Kingdomtide

by Rye Curtis

  Cloris?

  Cloris.

  I tend to frighten, so it spooked me some, Pete said.

  What’s a goddamn cloris?

  I can’t say that I know, Claude said. If it’s some kind of code, I can’t say that I know it. And what for, to what end?

  Maybe you misheard it.

  Maybe. Maybe. Don’t think I did.

  What sounds like cloris?

  Morris, Pete said.

  Where were you?

  Out by Darling Pass.

  See your goddamn ghost?

  Claude smiled. All right now, Debs. No need to have fun at my expense.

  Pete raised a red eyebrow. You don’t believe in the ghost, Ranger Lewis?

  I’ve never seen it.

  I guess it’s hard to believe in somethin especially when you can’t see it, Pete said. I tried to believe my wife loved me. But after a while she said she wanted to make a change in her life before change was too late to be made. She said I was repressed. Sometimes she likes to use words I ain’t never heard of to make me feel bad about my education. But I told her she ain’t goin to get another way of life like she wants, not at thirty-nine lookin like she’s sixty-nine, not a clean tooth in her gourd.

  Pete’s had some ciders, Claude said.

  Did I tell you what she said, Claudey?

  Why don’t you tell me later?

  No, go ahead, Lewis said. What’d she say?

  Said I had a weird heart in a weird chest. Said I looked like an ugly woman with derelict breasts.

  I’m sorry, Petey. She shouldn’t talk about you like that.

  Well, I’ll be all right. I know I got a weird chest, had it all my life, born with it. Pectus carinatum. But a weird heart? Been wrackin my brain tryin to know what she meant by that.

  Sorry again about the hour, Debs, Claude said, turning to her. Just thought I’d brief you on this cloris word in case you thought we should act on it in some way didn’t occur to me.

  Lewis steadied herself on the doorjamb and looked up to the dark sky. She recalled the coat of a black Labrador she had once watched her father euthanize in his clinic. She looked back to Claude. You don’t need to check on me every goddamn weekend. I’m all right.

  I know that.

  All right, she said. Man’s voice or woman’s?

  Couldn’t say. I’d say might’ve been a woman or a young boy.

  Pete fanned out a hand of small fingers. To me that voice had the sound of a forlorned woman, he said importantly.

  All right. I’ll make a note of this tomorrow mornin. You two ought to get on home before Cornelia eats you guys’ tongues and takes you to Neptune.

  Come on now, Debs, don’t poke fun.

  What’s that? Pete said.

  The goddamn ghost Claude’s got you lookin for, Lewis said. Gums off tongues, hair, and balls.

  She closed the door on the two men, then she went back to the kitchen sink. The stains in the uniform had not come out. She dropped the shirt in the wastebasket. She had another glass of merlot and took a long bath with another bottle and listened to Ask Dr. Howe How. A thunderous woman phoned into the program and asked how it was that she and her husband seemed to be behaving like unrealistic and impractical people. She asked if it were common for people to behave like characters they had seen on television. In a reedy and pragmatic voice like that of a physician in surgery, Dr. Howe offered that, yes, it was common, perhaps because to do so was easier than assessing and acting on our authentic impulses and concerns.

  Lewis switched off the radio and climbed from the bath. She dried herself and stood naked to her bedroom window looking out at the dark pines and the valley below. She took to the fogged pane the tip of a finger and outlined her tall reflection. Beyond, in the forest, distant flashlights worked the dark and struck the trees. Lewis figured it was the men searching yet for the ghost of Cornelia Åkersson.

  She wiped the window clear and returned to the bathroom to vomit in the sink and then went to bed where she slept a restless night of dreams she was sure she had dreamt but none of them could she recount upon waking. In the morning she said to herself, God only knows what happens to me in my goddamn dreams.

  Lewis stopped the Wagoneer to clear from the road a flattened goshawk. She sailed the carcass like a discus into the trees below and marked the incident in the notepad she kept in her chest pocket. The sun was not yet up, the road still dark. She drove on and came to the one-room cedar structure perched high up the mountain. She unlocked the front door under a sign wood-burned with National Forest Service Backcountry Station and went inside.

