Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Pearl sucked air through clenched teeth at a fresh wave of pain.

Pete asked Pearl to lie down and rest his head in Benjamin’s lap. He told him he was going to pour water into his eyes and wanted to flush them as clean as possible. Pearl did as Pete told him. He told Pearl to try and blink. The man’s eyelids were swollen shut, and when he opened them they split like sausage casings, fat pus dribbling out. Pete poured water into his eyes and the man arched in agony, but he did not cry out. Pete told him he had drops for him that would ease the pain a great deal. He said to stay still, and firmly wiped away the pus so that he wouldn’t have to do it again. The man whimpered. Pete told him he was going to pull his eyelids open and put in the drops. Pearl barked for him to do it already. Pete pried one eye open with one hand, the gummy lashes like a flytrap, and saw only the black sightless centroid of his pupil. He squeezed a drop onto the eyeball. Or not. He wasn’t sure, the eyelid clapped shut and the man strained away despite himself. Pete said let’s try the other eye, and the pupil was rolled up when he opened the lids and this time he saw the cool drop hit the ball. The man’s breath heaved into and out of him. Benjamin ran his hand over his father’s head as the drops did their work. Pete explained what the ointment was for, but as the pain diminished Pearl went pliant and let him run the ointment along the bottom of his opened eyelid like a line of white frosting.

They watched the agony go out of him. Melted excretions ran down his temples like white tears, but the man was still and Pete thought maybe he’d passed out — he’d been awake for two days in great pain — but he took Pete’s hand and patted it. The boy sniffed and grinned gratefully at Pete. Pete went to the fire and let the two of them alone.

He was two days with the Pearls. The first night he cooked hot dogs but they refused them. The boy said they didn’t eat swine. The pork and beans were out too. Pete ate the hot dogs himself and gave them buns and cheese and small tins of fruit cocktail. The man was sound asleep and snoring minutes after they wordlessly ate. They sat by the fire some, and Pete suggested the boy go to bed and then rolled a cigarette and sipped from his flask. He caught the child looking at him from inside his bag. They grinned mutually. Then the boy turned over toward his father.

On the first morning, the man’s eyes were crusted shut and they performed the same ablutions, applied the drops and ointment. He sighed at the fresh relief and let the boy stroke his head.

Pete got up and stretched his legs and observed the campsite. They’d dug out and flattened the earth on a hillside that wasn’t far from a good view of the canyon and which was only a short hike from the ridge that looked out on the northern approach to their position. They were close to fresh water, close enough that a blind man in agony could find it.

Pete inventoried their things, the collapsible cups and lightweight aluminum plates, forks, spoons, knives, a few small pots. They’d slept in the open air, but the area they’d dug out went some ways into the hillside. The shed they’d constructed of small logs was about four feet high on each side with a good yardage of canvas stretched taut over it. Pete spotted fishing poles, rifles, and a mishmash of garments, hats, unmatched gloves through the flap.

The only thing missing was the rest of the Pearls.

At supper the man sat up, beckoned his son, and softly said something to him. The child went into the shelter and returned with a bag he handed to his father. The man groped for it, set the bag in his lap, felt among the coins inside, and fetched one out.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Over here,” Pete said.

Pearl tossed the coin to him. It landed between his legs where he squatted. It was about the size of a nickel, pure gold, with an antelope on the back. An aristocrat on the obverse.

“That’s a quarter-ounce Krugerrand,” Pearl said. “For the medicine and the food and your trouble. I don’t know what gold’s at right now, but that’s more than fair.”

“I can’t take this.”

“Yes you can. You can change it into a hundred dollars. At least.”

“I’d heard you didn’t believe in the dollar.”

Pete couldn’t see his eyes to tell what the man might have thought about that remark. Pearl hawked up a plug of snot and spat.

“From who?”

“A pawnbroker. A dope farmer.”

Pearl lifted his chin and turned his head to better hear Pete.

“Ever since I came across your son,” Pete said, “I’ve kept my ear to the ground for you.”

Pearl daubed the corner of his eye with the back of his hand.

“Really, I can’t take this,” Pete said of the coin. “Helena pays for everything. Reimburses me, anyway. And my salary.”

“Render unto Caesar then,” Pearl said.

“And what if you’re right? What if the world comes crashing down and money’s worthless? Won’t you want this gold?”

Pearl smiled. Pete asked what for.

“Well, what is gold?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

Pearl leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“The metal isn’t for anything, is it? It’s soft and worthless. All we do with gold is stamp it with animals and dead men and Masonic symbols. Melt it into trinkets,” he said, donning an imaginary ring. “We stack bars of it in vaults.”

He laid gold bar atop invisible bar. One eye had come unstuck and was partially open, giving him the aspect of a demented vagrant or seer. A little of both.

“A can of Spam is a better hedge against the apocalypse,” he said, smiling. “It lasts a thousand years, and you can eat it.”

Pearl felt around his person and located some fingerless wool gloves in one of the many pockets on his olive army coat and pulled them on. He tipped his head at a noise he alone heard, some auditory figment of his own paranoia.

Pete turned the coin over in his palm.

“Why not put a hole in this one?”

Pearl smiled, presumably at his own infamy.

“That’s a South African coin. I have no opinion of the images on it.”

“But Lincoln and Washington?”

“Washington was a slaver and a Mason. And Lincoln issued fiat scrip to pay for his war on the states.”

“And FDR?”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Pearl said.

The boy watched them talk and looked to Pete like he had a stake in the outcome. Like he wanted Pete to pass his father’s test. Worried about it, in fact.

“I’m not a man,” Pearl said, unprompted and like he was holding another conversation with a ghost or within himself.

“You’re not a man,” Pete repeated. “What are you, then?”

The child looked away from Pete. It slowly occurred to him that Pearl wasn’t helpless at all, that the boy would do anything he told him to, that he had shot at Vandine—

“I’m dynamite,” Pearl said, smiling. Tilting his head as if to better hear Pete’s expression.

The boy would not look at Pete.

“What do the shapes mean?” he asked, as though they were talking about some harmless craft. “The square and the star and the keyhole?”

“Symbols,” Pearl said, fluttering his fingers in the air.

“Of…?”

“Of nothing. Like all symbols. Of themselves. Of a virus. As in the Tulpenwode.”

“The what?”

The boy abruptly stood. Pete resisted the urge to stand himself as the child went into the tent.

“In centuries past, there was a market in Holland,” Pearl said. “The country at the time was making advances toward modern capitalism. Trading currencies and commodities. Futures markets.”

Pete wondered if whatever Pearl had said— tool pen road ? — was some kind of signal. If the boy was even now fetching a gun.