Fourth of July Creek (12 page)

“We was promised two-fifty a month for him.”

“The stipend. Yes, they will send a check just as soon as the paperwork is processed and everything. No more than a week or two.”

“What are we supposed to do now?”

“How’s that?”

“How is what?”

“I mean, what are you asking.”

She shot Elliot a look, and he bowed his head. “We’re flat broke is what I’m asking. That kid don’t live on grass is what I’m asking. Elliot ain’t had no shifts since he got out of the National Guard is what I’m asking.”

“And I got until Christmas to decide to re-up or not.”

“He might have to re-up,” she said with a practiced outrage.

“I’ll contact the folks in Helena just as soon as I get back to Tenmile,” Pete said.

She crossed her arms like she didn’t believe any of it.

“Maybe they can put a rush on that check.”

“Maybe they can put a rush on it,” she said to Elliot, and then to Pete, “You ain’t hearing me. We ain’t made of money. Of any money.”

Pete looked over at the garage for some sign of Cecil.

“I oughta go get him,” he said.

“And when you get him, you can put him back in that car,” the woman said.

Pete looked from Elliot to his wife. She turned to go back into the house. Pete raced through the things to say, resisted the urge to ask why the hell they had him come all the way out with Cecil if they were going to commence with this horse-trading bullshit.

He felt his pockets.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I got about fifty bucks in petty cash left from taking him out here. What say I give you that, put a rush on the check—pay my own way back to Tenmile, mind you—and you all write me a check for the fifty, which I’ll cash once you get your check.”

“We don’t use a checkbook,” she said.

“Not for bills or anything?”

“No.”

“Maybe,” Elliot said, “this ain’t such a good—”

“Look,” Pete said. “Fifty is all I got. You can have it.”

The woman shook her head. She and Pete both wiped their hair out of their eyes. Even this seemed to annoy her—that it was windy, that Pete had long hair.

“That kid’s as weird as a three-dollar bill. A couple Christmases ago he’s riding his cousin’s tricycle like he was five. Carrying on like a retard. Wouldn’t give it back when he was told to, neither.”

The door slammed behind her, and the breeze through the cheatgrass filled the silence, and there wasn’t anything else to blow over that would make a sound, not a tree or clothes on the line or anything.

“Maybe this deal ain’t such a good idea,” Elliot said, looking off across the yard. The dog turned in concentrated circles before he set in the dirt. Pete reached into his wallet and pulled out the cash.

“I got forty-eight here,” he said, pressing the money into the man’s hand and folding closed his palm. Elliot took a pack from his front shirt pocket and shook out a smoke and offered it to Pete. Pete took it and Elliot took one for himself and they each lit them and smoked together without talking.

“I’m a see what he’s up to,” Pete said.

He jogged across the yard, past the lunging silent dog. He felt light-headed from the cigarette, and when he got to the doorway of the huge outbuilding he was panting. A rusted combine filled the main area. A snowmobile was off to the side. Cecil sat on a big round of pine. His hand fell gently from his face. He held a filthy red rag in his hand, and a bright red plastic gas can sat hard by. The boy’s huge dumb grin. Eyelids half closed like broken window shades.

Pete stepped into the outbuilding and the aluminum walls all around ticked in the wind like a cooling engine. He spat at a copper pipe, and it toned back at him for a long moment. The boy’s eyes lolled.

“You would love it at the treatment facility,” Pete said.

Cecil licked his lips as he turned toward this voice from the ether.

“They knock you out for days in that place. Just have to kick or hit or bite somebody. Whip out your dick. I know it. I seen it. And when you come to all groggy and fucked-up, they just wait and see if you do it again. And you will. They all do.”

Pete peeked out the doorway to see that Elliot still smoked on the porch of the house. From inside his pocket, Pete removed his tiny flask. Finished and replaced it and approached the boy.

“You know the worst part about treatment facilities, Cecil? The freedom. It’s what they call a paradox, Cecil. No longer being afraid of ending up there is what makes you free to do anything. And all the anythings you can learn. How to fight with a toothbrush or a spoon. All the drugs there are to take. How to molest other kids. You won’t believe the appetites you got inside.”

The kid snorted or choked a little or coughed. From the stump Pete lifted Cecil, who swayed and giggled. His actual breath stank of gasoline.

“You laugh? Go on. But let me tell you a secret. Kids like you, they become the worst ones. Maybe because it’s too late to send in someone your age. I dunno. But something just quits in kids like you and you become bad men. You go in wild ungovernables and you come out bad men.”

Pete balled a fist and slugged Cecil in the gut and as he doubled over Pete grabbed his face with his right hand and hit the boy again just under the opposite rib, dropping him to his knees. On the ground, the boy quietly kecked. Pete knelt.

“You can’t believe it, can you?” he asked. “How could this be, you ask yourself.”

Cecil looked up at him, flushed and gagging. Pete had never laid a finger on a client before. Not once done a thing in anger. And he wasn’t angry now. He was as astonished as the boy.

“All right,” Pete said. “Quit moaning. You’re all right.”

He lifted him up and brushed the pebbles and twigs from both their knees. He straightened Cecil’s T-shirt and met his tearing, enraged eye.

“Your mama doesn’t want you anymore. The Cloningers are good people and you ruined that. Maybe for other kids too. But you have this uncle. So I want to know: will you stay here?”

Cecil balled and unballed his fists. Bewildered and scared and angry.

“Look, I ain’t the one that hit you,” Pete said.

The kid blinked at the naked lie.

“I ain’t,” Pete repeated. “Those punches sure as shit come through me but they were not mine. As meant for you as they were, they were not mine.”

“Fuck you, man,” Cecil whispered.

