Fourth of July Creek (31 page)

He left the rest of his mail unopened and took the check to First Interstate, cashed it, and went for lunch at the Sunrise. He drank coffee all morning just trying to wake up from an exhaustion that coffee could not fix. Fear had worn him to a nub. What happened to her. Where she was. He worried he was forgetting things about his daughter every day, trying hard to score into memory’s bedrock the way she looked at different ages, the things they did. Cross-country skiing up at Lolo Pass. The tunnels they dug into twelve-foot snowbanks. Suppers he cooked for just the two of them and the steam from the boiled noodles and teaching her letters in the steam on the windows. A time she got a septic knee and couldn’t even stand and they put her on antibiotics and hoped all her blood wasn’t infected. She was pale and sweaty and his heart wrung like a wet towel, like now. Times it would unwind and his heart would race to remind him that something was terrifically wrong.

He kept asking himself where is she what is she doing please be alive why won’t she call just come home baby.

A morning, waking in his cabin, he thought he felt a lot better, happier, okay, even good. Rachel would reach out at some point. He’d gotten himself sure of that. He imagined her toughness and what resilience he’d witnessed in her, and again and again in all his cases. Children who had suffered unstinting hells, their toughness intact. A wryness, a wisdom some had earned. He imagined Rachel making it, meal to meal, shelter to shelter. That people would treat her kindly. That she had guardians at every pass. Things he believed because he had to, and believe them he did.

But when he went out in the chilled morning to his car, tiny handprints from some prior removal preserved in the frost on his windows promptly undid him. He slumped against the car door into the crusty snow and howled out griefs that had come on as sudden and frightening as earthquakes, and even after they emptied out, left him in fear of aftershocks, of unseen cracks in the load-bearing trestles of his mind. He wondered could he go on, but there was little else to do. And what did that mean anyway. To kill himself or to just sit in the snow against the car or to go inside his cabin and never come out.

Just the thought of going to work. The Pearls. Cecil in stir. What good could he be to anyone at all.

He stayed with Mary, and when he bothered to notice it, sensed her irritation in the way she moved about the place, the way she would look idly in the cupboards, the way she paced. As he addressed packages of flyers for midwestern social workers, he felt her watching him with magazines open on her lap.

He said he would stay somewhere else.

She said of course not.

He asked her to stop watching him and do whatever.

She set the magazine aside and said it was like he was in parentheses.

“You’ll have to explain that to me.”

“Never mind.”

He tried hard not to sound sarcastic when he told her he was just busy.
Busy looking for his daughter
.

“I know that, Pete. Let me help you.”

He licked an envelope and closed it. His ears were hot with an anger he didn’t understand, or know from where it came, except the whole situation, his entire life.

“This is weird,” she said. “Say something.”

All he could tell her was that he was fine.

He could see her crossing off things to say as she stood there. At last she took a shower.

He sat before the envelopes and handwritten letters and the stacks of flyers. He got up for a cup of coffee so cold it made him look at the clock. It was five-thirty. He’d been at this almost twelve hours now.

When she came out buttoning her shirt and toweling her hair, he apologized and asked her to come over and he showed her the map of all the places he’d sent packages and all the places he’d yet to call. He said he was hanging on by threads of hope, and these packages were those threads. It was all he could do to get these materials together and make the calls and wait for word. He asked would she help him.

She said nothing to that, and he tried to determine her thoughts from her watery reflection in the old glass of the apartment window. She seemed to wait another moment for him to address her loneliness, or desire or whatever was bothering her. This had happened before, but he hadn’t noticed. She’d go dark as an empty house.

She rose without a word and went into the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and then into the bedroom. He listened to her undress and climb into bed, the springs moaning. He wondered did she worry or sense that he’d slept with Beth, did she figure something out just now. Had something else occurred.

He joined her in bed. She climbed onto him and made love to him, tended to him with her entire body. She stayed locked around him and bore into him with her eyes until he was pieces, then shards, smithereens, motes, iotas. She said she loved him, she’d fallen in love. He was dust, swept away. Did he love her. Was there any he at all.

He groped around for himself. His spirit.

You are here
, she said with her body.
Right here.

And so he was. And he could love her.

Back in Tenmile, he spent a whole day organizing his files, and several more catching up—sometimes making up—his case notes. Had someone been there to see, his efforts would have been mistaken for enthusiasm, professionalism, and alacrity.

Portly Judge Dyson called his office and invited him up for a drink. He passed. Another invite came in the evening. He passed again. That night, as Pete wrote out false case notes, the judge darkened his office doorway, let himself in, and dropped into the chair. Pie-eyed and irritated at having to come down, the prospect of reascending all those stairs on his fat little legs.

“What’s your dyshfunction, son?”

Pete explained what had happened and where he’d been and what all he’d done to find his daughter.

The judge held his head in his hands as Pete spoke, and when he finished, told Pete that he had a friend in the Fraternal Order of Police and that he would put in a call. He’d think on what else could be done. He was reeking drunk when he arrived, but when he stood to leave he was as still as a post. His eyes were no longer bloodshot. He looked ready to lynch somebody.

Pete went to check on Cecil’s mother, sister, but they weren’t home. He picked through the notices from the power and water companies, catalogs, and junk mail. Left a note on the back of his card for Katie to call him.

