Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

How did she get busted?

A date pulled up in a Plymouth and didn’t lean over to roll down the window. The rain was small and persistent. She climbed in. He had a crew cut and was extremely nervous.

You want a date, baby?

Yes. He looked at her and his brows creased. How much?

Eighty. She’d never done this, but she figured she’d pocket the difference. Fuck Pomeroy. You see that parking lot over there. Just pull in. We got people who keep an eye out there, so it’s safe.

He swallowed, and put the car in gear, stalled out, restarted the car and pulled into traffic. She noticed Pomeroy didn’t have anyone on the corner, but she didn’t tell the date to drive on. She didn’t want to spook him. She wanted the sixty goddamn dollars for herself.

He parked. What do I get for eighty? He killed the engine.

You get off. In my pussy.

He sighed. Okay , he said, and reached into his coat for his wallet.

It’s raining like a mother out there , she said, unbuttoning her coat.

What was he holding when she turned to him?

A snub-nosed.38. She started to speak, her door flung open, and she was yanked so hard out of the car that she flew out onto the lot.

They put her in cuffs, and then in a hard plastic backseat of the police cruiser, a small processing room with the spastic overhead fluorescent panel, and now with this detective and his stubble and acrid coffee breath and sidearm, and this undercover greenie who was getting ribbed by his fellows— Christ, Cunningham, did you really draw down on this poor kid? — and then in the booking room, her purple fingertips, this oversize coarse pink jumpsuit that nearly fell off her shoulders, these paper slippers…

Was she surprised that no one was mad?

Yes. She expected someone to yell at her, this was the first time the cops had her in custody, but they simply directed her from one room to another, one holding cell to another, until they put her in a van with about seven similarly reserved girls and shipped her to Pioneer House.

Was she aware of the charges against her?

Yes. Prostitution.

Did she wish to make a statement at that time?

Frustratingly no. There’s nothing in the file.

Did she give her DOB and her POB and her next of kin?

No. She volunteered nothing but her name. Rose Snow. She was a whore. Did they get it? They could put her in jail for all she cared. They could go ahead and shoot her in the head.

For.

All.

She.

Cared.

Despite seventy years of abandonment to the weather, to eaves-high snow and the ceaseless drizzle and storm and winds that made a deadfall of so many trees, many dwellings and public houses in the ghost town of Deerwater remained upright all these years, if not safely habitable. The chinking had fallen from all the cabins where summer wasps nested in their coolnesses, and every building shone in the sunlight the otherworldly silver of sun-bleached pine, all the exposed woodwork napped in a gray velvet. But the buildings stood in testament to the hardy, hurried skill of the people who built them.

The town had burned down twice in its short history and both times was rebuilt in roughly the same configuration, running straight up the narrow gut of the ravine. There was a graveyard. There was a gallows. A jail dug into the hillside that was still locked shut with a rusted padlock.

The two-story clapboard hotel was the most sound and true of all the several dilapidations, and it was here where Benjamin Pearl watched a spider gingerly wrap a struggling bluebottle fly, expertly swaddling it in silk and tucking it in the corner among the others, as in a nursery. This spider’s pantry.

“Your turn, man,” Pete said.

“I’m a boy.”

“Term of endearment. Go.”

Benjamin looked at the board and lifted a black checker, moving it forward to where Pete could jump it.

“You sure about that?”

“Is it okay if we don’t play no more?”

“I was starting to wonder if we’d make it to a dozen games.”

“Will you stay awhile, though?”

“Yeah, sure.”

They were on the floor. A few iron bed frames with mattresses of straw and striped canvas ticking were jammed unevenly into the corner, and the Pearls’ things were spread out on the pine that was scored and scuffed with the boot marks of hundreds of long-dead men. A flashlight and Bible lay near the opening of Pearl’s sleeping bag. Collapsible plastic cups. The toothbrushes Pete had gotten them. A small camp stove and cans of food he’d brought stood in a neat stack along the wall. MINA, MINA, SHEKEL, HALF-MINA etched into the door.

“Why didn’t you two each take a bed?” Pete asked.

“Centipedes all in them. I like centipedes fine in the daylight, but I don’t care for them crawling on me when I’m asleep.”

“Fair enough.”

“There’s earwigs in ’em too and they’ll get into your brains.”

“Is that right.”

“Yup. It’s completely true.”

“I told your father, I’d clear out if you two wanted to come back to your house.”

Benjamin stood. The spider sat motionless in the middle of its web. Benjamin touched one of the spokes of it and the spider held on, but when Ben plucked it again, the spider sped to the edge, along the sill, near his food.

“We won’t go back. We’re cast into the wilderness.”

“And why is that exactly?”

Pete smiled as though he was teasing, but Ben watched the spider.

“What is it, Ben?”

He sniffed.

“They was all like in the cartoon. That’s when I knew.”

“You’re losing me, kid.”

“Paula was the sneezing one, and Ruth was silly and couldn’t move her arms right. And Jacob was like the one that was laughing all the time. And Rhea was grumpy. Just like in the cartoon.”

“The cartoon? What cartoon?”

Pete slid along the floor to where he could see Ben’s face. The boy gazed through the smoky glass or at the mottled surface of it.

“Ethan was sleepy. Mama couldn’t get him to wake up, and he was the littlest.”

“They were sick?”

“He did it to punish me.”

“Did what? What did he do?”

“Papa’s coming.”

Through the smoked translucent glass they made out the shape of Pearl hurrying up the still-rutted main street overgrown with bear grass. As he got closer, they could see his jaw moving like he was talking to himself. Pete wondered did they spend a lot of their time just muttering near one another. Did they even hear one another.

Pearl made the hotel steps two at a time to the second floor and shoved through the single-hinged door in a hurry, in a fury.

“Up! We’re getting out of here,” Pearl said.

“What’s going on?” Pete asked.

Jeremiah strode into the room, took his rifle from where it leaned against the wall, and went over to the window Benjamin had just been looking through. The boy had begun packing. Pearl rubbed the glass, but the stubborn accumulation of dust seemed to have melded permanently to the window in all these years and the view was warped and dim as through a glass of beer. He knocked out a few panes with the rifle butt with efficient pops. The boy hesitated, and Pearl sensed it immediately.

“I said pack it up, Ben.”

The child gathered their cups and shoved their loose clothing into their sacks and put on his coat and his boots.

“There’s someone coming,” Pearl muttered, scanning the overgrown ghost town, poking his head out the window to see left and right. “What I get for telling you we were here.”