Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“That’s pretty grandiose, don’t you think?”

“Obviously, I do not.”

Pete looked at Benjamin, who continued to pick at his palm. A completely normal conversation.

“I won’t take the coins,” Pete said. “I won’t take part in this.”

“You’ll do it,” Pearl said, sawing into the coin. “And I know you’ll do it because you don’t want anything bad to happen to us. To him. And you’ll do it because if you don’t, you’ll never see us again. And you’ll do it because you believe you’ll talk us out of these mountains and back into that society of yours. Because you’re the nice face of things. The kind, caring face.” Pearl stopped sawing, fixed his dark eyes on Pete. “The devil, I know how he comes. With cans of food and fresh clothes and coloring books.”

“I’m just a person, Pearl. You gotta stop with all this paranoia.”

“I’d ask you to entertain a notion for a little bit.”

“What’s that?”

“I’d have you consider that I might not be as stupid and backward as you think.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“Then I’d like you to be sincere in your desire to help us, and do what I’m asking of you rather than what you think is best for us.”

Benjamin had ceased picking at his hands.

“Where’s the rest of your family, Jeremiah?”

At this, Benjamin turned over in his sleeping bag away from them.

“Where are your other children?”

Pete swung the sack back to Pearl and it landed with a heavy plash of metal.

“Well now,” Pearl said, “there’s the difference between you and me. I can answer that question, and you cannot.”

In the morning they got ready to set out and Pearl and his son went together onto the ledge and when they came back in Benjamin’s nose was running and he’d been crying. He bravely told Pete it was good to see him and thanked him for the things he’d brought.

“You’re not coming?”

“He’s headed in the other direction,” Pearl said. “Dry up,” he told his son.

The boy wiped his nose.

“I’ll come see you again,” Pete said. “Okay?”

The boy nodded at the floor.

“Let’s go,” Pearl said.

They descended one after another down the ladder and into the late April rainwater that was now up to his thighs, the boy’s waist. It was cool and overcast. The boy didn’t climb along the walls, and when they got out of the water he was shivering and chattering on the opposite bank.

“So long, Pete,” he said.

“You’re freezing,” Pete said.

“He’ll be all right,” Pearl said. “Now, go on.”

Ben disappeared into the brush.

They walked all day and didn’t say a word, even when they stopped to eat or rest. When evening fell they kept marching and Pete had no idea where they were in the trim and waxing moon. It was some deep middle of the night when they made a road that stood out chalky in the dark.

“You’re just down there,” Pearl said.

They were barely able to see one another.

“Give me the coins,” Pete said.

Pearl dug them out of his small canvas bag.

“I’m gonna come up here in a week. I’ll bring some more fruit and dried beans and rice.”

Pearl said all right. Then he did a peculiar thing. He clapped his hand on the side of Pete’s neck and touched their foreheads together.

“I’m praying for your family,” he whispered before he turned around and loped up the road.

Where did she find Cheatham?

He found her. Sitting with her backpack at a taco stand in East Austin.

How was she?

She was sick. It hurt when she peed, probably because of the guy at the party. She felt like this meant she’d lost Cheatham. She didn’t want to lose him. She just wanted to be someplace else. She just wanted to go. With him. Nobody else.

Did she tell him?

Are you kidding?

What did they do?

They looked at each other a few minutes. They ate and talked. She asked did he love her, and he said he didn’t know. She asked did he want to find out. She wanted to find out.

They stayed at his place a few weeks, a bedroom in a house he shared with three other musicians. The walls were spray-painted silver.

She stayed in hiding, in plain sight. Afraid her mother would roll up Congress or the Drag by UT where Cheatham would go to play his guitar. She avoided cop cars like she was holding, like she was a fugitive, which of a sort she was.

Did she pester him to leave town?

No. A little.

When did they go?

When his friends started calling her Lines.

As in?

State Lines. As in don’t take a minor across them. When they started calling him Chuck.

As in?

Chuck Berry. A musician who took a girl across state lines.

Where did they go?

Oklahoma.

He came from some money. Was independently wealthy for a nineteen-year-old dropout. His father owned dealerships or gas stations. He had friends all over the lower Midwest. From Arkadelphia to Nashville.

What did they see?

They saw county fairs. Prize-winning hens and pumpkins and hogs. Quilts and lace and art made of construction paper and painted macaroni. They saw panoplies of whirled lights. Barking underweight carnies. Racing horses yearning against the lash and the night.

The saw kicked-up chaff on the horizon like the froth on a beer. Purple thunderheads opening up like head wounds, violences of wind and rain. A gray tornado made of hailstones and earth, of trailers, stock animals, and tractors.

They saw trees wrapped by corrugated siding like the signage of the route to ruin.

Was ruin what they came to?

Of a kind.

What kind?

Indianapolis.

He called Beth to see had she heard anything, but she wasn’t home or didn’t answer, and listening to her phone ring and ring he felt how strange it was that she and he and Rachel had been scattered and sent off, aliens to one another, a broken valence, who knew a family was so fragile as that. And his father and mother gone, and his brother off in Oregon, and he was alone and he left work for Missoula to see Mary to see her to have her to be with her it was something at least.

The elevator in the Wilma was open and empty. No car, no cables. Pete leaned in and looked up the shaft to see the bottom of the car, lit from below by an open door several floors up. A repairman in a leather belt came down the stairs with blackened hands and said it was stuck, everybody’d need to use the stairs.

Mary’s door was ajar. He rapped it with his knuckle. It swung open and gave onto a view of her fellating the lawyer in the kitchen. The man he’d followed. His eyes were closed and he clutched a juice glass. A hiccup of laughter from Pete put a halt to everything. She rose and spoke, pulling closed her shirt. The lawyer replaced his cock in his boxers and zipped up and tucked in his shirt and, thus composed, affected nonchalance. He drank from the glass, set it in the sink. Mary was saying something to the lawyer now and then they were both looking at Pete, and he realized that they were waiting for him to leave or move out of the doorway, and he wondered what expression he wore that made them stand in abeyance like that, what feelings authored this expression. He wondered did the lawyer recognize him, was Pete being made a fool of. He punched a framed picture several times, and it shattered and fell to the floor. Mary and the lawyer didn’t move. He sat against the wall in the broken glass.