Fourth of July Creek (39 page)

It made sense in his heart and his heart only.

“I left some of your coins in Reno,” Pete said. “When I was looking for Rachel.”

“I’m sorry you haven’t found her.”

Pete nodded, swallowed, gazed into the fire. He fetched a flask from his backpack.

“I don’t suppose—?” he asked, holding up the liquor.

“No,” Pearl said. “No thanks.”

Pete unscrewed the lid and took a pull from the metal container and set it on the stump, reflecting warped fire in its shiny and scored surface. He rolled a cigarette.

“Is your wife looking for her too?” Pearl asked.

“She’s messed up.” He stopped rolling the smoke, but thinking of how to explain her to Pearl made him tired. “Let’s just say I’ve been to Washington, Texas, Nevada, and Indiana looking for Rachel, and Beth hasn’t even left Austin. I dunno. She’s . . . I dunno.”

He resumed rolling the cigarette. Felt Pearl’s silence like an open oven, and when Pete looked up, Pearl was staring at him, hard.

“Where in Indiana?”

“Indianapolis.”

“You went to Gnaw Bone,” Pearl growled.

Pete’s mouth went dry. He tucked his hair behind his ear and the cigarette with it.

Fuck.

“Go on,” Pearl said. “What did you find there?”

“I need some water,” Pete said.

“I’ll bet you do.”

Pete fetched the canteen from nearby and drank under Pearl’s calculating gaze and wondered if he should run. But it would be across all these stones and he’d be easy to hear and easy to fell and if he made the woods Pearl would track him down eventually, certainly.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Pete drank some more.

This is how you die.

He set the canteen by.

“Yeah, I went to Gnaw Bone. Only because I was already in Indiana. Only because I couldn’t find Rachel and I was sitting in a motel room going crazy. And yes, I was curious about you and your family. I met your mother-in-law and sister-in-law. They were nice folks.”

Pearl touched his fingers to his son’s skull, traced his forehead.

“Do you even have a child? This Rachel. Is she even real?”

“Yes.” Pete leaned over the fire so Pearl could see his eyes. “Look at me. On my mother’s grave. I am
not
lying to you. I got a call that they’d found my daughter. But she wasn’t there.”

“You went to fill your file on us.”

“My office doesn’t have the budget to fly me—”

“What office? How do I know who you are? Your badge?”

“Well if you don’t trust me, why let me be with you and Benjamin?”

Pearl sat up. The boy stirred in his arms.

“Because I know that out here, the moment I need to, I can kill you. But just because I’ve made us safe from you doesn’t mean you’re not a snake.”

Pearl carried the boy to his sleeping bag. Pete listened to them murmuring and wondered would Pearl kill him, but knew somehow that he would not. Instead, Pearl sat back down and asked was there anything left in Pete’s flask. Pete palmed it to him across the fire. Pearl regarded his dished reflection in the metal before he took a drink.

They sat quietly in the dark for a long time, Pearl sipping from time to time. Pete felt like a midwife, waiting, waiting.

“I spoke to each and every one of them,” Pearl finally said, wiping a sleeve across his mouth. “And to a man they said to my face they would join us. I told them I was going to buy the land and that I was selling my house and I spoke to them about the proper preparations. They said nothing against these preparations. I sold my motorcycles and pickup. I provided literature on how to convert property to gold. . . .”

His eyes drifted down to the flames lashing upward.

“A man manages to salt away a little something for a rainy day. A farmer, first time in ten years he’s been able to put something in the bank. A year of all this God-given rain and the kernels of corn in all their thousands on that acreage, and that corn arriving at market when prices are at an all-time high . . . and he means to put the proceeds in the bank?! And I’m the crazy one.”

Pearl read the fire for a while longer.

“And Pastor Don. Liar. ‘I do not suffer a woman to teach, nor usurp the authority over the man, but to be in silence,’ he says. She dreamed that we would find a building in Gnaw Bone to make our church, and we did. She dreamed that the Soviets would launch a space station and that there would be an earthquake behind the Iron Curtain, and lo, there was an earthquake in Romania. I’d never heard of Romania until she dreamed of a disaster there. She dreamed of the air crash in the Canary Islands as clear as she had been there. And she dreamed of the mountains and the only fat pasture in them, and we found that fat pasture in Montana.”

The wind churned starlights in the water. It grew colder.

“She was a prophet and I a watchman to that congregation. But they would not suffer a woman.”

Pearl looked at the flask as though he’d just discovered it in his hand.

“I used to drink a lot. Too much. When I met her, I didn’t want to anymore.”

He tossed the flask back to Pete. It clattered empty on the rocks.

Pearl left him alone. The sky clouded over and in the perfect starless dark the fire made Pete feel naked and he let it burn out and huddled in his own bag listening the night long to the wind and the occasional owl and other things unseen knocking and cracking among the sticks and stones.

Did she arrive in Seattle?

Yes. She stayed. At last she stayed.

Why?

She had begun making a different kind of first impression. She made people uncomfortable. A worrying aura about her. She felt their hesitations.

And she was burned out. But in Seattle, she was off the hot blacktop. She thought she might settle down. She’d met a boy in Fresno who flopped in an apartment subsidized by a Quaker church. A thin thing named Pomeroy who had her dye his hair jet-black and was the only one in the past months and a year to ask her about herself.

