Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

A bitterly cold day with two new calls, one in Trego and the other up someplace called Thirsty Creek. There was no one at the former and he couldn’t locate the latter. When he returned to his office, there was a message from a logger by the name of Vandine. The man had had an encounter with a boy and his father up at a place called Freckle Creek or Tinkle Creek or some such. Pearl. Pete rang up the man at home, and learning that he lived in Libby, asked if he could come down.

Vandine was slick to the elbows in engine grease and he apologized, said he was just about done lubing his self-loader, would Pete mind waiting inside, his old lady’d put some coffee on. Pete went through the crooked picket gate to the house and no one answered the door, so he smoked on the two-by-four stoop in front of the trailer until Vandine was finished. When Vandine saw him still there and coffeeless, he grinned succinctly, stepped inside, and shouted at his wife for not fixing Pete anything, for not answering the goddamned door goddamnit. Pete waited among the motor parts the man had set on newspapers for later tinkering. Vandine beckoned him into the kitchen and scrubbed his hands at the sink, a five-minute job with gritty pink soap that dripped from his elbows as he looked about in increasing irritation for a towel. He yelled for his old lady, and Pete stood against the wall as they argued again.

The man wiped down his thick and poorly inked arms and went out, and Pete followed him down a trail to a shed where a box of cold Rainiers sat in the dark. Vandine turned over two buckets in the doorway and handed Pete a beer unbidden. He cracked his own, threw the tab in a jar of them, and sucked down half of it before Pete had even situated himself on the bucket.

He said cheers and tapped Pete’s freshly opened beer with his own, and began to explain that the pawnbroker over in Columbia Falls was an in-law, and that they’d had supper the other week. When Vandine and the in-law got to talking about what happened, the pawnbroker said there was a social worker who would be plenty interested in what he, Vandine, had to say.

“About what exactly?” Pete asked.

Vandine placed his hands on his knees and looked between them a moment. He eventually made a small preamble about how he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be sharing this story with Pete, because it didn’t reflect well on him. He looked up and said that there were legal ramifications.

“You ain’t a police officer or anything right?”

“No.”

“Do we have confidentiality?”

“Yes.”

“Gene says you folks’ll take information anonymous.”

“Absolutely.”

Vandine ran his hand through his black and white hair deciding.

“Truly,” Pete said, “if the police need to get involved I will say I got an anonymous call.”

Vandine scowled like someone fresh out of choices. He dangled the beer can between his legs.

“We was going through a rough patch last spring. Financially. I have to tell you this because it’s why I didn’t go to the cops about it.”

He took a long draft on his beer, observing that Pete did not sip his own. Pete drank then.

“Tell me what happened, Mr. Vandine.”

“I’s up on Tickle Crick, where Champion was cutting a new logging road,” he said. “Maybe I was up there making off with the right-of-way logs.”

“Right-of-way?”

“The ones they cut down to make the road. They leave them alongside of the road there. You seen my self-loader.”

“Right.”

Just then Vandine’s wife called out to him, and he hunched his shoulders at the incoming artillery of her voice. She shouted his name some more, and when they heard the wooden screen door clap shut, he sat upright again.

“So it’s May eighteenth I’m up there. You remember what happened last May eighteenth?”

“Mount Saint Helens.”

“Exactly. Ash falling on Tickle Crick and I had no idea what it was. This weird gray snow coming down. You remember.

“Well, my partner — the son of a bitch shall remain nameless — jumps on the CB and all the truckers are saying get indoors and don’t breathe it, it’s toxic. And don’t run your vehicles in the stuff, the air filters can’t take it. They’re saying to wait until it’s all done falling. Well we don’t want to get waylaid, not up there, so we decide to park, hump it down to his pickup, and leave my logging truck for when it all blows itself over.”

Vandine swirled the dregs of his beer in the can.

“Next day everything’s covered in ash, and I got a truck up Tickle Crick where it ain’t supposed to be. Day after that they’re still saying don’t drive if you don’t need to. It’s the next next day and I’m still up there with my dick hangin out. So by now I figure I better haul ass and get my truck down before Champion sends someone up there to check on the Cat and skidder they got up there. If they ain’t already. If they ain’t got my license plate and calling the cops already. You couldn’t be more red-handed than we was. But my alleged partner won’t go because they’re saying we ain’t supposed to be driving except for emergencies. I says it is a emergency. Not to me it ain’t he says. I says I get in trouble so do he, I says. That got him moving. So next day we get up early and head out.”

Vandine polished off his beer and fetched another one. He was slow to getting back into the story. As though he were sorting through the events.

“What happened?”

“My brother-in-law says you’re looking for this guy, name of Pearl?”

“Him and his son, yes.”

“The boy,” Vandine said, shaking his head.

“Yes. You saw them?”

“Matched my brother-in-law’s description in every detail.”

“Where?”

VANDINE SAT UP and explained what happened. The timber country all around coated gray and otherworldly and looking like a tintype or a still from an old western. Feels like you’re smack dab in a John Ford movie. And Vandine’s on a long dirt road straightaway and nearly misses in his rearview the waving hand in the truck’s wake of ash. He just sees an arm swallowed in a cloud the color of cigarette smoke. He says, Didja see that? Partner says, See what? Vandine stops the truck. Somebody come out of the woods , Vandine says.

Vandine pulls over, gets out. The kicked-up ash a red fog in his brake lights and out of it emerges somebody, this boy, bandana over his face, coughing. Vandine reaches in the cab and kills the engine and as the truck dies, he hears the click of a cocked gun right behind his left ear. A voice tells him, Don’t fuckin move. He glances over at the passenger seat and his partner’s eyes wide as dollar coins at whoever’s there behind him. The voice says for Vandine to move over and put his hands on the hood of the pickup and for the partner to get out and come around front of the truck or Vandine gets it in the back of the head.

The partner slides out real slow. Vandine can tell he’s thinking of running. Don’t do it , Vandine says.

The partner ducks behind the open door and runs low and into the dust cloud, and then over the lip of the road, you can hear the sumbitch crashing through the ashy brush. You can hear the sumbitch coughing.

Don’t kill me because of that idiot , Vandine says. He’s miles from anything. He can’t hurt you .

The boy comes up, he’s coated in ash, except for his eyes, which gleam red like open sores. He’s about as jumpy as a fart on a skillet, and the voice behind him tells him not to worry about the other one. The kid hops in the truck and gets to ransacking. Efficient at it. As the man pats him down, Vandine says there’s a thermos of soup and a can of Coke. That they’re welcome to them.