Fourth of July Creek (14 page)

Does the pawnbroker realize that no metal has such little real application as gold? Unless you count the generation of greed an application.

The pawnbroker says to him,
I thought you were here for buffalo nickels.

Gold is woven into our history, even these nickels, Pearl says. He says that humanity is an alloy of itself and gold. Or something like that. He goes on at length, so much history you can barely keep up. The de facto adoption of the gold standard by the founding fathers. Lincoln’s Scrip Act to get greenbacks to fund the war. The Brand-Ellison Act. The Sherman Silver Act. The Crime of ’73. The suspension of the gold standard to pay for World War I. How the commercial banks convert their dollars for gold, causing the Great Depression. All of it a long conspiracy to abandon the gold standard in 1933, to remove any real value from currency at all.

“Sorry, but I’m lost. What is all this he’s talking about?”

“Hysterical numismatics.”

“Pardon?”

“Horseshit. Nothing you don’t hear at trade shows. Every time there’s a recession someone goes on about it. How the whole game is fixed. How bullets and seeds are the only really real currency. Only, with Pearl, more intense. You can tell he’s brewing trouble the way he talks.”

“The way he talks?”

H
E SAYS WE’RE AT WAR
, that fiat currency is a permanent state of war. He makes the pawnbroker pull a dollar from the till. Pearl holds up the bill, says,
This company scrip is a boot on your neck like all company scrip. Good for a shit sandwich. It’s written on the damn thing, look here now.

Pearl explains the meaning of the descending capstone, how the thirty-two feathers of the dexter wing of the eagle correspond to the number of ordinary degrees in Scottish Rite Freemasonry. How the stars above the eagle’s head form a hexagram, a Star of David. Witchcraft and Hebrew magic.

And what could be more magical, more alchemical, than a soft yellow metal that derives from itself currencies and wars and then more complicated magics like markets and exchanges, loans, interest, compound interest, mortgages, credit cards, lotteries, futures, bonds, derivatives, short stocks, all manner of financial spells burgeoning out in ever increasing complexity and intricacy like a heathen mandala, all of it originating in a substance that has no physical application save as a symbol of itself in coin or bar.

Then he starts in about tulips.

“Tulips?”

“Something about tulips and markets in Europe. In the past. I dunno.”

“What did you say to all this?”

“I get a lot of cranks in here. People who can’t even see Fucked from where they are. Desperate to get some cash. People liable to do anything. But this guy . . . I couldn’t wait for him to leave. I just sold him the coins.”

“And then?”

“Then nothing. I never seen him again.”

“Never?”

“Nope.”

The pawnbroker opened the books on the display case. Pages of coins in plastic slots.

“What are these?”

The pawnbroker pointed at the first nickel in the sleeve and flipped the book around for Pete.

“A couple months later, this fella I know comes in, says have I seen one of these before.”

“I says, ‘Sure, it’s a hobo nickel.’ These old-timers in the Depression, they’d use a buffalo nickel because they were struck with more relief to them—the images aren’t as flush with the surface of the coin as your dimes and quarters and pennies. With small tools you can make the Indian look like some hobo or your riding partner. Put a knit cap on him and a train in back of him. Turn the buffalo into a horse or a camel.”

Pete examined a nickel that had been crudely altered into a Jewish banker. Hook nose, yarmulke.

“Pearl?”

The pawnbroker nodded.

“What’s ZOG?”

“Zionist Occupational Government. A lot of the older hobo nickels have your standard anti-Semitic signs in them. The Depression, and all. Though I did think it was a little bold that he’d put his name to it.”

The pawnbroker turned the page for Pete to see where Pearl had etched his name in the buffalo.

“Where’d your friend find it?”

“In a phone booth.”

“No shit.”

“Then they start appearing everywhere. Cigarette machines, newspaper boxes outside of the Osco Drug. You can see his work get better and better. Like this one. See how he turned the buffalo’s hump into a mushroom cloud? I’m partial to that one. Here’s one he turned into a crosshairs. Got pretty damn good in a short while.”

The pawnbroker opened the second book, and the two of them scrutinized the coins. He showed Pete pages of Hasidim with wavy beards and long payos.

“What’s the inscription on this one?”

“Oh yeah. This is when he started working small. Here, take the magnifying glass.”

“
The plague
. . .”

“
. . . has come.
”

“
The war is here. It will last until . . .”

“I think that last part is ‘. . .
the seventh year
.’ Amazing. I don’t know how he got the letters so small.”

“What the hell does it mean?”

“Well, that he’s gone apeshit, for starters. These books hold three hundred coins.”

“Christ, how many did he do?”

The pawnbroker turned up his palms.

“These are just the good ones.” He touched the books. “This is months of work right here.”

“But now he’s just putting holes in any coins.”

“It would appear.”

“It’s easier.”

“No, it ain’t. These holes look
punched
in. I got no idea how he’s doing it. I tried, it’s not easy. Not with just a hammer and a bit, even if you can get everything lined up. And it’s not just circles. That quarter you gave me, it’s got a pentagon-shaped hole. There’s triangles, squares, ovals, and now, pentagons. But, yes, he’s churning out a lot of coins.”

“And you’re collecting them?”

“People are actually coming in asking for them. You turn on the CB and you’ll hear truckers saying they just got one of Pearl’s square nickels out in Great Falls, who’s got a roundy dime?”

“So they’re really worth something?”

“Yeah, but it’s more than that.” The pawnbroker’s stubble on his chin sounded against his fingers like sandpaper. “This is a strange kind of genius. This lunatic has taken money and turned it into another kind of money. His own money.”

“Kinda brilliant for an act of rebellion,” Pete said. “But what for?”

“I take him at his word. He’s at war. Sooner or later he’s gonna give somebody a reason to go after him.”

