Tenmile was set in a triangular valley at the confluence of the Kootenai River and Deerwater Creek. A ghost town shared the creek’s name, a settlement abandoned in 1910 when the last of the fifty thousand ounces of copper had played out. Before that, gold and silver. Miners by the hundreds and then the thousands blasted it free with dynamite and high-pressure water hoses, melted the mountain into muddy and runneled hillocks that from the bird’s eye would have looked like a red and brown cavity furiously attended by denim-blue ants. Deerwater was never easily gotten to, and the town of Tenmile sprung up, first as a canvas-tent trading station the name of which was lost to memory but eventually became known as Tenmile because of its distance on the perilous switchbacks from the mining camp.
By the time the last of the miners left Deerwater’s muddy sluices, Tenmile boasted a town square with an area for a courthouse. The town swelled to 3,500 souls. The citizens incorporated and sent money to the legislature to be named the county seat and within the year broke ground on a courthouse and jail. Timber and the vermiculite mine in the nearby town of Libby kept Tenmile populated through the world wars and well into the 1960s before the grown children began to move away, the elders started to die, and the town settled at a suspect equilibrium of about 2,500 people in 1975.
It was home to many loggers and around a hundred men working at the mill. A few guys made more than fifteen dollars an hour at plumbing, machine work, and sporting goods. A used-car dealer did fair competition with his rivals in Troy and Libby. There were a pair of service stations and two churches (both Protestant), four steamy cafes, and ten bars. About three hundred citizens made the haul to Libby for the third shift at the vermiculite mine and came back looking like they were dipped in flour, bloodshot in the eyes. Fervid coughs kept their wives and children up nights.
There was a single lawyer who handled all the defense work, a rotund judge named Dyson, and a profoundly alcoholic district attorney on whom even the old sots looked down. Two pastors and two pastor’s wives and a gaggle of ever-present old ladies threw bake sales for various charities and gossiped about everyone in sight. Self-important nepotists manned the fire department and police station, the kind of men who sometimes turned handily heroic in the histories of other small towns and were no different here, having thwarted a bank robbery in 1943 that could be pointed out in places where ricocheted bullets had lodged around the square. There was even a piano instructor who lived in a small, well-kept cottage that looked like it just might house a piano teacher and from which issued an incompetent plinking that proved it. And there were twenty-plus teachers in the town and all were women save the gym instructor and the principal who managed the elementary and adjacent high school.
The children were like children from anywhere, maybe a little less so. Which is to say they watched very little television and lived in trailers and cabins. In the main, they behaved themselves, but that didn’t mean all of them were suited for much more than seventh or eighth grade. Nurturing a child’s intelligence was still considered a bit indulgent—the sooner they got to work, the better. It was well known that Principal Pemberton didn’t brook troublemakers—he simply expelled them into the meager economy. So it was something of an intrigue when Pemberton called and asked if Pete could come down to the school right away.
SOME OF THE OLDER children said they’d seen the boy on the playground but no one talked to him as he edged his way along the fence to watch the kids on and around the jungle gym. He sat on one of the halved dump truck tires in the wood chips, bonging his enormous boots against the rubber. The kids who noticed the boy didn’t speak to him.
Some thirty minutes later Principal Pemberton found him on the second floor, outside Ms. Kelley’s art class. The nurse was with the child now. Pete and Pemberton regarded them from behind the glass of the door.
“He turned to run, I grabbed his arm, and he bit me.”
Pete looked at Pemberton. He showed Pete his hand.
“Didn’t break the skin.”
Pete looked through the window at the kid. He wore brown camouflage pants that were rolled at the cuffs to fit him and a darker brown sweater that hung on him holey as netting. Leaves and pine needles stuck to the wool and his knit cap. His eyes scanned the room, lighting on Pete behind the glass only long enough to look away and study the nurse or the room.
“I got him wrapped up, but just barely,” Pemberton said. “The kid’s strong for his size.”
He tapped on the glass and the nurse came out.
