Fourth of July Creek (7 page)

Luke rubbed his face, pulled his hands across his eyes.

“I know. You’re right. You’re
right
. I can be frustrating.”

“At this point, even Jesus and Satan just wish you’d choose a fucking side.”

Luke uncrossed his arms and nodded. Ran his hand through his hair and then remembered that he wanted it flat, and pressed it back down.

“I know.”

Pete abruptly went inside. He returned rolling a cigarette.

“How’s your old lady?” Luke asked.

Pete pointed a wooden match at him.

“Leave it alone, Luke.”

Luke sat up straight and looked off into the woods. There was nothing out here except trees and stones and animals, and though the forest was alive with the sound of those trees swaying in the wind and the small critters moving in them, you could tell he was bored already of it. The woods made him antsy. Land and nature gave him no peace. Never did.

“It’s nice out here,” Luke lied. “I wish I’d have gotten my shit together to get a place like this.”

Pete turned a large piece of firewood on end and sat unsteadily on it.

“Bullshit. You hate it in the sticks.”

“So do you.”

“What do you want?”

Luke grinned a private grin that Pete knew hid a secret he was about to hear. Something Luke connived.

“Should I bother asking?”

“Bunnie wants you to come out to the house. Dad’s been sick. That cough.”

“Gosh, he has a
cough
? Why didn’t you say something?”

“You should go see him. Bunnie and him.”

“Let me just get my coat,” Pete said, dragging on the cigarette.

“You need to check up on them,” Luke said.

“You check up on them.”

“I ain’t going back that way.”

“Here it comes. I fuckin knew it. What’d you do?”

Luke ran his hands over his thighs, his fingers arched into tines. It was something bad.

“I knocked out my parole officer.”

Pete began to cough, he was laughing so hard. So hard he dropped the cigarette and stepped off the porch and gripped his knees.

“I had a knife on me that I’m not supposed to and Wes saw it and started talking all this shit. ‘Serious violation of my parole.’ Fuckin asshole. Way up in my face. Way up, Pete.”

“So you clocked him.”

“I beat the lovin hell out of him. I couldn’t stop my fists,” Luke said, holding up his hands with some wonderment.

“You dipshit.”

“Stop laughing. I had to spend two nights in the damn woods. It ain’t funny.”

“Yes it is. Yes, it truly is.” Pete got back up on the porch and just beamed at his brother. “This beats everything.”

“I ain’t going back. I can’t do no time again, Pete.”

“Shit, it can’t be that bad. Eighteen months? What are you gonna do instead?”

Luke stood and rocked back on his heels.

“Right. You have a
plan
,” he said.

“I need someone to know where I am. In case anything happens. With Dad.”

“Nothing’s gonna happen with Dad.”

“You really need to go see them, Pete.”

“I said I would.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well, now I have.”

“This week?”

“Where you gonna run to?” Pete asked.

Luke reached around to his back pocket and handed Pete a slip of paper. Penciled onto it was an Oregon post office box and a map with directions to a spot not far from the coast.

“What’s this?”

“He’s a decent guy. Met him at church. He was coming through giving a pretty interesting lecture.”

“Sounds like you got everything under control.”

Luke smiled the beneficent little smile he’d acquired with religion.

“You should go sometime. It’s done me a world of good.”

“That’s evident. Nobody would debate you.”

“Sarcasm is just anger.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Pete.”

“I got your information here.” Pete held up the paper. “Anything else?”

“I don’t think there’s a phone, but if there is, I’ll call your office.”

Pete mashed out the cigarette smoking on the porch with his bare heel. He didn’t feel anything but a small spot of warmth.

“Give yourself up, Luke.”

“I have, my man.” He pointed upward.

“To the Teton County sheriff.”

Luke put a hand in the air, his eyes floating off, a helpless expression on his face, and paid out a long sigh, that taken together meant that Pete was right, and running was foolish and would just escalate things, but also that Luke had made up his mind and there was no talking him out of it.