  In the kitchenette she started a pot of coffee and took three aspirin and splashed her face at the sink and clicked on the space heater. Her desk was flush against a large westfacing window with a view of the same wooded valley she could see from her cabin. Mist sat in the evergreens and was just burning off under a rising sun. Great clots of dark birds turned in the sky. Lewis took off the campaign hat and set it to a hook on the wall. She sat and powered on the radio equipment on the desk and waited for it to warm up. She leaned over the paging microphone.

  Ranger Lewis to Chief Gaskell. Ranger Lewis to Chief Gaskell. Come in, Chief Gaskell. Over.

  Mornin, Ranger Lewis. Readin you loud and clear. What’re you doin at the station this early? Over.

  Somethin was buggin me, couldn’t let it wait. John, you know anythin about a cloris? Over.

  What’s a cloris? Say again. Over.

  Cloris. I don’t know. I was hopin you would. Over.

  I don’t. Over.

  Is it not code? Stand for somethin? Over.

  Not anything I know. Over.

  Ranger Paulson received a transmission over his handheld last night out by Darling Pass, worried it might’ve been a distress call. It just said cloris. Thrice it said it. Cloris, cloris, cloris. Could’ve misheard. Over.

  Cloris? Say again. Over.

  Cloris. I’m spellin it C-L-O-R-I-S. Cloris. Over.

  Cloris. Copy. Cloris. I’ve never heard of that. Cloris. I’ll check around. Darling Pass? Was Claude out lookin for that ghost he says rides that turtle? Over.

  Goddamn Cornelia. He was. Over.

  He’s a strange bird. How’re you holdin up up there? Over.

  Lewis leaned back and looked out the window. A black beetle was climbing the inside of the pane and appeared there an immense animal using for stepping stones the peaks beyond. She hunched again for the microphone. I’m all right, John, thanks. Over.

  All right, well you let me know if there’s anything I can do. We’re thinkin about you. Marcy says she’s thinkin about you too. Divorce is hard times under any circumstance. Over.

  Appreciate it. Over.

  That everything, Ranger Lewis? Over.

  That’s everything. Out.

  Lewis stood from her desk and went to the kitchenette and poured a cup of coffee and splashed a little merlot in it from a bottle hidden in a cutout behind the cabinet and turned again to the window. She went back and leaned over her desk and flicked away the beetle.

  Mr. Waldrip and I had a calendar of 1986 from First Methodist pasted to the pantry door. Prior to us leaving on our trip to Montana, Mr. Waldrip had circled the 31st of August with black pen and had neatly written in the appointment we had with Terry Squime for the flight to our cabin in the Bitterroot National Forest. I have always thought it noteworthy that the 31st happened to fall on the first Sunday of Kingdomtide. If you are not a Methodist of a certain age likely you have not heard of Kingdomtide. It is meant to be a season of charity and unity in the Kingdom of God observed after Pentecost and before Advent. Not many churches observe it anymore. For me, ever since my time in the Bitterroot, it has turned out to be a season of considerable hardship and grief.

  I now have the calendar here with me at River Bend Assisted Living on the wall above my desk. Mr. Waldrip could not have foreseen he was marking the day he would wind up in a tree and I would be stranded in the wilderness, but that is just the
way these fateful moments go. Often we do not know the significance of a thing until it is good and well in the past. It is seldom now that I shut my eyes without I should see that calendar and the first Sunday of Kingdomtide circled in the glittery dark you can find on the inside of your eyelids. I fear it may be the last thing I ever see.

  There was painful little sleep to be had that first night. I must have said my name into the radio near to a thousand times. I was hoarser than a pioneer preacher on a Monday. I was not certain whether the radio still worked, but I made an effort nevertheless. When I did endeavor to get some shut-eye, I learned how mighty afraid I was. I did not care for staying in that little airplane with Terry’s disfigured body looming up in a terrible silence, but I came to reason it was a sight better than sleeping out in the open with the dark and all the unknown critters that call the dark their home.

  When I woke the sun was high and my shoulder and knees ached something terrible. I was getting thirsty. Dried blood flaked off my forehead like paint off an old prairie home. A filthy latticework of scratches and scrapes covered my arms. I was not even sure they were my arms. They seemed to belong to some old and pitifully treated indigent woman. I sat up and climbed out through the gash in the little airplane.