“He’s got bloody gums,” she said to Pemberton. “I think he has scurvy?”
“No one’s seen him before,” Pemberton told Pete.
“He reeks,” the nurse said.
The boy stood with his hands on his hips. He ran a sleeve under his nose. His movements were swiftly mannish, as though he were another species and full-grown for it, a pygmy or some other reduced people.
“Get a name off of him?”
“No. He wouldn’t tell me.”
“How’s he been?” Pete asked the nurse.
“Sweet as a little bell.”
“And no one has any idea where he’s from? None of the other kids know him . . . ?”
Pemberton shook his head.
The boy sat back on the exam table and unlaced his enormous boots, and after he pulled them from his feet, plucked out the rags balled into each to fill the space after his toes ended. He sniffed the second of these rags like it held some information, shook it out as he had the first one, and laid it to the side of him. He tugged off cheesecloth socks. His bare feet were sickening. A thin flap of soleskin hung from his foot and he pulled it off like a piece of wet sack paper. He smelled this too, held it up to the light, and tossed it onto the floor, where it set like a gray cold cut. The rest of his foot like an etiolated stem, a rotten tuber or root.
“My word,” the nurse said.
The boy looked up at their blanched faces and resumed the crude debridement of his feet.
Pete opened a notepad and wrote down the name of a pediatrician, tore off the paper, and handed it to Pemberton.
“This guy’s retired and a little deaf. Let it ring and he’ll eventually answer. Ask if he can come down.”
Pete opened the door and went in. The nurse was about to follow, but he asked her to let him see the boy alone. The boy glanced up, but kept picking at his feet. Pete took a chair across from him.
“Hi. I’m Pete.”
Pete leaned down and saw the gray sags under the child’s eyes on an otherwise clean pale face. There was a taupe grime of dirt and ash all over his clothes. He smelled like a burnt match and salted fatback. His chopped hair shot out in brown shocks.
“What’s your name?”
“Benjamin.”
“Mind if I ask how old you are?”
“Go on ahead.”
Pete grinned.
“How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“Really? You don’t look more than eight or nine.”
The boy licked his fingers and seemed to be pressing loose skin in place.
“Where’re you from?”
The kid tossed his head.
“In town somewhere?”
The kid shook his head no.
“Where’s your mama and daddy?”
The kid began to roll down his long socks. Light could be seen through them.
“Your feet hurt?”
“Not bad.”
“You must’ve walked a long way for them to get like that.”
The boy 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 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 of evening and the gelid air burned cold into their lungs. Pete’s lungs at any rate. You’re in terrible shape, he thought. The boy trudged just ahead of him and by the second switchback could have bolted and Pete wouldn’t have pursued him. But instead, the kid stopped against a stump where the road was half washed out and a steady trickle of water ran down a gut carved into the dirt.
Pete gripped his knees gratefully. Walking he’d pondered what he would say to the boy’s parents. He’d tell them that he brought Benjamin back just as fast as he could, that nobody wanted to mess with them or their boy. He was working on what he’d say about the clothes, the prescription, and the vitamin C. But as he played out the scene his positivity set with the sun, and his decision to take the kid up here seemed more absurd. Then fully stupid. Pete had been motivated by a certainty that keeping the kid overnight was not an option. He had no place to put him. Cecil was at the Cloningers’, and he couldn’t ask them. There was nowhere else.
But Pete still felt a surging anxiety as he sat there, then a dread realization of the possibilities, in particular the chance that the boy’s father would put a bullet in him. Violence became in his mind an ever-likelier outcome. There was the shelter in Kalispell. Pete could’ve run the kid down there. At least called around.
The boy watched him, and for a moment it seemed he’d been reading Pete’s thoughts.
“What’s your last name?” Pete asked.
“Pearl.”
Pete had caught his breath but wasn’t ready to start hiking again. He didn’t even want to know how much farther. His legs knocked. He squatted.
“Benjamin Pearl. That’s nice.”
