Fourth of July Creek (13 page)

A
few weeks of Indian summer gave way to a sudden chill, snowfall that melted in the last warm days of the year. A moose wandered into Tenmile. The town’s dogs surrounded it and not a few of them got kicked and nearly gored. The sheriff shot it dead in the middle of town.

There was a fistfight in the War Bonnet that spilled into the street and ended when Ike’s glass eye popped out and disappeared into the alley. He came back an hour later with a .22 and shot the miner he’d been fighting in the back of the head. The man was two days dying.

A few other deaths. An old woman collapsed in the IGA bathroom. Indian Harold had a heart attack in his apartment, his hot plate glowing a malevolent red for two days. When they found him, the plastic tile on the wall nearby had melted and the underside of the cupboard was black as burnt toast. Lucky the whole building hadn’t gone up, they said.

The weather turned fully cold, highs in the thirties, and Pete got his firewood finished and put plastic over the windows, and weather-stripped the door nice and tight with shims and half a roll of duct tape.

A bear had tried to break into his place, tore up the window over the kitchen sink pretty good. He could see a little rust-colored blood and tufts of black fur in the sash, on the porch posts. A problem bear. When Pete opened the front door, chipmunks dashed about and vacated through the new kitchen egress. A box of granola on the counter sat blasted open like a firework pagoda. He found his other stores in the cellar under the house unmolested.

The only other curiosity was his loose change: cooking dinner one night, he accidentally tipped his tin cup of coins into the sink and noticed an inordinate number of coins with holes in them. Just like the nickel he’d gotten at the Seven Feathers Truck Stop. He sorted out ten of them, recalled that he’d half-noticed the phenomenon in his comings and goings, but only just now, turning them all over to the obverse side, did he see the Lincolns, Jeffersons, Washingtons, and FDRs all shot through the temple. Dead presidents. He wondered how he’d come by so many.

A pickup pulled in behind his car and disturbed these speculations. His brother Luke. Pete went out wiping his hands squinting into the headlights. The engine died.

“Just get back in the truck and go,” Pete said.

A chickadee fee-beed lonely in the rising dark, and a breeze kicked up.

“I don’t got a single thing for you.”

It wasn’t his brother’s shape limping from the darkness.

“Who is it?” Pete asked. He tugged a hatchet out of a round of pine on the porch.

“It’s just me, Pete.” His brother’s parole officer faltered into the light. “Give me a minute.”

His name was Wes Reynolds. His bitter, hardscrabble people had come from Minnesota, before that, Sweden, settling in Choteau where he grew up, a year behind Luke in high school. Wes and Pete and Luke Snow had been friends, or friendly, mainly by necessity, as Wes lived near the Snow spread west of town. He was always on the porch when they finished dinner, waiting for them. Saturday mornings too. He told outsized lies about his father’s whereabouts, vehicles the man allegedly drove, and missions he’d been assigned. It got to where he annoyed even their mother. Pete and Luke dared him to eat and climb all manner of things. The summer he broke his leg, they were relieved to be rid of him, and after Luke started high school, he quit coming around. He had a child with a woman who left him inside of two years, taking the boy with her. He still wore the wedding ring.

Pete fried burgers in a skillet as they completed their pleasantries. Wes wore a cylinder cast from his shoulder to his wrist, a neck brace, and turned his whole torso to look around. He ate with his good arm, and they listened to one another chew, Wes all but wincing with the effort. He caught Pete lingering on the bloody bloom on his eyeball and the yellow contusion around the socket.

“Where’d you and my brother fight?” Pete asked.

“Wasn’t no fight,” Luke said, swallowing. “More like an ambush.”

“What happened?”

“He was shitfaced at the Buttreys, holding up the line. Harassing this high school sophomore to let him buy beer with a check. Even though they don’t take his checks and everyone in town knows he ain’t supposed to have beer as part of his parole.”

“Christ,” Pete muttered.

“And everybody knows I’m his PO. I’m supposed to stand there? I’m supposed to worry about embarrassing him? Or getting crosswise of the almighty Snows?”

“I hear you.”

“He’s been by.”

“No.”

