Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Oh, I ain’t giving it to you. I come to see you tear it up.

You came all the way from Choteau to—

So I can bring the pieces of this check back to your mother. Yep.

I won’t disappoint you.

That would be a refreshing outcome.

Pete rips the check in half, rips the halves in half, and snows the table with them. Then he heads back to the poker table, back to work.

The bell over the door tolled her unexpected arrival. He kicked out the chair in front of him.

“Have a seat, Mary.”

She looked at the chair a moment.

“Have lunch with me.”

“There was a call.”

“Look, I think you’re very pretty and I can tell already you’re interesting as hell. Just sit down.”

She grinned and shook her head at some thought and glanced at the door. As if debating something. Maybe she was thinking of her boyfriend.

“Soup,” he said, opening his hand over his bowl like he was teaching her the word.

“There was a call. From Tenmile. Somebody named Cloninger. He says the kid you left with him isn’t welcome anymore.”

What was it like on the way to Texas?

It was Wyoming, which means to drive forever through ugly scrubscape the color of dirty pennies.

It was just wyoming along. They were wyoming forever. You could wyom all day and not make any progress. To wyom was to go from nowhere to nowhere. Through nowhere. To see nothing. To do nothing but sit. You turn on the radio and wyom through the dial slowly, carefully in search of a sliver of civilization only to find a man talking about the price of stock animals and feed. You listen to a dour preacher wyoming about your bored and dying and wyoming soul.

Did her mom wyom too?

Mom wyomed all through Colorado. She smoked, she drank coffee and Tab and then beer, wyoming her fingers on the wheel sometimes and stopping to wyom to someone on the pay phone, maybe Daddy but probably that friend in Texas. The truck driver.

Is he your boyfriend?

It’s an old friend, Rachel Leslie.

She said Rachel’s name to annoy her.

Old friend from when?

From when I worked at the trucking company. He’s a trucker.

Is that why we’re going all the way to Texas?

He said we could stay with him, yes.

What’s his name?

Jimmy.

How do you know him?

I told you. From when I was a receptionist.

Did you do it with him too?

What is that supposed to mean? Him too what?

Come on. I know why Daddy left.

Did her mother hit her or pull over or give her some kind of talking to?

Worse.

What did she do?

She cried. Drops big and quiet racing down her face.

Did it unnerve Rachel?

Rose.

Did it unnerve Rose?

Yes.

Why?

Because her mother’s heart was wyoming, it was wyoming hard, and she was days and years and maybe forever from a good man.

Sexual deviancy came as little surprise anymore. Nymphomania, satyriasis, pedophilia, coprophilia, telephone scatologia — there wasn’t a particular paraphiliac that hadn’t crossed Pete’s path at one time or another. He’d worked with a six-year-old girl who’d been so sexualized that she would grab at passing groins, grope and cop feels like a brazen pervert, and could never be left alone with other children.

At first, he was shocked to discover whole rings of kids who practically orgied in group homes and psych wards, doubly shocked to find out how uncommon it wasn’t. There were kids he worked with who’d routinely been molested by parents, teachers, and staff at various institutions, as if some dark chaperone escorted them from consort to consort. He’d worked with panty thieves, serial peepers, and Lolitas who found and fucked Humbert upon Humbert on the way to school. Not a few of them touching him on the leg, trying to tongue his ear.

So Pete had no trouble imagining Cecil squatting over the Cloningers’ dog, reaching under it, and asking the dog how was that, and the dog yelping and then licking his hand, and Cecil doing it again, getting the casing between his fingers and expertly coaxing the lean member out.

The dog barking in earnest now.

And Pete had no trouble imagining old, kind Cloninger peering around the upraised hood of his truck to see what all was the rumpus, seeing the dog drop its front paws and bark a question mark — a sound Cloninger had never heard his dog, any dog, make — and the boy crabcrawling on the grass around the animal. And this time the dog being into it. Whatever it was. Cloninger’s eyes, they could not yet see this thing entirely new to his experience, there being no word for what was occurring.

And then all at once he understood. The coolness of his reddening face, a bracing ice water outrage, and he charges into the yard where the dog is now on its back, and there on the step are Cloninger’s dumbstruck daughters and his squinting dim son, and Cloninger kicks the dog, who snarls in alarm and then slinks off in shame or even guilt, because dogs, they do feel guilt, yes they do, they may not have souls but they have one point on the moral compass, the due north of masters like Cloninger, so the dog now goes to the ground low and backward-glancing. And Cloninger takes great heaving breaths just to keep from laying Cecil out, saying you’re gone, go get your things.

Pete and Cecil had lunch at the Seven Feathers Truck Stop outside of Columbia Falls. The kid said he had to take a piss, slid out of the booth, and slouched off to the bathroom. Pete could tell immediately that he was going to run. When the boy slunk out of the bathroom, he broke for the front, hitting the postcard rack next to the register. It pinwheeled over, spraying cards.

The customers at the counter ceased sawing into steaks and chicken-fried specials, set their silverware, wiped their chins, and regarded the boy’s flight with interest. He careered into the parking lot, was nearly struck down by a skidding compact, and alighted running on the pavement, skittish and bantam as all get-out. He juked as if someone were in hot pursuit and sprinted around the gas pumps. The folks at the counter leaned to watch him disappear from view.

“The meat loaf wasn’t that bad,” the plump waitress said to laughter. The cook taking a smoke break at the counter said to go on and just keep it up, and they all laughed again. The other waitress came out from the kitchen and asked what was so funny.

“That kid he was with”—the first waitress nodded toward Pete—“just took off like a maniac,” she said to the other. Then to Pete, “Your son, or…?”

“I’m from DFS,” he said.

“DF whatnow?”

Everybody in the place was watching Pete.

“I’m his caseworker,” Pete said. “Department of Family Services.”

Some silence. A coffee cup set back in its saucer.

“Well,” the waitress said, stuffing her pad into her apron and taking up plates. There was a low mutter somewhere along the counter, and a muffled, snorting laugh.

“You just gonna let him run wild?” someone asked. They looked at Pete, this Long-Haired Organ Where Their Tax Dollars Go as he crammed a cold handful of the boy’s fries into his mouth. They waited for him to do something.

“You want I should call the highway patrol, hon?” the waitress asked.

“Let’s not throw our skirts over our heads just yet,” Pete said. There was no good in letting her or the truckers, loggers, and farmers think this was an emergency, because it wasn’t.