Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“I’m a fuck,” Pete said. “I’m hammered dogshit over here.”

A slight grin at his choice description.

“I’m so sorry. It was a misunderstanding.”

She wiped her eyes and swallowed and waited for him to go on. He didn’t want to go on. He had to go on.

“My wife fucked this… guy.”

“She did?”

He gestured away all the particulars.

“So I think that I’m half-expecting you to screw me over. Nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with your shitty background. Mary, I… I marvel at you. I know what your life was like, and I sit in awe of you.”

She told him to shut up. He said he meant it.

There’d been too little praise in her life and she didn’t know what to do with the degree of his compliments. His sincerity, he could see, was difficult for her. Her chin vibrated, her whole body then as well. And he could see how she coped when she came over to him, put her hands inside his jacket and her tongue inside his mouth and touched him down onto the bed with a fingertip to his bruised sternum. She undid his pants and pulled them and his underwear down and kissed his cock and she slipped out of her own panties and ground her confusing feelings into a slick pair of orgasms that she summoned for them with hot words into his ear like a filthy spell. And his joy ebbed into a ruminating silence, realizing that half of what she’d been saying to him these past months was expressed with her body, a restless logorrhea that betrayed depths of her that she could not put into words, whole anguished diaries she’d yet to write if ever to write if ever if ever… and Pete felt party to a conspiracy to keep her mouth shut against her own ears, and it wasn’t that he suspected her of cheating on him that made him sorry and silent, but that what they’d been doing together all this time was not grow closer to each other so much as keep her at a safe remove from herself.

Her hair was still damp, and when she lifted her moist cheek from his chest to have a look at him it sounded like a good-bye kiss. She got up and went into the kitchen and then he heard music, and the sounds of her cooking put him in mind of his childhood, times he could hear his mother at the dishes. His father would be braiding leather at the table and occasionally they’d have a few words between them and their being there was a lullaby and how reliable was this lullaby.

A grim dream that he’d actually harmed a child. Furious digging into the hillside. He half-buried the marbled white body.

Mary shook him awake.

“Sorry,” he said. “Nightmare. Was I talking?”

“It’s for you,” she said.

“What?”

“The phone,” she said, slipping back into bed.

“What time is it?”

“Three something.”

“Who the hell is calling me here?”

“Your wife,” she said, tugging the covers back over her body.

He touched her shoulder in abstract apology, padded out to the living room, and picked up the phone.

“What is it, Beth?”

“Oh Pete.”

“Look, I know it’s late, but I did put a check in the mail yesterday. I tried to call the other day. You guys don’t pick up.”

“We moved to Austin, and—”

“What? Austin? When?”

“Pete, it’s been four days—”

“Why? What happened in Waco?”

“—and I’m calling you now because I’m real scared, Pete. It’s never been four days in a row…”

“Are you drunk?”

He heard a lighter flick and another voice in the room with her.

“It’s been four days, Pete.”

“What’s been four days?”

“Rachel.”

“Rachel and four days what, Beth?”

“She’s gone , Pete. I think she’s been… I can’t say it, but I can’t stop thinking it. Jesus, Pete. I need you to come. Please come. Just come.”

When his flight touched down in Austin, the pilot announced that the president had been killed. Gasps hissed throughout the cabin, then angry murmurs. The passengers debarked, and in the terminal men with coats folded over their arms consoled weeping women, lit their cigarettes. A somber crowd assembled around the television in the bar, watching the news. The president hadn’t been killed after all, someone said. They watched Reagan get shot on the screen over and over. A little old lady with wads of folded skin around her eyes, a little hat on her head just so, a print dress, took Pete’s hand and smiled gratefully. Across from him stood more people holding hands. Before Pete realized what it was, the prayer circle closed as a man took Pete’s left hand, barely glancing at him before he bowed his head. Pete was obliged to pray for Reagan.

The heat outside smothered him. The cabbie asked if he’d heard the news. Pete said he had. The cabbie said to watch out, we’d probably be at war with Russia by nightfall.

The neighborhoods teemed with black people and then with Mexicans and bright red and yellow businesses, and people went out in the heat in short sleeves and pants, and young girls in hardly any clothes at all, and boys in nothing but black shorts. The cabbie took him downtown along Sixth Street. At a major intersection hippies in flip-flops milled among the muttering homeless at the bus stops, and Texans in whole suits and ties strode along the pavement in waves of heat.

Beth’s place was across a large river or lake. Even in the shade of great oaks Pete sweltered. The brightly painted clapboard houses silently quaked. Welded statuary and mobiles of glass shards, amalgamated junk pressed into the service of whimsy. The toilet flower box just made him mad. He wondered where was Rachel in this astonishing heat. It was only March. He wondered what was this place Beth had brought his daughter to. What kind of people these Texans were.

Through the screen door he saw box fans blowing. He pulled his hair back and knocked again.

Beth emerged from a back room, threw open the door, and cascaded onto him, hand, arm, whole body, her head notched in his sweaty neck as in the old days. A single sob juddered out of her like an engine turning over. When she pulled away, snot and tears ran from his shoulder to her face, and she grinned in embarrassment and wiped his shoulder and her nose, and wiped his shoulder some more. Touched his shoulder. She smelled like herself. He held her here, and he missed her.

It was hotter within her house and he set down his army duffel. She went into the kitchen and returned with two bottles of beer, both pressed to her neck, and handed one to him. She was in scarcely any clothes at all. Cutoffs and a tank and no bra. She’d lost weight and her breasts sagged down her chest some, but the thinness made her beauty stark.

“I don’t want a beer,” he said. “I want to find Rachel.”

“Just sit. Pete.”

There was a fan trained on the couch and he sat in its stream and put the unopened beer on the coffee table next to some empties. Bottles were serried atop the mantel and ashtrays everywhere and clothes and Styrofoam containers.

“Stop it,” she said. “A week ago the place was spic-n-fuckin-span.”

She drank from the bottle. He left his sweating on the coffee table. She’d been to the police, she said. She’d called all the hospitals and shelters and everyone she knew. Everyone Rachel knew. The school, her teachers, everyone.

“I’m going to visit them myself. When did you last see her?”

“Five days ago.”

“What time?”

“Bedtime.”

“Bedtime when?”

“Late.”

“How was she?”

Beth sat in a plastic folding chair and leaned forward and swung the bottle between her legs from her fingertips.

“She was fine.”

“Was anything going on?”