Kingdomtide

by Rye Curtis

  Lewis watched unsteadily the man’s face.

  She drank a bottle of merlot at her kitchen sink and put on a clean uniform and then drove to a stately two-story cabin built of pine and painted clean white, stilted dark and alone in a far dead end overlooking the east valley. Down below in the foothills a little town glowed. No wind battled the trees and stars spun like rowels in the glassy firmament. Lewis parked the Wagoneer in the gravel driveway. She took up from the passenger’s seat a four-dollar bottle of merlot and picked off the price tag.

  The front door of the white cabin opened. Bloor ducked under the transom and peered out at her. His thin black shadow emerged like an insect from a crack in a floor. He put up a hand and rolled his long fingers. Lewis climbed from the Wagoneer.

  Without a word Bloor ushered her into the cabin. He closed the door and locked the dead bolt. He waved in a circle a chalked hand and asked her what she thought of the place.

  Lewis surveyed the large, open room. A circular steel fireplace burned in the center and a length of dark picture windows lined a wall beyond which lay a stilted deck and a hot tub and a barbecue. Long white couches were angled around a glass coffee table where there sat a bottle of wine. The kitchen was lit up through an open archway and from there came a smell of cooking that recalled a deep basement.

  It’s goddamn modern, Lewis said.

  I thought so too, Bloor said. He took from her the bottle she had brought and her coat. Do you go everywhere in uniform, Ranger Lewis?

  I expect I just got comfortable in it.

  It’s a handsome uniform.

  I’ve been by here before, Lewis said. It’s goddamn unusual to see a white cabin.

  It’s owned by a homosexual man named Cherry. Good guy. You know him?

  I know he rents this place out, but I never met him.

  Bloor thanked her for the wine and said, I’m sorry if I seem distracted. I just hung up with my daughter. She’s been trouble recently.

  I figure she’s the age for it.

  Bloor went over to the coffee table and set the bottle there beside the other and took from his chest pocket a cake of chalk and chalked his hands. I don’t want to say she’s slow, but it takes a long time to get her to understand the complexity of a thing. He took up the bottles and held them out for her to choose.

  Lewis pointed at the merlot.

  Bloor uncorked the bottle with a corkscrew from the table. She was caught today with that clerk with the dead tooth I was telling you about. In the school restroom. Suspended. What do you think of that?

  Nothin.

  Bloor poured two glasses of merlot. She told me one morning over eggs she wanted to do it. Can you believe that?

  Do what?

  Sex. I’m a progressive man, Ranger Lewis. Cultured, of this time. Beyond this time, even. But you know, part of me wants my daughter to be the eternal virgin.

  I expect that’s only natural, Lewis said.

  Bloor smiled and sat on the couch. He patted the cushion next to him. Lewis went over to him and sat. He handed her a glass and raised his. To the Waldrips and Terry Squime, may Light and Love have mercy on them. May they rest in peace.

  Lewis raised her glass. That’s premature talk.

  The two drank.

  How did you meet your ex-husband? I apologize if I’m too curious. My wife always told me that I’m curious in a way that makes people feel probed and unsafe.

  Lewis told him that she had met Roland at her dad’s veterinarian clinic when she worked there after school and Roland had brought in his dog to put it down. She told how they had gotten married just after she had left high school and had begun working in the Missoula Parks and Recreation. After a few years, she said, she took the ranger’s position in the Bitterroot Mountains and Roland was put in charge of purchasing in the small-game department at a hunting-goods store. At the time she had not thought anything of him running off on a business trip every other weekend.

  He was seeing someone else?

  He had a wife in Nebraska, one in Colorado, and one more in Montana. Lewis pointed to her badge.

  The man is a Mormon then.

  If he is he never told me about it. He’s in prison for trigamy.

  Koojee. At least you don’t have kids.

  Goddamn it, never needed any.

