Fourth of July Creek (33 page)

“Why not?”

“It’s graven images.”

“Graven images?”

Pearl didn’t look up from the knife he sharpened on a small whetstone.

“It’s just trains and things. Look,” Pete said, opening the book and beginning to color a race car. The kid sat there.

“It’s not allowed,” Ben said.

“Deuteronomy Four,” Pearl added.

“Sorry, but you’ll have to refresh me.”

“It’s forbidden to make a likeness.”

“A likeness.”

“A likeness is a distraction from God.”

“A coloring book. Is a distraction from God.”

“Everything. Television, trees, and animals themselves. Everything.”

“This explains a great deal, Jeremiah.”

“The world is a just grain of sand in all of everything that truly is. To linger on this world is foolish. To linger is to stare at your navel.”

Pete sat a moment stock-still in the wake of this, the silliest thing he’d ever heard.

“Tell me something,” he said, shoving the coloring book and crayons back in his bag. “Did Adam have a navel?”

Pearl smiled.

“Of course not.”

A thunderstorm trekked in on gray curdled clouds, and the rock wall at the back of the shelter wept with rainwater. Pearl warmed his hands by cupping the lamp and he darkled the shelter, made capes of shadow on the walls.

All evening he worked his little mint on a round in the corner. Over and over, he’d set a penny on a railroad fishplate and with a punch and hammer knock a hole through Lincoln’s temple, then chuck the coin into a coffee can. He did this to a few more presidents and then put a thin blade through the hole of one of them and affixed the blade and coin to a small jeweler’s saw. He carefully adjusted the screws so as not to break the blade. Pete could see he only had a few of them left in the cardboard drawer. He waxed the blade with a small bar of yellow wax and then set the coin over the crotch of a wooden V-shaped bench pin and began to saw, turning the coin or the bench pin to suit the angles of his imagination. When it was done, he unscrewed one end of the blade from the saw and slipped the coin into his palm and held it up to the lantern, casting a watery pentagram on the back wall. All of it accomplished much easier by Pearl than the pawnbroker had thought possible.

Pete asked to see. The coin was warm, a perfect five-point star in the copper of Lincoln’s head.

Pearl held up a paper sack of coins.

“I will have these punched and scored by tomorrow.”

He tossed another sack made of felt and full of coins to Pete and told him to put the penny in with them. Pete dropped it in and fingered through the others. More stars and exclamation points and question marks and swastikas. Clovers. What looked like a scythe.

“I’d like you to disperse them,” Pearl said as he threaded another coin onto the blade and then screwed it shut. “You can travel more widely than we can.”

“I thought you were finished with the coins,” Pete said. “Just a whimper, you said.”

“This is it.” Pearl rubbed his finger on the fishplate and his finger turned gray with the dust of the coins he’d vandalized. “The last money I’ll ever touch.”

He began to saw the next coin, a soft almost pleasing sound that for Pete immediately recalled Rachel pulling the zipper on her jacket up and down. Sitting in his car. Waiting for the light to change.

“Why do you want me to distribute these?”

“It’ll be over soon.”

“What will?”

Benjamin picked dirty sap from his hands.

“They will come and kill us.”

“No one’s coming to kill you—”

“Someone shot the president, Pete.”

“So?”

“The Secret Service is an arm of the Treasury. They have two missions: keep the president alive and protect the integrity of the US dollar. And the latter, I assure you, is more important than the former. They know all about me, Pete.”

“That’s pretty grandiose, don’t you think?”

“Obviously, I do not.”

Pete looked at Benjamin, who continued to pick at his palm. A completely normal conversation.

“I won’t take the coins,” Pete said. “I won’t take part in this.”

“You’ll do it,” Pearl said, sawing into the coin. “And I know you’ll do it because you don’t want anything bad to happen to us. To him. And you’ll do it because if you don’t, you’ll never see us again. And you’ll do it because you believe you’ll talk us out of these mountains and back into that society of yours. Because you’re the nice face of things. The kind, caring face.” Pearl stopped sawing, fixed his dark eyes on Pete. “The devil, I know how he comes. With cans of food and fresh clothes and coloring books.”

“I’m just a person, Pearl. You gotta stop with all this paranoia.”

“I’d ask you to entertain a notion for a little bit.”

“What’s that?”

“I’d have you consider that I might not be as stupid and backward as you think.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid.”

“Then I’d like you to be sincere in your desire to help us, and do what I’m asking of you rather than what you think is best for us.”

Benjamin had ceased picking at his hands.

“Where’s the rest of your family, Jeremiah?”

At this, Benjamin turned over in his sleeping bag away from them.

“Where are your other children?”

Pete swung the sack back to Pearl and it landed with a heavy plash of metal.

“Well now,” Pearl said, “there’s the difference between you and me. I can answer that question, and you cannot.”

In the morning they got ready to set out and Pearl and his son went together onto the ledge and when they came back in Benjamin’s nose was running and he’d been crying. He bravely told Pete it was good to see him and thanked him for the things he’d brought.

