Fourth of July Creek (24 page)

“He’s a fickle little son of a bitch,” he added.

“You all right?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

She looked at her watch.

“Go,” he said plainly. “Whatever you got to do. I’ll come by some other time.”

“It’s just that I was supposed to meet some people.”

“It’s all right.”

She searched his face. He asked her what for.

“I’m getting a weird energy off you.”

“Look, there’s nothing I’m wanting or not saying, okay? I just came by is all.”

She tugged off her gloves, removed her coat, and sat.

The waitress came, and Mary ordered a piece of apple pie. Pete shook his head no when the waitress looked at him to see if he wanted anything to eat too. It had begun to snow. Just a thin powder as though from a nearly empty shaker.

“I thought you had to meet some people.”

“You’re sad,” she said, and she touched his hair back over his ear and put the back of her cold hand on his forehead and cheek.

“I don’t need you to take my temperature,” he said, warming her hand in his. He remembered that she had terrifyingly cold feet. She loved to put them between his legs to shock him. She’d said she had poor circulation or thin blood, a real condition. Some quack told her to imagine pulling clothes from a dryer, to hold in her imagination a clean dishtowel, a warm pair of jeans with hot rivets.

The tiny brass bell over the door rang and the people who came in brushed the new snow off their hair and shoulders before it could melt.

“So, what’s up?” she asked.

He thought for a moment, and then told her about his father.

“I’m so sorry, Pete.”

“It’s okay. We weren’t . . . close.”

“Still.”

She held his hand, and he said that if he was upset about anything, it was leaving Cecil, that there wasn’t much to be done about it, but how it had left a bad taste in his mouth. More than a bad taste. Putting Cecil in Pine Hills made him feel awful that he’d run out of things he could do for the kid. Then there was the courthouse today. The holidays coming on.

Texas.

“I guess I got a lot on my mind,” he said. He smiled at the understatement.

She sat there, listening. That was all. In fact, as he was talking, he began to realize she wasn’t as forthcoming as he would have liked; she offered no palliatives or even a mildly philosophical take on this being the nature of the job or the people they worked with or the nature of life entirely. These were things that he would have said to her, and he resented that she didn’t offer them up.

“You’re distracted,” he said.

“I don’t like the way you worked that case,” she said.

“What case?”

“The boy you put in Pine Hills.”

“He was going to juvie whether I was involved or not.”

“You shouldn’t have tricked him. He trusted you enough to call you and you lied to him. You don’t know what that does to people. People who already don’t have enough people they trust. Just because you were ultimately right doesn’t make the way you went about it okay.”

“All right.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“I hear you. I could make excuses, but you’re right.”

She looked sidelong at him.

“What are your intentions with me?” she asked.

“My ‘intentions’? What are you, your own father?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Yes, effectively, I am my own father. I was—”

“Look, I know. About you. What your background is. It’s out. People know.”

She laughed. A hard bark of laughter that doubled her over when she looked at him.

“Everybody knows, Pete. I told Jim in my interview. All my professors knew, all my papers were about it, my thesis. It’s not a dark secret.”

“Okay.”

“I am
not
ashamed of myself. It’s not my fault.”

“Of course not.”

“So then don’t treat me like I’m a crazy bitch for asking you what’s up with us.”

He told her he was smitten with her. He said: “Let’s call it smitten, what I am.”

“Okay then. That sounds pretty good.”

“Can you bail on your people tonight?”

“I don’t want to go to the bar.”

“Okay.”

She told him he drank too much. He said for her to tell him something he didn’t know.

The waitress brought coffee, and Mary turned some cream in her cup with a spoon. The waitress brought the pie. Two forks, just in case Pete changed his mind, she said. She put a fork in front of him, and when he didn’t pick it up, Mary cut a bite with her fork and put it into his mouth. And it was good pie, and she was there, and he felt better. Simple.

She said he could take her somewhere, but it had to be somewhere special.

