Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Acase had in fact been opened on the Pearls by his predecessor. Pete found it in the files in his office, but there were no notes and the forms were empty save an address: 22,000 Fourth of July Creek Road. Pete had gone up to see the place but couldn’t find the turnoff and gave up. But when the snow melted, he hazarded up Fourth of July Creek one last time. He passed by Cloninger’s house on the way and waved at him standing in his yard with a hammer. Cloninger only seemed about to recognize Pete and didn’t have time to wave back, and might not have in any case.

This time he found the turnout, but the road was impassably muddy. He parked and hiked up through the old snow and cedar and larch, through the calling finches and kinglets to a meadow that gave onto a view of a large rock bench and atop it, a kind of house. The aluminum roof gleamed violently in the sun as he approached. All about the crude structure was the sound of melting snow weeping from it. The windows fogged gray with dust. He guessed it was a good thirty miles from the place in the woods where he’d first taken the boy. As the crow flies. They weren’t crows. They walked all that thick, ragged country. He wondered where they wintered. How. Where were the others, the mother, sisters, brothers.

He decided to go back to the place where he’d first met the Pearls, up the unmarked Forest Service road. The hike past the gate was no less difficult, the kernel corn snow over his ankles, and on the last stretch he slipped on almost every step. When he made the ridge, he sat on the wet rocks, sweating under his coat until he was cold again. From where he was, the fabric of the clothing he’d stuffed under the ledge was visible, but he went over anyway and pulled everything out. It had been jammed back in a disordered mess. Not the way he’d left it. The bottle of giardia medication was still there, but not the plastic bag in which he’d wrapped the vitamin C. He searched through the clothing and felt around under the ledge for it. He searched the ground nearby.

“You fuckers,” he said, smiling.

He stuffed everything back and hiked down to his car.

The next day, he returned with more vitamin C and a bottle of regular vitamins and several chocolate bars and cans of beans and chicken soup. He folded everything up together and replaced it in the crevice. He stepped back from the cache and then snapped his fingers and put the jeans in front so they’d know he’d been by.

Three days later he spotted the coat under the ledge instead of the jeans. He whooped and hoped they were somewhere about, to hear him. The vitamin C and all the cans were gone. He replenished the soup and beans and added some canned vegetables. He ate a bar of the chocolate himself.

“Hot damn,” he said.

The boy came along about when Pete expected. Middle of the day. Some distance from wherever they were camped. He loped up out of the golden currant brush, glanced around, nearly missed Pete sitting twenty feet away. He ran. Pete waited.

In forty minutes, he could just hear the boy coming up the hillside behind him.

“You come alone,” the boy asked or said, it was hard to tell.

The kid’s face was gaunt. No child’s fat. Mildly ghoulish cast to his skin.

“You take that vitamin C?” Pete asked.

The kid walked past him to the ledge and began to fill his canvas bag with cans. He put the chocolate in his coat.

“I’d like to come with you.”

The boy looked down the hill.

“My dad,” the kid said by way of explanation.

“I’d like to talk to him. There’s got to be an easier way for me to help than leaving the stuff under a damn rock way up here.”

“He doesn’t know.”

“Where does he think it comes from?”

“I go to town sometimes.”

“The IGA?”

“Sometimes.”

“And shoplift.”

The boy sighed impatiently, worried a hole in the sleeve of his sweater with his thumb.

“You don’t have to do that.”

The boy hiked his bag up his shoulders and started down the hill. Pete followed through a thickness of broken cedar, new lime green ferns, and livid mosses. The child’s wet warren. They trod into some new country, a stand of towering ponderosas. The long brown needles sounded softly under their feet. Cold breezes trundled invisibly over the moist and vacant understory of the trees.

The kid stopped walking. They leaned against pines, facing one another. The boy regarded him.

“You can’t come.”

“I know you’re worried something will happen,” Pete said.

“Something will happen. To you.”

“Do you really think he will harm me?”

The kid pulled puzzle pieces of bark from the tree and flicked them through the air, sailing like blades. The distances he achieved. So much time in these woods.

“I talked to a guy who ran into you two after all the ash came down.”

The boy’s eyes flashed up at Pete.

“It sounds like you guys were pretty scared. Your old man thought the world had about ended.”

The boy broke a stick with his foot.

“But it didn’t, did it?”

The kid’s lips constricted over his teeth. He scratched his cheek, but then resumed debarking the tree, sending the pieces whistling through the air.

“I don’t want you guys to feel like that anymore. Like you’re all alone out here. I can help you and your mama and your brothers and sisters.”

Pete crouched against the tree trunk so he was at eye level with the boy. He leaned in the direction of the child’s gaze to achieve some eye contact.

The kid turned and ran.

Pete’s posture against the tree — his back wedged against it, no leverage — put him at an immediate disadvantage. He took a moment just standing upright, and when he started after the boy, he slipped on the slick carpet of pine needles. By the time he was at a jog, the kid was gone. The big pines weren’t especially thick — not compared to the cedar — but after the quick fifty feet the boy put between Pete and himself, he’d disappeared. Or he was hiding. Pete slowed, searching this way and that, expecting to come across the child hiding behind one of the huge boles. No luck. If the kid kept at a dead run, looking for him this way only made his escape certain. Pete ran as fast as he could in the direction he guessed the boy had gone.

“Benjamin!” he shouted. “Come on! Let me just talk to you a minute!”

There was a blur ahead of him and to the right, some sixty yards away. Or it was his own movement shifting something up there in parallax. He broke after the figment anyway. Through his heavy breathing he could hear water. He stopped and listened, holding his breath. His heart throbbed. A creek somewhere ahead babbled. A snap, shuffling. Pete ran toward the water. He budged through the brush. The bank dropped suddenly, soil and rocks giving way until he had dropped into the drink, a knee-high pool that bloomed darkly with dirt.

The boy was upstream of him in the middle of the creek, a couple yards from the other side, stepping gingerly across a riprap.

“Ben!”

The kid glanced back at Pete, unhalting, and then leapt up onto the opposite bank and disappeared.

Pete slogged out of the pool and headed straight upstream, the creek shallows flowing around his ankles, walking the cold stones, arms out like a tightrope walker. He slipped on the tails of virid moss, vivid to glowing in the overcast. A thin sleet fell on him from the unobstructed sky. He made for the shore opposite to get under the trees, but it was all cutbank and deep eddies and he’d have to go where the boy had crossed or just about to exit the water.

He tottered upstream, ankles rolling like a child on ice skates. He slipped again, but close enough to the shore to reach for an overhanging branch of larch to halt his fall. It gave and gave under his weight as he pulled on it hand over hand, stripping away new needles, tipping and twisting backward until it gently, almost kindly baptized him into the water. He let go when his back was soaked and dropped into a four-foot pool. The cold evicted his breath and when he tried to rise, he slipped and fell again up to his neck and flipped over onto his knees and pulled himself up by the roots on the bank and stood. Stunned and dripping for a long moment. He moved upstream along the bank by handfuls of earth and flora like a man traversing a cliff face, until he arrived a few yards down from where the kid had crossed. There was a single wet footprint on the rock and then nothing, just thick green alder. He listened for anything at all, but there was only the water moving behind him and dripping off of him, and the whispering down of the sleet. He began to shiver. He pulled off his jacket and wrung it and wrung the shirt on his body and walked back across the creek. The going much easier this time because he was already soaking wet and angry.