Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“There’s no papers to sign, Cecil.”

“You said I could go live with Bear and Ell!”

“You gotta go in juvie until you have your day in court. I can’t keep you in the attention home. I got nowhere else I can put you.”

“You fucking asshole! You fucking dick! You lied to me!”

Pete reached for him, and he knocked his hands away, slid over.

“This isn’t my fault!” he shouted. Pete stood back, hands up.

Cecil was crying now. It was shameful to him, but the shame only made the sobs come thicker. Something burned in his stomach.

“You know that if you put me in there, you’ll never get me out!”

He looked around, out the back windows, for somewhere to run.

“You’d make it as far as the gate.”

“You’re a lying asshole bitch! You just tricked me into coming up here so you could throw me away! I never should have trusted you!”

Pete squatted down in the open door in front of him. Cecil could launch himself at him. He could get him by his pretty blond hair and do some real damage. He searched Pete’s face, imagined tearing it to shreds. But that was all he did, imagine it.

“I need you to calm down. Right now.”

There were pins of light in the blackness around Cecil’s vision.

“You’re hyperventilating. Just calm down, and listen to me. You’re not staying here. This is just where I gotta put you. I’ll see if I can find someplace permanent. Some program. I’ll find you something.”

“Ellll…” It came out ragged, like the words were serrated.

“You gotta forget that. It ain’t happening.”

“My uncle’s then!”

“It’s too late, Cecil.”

He fell against the dash, sobbed there.

“I’m sorry. I won’t… I won’t be bad… Oh God.”

He flopped back in the seat. Either Pete beckoned them or the men knew just when to grab him. He screamed, but was too stunned to really fight. They were firm, the way they had him by his arms and torso and were extracting him from the vehicle. An excruciating pressure on the back of his hand and he couldn’t hold on to the steering wheel and he immediately knew their competence, their experience, his own weakness. He sobbed anew as they walked him to the door. He tried to break for it, but so halfheartedly they simply steered him into the building.

They entered a small foyer that was filled with desks, and people in different uniforms watched him come in and even them looking on him made him cry that much harder and it was difficult to see in the wash of tears. The smallness of him. The smallness of his heart. No courage whatsoever.

“Can I stay with you? Pete?”

“It won’t be so bad.”

“That’s not what you said. You said it would be very bad!”

“It’s gonna be all right, Cecil.”

Someone said for Pete to go ahead and leave.

“Pete!”

“I gotta. You’ll be all right.”

“No. No. No no no no no no…”

Pete was gone and Cecil panicked, he strained against several arms for a door, the door he must have gone through, and he was adrift in terror then, bleached with fear, a brine in his throat at the terrific realness of this. Someone had him down on his back. Blue black stubble against his forehead as they held him. They carried him deeper into the facility. He made out the metal beds. The boys in them. Pointing, crowding round like pigeons at feed, he’d seen pigeons in Missoula, sleet of white feathers falling from the underneath of the Higgins Street Bridge. The brake lights strung out like bulbs along an awning, and the cold and the feathers snowfalling down.

No.

I’m not staying.

I ain’t gonna spend Christmas in here, I’ll die first I fuckin promise.

Your caseload is brutal and will get worse as the holidays steadily advance on the poor, deranged, and demented. Kids waiting with cops in the living room or the front seat of the squad car to stay out of the cold until you arrive. You run the children down to the crisis shelter in Kalispell. There aren’t many beds. You have twenty-four hours to find a placement. Fortunately, the emergency placements that were so scarce in summer sprout by the gross come Thanksgiving. People ashamed of their good fortune come the holidays, meaning well.

But as always the calls are mostly bullshit. Ninety-five percent. Landlords ratting out noisy, alcoholic tenants. Divorcees fighting over Christmas-morning custody. Visit the little studio apartments or a trailer or a yurt up the sticks, confirm that there are Cheerios in the cupboard, frozen juice in the freezer, blankets, winter coats, and mittens in the hall closet. Ignore the bong hastily covered by a bandana and write out an action plan and get the hag with stained teeth and her balding homunculus to sign it and fare-thee-well out the door. Don’t even bother with the paperwork for the state office because by noon there are three more new cases to replace that one. Just shove your pink copy of the action plan in a folder marked with the month and leave it at that because paperwork’s the single least important thing you can be doing. You have a backlog of real cases to work into your real rotation, cases that are as slow to close as infected wounds. Like the real sweet twitchy and dysarthric kid with a miserable and uncomplaining nub of a mother, a woman so ashamed of any aid that you come by at night and park around the block where the neighbors won’t see your car. You do her paperwork for heating assistance, Medicaid. Apply her for every program there is, because the doctor bills and insurance eat through her last motel-clerked penny like acid. Yes, you have bigger fish to fry than potheads and mileage reimbursement. Newly suicided fathers and their wreckage. The mother who calls your office wondering if you could take her child, God is telling her to kill him, you better hurry. Cecil in the fresh hell of Pine Hills. His sister, Katie, out there somewhere God knows, you can’t think about her, but you do think of all the magnificent horrors that can befall a child in the shabby motel rooms and concrete rest area bathrooms frequented by her mother, her mother’s shifting partners and adversaries, and the errant unattached freaks in those orbits.

You have what feels like an ulcer.

And the Pearls. Living on pinecones and squirrel gizzards waiting for Armageddon with their coin-scoring, apocalyptic old man.

And again circle back to your own life, like a pair of headlights in the rearview late at night, some trouble tailing you on the black highway. A brother on the lam in Oregon. Luke, you fool, just come take your medicine.

A daughter in Texas at an address where you send the checks. Should something happen to her, you know you underwrote it. You call but she doesn’t much want to talk or there’s no answer. After the holidays, this stretch, and it will slow down. You resolve to call. You don’t as much as you should. Wonder how you’re supposed to have a relationship at such distance. You worry.

You think, No news is good news . You think, That’s always true.

At a court appearance in Missoula, Pete gave curt and frank testimony stating to the judge that the woman in question had not kept a single appointment with him in the three months she’d been in his district. The woman yowled like he’d stuck her, but all it meant was she couldn’t have her kids back yet. The judge told her to quit it, and she fell to a stammered jag of weeping that had no effect on the proceedings’ outcome. When Pete left the courthouse, she leered at him from her car but didn’t say or do anything as he crossed the lawn. The groundskeepers bagged the leaves.

Mary wasn’t in the office, so he walked to her place. The elevator operator at the Wilma wouldn’t let him upstairs because she wasn’t in.