Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“Come on, you know me.”

“You have to be on the lease.”

“This a new policy?”

The elevator operator sat on his stool, caring for his nails.

Pete waited outside the theater smoking. The wind poured out of the mouth of Hellgate Canyon and eddied where Pete idly paced on the tiles in front of the box office. The breezes sketched up little twisters of brown leaves and a puppetry of paper. The elevator man was watching him through the glass door and Pete opened his palms, as if to ask what his problem was. The operator drew back.

He went for coffee up the block and had just sat down when Mary strolled by wearing a long coat and a look of wry expectation. She was headed downtown — instead of coming from — and her expression seemed like that of someone who knew she was going to her own surprise party. He grew jealous of whatever was on her mind. He rapped the glass, startling her. She covered her chest and smiled when she saw him, kissed him when she came in.

“I was wondering if I’d see you again.”

He put his hand under his T-shirt and made like his heart was visibly pounding. He could feel her smile like a heat lamp on his person. Anyone would suffer corny sentiments in her presence, she was that dear, that comely.

“You went by my place,” she said.

“I had a court date. I just stopped off for coffee.”

She set her hands on her hips and looked at him skeptically.

“Here. On the block where I live. You stop for coffee.”

He scratched behind his ear and admitted the elevator man wouldn’t let him in.

“He’s a fickle little son of a bitch,” he added.

“You all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

She looked at her watch.

“Go,” he said plainly. “Whatever you got to do. I’ll come by some other time.”

“It’s just that I was supposed to meet some people.”

“It’s all right.”

She searched his face. He asked her what for.

“I’m getting a weird energy off you.”

“Look, there’s nothing I’m wanting or not saying, okay? I just came by is all.”

She tugged off her gloves, removed her coat, and sat.

The waitress came, and Mary ordered a piece of apple pie. Pete shook his head no when the waitress looked at him to see if he wanted anything to eat too. It had begun to snow. Just a thin powder as though from a nearly empty shaker.

“I thought you had to meet some people.”

“You’re sad,” she said, and she touched his hair back over his ear and put the back of her cold hand on his forehead and cheek.

“I don’t need you to take my temperature,” he said, warming her hand in his. He remembered that she had terrifyingly cold feet. She loved to put them between his legs to shock him. She’d said she had poor circulation or thin blood, a real condition. Some quack told her to imagine pulling clothes from a dryer, to hold in her imagination a clean dishtowel, a warm pair of jeans with hot rivets.

The tiny brass bell over the door rang and the people who came in brushed the new snow off their hair and shoulders before it could melt.

“So, what’s up?” she asked.

He thought for a moment, and then told her about his father.

“I’m so sorry, Pete.”

“It’s okay. We weren’t… close.”

“Still.”

She held his hand, and he said that if he was upset about anything, it was leaving Cecil, that there wasn’t much to be done about it, but how it had left a bad taste in his mouth. More than a bad taste. Putting Cecil in Pine Hills made him feel awful that he’d run out of things he could do for the kid. Then there was the courthouse today. The holidays coming on.

Texas.

“I guess I got a lot on my mind,” he said. He smiled at the understatement.

She sat there, listening. That was all. In fact, as he was talking, he began to realize she wasn’t as forthcoming as he would have liked; she offered no palliatives or even a mildly philosophical take on this being the nature of the job or the people they worked with or the nature of life entirely. These were things that he would have said to her, and he resented that she didn’t offer them up.

“You’re distracted,” he said.

“I don’t like the way you worked that case,” she said.

“What case?”

“The boy you put in Pine Hills.”

“He was going to juvie whether I was involved or not.”

“You shouldn’t have tricked him. He trusted you enough to call you and you lied to him. You don’t know what that does to people. People who already don’t have enough people they trust. Just because you were ultimately right doesn’t make the way you went about it okay.”

“All right.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“I hear you. I could make excuses, but you’re right.”

She looked sidelong at him.

“What are your intentions with me?” she asked.

“My ‘intentions’? What are you, your own father?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Yes, effectively, I am my own father. I was—”

“Look, I know. About you. What your background is. It’s out. People know.”

She laughed. A hard bark of laughter that doubled her over when she looked at him.

“Everybody knows, Pete. I told Jim in my interview. All my professors knew, all my papers were about it, my thesis. It’s not a dark secret.”

“Okay.”

“I am not ashamed of myself. It’s not my fault.”

“Of course not.”

“So then don’t treat me like I’m a crazy bitch for asking you what’s up with us.”

He told her he was smitten with her. He said: “Let’s call it smitten, what I am.”

“Okay then. That sounds pretty good.”

“Can you bail on your people tonight?”

“I don’t want to go to the bar.”

“Okay.”

She told him he drank too much. He said for her to tell him something he didn’t know.

The waitress brought coffee, and Mary turned some cream in her cup with a spoon. The waitress brought the pie. Two forks, just in case Pete changed his mind, she said. She put a fork in front of him, and when he didn’t pick it up, Mary cut a bite with her fork and put it into his mouth. And it was good pie, and she was there, and he felt better. Simple.

She said he could take her somewhere, but it had to be somewhere special.

By the time they made it onto Highway 12 it was full dark, the motes of snow firing out of the black as though they were vaulting through stars. He pulled into an empty turnaround and took her across the still and empty blacktop and into the lodgepole forest and helped her up the trail slick in places with ice. The snow falling on the trees was a sound itself, so faint that it could be heard if they held their breath, and then lost in the thrum of their hearts and their panting as they hiked the grade. They found their way by his flashlight, and shapes of steam from the hot pools sifted lazily through the wet pines like robed ghosts of a sudatorium. Lurid mosses and mustard lichens grew here as in the rain forests of Washington, the near rain forest of the Yaak. They undressed on the wet rocks and put their clothes in a garbage bag. Flakes of snow alit on their bare shoulders, and he took her hand, and they stepped gingerly over the slick stones and down a few crude steps into the hot pool.

“Jesus,” she said, wincing at the heat.

“Come on. All the way. There’s a bench over here.”

She took a breath, slid down to him with a slow gasp that whistled over her teeth, and joined him on the stone that sat them in water up to their necks.

“Nice, huh?”

“If my skin doesn’t boil off.”

“Come on.”

She tilted her head back onto the rim of the pool and sighed, her breath convening with the cloud steaming over them.