Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Nothing. Her mother does all the telling. Starting off abstract. The thing about men. The things about men. How Jimmy always wanted her when they worked at the trucking company in Montana, you can tell the way a man will drink half his coffee sitting on the edge of your desk. And leaning over your desk to look at something, but really he’s just trying to get the smell of you.

Does she talk about Pete?

She does. On the two-by-four porch of Jimmy’s trailer, drinking a sweating beer. She says your father was once so affectionate, but when we had you it killed it or started to kill it, something about having children — you’re old enough to hear this now, you’re a young woman and you need to know this now — a child changes the love between two people. A baby makes it harder to keep the fire going. Don’t have a baby, Rachel.

Does she ask her mother if she regrets her?

No.

What does she ask?

Can she have a beer.

And can she?

Sure. Just promise me you won’t have a baby.

Afew weeks of Indian summer gave way to a sudden chill, snowfall that melted in the last warm days of the year. A moose wandered into Tenmile. The town’s dogs surrounded it and not a few of them got kicked and nearly gored. The sheriff shot it dead in the middle of town.

There was a fistfight in the War Bonnet that spilled into the street and ended when Ike’s glass eye popped out and disappeared into the alley. He came back an hour later with a.22 and shot the miner he’d been fighting in the back of the head. The man was two days dying.

A few other deaths. An old woman collapsed in the IGA bathroom. Indian Harold had a heart attack in his apartment, his hot plate glowing a malevolent red for two days. When they found him, the plastic tile on the wall nearby had melted and the underside of the cupboard was black as burnt toast. Lucky the whole building hadn’t gone up, they said.

The weather turned fully cold, highs in the thirties, and Pete got his firewood finished and put plastic over the windows, and weather-stripped the door nice and tight with shims and half a roll of duct tape.

A bear had tried to break into his place, tore up the window over the kitchen sink pretty good. He could see a little rust-colored blood and tufts of black fur in the sash, on the porch posts. A problem bear. When Pete opened the front door, chipmunks dashed about and vacated through the new kitchen egress. A box of granola on the counter sat blasted open like a firework pagoda. He found his other stores in the cellar under the house unmolested.

The only other curiosity was his loose change: cooking dinner one night, he accidentally tipped his tin cup of coins into the sink and noticed an inordinate number of coins with holes in them. Just like the nickel he’d gotten at the Seven Feathers Truck Stop. He sorted out ten of them, recalled that he’d half-noticed the phenomenon in his comings and goings, but only just now, turning them all over to the obverse side, did he see the Lincolns, Jeffersons, Washingtons, and FDRs all shot through the temple. Dead presidents. He wondered how he’d come by so many.

A pickup pulled in behind his car and disturbed these speculations. His brother Luke. Pete went out wiping his hands squinting into the headlights. The engine died.

“Just get back in the truck and go,” Pete said.

A chickadee fee-beed lonely in the rising dark, and a breeze kicked up.

“I don’t got a single thing for you.”

It wasn’t his brother’s shape limping from the darkness.

“Who is it?” Pete asked. He tugged a hatchet out of a round of pine on the porch.

“It’s just me, Pete.” His brother’s parole officer faltered into the light. “Give me a minute.”

His name was Wes Reynolds. His bitter, hardscrabble people had come from Minnesota, before that, Sweden, settling in Choteau where he grew up, a year behind Luke in high school. Wes and Pete and Luke Snow had been friends, or friendly, mainly by necessity, as Wes lived near the Snow spread west of town. He was always on the porch when they finished dinner, waiting for them. Saturday mornings too. He told outsized lies about his father’s whereabouts, vehicles the man allegedly drove, and missions he’d been assigned. It got to where he annoyed even their mother. Pete and Luke dared him to eat and climb all manner of things. The summer he broke his leg, they were relieved to be rid of him, and after Luke started high school, he quit coming around. He had a child with a woman who left him inside of two years, taking the boy with her. He still wore the wedding ring.

Pete fried burgers in a skillet as they completed their pleasantries. Wes wore a cylinder cast from his shoulder to his wrist, a neck brace, and turned his whole torso to look around. He ate with his good arm, and they listened to one another chew, Wes all but wincing with the effort. He caught Pete lingering on the bloody bloom on his eyeball and the yellow contusion around the socket.

“Where’d you and my brother fight?” Pete asked.

“Wasn’t no fight,” Luke said, swallowing. “More like an ambush.”

“What happened?”

“He was shitfaced at the Buttreys, holding up the line. Harassing this high school sophomore to let him buy beer with a check. Even though they don’t take his checks and everyone in town knows he ain’t supposed to have beer as part of his parole.”

“Christ,” Pete muttered.

“And everybody knows I’m his PO. I’m supposed to stand there? I’m supposed to worry about embarrassing him? Or getting crosswise of the almighty Snows?”

“I hear you.”

“He’s been by.”

“No.”

“It wasn’t a question.”

Wes extracted and extended a pointer from his shirt pocket.

“He came by after.”

“After what?” Wes asked, probing under his cast for the spot that itched.

Pete tried to figure out how to put it.

“After your run-in.”

“Say where he was headed?”

“I wouldn’t let him tell me.”

“Why?”

“In case someone come looking.”

Wes smiled revealing a chipped front tooth. Pete took up their plates and pulled the coffeepot off the stove and brought over two cups.

“Milk?”

“Nah.”

He poured them some coffee and nodded for them to go outside. He rolled cigarettes and by the time they were smoking the coffee had cooled off enough to drink.

“Look, Wes, I’m really sorry. But Luke… he’ll turn up sooner or later. He always does.”

“It’s not the same back in Choteau,” he said. “People ain’t as impressed with the Snows as they used to be.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it ain’t like high school. Meaning the cops aren’t gonna just tell Luke to go home and sleep it off. Fucking meaning”—Wes stepped off the porch and twisted awkwardly to see Pete around the beam—“when I catch him up here, you’re going down for abetting.”

Wes articulated himself into his pickup and rattled down the road. Pete went inside. He stood in front of his bulletin board empty save the map and post office box his brother had written down for him. He took it down, folded the paper, and put it in his wallet.

He investigated a family in a trailer park outside of Columbia Falls. A cadre of thieves who edged about the walls of the trailer like suspicious feral cats. Audibly sighing at his departure.

He stopped in town for gasoline, parked the car, and walked to stretch his legs. He could eat. The streets were empty, scarcely a person at business or play. He wondered was it Sunday. He passed a squat building made of stones and mortar from the city’s founding or nearly so and then a butcher’s shop with brown tile walls that were warm to the touch from the sun. The butcher notched up an eyebrow at Pete going by, switched the toothpick to the right side of his mouth. The Columbia was just up ahead, across from a chapel. He hastened up the street. The red vinyl upholstery on the inside of the door. The cleavage entryway of smoked glass bricks. He doubted there existed a bar between Tenmile and Choteau he hadn’t been in. Brisk business took place inside.