Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

They were gone an hour. Pete and the woman smoked, not a pleasantry passing between them.

“My daughter is missing,” he said.

The woman looked at him with no compassion whatsoever.

“She ran away from her mother’s. I can’t find her.”

“How old?”

“Fourteen.”

She pulled on her cigarette and looked into her glass and if she had a thought for him, she didn’t share it.

“We’re shitty parents. Her mother is just over at her house getting drunk. And I’m sitting here getting drunk. But there’s nothing we can do. I’ve looked everywhere.”

“You check the Drag?”

He nodded. “We were young. We weren’t ready for a kid. No one tells you that the mother of your child will resent the child and resent you. I am saying what you are not allowed to say: we did not love our child enough. God, I didn’t protect her. I didn’t protect her from us. I go into homes all the time and I save children. It’s what I do for a living, you see? And I didn’t save my own daughter.”

The woman had sat up, and now she went inside. She came back out with the bottle of rye. She squeezed his wrist as she filled his glass.

“Beau will be back soon,” she said. “We’ll all feel better in a little bit.”

When they returned, Beauregard oiled the party into Pete’s motel room and dialed in some music on the clock radio. He jiggered at the tinny sounds from the tiny speakers. Douglas removed a length of glass the color of maple syrup from his pants and Beauregard removed a pocket of foil from his shirt, folded it open, and plucked out a white pellet that Pete thought was a pill that the woman smoked. She sat serenely and Beauregard took the pipe from her open palm and bent to kiss her. She blew the smoke into his mouth. When he exhaled, she grabbed the back of his head and kissed him and pulled him onto the bed, wrapping her stained leg around him. Douglas shared with Pete a look of approval, of arousal. Beauregard disentangled himself and rose with the foil and the pipe. He loaded it again and handed it to Pete.

They called it base. Pete set down his cigarette and drink, and took the hit. He was unprepared for the exhilaration and he laughed ferociously. His vision filled with bright magnesium fires. He immediately wanted another one and finished his drink and cigarette waiting for the pipe to come around. It did. He and Douglas now became bosom. The music was soulful and invigorating. They spoke and spoke and spoke, most of it lies and heightened opinions. When the time came, Pete handed over some of his money, and Beauregard and Douglas left again. He and Sharla watched television, as quiet as people waiting in an ER. Douglas and Beauregard returned, the room filling with sound.

The hours shriveled into new smallnesses.

The rye was gone, they were out of cigarettes. Douglas had disappeared. Beauregard and Sharla argued about a scab she was picking at on her leg. They seemed to have forgotten they were in Pete’s room. He stepped between them to get his wallet and his keys, and still they argued. He went outside. He walked up the empty street. A strip club, railroad tracks. A police car sped by. He walked the tracks and then down a causeway to and around the shore of a pond.

He sat on the limestone in the dark. Felt the notches carved by water into the rock. He’d have wept but for the cocaine and the numbness and the queer sensation that the stones all around him were subtly shifting position. The very ground seemed to writhe. Nearby something slipped into the water. He wondered was he both seeing and hearing things. He’d had so little sleep. No more than an hour at a stretch since Beth had called.

A foot away a rock shuddered. He reached a shaking hand to the stone and it collapsed a half inch, socketed into the ground. He wondered was he going crazy. Had he already gone crazy. He touched the stone and the grooves on the dome of it—

A fucking turtle. Dozens of them all around. A bale of turtles crawling to water.

Two days later he came back to Beth’s house with her car and her keys but not with her little girl. Not that she expected him to. She didn’t hear him pull up or climb onto the porch. He sat exhausted against the wall and was out of her sight and he listened to her shuffle on flip-flops into the living room. He was about to call to her when she started to cry. She bawled so hard he felt witness to a vile pornography of grief and then he wondered was she crying because the cops had found Rachel’s body or a piece of her clothing in the water or were the dogs searching the fields or were divers dredging the river. Fear paralyzed him, he didn’t want to know. And then her sobs puttered into a soft blubbering and she lit a cigarette.

She came onto the porch and into the muggy afternoon, bugs screaming something terrific in the trees, coming and going in waves, he didn’t know they were cicadas or how loud they were, just that some incredible call-and-response was at work, a crackling choir that reminded him of baseball cards in bike spokes. She noticed him there and started crying anew.

“What is it?” he whispered. “What’s happened?”

He cringed as though waiting for her to hit him with a hammer.

“Nothing’s happened,” she said. “She’s still just gone.”

His relief was itself almost sickening and he wondered would this be the shape of his life. Constant worry. Images of her foot tangled in river flora, her contused and naked back, her hair in the dirt. Her teeth. Would these pictures forever turn on the carousel slide projector of his mind.

“Where have you been?”

“Everywhere. San Antonio. Just driving and looking and asking. I talked to kids all over the city, Beth. If she’s here… Hell, she’s not here. Or she’s…”

“Pete, don’t.”

“… or she’s in a hole…”

He wept on his knees like a man begging for his life. She pulled him inside and held him, swaying under the ceiling fan until his grief emptied out. She took his head and looked at him and said I know I know I know honey. It was he who kissed her. She tasted like salt and beer. She led him into the bedroom through the stages of their disrobing. He wasn’t tender with her, but neither was he rough. The lovemaking was necessarily urgent, ashamed. They would not have been able to abide another moment’s reflection. They were too sore, and there was no longer much surface to them, just a thin layer of skin and the raw pith beneath. If fucking could be frank, this was, and so was everything they said afterward. She exclaimed with some woe and wonder that this was how Rachel came to be. With these two people here.

She reached for a glass on the bedside table and drank. She handed it to him. It was bourbon and melted ice and still cool and watery and almost slaking.

“I keep calling the police station,” she said. “They sent an officer over. He said it sounds like she’d run away, not been kidnapped. I think she ran away, Pete. I think she ran away from me. I let her get away with everything and then when I tried to rein her in, she bolted. I think she’s okay.”

She turned and grabbed his chin to have him look at her. “Right? She’s just run away, right?”

“I’m sorry I left,” he said.

“I’m sorry too,” she said. “I am. I drove you away. I did it knowing that.”

“I think I knew what you were going to do. When you got dressed that night, when you went out.”

She sat up.

“I knew too,” she said. “I knew that you’d leave if I slept with someone. That you’d go exactly like you did. Pack a bag and vanish. Why did I do that?”

She reached over and took two cigarettes from the pack and lit one for him and handed it to him and then one for herself. She got out of the bed and walked naked into the hall and returned with a bottle. He felt the force of this uncanny tableau. As though they had no child. As though this were a different version of things. He took a small comfort that somewhere such an iteration as this one existed, where Rachel had never been born and the only damage he and Beth did was to each other.