Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

The cameraman, from atop his van, captures it all.

There is a thwarted bombing in Libby — a patrolman stops a Truppe Schweigen member with a box of pipe bombs on his pickup bench seat — and then an unthwarted bombing at the federal courthouse in Spokane.

There are death threats, and every so often Pete must evacuate his office and stand outside in the cold with Judge Dyson muttering and complaining as the meager Tenmile police sweep the building. It gets to be silly.

One morning a madman tosses a stick of dynamite into the post office. The windows blow out and a postman is killed, and another man stumbles outside burned and bleeding and naked save the tops of his overalls that hang on him like a denim bib. He staggers across the street holding his insides inside. He makes the courthouse lawn just in time for Pete to exit his office and see what’s the matter. Then he pitches over, smoking, dying from his injuries on a thin crust of rime and old snow.

People appear from all over, go to the man. A woman runs to her car and comes back with a quilt, and a doctor arrives, addresses the man’s injuries for a time, and then covers his head with the blanket. The shock is palpable. Weeping. The brick post office is still somewhat afire but only somewhat, as a volunteer fireman puts out most of it with the Sunrise Cafe’s kitchen fire extinguisher. A squad car races up the street, presumably hard after the terrorist. The mayor and the judge consult with the chief of police not twenty feet from the dead man. Clerks and secretaries hold closed their coats, waiting to be told what to do.

Pete crosses the street to the Sunrise. Old boys stand outside smoking, darkly delighted that something so outrageous has occurred. Even they are doing their part, comparing it to the bank robbery of 1905, contextualizing this event in the history of the place, making the first stabs at rendering it for all time.

Pete sits in a booth by the window. His finger idles around the tabletop a nickel with a swastika in it when the waitress at last comes over with a water, a place setting, and a menu. She observes the paramedics loading the dead man’s body into an ambulance.

“I heard he’s dead.”

“I believe that’s right.”

“I could just spit.”

“I bet you could do better’n that.”

She has had a hard life — you can tell from the way her face has aged, the frowns etched there — but Pete’s remark elicits an endangered smile. He’s recognized her, something deeply true about her, and it is a pleasant thing to be seen and for her toughness to be acknowledged.

“Yeah, I could do better than that. What’ll you have, hon?”

Pinkerton was sitting in a wooden chair outside of Pete’s office. He had his hat in his hand. He stood when Pete came in.

“We got the boy. I want him to see you when he wakes up.”

He’d been standing in the middle of the highway. The semi driver slammed on his brakes and the trailer skidded around parallel to the cab, but the whole assemblage managed to stay on the road and halt just a few yards in front of Benjamin. He was in a fever. He didn’t seem to recognize he’d almost been crushed by tons of firewood, rubber, and metal. The trucker chewed him out, then saw how sick he was and took him to the hospital in Libby.

The ATF found a lean-to shelter in the catface of an enormous larch. A burn scar tall enough to stand in, not far from the highway. A small cook fire had burned itself out. There was a sleeping bag, a sack of cooked rice, and a thermos full of an awful-smelling tea. The boy’s rifle stood at hand.

The ATF set up a perimeter to wait for Pearl. It snowed and they saw things all night, none of them materializing into the man. Come morning, it felt palpably obvious he’d been spooked and wasn’t coming back. They left Pearl a note that they had taken his son. Pinkerton said he went up there personally and shouted into the trees the same thing.

Still. It was still.

A fat deputy sat backward on a folding chair reading a Billy Graham paperback. Pinkerton showed the deputy his badge, and they went in. Benjamin slept on the hospital bed. An IV of clear liquid ran to his arm. There were scabs everywhere on his body, small cuts from running through the brush, clambering up clattered rockslides, and sleeping under cedar. His eyes moved under their lids and cracked as they flashed partly open. He murmured hoarsely. Pete touched his hair, and the boy tilted his face toward the contact. The heart’s living tropism. His eyes stopped moving as his dream ceased or the pictures on his eyelids turned pacific.

The deputy called Pinkerton to the door and he spoke with some other agents outside.

Pinkerton came back in.

“Someone took shots at our HQ downtown.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“I don’t know. I gotta go.”

“That wasn’t Pearl.”

Pinkerton pulled his cap onto his head.

“But I wish it were,” he said.

Pete sat by Ben for hours. Logging trucks from the highway running their Jake Brakes were the only sound that disturbed the room. Pete slept too, his chin resting on his chest. He dreamed as well. A diamond turned on his forehead. A tree. He was a landscape. He was covered with trees. He was the Yaak. He was Glacier. He was all the tremendous valleys of western Montana, cloud shadows grazing over him. Storm fronts broke against his nose. He was sparsely populated. He was a city. He teemed with highways and lights. He dreamed he had a sister, a beautiful girl, and in the dream he reasoned out that the girl was Rachel and what he was actually dreaming was a spirit inside of his, a sibling she’d never had, a son. He dreamed that we all contain so many masses and that people are simply potentialities, instances, cases. That all of life can be understood as casework. That DFS was a kind of priesthood.

The boy’s eyes were open.

They grinned at one another.

“Hey, kid.”

“Pete,” Benjamin said.

Pete sat up. The boy’s eyelids sagged closed again and then opened partway to look at him.

“How’s it sleeping in a real bed?”

“Is Papa here?”

“Not now.”

“He didn’t come back. He told me to stay because I was sick. But I got scared something happened to him. Is he here?”

“He’s fine. Look, it’s still dark out. Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

The boy turned his head and the snowfall just outside the window was hundreds and thousands of little turning white lights.

“He said he’d come back, Pete, but he didn’t. I thought I had the same cold as Mama and Esther and Jacob and everybody.”

“You just have a fever. Pneumonia. You should rest.”

The boy took a deep breath and sat up.

“I feel better.”

Pete went and poured him some water from a pitcher on a tray table and gave the boy the glass. Ben sat with it in his lap, looking vaguely at a spot on the blanket.

“You guys were on the run a little bit, huh?”

A change deepened the child’s expression, as though what was on his mind was itself difficult to think.

“Were you scared? There were helicopters and things. Dogs. It’s scary to—”

“Did that man die?”

Pete cast about for something else to talk about, but didn’t find anything.

“Yeah.”

“Papa was mad at me for it. But that man was going to shoot you, Pete. Right?”

“You saved me, Ben. That’s right.”

“He was bad?”

“Yeah.”

“So I’m not in trouble for it?”

Pete looked over his shoulder at the cop just outside. The man licked his finger and turned a page. Pete wondered should he tell the boy. Should he explain how he’d blamed his father for the man’s death.