Fourth of July Creek (22 page)

Vandine squatted down on his haunches and began to draw idly in the dirt with the side of the can.

“A person can imagine begging for his life. And beg, I fucking did. And I’ll allow that I was pretty cowardly in some of the things I said to this man and his son.”

“You weren’t a coward,” Pete said. “You were trying to stay alive.”

“It wasn’t any pleasure to discover that I would behave this way.” Vandine pitched the can spinning like a saucer into the woods. “In any case,” he said, “that’s not why I called you. I called you because of the boy. I’m a fuckup. But . . . I can’t imagine a man making his boy kill someone for nothing.”

Vandine reached for another beer, closed his hand around it. Again Pete waited for him to continue. But he did not. It occurred to Pete that Vandine and the boy had both been thrust into this horrible situation of Pearl’s making. How there was nothing either one of them could do about it.

“So the kid, did he—”

“He shot at me.”

“He missed.”

“From ten feet. I don’t know if it was on purpose or it was too much gun for him or the good Lord or what. But I didn’t get killed.”

“What about Pearl, didn’t he—?”

Vandine held up his hand for Pete to quiet down.

“Next thing I know I’m half-deaf and throwing up, and when I finally get my head together, I see the old man and the kid running off into the woods.”

Vandine stood, pitched his freshly empty can aside, and sat on the bucket.

“It was like some goddamned test. I wonder if the point wasn’t even to kill me. Like that Old Testament story, the father who has to kill his son—”

“Abraham.”

“Yup, Abraham.”

Vandine opened the beer and squeezed the pull tab in his fist. He regarded the cut the pull tab had put into his skin, and smiled dimly.

“Do you know where they are?” Pete asked.

“I was going to ask you that.”

“This was up Tickle Crick.” Vandine drank and nodded and snorted at some amusing thought.

“What?”

“You sure you want to go mess with this guy?” he asked.

Pete leaned back against the jamb of the shed and ran his hands over his face.

“No, I’m not sure of that. I’m not sure of that at all.”

T
he farmer rose before dawn and went out to chores. A broken chevron of geese honked in the high white air of morning, and he thought he might go down to the bottoms with the shotgun. The dog dancing at the sight of him in his rubber waders. He put the shotgun on the table, dropping shells into the pocket of his wool jacket.

“Thought I might head down the bottoms with the shotgun,” he said.

His wife was making breakfast. She scraped his eggs between two pieces of toast and handed the plate to him. Told him she had that appointment at eleven. He nodded, already working a bite of the dry toast and egg in his mouth, taking a swig of coffee to wash it back. He put the open shotgun in the crook of his arm, let out the dog ahead of him, and softly closed the door like he was already down in the low land by the water.

He crossed the field as the sun struck the tips of the Bitterroots and down through the chokecherry and water birch to the path that led to the long pond where he kept a permanent blind. The dog bounded through the brake of wild raspberry and, snuffling at the soil, tore off into the trees.

He whistled for the animal when it didn’t come back. Listened, whistled again. The dog barked. He set off into the trees.

He smelled smoke. Goddamned kids. Beer cans would be all over up there. He climbed the hill through the stand to the little clearing just off the dirt road. The dog bounded back to him and dropped a laceless hightop tennis shoe marked up in neon colors on the grass.

“Go on,” he said, and the dog tore up the hill ahead of him. The farmer was panting and hot when he reached the summit. Charred grass around a circle of ashes and a few glowing embers where the kids had a fire but didn’t even bother to dig a hole or make a ring of rocks. No beer cans to speak of, but, curiously, three plastic honey bears around in the dirt. And, so quiet it startled him to see, a young person sat on a log with his pants around his ankles, his head between his knees, hands palms up on the dirt in front of him. As if in a mortal bowel movement. The dog sniffed around his trousers.

The farmer set the shotgun against the tree and picked up a honey bear and held it up against a spot of sky. About half full of clear liquid. He sniffed at the nipple on the top. Alcohol. But something else.

Sulphur.

Shit.

He immediately pitched the thing aside and shook his hand in the air and wiped it on his jeans just below the knee. He asked the boy what the hell he’d been up to. Not expecting an answer. The kid’s white legs like alabaster sticking out of the denim pooled around his ankles.

“Don’t you be dead, now,” the farmer said.

He went over and poked him on the shoulder. The kid moaned.