“It wasn’t a question.”

Wes extracted and extended a pointer from his shirt pocket.

“He came by after.”

“After what?” Wes asked, probing under his cast for the spot that itched.

Pete tried to figure out how to put it.

“After your run-in.”

“Say where he was headed?”

“I wouldn’t let him tell me.”

“Why?”

“In case someone come looking.”

Wes smiled revealing a chipped front tooth. Pete took up their plates and pulled the coffeepot off the stove and brought over two cups.

“Milk?”

“Nah.”

He poured them some coffee and nodded for them to go outside. He rolled cigarettes and by the time they were smoking the coffee had cooled off enough to drink.

“Look, Wes, I’m really sorry. But Luke . . . he’ll turn up sooner or later. He always does.”

“It’s not the same back in Choteau,” he said. “People ain’t as impressed with the Snows as they used to be.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it ain’t like high school. Meaning the cops aren’t gonna just tell Luke to go home and sleep it off. Fucking meaning”—Wes stepped off the porch and twisted awkwardly to see Pete around the beam—“when I catch him up here, you’re going down for abetting.”

Wes articulated himself into his pickup and rattled down the road. Pete went inside. He stood in front of his bulletin board empty save the map and post office box his brother had written down for him. He took it down, folded the paper, and put it in his wallet.

He investigated a family in a trailer park outside of Columbia Falls. A cadre of thieves who edged about the walls of the trailer like suspicious feral cats. Audibly sighing at his departure.

He stopped in town for gasoline, parked the car, and walked to stretch his legs. He could eat. The streets were empty, scarcely a person at business or play. He wondered was it Sunday. He passed a squat building made of stones and mortar from the city’s founding or nearly so and then a butcher’s shop with brown tile walls that were warm to the touch from the sun. The butcher notched up an eyebrow at Pete going by, switched the toothpick to the right side of his mouth. The Columbia was just up ahead, across from a chapel. He hastened up the street. The red vinyl upholstery on the inside of the door. The cleavage entryway of smoked glass bricks. He doubted there existed a bar between Tenmile and Choteau he hadn’t been in. Brisk business took place inside.

Here’s the church, here’s the steeple
, he mused.
Open it up, where are the people? Across the street in the bar. Open it up, there they are.

Elbow to elbow with some old boys at lunch. The man next to him finished up and left, and a sot dropped in at Pete’s side, alcohol fumes pouring off him. The bartender set both palms on the bar and asked the drunk did he want him to come out from behind the bar or did the drunk want to leave of his own volition. The man drew a circle on the bar with his finger, pounded it with a fist by way of a hex, and spun off his stool and out the door.

Pete held up his beer glass.

The bartender returned with a fresh lager mildly bubbling. Pete dug crushed bills and coin money from his jeans. Counted out the amount with his index finger, stopped and picked up a quarter. There was a hole bored through Washington’s temple.

“You seen these?” Pete asked. “I got a bunch of these with holes in ’em at home.”

“May I?”

Pete slid it over, and the bartender held it up, handed the coin back to Pete, and went and said something to a fellow a couple barstools down. An old boy leaned forward to get a look at Pete, then rose from his stool and waddled over, removing a tucked-in napkin from his plaid shirt.

“This is Gene,” the bartender said.

“Can I see?” the man asked.

Pete handed the coin over. The man held it up to the neon light on the window and squinted at it. He showed some feature of the coin to the bartender. They murmured like a pair of diamond merchants.

“Give you three dollars for it,” the man said.

Pete laughed.

“It’s a quarter.”

The man set the shot-through quarter on the counter and reached into his back pocket for his wallet. Three old dollar bills that fell over his fingers like pieces of faded denim.

Pete covered the coin with his palm.

“Well, let’s just hold on,” he said. “You start out at three, maybe I can get you up to five.”

The man sighed out his nose and had a little trouble negotiating the old dollars back into his wallet.

“I’m just joshing.” Pete slid the coin toward Gene. “You can have it.”

When Pete wouldn’t take the man’s three dollars, he handed them to the bartender for Pete’s tab. He removed a small cloth pouch from his jeans, and dropped the coin inside.

