Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Just the thought of going to work. The Pearls. Cecil in stir. What good could he be to anyone at all.

He called agencies in Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and El Paso. Then he spent the next couple days on the phone calling agencies radiating outward from Austin. Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Iowa City, Indianapolis, Denver, Reno, Sacramento, Seattle. He had flyers made and prepared packages for the social services agents of varying sympathy that he spoke to, agents and supervisors who seemed keen to help and those who left him on hold for an hour and the majority, who made him doubt his entire profession.

He stayed with Mary, and when he bothered to notice it, sensed her irritation in the way she moved about the place, the way she would look idly in the cupboards, the way she paced. As he addressed packages of flyers for midwestern social workers, he felt her watching him with magazines open on her lap.

He said he would stay somewhere else.

She said of course not.

He asked her to stop watching him and do whatever.

She set the magazine aside and said it was like he was in parentheses.

“You’ll have to explain that to me.”

“Never mind.”

He tried hard not to sound sarcastic when he told her he was just busy. Busy looking for his daughter .

“I know that, Pete. Let me help you.”

He licked an envelope and closed it. His ears were hot with an anger he didn’t understand, or know from where it came, except the whole situation, his entire life.

“This is weird,” she said. “Say something.”

All he could tell her was that he was fine.

He could see her crossing off things to say as she stood there. At last she took a shower.

He sat before the envelopes and handwritten letters and the stacks of flyers. He got up for a cup of coffee so cold it made him look at the clock. It was five-thirty. He’d been at this almost twelve hours now.

When she came out buttoning her shirt and toweling her hair, he apologized and asked her to come over and he showed her the map of all the places he’d sent packages and all the places he’d yet to call. He said he was hanging on by threads of hope, and these packages were those threads. It was all he could do to get these materials together and make the calls and wait for word. He asked would she help him.

She said nothing to that, and he tried to determine her thoughts from her watery reflection in the old glass of the apartment window. She seemed to wait another moment for him to address her loneliness, or desire or whatever was bothering her. This had happened before, but he hadn’t noticed. She’d go dark as an empty house.

She rose without a word and went into the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and then into the bedroom. He listened to her undress and climb into bed, the springs moaning. He wondered did she worry or sense that he’d slept with Beth, did she figure something out just now. Had something else occurred.

He joined her in bed. She climbed onto him and made love to him, tended to him with her entire body. She stayed locked around him and bore into him with her eyes until he was pieces, then shards, smithereens, motes, iotas. She said she loved him, she’d fallen in love. He was dust, swept away. Did he love her. Was there any he at all.

He groped around for himself. His spirit.

You are here , she said with her body. Right here.

And so he was. And he could love her.

He drove to Spokane in the hopes that if Rachel had headed straight for Montana she might have made it that far. But no one at the shelters had seen her, nor downtown where a few bums begged for change. He sat in his car for a couple hours at the bus station and observed the hustlers making their rounds. He approached a few of the homeless, the addicts and rail riders. No one was any help. Not even lies to elicit a few dollars. His anguish so evident that even the bus station tramps and riverside bridge dwellers wouldn’t ply him with fictions.

Back in Tenmile, he spent a whole day organizing his files, and several more catching up — sometimes making up — his case notes. Had someone been there to see, his efforts would have been mistaken for enthusiasm, professionalism, and alacrity.

Portly Judge Dyson called his office and invited him up for a drink. He passed. Another invite came in the evening. He passed again. That night, as Pete wrote out false case notes, the judge darkened his office doorway, let himself in, and dropped into the chair. Pie-eyed and irritated at having to come down, the prospect of reascending all those stairs on his fat little legs.

“What’s your dyshfunction, son?”

Pete explained what had happened and where he’d been and what all he’d done to find his daughter.

The judge held his head in his hands as Pete spoke, and when he finished, told Pete that he had a friend in the Fraternal Order of Police and that he would put in a call. He’d think on what else could be done. He was reeking drunk when he arrived, but when he stood to leave he was as still as a post. His eyes were no longer bloodshot. He looked ready to lynch somebody.

Pete went to check on Cecil’s mother, sister, but they weren’t home. He picked through the notices from the power and water companies, catalogs, and junk mail. Left a note on the back of his card for Katie to call him.

He drove to Pine Hills to see Cecil. He hadn’t visited since he’d dropped him off the previous October. It was now coming on April. He waited in the visiting area at the small round tables. Sullen toughs posed for their fathers and brothers, while Indian kids and pale white farm boys came in and sat stone-faced before their weeping mothers. The only boy who didn’t have this manufactured toughness was a fat and guileless retard who had an open gentleness to his movements and expression that cast doubt on his guilt of anything at all. He played with his mother’s necklace and when it was time to go, wouldn’t give it back and had to be restrained. His mother faced the wall as they took him away. She left caterwauling not unlike her son.

Finally an official came to Pete and said that Cecil wouldn’t be able to visit. Pete asked was the boy in trouble or just refusing visitors. The man didn’t know.

On a clear warm day, he headed up the National Forest road toward the Pearls’ camp. He brought packages of rice and instant noodles, Kool-Aid, and dried beans. For the children, he brought bags of raisins and cinnamon candies, a few coloring books, a little packet of crayons, and a small cardboard puzzle of a bulldozer. Handkerchiefs for the wife or Pearl or whoever needed one.

It took a full day to hike to where they’d been camped when the father’d gone blind. Birds shot out the canvas flap of their tent in the hillside when he pulled it back. Inside was a nest with a few eggs, so he stayed the night on the ground by the fire, and remained as long as he could the next day. He was halfway down to his car before he realized he should have left some of the food. Or a note.

He drove and then went to the rocks where he’d left things for them. Everything in the cleft was gone. He put the dried foods in there and the next day went to see if they’d been to their old house up Fourth of July Creek. The meadow was filled with wildflowers, and he ate a sack lunch among the bumblebees and butterflies and saw now how pleasant it was and also the layout and how the property could be defended from the house on the rock bench, from the escarpment behind the house, and from the dense trees on the sides of the meadow.

About a hundred yards away was an overgrown earthwork or root cellar. He crossed through the marshy horsemint and skullcap, was muddied to his ankles getting to it. It took him a few minutes to determine that it was a burned-out Airstream trailer, blackened and now almost completely napped with moss and wild cress. Orange in places where it rusted. He sat a while in hypothesis about it.