Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

They spent a day climbing up into the floor of a glacial cirque. They hiked an esker that cackled with snowmelt and camped in the dark on the shore and in the morning washed their clothing in the turquoise tarn. Pearl fished, caught nothing in the blue milk water. The setting sunlight bled up the mountain past the bands of gray sill that bisected that massive rock.

They ate deer meat and rice and dried fruit. Pete and the boy played checkers again by the fire and then the boy wordlessly joined his father, sitting between his legs. In time he was asleep, Pearl petting his head.

“That’s a good kid,” Pete said.

Pearl nodded. It may have pleased him to hear so.

Pete thought about asking where the rest of the Pearls were. But Pearl would answer with a question: where is your daughter? And these absences were twinned in Pete’s mind as if the one could not be solved without the other, and he harbored the absurd hope that the revelation of the one would reveal the other.

It made sense in his heart and his heart only.

“I left some of your coins in Reno,” Pete said. “When I was looking for Rachel.”

“I’m sorry you haven’t found her.”

Pete nodded, swallowed, gazed into the fire. He fetched a flask from his backpack.

“I don’t suppose—?” he asked, holding up the liquor.

“No,” Pearl said. “No thanks.”

Pete unscrewed the lid and took a pull from the metal container and set it on the stump, reflecting warped fire in its shiny and scored surface. He rolled a cigarette.

“Is your wife looking for her too?” Pearl asked.

“She’s messed up.” He stopped rolling the smoke, but thinking of how to explain her to Pearl made him tired. “Let’s just say I’ve been to Washington, Texas, Nevada, and Indiana looking for Rachel, and Beth hasn’t even left Austin. I dunno. She’s… I dunno.”

He resumed rolling the cigarette. Felt Pearl’s silence like an open oven, and when Pete looked up, Pearl was staring at him, hard.

“Where in Indiana?”

“Indianapolis.”

“You went to Gnaw Bone,” Pearl growled.

Pete’s mouth went dry. He tucked his hair behind his ear and the cigarette with it.

Fuck.

“Go on,” Pearl said. “What did you find there?”

“I need some water,” Pete said.

“I’ll bet you do.”

Pete fetched the canteen from nearby and drank under Pearl’s calculating gaze and wondered if he should run. But it would be across all these stones and he’d be easy to hear and easy to fell and if he made the woods Pearl would track him down eventually, certainly.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Pete drank some more.

This is how you die.

He set the canteen by.

“Yeah, I went to Gnaw Bone. Only because I was already in Indiana. Only because I couldn’t find Rachel and I was sitting in a motel room going crazy. And yes, I was curious about you and your family. I met your mother-in-law and sister-in-law. They were nice folks.”

Pearl touched his fingers to his son’s skull, traced his forehead.

“Do you even have a child? This Rachel. Is she even real?”

“Yes.” Pete leaned over the fire so Pearl could see his eyes. “Look at me. On my mother’s grave. I am not lying to you. I got a call that they’d found my daughter. But she wasn’t there.”

“You went to fill your file on us.”

“My office doesn’t have the budget to fly me—”

“What office? How do I know who you are? Your badge?”

“Well if you don’t trust me, why let me be with you and Benjamin?”

Pearl sat up. The boy stirred in his arms.

“Because I know that out here, the moment I need to, I can kill you. But just because I’ve made us safe from you doesn’t mean you’re not a snake.”

Pearl carried the boy to his sleeping bag. Pete listened to them murmuring and wondered would Pearl kill him, but knew somehow that he would not. Instead, Pearl sat back down and asked was there anything left in Pete’s flask. Pete palmed it to him across the fire. Pearl regarded his dished reflection in the metal before he took a drink.

They sat quietly in the dark for a long time, Pearl sipping from time to time. Pete felt like a midwife, waiting, waiting.

“I spoke to each and every one of them,” Pearl finally said, wiping a sleeve across his mouth. “And to a man they said to my face they would join us. I told them I was going to buy the land and that I was selling my house and I spoke to them about the proper preparations. They said nothing against these preparations. I sold my motorcycles and pickup. I provided literature on how to convert property to gold. ..”

His eyes drifted down to the flames lashing upward.

“A man manages to salt away a little something for a rainy day. A farmer, first time in ten years he’s been able to put something in the bank. A year of all this God-given rain and the kernels of corn in all their thousands on that acreage, and that corn arriving at market when prices are at an all-time high… and he means to put the proceeds in the bank?! And I’m the crazy one.”

Pearl read the fire for a while longer.

“And Pastor Don. Liar. ‘I do not suffer a woman to teach, nor usurp the authority over the man, but to be in silence,’ he says. She dreamed that we would find a building in Gnaw Bone to make our church, and we did. She dreamed that the Soviets would launch a space station and that there would be an earthquake behind the Iron Curtain, and lo, there was an earthquake in Romania. I’d never heard of Romania until she dreamed of a disaster there. She dreamed of the air crash in the Canary Islands as clear as she had been there. And she dreamed of the mountains and the only fat pasture in them, and we found that fat pasture in Montana.”

The wind churned starlights in the water. It grew colder.

“She was a prophet and I a watchman to that congregation. But they would not suffer a woman.”

Pearl looked at the flask as though he’d just discovered it in his hand.

“I used to drink a lot. Too much. When I met her, I didn’t want to anymore.”

He tossed the flask back to Pete. It clattered empty on the rocks.

Pearl left him alone. The sky clouded over and in the perfect starless dark the fire made Pete feel naked and he let it burn out and huddled in his own bag listening the night long to the wind and the occasional owl and other things unseen knocking and cracking among the sticks and stones.

The next day a pair of fishermen descended the rocky moraine to the water and waved to them from the other side of the tarn. The men were a long time coming around, and Pearl was cautious and brusque with them and lied that the fishless water teemed with trout. Pearl and Benjamin packed up, and in a quarter hour they were hiking out of the cirque and down into the forest. Pete stayed behind. He watched the men fish and spent the night with them and when they gave up on the tarn the next morning, hiked out with them and got a ride to Libby and called the judge to come get him and take him to Tenmile.

Did she arrive in Seattle?

Yes. She stayed. At last she stayed.

Why?

She had begun making a different kind of first impression. She made people uncomfortable. A worrying aura about her. She felt their hesitations.

And she was burned out. But in Seattle, she was off the hot blacktop. She thought she might settle down. She’d met a boy in Fresno who flopped in an apartment subsidized by a Quaker church. A thin thing named Pomeroy who had her dye his hair jet-black and was the only one in the past months and a year to ask her about herself.