  Kids. You know, when we moved from Tacoma to Missoula I hoped the change of venue would help. But I don’t know. My daughter’s already lost her virginity straddling a toilet. It’s not that I’m made uncomfortable by sexuality. My tenure as a sergeant in the National Guard made sure of that.

  Bloor drank off a glass, then reached for the bottle and poured himself another. He stroked together the chalked fingers of his free hand and studied the wine with eyes that did not seem to see.

  When my wife passed away three years ago, he said, I thought I’d become a better person. To honor her memory, you understand. I haven’t. Not at all. I don’t know why.

  Sorry about your wife.

  Bloor looked at the ends of his white fingers. I love people, he said. Do you know what she used to tell me?

  No.

  That I could rule the world with love and compassion.

  All right.

  I miss her. When I tell people about her I can see it in their faces they don’t understand what a visionary woman she was. They don’t know what she meant to me.

  I expect that’s true.

  I’ve always lost people, you know. I think it’s why I first started in search-and-rescue. My mom disappeared watering pansies one morning when I was an infant. Nothing left but a pair of size-six clogs and a water hose running. My dad was already long gone, somewhere dead or alive in a country we had no idea about. Some people thought he’d come back and kidnapped my mom and drowned her in one of the Finger Lakes. They never found her. My sister raised me. Then she died of food poisoning in a hotel lobby ten years ago this Thanksgiving. Koojee.

  Goddamn sorry to hear that.

  Room service killed her. The hotel settled handsomely in court. Now I never have to work another day of my life if I don’t want to.

  I figure that’s a good thing.

  Losing my wife, Adelaide, was the hardest. We knew each other since we were kids. But I don’t think she ever was a child, you know. She always spoke like she’d been born with a life already lived in her. Most everyone didn’t know what to make of her, so they were vile to her. The boys at school tormented her. But I don’t think any of them ever really had the upper hand. It was even then like she’d wanted them to be vile to her in just the way they were. As if she’d orchestrated the whole thing for a pleasure only she knew about.

  Sounds like she was a goddamn special woman, Lewis said. She missed her mouth with her glass and dribbled merlot down the front of her uniform. She blotted the spill with her sleeve and held out the empty glass.

  Bloor poured her another. He turned his drawn face to the windows, where a blue light outside showed fog in the trees. A fingermark of chalk was on his chin. You don’t even know, he said, and he took her fingers between his chalked hands. Thank you for coming over tonight. He pinched the skin of her ring finger hard and filled his lungs like he were to submerge himself in water.

  Lewis took back her hand. You’re welcome.

  Bloor let out his breath and smiled.

  Lewis, rubbing the back of her hand, pulled the Wagoneer crookedly into the driveway. The lights were off in the pinewood cabin and the windows dark. Over the radio Dr. Howe spoke gently to a woman who had phoned in with the name Ronnie and asked how she could be expected to go on and live the life she had come to live when all she had ever wanted was to leave her husband and her three children and sing country-western music all night long in Nashville. Lewis turned off the engine but kept the radio on and listened.

  The woman said: I’m three hundred pounds. That’s somethin to do with it. But it ain’t fat that’s in me. I got all this frustration poolin in my belly and my thighs and my ass. I can’t be a country-we
stern singer. I’m morbidly obese and I ain’t got a particularly good singin voice. I count myself betrayed, Dr. Howe. I just knew that’s what I was goin to be when I was a little girl, but here I am now and I’m not and I’m large and I’m tonedeaf. My gran was a singer. Sometimes I go to the downtown library and look through those old microfiches they got of her and the shows she used to put on around town and I just get so frickin jealous, pardon my language. Jealous of my dead gran. That’s low, ain’t it? Tell me it’s low. And then my husband, not long ago I caught him eyeballin my baby sister at the church fish fry. That’s been on my mind. She’s only just able to have a legal drink and weighs nearly a hundred pounds less than me, so I ain’t no competition. Where’s a person like me with all this frustration poolin in them supposed to go to get their self-worth? I’ve just been dismissed and dismissed, even by people that’d say they love me. And I go to doin it to myself, Dr. Howe, I go to dismissin myself and I just sit on the end of my bed while the kids’re at school and my husband is at work and just watch the cat come in and out of the room.

