Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“Not exactly,” Pete told her. “I mean, you can imagine.”

She cocked her head.

“I drove straight down.”

“Right,” she said. “Why don’t you ride with me.”

She was thin and tired-looking herself and drove him to the Plato House emergency shelter in a silence that may have been respectful of him but was probably for her own benefit.

When they got out of the car, the sunlight shimmered off the hoods and Pete thought he might fall over. He leaned against a pickup and scalded his elbow on the fender. The woman was already at the door and she came back across the skillet of pavement and asked him again what was the matter. He said everything was the matter and that his father had died. Everything was the matter. She was quiet like she didn’t know what to say or perhaps had just employed a therapeutic method or was quite simply annoyed. The way she squinted in the sun, her hooded eyes like caves. I’m goin crazy , he thought.

“It’s so hot,” he said.

“Let’s go inside.”

“I don’t think I can take it if it isn’t my daughter in there.”

She looked in the direction of the building, the windows palely mirroring back the scorched tableau of the two of them, the lot, the untouchable cars.

“There’ll be a picture in her file. I’ll get it. That way you don’t have to go in.”

The unceasing sun coruscated off the windows of the buildings and the chrome and even the heat-hammered pavement that shone in places around the lot like slicks of hot oil. He paced out the few minutes it took the woman to come back. She handed the picture to him, the same featureless squint making her face look like it had melted some. He cupped the photo in his palm. The girl looked exactly like Rachel. They could pass for sisters.

He spent Saturday, the Fourth of July, in the casinos, earning comps right at the bar. Idly selecting lucky integers on the number pad beneath the smoky glass under his drink. He slipped coins by the handful into the machine and sometimes some of Pearl’s coins, which the machine spat out in the metal tray at his knees. In this way he left all manner of Pearl’s scrip at a few bars in Reno. It was something to do and then it felt like he was doing something. Like he was really sticking it to somebody.

At a hotel casino, a lank guard confronted him about the coins.

“You the one leaving these in the machines?” he asked, holding up one of Pearl’s quarters.

“Yes.”

“You need to come with me,” the guard said.

Pete took his drink with him and sat in a plush chair waiting for the casino manager to come.

The man arrived toting a tank and breathed from an oxygen mask for a few minutes before he croaked out that it was against the law to put anything but legal tender into the machines.

“Those are real coins.”

“They are… marred. You… need to… leave.”

“The hotel too?”

“Reno.”

“You can throw me out of your joint, but not town.”

“What… are you even… doing… here?” the man asked, sucking oxygen and regarding Pete with a measure of interest. The coins. He had to wonder what Pete was trying to accomplish with the coins.

“That’s a good question,” Pete answered.

Three days later, he was sleeping under the stars, deep in the Yaak with Jeremiah and Benjamin Pearl.

They were all out poaching together. Pearl made a crude blind in a thicket of thimbleberry upwind of a muddy meadow while Pete and the boy walked a little farther to a shaded spot where they could bugle in some elk. Pete knew the elk weren’t in rut and would, if anything, wonder what the hell all the hollering was about, but he kept his mouth shut. Maybe they’d get lucky.

As it turned out, Benjamin was pretty good with the bugle, better than Pete at achieving the breathy moan that curls at the end into a lonesome scream of the rut. The sound put him in mind of his father. At the bugle. Blowing. Watching through the binoculars. A time he and Luke are hunting with the old man, them elk’ll be right over this ridge, you two be ready and sure enough there stands a royal bull, his breath in thick handkerchief exhalations. Something aristocratic about the animal, as though it might slap you with a glove and challenge you to a duel. They all quietly kneel and aim and shoot at once and the bull’s forelegs drop and then the rest of it, and when they get to the animal, steam and pink and bubbles issue from a hole no bigger than your pinkie finger and the elk is very neatly dead, and only one of them hit it, no one can take credit.

But the old man says, Nice shot, Luke.

And you, you still remember this slight.

Of course, Benjamin called in no elk or other animals, though several large creatures of opportunity — vultures, hawks — gripped the power lines running from a metal tower that bisected the meadow. When Jeremiah gave up on the elk, he let Ben run over to gawk at the tower. The boy was only gone a few minutes when he shrieked, and Pearl and Pete looked at one another and sprinted toward him, both hollering that they were coming.

The scene at which they arrived was macabre. The boy stood at the edge of an area no bigger than a patio where the grass had been walked flat, and on which several dead animals lay in a writhing smoke of flies. There lay a turkey with a parcel of naked black skin near what looked to be the desiccated corpse of a raccoon. Not far away a deer with its throat ripped open lay next to a coyote. The coyote on its side like an exhausted, sleeping dog. Next to it a fox. Strangest of all, the black bear. Flat on its back, legs and arms spread wide, as though it were playing dead or at a kind of profane joke. Huge bluebottle flies worked over everything and the air hummed with them, the air was charged as by a television picture tube with the sound all the way down.

Pearl squatted near the turkey and plucked a loose feather from the bird, the feather’s vane burned away.

“Don’t touch anything,” Pete said. He put his palms in the air in front of him. “You feel that?”

Pearl stood. Gripped Ben. A power line snaked down from the tower into the grass and Pete pointed to it.

“That’s a line down.”

“Ho shit, let’s step back, Benjamin,” Pearl said.

They paced backward the way they came, but this time gingerly as sappers, and stopped and looked back and talked animatedly about the electrocuted animals and then retreated to the far side of the meadow and up the hill to a naked outcropping where they could watch what might happen next. The turkey vultures turned in slow circles, black and cruciate, waiting for them to leave. The men and boy were as giddy as princes.

“It seems cruel to watch,” Pearl said, chuckling.

He pulled the binoculars from his eyes and handed them to Benjamin.

“You ever seen such a thing?” Pete asked. “This is nuts.”

“Here they go,” Benjamin whispered, as the first of the vultures landed and waddled awkwardly toward the carcasses. Drawn by their own natural valence toward death. Several more landed in proximity, and immediately the birds began to jostle for position, all six or seven of them hopping and striving, at last perching on the bear, the coyote, their wings folding in and fanning out like black umbrellas triggered to open according to their enthusiasms.

Pearl took the binoculars from his son.

“Maybe they shut off the power.”

“Nah. You could feel—”

There came the flash and a millisecond later the air clapped with electrocution as two of the vultures stiffened in attitudes black and fixed as logos before they fell over smoking. The remaining birds heaved into the air. The Pearls and Pete gasped at one another like twelve-year-old boys. Then they rollicked with laughter. They waited a half hour for the vultures to land again, and though the birds circled in the air and perched and longed from the tower, they seemed to have learned their lesson. What a thing to see, Pete, Pearl, and the boy were saying as they headed back to camp, and when the evening air cracked again they laughed again too and wondered aloud were vultures that stupid or what manner of opportunist had been killed this time.