Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“I was already gone,” Pete said.

She poured him a glass, and he took it and drank.

“You were. Why were you already gone, Pete? What happened to us?”

He held up the glass of bourbon.

“I don’t know. I’m an alcoholic, Beth. You’re an alcoholic. Shit, I smoked cocaine the other night. I take kids away from people like us.”

“We’re not that bad. People fuck up. They get forgiven.”

She frowned into her drink. She set it on the dresser and went to him on the bed and took his hand. Up close he could see the gray stretched rays on her little paunch and breasts. How her body had served their child. And her habits.

“I’ve been thinking of something,” she said. “But I don’t want you to laugh at me.”

“I’m not capable of laughter now.”

She took his hand into both of hers.

“I think we should go to church.”

She waited for his reaction.

“I know, with your family and everything… that you feel like it’s bullshit.”

She waited again. He wondered did she know his father was dead, had she read his letter to Rachel. Did Rachel read it. He told her it was okay to say what she wanted to say. She folded her legs under and took his hand.

“I’ve been feeling, like, this hole inside? For a long time now. I don’t think we have a center. The other day I was here all by myself and I was waiting for you to come. I had all these pills and I was thinking of taking them. So I knew I had to get out of the house. And I went out and was walking around, and I dunno, I was already kind of fucked up. And I came by this church and I thought I’d just feel it out. And the people in there were singing and this lady in the back row sees me and she pats the pew and scoots down for me. But I knew if I sat still a minute I’d lose it. I’d embarrass myself even worse than I normally do.”

She pushed her curls behind her ears.

“I feel like I’ve been busted. Like the cops have pulled me over. Like God has pulled me over and I got to sit here with my hands at ten and two. And I got to get right or something is gonna happen to Rachel — if it hasn’t already. It’s God who’s the social worker, Pete. And he’s taken our kid away, you know?”

She squeezed his hands and trembled.

“You probably think it’s stupid.”

Pete closed his eyes and thumped the headboard and when he opened them she looked terrified that he was going to say something hurtful. This shamed him more than she could know.

“It’s not stupid,” he said.

She took a shuddering breath.

“Will you go to church with me?”

She took his silence for assent and kissed his forehead. She said she’d take a bath and then maybe they could eat and then they’d go find a service.

He was frightened for her and what was about to happen to her and felt the fullest burden of the fact that he was indeed a thing that had happened to her too and was happening to her yet and would be for a long time to come.

He listened to the water run and when he was quite sure she was in the tub, he dressed, walked up the street to the convenience store, and called a cab.

Did Booth rape her?

Who?

The guy who broke into her room, the night she ran away.

No. He just kept saying Hey, hey… like he wanted to wake her but at the same time not.

It was a million degrees already in March. She slept in her underwear and a tank top, no blanket, no sheet. She fell asleep to the hum and thump of some corn-fed redneck noise, a breaking glass, and laughter.

Booth going Hey, hey , and she woke up to his hand on her thigh and she shot up and out into the hall screaming and crying, and Booth came out shielding his eyes in the light because he must’ve been in there a long time just looking at her, maybe touching her, his hairy arms, his stubbleblue sweaty shamefaced face. She wouldn’t stop screaming until they dragged him out of the house. She slapped her mother, slammed her door, started to throw her things into a bag.

Was Booth just a pretext?

A what?

An excuse. To run away.

Yes.

Where did she run away to?

Cheatham, ultimately. But first a party in South Austin looking for him. A few of the wrong kind of high school girls knocked around the room as invisible as moths. Guys who knew their inhalants.

She literally had nowhere else to go. The party at its embers. Kids splayed in shadowy attitudes of sleep all over the floor. She had a cigarette with a boy on the back step. She could barely see what he looked like. The cars shook with the sex happening inside them.

Did he use a condom?

No.

Did he hurt her?

A little. She bore it with what felt to her like a mixture of grace and sophistication. She pushed out shame, brooked no doubts.

What was its main consolation?

Feeling grown. To have had a second lover.

What about Cheatham?

She found him the next day.

There were a few skirts of snow up around his house, but the larch needles had come in, neon green and soft to the touch. Raccoons meandered around his property for a few days but couldn’t get in the house and moved on.

His bank account was nearly empty and he thought he might have been fired, but his check was in the splay of mail shoved under his door at the courthouse. It didn’t matter if he was at work or not. He had no minders.

He left the rest of his mail unopened and took the check to First Interstate, cashed it, and went for lunch at the Sunrise. He drank coffee all morning just trying to wake up from an exhaustion that coffee could not fix. Fear had worn him to a nub. What happened to her. Where she was. He worried he was forgetting things about his daughter every day, trying hard to score into memory’s bedrock the way she looked at different ages, the things they did. Cross-country skiing up at Lolo Pass. The tunnels they dug into twelve-foot snowbanks. Suppers he cooked for just the two of them and the steam from the boiled noodles and teaching her letters in the steam on the windows. A time she got a septic knee and couldn’t even stand and they put her on antibiotics and hoped all her blood wasn’t infected. She was pale and sweaty and his heart wrung like a wet towel, like now. Times it would unwind and his heart would race to remind him that something was terrifically wrong.

He kept asking himself where is she what is she doing please be alive why won’t she call just come home baby.

A morning, waking in his cabin, he thought he felt a lot better, happier, okay, even good. Rachel would reach out at some point. He’d gotten himself sure of that. He imagined her toughness and what resilience he’d witnessed in her, and again and again in all his cases. Children who had suffered unstinting hells, their toughness intact. A wryness, a wisdom some had earned. He imagined Rachel making it, meal to meal, shelter to shelter. That people would treat her kindly. That she had guardians at every pass. Things he believed because he had to, and believe them he did.

But when he went out in the chilled morning to his car, tiny handprints from some prior removal preserved in the frost on his windows promptly undid him. He slumped against the car door into the crusty snow and howled out griefs that had come on as sudden and frightening as earthquakes, and even after they emptied out, left him in fear of aftershocks, of unseen cracks in the load-bearing trestles of his mind. He wondered could he go on, but there was little else to do. And what did that mean anyway. To kill himself or to just sit in the snow against the car or to go inside his cabin and never come out.