Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

The desk officer returned with two coffees, and Pinkerton sipped his. He spat it back into the cup and set it on the floor.

“I don’t know where Pearl is,” Pete said.

“Do you know where we can get something that isn’t burnt and lukewarm?” he asked.

Pete swirled the brown water in his cup. He didn’t want to drink anything. He was tired, very tired.

“Come on, Snow. Take me somewhere and hear me out.”

Pinkerton got up to call the FBI agent and explain what cafe they were in. When he came back to the table, he waved the waitress over and ordered a slice of meringue and asked did Pete want anything.

Pete said he was fine.

“Get some fries or whatever. On me. You haven’t even touched your coffee.”

“It hurts to drink.”

“You have a cavity or something?”

Pete gingerly brushed his stomach with his fingertips.

“Heartburn?” Pinkerton said. “I get that.”

“One of your colleagues kicked the shit out of me on the way here. But thanks for asking.”

Pinkerton looked Pete up and down.

“He was careful,” Pete said, lifting his shirt, “just to beat my guts all to hell.”

Grayish bruises along the ridge of his ribs stood out in the last of the evening light through the windows. Pinkerton sighed.

“You want to get that checked out?”

“I wanna take a pipe to that piece of shit.”

The waitress had returned with the pie and looked askance at Pete.

“Fair enough,” Pinkerton said. “Thanks, hon.”

He cut a piece of pie, put it in his mouth and chewed. He took a swallow of coffee.

“I can make this go away, but you and I have to come to an understanding.”

“Make what go away? I haven’t done a goddamn thing.”

“That’s not how we’re gonna see it. But if you and I come to an understanding…”

“About?”

“Jeremiah Pearl.”

“What exactly do I need to understand?”

“Well, first you need to know what happened up there,” he said, chewing, his voice thick with yellow meringue.

How did she meet Pomeroy’s girlfriend?

At the bus station in Tacoma they went to get into a locker where he’d put his watch, some hairspray, his brass knuckles (he showed her these for some time, fondled them), and a carton of Pall Malls. They’d hitchhiked down from Seattle in a semi with a blockhead truck driver who kept eyeing her legs. Later in the bus station, he said she could have made him quit that looking if she just gave him what he wanted.

What?

You could just put your little paw on his meat and he’d prolly cum in two seconds , he said, going through his things.

She stood. He smelled a shirt from the locker and shoved it into his duffel.

Fuck this , she said. She strode out and among the buses idling in the station, felt then how meager was her freedom, that no one worried over her.

What about her mother and father?

She was too busy crying to think of them. They would have ruined the perfect lonesomeness that she felt seeping into all her past — this was the story, she was always ever alone even at home — and her prospects too. She wyomed on the aluminum side of the bus and left swells of breath there. Riders watched her. A driver was behind her asking did she need any help, what was the matter, he could help figure it out. But she was embarrassed to have run out because she was a proud and independent girl, and said she was fine and paced among the rumbling, idling buses not yet going anywhere. She took a look at herself in the windows of the station. Her hair a shag, and she was wearing a blue ski jacket and a white denim skirt and how she looked was the only thing she had going on. When she went back inside the girl straddling Pomeroy spotted her right away and chewed on his ear and then said something into it. She was stunned. Not really jealous. Just surprised. She knew she looked better than this girl, who was at once used up and flush with youth. She had baby fat in her face and a small tire around her belly like she’d had children at a young age. Pomeroy leaned back to see Rose and called her over, and said, This is my old lady, Yolanda.

I thought you didn’t have a girlfriend.

Come off it.

You can call me Yo , Yo said.

She went back out to the buses again. She had fourteen dollars in her pocket. It wasn’t enough to go anywhere for real. Her legs were cold. At least it wasn’t raining. She made up her mind, but this time she really thought about what she wanted and what she had to do and what was the best thing between those two poles.

Where did the three of them go?

They rode to Seattle in a car that Yo had borrowed from an old homo named Jorge. They drove through a city like a gray and linear crystallization of the raw slab of clouds overhead. It was going on night when Yo killed the engine, let the car roll, and parked in front of a house on Capitol Hill. Yo said to just get out and not close the doors. Then Yo quietly clicked the car doors closed herself, and snuck up to the house. Pomeroy took Rose across the street.

Jorge didn’t give her permission, did he?

Pomeroy smiled. That Yo.

The house was reached by a row of concrete steps that went up from the sidewalk, and Yo looked especially squat sneaking up them, slipping in the front door.

Yo’s pretty , she said. Sounding his feelings about her, the depth of them.

She has nice lips.

And nice eyes.

They’re slanty. She’s a little Eskimo or something.

Yeah.

Yolanda slunk down the stairs in her purple flats, slapping across the street to them. She said to walk, pointing up the street. She got between them and put her arms through theirs and they trundled down the hill, past the wrought-iron fences and Victorian houses, on into the night traffic at Highway 5, under the highway and into a liquor store. Street kids and castoffs and whatever miscreants had called out Hey Pomeroy! and Pomeroy sashayed for them and when he had his bottle, shared and shared alike with a group of slack kids drinking beer and smoking weed in a small lot on Thomas Street.

That’s Dee and Jules and Custer and there’s Kenny and Curt , Yolanda said, and they nodded at her and checked her out. Yolanda turned her into the light and said, You look about like Sissy Spacek to me, but with darker skin tone , and Rose asked was she the coal miner’s daughter, and Yo said yep.

A cop rolled past and no one hid the bottle. That was exhilarating.

What’s happening tonight?

The kids looked around as if something might be evident in their immediate surroundings and finally someone said they were thinking of heading to the Monastery later.

The bottle had gotten to Rose. Someone had lit a joint and it was going around too. The Talking Heads hiccupped out of a passing car. One of them — Kenny — was a tall black kid who looked at her with vague intensity. She tugged on Yolanda’s arm, but Yolanda was talking to someone and just handed her a cigarette.

You gonna drink from that or what, girl? Kenny asked her.

She clutched the bottle to her mouth — it was heavy as a brick — and took a swallow and passed it on. Kenny kept his eyes on her, half-listening to Pomeroy.

Yo headed off giggling with Dee and Jules, so Rose went over to Pomeroy’s side with a cigarette in her mouth and let him light it, and felt in her silence quite adult. Kenny offered her the joint, but she held up her cigarette to say she would smoke this instead. Again, adult. She tucked in under Pomeroy’s arm and murmured just loud enough for him to hear that she was cold. He let his arm go around her and nobody noticed her there, the slight thing. A soft bird she felt like. Not even Yolanda really noticed her when she came back — she just took the cigarette from her and dragged off it and gave it back, and then complained about the assholes on Pike, and told Dee and Jules to watch themselves down there.