  Dr. Howe said: Ronnie, life is about adjusting our expectations. It is what it is, and will be what it will be, like it or not. And I believe that the secret to happiness is to find a way not only to accept and tolerate life as it comes, in any manner it comes, but to find a way to enjoy it in spite of yourself and the conditions it sets. You can’t have everything you want or you would implode and disappear. Do you understand me, Ronnie? You would have nothing at all without all that you believe you do not have.

  The day after I came to the creek, I prayed by it for a spell, batting away those terrible little mosquitoes and bottle flies. I was knelt in the wet shortgrass, upstream from the decomposing creature. I drank first from my palms and then from Mr. Waldrip’s boot. The water was mighty good and tasted like water from wells dug in Texas when I was a girl.

  I was by now very hungry and my stomach growled something terrible. I prayed with my eyes open for a way to feed myself and watched the clear creek for fish but saw none. I watched the grass fields of the valley and wondered if there existed an animal out there slow and dimwitted enough I might catch it. Although I had seen plenty of times the hunting of small birds and seen Father shoot coyotes from the back porch, I had not ever killed a living thing myself, save for flies and mice in our house. But those are just the little ole deaths of a household, not at all like the desperate carnage which occurs in the wild. Even hunting is just a game men play at today, no longer a mortal urgency in this age of convenience. Men hunt not out of hunger, but out of boredom. Though I suppose men do many things nature no longer requires of them.

  I got up from the creek and went back to the wood I had piled the night before. I had used up all of Terry’s matches, and I knew of no other way to get a fire going. I considered rubbing two sticks together as I had read about the earliest Indians doing this and had seen it depicted before in a diorama at the Panhandle Plains Museum, although I was sure I possessed neither the technique nor the stamina to ignite them. If I was to catch anything for supper, I would have to have it uncooked. The notion of eating uncooked meat worried me some. I hear that some people in bright cities are fond of eating raw fish, but it does not appeal to me.

  I went out with Terry’s black hatchet and stalked the rocky fields. I swung the blade through the tall grass endeavoring to scare up something I might have a chance to thump on the head. This proved mighty foolish and after an hour or so I sat breathless back by the creek. I very much dislike being foolish, so I used my shoelaces to fasten the hatchet to the end of a long stick, and I set about beating the water at every dark shape that went by. No doubt at least one poor little aquatic creature was maimed. Nevertheless I sat hungry, and my arms seized up around the shoulders like the hinges on the cabinet under my kitchen sink.

  I looked to that great decomposing animal in the water and I prayed aloud: Oh, heavenly Father, I do not want to starve. If I should join your holy side this day, please let me go quick, please do not let me starve.

  My dear! I was sure I would die of starvation.

  About midafternoon there was a sound in the sky, a clatter ricocheting off the mountains. It was faint enough that I was not sure I had not imagined it, but before I could see where it was coming from between the sunned peaks, whatever it was had gone. All that was left to be listened to was the trickling of the creek and the cry of the mosquitoes. I have since heard many stories about strange and mysterious sounds in the mountains. The ghost stories about the Bitterroot are especially peculiar and sad.

  Fish swam by in the creek until the sun was gone and I could no longer see much of anything. Yet the moon kept light on the dead animal in the water where its breaching bones were blue and swaddled in its own rotten skin.

  The next day I crawled in the fields eating little gray flowers. They tasted like Cynthia Weaver’s summer melon salad after it had sat a few days in the icebox. Not good. I ate what amounted to a handful of them and when my head began to wobble I rested against a stump by the wood pile. The night had been cold enough to put a frost to the blade of the hatchet and I had not slept much. In the sun now I fell asleep.

