Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Pete closed the manila folder.

“The mother’s a disaster. Most of her disability goes to speed.”

“I recognize the kid,” the cop said. “Got a good run of priors going.”

The kid dangled his head between his knees. A recreational gas huffer, who smelled like gasoline, but with an undertone of minerals like a rotting pumpkin in hot dirt. Other times of Cheetos and semen. With that acne-potted skin, you initially felt sorry for him. He came and went but not to school or for long or for good. He owed restitution for an arson (equipment shed, track field), had a pending court date for burgling pickups.

“He’s about one infraction away from a stint at Pine Hills,” Pete said.

“Like assaulting a cop.”

The thing was, Pete suspected the onset of something diagnosable, a condition or combination of disorders that a good therapist would home in on. But Pete could never get the fifteen-year-old to an appointment, either because of the boy or his insane mother. He told them there was a new drug called Ritalin in the literature. Regretted saying the word the moment it slipped out of his mouth and they looked at him like he’d broken out in French. Literature . What drugs and literature in the houses in and around Tenmile, Montana. Louis L’Amour and James Michener, and comic books, furled and foxed Penthouse s, some marijuana. Popular Mechanics and some truckers’ speed. The Bible, if you were lucky. Good God, what this dotty bitch and the punkinhead son would make of Revelations. It’d look like something painted on the side of a van. The cranks and drunks up here took to Jesus (in jail, if it pleases the court) and worried creases into the spine of the good book, consulting it like the I Ching or a Ouija board. For a good five or six months, they’d follow the Ten Commandments and hand out Jack Chick tracts like they were lucky pennies or rabbits’ feet. But soon they were chipping, they were sneaking a drink or a joint or some uppers on the sly, thumbing the thin pages for answers to the little questions as if following the better part of God’s law was achieved by divining from Leviticus what to have for supper or what color socks to wear.

“He could maybe do all right in a stable environment,” Pete said. “Maybe not.”

On the porch, the mother and son sensed things approaching a head. Their social worker had his clipboard under his armpit and he and the cop were talking. The mother watched, read the men’s body language, a language with which she had some fluency from previous arrests, other times she was made to wait. In court. At the SSI office, signing up for disability security. She chinned herself toward them trying to hear, but the kid was untroubled, mute and deviceless as a glass of lukewarm water.

“So do you feel like throwing a mom and her son in jail today?” Pete asked.

“I surely do not. But these two are full idiots.” The cop dropped the butt and mashed it neatly with the point of his boot. “I thought the mama was plumb full of shit.”

“About?”

“You. Dispatch didn’t even know if we had a Department of Family Services in town.”

“My office is in the basement of the courthouse,” Pete said amiably. “Next to Records.”

“So whaddya usually do with them?”

“There’s no usual. What can I say? The kid’s got priors. I’d like to keep him out of Pine Hills. There gonna be any charges?”

“I dunno. Resisting, I guess. Assault if you wanna go there.”

“Do you?”

“What I don’t want is to come back.” The cop pressed closed a nostril with his finger and leaned over and blew furiously out of it.

“Let ’em off with a warning?”

The cop nodded, wiping his nose with the back of his index finger.

“Okay. But let me talk to the girl first,” Pete said, bending to look in the squad car.

“The girl?”

There was no girl in the squad car. Pete had assumed there would be, but there wasn’t.

“What girl?” the cop asked.

Pete ignored him and charged through the yard and up the steps. The mother leaned over whining at him, but he stepped around her and she fell over—“Hey!” she said — but he was past her and into the house. The light laddering through the blinds was morning light, cleaner and brighter. Not that what it shone on was much worth seeing. Styrofoam cups and paper bags and dirty clothes in the windrows of their comings and goings. Ashtrays on the gnawn armrests of the couch were filled to overflowing with butts. A dark jar of liquid sat on the coffee table atop a stack of unopened mail.

“Katie?” he called. The catch in his throat surprised him. Sweet Christ, he really gave a shit. The way he charged up in here. That he was here at all.

“Kate, it’s me, Pete.”

He set down his clipboard and stepped into a small cloud of fruit flies off the kitchen and waved them away from his face, his eyes. Into the narrow hall. Bed sheets with rust-colored stains and rectangles of particleboard rode along the wall. A pacifier. A Happy Meal box filled with twine. Sacks of sand and cans of open paint. A hammer and a stack of eight-track tapes.

“Katie?”

There were families you helped because this was your job, and you helped them get into work programs or you set up an action plan and checked in on them or you gave them a ride to the goddamn doctor’s office to have that infection looked at. You just did. Because no one else was going to. And then there were the people who were reasons for you to do your job. Katie. Why.

Fuck why. She just was.

He stepped past the boy’s room and called for her again. She wasn’t in her room. Just a mattress on the floor and a thin sleeping bag and a cup of water. Pink nude dolls. He stepped over a crushed cardboard box and pulled on the cord to a bare bulb. Her small clothes lay on the floor. The cop’s shadow passed by the window. Shit, she might have run away and into the woods out back.

The sliding closet door rattled on its track. There.

“Katie, it’s Pete.”

The door slid open. His heart was actually pounding. She stepped out into the room, slight and shy and stinted. Hair nearly white, and scared white too.

He knelt.

“Hey,” he said.

She turned her head away.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

She put her head down and charged at him and threw her arms around his neck. He gasped, and her hair sucked into his mouth with his breath, and her heart thrummed in her little birdcage chest, the little pumping bird that raced in there. His own racing too. He could feel the relief behind his eyeballs, his face, shuddering in his body like exhaustion.

“So she was in here,” the cop said from the doorway.

Katie pressed her head tight against his, and he tried to unclutch her, but she closed her eyes against him, grabbed one of his ears, gripped his neck, and squeezed as hard as she could. Pete stood, the girl affixed to him. The cop scratched himself.

“It’s okay,” Pete said to the girl and then again, louder to the cop who departed, nodding sheepishly.

“Katie,” he said. “The policeman is gone.”

She looked to see if it was true, not at the door but at him. A skinny blond thing so small in his arms. She put her hands inside his coat.

“This was scary, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t move.

“The policeman came, didn’t he? Because your mom and Cecil were fighting, right?”

She murmured yes.

“It was scary, wasn’t it? I’d be scared. Not knowing what your mom is going to do to your brother or what your brother is going to do to your mom? Did you see the policeman?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And is that when you hid in your room?”

She nodded against his chest.

“It’s okay now. That was a good thing to have happened, because the policeman called me. And I’m here now and we’re gonna get this all straightened out, okay?”