“I got to get away from this trouble,” he said. “It’ll blow over.”

Luke stretched out his hand for Pete to shake and to the surprise of both of them, Pete took it.

“It ain’t gonna blow over, Luke. Not this time.”

Luke pumped his brother’s hand and pulled him in, clapped his palm onto his neck, and hugged him. Then he bounded into his truck, waved, and backed out. He turned around on the dirt road and then trundled down the mountain. For a long time Pete could hear him going.

He drove his Corolla with the windows down, but pumped them back up when mammatus clouds popcorned over the Flathead Valley and gumdrops of rain began to splash his windows. He turned onto Highway 28 and the clouds quit raining altogether and shortly thereafter broke up like a crowd after a fistfight. He drove into mature afternoon sunshine. The yellow valley slicked and glistening where the haymows stood in the fields like wet yurts. Coveys of birds rose in folding fans and closed to the ground, pecking where the rainwater had flushed up worms and bugs. The highway bore south, and at Paradise, Montana, he crossed just down from where the Flathead joined the Clark Fork River candescing in the sun like a sheet of copper tapering off up the valley toward Idaho. He eased along the water and rolled down the windows again. The cool fresh air poured in. The papers in his car fluttered like a rookery.

The wheels slipped on the wet dirt road heading into Billie Gulch and slipped again up the steep drive to the Short house. The drive was as pitted as a shell range. A pollarded goat drank from a halved oil drum and watched through its rectangle pupils the car slowly pass by and was trotting after when Pete glanced in the rearview. He leaned forward to get a better look at the house and when his car dipped into a severe pothole, Pete stamped his chin on the steering wheel. The car stalled out fifty yards from the place. His tongue throbbed and smarted sharply at once. It hurt so badly, he shuddered. He looked in the mirror, and the gaps between his teeth turned bright red.

Pete climbed out of his car and weaved up the drive working his jaw, which was sore too, and the ram trailed after, its yellow demon eyes unnerving him. He shooed it away. He said something like “Muthathuck,” and spat blood. The goat nickered at him and stopped to sniff where Pete spat and it ate the dirt, saliva, and blood, the godawful animal.

The Shorts kept a brace of black and tan Rottweilers, which were the nicest things they owned and that now lifted slobbering heads and growled in a low rheumy register in near harmony. They had met Pete, but always with Tony Short. Now Tony Short was nowhere about. They watched Pete sway heedless through the thin, gray mud, spitting blood. To the dogs he was merely some bent and slipping man, muttering and scraping off his shoes on the edges of the flagstone approach to the fence, now walking upright to the open gate. He was thirty, forty feet away from the porch when they barked. Pete halted, regarded them, and clapped his hands, beckoning them to heel. They might have recognized him. They might have not. His voice was suspiciously garbled. He might have sounded wounded. Definitely hinky.

He peered around and over them at the windows, what trodden hardpan littered with broken toddler bikes and rubber toys that passed for a lawn. Now the Rotties barked in unison and stood. They took quarter steps in his direction, quivering, teeth bared forth in the slow peeling back of their faces.

They had Pete’s full attention, and he tingled up and down his back. The air between his skin and his shirt was charged, as was his entire torso. He wondered did the dogs sense his electric fear.

“Eathy boys, ith me,” he said, and they charged, brimmed hearts pounding, hot throats open. Pete yelped and swung closed the gate, and they slammed into it. The latch rattled but the gate held. They fell over one another and clambered up snarling, spittling and furious. Pete backed away, palms up, and they reared hindlegged at the gate like dwarf landlords, upright dogmen now whimpering in fury. Pete halted his retreat. It was okay. He was okay. He grabbed his own chest in relief. Heart still rattling in its shallowed brisket.

