Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“Pearl could’ve dropped me at any time,” Charlie said. “He wanted me to know that.”

Pete looked at the quarter in his palm. The hole was neat, perfectly round, with a barely flared lip on the reverse. The exit wound.

If you asked around in Tenmile and Libby and in the offices of the statehouse in Helena and the professors of wildlife biology and the forestry departments of the universities, you would find men and women who had received these coins in the mail, Charlie said. It was in the paper. That they were in circulation meant that Pearl had declared war on everyone.

It had grown quite cold, and even near the fire the chill wrapped around the better part of him and Pete had to turn his back to the fire and then his front to stay warm. Charlie sat hatless loading the pipe again.

“How did you meet him?” Charlie asked.

Pete told him about finding his son in a school, taking him to his father. The pipe went around again. Charlie said he was damn lucky to be alive.

“What about you? You’re still out here.”

Charlie toked thoughtfully on the bowl, the smoke leaking out his open mouth like a gun barrel. He explained that they’d moved off some thirty miles or so and hadn’t known Pearl was about until Pete came along.

“Fuck it,” Charlie said. “We’ll go back and get the rest of the crop tomorrow.” The prominent cartilage in his throat was like an arrowhead that hadn’t made it all the way through his neck.

“Pearl might not believe in the dollar,” he added, gently tapping the ashes out of the pipe into his palm and then blowing them away. “But I sure as shit do.”

It was an empty rail yard building. She’d pried away a plywood board and then hacksawed all but one of the nails away, leaving the zinc heads on the other side so that the board still looked like it was nailed fast though it clung from a single nail in the middle. You slid it up to the side and climbed in. There was batshit and birdshit, and mice crawled in the walls, but it got them out of the schizoid weather here in the Missoula Valley, good grief it couldn’t make up its mind, cold, warm, colder, freeze your nuts off, warm. They covered the gaps in the boards with rugs, old carpets, packing material, and a foam rust-stained mattress, and the room just about warmed up from their body heat in the pitch-black alone.

Their busking, pathetic as it was, brought in about a buck and a half a day, sometimes more. Sometimes they begged outright and sometimes that worked better.

So, sleeping together: one night she coaxed Cecil under her blankets.

“No funny stuff,” she said.

He slid out and took his blankets back to the discarded rug he slept on. She said don’t be weird, who wants to mess with a pregnant lady anyhow. He said it wasn’t about that. Or her. Or whatever she was thinking. He was an inarticulate person. An angry person. She said what’s eating you. Chrissakes. He said there was this other time. He was quiet. She waited.

The building was right where the trains joined up and they crashed outside tremendously, unexpectedly.

He said to never mind.

They were quiet.

She said she could feel the baby inside her now. Moving a little bit. She said Bear was the first and only one she’d ever been with and it could’ve been the first time they’d done it she’d gotten pregnant.

Cecil had sat up in the pure dark.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I wanna have a baby. I don’t care I’m young. The clinic lady said they could take care of it for me and it took me a minute to get she meant to kill it. I said that don’t sound like taking care of it at all.”

Two train cars coupled outside with a boom that rattled the walls, sent down little bits of plaster or bird droppings. Times it was like being trapped in a collapsing mine.

“Why don’t you get over here in these blankets and help make us warm enough we can sleep?”

He didn’t move. Not yet.

“It’s all right,” she said. “My old man Bear — you’ll meet him when he gets out — he knows I love him and nobody else. He won’t care about you and me. It’s not like you’re some sketchy dude’d pull something.” She snorted a weird laugh. “He’d open up on a guy like that something wicked.”

“I can be pretty sketchy.”

“You’re as sketchy as a daffodil.”

“Fuck you.”

“You’re probably a virgin anyway.”

He lay down.

“I’m joking. It’s okay you’re a virgin. If you are. It don’t matter.”

She asked him was he gonna be like that. She said she was cold.

They listened to one another ball up in their blankets alone. She said he was being an idiot. He felt tough and that to go to her would be weak and he wouldn’t know what to do with himself in any case.

It was a whole week. But it got so cold. He didn’t want anyone touching him, but it was freezing and now she was angry at him wasting his heat like that, enough to throw him out maybe. They didn’t have enough covers to be fucking around like this. He finally took his blankets over and they snapped them out one at a time over them. He made her promise to keep her hands on his shoulders, not any lower. There were things happened to him just by getting in bed, things that spread out and changed ugly colors in his brain. To be honest, he was afraid he would hit her. He said so. He faced away from her and couldn’t sleep and started talking, he didn’t know if she was listening, he just went on about it.

“Might as fucking well tell you.”

HIS MOTHER WHINING for hours in her bed, calling for him as he passes the door. She’s all fucked up. He finally goes in. Cmere baby. Cmere in here with Mama I’m so sad.

“I understand what happened,” Ell says.

She says, Mama needs someone to hold her no one ever holds her . And so he does. He has his arms around her. She sleeps. He falls asleep. He comes to and she’s facing him crying, the whole pillow is wet and she’s stroking his face, My sweet sweet boy , she says, and he pretends to sleep, and she kisses him on the forehead, then on his lips. She’s tongue kissing him. Then she’s touching him all over, his stomach and his legs. He’s not wanting to, but he’s responding. His body is. He isn’t. He isn’t not. He’s just there. Then it’s going. It’s happening. He doesn’t want to but she’s pulling him into her, she smells like those peppermint cigarettes.

“How old were you?”

“Twelve.”

“It’s okay.”

“Like hell it is.”

“No, it’s okay right now.”

“I know it is.”

“I mean it’s okay to tell me.”

“It ain’t the worst thing I did.”

“You did? Who said it was you that did it? You think it’s only rape if a guy does it?” she asked.

She put her hand on top of his, he took a breath through clenched teeth, tensed his muscles. Then she said soft nonwords, and he released, went slack. After a while he said this is okay. She murmured that yeah it was, already half asleep.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said.

“Mm-hmm.”

He told her about Cloninger’s dog. He’d been wondering what the dog would do, wondering if all animals were helpless when it came to their peckers. That’s why he did it. He had no idea it was illegal. It seemed strange to be illegal when you thought about it. No one was getting hurt, least of all the dog. It was an experiment. But he supposed that he knew it was wrong in his conscience. Or was there something broken about his conscience if he still didn’t think it was wrong.

“What do you think, Ell?”

She’d fallen asleep.

He was all right with that, too.