Fourth of July Creek Read Online Free PDF Page B

order.
    The kid muttered into his legs.
    “I can’t hear you when you talk into your lap like that.”
    The kid looked up at him. “I can’t.”
    “Sure you can. Then we’ll eat—”
    “He won’t . . .”
    “Who won’t? Your father? He won’t want me helping you and your family?”
    The boy traced the lines of the grout in the tiles between his legs.
    “Does he hurt you?”
    “No.”
    “Does he hurt you mother?”
    No answer.
    “Look, Benjamin. Let me tell you what I see. I see a kid who’s sick and small because he hasn’t been getting fed enough. And now you’re telling me that you can’t put on some new clothes. I’m starting to wonder if it’s safe for you to go home—”
    “You’re not gonna take me home?!” the kid screamed. “You can’t keep me! You have no right!”
    “Whoa!” Pete shouted. “Just calm down. I’ll take you home. But I want you to—”
    Pete was going to tell the child to just take the clothes home with him, but the boy tore off his sweater and began unbuckling his belt.
    They lived in the woods some ways north of Tenmile in the rolling and dense forests of the Purcell Range. The boy didn’t know the way to town by any of the county roads or which logging road he crossed coming down from their camp. He emerged from the forest behind the IGA grocery. Beyond that was an uninterrupted series of ascending ridges bisected by an old railroad track that was no longer in use. The kid said he went along the backbone of the ridges until he descended to and crossed a creek and then finally up a logging road. Determining what logging road was the problem. Pete had an idea from his map in the glove box, but it was old, and the new roads were not on it.
    Of course, the kid had no idea how you drove there, didn’t know if it was a Forest Service road or a Champion Timber Company road or what. It was coming on evening and they had been all over looking for any markers the boy might recognize. Outcroppings of rock. But there were only trees, miles and miles of green larch.
    “Maybe this one,” the boy said, pointing to another turnoff marked with two yellow reflectors a mile or so from where Separation Creek joined the Yaak River. The child had eaten lunch, drunk a large glass of orange juice, and even smiled at some of Pete’s jokes.
    They went up a disintegrating road, grown over with timothy and cheatgrass. The potholes were disguised by banks of unmelted snow at the higher elevation.
    “This road’s gonna swallow my car.”
    There was a closed gate ahead.
    “That’s the gate there,” the boy said. “It’s got that dent in it.”
    Pete stopped the car and turned it off. The engine ticked under the hood. The larches and pines sighed.
    “How far?” Pete asked.
    “A ways.”
    “A couple miles, what?”
    The boy didn’t know. Pete told him to wait in the car and got out and began to inspect the area around the gate. There would be a key somewhere around here. There always was—biologists and surveyors for the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and Champion Timber were always coming and going. He looked in the crooks of trees at about eye level and under stones that were about the right size. He heard the kid get out of the car.
    “Just wait,” Pete said. “I’ll have this gate open in a minute.”
    Pete spotted a flat rock that sat conspicuously atop another one the size of a dinner plate. Bingo. He turned the top rock over. Nothing. He looked under the plate stone. Nothing.
    “The key’s gone,” the kid said.
    Pete stood.
    “Papa throwed it in them bushes over there, but good luck finding it.”
    Pete looked up the ragged road. He couldn’t even see the first switchback. He looked up for the sun, which had already ducked into the trees.
    “How far are you up this road?”
    “I dunno. A ways.”
    “A ways,” Pete said. He ducked under the gate and told the kid to come on.
    The sky and the snow they walked over turned everything the sleepy blue