Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Someplace better.

You haven’t touched your fries.

The eldest girl, at Pete’s elbow, began to sob quietly and he was unable to soothe her dismay. Mary nodded at him to get out, and she slid in next to her, took the girl’s wrist into her own long fingers and began to turn magic circles on the bones of her hand and then on her other hand. Her crying ceased, and in time the girl’s eyes rolled, her head fell against Mary’s shoulder, and Pete saw or imagined a ghost swim like a flagellate out of the little girl’s forehead, a departing devil. Mary coaxed deep mind-wiping breaths out of this girl and she nuzzled against her in this warmth and peace.

Pete asked quietly how she did this.

“Acupressure,” she said. “There are points on the body where the tension is physically stored.”

“You know, I could use a little of that.”

“Stop it.”

“Serious. I got a lot of tension stored up in this one spot—”

She threw a straw at him. The children laughed. He made a face at them and invited a fusillade of french fries.

At Christmas he sent Rachel a box full of things he feared were all wrong. A gross of jelly bracelets and three pairs of earrings. Sunglasses. A belt. A book of e. e. cummings and Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Lord of the Flies. A short letter explaining that her grandfather died and saying how much he loved her. He wrote Mary’s number and said if she couldn’t reach him at work to try him there.

He finally wrote Luke too. One draft explaining that the old man had died that he pitched into the fire because he could not calibrate the voice or sentiments. His own corrosive thoughts. He wrote another short note just telling him to come in, get it over with and then on with his life. That there was bad news and that he loved him. To just come back.

Mary worked Christmas but came to his cabin the days after. Fingers of ice from the eaves. Opening gifts, many of them bottles, batches, vintages. A kind of hibernation. New Year’s in Missoula. They skied Lost Trail. Hot cocoa and Rumple Minze on the lift, the sun shattering off the sheets of snow.

Then the succinct gray days of late January, February. The Yaak socked in with banks and clouds and cold. Shots of terrible arctic air, the useless sun. Everything under a nap of snow, and yet curiously alive. A fox hopping after bunnies or mice in the meadow beyond the trees. A stillness at the heart of things, between the beats.

A night he came home from work to fresh tire tracks leading up the road to his place, but stopping short of his drive. Footprints going to and coming from the cabin. As he made a fire, he discovered the cup with a puck of frozen coffee on the table. His brother or his brother’s parole officer. He wasn’t sure which. Didn’t care much, one way or the other.

Spring. Come March 1981 a spell of warm weather set the snow melting, everything dripping. Water running under the ice, the ice white and slick as enamel.

The temperatures squatted in the low fifties when he went to Butte for St. Patrick’s Day. Pete and his friends woke midday with heroic hangovers and dragged themselves into the pitched revelry already spilling into the streets. A carnival of motorcycle noise and nakedness to rival anything in Sturgis, anything in New Orleans. The whole town a red-light district, funny, hinging toward ugly. They watched fights that Shane ushered to completion with his meaty fists. They arrived at a house party where a crowd of leathery enthusiasts watched an old slattern tug on a pair of thin cocks attached to two men as pink and shiny as basted hams. Pete had only just wheeled outside to retch when Shane walked out as calmly as a sheriff, punching the head he had cradled in his armpit. A skinny witch rode his back and tore at his ears as he stepped off the porch and dropped the man he was beating into the grass. He seemed surprised to find he couldn’t work the gate latch with his broken hand, and once again they made for the ER, stopping for a six-pack, as if on the way to an afterparty.

Did she receive Pete’s gifts and letter?

She did. She didn’t read the books or wear the bracelets or the earrings or the belt, just the sunglasses and read the letter about her dead grandfather to her mother.

You should see if he left you anything. Son of a bitch was rich.

There’s another number here he wants me to call him at.

You can call him if you want.

Her name is Mary.

Whose name is Mary?

The number.

Let me see that.

Did her mother read the letter?

Just the last part with the number. The other woman’s name in Pete’s handwriting.

Mary , she said.

That was it?

She had people over that night and got rip-roaring after her shift. Then divorce papers. She would sit and regard her daughter in the sunshine on the porch that cut through the leafless live oaks, it was still warm enough to sit outside, and announce that she wasn’t going to say mean things about her father to her. That she would find out on her own that he was cold. That there was something broken in him. That she would see for herself what a wreckage he was, how incapable he was, just like how he would forget her birthday, just watch, he will forget. You’ll see.

And did he forget her birthday?

She didn’t care. She was all about Cheatham by then.

Cheatham?

A college dropout who’d come over with some friends some Friday her mother was working and the first one she said to herself she wanted. Yes, she had been boy crazy before, but this was different she wanted to hit him and bite him and crawl up him and chew his ear off. She couldn’t understand these violent feelings, but there they were she was nervous the whole night she actually drank and went up to him and said this was her house did he want to come inside and have a look around and he said he was okay on the porch having a cigarette and someone handed him a guitar and his long brown hair fell over his face as he played and she waited on him all night and two weeks later when he came over she made him walk with her around back of the house and then she climbed up him and kissed him and it was love he was nineteen she scared him but her birthday had happened and she said it was only five years’ difference now but he wouldn’t touch her anymore. He came by another time with some other people but didn’t talk to her at all really and then a time after that around Thanksgiving or Christmas and her mother threw a party on New Year’s and they did it in her room at last he had to leap under the bed when someone stumbled in and she screamed bloody murder and whoever it was slammed shut the door and she laughed at Cheatham for being so scared.

Was he sweet?

He really was. He wrote her a song and sang it in a whisper. A song about soft birds. He was worried it was so so so wrong for him to have slept with her.

Did she intend him to take her away?

Yes.

Did her mother suspect she was planning to leave?

Almost every night now it was a carnival of drunks and weed dealers and some speed dealers and these long-hair stoner guys and guys on motorbikes and artists and all sorts. Cheatham didn’t stand out. Her mother was distracted by bar people, by new prospects herself. She’d lost weight doing the hours on her feet, doing some coke, staying up all night, her voice was reedy and hoarse as she was herself in the throes of something fresh and almost teenaged. Having her own crushes from those in the aforementioned carnival. She and Rachel passing one another in the hall like roommates, not mother daughter, not that they were fighting yet either but in a kind of mutually agreed improximity like two north-poled magnets, never to touch, to close, even side-hugging when they were out together and someone said they looked so much alike, side-hugging like rival sisters made to stand for a picture.