Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Where you from, girl?

Montana.

Montana. Shit. Hell’s from there?

Me, I guess. Texas too.

Texas too, what?

What?

Texas too? How you from two places?

Don’t tease me.

Why you out here on the streets?

I was with a boy from San Antonio for a while. He took me to Indiana.

What boy?

Just some boy.

Maybe I know him.

Cheatham.

She rubbed the dye into his hair and a black tear ran down his forehead toward his eyes. She daubed it with the washcloth.

What’s he look like?

Sit still.

I don’t want none of this dye on my pillow.

I got a towel.

Don’t you get dye on my pillow.

Hold still then.

He asked her to turn off the lamp’s naked bulb. When she did the light from the small kitchen was all they could see by and it wasn’t much over on the bed.

How long’s it take?

She read the box. A dark-haired woman on the cover.

The directions are on the side, dummy.

She slapped a red handprint onto his bare chest.

Ow, damn.

Don’t call me dummy. It says to leave it for a half hour.

She threw the box on the floor.

That’s gonna leave a mark , he said, peering down in the half-light at his chest, where he smarted.

I should get going , she said, standing.

Wait, wait. Where you gonna go?

She didn’t know. She didn’t feel like she could stay. He got up on one elbow and reached for her wrist and got her rubber bracelet by his middle finger. He drew her arm to him and began to touch it all over.

You got a girlfriend? she asked when they were face-to-face.

You got a boyfriend?

His smile was incredible.

I saw some woman things in the bathroom.

I’ve never had a girlfriend.

His fingers ran up the inside of her arm and when he said, I like you , she laughed and turned her face up to the ceiling and swallows flew out of her chest it felt like and she helped him rinse his hair in the kitchen sink and when he turned around with a towel turbaned up on his head and kissed her, she kissed him back. He asked how old she was. She lied and said that she was sixteen. He said sure she was. He told her that he’d go slow or not at all, and she asked would he mind if they laid on the bed awhile first. It was like the other times in that it wasn’t very long at all before he had his hands on her and then his fingers up in her and her body was going too fast for her too, her mouth slick and her cooch too and his fingers were in her mouth and rubbing her cooch and then around her anus and pulling at her butt like he was trying to rip a loaf of French bread and then holding it like he was resting an open phone book on his forearm as he cradled her head to his like a receiver in a pay phone. She felt like a phone booth. Her body was a booth that a person could get into and call long-distance from inside of, call her dad Pete maybe, she wondered why did she think of him now, Pomeroy wasn’t like her father, not like Cheatham kind of was.

It was gross to think of your dad and she put that away.

Pomeroy moved her body for her, tilting her pelvis so that it sometimes felt in new places inside of her and she gasped because it hurt, which surprised her because it hadn’t hurt down there in a long time.

Did she tell him to stop?

Yes.

Did he?

Yes. In the half-light from the kitchen with the pipes groaning in the other Quaker apartments and the cars shishing on the wet pavement outside. It must’ve rained.

Men were animals, he said. Some animals have to run, some animals have to chase. She was an animal who would have to run. Unless.

Unless what.

I can keep those animals away , he said.

But who’ll keep you away?

She was teasing him and he didn’t care for it. He sat up.

I said I don’t have girlfriends. You do me if you want. If not, you don’t.

She wrapped herself around his torso. He smelled like black dye. Like a blot. Like black water. Wet hot water. She asked him how old he was.

Twenty. Go get them cigarettes.

She was all the way over at the table, naked and dribbling his cum out of her before she realized she’d just hopped to when he said so. He said wait let’s have a look at you and flipped on the bulb. She covered up with her hands and then dropped them so he wouldn’t have to ask her to and also because it felt immature to cover up and she wanted to be sophisticated. And it didn’t bother her, him looking her up and down a moment, nodding like he liked what he saw or just that she’d grown up in that moment. She didn’t care, or she told herself she didn’t care, if there was a difference, which perhaps there wasn’t. Men were supposed to look at women. They were supposed to.

Christ , he said, reaching for the smokes.

What? she said, horrified. Looking herself over.

He explained that she was so damn fine his heart did backflips. Shit her not.

He went to visit Cecil’s mother, intending to get him back into her home. There were so many cars parked on her block, he thought maybe she’d died, that he’d happened upon her wake. But of course there wouldn’t be anyone at her wake.

And Katie. Was she eating. Had she been to school at all this spring. Was she alive.

He parked and mounted the steps to the front door. A balding man with a mustache and a polyester brown suit cornered the house and climbed over the railing with a black single-barrel pump-action shotgun. He put a finger to his lips, pointed at the ground, smoothing his tie back into his coat. Pete looked dumbly at where he’d pointed and then started to back away. Several things occurred at once. Men in suits and tactical gear with pistols and submachine guns streamed through the tall grass toward the front porch. Pete’s knees buckled and the back of his hand was wrenched up between his shoulder blades by someone who’d come from behind.

He started to protest, but the man with the shotgun punched the stock into Pete’s gut, and he doubled over on his way down, his face striking the porch. His teeth rang in his skull like tines of a tuning fork as a couple hundred pounds compressed into a single kneecap in the middle of his back. He coughed and gagged at once and thought he was suffocating as someone cuffed him. Now someone straddled him. There were shouts from inside the house.

“There’s a kid in there!” Pete croaked.

“Shut up!”

“I’m a social worker! There’s a CHILD in there!”

The world rang and spangled. Something hard as iron had struck the back of his head, smashed his teeth into the porch again. Blood, metal, salt, a hot pain radiating from a point on the rear equator of his skull. He was collared up onto his knees, his head rolling, lifted to his feet. From within the house there were shouts, there were shots, quick POP-POP-POPs, and he was kicked back down. Boots on the porch all around him. Screams. Scuffles. He lay still, gonged and wincing.

From the back of the unmarked sedan in which he’d been placed, he could see plainclothes cops, cops in DEA jackets, and local law enforcement. Pacing in and out of the house, puffed up in their adrenaline and bulletproof vests. All this contemptible hard-assery. An ambulance at last arrived and weaved among the cars flashing its lights. Paramedics rushed inside.

The back of Pete’s neck was moist with blood. Indentures of his teeth scored the inside of his lips. The cuffs cut into his wrist bones. He was by now half-crazed with worry about Katie. Had she been shot. Hurt in any way whatsoever. He should’ve removed her from the home too. Instead of Cecil. She was the one he should’ve taken to the Cloningers.