“How many of those you have?” Pete asked.

The bartender and Gene shared a quick knowing glance, and then Gene emptied the little sack onto the bar. Dimes, nickels, pennies, quarters, all of them shot through.

“That’s about eight bucks in broken money,” Pete said.

“I’m of the opinion that these are a warning.”

“A warning of what?”

The man scooped the coins back into the pouch.

“Trouble.”

“From?”

The man looked up from the pouch at Pete.

“The man who made them.”

“Who’s that?”

“Goes by the name of Pearl.”

“Not a Jeremiah Pearl,” Pete said.

“You met him too?”

“Yeah. For my work.”

“Me too.”

“No shit.”

The man nodded, exchanged another silent communication with the bartender.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Pete asked.

Gene pulled closed the pouch, said maybe they should go to his shop instead.

The early afternoon light swept in the open door and then the fluorescents lit the place in full. A rack of leather jackets, stacks of speakers and stereo components and turntables, a display case of bone-handled knives. One wall was given to taxidermy, deer and whole foxes in posed dioramas with dusty eyes and spiderwebbing among the antlers. There were scimitars. Columns of paperbacks. A Nazi flag among other flags.

Gene explained that he’d been in the pawn business thirty years, inherited the building from an uncle. He ducked into a back room, returned grunting with several large plastic tomes, which thudded on the glass.

“What are these?” Pete asked.

The pawnbroker loped out from behind the register with his key and locked the front door, and pulled the roller blind all the way down. He took a stool behind the counter. He looked mildly insane. He had the same strange gray eyes of certain huskies or goats. He explained to Pete that he’d already told all of what he was about to say to the local cops, but that nothing had come of it.

“Was his boy with him?”

“Outside. He come in once to say he saw a police car, and what did he want the kid to do should the cop come back. His old man told him to wait inside by the door.”

“How’d the kid look?”

“Compared to the old man, about near a regular human being.”

“His clothes? You mind if I write this down?”

Gene nodded it was fine, and Pete pulled his small notepad from his jacket. Helped himself to a pen from a cup on the glass display case.

“The clothes was probably cut down for him. Big baggy man-pants cinched up with a belt, you know. He had on a down vest, I remember. One of them thermal underwear shirts. He looked okay, I guess.”

T
HE PAWNBROKER TELLS.
Pete writes. That Pearl looks at the coins in the cases and not seeing what he wants, asks does the pawnbroker have any buffalo nickels. Gene fetches out a box of them he has in a drawer, more valuable coins than those under the glass. Gene sets the box on the counter and Pearl paws through the coins, nodding. Pleased. Asks does he have any more. Gene says nah, but they aren’t too rare. That Pearl can go into any pawnshop, there’s probably a box under the counter just like this one.

Pearl says he’ll take them, but only if Gene gets some more. Says he can’t be going around to pawnshops all over the place.

“What did you say?”

“I say,
Sure, fine, whatever
. He’s stinking up the place. I just want him out.”

“I see.”

“But here’s the queer part: he pays in gold. From a little satchel of Krugerrands and Canadian Maple Leafs.”

“He doesn’t have any cash.”

“He don’t
want
any cash. Won’t let me make change on the Krugerrands.”

“What’s he say?”

“That he’ll take his change in buffalo nickels. When I get more.”

“And it’s weird to trade rare gold coins for less rare buffalo nickels?”

“Yes.”

“He give a reason?”

“Well, hold on and let me get to it.”

“Sorry.”

P
EARL’S BACK A FEW
weeks later. Gene has another box of buffalo nickels he’s managed to pick up. No kid this time, Gene doesn’t ask. Pearl doesn’t reek as bad or maybe Gene’s just expecting it. But this round it’s like Pearl’s had a couple pots of coffee. Pacing around the place, idly fingering the pawnbroker’s wares, expounding. About money. The history of money. Starts all the way back at the Byzant, the original gold coin. Does the pawnbroker realize how much gold in circulation is as old as that Byzantine coinage, Spanish doubloons, Aztec sovereigns.
Imagine this.
Seems to wait to see if the pawnbroker does, in fact, imagine it.