Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Sulphur.

Shit.

He immediately pitched the thing aside and shook his hand in the air and wiped it on his jeans just below the knee. He asked the boy what the hell he’d been up to. Not expecting an answer. The kid’s white legs like alabaster sticking out of the denim pooled around his ankles.

“Don’t you be dead, now,” the farmer said.

He went over and poked him on the shoulder. The kid moaned.

“Hey now,” the farmer said.

Cecil suddenly looked up, bloodshot and bewildered. The dog barked at him and the kid let out a little shriek, stood, and managed to turn one leg of his jeans inside out with his first step before the tangle dropped him. The farmer was trying to get his barking dog by the collar, so he didn’t see the honey bear lodged in the kid’s bunghole.

Whenever Cecil mentioned his headache to anyone, they asked how his asshole was doing, or said they could only imagine how his ass felt, and so he stopped saying anything about his head. But it didn’t matter. The cops continued to speculate. Would they need to administer the aspirin rectally. Did they have a suppository for him. Did he shit out the mouth. Thank goodness he wasn’t a smoker, whatever that was supposed to mean.

He spent the day in the lobby of the Missoula police station with the desk officer, who was reading a paperback. Sometime in the late morning, the desk officer glanced up at Cecil and a funny look came over his face, and he left his station and returned with a paper lunch sack and set it on the chair next to the boy. He told the cop who came out of the restroom not to leave his lunch where the boy might could sit on it and eat it.

By evening, no one had come for him. He was issued a gray jumpsuit that chafed him and taken to a great white door and into the cells, which were painted cinder block and echoed with their footsteps. A sot with wasted eyes and a walleyed brute leered at him passing. The drunk closed his lids and curled up on the floor like a cat, but the brute walked to the bars and watched the deputies put Cecil into the cell.

The brute scratched his stubble and the wiry black hairs of his dark arms and regarded the new arrival thoughtfully.

Cecil looked around the cell. There were two bunks. A rudimentary chair and small table formed up out of concrete. A black stool banked in the lidless metal toilet had been there so long it had no odor. It was cold, and the clothes on him seemed unable to keep the heat of his intermittent shivering.

The brute watched him take in his surroundings with a pair of small black eyes, close-set in his pocked face.

“Boy.” He stretched up on his tiptoes, tilting his head back and looking down a knobby protuberance of a nose at Cecil sitting on the bunk. “That’s my bed, boy,” he said. “Get off it.”

Cecil climbed down.

He was nearly in the bottom bunk when the brute tsked his tongue. Cecil looked at him, and the man shook his head no.

Cecil sat on the concrete chair.

“Get out of it,” the man said calmly.

Cecil put his head down.

“I said get up out of it, boy.”

Cecil slid out onto the floor. Then the man began to talk to him. Steadily. How much trouble Cecil was in. What errors the young man had made. What all they would have to do about that. In time. In due time.

The next afternoon the cops had him change back into his street clothes, and put him up in a back room of the station to wait. The door was ajar and he heard when Pete came in, heard Pete talking to the officer who was in charge. He crept up to the door and peeked out.

“I’m the one he told you to call. The boy you picked up yesterday. He all right?”

The officer looked at Pete’s badge with his reading glasses and then gestured for him to sit. He opened a drawer and set a honey bear in a plastic bag on the desk. Then he leaned back in his groaning chair and drummed his fingers on his fat stomach.

“That was sticking out his ass.”

Pete rubbed his face. Couldn’t help grinning.

“I don’t know why everybody thinks this is such high goddamn hilarity,” the cop said to the room generally.

“I’ve known kids to do it,” Pete said.

“The hell for? Is the mouth gone out of style?”

Pete put his elbow on the desk, leaned in.

“The tissues down there”—the cop frowned disgustedly at the word tissues —“are very absorbent. A shot of booze straight into the bloodstream. You’re drunk instantly and you don’t smell like it.”

“What kid knows this?”

“Information gets around.”

The cop sat up and put the honey bear back in the drawer.

“You get drunk, your dad whups you, and you spend the day baling hay or mending fence puking your guts out. That’s the way it’s done. And you drink whiskey not fuckin vodka and you sure as shit don’t do it with your puckered asshole!”

There was a small commotion of cops and a real criminal at the front door, chairs getting kicked around the tile near the desk. Grunts and the like. Then the door to the cells opened and swallowed up the noise.

Pete asked where the kid was.

Cecil knocked over a chair getting back to his spot at the table. Pete gestured wearily from the doorway for Cecil to follow him before he even made it back to his seat. They both signed some paperwork and walked out to Pete’s car. Once again, they sat a minute together, Pete drumming the steering wheel.

“I got some people I can live with,” Cecil said. “Here in Hamilton. We’re in Hamilton, right?”

Pete looked at him.

“You’re in Missoula. You were picked up in the Bitterroots.”

“Her name is Ell and his name is Bear.”

“Bear.”

“Yes.”

“That short for Honey Bear?”

“What? No.”

Pete reached across Cecil to the far side of the dash for a lighter that had slid over there. It wasn’t lost on Cecil that Pete wanted to keep him from winding up with it.

“What happened at your uncle’s?”

“I never asked to go there.”

“You didn’t give me many options, Cecil. In fact, why’d you even have the cops call me? You clearly want nothing to do with the options I can provide you.”

“I have one now. These people, Bear and Ell. They’re of age . You can make it so I can live with them.”

“I wasn’t stopping you. Why didn’t you just go be with them?”

“I was trying to get a ride.”

“And wound up with a honey bear in your ass. Of course.”

“You were the only person I could call. So now, just make it so’s I can live with them.”

“Just make it? I don’t know them from Adam, Cecil. What is it you think I—?”

“Fine. Why don’t you just punch me again? Made you feel better at least.”

Pete sighed, laid his head back against the headrest.

“That wasn’t right. It wasn’t okay at all. But I was trying to get you to listen, to tell you that if you blow it with your uncle, I’d have to put you in a very rough place—”

“I have a fuckin place! Just check it out.”

Pete turned to face him.

“Please. Please?”

“What about your mom?”

Cecil crossed his arms and wedged himself against the car door.

“The whole idea was only to get you two apart to cool off,” Pete said. “Why don’t we see about going back?”

Cecil shook his head and would not meet Pete’s eye.

“Is there something you’re not telling me? Is there something I can help—”

“If you want to help me, let me live with Ell and Bear. Otherwise just throw me in a hole or wherever you’re gonna put me.”

Cecil had to stay in the temporary shelter in Missoula for a week. Maybe two, Pete said. It was fucking bullshit, a brick dormitory with ten bunk beds on red tile that had been scuffed the color of Pepto. White cinder block walls with boogers on them and a chest of nappy stuffed animals, wooden toys from the 1960s.