’s nape like knurled stocks. Wondering should he trust Pete, whether Pete looked capable. Cecil tried to twist and slip free but the rancher simply clenched the boy all the more tightly, lifted him up onto his tiptoes.

“Just hold still, Cecil,” Pete said.

“It don’t look to me like you finished the job correcting this boy. Course the government ain’t been any good at fixing anything, has it? Probably had him sitting on his ass all day, didn’t ya? Hold still, godamnit.”

Pete and the man at the crux now. How long until the boy raises his arms, drops, and wheels free. Or kicks the old man in the nuts with his heel.

The rancher looked at the top of the boy’s black thatch of hair as though he could derive an intent from it. A bead of sweat traced the ridge of his nose and fell from the tip.

“Take him before I change my mind,” he said as he unthreaded his fingers, sprung loose his arms, and Cecil stumbled forward. He remained arms out, head down, like a mold of the old man’s action on him. He smirked up at Pete.

“He’s bleeding,” someone said, and the hostess ran outside after the old man with a dishtowel. Behind the big man’s left ear was a long fresh scratch, the rust-colored blood from it in the forking wrinkles at the back of his neck. They all watched her call to the old rancher and point at his head. The old boy touched his neck and grimaced at the blood on his fingers. He snatched the towel from her and stormed off to his pickup with it pressed to his wound.

Pete thanked the hostess when she returned, waved vaguely at the patrons. Everyone looked on Pete and his cretinous ward with annoyance approaching disgust. Muttering anew. Pete yanked Cecil out of the restaurant backward.

He left the keys in the ignition unturned while the wind buffeted the car. He turned to say something. Cecil held a single middle finger in his palm, lifted it before him like he’d found it on the floor and showed it to Pete.

“Back at ya, buddy,” Pete said.

Cecil took back his finger, set it in his hand, and regarded it crazily. Pete started the car.

They went along the southern border of Glacier Park, followed the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. Turquoise pools and red and rusty railcars curling out of tunnels. Just over Logan Pass Pete spotted a pair of mountain goats at a mineral lick and pointed them out to Cecil, but the boy was having none of it. Fuck him then. No idea how good he had it. The pines shifted in the wind up to the tree line where great escarpments loomed gray and black. Past the Silver Stairs chuckling out of the mountains like mercury. Through East Glacier and out of the mountains and onto the endless plains of the Montana Hi-Line. Winter wheat chaff and dirt conjured up into curling sheets across the stubbled fields in five kinds of brown.

Up a rise, the Sweet Grass Grain silo peeked over at them. Tucked in hills the color of toast, Shelby spilled up in intervals. They descended into the town proper and passed a church where parishioners milled and children ran orbits. Another and another church. Mighty silos, a water tower, and they climbed another hill to see the rail yard.

Pete checked a piece of paper on the dash, turned at the next light, and headed north, scanning the right side of the road for the relevant mailbox. It was a trailer, once red, sunscalded pink. He stopped at the gate and got out, opened it, drove through, got out, and closed it.

In the large outbuilding Cecil’s uncle knelt next to a snowmobile. A dog on a chain strained and leapt at the edge of the stamped earth circle around the stake to which it was leashed. Silently gnashing the air ten feet from where they parked. Pete caught himself rubbing his bandage. The animal’s vocal cords were cut. Docked like its tail.

“Howdy,” Pete called to the outbuilding, fetching his jacket from the backseat. The man looked up, stood, and wiped his hands on his jeans as he strode out to meet him. His hair was shaved into a flattop and he had the look of large, hale men who shoot straight and mean well, but probably nurse a good many resentments. They shook.

“I’m Pete. From DFS. Spoke to your wife.”

“Elliot,” he said, peering over Pete’s shoulder at Cecil still in the car. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nervous, I suppose.”

“Is he gonna get out?”

“Let’s give him a minute.”

“Because he don’t have to be here. Favor to his mother is all this is. He don’t like it, he can shove off.”

“He’ll stay.”

They started for the house. There was an add-on covered in tar paper at the back. The fence terminated in a stack of posts some ways off and added to the air of incompletion about the place. A thin woman emerged from behind the screen door. She leaned on the porch railing, shielding her eyes from the sun, and peered toward the car trying to get a look at Cecil.

“There’s the wife,” Elliot said gruffly.

They went over together. She was a hard thing, taut in her arms and in her face. She was cross, at Elliot or the situation, maybe perpetually. She looked older than her husband. Wind-chapped lips. She nodded toward the car.

“What’s with him?”

“A little cold feet. He’ll come around.”

“This is a favor to his mother. He don’t like it here, he can shove off,” she said, just like her husband.

“He’ll warm up to it,” Pete said. “He’s at that age. Wants to get out on his own. But most of all, he needs stability.”

She looked meaningfully at Elliot. She was about to say something—probably about the boy’s mother—but the car door opened and Cecil climbed out. The dog lunged against its chain, whining airily, as the boy walked just at the edge of the animal’s limit up the drive. Pete called to him, but Cecil ignored him and went into the outbuilding.

“Let me talk to him,” Pete said.

“Hold on, mister,” the woman said. “You got our check?”

Pete was already on the steps, and he turned to face her.

“You know, I didn’t get your name,” Pete said pleasantly.