  Terry was still strapped in his seat, warped up like an old cigar-store Indian left out in the weather for a considerable long while. His fingers had buckled into an array like buzzard talons and his jaw was crooked and dried out. I cannot know what on earth compelled me but I covered my mouth and went closer to him. Tiny gnats danced on his opaque eyes and I studied the way the bigger flies throned the tongue in his gaping mouth like little green potbellied despots.

  I left Terry and went to the edge of the escarpment and stood next to Mr. Waldrip’s boot. My poor husband was down there yet caught in that spruce. He had not moved. I prayed then and there that this would be the most heartless sight to which I would ever bear witness. I got a handful of pebbles and chucked them at him. Some missed entirely and others bounced clear off his back. Mr. Waldrip did not move. I was reminded of when he had been hospitalized for his back surgery in 1974. When they put him on the morphine he went quiet and helpless. I had never seen him like that before. I had certainly never seen him deceased before. He was a mighty sweet man, dear Mr. Waldrip, God rest his soul. I miss him very much.

  A young black woman who is a therapist here at River Bend Assisted Living has told me that there is a woman in Switzerland with one of these doubled surnames that are fashionable today, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who believes that there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I am sure that she means well, but I do not believe she has it exactly right. The stages of grief are myriad and you could not endeavor to name them all. A stage for every recollection, for every ever-failing memory, and these stages are nameless and they are many, so that cast before you is a measureless spectrum of unparticular nostalgia and loss. Grief is the cold end of the night, I believe.

  I turned back to the airplane and decided I would try the radio again. By then I had grown used to the foul way Terry smelled so that I did not even flinch when I crawled in around his legs and took hold again of the receiver. I said the same thing I had said all night prior: Help me, my name is Cloris Waldrip. Our airplane went down.

  I repeated this at intervals some one hundred times or better. I was getting mighty hungry and thirsty so I looked for my purse and found it had tumped over on the floor next to my seat. I put back what I could find: my gallbladder medication (which I had nearly finished and did not especially need to take anymore, thank goodness), a packet of tissues, my little copy of the King James Bible, my house keys. I did turn up a handful of my caramels under the seat, but I could not find my copy of Anna Karenina nor my pocketbook. I did not imagine I would need my pocketbook, but I would have liked to have had the copy of Anna Karenina. I could not find any water.

  I backed out of the fuselage with my purse and I unwrapped a caramel and ate it on a short boulder close by so that I could still hear the radio should anyone come through. It was a Monday and I usually had my Panhandle Ladies’ Breakfast Club on Mondays out at the Goodnight House. (Colonel Charles Goodnight was a celebrated cattleman who helped settle the Panhandle, and his family have kept up his fine estate as a landmark of historical significance.) We often ate on the veranda. Had Mr. Waldrip not convinced me to go on this crazy trip, I would have been sat between Sara Mae Davis and Ruth Moore, the sun in Ruth’s dyed orange hair like a Christmas light, both of them yammering about the new establishment in downtown Amarillo that was said to be an iniquitous place for women who liked women and men who liked men.

  I had reached into my purse for another caramel when suddenly Terry shuddered and growled! Dear me! Flies blew out like smoke from his nose and mouth in a great retch. I let out a terrific scream and covered my face in horror. I fell to my knees and prayed.

  A kind pathologist would later inform me that Terry had eructed. Unpleasant a thing as it is, during decomposition a corpse will build up internal gas that has to escape somehow. I understand the gas is sometimes called cadaverine. It does not sound right to me, but this pathologist was a medical man so I am inclined to believe him. It would be a shame if he were pulling an old woman’s leg.

  After I had prayed for some time I opened my eyes. Terry was much as he was before. The flies had resettled him and his mouth was black with them. I was in dread for fear he would move again. After a spell, when finally I decided that he would not and was very deceased, I looked to the sky for the time of day and could not tell what it was. If I had been in our little house I would have been able to tell by the way the light falls through the windows in the sitting room. Living that long in a place makes it something of a clock. Everything tells you the time. You could know the hour by the shadow of a chair leg on the carpet. But out there on that mountain the light fell about so strangely that I was hardly ever too certain.

