Fourth of July Creek (32 page)

“You didn’t find her?”

“No. Not yet.”

Pearl set the stock of his rifle on the rocks, and hung on it like a walking stick. The battered weapon looked like it might not fire at all.

“What are you doing up here then?”

Pete pointed over his shoulder back toward the camp.

“Like I said. I brought some things for your family.”

“So she just took off?” Genuine wonderment colored his voice. He looked at Pete like he was from an alien country. “From her mama?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well.”

Pearl crossed the water toward Pete and seemed unable to give expression to the sentiments churning behind the queer expression under his beard. His eyes and mouth pursed as against a strong wind or thick black smoke. He clapped Pete on the shoulder and said they needed to get moving if they were gonna make it.

They hiked two long miles up through devil’s club and ivy and then snowbrush and cinquefoil and up the rocky backbone of a high ridge that looked out over a small lake, a blue color so ideal that at this distance it looked like spilled paint. Pearl sat beneath a skeletal windblown cedar clawing at the sky. He looked at his watch and closed his eyes and murmured through his beard, in prayer it seemed. Pete stood a few minutes waiting and asked what they were doing. Pearl said to sit, it would be a half hour.

“What will?”

“Until we can go on.”

Pete squatted and ate jerky from his bag, but Pearl shook his head when Pete offered it to him.

At the half hour, Pearl raised his rifle and looked through the scope down at the lake. Pete peered down to see, but wherever Pearl aimed was too far to make out. Pearl set aside his rifle and made a series of large gestures, contacting his family using a semaphore they’d worked out.

Pearl looked through the scope again and grunted. He walked along the ridge a ways and then took a broken trail down the mountainside away from the water. Pete hurried after. They kept descending.

“Aren’t we going to the lake?”

“Nope.”

“Isn’t your family down there?”

“Just the boy.”

“Why aren’t we going to meet him?”

“We are.”

“It doesn’t seem like it.”

Pearl stopped.

“We aren’t camped there. Just follow me.”

He shouldered his rifle, and they carried on.

After a while Pete asked Pearl again how were his eyes. Pearl raised his hand to say they were okay. They didn’t speak for the rest of the way.

It was evening when they arrived, and Pearl issued a hoot and a few seconds later came an identical answer. In a small clearing in the trees, the boy raised up at the sight of Pete.

“Howdy, Pete,” he said, shaking his hand.

Pete squatted down to see how he was. Filthy. Some cuts on his hands. Otherwise hale.

“Can I see your belly a second?”

The child obliged.

There were no liver spots on his skin. He looked fed and under the dirt had good color.

“You look A-OK, kid,” Pete said.

Ben grinned. His father told him to get firewood and start a fire.

Pete took in the camp. It was much like the other. More crude, hasty. Their things were strung up in catenary lines between the trees where bears could not reach them. Benjamin started a fire and, as he fed it lightwood, kept glancing up at Pete as if he couldn’t help it.

“I have an eagle feather,” he said.

“You do?”

“Yeah. It’s in my bag.”

He retrieved the feather and showed it to Pete, running it the length of his arm like a jeweler presenting a necklace. Pete whistled.

“It’s nice. Where did you get it?”

Ben watched his father now. Pearl had shielded his eyes and was gazing skyward.

“What in the hell is that?” he asked Pete, pointing up.

Pete stepped out from under the alder boughs and saw the contrail of a jet directly overhead, the white line bisecting the emerging stars.

“A plane?” Pete said.

“Put out the fire,” Pearl said to the boy. “Pack everything up.”

The boy hesitated, and Pearl cuffed him upside the head. Ben scampered to, kicking hunks of dirt and moss onto the fire.

“Whoa!” Pete hollered. “It’s just a plane.”

“Directly overhead. I’m not stupid. How do you think we’re still alive?” Pearl said, ripping up carpets of moss and covering the fire himself.

“I’d love to know what the hell happened to you, why you are like this.”

Pearl stopped stomping out the fire. He looked hard at Pete.

“What are you looking at?” Pete asked.

Pearl went to him and took his backpack right off his back. He dumped the contents onto the ground. He furiously pawed through everything.

“What the hell are you looking for?”