“Mama said our name reminds us of how rare we are.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sarah. Before that, it was Veronica.”
“Before what?”
“I dunno. Just before.”
“And your daddy?”
“Jeremiah Pearl.”
“You got any brothers and sisters?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Five.”
“Five? Wow. That’s a lot. Are you the oldest?”
“Nah.”
“What are their names?”
“Esther, Jacob, Ruth, Paula, and little Ethan. I come before Paula and after Ruth.”
“I see. Are they up here with your parents?”
The boy stood and tugged a sapling from the side of the hill and beat the dirt out of its roots. Pete looked around. He’d scarcely noticed that they’d walked into an area that had been replanted in the summer. Waist-high green pines grew up and down the hillside. The Pearls had chosen a good place to be away from society. The traffic up here—from the timber company at least—would be minimal for some years.
“Why’d you go into the school today, Benjamin?”
“I dunno.”
“Just sort of wandered onto the playground?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what were you doing in town?”
“Getting some things.”
“What things?”
“Food and things.”
“You have a house or some friends in town or something?”
“No.”
“Dumpsters?”
The boy pulled another sapling out of the ground.
“They throw a lot of perfectly good stuff away behind the grocery stores, don’t they?”
The kid shrugged and beat the dirt out of the sapling and tossed it over his shoulder. He pulled on another. It was almost as tall as he was.
“I don’t think Champion Timber’d be crazy about you doing that.” The boy had no idea what Pete was talking about. Pete said they should get going.
“He’s coming.”
“Your father? Where? Here?”
“He’s been watching the whole way.”
Pete turned in a full circle, looking in the short trees for some sign. Again, it was well thought out. There was cover in the saplings, but they were short enough to provide ample sight lines from any of the surrounding ridges and peaks. The revelation of his own exposure annoyed Pete.
“Let’s go meet him then. It’s getting dark.”
The kid started up the draw from where the water washed out the road. They climbed up over stumps and rocks and the water ran under kernel-corn snow that was a year old and knee-deep in this hillside cavity. They achieved the rim and walked it, slipping on icy hidden roots. They rested and went on in the falling dark at last arriving on the ridge. There was starlight to the east. A dark vista of trees and still more trees.
Pete massaged his side. An ache there. He was cold and short of breath in the lashing wind, and his eyeballs floated in little pools.
“So,” he panted. “Where the hell. Is he?”
A deafening crack drowned out the boy’s answer. A flash, a light in his eyes. Pete crouched in a beam of light and the gunshot was echoing back off the mountains. The light remained in his eyes like bear spray, and finally the shot died out and still he hunched and covered his eyes against the light. He looked over and the boy stirred on the ground. He thought the child had been shot.
“Get up,” a man said from behind the light.
Pete splayed his fingers in front of his face as if to filter out some of the glare, but it fired into his eyes all the same, and many-colored coronas burned in his vision when he looked away.
The boy started to walk toward the light, and Pete was trying to decide if he should reach for him, hold him back—of course not, you’ll be shot—when the man spoke: “Stay right there.”
“Papa, I—”
“Stay right there!”
The voice boomed of its own signal magnitude, a thunder.
“Mr. Pearl? I’m from the Department of Family Services.” His voice sounded high and fearful in his own ears. He carried on and hoped that his timbre would improve: “I’m not law enforcement or anything like that. May I show you my badge?”
The light offered no response.
“I just come across Benjamin in town and he said you all were living up here and so I brought him back.”
The light swept over to the boy.
“Take off those clothes,” the man ordered. Benjamin immediately complied and the light swung back into Pete’s eyes.
“Wait,” Pete said. “It’s gotta be thirty, forty degrees out. There’s nothing wrong with the clothes. They’re new. Look, you’re not on the hook for them. They’re gratis. Free.”
“I know what gratis means.”
“Of course. I just meant that it’s my job. I have a budget for this sort of thing.”