“You think people will die.”

“Yeah.” The pawnbroker swung closed the book of nickels. “For starters.”

Why were they fighting?

Jimmy said for Rachel to put on some clothes she said you’re not my dad and her mother said to listen to Jimmy and she ran to her room and then Jimmy and Mom were fighting and everyone was pissed at everyone such bullshit jesus.

What was she wearing that ignited the incident?

Shit her mother bought for her in the first place. A halter top. Cutoffs.

Why did her mother tell her to change then?

. . .

Is this when he started looking at her like that?

. . .

Like he was supposed to look at her mother? From across the room, taking whole rude draughts of her with his eyes? His tongue moving like he was working something in his teeth loose?

Gross.

So was the fight about that? About Jimmy looking at her that way?

More or less. But also her mother going to the bars in Waco. Afterparties in Jimmy’s trailer. All the strangers up from Austin.

Did the neighbors complain?

Some did. The cops came one time. Checked IDs, went room to room. Ran a flashlight over her in bed. She screamed.

Jesus.

It was fucked.

So was this when she first ran away?

No. There wasn’t anywhere to go yet. Besides, this was nothing new. Her mother was always “having a few people over tonight” or “going out for a little bit” even back in Missoula. Even before her father left. The both of them sometimes. Her father carrying her from the couch where she’d fallen asleep. His tobacco whiskey whiskers, good night Applesauce.

Did she miss him?

Of course. But not exactly. Everybody wants freedom.

Meaning?

Meaning she sneaks a bottle of vodka to school.

For what?

To make friends. She wants to be grown. She wants to have a few people over too. She wants to go out for a little bit.

Did she make friends?

In the grove of live oaks between her school and her house. There was a place where kids went to smoke, listen to music, and make out.

And what did these kids make of this tiny thing only on the cusp of fourteen and walking up with a handle half-full of vodka?

They asked her what did she have there. She said, does anyone have a cigarette, I’d kill for a cigarette right now.

All maturelike. Had she even ever smoked before?

A couple times. Lori and Kim smoked back in Montana. She used to sneak them some of her mother’s cigarettes. It’s how she made friends with them too. She pulled on the vodka and passed it to a boy who lit a cigarette and gave it to her.

Did Rachel like that?

Rose.

Did Rose like that?

Like what?

The boy giving her the cigarette?

She loved it.

A
scant shadow dressing in the dark, thin arms, narrow chest, tugging his shirt over his head against a brown moon hung low outside his window. He ceases his dressing to listen, his silhouette turning to, halting, turning fro. Nothing. Cecil bends. Pulls shoelaces through the eyeholes, doubleknots them.

He pads over to the light switch but doesn’t turn it on. Produces a small tool from his pocket. Flat head in the flat head screw on the switch panel. The screws fall into his hand, into his pocket. He removes the plate, removes a twenty-dollar bill folded and pressed into the box with the wires. He slips the bill neatly in his shirt pocket and replaces the light-switch plate.

He slides open the window, removes the screen from the frame with practiced ease.

The dog in the yard stands, wags what should be a tail. She made Uncle Elliot have the animal’s cords cut. His balls too.
Would like to do a little work on her with a knife. Stack her own damn firewood.

He moves Indian-quiet through the yard to the outbuilding, the dog padding along, her chain dragging to its limit, whereupon she leaps making that awful airy bark, that rude longing aspiration. The outbuilding. The tarp. The under it. The old single-speed Huffy. Tires he patched himself on the sly.

He pedals down the drive crunching over the gravel to the gate. Bike over gate, Cecil over gate, Cecil back onto bike. Stark cyclist gliding on the blacktop, the countryside of tilted fence posts and barbed wire and small bitter wind. He is cold and nearly miserable.

Pedal. You’ll warm up.

Shelby itself is still, yellow lights ablink at the intersections. You couldn’t be farther from anywhere. He wheels in behind the Hi-Line Bar to ditch the bike. Blows his hands, pacing. A cur wanders by startled to see him, growls, cuts a wide path. He shakes stones in hands like dice, pitches them at the railroad tracks. He walks the ties, he walks the fishplates.

Two hours, the pink surge of dawn.

He hazards out to the street.
Dude’d said meet him in back, but maybe . . . No.

His ride is not coming.

He sets awhile in the South of the Border, idly mincing his eggs with his fork.

They’ve told you to rise and shine by now, idiot. You could go back. Say you’d taken a bike ride. No. Rather they’d drag you out of here than ride back there under your own power.

A Blackfoot Indian comes in, orders a coffee and a donut to go. Rancher by the look of him. Brown denim jacket. Cowboy hat, beaded hatband.

Go.

Cecil follows him out.

He asks the man is he going west. The sun in his eyes from the dusty shop window opposite. He shields them to see the Indian’s face the texture of pitted wax, looking at him out the open door of his Ford. He shields them from showing his fear. The Indian scarcely nods. But nod he does. Cecil hops to.

A whole day to just get from Cut Bank to Kalispell. A buffet lunch he can neither really afford nor resist. A box of saltines.

He skulks, a black bogeyman at night in the Kalispell alleyways behind the old railroaders' cottages, walking to stay warm, running from barking dogs. He sits in a coin-op laundry for as long as feels safe. Catches a southbound Kenworth.

“You got the fidgets,” logger says.

“I’m all right.” He stiffens, deepens his voice. “M’aright.”

He walks to the rail yard in Missoula. See him dashing out after the departing train at sunset, slipping off the low rung, tumbling. He lies there, everything inside him rattling around, settling. Agony all over. He pushes himself up by the palms on the sharp white stones. A swollen pulsating lip. He checks to see that he has all his loosened teeth. His goddamn hair hurts.