Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

And when he was sure Pete heard him, Cloninger slapped the hood and ran inside.

When did she realize that Pomeroy would make a whore of her?

By the time she got back from the Safeway with the dye, a loaf of bread, and a carton of cigarettes. She stopped in the middle of the stairwell, saying to herself you’re so stupid. A heavy door some floors below opened and closed. She left the groceries on the floor. She sat across from the Golden Arms on the curb.

A few minutes later Pomeroy was outside, shivering in his short sleeves, crossing the street right for her.

This was as far as I was gonna look. Yo said to go after you, but I was just gonna walk around and tell her I couldn’t find you.

I wanna talk to Yo.

Fine. She’s right up there. Talk your fuckin head off. I’m going to the bar.

She marched up the stairs and found Yo making a sandwich.

I’m not doing it. Not what you do.

Yo put down the knife and leaned against the counter.

No one asked you to.

I’ll do something else.

Okay.

I’m afraid Pom’s gonna kick me out.

You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to , Yo said.

You don’t sound like you mean it.

Yo shrugged and started eating.

Did she panhandle down along the waterfront and inside the Pike Place Market, a little cup in front of her?

Yes. And the old men who worked those plum spots ran her off, and she found herself talking to a cop at an on-ramp to I-5, asking her what the hell she thought she was doing working that intersection. The cop himself calling what she did work.

So she found herself down between Second and First streets with the other panhandling kids and the young hookers, the old buskers who caterwauled over four-string guitars like outraged leprechauns. People who slunk into the night with huge boom boxes and strutted for one another, watching unbothered when the paramedics rolled up and tended to a freshly wounded girl who screamed and denied herself care until the pigs showed up and forced her into the ambulance.

Can’t they see a girl was raped? Can’t they see her date took a tire iron to her? Why they gotta make her say it? Yo would ask, and Rose would not know the answer or what Yo was expecting her to say.

Did she see when Pomeroy barreled up the block and knocked the shit out of some street rat named Vince for trying to roll Yo five weeks before? Did he come out of nowhere while Rose was hitting up strangers for nickels and dimes and take Vince by the hair and slam his face into a light pole to the surprise and muted evasion of all the civilians coming out of the fish market?

And when the cops were coming, she took him by the hand and moved him off a ways, sitting him on the curb, and then sat herself on his lap, commencing to make out with him so that the cops didn’t think he was the one who’d left the street rat bloody and knocked out there on the ground.

Did Pomeroy ask if she had any money?

She left her cup over on the sidewalk and it was filched and long gone.

I forgot it when I saw you. I just came running over. I was trying to help you.

You know how to help me , he said, and he strode away.

Cecil had been living in a canvas tent with three other boys, digging trails and putting in fence under the direction of a ranch manager who was not employed by Montana Corrections, but rather worked for a friend of the warden and who had for years used the young men at Pine Hills as a private labor force. Those chosen for this detail were considered lucky. Fresh air and three squares. They were offered a cigarette every evening just after supper, and hot coffee, bacon, and eggs at dawn. The property was bordered by a dry creek bed just outside of Box Elder with the Rocky Boy Reservation on the other side. They worked miles from anything except coyotes, gophers, scrub brush, and the few dilapidated trailers and corrugated shacks that dotted the chalky wasteland reservation to the east.

The other three boys were Indians or half-Indians and shared a laconic humor that Cecil couldn’t penetrate, and were in any case not disposed to proffer him any kindness. Cecil had by now acquired a reputation for viciousness, and was considered in the small violent society within the institution to be something of a comer, a real hard case who didn’t give a fuck. The Indians called him No Fuck, he said it so much. Cecil called them stupid prairie niggers, and if they’d been inside, he would’ve been obliged to fight them all. But the boys worked in the hammering summer sun all day chopping at the hillsides with pickaxes and shovels while the ranch manager watched them from the shade of his pickup. By bedtime they promptly passed out, and at dawn their backs ached from nape to asshole and they were sore everywhere else.

There was also a straw boss on the ranch, a kid about their age. He had a contempt for Cecil and the Indians born most likely of a significant wonder of what it was they’d done to wind up here. He supervised their efforts from his horse. He chewed tobacco, spitting poorly so that his blue shirtsleeve was constantly stained. The Indians quietly joked that he wiped his ass with his shirt cuff.

The straw boss, this nephew or some relation to the owner of the property, asked Cecil what the Indians were saying about him. Cecil told him. The next day, the straw boss didn’t chew any tobacco and looked at the Indians like he dared them to say anything. Come late morning, they obliged him with some muttering and small trickles of laughter.

“What did those fuckin Indians say?” the straw boss asked Cecil.

“I didn’t hear,” Cecil said.

The kid rode up and asked them did they want to go back to the prison, he could arrange for that, and when they looked at him with faintly disguised indifference, he rode off to visit the ranch manager, who was dozing in his pickup a half mile away. They all watched the kid ride his horse up to the truck and then lean over and talk with the foreman. Then the pickup started up and crossed the uneven earth to where they stood by a pile of fence posts. It seemed the boom was about to come down, the way the manager exited the pickup and slammed the door and hiked his belt and marched at them bandy-legged and swole up. But the ranch manager was utterly unequipped to deal with bickering boys, was in fact astonished that these kids had any time at all to mess around talking, much less arguing, and it was immediately evident that he was as disgusted with the straw boss as with any of them.

He checked their progress on the fence. He asked Cecil to show him how he was using the posthole digger. Before Cecil could finish, the man snatched the tool from him and demonstrated a few tips toward using it more efficiently, as though that were the source of all the trouble. Then he got back in the truck and watched them return to work.

The straw boss sat on his horse, seething.

That night, the straw boss sent the Indians to bed early. Alone with his one white prisoner, he said his name was Jeremy.

“Do you want to escape?” he asked.

“What?”

“We can take the pickup. It’s mine to inherit anyway,” he whispered over the fire. “All this property belonged to my daddy before he died and my uncle took over. He acts like it’s his, but it’s mine. But he can fuckin have it. I hate it out here. I hate fuckin Indians especially.”

He spat, wiped his lip with his finger, wiped his finger in the dirt.