Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“Well, there’s no telling where she is now.”

“Surely you can find out. A file?”

“The letter,” Butler said, thrusting out a large palm, fine long fingers. Pete gave it over. Butler sat at his desk and opened a thin drawer and plucked out a pair of reading glasses and took a good deal of time situating them on his face. He started to read, took the glasses off, cleaned them, put them back on, and resumed reading.

“I asked you to call.” Butler put his finger on this instruction in the letter, as if he would have Pete read the passage again.

“I know. I did. There was no answer.”

“I don’t work Mondays.”

“Right.”

They looked at one another. A realization crept over Pete that there was something deeply amiss with this man.

“I asked you to call so I could avoid having you take a trip if she wasn’t here—”

“Can you just tell me if she’s in your facility or not?”

“We have more than one facility, but none of them would have her for this long.”

“Well, where is she?”

“She could have had a court date and then would be in the juvenile facility. She could have been sent to one of the treatment centers. I have so many cases, you see.”

“Yes—”

“Or a long-term facility.”

“Okay, but—”

“Or she may have been released to an adult guardian in the community—”

“Norman,” Pete said, covering his eyes.

“Yes?”

“I don’t expect you to know where she is off the top of your head.”

“I’m just trying to tell you the possible outcomes, Mr. Snow.”

“Is there a way we can find out the actual outcome?”

Norman sighed out of his nose and stood. Pete followed him around the corner and down a row of cubicles to a locked door. He thumbed through several dozen keys on several interlocked key rings for several minutes. When the door swung open, he flipped on the light and stepped aside. A card table strained under the weight of hundreds of manila folders between two walls of filing cabinets.

“Her file is there,” Butler said.

Pete took off his coat and set it on the floor, there was nowhere else in the smallness of the space.

“There’s coffee in the break room,” Butler said.

Two pages. She’d given her name as Rose Snow. It made him think of blood, of someone dying in the snow. She’d been arrested for prostitution.

Prostitution.

He scanned the rest of the document in a fugue, without affiliation to what it described.

It was the only way.

“What did she need to go to the clinic for?” Pete asked.

Butler looked up at Pete and then took the file and read it over with his glasses and handed it back.

“It doesn’t say.”

“I know it doesn’t fucking say. Who’s this Yolando Purvis you released her to?”

“Purvis…,” he said, chewing on his pen. “Why do I remember her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s an address here, I’ll just go—”

“Let me see.”

Pete handed the file over. Again with the fetching of his glasses from his shirt, the reading. Pete wanted to punch him in the face, he was so slow.

“Ah, right,” Butler said, nodding to himself like he’d figured out a portion of a crossword.

“What is it?”

“The Golden Arms is a young-adult transition facility. A place we have set up for street kids so they have an address, so they can get a job, et cetera.”

Pete pulled on his coat.

“You should go there,” Butler suggested.

No one answered when he knocked on the apartment door, so Pete waited in the hall. A wallpaper of repeating roses. A fire extinguisher behind glass. The powerful odor of something canned and meaty cooking on a hot plate.

No one came by, so he went out to a cafe around the corner. He ordered a brothy chowder of rubbery seafood that turned in his stomach. He watched through the bleary windows for her.

There was no answer at the apartment again. He searched for signs of Rachel, as if she’d have left behind a clue or written her name on the wall for some reason. As if she’d have left a trail of bread crumbs. Fairy tales bore troubling resonance now. Wolves and dark forests. He wondered was she scared, how scared.

His chest clenched around his heart and it wouldn’t release, and for a few moments he thought he would faint right there in the lobby, his rib cage slowly suffocating him like a great bony hand. He sat on the hall runner worn to a napless gray and swallowed deep breaths. Told himself things he would tell a client. That the anxiety would pass. That all was not as it seemed. Not as dire.

But it was as dire. Exactly as dire.

In the lobby, he thought about calling Beth.

He didn’t want to talk to her.

He didn’t want to be alone.

He dialed.

She answered and he told her where he was.

“I’m outside her place, waiting for her to turn up.”

“Where?”

A couple came in the front door of the apartment and crossed the lobby. A guy with shoulder-length black hair and a short and overweight vaguely Asian girl. They went up the stairs together. The only people he’d seen come or go.

“Seattle.”

“Seattle.”

She’d begun to softly sob.

“Is she okay?”

He thumped the receiver against his forehead.

“Is she okay?”

“Yes. This place is nice. She’s living with some people.”

“What people?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“How did you find her?”

He explained. Partially. Nothing about Rachel’s arrest.

“I’ve been praying for her every night, Pete. He’s been protecting her.”

She began to cry again. They were quiet a few minutes like this, him listening to her cry. He felt like bawling as well, but he was too keyed up watching the door. For her to walk in any minute.

“Why did you leave, Pete?”

“When?”

“When you were here. In Austin.”

“It… was time to go, Beth.”

“You should’ve come to church with me.”

“I’m gonna find Rachel. And then I’m gonna take her home.”

“With you?”

“She can live in Tenmile with me or Missoula or wherever she wants.”

His head swam, and he had to sit in the phone booth with his head between his legs.

“I keep feeling like I’m going to faint. My hands are tingling.”

“Pete?”

“Yeah.”

“I want to tell you about Jesus, Pete.”

He blew out long breaths.

“That’s where we lost our way, Pete. We gotta get right with Jesus.”

“Okay, Beth.”

“Keep your heart open.”

“Wide open, Beth.”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

He set the receiver on top of the phone. Concentrated on his breathing.

RACHEL NEVER SHOWED UP. This did not prevent him from depicting it.

She comes in shaking off an umbrella.

She comes in shivering cold.

She comes in with someone else.

Then she sees Pete. She starts to cry. He goes to her.

Or she runs away. He runs her down, outside. She cries. He has her.

All night he sat there. People came and left, none of them her.

He tried the apartment again on the chance that she’d come in a back way. He was startled to see the black-haired kid that he’d observed in the lobby with the other girl answer the door. Up close it was apparent that his hair was dyed. He had the face of a skeptical cartoon rat.

“I’m looking for Rachel Snow,” Pete said.

The kid was twenty, early twenties.

“Sorry, man, wrong apartment.”

He started to close the door, but Pete stopped him.

“Rose. She goes by Rose.”

The kid wore no shirt, and a few bright scars rose on an otherwise immaculate pale torso. Pete could hear the girl at something inside, running water. There were candles. Cigarette smoke.