Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Now the judge talked with his hands, threw wide his arms, touched the man’s chest, and pointed at his open palm. Pete willed him to ease off. But the judge now buttonholed the guy — literally hooking his fat finger through the man’s open buttonhole — as though turning this man alone would deliver Rimrock County to President Carter.

Give it up, Judge, Pete thought. We need to keep our heads down. We need us a stiff drink. The man spoke and the judge crossed his arms and tilted his head back in a mime of listening. Pete had seen this move in court and it always preceded a redoubled harangue.

Could be hours.

Pete went back inside. Neil had his foot all the way up on the cooler and leaned over it shelling peanuts, watching the television over the end of the bar. The president and Reagan behind their lecterns. Reagan’s wrinkled cheeks ruddied with makeup. Carter and those outrageous lips.

Pete put his hands on the bar and leaned in.

“Do me a favor and turn it off? I don’t want to hear from him all night about what a Republican dupe you are.”

Neil smiled and got up on the cooler and flipped the channel. The debate was on all of them. He killed the sound and climbed down.

“You want a drink?” he asked.

“Better get me a boilermaker. It’s been a long-ass day.”

Neil selected a bottle, held it up. Pete nodded that it was fine as he took out a twenty.

“When the judge comes in, bring the bottle over before he can give you any money.”

Neil clucked his tongue and took Pete’s cash.

A couple of the judge’s friends along the wall held up their beer cans in greeting, and Pete settled into a booth at the back of the bar. A quiet night. The poker table was covered with a black blanket. Pete sloshed his whiskey around, watched it cling like oil to the side of the short glass, and then took a drink. Hot and lovely. He quickly finished the whiskey, drank his beer, then got another from Neil, and when he’d finished that one, the judge came in fuming. Pete called, and the judge stormed over and slid into the booth, his gut taut against the table. Pete nudged the table away so the man could fit in. The judge frowned at him for it.

“Apparently we got us a real problem with welfare queens,” the judge said.

“Is that right.”

“You can’t throw a stone without hitting one. Even out here in Rimrock County if that sumbitch Johan is to be believed.”

Neil came up with the bottle and a glass. The judge grabbed them away from Neil and poured and then reached into his suit coat for his billfold.

“This goddamn Reagan — Where you going, Neil?”

The judge held up a bill. Neil pointed at Pete, and the judge scowled at him and put the money on the table.

“I drink your good stuff all the time,” Pete said. The judge took a sip, held up the drink to say thanks, but left the bill on the table. Then he narrowed his eyes at Pete, studying him up and down as one might a horse or an engine block. He reached across the table and pinched some of Pete’s hair between his fingers.

“Get a haircut,” he said, tossing it away. “Why do these people let you into their homes, I have to wonder.”

Pete smiled and poured more into his and the judge’s little glasses.

“Because they know I’m not a cop.”

The judge smirked into his whiskey, then swallowed. Asked how was business. Pete told Judge Dyson about the boy he’d taken to Cloninger’s.

“Got ’em a Reagan sign up in their yard?”

“Not that I saw.”

The judge took a fresh can of snoose from his vest pocket and snapped it in his hand while Pete told him about the Pearl boy and the gunfire and his father.

“These people,” the judge muttered, more about the general electorate than Pete’s clients.

“The guy made his kid take off the clothes I bought him. I’m not sure what to do now.”

“Let them rot, the ungrateful sons a bitches.” Dyson ran a fingernail around the diameter of the can, and twisted it open.

“Noble sentiment there, Judge.”

“You go back up there, you’ll get yourself hurt.”

The judge took a pinch and tucked it in front of his bottom incisors. He licked his fat lower lip, picked black motes off his tongue.

“If I go alone,” Pete said.

“You’ll get some deputies hurt then. Just help the ones you can. It’s not like you got nothing else to do.”

Pete went and retrieved a coffee cup from Neil for the judge to spit in. The judge turned the cup handle away and aligned the can of chew next to it and his glass. He was not as neat a man since his wife had died, but habits remained.

“I seen your father’s new old lady…”

“Bunnie.”

“That’s right, Bunnie. When I was in Great Falls a few weeks back,” the judge said.

“How was that?”

“Evangelical. No match for your mother, rest her soul. The judge raised his glass and they sipped. “Bunnie had a couple bags on her arm. I assume that means the ranch is still doing okay.”

Pete scoffed. “That ranch is a hobby.”

“Your old man makes more of his hobbies than most people do with a whole career.”

“He’s just mean, is all.”

The judge was going to say something about this, but Neil came over to check on them, and the judge shoved a fat finger in his face.

“Don’t let this guy buy my drinks, Neil.”

Pete slid out of the booth and the judge grunted his way out too. They watched the debate on television for a minute. Carter’s sallow aura was evident, more so with the sound down. Reagan’s turn to talk. He shook his head, said something to his lectern, looked up and smiled at Carter like he’d turned over a royal flush in a movie. It occurred to Pete that no one wins a close hand with a royal flush in real life. Ever. But in the movies, royal flushes were always coming to the rescue. These remarkable turnabouts, reversals on the turn of a card.

The front door boomed open. The judge scurried through it on his fat furious legs.

Pete’s cabin sat on five acres in the Purcell Mountains fifteen miles north of Tenmile, a two-mile walk from some decent fishing in the Yaak River. He’d put down two thousand dollars and made payments to the doddering codger who’d built it and now lived with a sister in Bozeman. A kind old guy who showed him all the little kinks of the place, what doors wouldn’t latch, which window wasn’t true. White sandpaper stubble and watering eyes when he left.

Think of getting old.

Think of being only thirty-one yourself and having gotten so much already dead fucking wrong.

Pete had running water and was to have electricity in the spring if the county could be believed. He had a new water heater from Sears on the porch, still wrapped in plastic, which he couldn’t install yet; unlike the electricity, it was unclear when or if the county would bring gas, but he got a deal on the water heater. He’d hoped some surveyors he’d seen farther up Separation Creek were in the employ of developers, but a Forest Service truck met them and he couldn’t be sure the men weren’t from Champion Timber Company. He foresaw another year showering at the courthouse.

Next to the water heater was a nearly spent stack of firewood, but he had a pile of rounds out back of the house that he could split to get through the spring. The layout inside was simple, ample. A bedroom where for now he chucked his empty cardboard boxes, a front room with his bed, a leather chair, a kerosene lamp and an electric lantern, two shelves of books, and a bureau. An olive canvas bag half-full of clean or dirty clothes for the Laundromat in Tenmile. In the kitchen a separate woodstove cooked his meals just fine, and a hatch in the floor led into a root cellar where he kept his milk, beer, and vegetables. Problem bears broke into places up around here, but he hadn’t had any trouble. The very idea of problem bears. A problem for who. Did the bears talk about problem people.