Where you from, girl?

Montana.

Montana. Shit. Hell’s from there?

Me, I guess. Texas too.

Texas too, what?

What?

Texas too? How you from two places?

Don’t tease me.

Why you out here on the streets?

I was with a boy from San Antonio for a while. He took me to Indiana.

What boy?

Just some boy.

Maybe I know him.

Cheatham.

She rubbed the dye into his hair and a black tear ran down his forehead toward his eyes. She daubed it with the washcloth.

What’s he look like?

Sit still.

I don’t want none of this dye on my pillow.

I got a towel.

Don’t you get dye on my pillow.

Hold still then.

He asked her to turn off the lamp’s naked bulb. When she did the light from the small kitchen was all they could see by and it wasn’t much over on the bed.

How long’s it take?

She read the box. A dark-haired woman on the cover.

The directions are on the side, dummy.

She slapped a red handprint onto his bare chest.

Ow, damn.

Don’t call me dummy. It says to leave it for a half hour.

She threw the box on the floor.

That’s gonna leave a mark
, he said, peering down in the half-light at his chest, where he smarted.

I should get going
, she said, standing.

Wait, wait. Where you gonna go?

She didn’t know. She didn’t feel like she could stay. He got up on one elbow and reached for her wrist and got her rubber bracelet by his middle finger. He drew her arm to him and began to touch it all over.

You got a girlfriend?
she asked when they were face-to-face.

You got a boyfriend?

His smile was incredible.

I saw some woman things in the bathroom.

I’ve never had a girlfriend.

His fingers ran up the inside of her arm and when he said,
I like you
, she laughed and turned her face up to the ceiling and swallows flew out of her chest it felt like and she helped him rinse his hair in the kitchen sink and when he turned around with a towel turbaned up on his head and kissed her, she kissed him back. He asked how old she was. She lied and said that she was sixteen. He said sure she was. He told her that he’d go slow or not at all, and she asked would he mind if they laid on the bed awhile first. It was like the other times in that it wasn’t very long at all before he had his hands on her and then his fingers up in her and her body was going too fast for her too, her mouth slick and her cooch too and his fingers were in her mouth and rubbing her cooch and then around her anus and pulling at her butt like he was trying to rip a loaf of French bread and then holding it like he was resting an open phone book on his forearm as he cradled her head to his like a receiver in a pay phone. She felt like a phone booth. Her body was a booth that a person could get into and call long-distance from inside of, call her dad Pete maybe, she wondered why did she think of him now, Pomeroy wasn’t like her father, not like Cheatham kind of was.

It was gross to think of your dad and she put that away.

Pomeroy moved her body for her, tilting her pelvis so that it sometimes felt in new places inside of her and she gasped because it hurt, which surprised her because it hadn’t hurt down there in a long time.

Did she tell him to stop?

Yes.

Did he?

Yes. In the half-light from the kitchen with the pipes groaning in the other Quaker apartments and the cars shishing on the wet pavement outside. It must’ve rained.

Men were animals, he said. Some animals have to run, some animals have to chase. She was an animal who would have to run. Unless.

Unless what.

I can keep those animals away
, he said.

But who’ll keep you away?

She was teasing him and he didn’t care for it. He sat up.

I said I don’t have girlfriends. You do me if you want. If not, you don’t.

She wrapped herself around his torso. He smelled like black dye. Like a blot. Like black water. Wet hot water. She asked him how old he was.

Twenty. Go get them cigarettes.

She was all the way over at the table, naked and dribbling his cum out of her before she realized she’d just hopped to when he said so. He said wait let’s have a look at you and flipped on the bulb. She covered up with her hands and then dropped them so he wouldn’t have to ask her to and also because it felt immature to cover up and she wanted to be sophisticated. And it didn’t bother her, him looking her up and down a moment, nodding like he liked what he saw or just that she’d grown up in that moment. She didn’t care, or she told herself she didn’t care, if there was a difference, which perhaps there wasn’t. Men were supposed to look at women. They were supposed to.

Christ
, he said, reaching for the smokes.

What? she said, horrified. Looking herself over.

He explained that she was so damn fine his heart did backflips. Shit her not.

H
e went to visit Cecil’s mother, intending to get him back into her home. There were so many cars parked on her block, he thought maybe she’d died, that he’d happened upon her wake. But of course there wouldn’t be anyone at her wake.

And Katie. Was she eating. Had she been to school at all this spring. Was she alive.

He parked and mounted the steps to the front door. A balding man with a mustache and a polyester brown suit cornered the house and climbed over the railing with a black single-barrel pump-action shotgun. He put a finger to his lips, pointed at the ground, smoothing his tie back into his coat. Pete looked dumbly at where he’d pointed and then started to back away. Several things occurred at once. Men in suits and tactical gear with pistols and submachine guns streamed through the tall grass toward the front porch. Pete’s knees buckled and the back of his hand was wrenched up between his shoulder blades by someone who’d come from behind.

He started to protest, but the man with the shotgun punched the stock into Pete’s gut, and he doubled over on his way down, his face striking the porch. His teeth rang in his skull like tines of a tuning fork as a couple hundred pounds compressed into a single kneecap in the middle of his back. He coughed and gagged at once and thought he was suffocating as someone cuffed him. Now someone straddled him. There were shouts from inside the house.