Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

The lawyer could leave. The blow job was over. This was Pete’s. It was over with Mary, but this moment was his. He realized he was saying these things aloud. The lawyer was asking Mary did she want him to stay. Then he was stepping around Pete and out the door. She reached the doorway of her apartment, asking was Pete quite finished. Her neighbors were in the hall, onlooking. He’d been yelling, he supposed.

She told him he was bleeding. She left the door open and a balding layabout in a stained T-shirt grinned at him as Mary went to the kitchen for a rag. She returned to him like she might a wounded animal, low-toned, flat-affected. She gingerly took his hand and plucked the glass from his knuckles and winced as she did so. It began with tending his hand, and it would end with tending his hand.

He felt sick. Then he kissed her. The mouth that had just had the lawyer’s cock in it and the rivalry inherent in that. She was caught off guard and perhaps felt guilty or obliged, and he knew there was no affection or desire to win her back in this kissing, now on her neck — she sucked in air through her teeth like his lips were ice, as if this were all some kind of dare — and he thought to fuck her right there on the floor in the broken glass, but something subtly shifted between them and the spell or whatever it was was broken.

She let go of his hand, stood, and veered into the kitchen and drank a glass of water. From over the refrigerator, she got a pack of cigarettes and waited for the electric coil on the stove to light it. She seemed to be barricading herself in there. He kicked closed the front door.

Then she came out of the kitchen. She’d acquired a new self-possession. Even her posture was frank. She said she wanted to talk. Would he listen.

She said she needed things in her life to be separate. That she had a way she organized herself. Would he just listen. Would he just shut up a minute and listen.

Did he have any idea how many times she’d been raped. What a number it did on her mind. How much she’s just out there coping. And the way she copes is, she’s a bureau. Like a dresser.

Would he please just shut up for a minute.

There was this old couple. There was a room the old man took her in. An old-time dresser in there, like an apothecary cabinet. Dozens of little drawers. She wasn’t allowed to play with it, it was antique. She wasn’t even allowed in the room. But the old man would take her in there. She’d watch the dresser. Think about what was in the drawers.

She knows it’s a totem. A way of organizing her life. But it was useful to see how the things that had happened and were happening to her could be sorted. When the man was on her, she said, This just goes in that drawer there. ..

She put the bad things in those drawers, like little buttons. Then the good things too. She knows it’s just a metaphor or symbol. It’s just an organizing principle. It’s repression.

She had this therapist who tried to get her to describe the drawers, what was in them. He made her do it. And all the drawers fell open and the buttons spilled all over the floor and by the time she got home, she was worse off than before, buttons everywhere. She had to pick them up one by one and put them all back. Took her two years. Ninety minutes with a psychiatrist and she’s out two years, sometimes getting more new buttons faster than she can put the old ones away. These rugby players, for instance. Reno, for instance. The Wind River Facility in California, for instance.

Would he look at her. Would he see she’s telling the truth.

There was a time when a guy like him would be somewhere on the floor. Lost there for a long while. She’d forget who’d come to see her. Wouldn’t be able to tell the one who had money from the one who had drugs from the one who liked to dance from the one who liked to make her feel like shit from the one who was kind and only ever pulled her hair, and even only when she needed him to.

She said she had a drawer for guys she could love. A few buttons in there. And he’s in that drawer. And when he comes over, she gets so excited to open that drawer and take him out—

The lawyer is from a kind of bad drawer. Not the worst drawer. A bad one.

No, he doesn’t hurt her. Not in a typical way. What he does is between him and his conscience. It barely has anything to do with her. In a way.

Would he look at her.

She does, she does probably love him like a normal person might love someone. But he’s on the floor. And he has to get back in his drawer. The good drawer. Would he please just get back in his drawer. Just pretend this didn’t happen. That it doesn’t happen. Please.

He stood up.

“Mary,” he said.

“What.”

He opened the door.

“Fuck you.”

He left.

Bender.

The shit they pulled.

Spoils on the curb explaining things to the cops. A man wants to knock out the windows of his own car, it’s his business, Spoils says. Glass and blood all over Pete’s file folders. The cops checking his license and registration, uncuffing him, telling Spoils to take him on home.

Pete on the dog-smelling bed with all the dogs and waking among the dogs and throwing up, and the dogs sniffing it and not hazarding to even taste it, these fine mongrels.

A call came from Indianapolis that social services there had picked up a girl that met Rachel’s description. Pete drove eighty-five the whole way to Spokane and rode a red-eye to Salt Lake, slept in the terminal and touched down in Indianapolis thirty-six hours after he got the message. He took a taxi to the Child Welfare Office and was referred to a shelter on the north side of town, an ugly pale building shoved among the brick houses. A black man sitting on a bucket smoking looked down his nose at him.

By now coming on evening, the sun sidling and flashing up the windows under the discouraging clouds. Somehow he knew she wasn’t going to be there, that it wouldn’t be her, or that she’d be gone.

The shelter hadn’t admitted anyone by her name, and when they escorted him through the wing of teenagers no one had seen a girl by the name of Rachel. He showed the staff a picture, and a savvy black girl slipped over to them and said she knew Rachel and said she knew where she was and could take him there right now. Soon all the girls said they saw her, lying to him, every last one. Their black city speech rushed by his Montana ears like freeway cars and he realized that if he was himself a country mouse what a small and bewildered thing Rachel must be.

The first girl was saying she did so see Rachel, fuck y’all, she did so see the girl, the girl was in here two weeks ago, had her hair cut all stupid with short bangs and long bangs like it didn’t grow out at the same speed. The other girls’ insults and insinuations redounded and amplified off the concrete walls, and the girl said Rachel was let out three days ago and wouldn’t shut up about some dude, name of Cheatham.

“Cheatham? Cheatham what?”

“Last name.”

“Rachel was with a guy named Cheatham.”

“Yes. But she didn’t say her name wasn’t no Rachel. But that was her. In yer pitcher.”

“What did she say her name was?”

“Shit, I dunno. It just wasn’t no Rachel,” the girl said.

The staff muttered to Pete that the girls were all liars.

“Wait. I think it was Rose. Yeah, it was Rose.”

The wing manager wouldn’t let him look at the intake books and smirked at his request in such a way that said the books were themselves a bit of a shared joke. Then a girl came in with a square of naked, bloody scalp and they said Pete had to go, meaning this was his fault, he’d riled the girls and their rickety routine, he’d taken staff from the floor and now look.