  I woke to a sting under my arm. It turned out to be a tick. The little monster had already gorged itself fatter than any I had seen before behind a dog’s ear. The thing looked like a chinaberry. Mr. Waldrip used to heat my tweezers on the stove and pick them off his bird dogs when they got big and yellow enough to see in their coats. I jumped up and hollered and slapped it, which anybody worth knowing knows you ought not to do. Blood ran down my side in a mullion of black. The wicked thing clung to me. Its backside was blown out like pitted fruit. I picked it off. Of course the head stayed in.

  I wiped the blood on my skirt and left there something like those handprints of ancient people on the inner walls of caves. The weft of blood drying in the wrinkles of my palm made a gory relief of those little life lines and love lines our dear grandniece, Jessica Pollard, had read for me one Thanksgiving and prophesied that I would finish out a long and loved existence. Jessica now lives with her olive-skinned husband and two handsome sons in Phoenix, Arizona. I might have at one time been concerned about her practicing the reading of palms, but now I think it bears little true weight on the condition of the soul.

  Suddenly then I felt heat. I turned. You may not believe it yet, but what did I see but a fire burning in the wood I had piled the night before. Fire!

  I froze. For most people, surely for the skeptical youth of this most recent generation, it is mighty hard work to believe that a fire could start on its own. It was hard for me to believe it too. I spun around and looked quickly over the woods and the fields, but I did not see much of anything. I crouched down. I stood up again. My goodness, I did not know what to do.

  I crept up to the fire. Flies circled a steel pot on the ground. My heart galloped. A little skinless body was floating inside. I guessed it had been a rabbit. I looked around again.

  Anyone there? I hollered. Hello? Hello? My name is Cloris Waldrip!

  After a minute or two I sat back down on the ground. I sat there good and frightened for a spell, watching those pale flames in the daylight. Upon reflection I considered a sermon Pastor Bill had given some months prior. He had called the congregation’s attention to Mark 10:27: And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible. It was soon made plain that my prayers had been answered in nothing less than a miraculous manifestation of the Divine. They say God works in mysterious ways. This was not all that mysterious. I had been mighty hungry and I had prayed and here now was some supper. Had there ever been a more comprehensible answer to any prayer? I certainly had never heard of any since the feeding of the multitude.

  I took a breath and I set about boiling up the rabbit over the fire. I prayed aloud, thank you, God, thank you, Jesus!

  However I will put it down here that even then my thoughts strayed to the hooded face I was sure I had s
een in the woods up the mountain. It is true I have never been one of these silly women to spin tales of ghosts and ghouls. I have always considered those the offspring of idle and devilish minds, nothing of substance in the world of God. Yet when I was a young girl, Grandma Blackmore, who belonged to an older, smokier generation of storytellers, would tell me and Davy about our long-departed great-great-aunt Malvina, and how it was that some unnamed villain had stolen her away and buried her alive in a cow swamp and ever since her unsettled spirit itinerated the whole of Texas in search of living descendants. Some nights I would lie awake after Davy had gone to sleep and I would imagine I could see her out the window, dragging herself across the prairie in a muslin dress freighted with black mud.

  But I managed to put these thoughts from my mind. Those of Great-great-aunt Malvina and the hooded face and the gruesome death of Terry Squime. None were of God. I suppered that night by firelight and drank from Mr. Waldrip’s boot and watched the logs glow and next to a tiny midden of clean-picked bones I slept.

  I was two days at that place by the little creek, resting and pondering the miracle. Sitting around like that there is nothing much else to do but get hungry and soon enough I had eaten up even the bones of that rabbit. I first boiled them and dried them and then I took a stone and ground them into a meal that I could put to my tongue. The same as the giant in the fairy tale about the beanstalk. I used to tell that fairy tale to my kindergarteners and come up with parts of my own. I did that with most stories. I will not do it with this one. Although I have had students visit me after they are grown and tell me they enjoyed my stories better than all the rest. A tale belongs to whoever tells it best.