Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

So they finish eating and get the check, and when Pomeroy goes up to the register, the cashier rings up, like, twice what it should be.

Pomeroy says, Whoa, we had pancakes, two coffees, bacon, whatever. It wasn’t this much.

The cashier says, But the other breakfast. What breakfast , Pomeroy asks and he knows as soon as he says it. A scam.

Pete studied the kid’s ratty face for guile and lies, for some deeper stratagem in his eyes, his pubescent mustache.

“I’m her father.”

“Or you’re some guy who just wants fuckin breakfast,” Pomeroy said. “I don’t give a shit.”

“I am her father !” Pete roared. Whores and Pomeroy’s heavies and johns watching to see what might happen.

“It don’t matter,” Pomeroy said. “I can’t have you out here.”

He hopped off the berm.

“She’s hiding from you,” Pete said. The truth of it startling Pete. “She is. What did you do to her?!”

Pomeroy walked through traffic like it couldn’t touch him. Which it didn’t.

“Maybe she’s hiding from you , motherfucker,” Pomeroy called from the middle of the street.

“That’s a lie! That’s a fucking lie!” He started into the street, but the traffic, it would touch him, and the cars swerved and horns startled him into stopping just off the curb. Pomeroy kept walking, his boys kept watching.

“I’m gonna tune you up, you fuckers! I’m gonna…”

He felt like he was choking. Like he would suffocate.

The very idea of her having breakfast. Giving a hug. He wasn’t suffocating, it was just the story, just the fullness of the pictures of his daughter it put in his head.

According to the map Luke had given him, his brother’s place was a half-day away in the woods in Oregon, not close to anything, a ways up a dirt road that in places had boards laid across muddy washouts.

There was a cabin lime green with moss, ferns feathering all around, the soil black and rich. When he got out of his car, a dog was already coming up followed by an alarmed white-haired coot yanking up his suspenders.

“Is Luke Snow here?” Pete called. He knelt and the dog sniffed him warily.

“It’s just me,” the man said. “You get back in your car and—”

“It’s all right, Theo,” Luke said, coming around the side of the cabin. “It’s my brother.”

Luke clapped the old man on the shoulder, and when he got to Pete, threw his arms around him and hugged him tight.

They went inside and Luke showed him around a cabin that seemed to be partly under construction, partly mid-demolition. The back wall was nothing but a tarp and beyond that a stack of two-by-fours and a pallet of concrete. Luke said they were planning on pouring a foundation but it had been raining and they were waiting for everything to dry out, if it would. In back of the house stood a greenhouse, a tractor, and a half-acre of corn.

“You look good,” Pete said.

Luke took Pete by the arm.

“And you look like shit.”

“Why’s everyone keep saying that?”

“All these bastards must have eyes in ’em or something.”

He took Pete into the greenhouse and showed him the tomatoes and peppers and flowers he had growing. Herbs. A thriving marijuana plant he winked at Pete about, glancing out at Theo in the cabin.

“Old coot has no sense of smell. Not that he’d know weed by smell.”

“So you can fart around him too.”

“Nah, any change in air pressure messes with his trick knee.”

“Well, you can’t have everything.”

“Still. It’s the life of Riley out here.”

“Just you and the handsome octogenarian.”

“Is that a Latin joke?”

“I said he was eighty years old.”

“Damn close.”

They grinned near one another, at the ground. Luke pulled dead leaves from the tomato plant by running his hand along the stem.

“I’m afraid to ask,” Luke said.

“Ask what?”

“Why you’re here.”

Luke took all the news worse than Pete expected. He sat in a bed of moss and dangled his hands out over his knees and spat between his legs.

“This is my fault, my mistakes are still rippling outward. The damage I done isn’t done.”

Pete sat next to him. Pete told him the old man’s death wasn’t anybody’s fault. And Wes, that was more due to himself and Pearl than anything.

He found himself talking more about Pearl, about the strange Pearl boy and how everything went down to get them to this point. How the man had murdered his wife and children and was there any accounting for that.

Then he began to tell Luke about Rachel. To take for instance his daughter. How long she’d been gone, and still had not come home. How strange it was people calling her Rose. Like she was a fiction. How some of this was of her own mistaken volition. How there was always more than one source to any trouble. How it required two parents to let her down. That was his point. Nothing was any one person’s fault.

“No idea where she is?”

“She’s in Seattle. Somewhere. There’s this kid, this twentyish kid. A pimp.”

“You’re not saying—”

“I am.”

“No.”

“I met him. She lived with him. And another girl.”

“No. Not Rachel. She’s a child.”

“The last time you saw her maybe. Now—”

“No.”

“A little girl doesn’t hitchhike from Texas to Indiana to Washington, Luke. She doesn’t survive… out there…”

The thought of her. He stood, staggered off to the trees and threw up. Then his face poured. Tears. Snot. Drool.

When he came back, Luke was lacing up a pair of boots.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go find this motherfucker.”

Night they waited on a bench across the street from the Golden Arms. He thought perhaps he’d missed Pomeroy’s arrival — the front door to the Golden Arms closed behind someone. He watched the apartment window.

“You see that van?”

“The Chevy?”

“Uh-huh.”

They watched it idling a few parking spaces up the street from the front door.

“Been around the block a few times,” Luke said.

“You think it’s him?”

“Let’s watch a minute.”

The driver killed the engine, and after a few moments, four men jumped out. None of them Pomeroy. The men zipped up their coats, looked up and down the street, and then went in a group into the Golden Arms.

“Come on,” Luke said.

They jogged across the street to inspect the van. Pete put cupped hands on the driver’s side window and looked inside. A can of chew. Some empty beers. A baseball bat.

“He ain’t in here,” Luke said from the rear of the vehicle.

They went back across the street to watch the apartment window. The men exited the building and, again looking up and down the street, got into the van.

“What’d you think the chances are they’re looking for this piece of shit?” Pete asked.

“I dunno. This guy ever been to California?”

“Why?”

Luke pointed at the departing vehicle.

“California plates.”

They went to Pike Street and the Monastery but mainly watched the young whores come and go. They went over together and asked if any of them had seen Pomeroy and received in reply only cautious ignorance.

They saw the van again. Luke pointed it out.

“I’m starting to wonder what are the chances,” Pete said, “of that van being here and at that fucker’s apartment?”

“Some coincidence, that.”

“I think someone else is looking for him.”

“Let’s get the car.”

They were parked two spaces back from the van when Pomeroy exited the Triangle Tavern. Even then, as they leapt out of the car, Pete felt a strange pull. Even as Luke ran to tackle him, even as the men from California — from Sacramento, to be precise — spotted Pomeroy and themselves scrambled out the back of their van to attack him, and even as Pomeroy saw them coming at him and turned around and then saw Luke and Pete running toward him as well, even in this moment of high action, Pete still felt, strangely, that this was all some kind of nonsense, that he was missing something quite more important than these Californians now clubbing Pomeroy to the ground with their bats.