Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“Why did she run away?”

Pearl glanced up, but didn’t say anything.

“It’s sorta complicated.”

Now the expectant boy was looking at him.

“She and her mother went to Texas,” Pete said.

“How come?”

“Her mother and I weren’t getting along.”

“How come?”

“Benjamin,” Pearl said.

“It’s okay,” Pete said. “Her mother did something she oughtn’t have, and it made me really upset.”

“Was she bad?”

“Benjamin, leave him alone,” Pearl said.

“It’s all right, Jeremiah,” Pete said. “She did a bad thing. She’s not a bad person.”

“Sometimes God needs you to do a real bad thing, only it’s not a bad thing when He wants you to do it, because nothing that God commands you to do is a bad thing. Was it like that?”

Pearl had stood. From where he was, he couldn’t see Benjamin’s face. Neither, for that matter, could Pete. The boy’s eyes were trained on the board. Pearl was waiting to hear what the boy would say next. Just then, Ben looked up at Pete, a whorl of notions spinning behind his eyes. Things he’d seen and done and had happen to him.

“You all right?” Pete asked. Pearl cocked his head back and his mouth fell open as if he were watching a doorknob turning and he was just waiting to see who would walk in.

“Would you like me to pray for your daughter?” Benjamin asked.

“I think that’d be all right.”

Benjamin closed his eyes and laced his fingers together over his heart.

“You don’t need to do it this second,” Pete said.

Pearl sat back down, folded his hands on his lap, and closed his eyes too.

“Lord, we ask that you in your wisdom, that you keep Pete’s little daughter—”

Ben peeked one eye open.

“Rachel,” Pete said.

“—that you keep Rachel in your safety, Lord, and you watch over her in her journey from persecution Lord so that she can be reunited with her father Lord. Amen.”

“Amen.”

“Amen.”

Benjamin sighed with satisfaction.

“I forget whose turn it is,” he said.

Pete moved his last king toward Ben’s last king, and for a while they evaded one another in silence.

Under the boughs of a larch Benjamin found a freshly killed and mostly eaten deer. Pearl spoke endlessly of catamounts. How they are the only creature that kills for sport. How their survival requires murder.

And, my word, the wolves.

He’d been to a Fish and Game meeting in Libby where a wire-rimmed geek proposed repopulating the Yaak with Canadian wolves. Pearl stood and promised he’d shoot them on sight. Said he’d lace roadkill with strychnine. These people from the universities and DC were out of their fuckin minds, he said. What pox they would call “endangered” next.

The boy took the skull and the antlers from the deer and they walked down out of the mountains along a gray belt rock face. They could hear a falls somewhere upstream and the boy wanted to see it and so they went. They sat and sunned themselves as the boy ran up and down the rock stairs of the cascade, Pete worrying the whole time he’d fall in and be swept away.

They skulked across Highway 2 and back into the Cabinet Mountains. Another part of the Pearls’ circuit opening up to Pete. A country cut by glaciers into humongous serrated mountains and scalloped peaks.

They shot a small deer and spent a few days in the dilapidated remnants of an old mining camp, sleeping in the shallow shaft. Pete and the boy performed amateur archaeology on the site, digging up Chinese potsherds and even a lion of carved ivory. The boy wouldn’t keep it, wouldn’t let Pete keep it, and discarded it somewhere in the woods.

The second day they found fabric and weaved grasses and charcoal, and inside the last threads of a burlap sack a watch, corked and stained glass vials, and a dense black talon the size of Pete’s palm.

“The mountain lion that came from must’ve been huge.”

Pete laughed.

“What?”

“This isn’t from a mountain lion. It’s a fossil. It’s a dinosaur claw.”

Benjamin swallowed, leaned away from it, then asked could he hold it. Pete set it in his hand. The boy’s arm sank a touch under the weight of it.

“It’s heavy.”

“It’s a fossil. It’s rock.”

He’d never seen anything so evil, he said, then ran uphill to where his father was hammering around in the mine. When Pete trudged up to them at the mouth of the hole, they’d set it on the ground and were squatting before it like two boys at a dead snake.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Pete said. He conjectured that it was found in the Sawtooths. There were quite a few fossils in that range. Or perhaps the Chinese settlers had brought it from China. Neither Pearl said one single thing.

“You two all right?”

“It’s just amazing,” Pearl said. “The power of Satan. Whoa.”

Pearl went on to explain to Benjamin how Satan had left these all over the Earth.

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

To confuse people and put them in doubt, Pearl said. Such is Satan’s power.

“Of course,” Pete said. “You don’t believe the world is old as it is.”

“As they say. As old as they say. No, I don’t.”

“How old is it then?”

“Six thousand years, tops.”

Pete asked for the canteen. Pearl handed it over, and Pete glared at him as he drank. He wiped his arm on his sleeve and handed it back.

“Do you know they can tell how old a rock is by the carbon—”

“Radiocarbon dating. Yes. Radiometric dating too. I know about these. I also know they yield all kinds of conflicting results. When you get back to town, I’d encourage you to look into a book called The Prehistory Lie . By…” Pearl tapped his skull, trying to remember this author. Obscure and self-published, doubtless.

“So that talon right there, it never existed.”

“Yes.”

“And it was put in the rock by Satan, right?”

“It’s what we’re up against. The Deceiver is powerful.”

“Christ,” Pete said. “Sorry— Cripes .”

Pearl smiled.

“That’s all right. It’s your soul to do with whatever you wish,” Pearl said. “Though taking the Lord’s name in vain is annoying. What with so many perfectly good curse words like fuck and shit , and even holy shit…”

When the boy laughed, Pete realized Pearl was teasing him.

“There is a great deal of scholarship that goes ignored in the universities,” Pearl said. “Serious scholarship that does not comport with the Zionist agenda.”

Pete saw a harangue coming on and sat. Pearl cited the work of Dr. Jones and Archbishop James Ussher, who, though he was certainly burning in hell, calculated backward from the reigns of the kings of Israel to the Creation. He allowed there was some divergence of opinion on the exact age of the Earth, what with the cumulative uncertainty from verse to verse.

Pete realized that to Pearl, Satan had staged the world in this and every ancient particular. Pete imagined what it would feel like to believe such a thing, to see the very Devil ranging about the Earth like an art director, crafting fictions in the schists and coal seams and limestone. All to cast doubt on the Bible’s timeline. All for the harvest of lost souls. Maybe it would be worth it for the Devil. You could almost picture it. Almost. You could almost believe a book more real than the real, more actual and relevant than terra firma and all the dull laws that govern it.

“You know, Jeremiah,” Pete said, “if I believed the things you did, I’d act at least as batshit as you do.”

“Rawls,” Pearl said.

“Rawls what?”

“ The Prehistory Lie . It’s by Rawls.”