Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“I’m sure it’s nobody. Kids come up to drink beer and people come to look at the old—”

“This was no kid. Some fucker with a sidearm. You report us to your superiors?”

“Jeremiah, I don’t think I have said more than two words to a superior in a year.”

Pearl scoped the meadow between the ghostly cabins and mercantiles, a roadway once choked with cart, hoof, and foot traffic. Where children had dashed between wagons on their way to the school.

Pearl whipped around.

“Is this it? Is this how you decided to end it?”

Pete opened his face to Pearl, let play every honest naked thought and let Pearl read them.

“Do you really think I want something like that?”

Pearl slung his rifle over his shoulder, told Benjamin to hurry up, and dragged a canvas bag of their things out of the room and down the hall toward the stairs. Pete followed. He needed to talk to him. About the kids being sick. About Ben thinking it was his fault—

Pete stopped on the landing when he realized what Benjamin had been telling him.

That they died.

That the children got sick and died. And Pearl told the boy it was his fault.

Pearl started down the stairs.

“Jeremiah!”

Pearl ignored him.

“Wait a minute!” Pete shouted. “They’re dead, aren’t they?”

He gripped the banister and just the weight of his hand made the rail come free and the balusters helixed away out over the stairs, pieces falling in front of Pearl. Pearl stopped on the steps, his breathing heavy. Pete could see his face in profile — the man wouldn’t turn all the way around — breathing heavy through his nose, like a bull. His jaw moved queerly and his whiskers shook. He was otherwise still.

“Why’d you tell Ben it was his fault?”

Pearl heaved the canvas bag to the bottom of the stairs where it thudded to the wood floor and sent up a plume of chalky dust. Then he descended himself, his footfalls heavy on the steps. Pete went after him.

“What did you do, Jeremiah? Those kids—”

Pearl whipped around and struck Pete’s face with an open palm. The blow threw him back and into the newel at the bottom of the stairs. Pearl hit him again and Pete fell onto the floor. He crabwalked backward as Pearl rained down slaps and then fists, starbursts of pain, klaxons of pain, as Pearl shouted that he would bury all of them for what they did, that he was the Lord’s avenger, that none would be spared His wrath.

Then his face shuddered like a broken engine coming to rest.

Pete’s head toned, an aching bell.

Then Pearl had Pete’s shirt in his fist and he spoke into his face.

“I am dynamite, Mr. Snow. And you, you are a functionary of Satan. You cannot say you were not told. You cannot say that no one told you what you are.”

He punched Pete in the nose and all over his face and all was white and loud and blurred.

The boy was shouting from upstairs. His voice composed itself.

“Papa! PAPA!”

Pete lay flat on his back in the settling dust. He’d been gone a moment, but now he sat up on his elbows, working a diskiltered jaw. His vision mildly quaked. His teeth hurt. His ear pulsed like a burning coal. He tasted blood.

Pearl knelt in the doorway, his rifle aimed somewhere out into Deerwater.

“Hold it right there!” he ordered, his voice clear and plain.

Pete flipped onto his stomach. Christ. What was happening now.

He pulled himself up on the wall and along it and then stood behind Pearl.

His heart sank at what he saw.

Wes.

His brother’s PO had halted in the middle of the exposed roadway between the old buildings. He tilted his head to see better who was yelling at him, but he couldn’t make anyone out in the shadowed interior of the hotel. Pearl trained his rifle on Wes.

“Okay, look,” Pete said steadily to Pearl.

“Shut up.”

“Now listen. That’s my brother’s parole officer.”

Pearl took his left hand from the forestock and yanked Pete forward and out the front door by his belt loop.

“You two get out of here,” Pearl said. “Now. Or I will kill him. And you.”

Pete stood in the sunshine and horseflies. He shielded his eyes.

“Wes!” Pete shouted.

Wes threw out his palms, wordlessly asking what the hell was this. Pete jogged to where he stood about 150 feet in front of him, waving his palms the whole way. Wes craned his neck to look up into the window overhead. Pete glanced up and back. Shit. Ben’s rifle barrel appeared out the window as well.

“Get Ben down from there!” Pete shouted to Pearl as he advanced toward Wes.

Wes reached down and unsnapped his holster.

“Christ!” Pete yelled. “Let’s don’t escalate, Wes.”

“Just tell your brother to come out,” Wes replied.

“My brother isn’t here, Wes,” Pete said when he was close enough to talk plain to him. “These are just—”

“A couple idiots drawing down on an officer of the law. Luke! Luke Snow, you get your ass out here!”

Wes advanced, removing his.38.

“I said to stop right there!” Pearl screamed and the ferocity of it stalled Wes, but only just, and Pete stepped directly in front of him, palms up.

“Please, Wes. Just listen.”

Wes advanced yet. The fool.

“Wes! Stop!”

“You better fuckin stop him, Pete!” Pearl shouted.

“Wes, please! Just hold up a goddamn minute!”

Wes halted a few feet from Pete, who stole a quick look over his shoulder. Benjamin was still at the window. Pearl had moved outside, taken a new position at the corner of the hotel, where he drew a fresh bead on them. Pete again put himself between the two men.

“I’ll put a bullet in the both of you cocksuckers!” Pearl yelled.

“Jeremiah, just let me talk to him!”

Pete stepped forward, just to the left of Wes. Close enough to touch him.

When Pete reached for his shoulder, Wes leaned away, aimed the pistol at Pete’s chest.

“Look, I’ll tell you where Luke—”

Wes shuddered, unevenly, like he was having trouble with a dance step, and lowered the gun. Crows started from an old barn roof. Wes reached around as if to scratch his back and then belched up a long red tongue that Pete still didn’t recognize as blood. Then he did, and the long suctionlike fade as the rifle report diminished away into the trees, the wind in the trees.

Hearing himself say oh shit it’s all right it’s all right.

Seeing himself stepping forward.

Wes pointed the pistol at Pete again, his wide eyes glassy with shock or pain or perhaps something only known to the nearly dead. Then the man’s head yanked backward as if on a string. A red cataract flipped out behind his ear. He toppled down.

Pete spun around. To yell at Pearl to stop. But there was only the boy in the upstairs window, a ghost of smoke there. Pete looked at Wes helplessly. Through the open front door he heard Ben bound down the stairs. He paused at the doorway to look out at what he’d done, and his father yanked him down the hall, toward the back. Another moment and they were headlong to an old broken fence. Pearl ran and the boy chased after.

Hearing himself shouting at them.

Feeling himself neither going after them nor staying put, just moving about within his senseless, ceaseless invective.

Hearing himself asking them what did they do, what did they do. Why. Why didn’t they let him take care of it. He would have taken care of it.

Benjamin stopped at Pete’s garbled screaming and turned around. Pearl had made the fence and seeing that his son had lagged, ran back and plucked Ben by the ear and led the crying child in front of him and fairly barked at him until the boy began to run.

All was quiet save the gentle aspiration of the man on the ground. Pete went to where he lay faceup, his eyes partly shut like someone squinting at a menu. His plaid shirtfront black with a saucerful of blood. He called to the Wes within the body, and inspected him to see what could be done. A good portion of the man’s skull and brains were gone. Yet he breathed. Wet, thin breaths that spoke to the suddenness and inappropriateness of his death stealing over him.