By the time they made it onto Highway 12 it was full dark, the motes of snow firing out of the black as though they were vaulting through stars. He pulled into an empty turnaround and took her across the still and empty blacktop and into the lodgepole forest and helped her up the trail slick in places with ice. The snow falling on the trees was a sound itself, so faint that it could be heard if they held their breath, and then lost in the thrum of their hearts and their panting as they hiked the grade. They found their way by his flashlight, and shapes of steam from the hot pools sifted lazily through the wet pines like robed ghosts of a sudatorium. Lurid mosses and mustard lichens grew here as in the rain forests of Washington, the near rain forest of the Yaak. They undressed on the wet rocks and put their clothes in a garbage bag. Flakes of snow alit on their bare shoulders, and he took her hand, and they stepped gingerly over the slick stones and down a few crude steps into the hot pool.

“Jesus,” she said, wincing at the heat.

“Come on. All the way. There’s a bench over here.”

She took a breath, slid down to him with a slow gasp that whistled over her teeth, and joined him on the stone that sat them in water up to their necks.

“Nice, huh?”

“If my skin doesn’t boil off.”

“Come on.”

She tilted her head back onto the rim of the pool and sighed, her breath convening with the cloud steaming over them.

“Yeah.” She sighed. “Okay. I get it.”

Pete reached for the flashlight and shined it around the boulders and trees.

“This would be a good place to spend the winter.”

She laughed.

“Seriously. You got hot water. You set up your camp down near the creek. You could make it out here okay.”

“If you don’t mind all the naked people coming and crashing your camp.”

“Well, not here. Something like this up around Glacier.”

“Tenmile getting a little crowded, is it?”

“Not me. I was just thinking of this case. This kid. Sorry. I didn’t mean to talk about work again.”

“Get it off your chest.”

She beckoned him to speak with her fingers. Pete took them, kissed them.

“This boy and his family are living somewhere in the sticks, and I was trying to figure out where they might be holed up for the winter. How in the hell they’ll make it. Something like this would be prime. But I don’t think there’s any hot springs up there.”

Her eyes were closed, and beaded water was already running down her neck to her clavicle.

“You have no idea where they are?”

“Not really.”

“Do they have any previous cases on file?”

“Pearl’s more the kind of guy you read about in the paper.”

“You should check.”

“I should’ve already. I’m losing my knack for this.”

“At least you have a beautiful cock.”

She didn’t look at him or move, but a sleepy grin cracked across her face.

“I’m gonna have to wash your mouth out,” he said.

“I can’t help it. I’m just a product of the system,” she said, tilting her head slightly in his direction. “I had a lot of foster daddies,” she whispered gravely.

Her eyes were half closed and in the deep darkness he could not see what kind of craving rode in them, so he swallowed and took her outstretched hand.

She slid up to his ear, whispered, “A lot of staff who would check on us at night,” and bit his ear. He wondered was this flirting. She grinned. Flirting. Should he play along. Could he play along. Did she think this would arouse him. She stirred vaguely under the water, and a grenade of lust boomed in Pete’s chest.

“They took advantage,” she whispered.

He got in front of her, and pinned her to the edge of the pool.

“They—”

He put a finger over her mouth to shush her, and she nodded and put her body to him as if to say she understood, yes, but would he still please, would he still.

For a period of weeks things were as good as ever between them. They took a drive to Livingston for interesting gourds from Hutterites, and on Halloween they handed candy to the few children living in the Wilma who raced the floors for treats in plastic costumes.

In mute astonishment they watched Reagan get elected on the television at the Union Club, where the Teamsters Local 400 had gathered to observe, crush their hats, and get mournfully plowed. When someone put on the jukebox, Pete and Mary turned slow circles on the dance floor and went home in a sleety snowfall that soaked and chilled them on the three-block walk to her apartment. An errant shout that might have been joy at the election’s outcome redounded off the empty streets, and then it was quiet, as though all was well in the Republic.

“The judge is gonna be a mess,” Pete said. “I should go home and check in on him.”

