Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

She wasn’t ready to straighten out anything. She needed him to hold her. He rubbed her back, the laced bones of her spine. She shuddered out a terrific sigh. He wondered what she was thinking. He wondered did she wish he would take her away. Did she wonder what his house was like. What kinds of food he had. What he would play with her. What kind of father could he be.

He knew what kind of father he was.

But he knew too that it’s nice right here to hold a small frightened girl and be strong and necessary. Times he took children from a bad home when it was almost worse on him than the child. Times they crushed up against him like this and he thought the work all came down to sheer rescue.

He carried her through the house and to the porch. The sun was full up, and the birds were out making their singsong rounds. The cop was talking to the mother and Cecil and he acknowledged Pete with a nod, looked under his fingernails, and kept talking to them.

“Now, I could put both of ya’s in jail. I oughta should.” He winked at Pete. “But, uh—”

“Pete.”

“—Pete here says you’re good folks having a spot of trouble is all, and I should be lenient.”

He uncuffed them, the mother first. The boy rubbed his wrists. The shamed woman’s chin quivered, but she didn’t say anything.

“I don’t wanna come back, you hear? If I do, somebody’s going to jail. And I mean if I come back tomorrow, or next week or next month. I don’t ever want to come back, you understand?”

The woman nodded. Cecil seemed transfixed by the indentures on his wrists.

“You all right here?” the cop asked Pete.

“Yeah. Thanks, Eugene.”

The cop tipped his hat, and walked to his car, lighting another cigarette. When he left, a thick cloud of dust bore up from the road and washed over the porch and enveloped them. Pete covered the girl’s face and went inside.

Pete had come up from Missoula to work in Tenmile a little over a year before, in the fall of 1979. Most of the people he actually knew in the town and in the region were his clients. In Tenmile everybody knew everybody else or at least one of their kin or where they liked to get good and peppered on a Friday night. Thus far, Pete had maintained a low profile. Anyone who met him outside of work knew only that he had an office at the courthouse, maybe something to do with easements or water rights. Some kind of comptrollery that went on in the basement.

But his anonymity would not last for long, he knew that. The past Saturday night he’d seen both the boy and the mother out and up to no good, Cecil in the bed of a pickup with a broken baseball bat, and Debbie on a stool at the Dirty Shame bar in an open-backed top that exposed her razorous shoulder blades and a dense constellation of moles. He’d managed to avoid speaking to either of them, but Tenmile shrank with every case.

Debbie followed him inside the house, dropped onto the couch, and commenced quietly sobbing. Pete sat on a wooden chair by the door. The room stale with the smell of flat soda and body odor. The mother glanced at him in intervals. Pity me. Poor me. Angling for his sympathy.

Let her dangle a minute. Let her see how well that works.

He got up and carried Katie into the kitchen, still nuzzled to his chest. He didn’t even know if her eyes were open. He tried to catch their reflection in the window, but couldn’t make her out. Five years old and light as a toddler. He might have been holding a long doll for all she moved or weighed.

“You hungry?”

She nodded against his chest. Plates crusted with dried mustard and mayo and ketchup crowded the countertops like discarded palettes. Fruit flies teemed over a bowl of old fruit, fruit he might’ve brought two weeks ago. Jesus, it was the fruit he’d brought. For fucksake. You try and help and she doesn’t even give them the fruit. She doesn’t even pretend. You put the fruit in the bowl for her and you say to her to make the kids eat it and she nods vigorously like she learned to in school, in detention, at what few jobs she’s had, she’s only ever learned to nod and say yes. Fucksake. You could picture her getting pregnant that way. Yeah, sure, it’s not my time of the month, don’t worry about it, I ain’t getting pregnant. I do too much speed. My ovaries are broke.

There was cold pasta in the sink that looked halfway fresh. He touched it and it was still moist. It smelled okay. He set the girl on a plastic lawn chair by the table. She watched him fetch a bowl from the stack of dirty ones and wash it with hot water and a bar of soap from the windowsill. He washed a fork the same way, grinning at her. He sniffed the noodles again, and then forked the stiff spaghetti, but it came out of the colander like a halved basketball, and so he rinsed it and pulled it apart with his hands into a saucepan. He searched the cupboards and fridge and at last simply emptied a ketchup bottle over the pasta, and put the red mess on the electric stove. The girl tucked her knees up under her armpits, gazing at him as he turned the noodles in the heat. When the pasta sizzled, he carried her and the steaming bowl out to the living room. On his lap she blew on it, ate, and was otherwise silent.

The mother had ceased crying and stared at him grimly.

“I just can’t get you all off my back,” she said.

“I’m not on your back, Debbie. You told the cop to call me.” He covered the girl’s ears. “I’m nowhere near your damn back.”

He could feel the girl chewing under his palms.

“You let things get so out of hand, the cops come? Jesus, Debbie.”

Her chin crumpled like a can again. He uncovered Katie’s ears and whispered he needed to talk privately to her mother, and she nodded and blew on her food. Lovely girl. He’d take her. He would. He covered her ears again.

“I know. I know. Just nothing works out for me.” She picked through the junk on and around the coffee table for something — a cigarette probably — and knocked a metal pipe to the floor.

“We talked about that.”

She nudged the pipe under the couch with her foot.

“About self-pity,” he said. “Not the pipe you’re trying to hide.”

“You said you’d help me,” she said, searching the cluttered table with roving hands.

“What do you think I just did with that cop? That’s helping. That’s exactly helping,” he said.

She found an empty pack, and crushed it, sighing hugely.

“Not enough it ain’t.”

She looked at the cuff-welts on her wrists and started in crying again. Katie twisted spaghetti around her fork.

“Debbie. You’re not the only one to ever fuck up. Everybody’s got their troubles.” Pete kissed Katie’s hair. “Even me. I got problems just like you do. I mean, hell, I’m only up here in Tenmile because I needed to get away from some bullshit where I was at.”

At this, Debbie looked at him.

“Just take him away.” She tried to work up some tears. “He’s an ungovernable.”

“You can parent him, Debbie.”

“I got a note from his school that he ain’t been for weeks.”

“We can deal with that. Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on here at home.”

She rubbed her face. She was coming off of whatever she’d been on and her spindly hands worked her head like they were trying to dig into her skull. Her legs quietly pistoned.

“You know what all goes on. He’s crazy.”

“I’ve made numerous appointments to get him in to see the psychiatrist in Kalispell—”

“He won’t go! What am I supposed to do? He’s biggern me!”

“You can hold your own, Debbie—”

“He hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you.”

He hates her, Pete thought. I hate her.

She balled her fists and crushed them into her eyes. For several moments.