Fourth of July Creek (38 page)

“Did you find your little girl?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“I’m sorry, Pete.”

“Thanks.”

They played a few minutes more, and Benjamin glanced in the direction of the creek where his father had gone.

“I ran away this one time,” Ben said.

Pete folded his arms and asked was that so.

I
T WAS A SUMMER CAMP
at Hayden Lake, Idaho. He didn’t want to go, but Mama and Papa made him and his brother and sisters too. The camp is all right. Games, and you can earn candy if you do your chores and all your Bible lessons. Songs around the campfire. Fishing the lake. Tubing the ice-cold creek.

One afternoon they are made to hike up to a clearing with only the pastor to hear some more about Chinese Communists. How they kill little girl babies and how the people are rounded up into camps, not like this camp not at all, but like—

The pastor is interrupted as men on horseback come from every direction firing guns in the air, throwing smoke bombs. Some of the older children laugh, stand up. The little girls are crying before the pastor is dragged away, hollering, kicking up dirt. Now all the girls scream and the littler boys too. At the edge of the clearing, just before the trees, the pastor gets loose. He’s at a dead sprint and one of the men pulls a pistol out from under his duster and everybody screams and he is shot and falls and now everybody is grabbing everybody else and bunching up like spooked sheep.

The men’s bandanas cover their yelling mouths. There’s smoke coming from somewhere, everywhere. The horses step in place at all of this carrying-on, the children dashing around, huddling, the young ones by now blubbering. Then a pickup and trailer come barreling through the meadow and more men get out and order the children to climb in back.

Ben’s big brother Jacob breaks for it. His sister Esther screams for him not to, but he’s running across the meadow. Two men on horseback go after him and sweep him up and for a moment he dangles in the air between the two horses his legs pumping, it looks almost like they’d tear him in two. Then he is thrown across a pommel and taken to the trailer. Ben’s big sister Esther is already lifting his little sisters Ruth and then Paula into the trailer. She reaches for Ben, says to come on.
It’s just pretend
, she says. The smoke has cleared and she points to where the pastor is pulling on a duster, covering his face with a bandana. It’s okay, she says.

But Ben drops and crawls under the trailer, his belly wet from the grass, and then to the hitch and no one has seen him and he keeps on crawling, under the truck and out from under the front of it. He’s almost to the forest by the time anyone spots him, but in no time, hoofs fall behind him, all around him. He feels a hand on his back, he’s lifted by his shirt. He throws up his arms and slips out and keeps running. He doesn’t know how he knows how to do this, he just does it. He scampers into the trees and into the brush cutting at him and the horses don’t or can’t follow, not directly. He’s hopping and tripping down a ravine and into some more brush. He drops flat onto the ground. Pine needles all in his chest and neck and chin. Panting on the ground, trying to be quiet. Dirt in his mouth. The fat of his palms bleed. The men are distant. Esther yells for him. Hoofs pound by a few yards away, go far, swing near again. He’s breathing heavy and trying not to breathe heavy. He stays put. Horses charge past. Men say
Get him!
and
Gotta find that boy!
and such things.

He tucks his knees under him and peeks through the brush. Now he knows it’s not real, but he’s afraid of getting into a different kind of trouble. He hears the truck leave the meadow. But the men on horses still search for him. They ride through the woods. They ride right by. They call to him. It’s okay, they tell him. It’s just a lesson. The other kids are okay. Nothing bad is gonna happen to him.

He doesn’t move. He can hear them talking about him. What a little bugger he is. He knows it’s safe, it’s okay to come out, but he don’t want to. Maybe it’s bad of him, but really it’s not bad because even when he wants to get up, he can’t.

He can’t make himself obey.

He realizes then what all his mama and papa have been talking about all these years. How they will be hunted down and killed and what that will be like, and it’s okay because what comes after is heaven and they’ll all be together it’s not for us to question only to obey. He
is
an obedient boy. Obedient to God. He knows what he’s supposed to do.

Now the men are on foot and Benjamin is standing there waiting for them. The man’s bandana is around his neck, and his chin and jaw are almost blue where he shaves them. The man has Ben’s shirt, and when Ben goes to him, he helps him on with it. They give him some water from a canteen, and the man lifts him onto the horse and climbs up into the saddle behind him. They ride slowly across the meadow, the man’s hand on his belly. He’s never been on a horse, and the animal swaying under him and the grasshoppers leaping away from the footfalls of the horse steady his heart. Everything runs from a horse.

