Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

She filled a glass with ice and poured him tea from a jug in the window, and when she turned around there was a fresh resolve in her face to say something frank.

“Thank you,” he said, taking the tea. “Now go ahead and tell me what you want to tell me.”

“I want to help. I want you to find your daughter, but I don’t know why you’re here. Why her mother called. I forbade Kristin from going over there weeks ago.”

“Why?”

The woman plucked a dead frond from a fern by the window.

“Her mother. There is alcohol and drugs all over the place. People there all hours of the night. How did you not know this?”

Pete set down the glass of tea. Gazed into it.

“Heather’s mom said the same thing.”

“Kristin says she hasn’t been in class since February.”

“Well, where the hell has she been?!”

The question shot out of him unbidden, and he immediately murmured an apology and stood to go. She’d taken a step back, but now she gripped his forearm.

“When you get her, you keep her.”

He said he would. He said he was sorry for disturbing her afternoon. He thanked her and he left.

He drove the city, searching all the places the social workers said to search and then the youth homes and runaway centers, showing skeptical staff his Montana DFS badge, more than a few of them asking him wasn’t he way out of his jurisdiction. He said it was his daughter and to a person they turned remorsefully accommodating. A large-bosomed Texas matron offered to print him a ream of flyers if he’d leave her the picture he had of Rachel. She said a lot of the runaways could be found on the main drag near the University of Texas, panhandling and busking near campus and lying to cops.

His shirt soaked through walking the Drag. He made no progress whatever, the kids had never heard of her, the trail was as cold as the weather was hot. He didn’t eat or drink, and by evening a headache cleaved his head into discrete lobes of pain. He sat outside a run-down three-story house where he’d seen college kids and younger go in and out. Visits of five or six minutes. None of them Rachel, each tiny teenage girl among them causing a hope to crest and crash in his heart.

SHE HAD ALWAYS liked to dance. Pete would strike up a beat on his chest, lap, or the walls, and she would twirl her arms and stutter-step in place like a miniflapper all of eighteen months old. She loved pears and ate fistfuls of scrambled eggs and was practically famous to all the tenants in their apartment building. Everybody knew everybody. The tenants decorated each floor on holidays, mainly for her, as there were no other children in the building among the minimum-wage earners and single widowers and working college kids like Pete and Beth. Such a pretty picture Rachel, Beth, and Pete made, as ideal as a water molecule, hydrogen, hydrogen, oxygen. Complete and entire.

The tenants would leave their doors open to her, and Pete would sit at the top of the stairs to make sure she didn’t topple down them, and she ran from apartment to apartment and now he wondered did she trust the whole world because of that and did she think she could dance just anywhere at fourteen and it would be safe, and he wondered was she so foolish as that, and he thought of course she was, she has me for a father and Beth for a mother.

Long nights with thin, wakeful sleep, thick sluggish days driving around in Beth’s car, walking creek beds and cemeteries and waiting on picnic tables in disheveled neighborhood parks and traipsing through bamboo warrens and squatting among the wary homeless and asking did they see a girl about fourteen, yay-tall, real cute, curly hair. They said no they didn’t. Or they said yes they did because he as much as described any and all white girls who were in this kind of trouble. And among this population of the peculiar and outright insane were more than a few who Pete suspected were capable of virtually anything and he was leveled by the naked fact that there was nothing that could not happen to his little girl. Everything was permitted. This was real, not a fiction or mere case he was working at some remove from his heart. And he said to himself all these days, Oh Christ what have I done, I have let her down in every meaningful particular, above all failing to love her enough that she knew his love and would come to him.

Times he entertained the idea she was en route to Montana. Times he swore oaths, promised to die if she would come back — I’ll die. I’ll suffer anything but this, her absence. Her silence.

Not knowing where she was. Oh my God. An untold sorrow. He’d seen so much suffering, but he’d only ever suffered it secondarily. To have it fresh and his own. The scope of it. He’d had no idea. He’d known nothing.

Times he was sure she was dead. Times he spotted her body in city creek beds and ditches, in among the weeds at the shore or floating out in the river. He walked the muddy beds. Flotsam and detritus from floods, garments strung up in creek-side flora like scarecrows. Snakes and fleet lizards and spiderwebs the height of him. Insects of incredible size and speed. Nothing like home. This wasn’t home.

He harbored the hope that she’d headed north. He wrote it on a piece of paper and kept it in a shirt pocket close to his heart.

He visited Rachel’s school, her teachers, trying his best to appear… he didn’t know how to appear. Professional or insane with worry. He went to San Antonio, which was much larger than he’d expected, and stayed a few fruitless days showing flyers, hanging them in shelters, giving them to anyone who’d take one.

Staying next door to him in the motel was a bickering couple at whom he more than once pounded on the wall. It rained one evening and when he returned from scouring the city, he found them sitting out front of their doorway sipping pleasantly from tumblers under the awning in the evening cool. The man’s name was Beauregard and he gave the impression he was awaiting a call or a ride, even as he pressed a glass of rye into Pete’s hand and introduced his wife. Sharla or Sharlene or Darla. She smoked and forced something short of a greeting out of her mouth when Pete held up his glass.

They were between jobs. They asked was he staying alone. Pete said he was. Beauregard removed his cap, as if to distract from his agenda in asking about Pete, and Pete’s hackles went up, but the rye went down and his wariness leveled off with a companionable drink, the pleasant coolness of the rain, and the overcast sky. A birthmark ran up the inside of the bored woman’s leg to an unknown terminus, like she’d pissed or bloodstained herself. He wondered who were these people really. Not just here, with him, but the world over. He saw them every day in his work and had yet to know why there were so many.

With Beauregard and Sharla, he let down his guard, come what may. He wondered was his daughter in some place similar doing something as foolhardy. More foolhardy. He found himself deaf to whatever Beauregard was saying and, sizing him up, wondered could Rachel evade such a man, the ropy muscles of his bare arms in his tank top.

He pummeled his worry down with another glass of rye. It got hotter as the sun set.

A black man arrived, thin, with large eye whites like boiled eggs. Pete looked the man over not in wariness or anxiety but in undisguised curiosity. He’d never seen someone so jet-black, skin glistening in the increasing humidity like a wet stone. Beauregard introduced them, and the man asked Pete what the fuck he was looking at. Sharla snorted. It seemed for a moment there’d be trouble as Pete stammered out that he wasn’t looking at anything. Pete was ashamed and said he was sorry and that he’d better be heading in to hit the sack. They just looked at him like he was crazy saying that, and Beauregard said for Pete to wait with Sharla, he and Douglas here had to go on an errand and he sure as shit wasn’t leaving Douglas alone with Sharla. It wasn’t clear that this was a joke or at whose expense if it was.