Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“Well, what were you doing in town?”

“Getting some things.”

“What things?”

“Food and things.”

“You have a house or some friends in town or something?”

“No.”

“Dumpsters?”

The boy pulled another sapling out of the ground.

“They throw a lot of perfectly good stuff away behind the grocery stores, don’t they?”

The kid shrugged and beat the dirt out of the sapling and tossed it over his shoulder. He pulled on another. It was almost as tall as he was.

“I don’t think Champion Timber’d be crazy about you doing that.” The boy had no idea what Pete was talking about. Pete said they should get going.

“He’s coming.”

“Your father? Where? Here?”

“He’s been watching the whole way.”

Pete turned in a full circle, looking in the short trees for some sign. Again, it was well thought out. There was cover in the saplings, but they were short enough to provide ample sight lines from any of the surrounding ridges and peaks. The revelation of his own exposure annoyed Pete.

“Let’s go meet him then. It’s getting dark.”

The kid started up the draw from where the water washed out the road. They climbed up over stumps and rocks and the water ran under kernel-corn snow that was a year old and knee-deep in this hillside cavity. They achieved the rim and walked it, slipping on icy hidden roots. They rested and went on in the falling dark at last arriving on the ridge. There was starlight to the east. A dark vista of trees and still more trees.

Pete massaged his side. An ache there. He was cold and short of breath in the lashing wind, and his eyeballs floated in little pools.

“So,” he panted. “Where the hell. Is he?”

A deafening crack drowned out the boy’s answer. A flash, a light in his eyes. Pete crouched in a beam of light and the gunshot was echoing back off the mountains. The light remained in his eyes like bear spray, and finally the shot died out and still he hunched and covered his eyes against the light. He looked over and the boy stirred on the ground. He thought the child had been shot.

“Get up,” a man said from behind the light.

Pete splayed his fingers in front of his face as if to filter out some of the glare, but it fired into his eyes all the same, and many-colored coronas burned in his vision when he looked away.

The boy started to walk toward the light, and Pete was trying to decide if he should reach for him, hold him back— of course not, you’ll be shot —when the man spoke: “Stay right there.”

“Papa, I—”

“Stay right there!”

The voice boomed of its own signal magnitude, a thunder.

“Mr. Pearl? I’m from the Department of Family Services.” His voice sounded high and fearful in his own ears. He carried on and hoped that his timbre would improve: “I’m not law enforcement or anything like that. May I show you my badge?”

The light offered no response.

“I just come across Benjamin in town and he said you all were living up here and so I brought him back.”

The light swept over to the boy.

“Take off those clothes,” the man ordered. Benjamin immediately complied and the light swung back into Pete’s eyes.

“Wait,” Pete said. “It’s gotta be thirty, forty degrees out. There’s nothing wrong with the clothes. They’re new . Look, you’re not on the hook for them. They’re gratis. Free.”

“I know what gratis means.”

“Of course. I just meant that it’s my job. I have a budget for this sort of thing.”

The boy had dropped the coat and the shirt into a pile in front of him and was undoing the pants. An insistent logorrhea poured out of Pete as the kid pulled off a brilliant white T-shirt.

“Look, if it’s a matter of you wanting to not take a handout, that’s fine. I can certainly arrange to, you know, accept payment for the clothes. I, I didn’t mean to offend you or overstep my bounds. Benjamin didn’t ask for the clothes. I insisted that he take them.”

The boy unlaced and kicked off his new boots and tugged off the new socks and then pulled down his pants and stepped out of them onto his wounded bare feet.

“Mr. Pearl. Please. He’s just a boy out here in the cold. I wouldn’t have—”

The light swung over to the boy and then back into Pete’s face and stopped him short. The boy stepped gingerly in place on the pine needles, wincing.

“Please, sir. Mr. Pearl. Your son’s got giardia poisoning from drinking out of the streams up here. I figure you and your family might have it too. I have some medicine here in my jacket. Enough for all of you and I can bring some more. In fact, I was hoping that you might let me bring up some oranges. He’s got bleeding gums and we think…”

He trailed off. Benjamin was naked. All knobs and knots, white and gaunt, and he put Pete in mind of creatures that lived in caves, albino spiders and eyeless fishes and newts. A white boy with purple and brown bruises and dirt and pink scar tissue and all those jaundiced whorls, all of the colors so faint in the whelming whiteness of him. He was nacreous, mother-of-pearl, this son of Pearl. And about his thighs and stomach a leopard dappling of liver spots, his penis scotched in his new pubes like a gray node. You thought not of flesh at the sight of his body, but minerals. It was a small astonishment that he was mobile, that this pearlescent boy clutched himself with bony arms.

“This isn’t necessary,” Pete said. “There’s no reason he needs to suffer.”

“You go,” the light, the elder Pearl, said. “You come back, you can expect a fatal wrath. You tell the same thing to the feds.”

“The feds? Nobody’s coming. Nothing like that is going on here.”

“You’ve come, haven’t you?”

The fact that the man spoke settled Pete’s nerves some. He could interact. Pete could do his job.

“I’m just returning your boy. I’m not bringing any trouble. All my job here is to help.”

“You come clothed in weakness, but I know what stands behind you. You insinuate yourself among good people and you rot them from the inside with your diseases and mental illnesses.”

Crazy talk. What to say? You don’t push him. You don’t test him.

“You need to put these clothes back on this boy,” Pete said plainly, astonished at the brazenness of it. Despite the rifle, the light, his fear. “If I thought you were going to make him strip naked in weather like this, I wouldn’t have brought him back at all. And if you think I’m just going to allow this boy to freeze —”

The beam shot into the trees and Pete followed it as it skittered to rest and lanced the black canyon, realizing too late that the man had simply dropped the light and was coming at him. Before Pete could recover his vision, Jeremiah Pearl was on him, had him by the jacket and was lifting him with one arm and pitching him backward to the ground. Pete lay there stunned. His vision a waterfall of sparks. His head rang. Those black angry eyes, even now striking fear into him. Pete threw up his arm helplessly and scuttled backward into a tree.

He now made out Pearl squatting right over him with his rifle in one hand. The man’s breath, body, and beard stunk like a smudge pot.

“I’ll put one in that boy’s brain before I let you have him. That is a solemn fuckin promise.”

He leaned forward. Pete flinched. The man spat on him. Then he whipped around and heaved his naked son up onto his hip and jogged into the brush.

Pete could still hear them moving across the mountainside and the boy sobbing, and Pearl saying something to him, not harshly, something firm and measured. Pete’s impression of it was that they were very scared, as if they’d had the same nightmare and he was assuring the boy that they were awake now, that everything was okay.