Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“Nuh-uh,” the kid said.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I need to go home.”

“And I’ll take you. But you could use some new clothes and something to eat. Then we’ll go right home.”

Pete picked up the shirt and started toward the boy. An outsized fear gripped the child and he backed into the wall and slid down against it and closed his arms around his head.

“Hey, hey it’s all right,” Pete said. “I’m not gonna hurt you. Here—”

But when Pete set the shirt on the tile before the kid, he clutched himself, pressed his face in his folded legs. Pete stepped back.

“Come on,” Pete said. “You’re wearing rags.”

The kid didn’t move. Five minutes like this. Ten. Flatware clapping together in the kitchen. Someone tried the door and Pete shouted that the bathroom was out of order.

The kid muttered into his legs.

“I can’t hear you when you talk into your lap like that.”

The kid looked up at him. “I can’t.”

“Sure you can. Then we’ll eat—”

“He won’t…”

“Who won’t? Your father? He won’t want me helping you and your family?”

The boy traced the lines of the grout in the tiles between his legs.

“Does he hurt you?”

“No.”

“Does he hurt you mother?”

No answer.

“Look, Benjamin. Let me tell you what I see. I see a kid who’s sick and small because he hasn’t been getting fed enough. And now you’re telling me that you can’t put on some new clothes. I’m starting to wonder if it’s safe for you to go home—”

“You’re not gonna take me home?!” the kid screamed. “You can’t keep me! You have no right!”

“Whoa!” Pete shouted. “Just calm down. I’ll take you home. But I want you to—”

Pete was going to tell the child to just take the clothes home with him, but the boy tore off his sweater and began unbuckling his belt.

They lived in the woods some ways north of Tenmile in the rolling and dense forests of the Purcell Range. The boy didn’t know the way to town by any of the county roads or which logging road he crossed coming down from their camp. He emerged from the forest behind the IGA grocery. Beyond that was an uninterrupted series of ascending ridges bisected by an old railroad track that was no longer in use. The kid said he went along the backbone of the ridges until he descended to and crossed a creek and then finally up a logging road. Determining what logging road was the problem. Pete had an idea from his map in the glove box, but it was old, and the new roads were not on it.

Of course, the kid had no idea how you drove there, didn’t know if it was a Forest Service road or a Champion Timber Company road or what. It was coming on evening and they had been all over looking for any markers the boy might recognize. Outcroppings of rock. But there were only trees, miles and miles of green larch.

“Maybe this one,” the boy said, pointing to another turnoff marked with two yellow reflectors a mile or so from where Separation Creek joined the Yaak River. The child had eaten lunch, drunk a large glass of orange juice, and even smiled at some of Pete’s jokes.

They went up a disintegrating road, grown over with timothy and cheatgrass. The potholes were disguised by banks of unmelted snow at the higher elevation.

“This road’s gonna swallow my car.”

There was a closed gate ahead.

“That’s the gate there,” the boy said. “It’s got that dent in it.”

Pete stopped the car and turned it off. The engine ticked under the hood. The larches and pines sighed.

“How far?” Pete asked.

“A ways.”

“A couple miles, what?”

The boy didn’t know. Pete told him to wait in the car and got out and began to inspect the area around the gate. There would be a key somewhere around here. There always was — biologists and surveyors for the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and Champion Timber were always coming and going. He looked in the crooks of trees at about eye level and under stones that were about the right size. He heard the kid get out of the car.

“Just wait,” Pete said. “I’ll have this gate open in a minute.”

Pete spotted a flat rock that sat conspicuously atop another one the size of a dinner plate. Bingo. He turned the top rock over. Nothing. He looked under the plate stone. Nothing.

“The key’s gone,” the kid said.

Pete stood.

“Papa throwed it in them bushes over there, but good luck finding it.”

Pete looked up the ragged road. He couldn’t even see the first switchback. He looked up for the sun, which had already ducked into the trees.

“How far are you up this road?”

“I dunno. A ways.”

“A ways,” Pete said. He ducked under the gate and told the kid to come on.

The sky and the snow they walked over turned everything the sleepy blue of evening and the gelid air burned cold into their lungs. Pete’s lungs at any rate. You’re in terrible shape, he thought. The boy trudged just ahead of him and by the second switchback could have bolted and Pete wouldn’t have pursued him. But instead, the kid stopped against a stump where the road was half washed out and a steady trickle of water ran down a gut carved into the dirt.

Pete gripped his knees gratefully. Walking he’d pondered what he would say to the boy’s parents. He’d tell them that he brought Benjamin back just as fast as he could, that nobody wanted to mess with them or their boy. He was working on what he’d say about the clothes, the prescription, and the vitamin C. But as he played out the scene his positivity set with the sun, and his decision to take the kid up here seemed more absurd. Then fully stupid. Pete had been motivated by a certainty that keeping the kid overnight was not an option. He had no place to put him. Cecil was at the Cloningers’, and he couldn’t ask them. There was nowhere else.

But Pete still felt a surging anxiety as he sat there, then a dread realization of the possibilities, in particular the chance that the boy’s father would put a bullet in him. Violence became in his mind an ever-likelier outcome. There was the shelter in Kalispell. Pete could’ve run the kid down there. At least called around.

The boy watched him, and for a moment it seemed he’d been reading Pete’s thoughts.

“What’s your last name?” Pete asked.

“Pearl.”

Pete had caught his breath but wasn’t ready to start hiking again. He didn’t even want to know how much farther. His legs knocked. He squatted.

“Benjamin Pearl. That’s nice.”

“Mama said our name reminds us of how rare we are.”

“What’s her name?”

“Sarah. Before that, it was Veronica.”

“Before what?”

“I dunno. Just before.”

“And your daddy?”

“Jeremiah Pearl.”

“You got any brothers and sisters?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Five.”

“Five? Wow. That’s a lot. Are you the oldest?”

“Nah.”

“What are their names?”

“Esther, Jacob, Ruth, Paula, and little Ethan. I come before Paula and after Ruth.”

“I see. Are they up here with your parents?”

The boy stood and tugged a sapling from the side of the hill and beat the dirt out of its roots. Pete looked around. He’d scarcely noticed that they’d walked into an area that had been replanted in the summer. Waist-high green pines grew up and down the hillside. The Pearls had chosen a good place to be away from society. The traffic up here — from the timber company at least — would be minimal for some years.

“Why’d you go into the school today, Benjamin?”

“I dunno.”

“Just sort of wandered onto the playground?”

“I don’t know.”