Pete said that sounded like it was scary.

Pearl returned with a tarp, fishing line, and a needle. He sat within earshot and began to mend a hole in the canvas.

The boy was quiet, but maybe not because of his father. This was the longest he’d ever spoken to Pete and he seemed depleted. He told Pete it was his turn.

They jumped one another’s pieces until only a few kings remained on the board.

Benjamin sat cross-legged with his chin in his hands.

“Do you miss her?”

“Of course I do.”

“Why did
she
run away?”

Pearl glanced up, but didn’t say anything.

“It’s sorta complicated.”

Now the expectant boy was looking at him.

“She and her mother went to Texas,” Pete said.

“How come?”

“Her mother and I weren’t getting along.”

“How come?”

“Benjamin,” Pearl said.

“It’s okay,” Pete said. “Her mother did something she oughtn’t have, and it made me really upset.”

“Was she bad?”

“Benjamin, leave him alone,” Pearl said.

“It’s all right, Jeremiah,” Pete said. “She did a bad thing. She’s not a bad person.”

“Sometimes God needs you to do a real bad thing, only it’s not a bad thing when He wants you to do it, because nothing that God commands you to do is a bad thing. Was it like that?”

Pearl had stood. From where he was, he couldn’t see Benjamin’s face. Neither, for that matter, could Pete. The boy’s eyes were trained on the board. Pearl was waiting to hear what the boy would say next. Just then, Ben looked up at Pete, a whorl of notions spinning behind his eyes. Things he’d seen and done and had happen to him.

“You all right?” Pete asked. Pearl cocked his head back and his mouth fell open as if he were watching a doorknob turning and he was just waiting to see who would walk in.

“Would you like me to pray for your daughter?” Benjamin asked.

“I think that’d be all right.”

Benjamin closed his eyes and laced his fingers together over his heart.

“You don’t need to do it this second,” Pete said.

Pearl sat back down, folded his hands on his lap, and closed his eyes too.

“Lord, we ask that you in your wisdom, that you keep Pete’s little daughter—”

Ben peeked one eye open.

“Rachel,” Pete said.

“—that you keep Rachel in your safety, Lord, and you watch over her in her journey from persecution Lord so that she can be reunited with her father Lord. Amen.”

“Amen.”

“Amen.”

Benjamin sighed with satisfaction.

“I forget whose turn it is,” he said.

Pete moved his last king toward Ben’s last king, and for a while they evaded one another in silence.

Under the boughs of a larch Benjamin found a freshly killed and mostly eaten deer. Pearl spoke endlessly of catamounts. How they are the only creature that kills for sport. How their survival requires murder.

And, my word, the wolves.

He’d been to a Fish and Game meeting in Libby where a wire-rimmed geek proposed repopulating the Yaak with Canadian wolves. Pearl stood and promised he’d shoot them on sight. Said he’d lace roadkill with strychnine. These people from the universities and DC were out of their fuckin minds, he said. What pox they would call “endangered” next.

The boy took the skull and the antlers from the deer and they walked down out of the mountains along a gray belt rock face. They could hear a falls somewhere upstream and the boy wanted to see it and so they went. They sat and sunned themselves as the boy ran up and down the rock stairs of the cascade, Pete worrying the whole time he’d fall in and be swept away.

They skulked across Highway 2 and back into the Cabinet Mountains. Another part of the Pearls’ circuit opening up to Pete. A country cut by glaciers into humongous serrated mountains and scalloped peaks.

They shot a small deer and spent a few days in the dilapidated remnants of an old mining camp, sleeping in the shallow shaft. Pete and the boy performed amateur archaeology on the site, digging up Chinese potsherds and even a lion of carved ivory. The boy wouldn’t keep it, wouldn’t let Pete keep it, and discarded it somewhere in the woods.

The second day they found fabric and weaved grasses and charcoal, and inside the last threads of a burlap sack a watch, corked and stained glass vials, and a dense black talon the size of Pete’s palm.

