Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

“How’s he gonna find me?”

“He has to come out of the mountains first.”

“Where will we go? Where will we live?”

“I don’t know.”

He shoved his hands into his coat and burrowed deeper into it.

“Maybe… I was thinking if you wanted, we could try you living with me,” Pete said, but Ben had already started back for the house and if he heard Pete’s offer, he didn’t care.

Winter was sudden, the snowfall fat and heavy. The judge called Pete to come shovel his roof before the whole thing caved in. Believing that the Monte Carlo entitled him to Pete’s labor. Pete was hot and coatless and in the perfect quiet of the day wondered where everybody went. Then the judge emerged from inside and told him to hurry up, he wanted to get to Tenmile for a drink.

All that remained of the federal presence was a skeleton crew of agents who sipped coffee in the Sunrise and read newspapers they had sent from back east. A fool calling himself a bounty hunter came and chatted up the old boys at the counter, and soon they were mutually flattering one another.

When Pete sat, the waitress asked was the judge joining him for lunch. He told her to bring two coffees just to be safe, and when she did, he stirred in creamer and listened to the bounty hunter tell lies. Pete ate lunch listening to the badinage, paid, and asked the waitress to tell the judge to come get him at his apartment.

He’d just lain down when the judge knocked at his door.

But it wasn’t the judge. Some wild-eyed vagrant stared back at him, clothed in too-large miner’s coveralls. The man’s face was splotched red in places with gin blossoms or bad chilblains under a trucker’s hat.

“Jeremiah,” Pete whispered.

“Where’s Benjamin?”

“Come in.”

“My son, Pete.”

“He’s fine. He’s safe.”

“Let’s go.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Come in and sit down.”

Pete threw wide his door and went and sat at the little table in the middle of the studio apartment.

Pearl stepped inside, closed the door, and inspected the room. Opened the broom closet, the bathroom. Studied the street through the window, flush to the wall. Then pulled down the blinds and sat. He didn’t look like Pearl at all. His viscous naked face shone with sweat. Where it didn’t glow nearly red from what must’ve been a crude and rushed shave with an old razor and creek water was stippled gunmetal blue. The coveralls were coated in vermiculite dust, and he must’ve grabbed them off some miner’s back step or pickup.

“You’re going to take me to my son.”

He produced a.38 from inside his pocket.

“Jeremiah, I know what Sarah did.”

Pearl’s beardless face gave Pete access to a startling gout of disordered thoughts. Anger. Racing fear. Then a brittle conviction. Pearl closed his eyes. A long time. Pete could’ve taken the gun.

“They were sick and you were going for help. She thought they’d been poisoned and she—”

Pearl’s eyes snapped open.

“They were poisoned,” he hissed. “How does every one of them get so sick like that…?”

The thought guttered out like a candle. Like an old lie. They sat facing one another for a long time, as though at a card game that had taken a strange turn, and neither one quite knew the rules. Then Pearl leveled the pistol at Pete’s face, looking almost surprised at this outcome himself.

“Take me to my son.”

Pete thought he’d be scared in such a moment as this, if it ever came. But he wasn’t. Whatever fear nested in him dissipated the moment Pearl lifted the gun.

“Taking you to him, right now, like this,” Pete said, “would go against everything that’s sacred to me.”

“I will kill you.”

“I know what it’s like, Jeremiah. Losing a kid. I know some of your pain. I’d do anything to get Rachel home. So I understand you, but I will not hand over your boy at gunpoint.”

Pete stood slowly and wasn’t killed. And he wasn’t killed when he fetched out the black case and the box and carried them onto the table. Pearl sat with the pistol in his palm and watched Pete open the case, set up the projector, and thread in the film. Pete told him he’d asked his mother-in-law if he could borrow these. Pete didn’t look at Pearl as he turned out the lights, nor when he flipped on the projector. A square of white on the bare wall over his bed and then the children. Out of focus and waving. With Sarah in a green canoe on a stony shore. Little feet off the edge of a dock. Pearl himself in cannonball. Holding a Coke. Holding a cigarette, no, a piece of chalk, that he uses to trace the shapes of his children on the pink wall of a quarry. Their outlines. Their faces so close now. Their very freckles. A campfire, a snake in a bucket, a reaching hand. A motorcycle burns rubber, Sarah waves the smoke away from the baby—

The film slaps the projector. The fan. The glowing white square in the wall.

Pete threads in another film.

A baby bottle. Sacks of candy. A baptism in a flashing river.

Every lovely silliness composed of light, every good coin of time in Pearl’s life.

It is dark out when they’ve finished the box. Pete turns off the projector and the fan quits, leaving them in a novel quiet. Pete opens the shades to let in a little streetlight, winter’s stillnesses.

“You weren’t sure. You argued. As the kids got sicker. You wanted to take them to the hospital.”

Pearl turns his head and looks out the window. He says her name.

Sarah.

That is all. Just her name.

“When you saw your baby boy was dead, you quit arguing, and you went to get a doctor.”

“I wanted, I wanted…” Pearl touches his chest with his fingertips and then lets fall his hand into his lap. “I couldn’t put all those sick kids in the bed of the pickup. They weren’t… they couldn’t… Esther’s neck was so stiff, she couldn’t move her head and…”

Pearl takes a deep breath and a single sob falls out of him like an ingot thudding on the table. He breathes unevenly, like the air won’t take.

“You didn’t think she’d do that, Jeremiah. You never thought that. How would you?”

Pearl is leaning forward, whispering. As though the opinions he has are secrets. He whispers that he still loves her, can you believe that, after what she’s done. That he misses her yet. His helpmeet. His one. That if she walked in the door right now, even now, he’d sit with her and start over with her. Whispers how pathetic that is. How evil. He whispers he misses his children, that of course he misses his children. He’s failed his children. He’d as killed them himself. That he doesn’t deserve them. Because of her. Because of a love that does not see madness.

“My God,” he says. He takes his head in his hands and kneads it like a foreign object, some tumor he must get the feel of, that he might remove with his bare hands.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I were you—”

Pearl looks startled, alarmed to be here. He sweeps himself up. He turns in the apartment, still holding his head like a person in thrall of migraine, someone insane with auditory hallucinations. He leans over to vomit but nothing comes up as he seizes. He keeps bending over into empty retching.

“Jeremiah, it’s okay.”

It is through wasted eyes, red and scalded round, like he’d been all this time staring into a white sun, that Pearl at last sees him. The man is burned through, cauterized, a scar, and for all that, familiar as whatever it is Pete sees in any mirror. Pearl is Snow is himself is everyone.

When he went to look, did he sob there and ask her why? And did he hold her yet?