“I am not just an agent of the state. I’m an agent of your future. I’m a goddamn time traveler. And, I promise you, that little tune-up was just a preview.”

Elliot was lighting another butt off his second or maybe third cigarette when Pete got to the porch. He let the man take the reins of the situation, handing off the boy to him like a half-broke horse. He fetched the boy’s things from the car and followed them through the house as Elliot’s wife crossed her arms and asked why he smelled like gas. Cecil glowered at her, hunched and miserable. Elliot patiently showed Cecil where he would sleep and keep his things, as patient as a man taking his sister’s son, at least as patient as a man who needs money to do such a thing.

The kid might run. Pete might have to find him again and bring him back. You couldn’t know.

Pete crossed the brown and blasted grass. The dog heaved up at him, wheezing through the cut cords of its voice box. The chain went taut. The animal’s pads rose and patted the hard dirt. Its teeth snapped in the air.

Pete sat in the utter quiet of his car but for the fond wind and the ringing of the animal’s chain.

Was Jimmy nice enough with a big harmless face and so excited to see them that he’d ordered pizza and beer and Cokes?

He called them Cokes, but they were 7UPs, said would you like a 7UP Coke, I also have some Dr Pepper Cokes. Rachel was confused and said she’d have whatever kind of pop he had and he looked funny for a minute and checked the freezer and said they could run out for pops or ice cream after dinner.

What were pops?

Popsicles.

And pops were called Cokes?

Or sodas, yes.

Did Rachel and her mother and her mother’s “friend” go out for Popsicles?

They were gonna. They didn’t. They got to talking and talking and Mom laughing at every last thing he said and drinking Lone Stars and him showing them the tub where he kept his turtles and saying he just showered with them or in the truck stops mostly but he was fixin to have to get them an aquarium on account of them staying with him,
staying with him
he called it, not moving in and it was obvious from the get-go.

What was obvious from the get-go?

They weren’t staying.

Why?

Because. You could tell.

How?

He was terrified of them. Him asking did they want to see the inside of his semi-truck, and they all climbed in, and Rachel crawled into the sleeper cab and he turned on the lights and said he’d sleep in the truck, there was a room for Rachel and Beth could sleep in his room, and her mother said he didn’t need to do that, but he went ahead and did it anyway.

Was there a room for them?

There was a room for her and a fold-out couch and a dresser a closet half-full of boxes of Jimmy’s things about a hundred sweat-stained baseball caps and some old calendars of women splayed over machines, and in the middle of the night as she tried to sleep her mother went out to the truck. Rachel pretended to be asleep when her mother came in to check on her and kissed her good night with beery tobacco lips before she went to Jimmy’s bedroom.

What was it like in Waco?

Who knows? They never went anywhere. McDonald’s sometimes. She just watched TV.

What shows?

Love Boat. Fantasy Island.

The Facts of Life.

Venturing sometimes out into the trailer park. Signs of children, a Wiffle ball bat flattened as though hammered into the dirt drive, toddlers toddling, the women watching her grow uneasy under their gaze. She runs away when they ask her is she living at Jimmy’s.

And then Jimmy is gone. A week.

And then when he’s back, they are always
just talking
in the kitchen and she needs to play outside. Then when dinner’s ready they put her in front of the TV and talk in the back room. Then they talk outside in the dark. In his truck. Then Jimmy’s yelling at her mother to go inside, just go inside the damn trailer, it’s enough already.

Mom coming in to wyom in the trailer. Days and days wyoming. Jimmy on the road all the time, treating her like she’s lucky to be here. Goddamn turtles in the tub. This ain’t no Taj Mahal. Jimmy saying what does Beth have to complain about, living high on the hog, rent free and everything.

What about school?

Don’t ask. It’s horrible. Texas girls with big hair and cliques. She’d skip, but she doesn’t know where to go, the girls are awful. Jealous, her mother says.

Of what.

Of your breasts. Of the boys wanting you.

Tells Rachel to come here and let her have a good look. Turns her about and then crushes out her cigarette and hops out of bed in her underwear and opens the closet and Rachel thinks she’s going to get her a shirt or something to wear but she pulls down a shoe box from the back corner of the top shelf and inside is a pistol.

What’s it for?

To sell. It’s an antique. They’re gonna pawn it and have some fun, her mother says.

So they shop together?

Yes, and get their hair and nails done, and they talk about the boys loping through the mall, her mother saying watch now how they are looking at us, the two of us all done up.

But they aren’t looking at her, she’s too old.

Flirting with the shoe salesman now. God.

And does she keep Rachel home now, say for her to cut class and stay home?

Yes.

And do they watch TV all day and go for long drives and was it like they were always just waiting for Rachel to get old enough so they could be friends and tell each other everything?

That’s what her mother says.

And what is the everything Rachel tells, on the porch in the cooling of the evening?

Nothing. Her mother does all the telling. Starting off abstract. The thing about men. The things about men. How Jimmy always wanted her when they worked at the trucking company in Montana, you can tell the way a man will drink half his coffee sitting on the edge of your desk. And leaning over your desk to look at something, but really he’s just trying to get the smell of you.

Does she talk about Pete?

She does. On the two-by-four porch of Jimmy’s trailer, drinking a sweating beer. She says your father was once so affectionate, but when we had you it killed it or started to kill it, something about having children—you’re old enough to hear this now, you’re a young woman and you need to know this now—a child changes the love between two people. A baby makes it harder to keep the fire going. Don’t have a baby, Rachel.

Does she ask her mother if she regrets her?

No.

What does she ask?

Can she have a beer.

And can she?

Sure. Just promise me you won’t have a baby.