Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

You see your daughter now in toto, from a vantage not even fatherhood has given you, a new place. You don’t know her trajectory, weren’t meant to know it, because of her or by circumstance. You simply wish her well. A voice in you is saying to keep her safe, warm, to light her way, for her to know little fear and to have bravery and joy.

After a while it occurs to you that this is a prayer.

How did she set up Pomeroy?

She watched for the van and when it came around again, she ran up, startled the driver into rolling down his window, and told him that she would call them at the pay phone on Second and Pike. When she did, it’d be to tell them where Pomeroy was.

Why did she run from her father?

She was surprised ashamed couldn’t go back wanted to die rather than have him see her like this wanted to go south, she had it all set up.

Set up with who?

…

Did she leave Seattle right away?

She went to see Pomeroy first.

Would Seattle General let her?

No, so she waited until the nurse changed shifts, stole a large duffel from one of the rooms, and told the new nurse her name was Rose Pomeroy, that she just rode in from Spokane to see her brother.

Pomeroy had two arms in casts and one leg was elevated, and bandages covered the top of his head. He looked like a purple infant, his face was so swollen up. She pulled a stool over and sat down. He didn’t move when she spoke to him. She put herself up to his ear and said that he shouldn’t have treated her that way. He shouldn’t have made her fear for her life.

Did she hurt him?

She found a place on his arm where the bandages ended just above his elbow and wanted to bite into his flesh, she wanted to gnaw until she tasted blood.

Instead?

She kissed his wrist. A small shudder passed over him.

Did it feel good to still have her kindness?

It did. Very much so.

And Brenda, what became of her?

The girl Pomeroy brought up from Sacramento? The reason they’d nearly killed him?

Yes.

The Sound. They pulled her from the Sound.

Dinner with Spoils and Shane and Yance and sundry women from Butte, from Wyoming, from the university. An artist who smokes and speaks at length of an encounter with Bob Dylan at last pins Pete to the wall and in the small hours fucks him on the stairs. She goes upstairs to douche, his head sloshing from his spent efforts. He tumbles outside, falls, and somehow makes his feet, the sidewalk, his way, almost by feel through the snowy blue and gray tableau, across the Clark Fork River on the Higgins Street Bridge. The Wilma looms up on the north shore of the river like a hewn obelisk. He hollers for Mary, once, twice.

He’s on a bed. A girl or perhaps a woman in attendance. Working loose of her clothes, a satiny fabric, a thunderstorm of sparks as it passes over her head. His nose somehow in her waxy, stubbly armpit.

“The fuck are you doing?”

“Huh?”

“My lips are over here.”

“I’ll pass.”

“You’ll what ?”

“A joke. Come here.”

He is shook.

He is in another room.

He is peeing in a closet.

He is peeing on someone’s bed.

He is peeing into a bottle in a car, missing, pissing on the floor.

He is among many angry strangers.

He is walking on the roadside under a transom of falling stars, the sky streaked in a kind of agony, white grooves, his eyes can’t brake their casters.

Come Halloween he is back in Tenmile, coaxing the judge into or out of a booth, bar crawling in a Santa suit. The judge a laggard in the plush velvet seats of the War Bonnet, holding a sky blue orb of liqueur like a seer’s bauble. A disordered air hangs about him like he might fling the glass at the first offensive target. Or no target at all.

There are stories of hens laying fewer eggs. Things out of place up at lakeside cabins. Unexplained spikes in electric usage. Break-ins where the thieves only make off with boots, ammo, and maps. Near a residence up Question Creek a dog keeps finding pelts, a beaver, a coyote, many rabbits. This same dog is discovered dead near a bowl of sweet lime green antifreeze. A snowshoer comes across a few wet quilts and sleeping bags hung up to dry, stiff and frozen in the cold. A hunter comes across an ember and turns over a hastily buried campfire with his boot. He swears later he felt crosshairs on him. He walks backward twenty feet, turns, and runs back to his car.

All of these are attributed to Pearl. The assumption is that he’s close to Tenmile, slipping into town as needed. Dogs and horsemen from the Department of Corrections are brought in. They find a shelter a couple miles from the highway made of planks and plastic, and they surveil it, but only arrest a pair of poachers who camp there.

After they hand down an indictment for the murder of Wes Reynolds, they begin to buzz the woods where they think Pearl’s hiding with helicopters and C-130s. The people who live in the cabins complain.

Demented Harold goes down to Kalispell with an idea etched on a napkin and comes back with fifty T-shirts that say JEREMIAH PEARL: HIDE AND SEEK CHAMPION 1981. The ATF guys buy out his stock and he comes back with fifty more and another fifty that have a quarter with a hole in it and read RUN, JERRY, RUN!

A throng gathers up at Fourth of July Creek and then a permanent camp of neo-Nazis and Christian Identity and various bands of separatists and sympathizers. There are new protocols for going up that road. There are complaints in the local paper about the federal occupation. Some graffiti. Some leafletting. Some media from the smaller stations in Idaho and eastern Washington. A combative Jewish reporter from New York appears and promptly disappears after a brick goes through his car window. The motels and cabin rentals do brisk business and the Sunrise hires a fourth waitress. Helicopters continue to hazard the crisp night air.

Then there’s trouble.

Snow falls in white floc like the ashy precipitate of a yonder fire, in discrete spirals and helixes on a haphazardry of vehicles, squad cars, and motorcycles on the way to Fourth of July Creek. A man wearing a turtleneck, pince-nez, and a sidearm like some kind of Nazi intellectual runs a Confederate flag up the flagpole on his motor home. A cameraman from a Spokane television station films him from just across the way atop his own news van. And a cordon of police stand down a mostly shouting rabble of unemployed loggers and handymen, denimed teenagers with domes shaved and naked in the vailing snow. They holler. Angry women quote scripture and legal precedent and jeer the cops, calling them pigs and jackbooted Nazis with no irony whatever.

Some one hundred of them, now closing the gap toward the line of police. The cops retreat uphill toward an area cleared of trees, a muddy, rooty, churned-up scar of soft Yaak earth. Behind them, several vans and motor homes constitute the federal occupation of Fourth of July Creek, the source of all this outrage.

Shattered chants and ceaseless invective morph into a nearly simian cacophony of hoots and throaty shrieks as a white cloud of gas composes and insinuates itself into the small crowd that yet churns forward from the rear and backward from the front as the agitators break into two scattering bodies, fanning and choking and wild-eyed, coursing up and down the road. In the close quarters the cops swing batons at the remainder of the mob recalling, strangely, a swath of Hutterites scything a field of grain. A man bursts from the crowd covering his eye, blood running from his ear, and caroms into the parked cars and falls over like a windup figure. The batons keep on until there remain only pockets of conflict. A woman flashes by with a baby pressed to her chest. A cop appears, swings his baton between a biker’s shoulder blades, and sends him to earth with a sad thud. Another cop sweeps down to help beat him.