Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“Yeah.” She sighed. “Okay. I get it.”

Pete reached for the flashlight and shined it around the boulders and trees.

“This would be a good place to spend the winter.”

She laughed.

“Seriously. You got hot water. You set up your camp down near the creek. You could make it out here okay.”

“If you don’t mind all the naked people coming and crashing your camp.”

“Well, not here. Something like this up around Glacier.”

“Tenmile getting a little crowded, is it?”

“Not me. I was just thinking of this case. This kid. Sorry. I didn’t mean to talk about work again.”

“Get it off your chest.”

She beckoned him to speak with her fingers. Pete took them, kissed them.

“This boy and his family are living somewhere in the sticks, and I was trying to figure out where they might be holed up for the winter. How in the hell they’ll make it. Something like this would be prime. But I don’t think there’s any hot springs up there.”

Her eyes were closed, and beaded water was already running down her neck to her clavicle.

“You have no idea where they are?”

“Not really.”

“Do they have any previous cases on file?”

“Pearl’s more the kind of guy you read about in the paper.”

“You should check.”

“I should’ve already. I’m losing my knack for this.”

“At least you have a beautiful cock.”

She didn’t look at him or move, but a sleepy grin cracked across her face.

“I’m gonna have to wash your mouth out,” he said.

“I can’t help it. I’m just a product of the system,” she said, tilting her head slightly in his direction. “I had a lot of foster daddies,” she whispered gravely.

Her eyes were half closed and in the deep darkness he could not see what kind of craving rode in them, so he swallowed and took her outstretched hand.

She slid up to his ear, whispered, “A lot of staff who would check on us at night,” and bit his ear. He wondered was this flirting. She grinned. Flirting. Should he play along. Could he play along. Did she think this would arouse him. She stirred vaguely under the water, and a grenade of lust boomed in Pete’s chest.

“They took advantage,” she whispered.

He got in front of her, and pinned her to the edge of the pool.

“They—”

He put a finger over her mouth to shush her, and she nodded and put her body to him as if to say she understood, yes, but would he still please, would he still.

For a period of weeks things were as good as ever between them. They took a drive to Livingston for interesting gourds from Hutterites, and on Halloween they handed candy to the few children living in the Wilma who raced the floors for treats in plastic costumes.

In mute astonishment they watched Reagan get elected on the television at the Union Club, where the Teamsters Local 400 had gathered to observe, crush their hats, and get mournfully plowed. When someone put on the jukebox, Pete and Mary turned slow circles on the dance floor and went home in a sleety snowfall that soaked and chilled them on the three-block walk to her apartment. An errant shout that might have been joy at the election’s outcome redounded off the empty streets, and then it was quiet, as though all was well in the Republic.

“The judge is gonna be a mess,” Pete said. “I should go home and check in on him.”

“Take me,” she said.

It was nearly 4:00 A.M. when they arrived in Tenmile, and the judge was heaving in his booth with Neil and the sheriff keeping watch. He had wept openly in the preceding hour. He’d been telling stories about the old days, outraged yarns of cattlemen riding up on shepherds and slaughtering the offending stock, hanging rustlers and innocents alike, and terrorizing the state generally. He inveighed against the Copper Barons. He sang the Montana state song and then a few bars of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” drumming his tobacco-stained gut in a tuneless rage, cracked verses spewing from his voice box. Pete took a shot of bourbon with him and the judge agreed to let the sheriff drive him home.

Pete drove Mary up to his place and lit the fire as she looked the cabin over. Maybe wondering what it might be like to live there. What kind of husband he would be. He knew what kind of husband he had been, but felt — watching her touch his fishing pole, run her finger down the spines of his books, and idly inventory his cupboards — that he might be a different kind of husband now. She asked what happened to the window and when he said a bear is what happened to the window, she didn’t believe him, and when she saw he was serious, she stayed close to him. He dragged the mattress out by the fire. The sun rose on the Yaak and they went to sleep.

He would take off to do his cases and come back to Missoula to be with Mary whenever he could. Long weekends. The days were shorter now. Colder. Days he cut work like he’d cut high school geometry, realizing with a soft embarrassment that he did so with no fear of consequences. That old Snow sense of entitlement. But this too: DFS could not fire him any more than they could hire someone to help him. He was as good as it got, and for the most part that was pretty damn good.

He watched it snow from her window, falling pink embers in the evening neon of the marquee. Nothing accumulated and the cars swished by in the street below as if it had rained. He napped on the couch like a hot cat and woke and moved away from the radiator and into the cool of the bedroom. He smoked in her groaning brass bed reading her books and it was usually dark when he finished. For hours he merely listened to the traffic down below, people about their business, utterly reft of his enjoinment, his sage advice.

It’s almost as if they don’t require your assistance at all. Imagine that, Pete.

It would be dusk. The lock would click open, she would come into the bedroom with a cup of wine, disrobe, slide into bed, and they would begin to harvest orgasms.

She would tell him stories sometimes of the group home. How the kids were, how the staff was. Times she snuck out. A time she ran away with another girl, hitched a ride from Spokane. They stayed with a Boeing executive for a few weeks. He gave them presents and money for letting him masturbate onto them. They stole his wallet, got picked up on Capitol Hill, sent back to Spokane.

On Thanksgiving Day, Mary needed an assist and a second car to do a removal, so Pete went with her. They rescued the kids simply enough. The jittery mother appeared almost relieved, saying to take ’em just take ’em, and the children were in various states of comprehension as Mary and Pete helped stuff what clean clothes and toys they had into duffels, and then through the yard muddy with snowmelt to the cars. But as they left, the guilt did a sudden number on their mother and she raced down the mountain after them, laying on her horn, flashing her lights. The kids bawling at the sight of her reaching for them at the stoplights in town. Pete pulled into the parking lot of the Kmart while Mary ran in and called the cops, and the kids howled against the windows of the cars, hysterical and hyperventilating, until the cops took their mother away. But then a slobbery, sniffling quiet and anesthetic relief washed over them, and they sagged like they’d been drugged. Some even dozed.

Pete and Mary shuttled them like their own harried brood into JB’s Big Boy, and they ate burgers and shakes, and colored on the place mats. With nourishment came new anxiety, where were they staying, what will happen to us, and Pete and Mary could only give immediate answers.

The attention home.

Yes it’s nice there.

Yes you’ll all be together.

No we don’t know about after that.