by Rye Curtis
I don’t want to die out there, Ranger Lewis. Do you? Bloor clapped his legs and stood and left on his khakis two white handprints. I’ll return six o’clock tomorrow morning. He looked once clear into her eyes, winked, and replaced his sunglasses. Lewis recalled a man who had worked as a janitor in her father’s clinic. In the evening hours, when she would work at the clinic after school, she would find this man pacing the blue halls with a carpet steamer, or washing dung from the pens with his thumb on the end of a hose, or folding into the plastic bin next to a lightning-scarred oak the bodies of euthanized dogs and cats. The last time she saw him there he had winked at her too.
That evening Lewis drove the mountain road to her pinewood cabin, listening to Ask Dr. Howe How on the radio. A man with a hurried whisper like that of someone hiding under a desk during a home invasion phoned in with concerns about an inability to throw punches in his dreams. I’m gettin killed in there, Doc.
Lewis turned up the radio and pulled over to a shoulder overlooking a deep gully. She drank from the thermos of merlot and listened to Dr. Howe tell this man that he had gone to sleep with unsettled anxieties of sexual inferiority and that he would do well to remember that all men are created inferior in some way and are therefore all equals. Practice enjoying sex and fulfilling your partner in a respectful intimacy, Dr. Howe told him.
Lewis finished the thermos and climbed from the Wagoneer. She squinted out over the land and the evening mist that settled it and the thunderhead in the mountains. The last of the sun colored her face and was gone. Lightning burned beyond. She touched to her tongue her fingers and wetted them. She sent them into her government-issue trousers and closed her eyes to the dark.
Hateful swarms of mosquitoes kept that steep and rocky little wood. Most of the time there was not a thing to do but go straight through them. I just covered my mouth, pinched my nose, and held my breath. Mosquitoes have always been a special nuisance to me. When I was a little girl our house was by a seep pond and Mother would leave the window open on hot summer nights. You could count on those little winged devils to find out the holes in the flyscreen. I would swat at them until the moon was gone. I am not fond of that awful whine they like to make. Gracious, how gargantuan they sound when they get right up to your ear and sing that song which I imagine is sung in the halls of damnation.
I was slow getting down that mountain, being that I was mighty careful where I put my feet. All about were barrows of rock and motts of twisted pine and big old spruce. I held on to low branches to keep from falling over and stopped often to rest my breath. I was mighty thirsty again too. One good spill dirtied up my skirt and the zigzag sweater, but I managed not to hurt myself. Mr. Waldrip and I had been taking calcium tablets with our breakfast, so my bones were good and strong.
I am sure it was near three hours before I got to that little clearing where I had marked there had been smoke.
When a mind has had seventy-two years’ worth of thoughts, it has the opportunity to start acting a little funny. It runs the way my vacuum cleaner ran after twenty-three years of Mr. Waldrip refusing to replace it. The rubber belts inside go slack and the work of it smells like warm hair and dust. Now, I had never worried much about dementia before; Grandma Blackmore’s mind could skin a buffalo right up until the day she ended her earthly career at ninety-six. Still, as I set my old back to a great spruce and sank to the ground, my worry was that my cognition had fooled me good about the smoke I had seen rising up from the clearing. It occurred to me that it might have been wishful thinking, the way men lost in deserts see lakes where there is nothing but sand. There was not a thing in that clearing save rocks and grass and somewhere a terribly noisy owl. But I was sure I had seen smoke.
Clouds blew in above and the shadows under the trees grew together. Suddenly all was darker. I had a pain in my stomach. I had not yet passed the jelly and toast I had eaten at the Big Sky Motel the morning of our fateful flight. And I was mighty hungry. I sat for a spell holding my stomach as what was left of the sun crowned the mountains. The place had the look of evil and I was scared. True dark would come soon and I had no airplane to shelter in.
I decided that I would build a fire. I set about gathering twigs and sticks and pine cones and I piled them in the flattest place I could find. I drug a rotted log to the pile and sat there. I took out the matchbook from Terry’s coat pocket. Once more I studied the muscled dancing skunk on the cover and then I struck a match. The flame did not want to take to the log and it burned my fingers and went out. Three more matches were left.