Pearl mumbled to himself, tore into the plastic bags of beans, the boxes of rice. He picked up the puzzle and cut it open with a knife and fingered through the pieces. He shook out the bags of raisins and cinnamon candies and weighed the cans with his hands. Shook them next to his ear.

“It’s just food,” Pete said. “A few things for the kids.”

Pearl squatted regarding the mess he’d made. Poked it with his finger. The boy was standing nearby, watching, slowly putting his sleeping bag back into its sack.

“What things?” Ben asked.

Pearl threw a handful of small rocks at his son, and the child cried out, and immediately covered his mouth. Pete stepped between Pearl and the boy.

“Jeremiah! Don’t do that—”

Pearl swept up his rifle and leveled it at Pete’s face.

“Don’t tell me what to do. I will bury you.”

“Jeremiah.”

“I’m all right,” Benjamin stammered. “I’m all right, Pete. It’s all right, Papa.”

“Benjamin,” Pearl said, and it was all he needed to say. The boy furiously packed their things, shoving his bag into the sack and pulling the drawstring closed.

Pearl kept the rifle trained on Pete.

“I don’t like guns pointed at me,” Pete said, level. Flat.

“I don’t like jets flying directly over my position.”

“I’m not . . . I’m just a social worker. That is just a plane.”

“You disappeared on us.”

“I told you the truth. I was in Texas looking for my daughter.”

Pearl stepped forward, the barrel inches from Pete’s face.

“Why aren’t you still looking for her?” He poked Pete in the ribs with the rifle, hard. “Don’t you care where she is?”

When he poked him again, Pete grabbed the rifle barrel and pressed the muzzle into his chest.

“You think I’d be out here if there was one thing I could do to get her?”

Pearl pulled on the gun, and Pete stepped forward, still gripping it, still touching it to his heart.

“You think I don’t spend every second wondering what’s happened to her? Do you have any idea what that’s like? Go ahead, put me out of my misery.”

Pearl yanked the rifle out of Pete’s hands, and backed away. He and Pete regarded one another, something wordless and true shaping up out of the moment. Empathy even.

“Put these things back in Pete’s bag,” Pearl said to this son. “We’re moving out in five.”

The boy released his head, his handfuls of hair, and Pete told him it was okay, and they put the cans and puzzle pieces in Pete’s backpack together. Pete said to leave the spilled things. He’d bring more. Then they followed Pearl into the wilderness.

They stepped cautiously in the moonless dark and finally set down for what was left of the night at some arbitrary hillside location that had no discernible advantage. It grew very cold in the depths of night, and Pearl allowed his son to fetch out their sleeping bags. They sat in them under the stars, watchful as stooped cats. Soft nutritious duff under them like a mattress. Just before dawn the boy was asleep.

“President Reagan was shot,” Pete said.

“Is that the truth?”

“He survived, though.”

Pearl nodded.

“I always thought it would be a European. Someone from Hollywood.”

“Thought who would be European?”

“The Antichrist will survive an attempt on his life.”

“Reagan’s the Antichrist?”

“He’s from Hollywood.”

“Well, there you go,” Pete said.

“Don’t patronize me,” Pearl said. “I know you don’t believe any of this.”

The boy stirred where he lay between them, and Pearl leaned over and petted his head.

“I see a lot of different people with a lot of different beliefs. Native Americans and Mormons—”

“
Mormons
,” Pearl said, shaking his head. “That’s not a faith. That’s a company.”

“Best neighbors I ever had were Mormons.”

“Gnaw Bone was lousy with Jehovah’s Witnesses coming by every week, selling a map to hell. A man comes to your house to give you something—a service, a good, a belief—you best set him back on his way.”

“Gnaw Bone?”

Pearl frowned, as though he’d given something unintended away.

“Indiana.”

“Your people from there?”

Pearl volunteered no more.

The birds began to trill at a dawn that couldn’t yet be seen. Pete asked was it all right if he smoked and Pearl nodded. He rolled and lit a cigarette. When he was finished there was enough light to see how thick and close the trees were. Snags and huge sheets of moss.

“How long you gonna stay out here?”

Pearl spat.

“Till we die.”

“Until you’re killed, you mean.”