“Hey now,” the farmer said.

Cecil suddenly looked up, bloodshot and bewildered. The dog barked at him and the kid let out a little shriek, stood, and managed to turn one leg of his jeans inside out with his first step before the tangle dropped him. The farmer was trying to get his barking dog by the collar, so he didn’t see the honey bear lodged in the kid’s bunghole.

Whenever Cecil mentioned his headache to anyone, they asked how his asshole was doing, or said they could only imagine how his ass felt, and so he stopped saying anything about his head. But it didn’t matter. The cops continued to speculate. Would they need to administer the aspirin rectally. Did they have a suppository for him. Did he shit out the mouth. Thank goodness he wasn’t a smoker, whatever that was supposed to mean.

He spent the day in the lobby of the Missoula police station with the desk officer, who was reading a paperback. Sometime in the late morning, the desk officer glanced up at Cecil and a funny look came over his face, and he left his station and returned with a paper lunch sack and set it on the chair next to the boy. He told the cop who came out of the restroom not to leave his lunch where the boy might could sit on it and eat it.

By evening, no one had come for him. He was issued a gray jumpsuit that chafed him and taken to a great white door and into the cells, which were painted cinder block and echoed with their footsteps. A sot with wasted eyes and a walleyed brute leered at him passing. The drunk closed his lids and curled up on the floor like a cat, but the brute walked to the bars and watched the deputies put Cecil into the cell.

The brute scratched his stubble and the wiry black hairs of his dark arms and regarded the new arrival thoughtfully.

Cecil looked around the cell. There were two bunks. A rudimentary chair and small table formed up out of concrete. A black stool banked in the lidless metal toilet had been there so long it had no odor. It was cold, and the clothes on him seemed unable to keep the heat of his intermittent shivering.

The brute watched him take in his surroundings with a pair of small black eyes, close-set in his pocked face.

“Boy.” He stretched up on his tiptoes, tilting his head back and looking down a knobby protuberance of a nose at Cecil sitting on the bunk. “That’s my bed, boy,” he said. “Get off it.”

Cecil climbed down.

He was nearly in the bottom bunk when the brute tsked his tongue. Cecil looked at him, and the man shook his head no.

Cecil sat on the concrete chair.

“Get out of it,” the man said calmly.

Cecil put his head down.

“I said get up out of it, boy.”

Cecil slid out onto the floor. Then the man began to talk to him. Steadily. How much trouble Cecil was in. What errors the young man had made. What all they would have to do about that. In time. In due time.

The next afternoon the cops had him change back into his street clothes, and put him up in a back room of the station to wait. The door was ajar and he heard when Pete came in, heard Pete talking to the officer who was in charge. He crept up to the door and peeked out.

“I’m the one he told you to call. The boy you picked up yesterday. He all right?”

The officer looked at Pete’s badge with his reading glasses and then gestured for him to sit. He opened a drawer and set a honey bear in a plastic bag on the desk. Then he leaned back in his groaning chair and drummed his fingers on his fat stomach.

“That was sticking out his ass.”

Pete rubbed his face. Couldn’t help grinning.

“I don’t know why everybody thinks this is such high goddamn hilarity,” the cop said to the room generally.

“I’ve known kids to do it,” Pete said.

“The hell for? Is the mouth gone out of style?”

Pete put his elbow on the desk, leaned in.

“The tissues down there”—the cop frowned disgustedly at the word
tissues
—“are very absorbent. A shot of booze straight into the bloodstream. You’re drunk instantly and you don’t smell like it.”

“What kid knows this?”

“Information gets around.”

The cop sat up and put the honey bear back in the drawer.

“You get drunk, your dad whups you, and you spend the day baling hay or mending fence puking your guts out. That’s the way it’s done. And you drink whiskey not fuckin vodka and you sure as shit don’t do it with your puckered asshole!”

There was a small commotion of cops and a real criminal at the front door, chairs getting kicked around the tile near the desk. Grunts and the like. Then the door to the cells opened and swallowed up the noise.

Pete asked where the kid was.

Cecil knocked over a chair getting back to his spot at the table. Pete gestured wearily from the doorway for Cecil to follow him before he even made it back to his seat. They both signed some paperwork and walked out to Pete’s car. Once again, they sat a minute together, Pete drumming the steering wheel.

