Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Cecil was scared. He knew they were going even before Ell asked did he want to come with them to a place out in Hamilton. A little house they could stay in. They were set for a few months there if he needed a place. Bear was rubbing her neck as she explained these things and his fingers made her eyes roll back in her head like she was a puppet. This was distracting. He wanted Bear to quit touching her and knew he had no right to want that. Still, it didn’t seem okay that you could touch a person and they’d be helpless to it.

The taste of his mother’s mouth, wet burned peppermint, was always on his tongue.

“I think I might just stay in that spot of yours, try my luck here in Missoula. I’m gettin’ the hang of downtown,” he said, spitting onto the curb.

“You sure?”

He nodded. She smiled dimly at something Bear did behind her ears.

“Bear and I think you should come,” she said. “You don’t got anybody here.”

“Neither do I got anybody in Hamilton.”

That this hurt her feelings was plain, which made him feel better, briefly. Then mean.

“I met you,” he offered. “I bet somebody else turns up.”

She went into the grocery. He and Bear stood together, not much looking at one another, let alone saying a word. She returned with a pen and came back with an address written on a piece of sack paper.

“It’s not far,” she said. “You can catch a ride out there and find us, you want to.”

Bear shook his hand and thanked him.

“I owe you,” he said.

Cecil asked for what, but Ell hugged him, said something in his ear, but he was too far gone to hear it.

Cecil watched the department store ladies undress the mannequins in the windows of the Bon Marché. They took off the arms and set them on the floor. An old hunched cowboy walking spraddle-legged with his wife winked at him and jerked a thumb at the nude armless bodies in the window.

Cecil walked along the river, down through a tangle of brush for want of anything at all to do. He came upon a pair of men at something by the water, but it wasn’t fishing. One spotted him upstream on the broken concrete and rebar that made the upper shore of the river. The men spoke and then they both stood watching him. Cecil was afraid they would follow him if he left, so he hazarded a mild nod and squatted and looked innocently out over the water.

One of the men called out something Cecil couldn’t hear. The man said it again or something else entirely. Cecil shook his head no, and started to climb back up through the Russian olive and bullrush. He heard the man shout and he scampered up the rocks and flailed through the small trees and didn’t stop running until he made West Broadway and all the traffic there.

Two nights later the board to his building had fallen. He held the bag of produce he’d selected from a Dumpster and stood in the alley facing the building for some time, unsure what to do. His blankets and few utensils. He set the sack under a small tree and crept to the hole. The board had been put aside and shadows wavered in the laughter of the men who made them.

He walked up and down the tracks working up his courage. The men went quiet before he reached the hole, were already regarding him with candlelit bearded faces, hazardous eyes.

“Hi. I left some things…”

The men drank from their beers. None spoke.

“I think I left some things in here.”

“Come in and have a look around,” one of them said.

Cecil hadn’t thought that far ahead. How he’d negotiate his things out of the room. If objections arose. You go in, you might not ever come out.

He trotted away. They didn’t even laugh, he was so insignificant.

He went up Orange and over to Higgins heading toward the river again. It was cool, might not be too cold to find a spot under the bridge. He eyed fire escapes, the unlit windows of the offices above the street. Then he spotted Pete and a pretty woman inside the Oxford at a poker table. He couldn’t believe his luck, was in fact afraid to mess with it, and so he just looked through the window at him, but Pete was hunched over his cards, the woman talking in his ear. A cup of coffee appeared at his elbow, and he drank it and never once looked out the window. At last Cecil opened the door, but the bartender happened to look up from his wiping and shook his head no at him.

He waited outside in the blue neon of the beer signage, watching an old drunk wrapped in a sleeping bag shout absurdities at passersby. I am that guy , he thought. Far as anyone else is concerned, just another guy on the street, nowhere to go, no one to go to.

When Pete didn’t come out after a time, Cecil returned to the window. Pete and the woman were gone. He remained in front of that window like a dog. Then he searched around the side of the building. There was an exit there that Pete may have used. He scoped around the place some more. Looked in the window. By now no one was on the street.

He slept a few hours in the window well of a church on Myrtle before the frost came, and then he rose and walked across town to Buttreys. Pissed at this point, just furious. He loaded a cart full of things he had no intention of buying and made sly egress through the loading bay in back of the place with a loaf of bread and a summer sausage.

Not a soul truly saw him, maybe not that whole day.

Come dark he’s full of meat and bread. He walked by the Oxford again and waited, but Pete was not there and did not pass on the street. He walked to the university campus and admired the people dining with utensils in the cafeteria. In the commons among the smoking and reading students, he warmed up, wondering what on earth they could be reading for so long. He found a room with long low couches and slept on one until the building was closing.

He asked a college kid on the footbridge how far it was to Hamilton. The kid said it was maybe forty miles. Forty fuckin miles down Highway 93. The wind out of Hellgate Canyon was a rapid, cold astonishment to him. He hurried across the bridge to at least get in the lee of the houses and buildings. He thought about trying doors, explaining his pitiful state.

He found himself back downtown watching the high school kids cruise Higgins Avenue. It was a Friday night, and they drove up and down the street, up and down, their engine racket rebounding off the bricks. Small crowds spilled in and out of the bars and a carnival mood prevailed despite the cold. He’d been in Missoula for some weeks but never downtown at this hour on a Friday. The giddying spectacle of cars sometimes speeding by, the girls inside shrieking, girls calling out to him as he walked alone. Something that radiated off him from his few weeks of vagabondage, a new way he bore himself up. A vague optimism overtook him.

Near the old train depot the cars turned around and headed back down the street. Some parked on a gravel lot, idling or barely rolling in the cold, and teenagers clung to and ran between them. He watched from across the street, wondered what kinds of lies he could tell that would get him to Hamilton. He settled on a few of the less outrageous, took a deep breath, and started to cross. He shoved his hands in his pockets and sauntered over like they’d called him by name.

Pete kept an ear to the ground for the Pearls, but heard only rumors. He called the pawnbroker from time to time, but Pearl had not been by, and the pawnbroker said he didn’t expect him. Nevertheless, Pete asked around in truck stops and cafes, and nearly always someone knew who Pearl was or something about his coins, but of the man’s whereabouts, nothing. There were rumors and apocrypha. He was dead. He lived with a band of Métis Indians in Canada. The government had disappeared him. But never an eyeball on the man personally, save the dope farmers and the pawnbroker.