Fourth of July Creek Read Online Free PDF

pulled on the socks and then began to stuff the rags back into his boots. A vinegar odor wafted across to Pete.
    “Listen, I’m from DFS. I can take you home.”
    The kid pulled one of the great black boots onto his foot and began to lace it.
    “Sorry. Department of Family Services. That’s what the letters mean. I’d like to see if you and your family need anything. Help with groceries or maybe some medicine or something.”
    The kid tugged on the other boot and laced it.
    “What do you think?” Pete asked.
    The boy stood on his newly booted feet and rocked in place on them.
    “I gotta shit,” he said.
    The kid walked bowlegged and with his chest forward like he was breasting his way across a river, observing with badly concealed interest the panoply of animals and plants cut from construction paper and taped to the walls. He looked through an ajar door at a classroom taking a quiz and at the lockers and up into the staircase with the mute fascination of an ambassador. In the bathroom, the boy entered the doorless stall and regarded the sculpted porcelain a moment before locating the upright seat and pulling it down. He shat with Pete watching, shameless as a dog. When he washed his hands, he lathered promptly, and then rinsed with wary pleasure, turning his hands in the hot water and looking at Pete in the mirror as if he had to keep an eye on him, and not the other way around.
    The child didn’t have hot running water. And he’d never set foot in a public school.
    The boy wouldn’t let the doctor examine him, but the doctor said scurvy was certainly possible. Said to check his belly and legs for liver spots, if the boy’d ever let him. He told Pete to get him some vitamin C, asked after the boy’s stool, and when Pete described the quality of it, wrote a prescription for the giardia he’d probably gotten from drinking the mountain water.
    There was no trace of the boy’s earlier violence against the principal. If anything, the child radiated studied calm. He spoke in the clipped cadence of a POW, announcing at one point that he’d renounced his citizenship. He stated plainly that he’d kill anyone who stuck him with a needle.
    Pete took the boy with him into the pharmacy for the medicine and vitamin C. The kid suffered a few stares for his clothing, the lengths of tattered sweater hanging off of him like witch-hair moss. His ears turned red. Pete took him around the corner to Jessop’s Sporting Goods and by eye sized a winter coat, jeans, and a pullover because the boy wouldn’t try anything on. He bought him socks, a bag of undershirts, and a pair of boots. For good measure, he grabbed a first-aid kit with gauze, bandages, salves, and aspirin, and had the clerk fetch a bottle of iodine tablets.
    He half-expected the child to run, but he followed Pete faithfully.
    When they got to the Sunrise Cafe, Pete guided the boy into the bathroom and set the sacks of clothes on the counter. He pulled out the bag of T-shirts and opened it and tore the tags off the pants.
    “Let’s get you in these new duds, huh?”
    The boy swallowed, regarded the clothes like a person might a growling dog. With stillness and fear.
    “Nuh-uh,” the kid said.
    “Why? What’s wrong?”
    “I need to go home.”
    “And I’ll take you. But you could use some new clothes and something to eat. Then we’ll go right home.”
    Pete picked up the shirt and started toward the boy. An outsized fear gripped the child and he backed into the wall and slid down against it and closed his arms around his head.
    “Hey, hey it’s all right,” Pete said. “I’m not gonna hurt you. Here—”
    But when Pete set the shirt on the tile before the kid, he clutched himself, pressed his face in his folded legs. Pete stepped back.
    “Come on,” Pete said. “You’re wearing rags.”
    The kid didn’t move. Five minutes like this. Ten. Flatware clapping together in the kitchen. Someone tried the door and Pete shouted that the bathroom was out of