“The mountain lion that came from must’ve been huge.”

Pete laughed.

“What?”

“This isn’t from a mountain lion. It’s a fossil. It’s a dinosaur claw.”

Benjamin swallowed, leaned away from it, then asked could he hold it. Pete set it in his hand. The boy’s arm sank a touch under the weight of it.

“It’s heavy.”

“It’s a fossil. It’s rock.”

He’d never seen anything so evil, he said, then ran uphill to where his father was hammering around in the mine. When Pete trudged up to them at the mouth of the hole, they’d set it on the ground and were squatting before it like two boys at a dead snake.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Pete said. He conjectured that it was found in the Sawtooths. There were quite a few fossils in that range. Or perhaps the Chinese settlers had brought it from China. Neither Pearl said one single thing.

“You two all right?”

“It’s just amazing,” Pearl said. “The power of Satan. Whoa.”

Pearl went on to explain to Benjamin how Satan had left these all over the Earth.

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

To confuse people and put them in doubt, Pearl said. Such is Satan’s power.

“Of course,” Pete said. “You don’t believe the world is old as it is.”

“As they say. As old as they say. No, I don’t.”

“How old is it then?”

“Six thousand years, tops.”

Pete asked for the canteen. Pearl handed it over, and Pete glared at him as he drank. He wiped his arm on his sleeve and handed it back.

“Do you know they can tell how old a rock is by the carbon—”

“Radiocarbon dating. Yes. Radiometric dating too. I know about these. I also know they yield all kinds of conflicting results. When you get back to town, I’d encourage you to look into a book called
The Prehistory Lie
. By . . .” Pearl tapped his skull, trying to remember this author. Obscure and self-published, doubtless.

“So that talon right there, it never existed.”

“Yes.”

“And it was put in the rock by Satan, right?”

“It’s what we’re up against. The Deceiver is powerful.”

“Christ,” Pete said. “Sorry—
Cripes
.”

Pearl smiled.

“That’s all right. It’s your soul to do with whatever you wish,” Pearl said. “Though taking the Lord’s name in vain is annoying. What with so many perfectly good curse words like
fuck
and
shit
, and even
holy shit . . .”

When the boy laughed, Pete realized Pearl was teasing him.

“There
is
a great deal of scholarship that goes ignored in the universities,” Pearl said. “Serious scholarship that does not comport with the Zionist agenda.”

Pete saw a harangue coming on and sat. Pearl cited the work of Dr. Jones and Archbishop James Ussher, who, though he was certainly burning in hell, calculated backward from the reigns of the kings of Israel to the Creation. He allowed there was some divergence of opinion on the exact age of the Earth, what with the cumulative uncertainty from verse to verse.

Pete realized that to Pearl, Satan had staged the world in this and every ancient particular. Pete imagined what it would feel like to believe such a thing, to see the very Devil ranging about the Earth like an art director, crafting fictions in the schists and coal seams and limestone. All to cast doubt on the Bible’s timeline. All for the harvest of lost souls. Maybe it would be worth it for the Devil. You could almost picture it. Almost. You could almost believe a book more real than the real, more actual and relevant than terra firma and all the dull laws that govern it.

“You know, Jeremiah,” Pete said, “if I believed the things you did, I’d act at least as batshit as you do.”

“Rawls,” Pearl said.

“Rawls what?”

“
The Prehistory Lie
. It’s by Rawls.”

They spent a day climbing up into the floor of a glacial cirque. They hiked an esker that cackled with snowmelt and camped in the dark on the shore and in the morning washed their clothing in the turquoise tarn. Pearl fished, caught nothing in the blue milk water. The setting sunlight bled up the mountain past the bands of gray sill that bisected that massive rock.

They ate deer meat and rice and dried fruit. Pete and the boy played checkers again by the fire and then the boy wordlessly joined his father, sitting between his legs. In time he was asleep, Pearl petting his head.

“That’s a good kid,” Pete said.

Pearl nodded. It may have pleased him to hear so.

Pete thought about asking where the rest of the Pearls were. But Pearl would answer with a question:
where is your daughter?
And these absences were twinned in Pete’s mind as if the one could not be solved without the other, and he harbored the absurd hope that the revelation of the one would reveal the other.