“I got some people I can live with,” Cecil said. “Here in Hamilton. We’re in Hamilton, right?”

Pete looked at him.

“You’re in Missoula. You were picked up in the Bitterroots.”

“Her name is Ell and his name is Bear.”

“Bear.”

“Yes.”

“That short for Honey Bear?”

“What? No.”

Pete reached across Cecil to the far side of the dash for a lighter that had slid over there. It wasn’t lost on Cecil that Pete wanted to keep him from winding up with it.

“What happened at your uncle’s?”

“I never asked to go there.”

“You didn’t give me many options, Cecil. In fact, why’d you even have the cops call me? You clearly want nothing to do with the options I can provide you.”

“I have one now. These people, Bear and Ell. They’re
of
age
. You can make it so I can live with them.”

“I wasn’t stopping you. Why didn’t you just go be with them?”

“I was
trying
to get a ride.”

“And wound up with a honey bear in your ass. Of course.”

“You were the only person I could call. So now, just make it so’s I can live with them.”

“Just make it? I don’t know them from Adam, Cecil. What is it you think I—?”

“Fine. Why don’t you just punch me again? Made you feel better at least.”

Pete sighed, laid his head back against the headrest.

“That wasn’t right. It wasn’t okay at all. But I was trying to get you to listen, to tell you that if you blow it with your uncle, I’d have to put you in a very rough place—”

“I have a fuckin place! Just check it out.”

Pete turned to face him.

“Please. Please?”

“What about your mom?”

Cecil crossed his arms and wedged himself against the car door.

“The whole idea was only to get you two apart to cool off,” Pete said. “Why don’t we see about going back?”

Cecil shook his head and would not meet Pete’s eye.

“Is there something you’re not telling me? Is there something I can help—”

“If you want to help me, let me live with Ell and Bear. Otherwise just throw me in a hole or wherever you’re gonna put me.”

Cecil had to stay in the temporary shelter in Missoula for a week. Maybe two, Pete said. It was fucking bullshit, a brick dormitory with ten bunk beds on red tile that had been scuffed the color of Pepto. White cinder block walls with boogers on them and a chest of nappy stuffed animals, wooden toys from the 1960s.

When Cecil had arrived there were three boys and seven girls aged four to sixteen, and the majority looked to him to be related by their dishwater blondness and their odor, a piney scent that he shortly came to realize was the smell of the medicine shampoo they were all made to use.

The small children generally kept themselves apart from him because of his size and his ratty face, and the sixteen-year-old was a muttering Indian boy who only left his bunk to look out the window or watch television.

There was a little girl named Tracy who had bald patches on her head. Around her bed were long strings of hair that she pulled out in the night. You could hear her doing it, a barely audible tugging sound like someone yanking a sleeve or the drawstrings on a pullover. The other children seemed to have gotten used to it. Cecil told her to knock it off, but she never did, and he realized that no one was used to it, there was just no remedy for it.

There was another troublesome kid, an obese hysteric named Scotty. He stole a coffee cup from an attendant and after a two- or three-minute standoff, threw it at the attendant’s face. Blood from the man’s nose soaked his shirt, and the kid cried like a toddler when they restrained him. Screamed like they’d stuck him with knife.

Tracy and Scotty were taken away in the same hour, and for a day there, Cecil was high on the hog because he claimed both bunks and no one questioned it. Then several of the girls left and eight new kids arrived and he retreated to a bunk near the window and the rackety radiator. There were kids with scars that fairly glowed like pink wax melted across their naked backs in the showers. Kids who had no respect for personal property or space and who would take your toothbrush or touch you without warning. Kids who bit. Kids who arrived in the middle of the night. Kids who slept on blankets on the dirty runners and left at first light. These children cried at night, they spoke at night, they would not shut up and in the dark you imagined waiting until they were deep in sleep and then slinking over and punching them in the face. That you were ashamed of these feelings did not drive them away. Cecil even imagined what kind of places these kids came from—and these places seemed to him to be in a significantly worse category than his own sad, weird home—and felt the stirrings of pity, but good God they would not cease jabbering. It was like they could not help making themselves hated objects, magnets for cruelty. He wondered did all abuse simply come down to children so irritating that they engendered violence or neglect, the reverse of the way adorable children got toys, got spoiled, and got fat. Seven days and still no Pete.