“Take me,” she said.

It was nearly 4:00
A.M.
when they arrived in Tenmile, and the judge was heaving in his booth with Neil and the sheriff keeping watch. He had wept openly in the preceding hour. He’d been telling stories about the old days, outraged yarns of cattlemen riding up on shepherds and slaughtering the offending stock, hanging rustlers and innocents alike, and terrorizing the state generally. He inveighed against the Copper Barons. He sang the Montana state song and then a few bars of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” drumming his tobacco-stained gut in a tuneless rage, cracked verses spewing from his voice box. Pete took a shot of bourbon with him and the judge agreed to let the sheriff drive him home.

Pete drove Mary up to his place and lit the fire as she looked the cabin over. Maybe wondering what it might be like to live there. What kind of husband he would be. He knew what kind of husband he had been, but felt—watching her touch his fishing pole, run her finger down the spines of his books, and idly inventory his cupboards—that he might be a different kind of husband now. She asked what happened to the window and when he said a bear is what happened to the window, she didn’t believe him, and when she saw he was serious, she stayed close to him. He dragged the mattress out by the fire. The sun rose on the Yaak and they went to sleep.

He would take off to do his cases and come back to Missoula to be with Mary whenever he could. Long weekends. The days were shorter now. Colder. Days he cut work like he’d cut high school geometry, realizing with a soft embarrassment that he did so with no fear of consequences. That old Snow sense of entitlement. But this too: DFS could not fire him any more than they could hire someone to help him. He was as good as it got, and for the most part that was pretty damn good.

He watched it snow from her window, falling pink embers in the evening neon of the marquee. Nothing accumulated and the cars swished by in the street below as if it had rained. He napped on the couch like a hot cat and woke and moved away from the radiator and into the cool of the bedroom. He smoked in her groaning brass bed reading her books and it was usually dark when he finished. For hours he merely listened to the traffic down below, people about their business, utterly reft of his enjoinment, his sage advice.

It’s almost as if they don’t require your assistance at all. Imagine that, Pete.

It would be dusk. The lock would click open, she would come into the bedroom with a cup of wine, disrobe, slide into bed, and they would begin to harvest orgasms.

On Thanksgiving Day, Mary needed an assist and a second car to do a removal, so Pete went with her. They rescued the kids simply enough. The jittery mother appeared almost relieved, saying to take ’em just take ’em, and the children were in various states of comprehension as Mary and Pete helped stuff what clean clothes and toys they had into duffels, and then through the yard muddy with snowmelt to the cars. But as they left, the guilt did a sudden number on their mother and she raced down the mountain after them, laying on her horn, flashing her lights. The kids bawling at the sight of her reaching for them at the stoplights in town. Pete pulled into the parking lot of the Kmart while Mary ran in and called the cops, and the kids howled against the windows of the cars, hysterical and hyperventilating, until the cops took their mother away. But then a slobbery, sniffling quiet and anesthetic relief washed over them, and they sagged like they’d been drugged. Some even dozed.

Pete and Mary shuttled them like their own harried brood into JB’s Big Boy, and they ate burgers and shakes, and colored on the place mats. With nourishment came new anxiety, where were they staying, what will happen to us, and Pete and Mary could only give immediate answers.

The attention home.

Yes it’s nice there.

Yes you’ll all be together.

No we don’t know about after that.

Someplace better.

You haven’t touched your fries.

The eldest girl, at Pete’s elbow, began to sob quietly and he was unable to soothe her dismay. Mary nodded at him to get out, and she slid in next to her, took the girl’s wrist into her own long fingers and began to turn magic circles on the bones of her hand and then on her other hand. Her crying ceased, and in time the girl’s eyes rolled, her head fell against Mary’s shoulder, and Pete saw or imagined a ghost swim like a flagellate out of the little girl’s forehead, a departing devil. Mary coaxed deep mind-wiping breaths out of this girl and she nuzzled against her in this warmth and peace.