Mr. Waldrip and I used to visit the Panhandle Plains Museum in Canyon, Texas, where there are life-sized plaster figures of cavemen and cavewomen, hairy and mean, squatting at the limits of a campfire with paper flames. One of the cavewomen was meant to have set it. My thought was, if she had been able to set a fire back then in that hard way of living, surely I could too.
I tore up some pages from the Time magazine about President Reagan’s colon surgery and stuffed them under the wood. Then I lit another match and dropped it in the makings. It burned some and went out. I tried again with the penultimate match and had not a thing on my mind save that cavewoman. The flame took and slowly wound its way up the tinder. I had never before given much thought to what Darwin called his Origin of Species, but I did then. I can see how it might have come about. The people that could not get a fire going would have perished in the cold. And I suspect it was womankind that spared Man from extinction.
The fire caught into a fine blaze and I watched it there for a little while. I was feeling mighty pleased with myself, so much so that I risked a little cheer out loud. It is true a fire is a great comfort even in the most dire of circumstances, but it does make the dark it cannot reach a great deal darker. I endeavored to keep my eyes from the dark and watch the glow in the rotted log instead. Little bugs trapped there hissed and exploded like popped corn. A poor daddylongleg was scurrying from the heat but its fine appendages singed away and the fire overtook it.
By then my stomach pained me something terrible and my bowels began to move. I hurried to the other side of my fire and looked around at the dark. I do not take any pleasure to include this here, but bless you, I will not shy from relating this story in its entirety. It is important that you believe I am relating the whole and pitiful truth of the strange events yet to come in this narrative. As a tree kept my balance, I undid my skirt and rolled down my stockings and I relieved myself right there in the firelight before all creation.
I have always considered myself a well-bred Texan woman, but I suppose even the best of us have bowel movements. My generation is mighty ashamed of them and precisely why that is I do not know. But I was sure sorry for myself and I teared up a little and swatted away the little black flies and mosquitoes that pestered me. I was a pitiful sight to behold. After I had finished, I kicked some pine needles over it and went back to where I had been sitting before and cleaned my ankles with grass. The notion crossed me that I was more unlike myself than I had ever been before.
I watched the fire take more of the log and exhausted I fell asleep.
I woke to thunder. It was dark yet and wind and rain clashed in the trees. The fire had gone out and the burnt-black wood hissed like a nest of smoking snakes. I backed up to the spruce close as I could, but rain still fell on me. It had created a sump and I was sat right in it. The rain washed out my permanent. I am sure I looked like a sopping wet mouse. I have always disliked the way I look when my hair is wet. I got out the umbrella I had found in the airplane and went to open it but it had a big tear in it and was about as useful as a ceiling fan in an igloo. I chucked it aside and set Mr. Waldrip’s boot out to fill up. I wrapped up tight in Terry’s coat. The rain was not as cold as it could have been, I imagine, but I shivered out of my bones nevertheless. How I did not perish right then and there I do not know.
I was glad that it was not long before the rain turned to scarcely a drizzle. For the better part of an hour the lightning crawled i
n the night above the trees. The sky seemed to me then like a cracked mirror turning and glinting and giving back all the awful true nature of the earth below, which was a hilly and scorched landscape of soot, a very unlucky and inhospitable place indeed.
One strike was not far away and it lit up a mighty strange presence ahead between the boles of two big pines. The light had come and gone so quickly that I was not too certain what I had seen. My first thought was that it had been the face of a young man, hidden in the dark of a hood. When the light was gone I was stone blind. I screamed out before the crack of the lightning reached me in the dark. I was considerably frightened.
It is a funny thing how I trembled at the notion that another person was out there with me, when another person was just what I had hoped to find. There is just something about strangers. And my thought was: what manner of lunatic would stand quietly in the dark and the rain to watch an old woman suffer? Or was it Terry’s disembodied face regurgitated by that white-eyed raccoon, come to haunt me for what I had taken off his person? Perhaps there are spirits over which God has lost dominion, though I have never given much credence to phantoms.