Their barking continued unbroken, and they seemed to need no breath to do it. Pete flipped them off. He turned and walked back to his car, dodging puddles, happily hopping over them, quite giddy at this point, coulda shit myself, sweet Jesus that was close—

Of hot white sudden he realized that the barking was halved, that the rhythmic tread of dogfeet was at least one of those fine animals loose and headlong at him.

He didn’t even look.

He leapt potholes to where his car had died, yanked open the door, and flung himself inside in terror just as the dog hit the open door, skidded past and immediately recovered, lunging, snapping at his hand before he could close it. For a moment the dog just barked at him as he dared not reach for the door handle. Then he did reach. The dog clamped its watering maw onto his outstretched hand. He yanked it free of the animal’s mouth, but the dog was able to budge into the car with him.

From the yard, the less clever of the two animals stood and barked in high agony, completely forgetting the gap in the fence. The vehicle rocked at the combat within it, and the dog watched the man spill screaming out the passenger door, and leap atop the car. The Rottie followed him out, ran back into the vehicle, and out the driver’s side door, bewildered that it didn’t somehow arrive on the roof.

Pete quaked and nearly retched with fear as he checked himself. Dark blood pooled in his palm and dripped out the back of his hand. Abrasions seethed under his coat. A long tear in his pant leg where the dog’s jaws had snapped closed like a sprung trap. Which the animals were. Hatred for Tony Short swelled in his breast. Fucking hill people and their fucking dogs lying around like loaded guns.

The vehicle shook under him as the dog began tearing the upholstery. The second Rottweiler had found the hole in the fence now, and sprinted over and joined the other in the car, and from the sound of it, the two of them fought one another for a moment. Then they circled Pete’s car and Pete on top of it, heaving themselves up, whining and smiling at him, circling, until at last one attempted to scramble up to him, claws slipping on the bumper and hood as it slid off with a grunt. It would not be long, though, before one of them simply leapt onto the hood and drove him off the roof and into the jaws of the other.

The moment to move was now.

Now.

Okay now.

They’re going to get up here, you don’t do something—

Pete slid over and shut the passenger door from above, and the dogs closed in on him, jaws clacking at his hand, and then he flung himself over to the driver’s side, dropped off the car, sprung into it, and slammed closed the door.

The Rottweilers scratched at the door and window, and then snapped at one another again, hindlegged in an outraged dance. The gnashing inches from him on the other side of the window like something you wouldn’t even see at a zoo. Buffeting the car with their muscle, Pete’s keys jangled in the ignition.

He opened the glove box and soaked up blood from his hand with a paper napkin. He grabbed a flask and opened it against his chest with his good hand and dribbled liquor onto the holes in his bad hand. It burned, and he winced hugely. He pressed the saturated and ripping napkin against his hot wounds until it finally stanched the bleeding and clung poulticed to his palm. The dogs crazed and slicking his window with slobber the whole time. He yelled at them, but naturally they could not leave him be.

He dropped his head back and tried to cease shivering. Pictured the Short house in flames. How he’d do it. He didn’t even care about the Shorts’ children anymore, children who’d turn out just like Tony or get pregnant by guys like Tony who bought and bred dogs for sheer destructive power. Raze the thing. Scatter the Shorts to the winds.

He grabbed their case file from the seat, and bloodied the case log:

Pete set the paperwork aside. He reached into the open glove box, fetched the canister from within it, and cracked the window. He paused a moment in sympathy for the guileless animals, genuinely touched by the raw beauty and ideal breeding snarling wildly at the inch-wide gap in his window. Then he maced one dog square in its snapping face with exquisite joy. It bucked back and twirled coughing, fell, scrambled up in the mud, and then careened blind until it collided into a metal shed at full speed with an explosive bang. For a time it did not move. The second bore into the field after Pete sprayed it, simply trying to outrun the hot torment. Peace settled over the scene. The hornless billy chuckled like an amused codger. Pete stashed the spray and wrote some more:

—Agent P.W.S.