Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

She walked to a crowded diner downtown and read and reread the menu at the counter until one of the booths emptied. Then she slipped the tip into her palm and walked to another diner. Looking over her shoulder the whole way. She was near Pike and could see some kids she knew and Kenny and the girls who were getting into cars. Dates, they called them. At first she thought all they did was really go on dates. To the movies. What a sucker she was, what a country mouse.

Did she think of calling home? Her mother? Or Pete?

For a minute, but then an old guy with horn-rimmed glasses pulled a girl out of his Pontiac, and she was yelling and carrying on. Kenny and some of the street kids coming over. At the sight of Kenny, the man jumped into his car and tore off. The girl shrieking and throwing her things, her compact, her hairbrush. A cop pulled up. The crowd melted.

She went to the diner and wondered what to do until dark getting the shakes on the thirty-five-cent coffee. The neon and night sounds downright terrifying now. Catcalls and wolf whistles and the like. Tires on the road. She looked over the counter and into the kitchen. The cook at his regular job. A proper address. A Social Security number. She didn’t have any of those things. She didn’t even know how to do the stuff a waitress does. How to wash dishes even.

Then she spotted Pomeroy. He was in the door, scanning the room. He was wet with rain mist and his black hair shone. He looked on her like a relieved, disappointed father and that corkscrewed into her heart like the feeling of being loved. She stood. She ran to him and began to hug him, but he wrenched her around by the arm and she cried out. People watched, people did nothing.

Where the fuck you go? He was dragging her out of the place. Where you been? Yo and I been fuckin worried. ..

He was rough with her all the way to the bus stop, but when they got on, he put his arm around her, and she fell into his chest and he petted her head and the sounds that came out of her were coos from before she could talk.

Did they heat chili in its can over the hot plate and pour it over hot dogs and drink Rainier beer? Did they put on the radio and hear the cartoon motorcycle purr of “Electric Avenue” for the very first time in their lives? Did Pomeroy make another beer run and return with a quarter of weed and Kenny and Dee? Did the girls brush their teeth with their fingers because Normal gave them toothpaste but forgot the brushes, and did they get in the dark with Kenny and Pomeroy and become an elegant harem, smoking from Kenny’s long brass pipe?

Yes. They did.

And the next day it was like winter in August, the radiators knocking throughout the building, the hallways showing your breath and sounding your steps. The second-floor communal bathroom was wet in the mornings, and a peppered rime of stubble coated the sink that was the only evidence of other boarders. But she felt good, like a squatter, like they were getting away with something, squatting over the pissy, splattered toilet seat to pee and shuffling down the hall in Pomeroy’s heavy duster and back into bed with him and Yo.

Was Yo gone for days at a time?

And Rose and Pomeroy would be quiet all week, except to play checkers with pennies and bits of paper or to have a quick fuck in the bed. She took up smoking in earnest, and Pomeroy sent her down for Camels from the machine in the lobby. A Hmong man about the size of her and four times her age made change from behind the front desk, and eyed her with suspicion, but didn’t say anything.

You send me out for everything and I’m not supposed to be here , she said, tossing the cigarettes onto his bare chest.

Do you even care about me? he asked.

Yes! Yes, I do!

I’m not so sure about that. If you did, you’d just do things for me.

He fretted with the radio, trying to get stations to come in.

C’mere , she said.

What.

He didn’t come over, and instead went and sat at the kitchen table. She straddled his lap and ran her hands through his hair. He leaned back and she felt perfectly adult. She lit a cigarette and gave it to him.

Your roots are coming in. Give me some money and I’ll get you some dye.

He lifted her off of him, brusquely, in a mood, and stood.

Where you going?

I don’t have girlfriends. He put on his coat.

I know.

So you don’t get to ask me where I’m going.

Was it hard for him because he’d been falling in love with her? Had all this time without Yo brought them close, sharing cereal from the same bowl and just smiling at one another across the Formica table? Did he need to cut the cord? Not that she had anywhere else better to go, but did she stay because she thought he was falling in love? Real love and not like Cheatham’s love? Was she actually acquainted with his heart in a way that he himself was not?

She worked up a belief in this.

Was she right?

Of course not. A little. Yes. Maybe.

Who knows?

Exactly.

What he did was, he left. Three days. She ate what was in the pantry and stared at the door and cried and expected any minute the Hmong man would come and kick her out onto the street.

When Pomeroy came back, he had Yo and some money.

From what?

Yo’s dates.

How did she know?

Rose asked and Pom told her. He gave her some money, and sent her out for hair dye.

From her jail cell, Debbie complained ceaselessly of aches in her stomach, her head, her thin bruised limbs. She said to the cops that they had to do something about it, that she had rights. Then she just begged for relief. She trembled and wore an expression of such pained anxiety, the dayshift jailer took her seriously and brought her aspirin every two hours and, when her condition failed to improve, eventually arranged to have her taken to the hospital. After the fact, it was pretty obvious she was suffering massive withdrawal, that her body was precisely calibrated to the careful and steady administration of vodka, amphetamines, and barbiturates to maintain her.

The jailer on the second shift was a recovered alcoholic and considered sobriety his life’s achievement and ministered to her, holding her hand through the bars of the cell. Her thin fingers were bulbed at the knuckles and otherworldly and tacky as drying Elmer’s glue. After a while she asked for her hand back, it hurt to have it held at all. The jailer gave her half a pack of cigarettes, and when she smoked one, she threw up. But right after she puked she felt better for a little while, and so she worked the pack for the few respites of sweaty, swimmy relief that vomiting afforded her.

A hospital visit was supposed to happen just after the morning shift change, but a teacher had broken up a huge fight in the local high school parking lot, and by the time everything was sorted out Debbie’s appointment had been scotched. She asked to go to the ER once, but it was a faint request made to a cop shop full of a dozen sullen high school wrestlers and officers calling their parents. She went to lie down. No one saw her spasm or heard the jouncing of the springs under the thin mattress as she had the heart attack that killed her.

Pete rode with Judge Dyson to his 1920s-era farmhouse just west of Tenmile. An old buckboard was sunk in a nap of moss in front of a collapsing barn, but the house and the dooryard were fastidiously kept. The judge got out of his car and Pete followed him around the house. The judge waddled up to a car there and pulled off the tarp, revealing a powder blue 1977 Monte Carlo.