“You’re not coming?”

“He’s headed in the other direction,” Pearl said. “Dry up,” he told his son.

The boy wiped his nose.

“I’ll come see you again,” Pete said. “Okay?”

The boy nodded at the floor.

“Let’s go,” Pearl said.

They descended one after another down the ladder and into the late April rainwater that was now up to his thighs, the boy’s waist. It was cool and overcast. The boy didn’t climb along the walls, and when they got out of the water he was shivering and chattering on the opposite bank.

“So long, Pete,” he said.

“You’re freezing,” Pete said.

“He’ll be all right,” Pearl said. “Now, go on.”

Ben disappeared into the brush.

They walked all day and didn’t say a word, even when they stopped to eat or rest. When evening fell they kept marching and Pete had no idea where they were in the trim and waxing moon. It was some deep middle of the night when they made a road that stood out chalky in the dark.

“You’re just down there,” Pearl said.

They were barely able to see one another.

“Give me the coins,” Pete said.

Pearl dug them out of his small canvas bag.

“I’m gonna come up here in a week. I’ll bring some more fruit and dried beans and rice.”

Pearl said all right. Then he did a peculiar thing. He clapped his hand on the side of Pete’s neck and touched their foreheads together.

“I’m praying for your family,” he whispered before he turned around and loped up the road.

Where did she find Cheatham?

He found her. Sitting with her backpack at a taco stand in East Austin.

How was she?

She was sick. It hurt when she peed, probably because of the guy at the party. She felt like this meant she’d lost Cheatham. She didn’t want to lose him. She just wanted to be someplace else. She just wanted to go. With him. Nobody else.

Did she tell him?

Are you kidding?

What did they do?

They looked at each other a few minutes. They ate and talked. She asked did he love her, and he said he didn’t know. She asked did he want to find out. She wanted to find out.

They stayed at his place a few weeks, a bedroom in a house he shared with three other musicians. The walls were spray-painted silver.

She stayed in hiding, in plain sight. Afraid her mother would roll up Congress or the Drag by UT where Cheatham would go to play his guitar. She avoided cop cars like she was holding, like she was a fugitive, which of a sort she was.

Did she pester him to leave town?

No. A little.

When did they go?

When his friends started calling her Lines.

As in?

State Lines. As in don’t take a minor across them. When they started calling him Chuck.

As in?

Chuck Berry. A musician who took a girl across state lines.

Where did they go?

Oklahoma.

He came from some money. Was independently wealthy for a nineteen-year-old dropout. His father owned dealerships or gas stations. He had friends all over the lower Midwest. From Arkadelphia to Nashville.

What did they see?

They saw county fairs. Prize-winning hens and pumpkins and hogs. Quilts and lace and art made of construction paper and painted macaroni. They saw panoplies of whirled lights. Barking underweight carnies. Racing horses yearning against the lash and the night.

The saw kicked-up chaff on the horizon like the froth on a beer. Purple thunderheads opening up like head wounds, violences of wind and rain. A gray tornado made of hailstones and earth, of trailers, stock animals, and tractors.

They saw trees wrapped by corrugated siding like the signage of the route to ruin.

Was ruin what they came to?

Of a kind.

What kind?

Indianapolis.

The elevator in the Wilma was open and empty. No car, no cables. Pete leaned in and looked up the shaft to see the bottom of the car, lit from below by an open door several floors up. A repairman in a leather belt came down the stairs with blackened hands and said it was stuck, everybody’d need to use the stairs.

Mary’s door was ajar. He rapped it with his knuckle. It swung open and gave onto a view of her fellating the lawyer in the kitchen. The man he’d followed. His eyes were closed and he clutched a juice glass. A hiccup of laughter from Pete put a halt to everything. She rose and spoke, pulling closed her shirt. The lawyer replaced his cock in his boxers and zipped up and tucked in his shirt and, thus composed, affected nonchalance. He drank from the glass, set it in the sink. Mary was saying something to the lawyer now and then they were both looking at Pete, and he realized that they were waiting for him to leave or move out of the doorway, and he wondered what expression he wore that made them stand in abeyance like that, what feelings authored this expression. He wondered did the lawyer recognize him, was Pete being made a fool of. He punched a framed picture several times, and it shattered and fell to the floor. Mary and the lawyer didn’t move. He sat against the wall in the broken glass.

The lawyer could leave. The blow job was over. This was Pete’s. It was over with Mary, but this moment was his. He realized he was saying these things aloud. The lawyer was asking Mary did she want him to stay. Then he was stepping around Pete and out the door. She reached the doorway of her apartment, asking was Pete quite finished. Her neighbors were in the hall, onlooking. He’d been yelling, he supposed.

She told him he was bleeding. She left the door open and a balding layabout in a stained T-shirt grinned at him as Mary went to the kitchen for a rag. She returned to him like she might a wounded animal, low-toned, flat-affected. She gingerly took his hand and plucked the glass from his knuckles and winced as she did so. It began with tending his hand, and it would end with tending his hand.