Fourth of July Creek (8 page)

Did her father call?

Yes. She’d answered the phone assuming it was Kim or Lori and hoped maybe but probably not Kevin calling her back.

God, if it was Kevin. A soph-oh-more. Yes, more please.

Hey Applesauce, her father said.

Oh.

Yeah, hi.

Hi
.

Look, I can’t make it down today. I’m really sorry. I got bit by a dog. I need to have it looked at—

She asked him did he even have any idea what was happening.

He said what, what was happening.

She said she couldn’t believe he didn’t know. She wanted to get back at him. Intuited that she had some power in knowing what he didn’t: her mother was in her bedroom, shoving clothes into garbage bags.

What is it, honey? What’s going on?

What is wrong with this family?

He said Rachel. He said come on Applesauce. He said to put her mother on the phone.

She placed the phone on its silver cradle. She ran her hand through her hair over and over and hated her tiny head in the reflection of the toaster. The phone rang again. She stood from the table and walked on the balls of her feet to her bedroom. Her mother said for her to get it, but Rachel closed her door.

Jesus, Rachel!

YOU GET IT!
she shrieked.
I’M PACKING LIKE YOU TOLD ME TO! GOD!

An empty suitcase. She heard her mother’s voice veer into a fighting pitch on the phone. She opened a drawer and pulled out an armful of shirts and threw them onto the bed. In the back of the half-empty drawer was a saddening fifth of vodka.

Was it for a party? Was it for showing how grown she was and practically sophisticated?

Yes. It was for sitting with Kevin. She’d seen his stomach once. His bare stomach.

God.

Soft. But hard.

Oh.

More.

It ached to think about.

Was that so over now?

Duh.

H
e drove four hours to the city of Missoula to see his wife. He didn’t eat or stop for gas. No radio. Like when you were a kid. The old man treated every road trip like a moon shot. You brought your grub for the trip or you went hungry. You held it or you pissed in the milk carton. Wasn’t anything on the radio anyway.

He took Orange Street under the railroad and went up Front. It was strange visiting the city again, their city. The specific feeling of this small western city geography. He’d done his undergraduate at the university. A liberal arts degree in seven semesters. He’d done three semesters of grad school before he couldn’t afford it anymore. All of it right out of high school with a wife and newborn daughter. No small pride in that.

There were cars around and people on the sidewalks. Buildings higher than two stories. He’d grown acquainted with smaller rhythms.

He turned onto his wife’s street and parked near their cottage apartment by the river. Her apartment now. Late morning now and the sun had warmed off the frost except in the shaded lee of things. The aluminum screen was propped open with a broken brick, the door ajar. An open U-Haul trailer sat hitched to her little pickup, and his wife’s clothes, his daughter’s box spring, and even some of his old things were visible in it. A fierce hammering commenced in his chest and temple at the sight of his leather chair. He started up his car and then turned it off.

When she saw him come in, she set down a cardboard box, took the bandana off her head, wiped her brow, and put it in her back pocket. She already had a beer on the floor near her that she picked up and drank. Put her palm on her hip. The loose beauty about her—the way her smile cracked across her face, her wide lopsided curls rigged into a bun that seemed liable to topple down—reminded him of a tooth about to come out, a button about to fall off. Everything about her always on the verge of falling down or out. Made a body want to screw her heart out. Even now. Even after she’d cheated on him and even though it still hurt like a purple bruise, he could see falling into bed with her. Just look at her. The beer, eyebrow cocked, her condescending grin.

She said his name plain. Even that ached.

What it must be like to go about in that body, to think with that mind. It occurred to him that even if he didn’t forgive her, it was possible to not blame her. Some narrow country existing between recriminations.

“Fucking Texas?” he asked.

He looked about. Bright squares of fresher paint where the pictures had been removed. Indentures of the couch feet in the rug.

“Yeah, Pete. Texas.”

“And you don’t ask me.”

“I don’t gotta ask you where I can live.”

“The hell you don’t, Beth. She’s my daughter.”

“You’re welcome to take her up into the woods with you. If she’d go.”

Backlit from the sunlight in the kitchen, his daughter appeared or might have been in the doorway the whole time. Nearly featureless in the shadows, a cutout. Knobbed at the knees, holding her kindling arms across her. Knowing if he went toward her she’d bolt to her room and slam the door, but he did anyway and she did, of course, run to her room.

“Applesauce, come on.”

She was thirteen. She hated him.

He stood in the kitchen. Beth’s keys were on the table. She saw him looking at them and she picked them up and chucked them at his chest.

“Keep us in the pumpkin shell. Right?”

She crossed her arms. Dare-faced.

He shot out the door with the keys.

“Ah hell, Pete!” Beth yelled.

She pursued him around the house, and catching him just as he reached the lilac bush, landed small blows to his head with her little pool-ball fists, and then all atangle they trundled through the brush and down the sharp incline to the rocks by the river. She clung to his arm so that he couldn’t get a good throw, and the keys plunked into the water not far from the shore. He shucked her off. She pelted his back with river rocks, and he climbed the bank wincing, and sprinted to the house, flung open the back door, and strode down the hall and into his daughter’s doorway.

Rachel folded clothes kneeling on the floor, stacking them in little piles. Sparkling denim skirts. Striped shirts the colors of candy. She shoved things into a neon grip. She wore lip gloss and blue eye shadow, and her thin wrists were bangled with colored bands.

“Tell her you don’t want to go,” he said.

Homosexuals postered to her walls in blouses and fishnet gloves pouted at him. She stood up and walked calmly to him on flounced pink socks. Almost balletic in the precise placement of her feet.