He drove to Pine Hills to see Cecil. He hadn’t visited since he’d dropped him off the previous October. It was now coming on April. He waited in the visiting area at the small round tables. Sullen toughs posed for their fathers and brothers, while Indian kids and pale white farm boys came in and sat stone-faced before their weeping mothers. The only boy who didn’t have this manufactured toughness was a fat and guileless retard who had an open gentleness to his movements and expression that cast doubt on his guilt of anything at all. He played with his mother’s necklace and when it was time to go, wouldn’t give it back and had to be restrained. His mother faced the wall as they took him away. She left caterwauling not unlike her son.

Finally an official came to Pete and said that Cecil wouldn’t be able to visit. Pete asked was the boy in trouble or just refusing visitors. The man didn’t know.

On a clear warm day, he headed up the National Forest road toward the Pearls’ camp. He brought packages of rice and instant noodles, Kool-Aid, and dried beans. For the children, he brought bags of raisins and cinnamon candies, a few coloring books, a little packet of crayons, and a small cardboard puzzle of a bulldozer. Handkerchiefs for the wife or Pearl or whoever needed one.

It took a full day to hike to where they’d been camped when the father’d gone blind. Birds shot out the canvas flap of their tent in the hillside when he pulled it back. Inside was a nest with a few eggs, so he stayed the night on the ground by the fire, and remained as long as he could the next day. He was halfway down to his car before he realized he should have left some of the food. Or a note.

He drove and then went to the rocks where he’d left things for them. Everything in the cleft was gone. He put the dried foods in there and the next day went to see if they’d been to their old house up Fourth of July Creek. The meadow was filled with wildflowers, and he ate a sack lunch among the bumblebees and butterflies and saw now how pleasant it was and also the layout and how the property could be defended from the house on the rock bench, from the escarpment behind the house, and from the dense trees on the sides of the meadow.

About a hundred yards away was an overgrown earthwork or root cellar. He crossed through the marshy horsemint and skullcap, was muddied to his ankles getting to it. It took him a few minutes to determine that it was a burned-out Airstream trailer, blackened and now almost completely napped with moss and wild cress. Orange in places where it rusted. He sat a while in hypothesis about it.

A weekend full blotto. Arguing with Mary on the dance floor of the Top Hat. He went to the wall and pulled another beer from the pitcher, and she knocked it out of his hand. He laughed. He went outside into the evening air and started for his car. She followed and he let her in.

“Take me for a drive,” she said, digging into the paper sack of schnapps on the floor.

They were halfway to Evaro when she started to throw some kind of fit. He simply pulled over, got out, and started to walk down the hill toward town. The asphalt reflected blue and red, and he turned around and hiked back up to his car. She was crying, sitting on the rear bumper.

“Is this your car?” the highway patrolman asked.

Pete said it was.

“Any particular reason you decided to leave it?”

Another patrol car U-turned and pulled in behind the first.

“We were having an argument.”

“You can’t abandon your car.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yes. I shouldn’t have abandoned it.”

The second patrolman touched Mary on the knee to see about her and then came up on the other side of Pete’s car and shined a light inside of it.

“We’re both in the Department of Family Services. We’re just, uh, stressed.”

“Yeah, I’d say the
stress
is what’s gotten to her.”

“I’m—”

“Shut up. You’re lucky. Because I am a softie about you DFS people. My sister did this work and she drank like a dang fish. Consider this your talking-to.”

Pete nodded. The cop pulled a tiny green New Testament from inside his coat pocket.

“You got one of these?”

“Yup.”

“Take this one anyway,” he said, pressing the book into Pete’s hand. “And gitcher poop in a group.”

Another week went by before he had the time to hike to the Pearls’ camp again, and by the new ashes in the fire pit he figured he’d missed them by a day, no more than two.

He slept over and dreamt of Rachel. Neutral dreams that were mostly altered memories or wishes and didn’t augur anything good or bad.

When he woke, Jeremiah was sitting on a stump, leaning forward holding his rifle.

“Good morning, Pearl,” Pete said. “How’re your eyes?”

“Where you been?” Pearl asked, meaning the last few weeks. Pete couldn’t remember if he’d said when he’d be back. He’d intended to return sooner than now, but he hadn’t made promises. He didn’t think. He couldn’t remember.

“Texas, actually.”

“Doing what?”

Pete let the question hang there for a moment while he buttoned his jeans and slipped on his coat against the April morning cool.

“I asked you a question,” Pearl said.

“I heard you.”

Pearl squeezed the rifle barrel, stood, and started for the forest. He was crossing the creek when Pete caught up to him. He yelled for Jeremiah to wait. The man stopped in the middle of the water that had widened by several feet with the snowmelt. Ice water ran over boots that Pete knew to be thin and surely no longer watertight. He beckoned Pearl out.

“I brought some food. Things for your kids. Come on.”

“You think I’m stupid?”

“I think you’re paranoid.”

“You tell me where you really were.”

“I had to go to Texas.”

Pearl crossed the creek.

“My wife and daughter are down there.”

Pearl’s expression flickered like a candle flame. “In Texas,” he said, as if trying out the concept.

“She left me.”

Pearl seemed to believe this was feasible.

“What for?” he asked.

“Jesus, Pearl. Because she was angry with me.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name.”

“Just come get some food.”

“You go down there to get them back?”

Pete didn’t know if he wanted to tell Pearl about his daughter. He didn’t come up here to talk about this. He’d come up to leave himself behind. Yet here he was anyway. There was no getting away.

“My daughter ran away. I was down there looking for her.”

Pete’s voice had dropped, and Pearl tilted toward him to hear him over the tumbling water.