The boy had dropped the coat and the shirt into a pile in front of him and was undoing the pants. An insistent logorrhea poured out of Pete as the kid pulled off a brilliant white T-shirt.
“Look, if it’s a matter of you wanting to not take a handout, that’s fine. I can certainly arrange to, you know, accept payment for the clothes. I, I didn’t mean to offend you or overstep my bounds. Benjamin didn’t ask for the clothes. I insisted that he take them.”
The boy unlaced and kicked off his new boots and tugged off the new socks and then pulled down his pants and stepped out of them onto his wounded bare feet.
“Mr. Pearl. Please. He’s just a boy out here in the cold. I wouldn’t have—”
The light swung over to the boy and then back into Pete’s face and stopped him short. The boy stepped gingerly in place on the pine needles, wincing.
“Please, sir. Mr. Pearl. Your son’s got giardia poisoning from drinking out of the streams up here. I figure you and your family might have it too. I have some medicine here in my jacket. Enough for all of you and I can bring some more. In fact, I was hoping that you might let me bring up some oranges. He’s got bleeding gums and we think . . .”
He trailed off. Benjamin was naked. All knobs and knots, white and gaunt, and he put Pete in mind of creatures that lived in caves, albino spiders and eyeless fishes and newts. A white boy with purple and brown bruises and dirt and pink scar tissue and all those jaundiced whorls, all of the colors so faint in the whelming whiteness of him. He was nacreous, mother-of-pearl, this son of Pearl. And about his thighs and stomach a leopard dappling of liver spots, his penis scotched in his new pubes like a gray node. You thought not of flesh at the sight of his body, but minerals. It was a small astonishment that he was mobile, that this pearlescent boy clutched himself with bony arms.
“This isn’t necessary,” Pete said. “There’s no reason he needs to suffer.”
“You go,” the light, the elder Pearl, said. “You come back, you can expect a fatal wrath. You tell the same thing to the feds.”
“The feds? Nobody’s coming. Nothing like that is going on here.”
“You’ve come, haven’t you?”
The fact that the man spoke settled Pete’s nerves some. He could interact. Pete could do his job.
“I’m just returning your boy. I’m not bringing any trouble. All my job here is to help.”
“You come clothed in weakness, but I know what stands behind you. You insinuate yourself among good people and you rot them from the inside with your diseases and mental illnesses.”
Crazy talk. What to say? You don’t push him. You don’t test him.
“You need to put these clothes back on this boy,” Pete said plainly, astonished at the brazenness of it. Despite the rifle, the light, his fear. “If I thought you were going to make him strip naked in weather like this, I wouldn’t have brought him back at all. And if you think I’m just going to allow this boy to freeze—”
The beam shot into the trees and Pete followed it as it skittered to rest and lanced the black canyon, realizing too late that the man had simply dropped the light and was coming at him. Before Pete could recover his vision, Jeremiah Pearl was on him, had him by the jacket and was lifting him with one arm and pitching him backward to the ground. Pete lay there stunned. His vision a waterfall of sparks. His head rang. Those black angry eyes, even now striking fear into him. Pete threw up his arm helplessly and scuttled backward into a tree.
He now made out Pearl squatting right over him with his rifle in one hand. The man’s breath, body, and beard stunk like a smudge pot.
“I’ll put one in that boy’s brain before I let you have him. That is a solemn fuckin promise.”
He leaned forward. Pete flinched. The man spat on him. Then he whipped around and heaved his naked son up onto his hip and jogged into the brush.
Pete could still hear them moving across the mountainside and the boy sobbing, and Pearl saying something to him, not harshly, something firm and measured. Pete’s impression of it was that they were very scared, as if they’d had the same nightmare and he was assuring the boy that they were awake now, that everything was okay.
He listened until they were gone. Then he gathered the clothes, folded them, put a business card in the pocket of the pants, and set them under a cleft in a rock where they would be dry and could still be seen. He walked carefully down through the dark woods to the road and to his car.
Another day at the office.