Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“Have a pull of this here, Pete.”

Palming the flask, and taking a swallow, he retched it all burning back into his mouth. He spat into the weeds in back of the Eastgate Bar expecting them to ignite. Pivoted gracefully and went through the open door. The inside was as cool and dark as they were loud. He hopped onto a plush green stool and drank all that was proffered him. The candy cinnamon Hot Damns! that coated his lips and little glasses of Redeye that stripped his throat. The jukebox glowed green, red, and lurid blue. When a bass line curled out, Ursula pulled him up. He lay into her bosom as they slow danced among the squat tables. Knocking the candles in their red beaded teardrop holders to the carpet. She straddled his leg and ground herself on him. The girl behind the bar told them to get a room, that that wasn’t dancing. They groped against the wall yet. He ran his hand between her legs. It came away hot and moist as something from an oven. The girl behind the bar said she was calling the cops, they didn’t knock it off.

“You’re pale.”

“M’aright.”

“Where you going, baby?”

“Minute.”

This moronic sunlight. Pete wheeled around the side of the building away from the dinnertime traffic on Broadway and leaned his head against the building, his arms quivering, and opened a faucet of rainbow vomit. The earth misted through his tears. Great sweeps of his head, steps taken, keeling into the backseat of the Gran Fury. Nodding out on warm Naugahyde, he had dreams of little narrative or figure or action. Colors. A whorl of sickened faces. The sense everybody needed his help.

He is lifted by his armpits out of this car. Steps less articulate than a puppet’s. Coming to. His feet furrowing the dirt, bouncing over tree roots, dragging pinecones. Darkness. Smoke.

“Here you go, buddy.” A can set in his lap. Somehow he’s been shaped cross-legged by the campfire. Shane opens the can, squeezes his hand around it. Man is clay, he thinks.

“A couple sips of that’ll bring you around.”

“Man is clay.”

“He sure as shit is, buddy.”

Every pained divot in his crushed and wasted features he can feel. He sets the can by and crabs behind him and draws himself against a stump.

A body between him and the fire now.

It is Great Ursula, hands on her hips.

“You dance with me, baby?”

“Just let him alone, Ursula.”

“You just stay right there, honey,” she says to him. “I’m a dance for you.”

Great Ursula standing in front of him, a black amphora against the fireshards, the upflung sparks. She tells no lie. She is dancing.

He woke in the dark, sat up, and wondered where he was. He recognized the orientation of the windows in the walls but was for a moment lost in a rough draft of a place dear to him until he remembered all that had happened. Missoula. This, the cottage they shared. Where they tried to stay married. The place was empty. Beth had cleared out already, taken Rachel.

He got up and rinsed his face at the kitchen sink.

Spoils snored on the living room floor. In a sense, his last friend, the last one who thought of him dearly. Shane, Yance, and the others — they missed him, but they didn’t know him.

Nobody knows me but me. Where had he heard that. Was it true.

Spoils awake of a sudden and peering up at him.

“How you doin, professor?”

Pete coughed. Bolts of phlegm rattled loose and he spat them onto the wall and sat on the carpet with Spoils.

“Where is everybody?”

“I said I’d stay out here with you. Almost left you on account of you were punching at anybody’d touch you.”

“I got hammers in my head.”

“It’s good to see you, Pete,” Spoils said.

Pete nodded.

“Where’s Beth?”

“She’s going to Texas.”

“Texas?”

“Yeah.”

“Jeez. But Rachel…?”

“Yup.”

Spoils sat up against the wall.

“We seen him at the Stock’s one night. Playing poker.”

“I ain’t even mad at that fucker.”

“Shane kicked his teeth in anyhow.”

“I didn’t ask him to do that.”

“You’d a done it for him.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Well, Shane, he does like to pound a motherfucker.”

They sat in the squares of streetlight and looked at one another like a pair of prisoners in a cell.

“What are you gonna do, Pete?” He nodded toward the door.

“About Beth and Rachel?”

“Yeah.”

“I dunno. I should go get ’em. I just don’t know how.”

Pete’s eyeballs throbbed in this screaming gale of a hangover, of a life. He said to himself to quit feeling sorry for himself. Bed, lie in it.

“It is real good to see you, Pete.”

“You too, Spoils.”

It was five in the morning. He told Spoils to go back to sleep and he sat in back of the cottage listening to the river behind the bushes, slowly deciding things. Deciding to quit his job and chase down his wife.

At least get Rachel back.

Something. He wasn’t sure what.

Just quit the job first.

He entered an annex of one of the county buildings, and through a door into Western Service District Headquarters of the Department of Family Services regional offices. Three rows of cubicles under low-hung ceilings the color and texture of saltines. The only person around on this Saturday was a woman nursing a baby from a bottle in a chair in the middle row of cubicles. She lit a cigarette, then hefted the child over her shoulder to burp it, turning her head to exhale smoke away from its face. Under a nearby desk, a boy turned over. Asleep too. From somewhere in a rear office another woman emerged with papers and went into the cubicle where Pete couldn’t see her. A moment later the mother toted the baby down the divide between the cubicles toward the front door. The social worker woke the child under the desk. The boy sat up dazed, then fearful and unrecognizing. She coaxed him out, took his hand, and walked him toward the front door after his mother. The boy, now alert, inspected Pete as he passed, whose own attentions had drifted to the social worker guiding and coaxing the child along.

She was someone new to the office, or new to Pete at least. Long dark hair done in a loose ponytail. A warm grin spread over her open and pleasing face as she led the child, and noticing Pete, she asked him would he wait, said she’d be right back. He said he would. Thinking I’d set a car on fire if you asked me nice. I’d eat a shotgun shell.

He sat on the plastic chair near the door. His hand throbbed and itched under the filthy bandage gone brown with dirt, blood, and discharge and he scratched the wound absently. The dog bite had begun to heal, but after a few days the pink folds of skin around the scabs had turned bright red and hurt to touch.

He watched through the blinds as the social worker put the woman and her kids into a cab, and then met her at the door when she came back in. Smiling, her hands shaped into a little basket. She asked what she could do for him.

“I’m looking for Jim,” he said.

“He’s the supervisor.” She glanced at his bandage. “Are you working with anyone? Or is this a referral?”

He chuckled. He had not showered. The awful bandage. He said that no, he wasn’t working with anyone.

“Maybe I can help you.”

He noticed then that a pine needle was suspended in a tangle of his long hair. He hadn’t shaved, hadn’t so much as glanced in a mirror. He surely looked as sorry as anyone who’d been here for services.

“Are you all right?”

He laughed outright now. Looked at her and cackled again.

“Is something funny?”

“I’m actually DFS. Out of Tenmile.”