I kept my eyes on the place in the dark, but when the next bout of lightning lit up the trees, whatever it was had gone. The woods flashed on and off for a spell, and I watched for the face to come back, but it did not. There was only that grand timber, which to me then were like great bars to a cell imprisoning me for convictions I feigned not to understand. I tucked my head to my chest and waited for morning.
Mr. Waldrip’s boot filled up past the ankle overnight, but I only got a little sip that morning before I stumbled and spilt it and would spend the rest of the day as thirsty as a catfish in a catamaran. The morning was overcast but the trees all about were bright and grayly bejeweled with rainwater. The good thing about everything being wet and cool was that the mosquitoes had taken the morning off to do whatever it is they do when they are not out terrorizing us higher creatures.
I did not move for some time. I considered not moving ever again and letting myself perish right there. It might have been the first time that I had entertained the notion of resigning to what many would have said was an inevitability in the case of a seventy-two-year-old woman becoming lost in the wilderness. It most certainly would not be the last. I imagined myself looking something like poor Terry, rigid and squirreled up against that spruce, my jaw off its hinges and flies making a mansion of my skull. I wondered how long my hair would stay in and if I would be found in this most unlovely condition, or never again be beheld by human eyes. I could not decide which fate I most preferred.
I took out the tore-up map and worked to make sense of it, but it could not be done. It might as well have been a swatch of the Chinese wallpaper that insufferable Catherine Drewer had used in her sitting room. I decided to voyage away from the clearing and farther down the mountain, although not before I stepped right in my own mess and had to clean my shoe in the wet grass! I do not mean to offend, and this is again a detail I could have left out, but I believe it contributes to the absurdity of my plight and proves that I am not being false nor grand.
After about an hour I came to a rocky place where I could see out from the trees and down into a valley. My heart jumped! I spotted in the distance the asphalt of a highway, tracing a path back to civilization. I was likely as good as rescued if I could make it down there. With renewed energy and hope I made my way down to the valley. All the while I heard strange noises behind me. I had the notion I was being followed.
I reached the place after a couple of hours and stumbled out of the woods. The highway was not a highway at all but a creek. Gracious, I was disappointed. Although by that time I was mighty thirsty too, so it was hard work to be too disappointed in finding water. I wobbled on like a newborn calf, my stockings tore up pretty good now, and I collapsed at the bank of that creek. I cupped my hands in the water and drank. It was very cold and clear. I had drunk two handfuls when I looked up and spotted in the shallows the hairy corpse of a huge animal! I spat out the water and jumped back. I was nearly sick, but I held my hand over my mouth. The thing had antlers and scraps of hide trailing in the current such as some gowned pagan devil.
I went upstream past this dead monster and filled Mr. Waldrip’s boot. I did my best not to let my imagination wander to what other nasty things might be lying afoul in the water. While I sat sipping from Mr. Waldrip’s boot the light changed color on the mountains all around me. I was hungry and cold so I prayed and then set about building another fire for the night. I piled wood together much the same as I had done the night prior, only I gathered more of it and more dry tinder. I piled the makings near the creek. It was near dark when I sat down exhausted and took out Terry’s matchbook.
The wind was against me and howled wildly over the valley, and the wide sky darkened with clouds. I opened the matchbook to the last match and tore it carefully. I steadied my hand and positioned my back to the wind. I got close as I could to the tinder pile, then said a prayer and struck the match. The matchhead hissed and blackened but did not bring a flame.
Dark came but not before I spotted the silhouette of an animal I took to be a mountain lion prowling a far ridge of rock. Scared and uneasy, and nearly starved, I had my last caramel for supper. It threatened to rain, but the wind chased the clouds from the sky and uncovered the stars and moon. The dark was hardly dark anymore under the bare heavens, which shone down on the grassy fields of the valley, the silvery creek, the woods nearby.
