Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

He’d gotten it all wrong. Once again.

Idiot.

Is there anything you touch doesn’t turn to shit.

He knocked his head against the rear window. A nearby cop turned around, looked at him, shook his head no, and resumed speaking to his fellows.

“Fucker!” Pete shouted. He pounded his head against the window. To break it if he must.

The balding cop who’d hit him with the shotgun flung open the door.

“There’s a little girl—”

The cop punched him in the mouth. He toppled backward, stunned and squirming.

“Shut the fuck up.”

Slam went the door. Pete turned over onto his knees and watched the runnel of blood out his nose splotch the fabric of the backseat. This was a nice sedan with a cloth interior, not some county squad car of vinyl. He blew blood all over the upholstery. He sat up and spat at this road show of federal law enforcement, and a bubbly red slug drew down the window.

They searched Pete’s car, set things from his glove box and passenger seat on the roof. For no ostensible reason a federal agent removed the cardboard Pete had taped over his broken window. Just being thorough. A file folder opened in the breeze and several sheets of paperwork blew away. The citizens standing across the street taking everything in picked up the loose papers and inspected them.

“Shit’s confidential,” Pete hollered. No one heard him or looked his way if they did. When the cop emptying his glove box discovered it, he opened and took a sniff from Pete’s flask, capped it, and set it on the folder.

A Tenmile police officer emerged from the house with Katie in his arms, and the girl rode him in mute shock to the squad car parked alongside the one Pete was in. He could see someone put a blanket around her and then stand next to her where she sat, legs out the back door. She was eye level with Pete and when she saw him she knew him, and he said to her it was okay it would all be okay though she couldn’t hear him. She locked her eyes on his. She tethered herself to him in this way, and he could see her wonder why he didn’t come out of the car for her, why he was so very bloody too. He said he was very, very sorry. Someone nudged her over into the seat and got in back with her, and the car pulled away.

Debbie out the front door now, performance in full, leaping and arching her back against her captors and handcuffs and falling backward into the arms of the cop behind her. T-shirt torn at the neck and sliding over her shoulder, a sagging tit flopping out as she twisted and dug in, her feet running halfway up the porch post. For a moment she strained perpendicular to the floor like a bow aimed at the sky before another cop took her by the feet and with the one holding her by the armpits bore her snapping, kicking, and squirming, and quickly folded her into a sedan. Then it pulled away too.

The fed who’d had the shotgun opened Pete’s door. He double-took the bloody mess on Pete’s face, parted his jacket and set his hands on his hips.

“Jesus,” he said, and took a handkerchief from his jacket. “What did you do to my car?”

Pete edged away from him.

“Fuck off, pig.”

The fed tossed the handkerchief at Pete and closed the door.

They were soon on Highway 2, heading east into a brilliant day, clear skies, warm.

Pete asked who got shot. It occurred to him that if Cecil had been there, he’d be dead. Maybe he had been there. Maybe he’d been released. Pete asked was it a teenager they’d shot.

The fed glanced in his rearview at Pete but didn’t say anything.

“You realize I’m their social worker, right, dipshit?”

The agent drove in silence. Pete sat back. His head throbbed, front and back, bulbs of pain like a flashing string of Christmas lights around his skull.

“I know my rights. And you straight fucked up.”

The fed adjusted his mirror and tried to settle in for the drive, but Pete harried him with insults. He asked how long the DEA had been hiring retards. Was it a quota thing or was there a special squad of them. He complimented the man’s comb-over. He asked was he philosophically a fascist or was this just the consequence of being hung like a thumb. Was he missing a testicle like Hitler. What it was like to have been aborted. Was his mother a good kisser. Was his father. Did the little fellas he fellated mind his mustache.

Pete flew into the side of the door, struck his head against the window as the fed suddenly turned. They rumbled over gravel and then skidded to a stop and the fed killed the engine. In the brief subsequent silence Pete could hear the man breathe through his nose, the very dust settle. Then the fed got out. Pete heaved himself up and his door was open. The fed grinned. He took a handful of Pete’s long hair and yanked him out. He stood Pete in front of the rear tire and most officially slugged him in the stomach. Pete pitched forward. The man caught him, and Pete could smell his lunch. Meat, gravy, bitter coffee.

He slugged Pete under the opposite rib and standing so close kept him on his feet as he pumped fists into his guts dexter and sinister and when he stepped back, Pete dropped to his knees and then onto his side convulsing and cacking on the gravel. His breath croaked to and fro, like it wouldn’t take, like he was trying to find a way to breathe sideways.

The fed panted from his efforts and asked Pete whatever had happened to his smart-ass mouth. Then he spat onto Pete’s face and fetched his handkerchief off the ground where it had fallen and knelt in front of him. He sat Pete up, spat into the handkerchief directly, and wiped Pete’s face clean. He said it was a good old spitwash like Mama used to do. He asked could Pete believe the pain he was in. He pulled up Pete’s shirt and exclaimed, my, what little indication there was of any assault. How long it would take before he would bruise there if at all.

He stood Pete up. By now, the handkerchief was covered with blood. He spat on Pete’s face directly again and used his thumb to clean the last bit of dried blood from the grooves around his nostrils. Tilted Pete’s head this way and that, pulled back Pete’s lips to have a look at his teeth and gums. Like a man inspecting a horse or hunting dog. The cop’s bitter breath reeked all over Pete’s face. He stepped back, had a good look at him, and asked Pete had he had quite enough.

Pete closed his eyes and hung his head yes. His rearranged guts churned.

The fed straightened him, said that was too bad, and whaled on him a little more.

The basement of a post office in Kalispell. They uncuffed him and deposited him in a chain-link cell in the corner that was concrete walls on two sides and a few folding chairs and that was all. A metal desk stood outside the makeshift cell and a map of Tenmile was taped to a free-standing chalkboard on wheels.

Debbie’s high hysterical voice cantered behind a door across the room. After a while the cops ushered her upstairs and she looked at Pete as if she couldn’t quite place him.

The sole remaining DEA agent removed his gun, put it in the drawer in his desk, and commenced with paperwork. Pete asked could he have something to drink. The officer trudged upstairs, came down with a Coke, and forced it under the chain link with his foot. Just drinking made Pete’s stomach quake. Even sips. He pounded the cola anyway and burped in a novel kind of agony bent over on his folding chair. He lay flat on his back and still his insides ached all the way through to his spine.

It was too cold in this basement to sleep through the hours. There were no windows to tell the time by, and when Pete asked him, the agent would not tell him.

“That woman you got, she’s too fucked up to be whoever you think she is.”

“And who exactly do you think we think she is?” the agent asked, not turning around.