  I guessed it was late afternoon and I decided I would take a look around before dark. I was just then beginning to get my wits about me and think rationally on what I ought to do. Though I do not believe I had as of yet understood my situation entirely. I scouted around the escarpment, but never left sight of the little airplane. The place was not large. It was a narrow chance we had stopped there instead of farther down the mountain in the timber. I found little else besides granite cliff faces, which I could not climb. However I did spot a raccoon with a white eye hiding in a shrub that grew straight from the rock. I watched it for a spell and it watched me back best it could. It reminded me of a pet raccoon that an unusual neighborhood boy had named Duodenum and had kept in a messy dog kennel and fed scraps of cooked meat, except that Duodenum had the whole of its sight.

  I went back to the airplane and shuffled some more through the debris in the cockpit and turned up a tore-up map of Montana. There was also an issue of Time magazine from the year prior about President Reagan’s colon surgery. I sat on a rock and read it until the daylight had all but gone. Then I returned to the radio. The little light in it had gone out. I tried it but did not hear the static I had heard before. It occurred to me that I ought to have stayed after it earlier until it had died.

  Night fell after what I hold to be the longest day in creation. A gentle rain began and I sat back in that little airplane and held my eyes shut and thought about Mr. Waldrip out there in that spruce. I was mighty thirsty but I was too frightened to go out for a drink of rain. Something rustled around outside. I told myself it was only the white-eyed raccoon and did not open my eyes to find out for sure.

  In the morning I woke to an awful shock. Terry had slid out into the aisle and his face was within a foot of mine. His eyes and nose and lips were all but gone. I suspect that the white-eyed raccoon had made a meal of them and was sleeping soundly someplace with a red muzzle. My goodness gracious, I hollered like a steam whistle and scrambled from the airplane. I fell to my knees and shut my eyes and prayed for some time. Whe
n I opened them they were on the mountains and the rolling valley. In the valley I saw a thing which at first I took to be swifts flying. But I rubbed my eyes and saw better that it was smoke! Lead-colored smoke over the treetops.

  I stood up and dusted off my stockings and tidied my hair. I went up to the edge of the escarpment. The smoke was from a campfire, I reasoned. Here I was to make a fateful decision. Best I stay near the airplane and wait for help? There was no water at hand and I had no way to know if anyone had heard me over the radio. How long would pass before they would know to look for us? Or should I venture down to the smoke with the idea that there might be a campsite? The smoke was at a considerable distance, but I judged I could reach it before nightfall. Although I was concerned I could injure myself (seventy-two-year-old women are not meant to climb anything), that little airplane had become a mausoleum of wickedness and I dreaded another night there more than anything else. Troubling a decision as it was, and fateful as it would prove to be, I made up my mind that I would leave the airplane and make a pull for the smoke. I had a good idea that it was a nice family down there cooking breakfast.

  I happened to look down at my side. Mr. Waldrip’s boot was still upright there at the edge of the escarpment. It was full up to the ankle with rainwater. I was then mighty pleased that I had bought him those good alligator-skin boots, being that alligators are waterproof. I knelt down and got that boot and gulped the water until it was gone. I ought to have sipped it and saved some in the toe, but you do not think that way when you are thirsty.

  I went back to the airplane. It was cooler than it had been, so I had decided I was going to take the big wool coat Terry wore. If Mr. Waldrip had been there with me he would have done the same thing. I imagine he would have been disappointed with me if I had not salvaged everything I could both from the airplane and from Terry’s person.

  I inched closer to him but kept my eyes on the ground. He smelled like a dead horse. I grabbed for him and felt for the seatbelt and unbuckled it. He slid out of his seat and toppled to the rocks with a heavy thud and an upwelling of many flies such as dust beaten from an old cushion. I turned him on his side and worked one arm free from his coat. His joints popped. I told myself I was only loosening up the stiff leg on the old card table we used for bridge night at First Methodist. I rolled him and did the other arm. He ended up on his back, and I was stood over him with his coat. It was a gray color and was patterned with blood and looked now a little like red damask. I had the thought that I had robbed him. I looked him full in the face or what else there remained of it. It had been gnawed away and there was no blood nor flesh to it, only such as would be left on a watermelon rind after a picnic.