Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“I’m full.”

“You sure?”

“God yes.”

“You’re going to need your strength,” she said, taking his bowl and setting it on the coffee table. She got astraddle him. Hiked up his shirt and began to run her nails along his torso. He gasped and it embarrassed him, but she didn’t care or notice. She bent down, her robe was open already, and he swooned like a drunken woodland god. He started to pull her up, she fell back.

“It’s cold on the floor.”

“You’ll be warm in a minute.”

He was due some vacation days and he took them. A week of noons he woke and went downstairs to watch matinees in the Wilma or up the street to the Oxford for a late lunch and a little poker with tight-assed old cowboys. He had her key but he still paid the elevator man to let him up. Groceries and a bottle of something waiting for her when she got back from work. He liked having the place to himself. Waiting for her. Cracking the paper seal, ice in the glass, glug splash, ah.

He woke to her sitting on the bed, watching him sleep.

“Hey you.”

“Hey yourself.”

He sat up, the springs in the bed groaning and then tocking to stillness. How the contraption had clattered, bounding like a stagecoach. Fucking her you felt like you were really getting something accomplished, like you were a team, you two were good at it, that it was a thing that could be won.

“I feel like this bed is just gonna disintegrate,” he said, patting the mattress.

She smiled. He noticed just then that her eyetooth was gray and too that her smile was no less lovely.

“What time is it?”

“Almost five.”

He took a breath so deep it made his throat sore.

“I guess it’s supper what I’m buying you.”

They ate in a bleary cafe with weeping windows. Shared a tapioca dessert, spoons clinking in the pudding.

“So you’ve been at this awhile,” she said.

“What this?”

“The pudding.”

“What?”

“The job , dummy. I looked up some older cases in the records and saw you in there, in Missoula County. After you visited the office that day.”

“What did you do that for?”

“I wanted to see about you before I fucked you.”

He grabbed the check when the waitress set it down.

“You’re up in Tenmile now.”

“Yep.”

She sat back in the vinyl booth and regarded him. It had become something of a pastime, this just looking at him.

“What?”

“What made you run up there?”

“I didn’t run.”

“Those rural gigs are tough. Hours on the road. Not a lot of support. I’m sure you were on track for supervisor down here. So why go up there?”

He was in his wallet and set a twenty on the table. The waitress came and got it and made for the register. He asked would she bring him another cup of coffee, and she waved over her shoulder that she would. He folded his hands together and leaned forward.

“Can we talk shop just this once, and not anymore?” he asked.

“I don’t want to talk shop.”

“Then what are we talking?”

She waited until the waitress dropped off his coffee and change. He noticed there were no holes in the coins.

“There’s a party tonight, and I want you to come.”

“All right,” he said.

“It’s a work party.”

“Ah.”

“Over at Tricia’s.”

She waited to see if he would say anything else, and when he didn’t, crossed her arms. He reached across the table and got her wrist. A pair of hairline scars there too. He rubbed the groove they made. He did not wonder at all about why she’d done that. It was past.

“What is it?”

“I feel stupid.”

“About what?”

“I like you,” she said.

“I like you too.”

“I want to go to the party with you.”

“I’d like to be gone with to the party.”

She looked off.

“Mary, what the hell is it?”

“I’m new.”

“And?”

“And I’m gonna feel stupid when all the girls you’ve been with from the office are talking about me.”

He grinned and took her cold hand and rubbed it and told her that he’d never been with anyone from the office.

“I haven’t so much as kissed one of them under the mistletoe.”

He took a hand away to sip his coffee and held hers with his other one.

“I’m not a jealous person,” she said. “But people talking, I hate it. I need things to be separated. Work. Life. Separated.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t even care if you have somebody else in your life—”

He’d let go of her hand.

“Do you have somebody up in Tenmile?”

“I left my wife a while ago.”

He sipped his coffee. Before he could set it down, she took it from him and had a drink too.

“A wife.”

“She went to Texas.”

“Texas.”

“You’re repeating me.”

“Sorry.”

“Now you’re apologizing.”

“Fuck you.”

“Now you’re swearing.”

She set his cup back down in front of him.

“Do we need to talk about her?” he asked.

She scratched behind her ear. Smiled when she looked at him.

“No.”

He sipped his coffee and she took it from him again.

“Let’s go to this party.”

“It’s not for a while.”

He slid out of the booth and stood.

“Let’s go to this party slowly.”

They are drunk when they arrive, an almost empty fifth of Montana Redeye. She climbs a wrought black spiral staircase ahead of him, he keeps trying to put his mouth onto her lovely ass as she ascends before him. The lively throng upstairs. So much cigarette smoke the house may be afire. A guitar boils out a crude blues through overworked speakers. She leads him to a card table sagging under bottles, faceted half-empty goblets of red wine, and a fondue pot with a burping neon orange skin. Someone has placed olive eyes in the thing. Pete pumps a spittle of froth from a keg floating in a garbage can of ice water and gives up. Faces spin out of the mass to recognize him and shake his hand and say things to him he cannot hear.

Now Mary is gone.

He wheels into the kitchen to find her. People he knows from work, guys from the Attention Home slap his back.

“Pete, my man. What’s that you’re drinking?”

Pete hands the bottle over. Accidentally knocks a playcastle of cans off the counter.

“Christ, Pete. Nobody actually drinks this.”

Pete shrugs dreamishly, coughs creamishly, hawks into the sink.

“Got a cold there?”

“I’m runnin’ a temperature, all right.”

“How’s the wife?”

“Texas.”

“What?”

“We’re splits.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No one quits a good thing,” Pete said.

A loud record now, something new from the plinky tinny keyboard sound of it. Mary dances in the living room. Alone. Swaying about in that dress, a satiny red and white thing that fits her all over.

“That Mary is just…”

“Yes. Yes she is.”

Someone hands Pete a can with a screwdriver stabbed into it.

“Did you hear about her?”

“Hear what?”

“Shotgun that thing already.”

Pete removes the screwdriver and puts the can to his face. A cold bubbling snake liable to choke him. A long foaming burp. He sets the empty by. Burps again.

“Hear what?”

“She has a file. Jake come across it. She was in and out of foster homes and state hospitals her whole life. And it wasn’t no good run neither. Fuckin bonkers. One placement, they kept her in a goddamn closet most of the time. This was two years. Two years of getting beat and raped. All before she was twelve years old. And the shit at the state hospital? With the guards fucking the girls? She was up there too. It’s still like a goddamn brothel up there. I never send a kid there, I can help it.”