“My soul will live forever.”

“What about him?” Pete nodded toward Benjamin.

“He’s fine.”

“What about your wife and other children?”

Pearl spat.

“Look, I’m just trying to do my job.”

“You’re not here because of your job.”

“You’re right,” Pete said. “I’m sitting up here in the sticks with you two for the sheer pleasure of it.”

Jeremiah Pearl smiled and leaned back against the hillside with his hands laced, cradling his head, and closed his eyes. As if in the coming light of day he could now rest. “We all have a part to play. We’re all instruments of His will.”

“You’re a lunatic,” Pete said.

Pearl grunted. In moments, he snored.

The boy ran ahead and told Pete to hurry and they emerged from the brush and arrived at a thin and shallow creek that ran through a narrowing canyon. Boulders strewn like the toppled bulwarks of an old castle. The banks soon gave way to sheer rock and the child clambered up the ledges of the canyon on small footholds and disappeared around a jutting face about thirty feet high. The water was only ankle deep. Shot-through tin cans lay among the pebbles in the bed. Dried bits of paper and what looked like runny scat stained the walls. They arrived under a waney set of planks. The boy called down to him from somewhere in the dark ahead. Pete ventured forward and could just make out the green streak of the creek’s origin somewhere above. He walked between timbers supporting the queer structure, a kind of fort straddling the creek at the top of the rock walls. Pearl pointed to a crude wooden ladder wedged underneath, and Pete climbed up.

The floor creaked beneath him and there was no room to stand. He touched the canvas roof. It was ably waxed to wick away water. When Pearl came up, it was evident that the whole space was barely big enough to seat them all. Even though it had been empty for many days, the air was heavy with the smell of the Pearls, of smoke and grease and pine sap.

“Is that the only way out?” Pete asked, pointing to the hole.

The boy crawled around him and propped open the canvas at the rear on a stick. Pete crawled out with him onto a ledge the size of a small patio. A vista of the wilderness, alder and cedar. Greater cloud-kissed mountains rearing up many miles away. A bed of white coals lay under a blackened overhang where they cooked. Pete peered over the ledge down a forty-foot face that aproned into a scree.

“Nice view,” Pete said.

The boy slipped down the side of the cliff face to a foot-wide ledge.

“Okay, okay. Get back up here.”

“I’m not gonna fall, Pete.”

“Just come back.”

The boy pulled himself up with a self-satisfied dexterity and sat with his legs over the edge.

“You afraid of heights?” Ben asked.

“Just falling from them.”

Ben digested the joke and then chortled like a donkey.

He watched Pete squat and take off his pack. He took in every detail of Pete, and Pete understood now why he’d been lured into the school. The boy was terrifically bored.

Pearl pitched out some firewood from within the shelter and the boy went and started the fire. The man came out with three open cans and set them inside the fire pit next to the flames and crouched back inside. The ledge was small enough that someone was always at the lip, usually the boy. Pete was terrified the child would fall, and never got used to him walking along the edge.

They ate beans quietly. Ben watching to see if his father or Pete would talk, knowing that he himself should not. The back wall of the shelter was a rock face where the water ran like a leaky tap, which of a sort it was. You put a cup against the green slick and in a few moments it was full of potable water. At the other end of the shelter was a hole like an old-time jakes where they defecated down into the creek. Pearl took their cans and pitched them down the hole. The boy went out to piss off the ledge, leaning and twisting like he had a trout at the end of his line of urine. When Pete went to piss, the boy asked how far out could he could do it, he wanted to see.

“I can’t go with you standing there,” Pete said.

The boy laughed at this preposterousness.

“I mean it,” Pete said.

His father called him inside and Pete could see the man’s amusement by the lamplight.

“You can’t pee with me standing there?” Ben said when he got back inside. “That’s so hilarious.”

“Hand me my backpack.”

The boy pulled it out from the corner and slid it over to him. Pete opened it and plucked out a handful of loose crayons and the coloring book. He set them in front of Ben. But the boy didn’t touch any of it.

“It’s a coloring book,” Pete said. “You’ve seen a coloring book, right?”

The boy nodded.

“Go ahead. It’s yours.”

“I can’t.”