I did not know what next to do. I worried my situation had grown too dire. But I knew come morning I would be compelled to do something, anything at all. The dead monstrosity was yet nearby, its black antlers moonlit and the twinkling water underneath like a bed of lovely gems.
I heard something move in the woods. I recalled the face I was now certain I had seen the night before. I thought of the mountain lion too. My Bible was in my purse and I moved it to the breast pocket of Terry’s coat right over my heart. But I was mighty tired, enough not to be too afraid of mysterious faces and mountain lions. There was not a thing to do but to offer up my prayers to God and succumb to exhaustion.
The pilot swung the helicopter low over gray slopes of scree high above the tree line. Lewis squinted against the crags of sunlit granite, upthrust from the depths of the mantle some eighty million years ago. She brought slowly to her lips a thermos of merlot.
Bloor, long legs folded childlike in the seat next to her, knees level to his chin, turned upon her his pale face. His voice squelched in her headset over the beat of the blades. Have you ever been to Macao?
Lewis shook her head.
An older man with clubbed fingers sat across from them. He watched the window. Bloor had introduced him as Cecil. Keep your eyes peeled, he said.
I left Jill with her grandmother and spent last winter in Macao, Bloor said, and he made a show of looking out the glass. Had to get away. Met a six-foot-three Pekinese woman named Chesapeake. They pick their own English names, you know. She picked Chesapeake. Her friends referred to her by a Chinese word that means ladder. You’re tall too, Ranger Lewis.
Cecil looked up. Keep your stupid eyes peeled.
Cecil’s a longtime rescue paramedic, Bloor said. Works even though he has COPD. He doesn’t like me very much.
These people we are lookin for, they are dead, Cecil said. He turned back to the window. Sun filled his eyes yet he did not squint.
Koojee, said Bloor.
They flew onward over intrusions of granite set in the earth like molars in a jaw, and they each of them searched the ground below, wearing now sunglasses as the day grew brighter. Wind shear drove the helicopter down and Lewis squeezed the thermos in her lap. The air smoothed and she drank. Bloor watched her behind yellow lenses and asked her if she considered herself an ethical person.
Lewis wiped her mouth and ran a tongue over wine-red teeth. She tightened the lid to the thermos. Not sure, she said.
Bloor brandished a finger whi
te with chalk. I give a share of my time and skills for the wellbeing of others, so for the sake of universal balance I allow myself particular ethically selfish pleasures. Chesapeake was an ethically selfish pleasure.
Lewis smiled and unscrewed the lid to the thermos. She drank and rescrewed it.
What ethically selfish pleasures do you allow yourself, Ranger Lewis?
Goddamn, I’d have to think about that.
I hope you do.
Cecil put up a hand. Do you need me to peel them for you?
Thank you, Cecil, Bloor said.
The pilot circled two other mountains and passed over a bleak forest. Lewis kept her eyes to the land and blinked little. In the glass she could see Bloor turn his head to look at her. Twilight was already upon them when the pilot warned that they ought to turn back before they lost the light.
Goddamn it, Lewis said.
Cecil had not turned his head for a time. At long last he shuddered it around to them like some rickety piece of theater on a set of pulleys. It’s difficult to think anyone of any age could survive down there at all, he said, and he coughed on the plump ends of his fingers.
As the pilot began to fly them back toward the station, Bloor spoke about the depression of people without ambition.
These are the eighties, you know, he said. I’ve seen thirty-year-olds dressing like teenagers. I’ve always been ambitious. Do you enjoy your work out here, Ranger Lewis?
They passed the black edge of the mountain in the oncoming dark. Yes, she said.
My daughter will be eighteen the third of November. I’ll tell her about you, remind her that there are ambitious women out there.
Be quiet, Cecil said. You’re makin the pilot crazy.
One more thing, Cecil. Then you can wire my jaw shut if you want. Listen, Ranger Lewis. I apologize if this is too forward. Sometimes I’m too forward. Have dinner with me this evening? I’m renting a large lonely cabin and I’d appreciate the company. We can go over the case and discuss our options.