Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

He called around to social services offices, police stations, and shelters in Denver, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas. He wondered at the map where Rachel had gone.

A weekend full blotto. Arguing with Mary on the dance floor of the Top Hat. He went to the wall and pulled another beer from the pitcher, and she knocked it out of his hand. He laughed. He went outside into the evening air and started for his car. She followed and he let her in.

“Take me for a drive,” she said, digging into the paper sack of schnapps on the floor.

They were halfway to Evaro when she started to throw some kind of fit. He simply pulled over, got out, and started to walk down the hill toward town. The asphalt reflected blue and red, and he turned around and hiked back up to his car. She was crying, sitting on the rear bumper.

“Is this your car?” the highway patrolman asked.

Pete said it was.

“Any particular reason you decided to leave it?”

Another patrol car U-turned and pulled in behind the first.

“We were having an argument.”

“You can’t abandon your car.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yes. I shouldn’t have abandoned it.”

The second patrolman touched Mary on the knee to see about her and then came up on the other side of Pete’s car and shined a light inside of it.

“We’re both in the Department of Family Services. We’re just, uh, stressed.”

“Yeah, I’d say the stress is what’s gotten to her.”

“I’m—”

“Shut up. You’re lucky. Because I am a softie about you DFS people. My sister did this work and she drank like a dang fish. Consider this your talking-to.”

Pete nodded. The cop pulled a tiny green New Testament from inside his coat pocket.

“You got one of these?”

“Yup.”

“Take this one anyway,” he said, pressing the book into Pete’s hand. “And gitcher poop in a group.”

Another week went by before he had the time to hike to the Pearls’ camp again, and by the new ashes in the fire pit he figured he’d missed them by a day, no more than two.

He slept over and dreamt of Rachel. Neutral dreams that were mostly altered memories or wishes and didn’t augur anything good or bad.

When he woke, Jeremiah was sitting on a stump, leaning forward holding his rifle.

“Good morning, Pearl,” Pete said. “How’re your eyes?”

“Where you been?” Pearl asked, meaning the last few weeks. Pete couldn’t remember if he’d said when he’d be back. He’d intended to return sooner than now, but he hadn’t made promises. He didn’t think. He couldn’t remember.

“Texas, actually.”

“Doing what?”

Pete let the question hang there for a moment while he buttoned his jeans and slipped on his coat against the April morning cool.

“I asked you a question,” Pearl said.

“I heard you.”

Pearl squeezed the rifle barrel, stood, and started for the forest. He was crossing the creek when Pete caught up to him. He yelled for Jeremiah to wait. The man stopped in the middle of the water that had widened by several feet with the snowmelt. Ice water ran over boots that Pete knew to be thin and surely no longer watertight. He beckoned Pearl out.

“I brought some food. Things for your kids. Come on.”

“You think I’m stupid?”

“I think you’re paranoid.”

“You tell me where you really were.”

“I had to go to Texas.”

Pearl crossed the creek.

“My wife and daughter are down there.”

Pearl’s expression flickered like a candle flame. “In Texas,” he said, as if trying out the concept.

“She left me.”

Pearl seemed to believe this was feasible.

“What for?” he asked.

“Jesus, Pearl. Because she was angry with me.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name.”

“Just come get some food.”

“You go down there to get them back?”

Pete didn’t know if he wanted to tell Pearl about his daughter. He didn’t come up here to talk about this. He’d come up to leave himself behind. Yet here he was anyway. There was no getting away.

“My daughter ran away. I was down there looking for her.”

Pete’s voice had dropped, and Pearl tilted toward him to hear him over the tumbling water.

“You didn’t find her?”

“No. Not yet.”

Pearl set the stock of his rifle on the rocks, and hung on it like a walking stick. The battered weapon looked like it might not fire at all.

“What are you doing up here then?”

Pete pointed over his shoulder back toward the camp.

“Like I said. I brought some things for your family.”

“So she just took off?” Genuine wonderment colored his voice. He looked at Pete like he was from an alien country. “From her mama?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well.”

Pearl crossed the water toward Pete and seemed unable to give expression to the sentiments churning behind the queer expression under his beard. His eyes and mouth pursed as against a strong wind or thick black smoke. He clapped Pete on the shoulder and said they needed to get moving if they were gonna make it.

They hiked two long miles up through devil’s club and ivy and then snowbrush and cinquefoil and up the rocky backbone of a high ridge that looked out over a small lake, a blue color so ideal that at this distance it looked like spilled paint. Pearl sat beneath a skeletal windblown cedar clawing at the sky. He looked at his watch and closed his eyes and murmured through his beard, in prayer it seemed. Pete stood a few minutes waiting and asked what they were doing. Pearl said to sit, it would be a half hour.

“What will?”

“Until we can go on.”

Pete squatted and ate jerky from his bag, but Pearl shook his head when Pete offered it to him.

At the half hour, Pearl raised his rifle and looked through the scope down at the lake. Pete peered down to see, but wherever Pearl aimed was too far to make out. Pearl set aside his rifle and made a series of large gestures, contacting his family using a semaphore they’d worked out.

Pearl looked through the scope again and grunted. He walked along the ridge a ways and then took a broken trail down the mountainside away from the water. Pete hurried after. They kept descending.

“Aren’t we going to the lake?”

“Nope.”

“Isn’t your family down there?”

“Just the boy.”

“Why aren’t we going to meet him?”

“We are.”

“It doesn’t seem like it.”

Pearl stopped.

“We aren’t camped there. Just follow me.”

He shouldered his rifle, and they carried on.

After a while Pete asked Pearl again how were his eyes. Pearl raised his hand to say they were okay. They didn’t speak for the rest of the way.

It was evening when they arrived, and Pearl issued a hoot and a few seconds later came an identical answer. In a small clearing in the trees, the boy raised up at the sight of Pete.

“Howdy, Pete,” he said, shaking his hand.

Pete squatted down to see how he was. Filthy. Some cuts on his hands. Otherwise hale.

“Can I see your belly a second?”

The child obliged.

There were no liver spots on his skin. He looked fed and under the dirt had good color.

“You look A-OK, kid,” Pete said.

Ben grinned. His father told him to get firewood and start a fire.

Pete took in the camp. It was much like the other. More crude, hasty. Their things were strung up in catenary lines between the trees where bears could not reach them. Benjamin started a fire and, as he fed it lightwood, kept glancing up at Pete as if he couldn’t help it.

“I have an eagle feather,” he said.

“You do?”

“Yeah. It’s in my bag.”