“Come here,” he said, throwing his arms wide. The contempt shimmered off of her like actual heat, as though he’d opened a furnace.

She closed the door on him. The small clatter of the hook-and-eye lock.

He was muttering promises against the door when Beth’s tennis shoes slapped on the kitchen tile. She could see him in the hall from where she sat at the kitchen table, little puddles at her feet.

“You’re a son of a bitch, Pete.”

She pulled off her wet shoe with effort and chucked it at him.

“You buy her all that makeup?”

“And beer and rubbers.”

“You’re not kidding.”

“Christ, Pete.”

“Not much. You’re not kidding very much.”

“You don’t get to social work me!” she yelled. “You just don’t. You split. It got rough here and you went to live in Tenmile. That was your decision.”

“You made decisions too.”

She threw her other shoe at him. He leaned away and it spanked the wall.

“I’m not apologizing again. I’m not. I’m done trying to get your forgiveness. And I tried, Pete. Oh, I tried and tried and tried. I called you and called you and we went up there to see you. And what happened when we went up there to see you, Pete?”

“Just don’t go,” he said to the floor.

“Did you come out of that shitty cabin? Did you come out and see your own daughter, Pete?”

He looked up at her.

“You’re like an accident,” he said. “You’re like I was hit by a truck.”

“Oh my God.”

“I’m not looking at a person right here in front of me. You’re more like a bad thing that happened to me.”

Her laugh was sharp, a bark.

“That’s really deep, Pete.”

She grabbed some mail from the table and went through it, tossing what was addressed to him at his feet. Then she tore a bill open and wrote on the inside of the envelope and handed him the scrap. She said it was the address in Waco. That he could write to Rachel if he wanted. That he could start to send money if he was worth a shit at all.

The bartender at the Stockman’s knew him, and Pete turned around and exited onto the street to avoid him. He was so inconsolably angry. He crossed the street behind a truck stamped
FISH
and was nearly hit by a Chrysler Imperial that screeched to a stop kissing his hip. Pete leered through the windshield with his hands on the hood of the car, the occupants dimly cognizant of his rage. He went up the block on Higgins scarcely aware of the foot traffic, the few ladies window-shopping the jewelry at Stoverud’s, a pair of businessmen slapping shoulders. He ducked up the alley and tried the back door of the Missoula Club, but it wouldn’t open for him. He scowled at the backside of the Howard Apartments. Some windows thrown open to the warmish noon, revealing the top of a television and a pair of naked feet a floor up. An argument broadcast from another of the upper rooms. Pigeons cooed and shook and bickered in the brick eaves and let fall a sleet of white shit and feathers. He pounded until a grim aproned barkeep unbolted the door. They looked at one another with mutual irritation.

“You open or not?” Pete asked.

The man stood aside and let him in. Pete sat at the bar and fingered the coin-scored divots in the pine, waiting for the bartender to pull his beer. He had most of it pumped down his throat by the time the man had extracted his change from the old-fashioned black niello register. Pete left the money where the man put it, and slid the glass at him. The bartender chewed his cheek.

“Chop chop,” Pete said.

The man poured another, and Pete burped silently and drank under the man’s gaze. The bartender went to the small cutting board near the griddle and cut onions and came back wiping his hands on his apron and filled Pete’s beer and held up a bottle from in front of the mirror. Pete nodded. He poured them each a shot. Glasses clinked, the liquor hot and smoky. The bartender sucked the bourbon from his mustaches and then cooked Pete a burger and put the paper plate in front of him. Said for him to eat something.

“That’s all right,” Pete said.

“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, pal. Eat something, you’re gonna drink like that in here.”

Pete swallowed the last of his beer and slowly fingered out his change to the man, and told him he’d take a pint of Redeye. The bartender just stood there. Pete took a bite from the burger and chewed enormously. The man fetched down a pint bottle from the shelf, sleeved it in a paper sack. He snatched it back when Pete reached for it.

“I don’t want to see you in here again. Not today.”

On the sidewalk he looked around for a place to open the bottle. He turned and went to where Ryman Street quit in a parking lot by the river. He hopped down the riverbank clutching the alders for balance and pushed through a brake of Russian olive. He perched on a stripped cottonwood worn smooth by the water, the wood warmed by the sun. The Clark Fork River churned heedlessly past. Paper litter garlanded the thin trees nearby. A rufous barrel shipwrecked on the rocks. He uncapped the bottle and drank from the sack, visible in his seething to the pedestrians and the cars crossing the Higgins Street Bridge. Kingfishers chittered. Water skippers skated on a puddle by his feet.

There was a time with his wife on this river or a river just like it, it can’t be this river, but in his memory it is this one. A time on a wash just like this where he lay shirtless with her shivering in the August night, jeans pasted dark and wet to his knocking legs, his torso white to glowing in the moonlight. Her hair tendriled and framed about her face like an outlandish black tattoo. Her wet dress like a sleeve of molting skin, which of a sort it had been that whole night in their dancing. Her heart in its red and white cage knocking just inches from his own, like two young prisoners tapping out simpleton Morse I am here I am here I am here. Here I am for your pleasure for you forever. On a river like this where he impregnated her. A river promise too, he said I love you I love you. Seventeen years old. A pleasure so total that even then he knew he had mortgaged years to her and he did not care.

A derelict who was either Indian or sunburned so often that he looked like one emerged from the foliage downstream, togaed in an unrolled sleeping bag. This man nodded at Pete like he recognized in him a shared trouble, and came over and sat on the fallen tree next to him. Pete willed him away, but the man didn’t move or speak. Pete drank. The man leaned over to say something, but stopped, leaned away. He leaned over again, and back again, as if there was some confidence he could not evict from his brain.