by Rye Curtis
The bones did not taste of much, and for that I was grateful. I boiled water from the creek and drank it and in the mornings I relieved myself near a leafless bush dead and calcified like the weird piece of coral that sat on Linnie Curfell’s coffee table. In the sixties she and her husband brought it back from an island in the Caribbean and ever since scarcely knew how to converse about anything else. Anyway, every time I had to use that bush I made an effort to hide myself against it best I could. I laugh as I write this now. It was as if I had become embarrassed before God out there. After the appearance of the fire and the rabbit in the pot, God sure seemed nearer than He ever had back in Texas.
When the sun was up and it was warm enough I removed my clothes and washed them in the creek upstream from the dead beast. Then I bathed in the shallows. It is not something that I easily admit, but I believe it is important; it was romantic to be naked outdoors. I thought about my first kiss. It was with a boy named Charles Manson. Now, he was not in any manner related to that terrible man who murdered those poor people in California. He only shares what has become a terribly unfortunate name. I was twelve years old and Charles was fourteen. He grew a mustache like the mold on a crust of bread. He had taken me out back a hill of dirt and tractor parts stacked in his yard.
I have forgot the kiss, save that it tickled and that it was glorious hard work not to sneeze. But I do recall his words. Open your mouth, moonrise, he said. He was a mighty good talker, Charles, and went on to become the Clarendon school system’s superintendent, which he did very well until he passed away on his forty-second birthday without warning nor knowable cause. He fell to the floor in front of the icebox. His widow, Geraldine Manson, simply said to the police and anyone else who would listen that God had wanted him home, but I do not warrant that she has any notion as to what God does or does not want.
When I got out from the creek there was a shiny black leech on my leg. It would seem everything out there had a thirst for my blood and a hunger for my body. I picked the thing off and chucked it back to the current and went to the fire, where I dried my clothes and sat warm in Terry’s coat, naked as a jay bird. My permanent was all but deflated and I slicked my hair back behind my ears into something like the style Father had worn all throughout the Gay Nineties. I have a daguerreotype of him then, after he had found work as a traveling salesman, selling tonics along the Santa Fe Railroad. That was before he met Mother and settled in Texas.
After I was dry I was hungry again. At home Mr. Waldrip and I ate small portions. I seldom thought much about food except for that we needed to eat and I had to decide on what to cook for supper. But out in the Bitterroot I was sure I could eat a whole burrowed generation of rabbits and whatever it was the antlered creature in the water had once been. I prayed aloud again asking the Lord to spare me from starvation. As I prayed I heard rise that same sound I had heard two days before, a clatter over the mountains, a rattle in the blue sky. Past the northern ridge hung a tiny black spot.
Bless me, it was a helicopter!
I put my arms up and hollered loud as I could. I made not words but guttural fricatives. Oh Lord, let me be loud enough to reach them, let them see me! I threw off Terry’s coat and scrambled over that field waving naked and wild and unashamed. The helicopter turned towards me! I tripped over a rock and fell, scratching up my chest on a bristly kind of sticker weed. When I brought my head up again the helicopter was gone and the sound with it.
I sat a spell and worried I had broken something, but I counted my ribs and it appeared I was fine. I had bloodied my elbows up pretty good. I did not bawl nor allow myself much disappointment. I feared it would be too much. If I stopped to despair of ever being found or worry that was my last chance of rescue, or if I kicked myself for leaving the little airplane, I might not go on at all. Instead my only thought was: Now I know they are looking for me.
That night I went to sleep by the fire thinking of Mr. Waldrip and what a lovely evening we could have been sharing in the rental cabin if the little airplane had not gone down. The sight of Mr. Waldrip at the dinner table came to mind, knifing his way through a sweating steak. Even in my imagination he still had the dab of jelly on his chin. It is a difficult thing to relate, the loss of a lifelong companion, but here I will suggest to you that it is akin to losing your name. Such as if you and no one else in the world knows what to call you. It is not something I like to dwell on.
A pungent odor woke me in the morning. You may not believe me, because I am a funny old woman and you could think my mind is a nest of dead spiders. But I mean to tell you that when I opened my eyes I saw a big ole trout laid out on a rock. A note was pinned to it by a twig through the gills. It appeared to be written on a piece torn off a brown paper bag from a grocery store. In the blue block letters of a child’s penmanship were the words: Go Downriver.
III
Koojee.
Lewis and the two men in the station looked up.
Bloor leaned in the doorway. He rolled in his palms a fresh cake of chalk. I’m terminating the search, he said.
Lewis stood at her desk and knocked to the pineboards a mug of merlot and coffee and cursed it where it broke.
I’d say it’s time, Claude said.
The old dog at his feet raised its head to look at the halved mug on the floor. Claude was untangling a telephone cord at his desk. A busy signal burred dully in the receiver.
Bloor returned the chalk to a pocket in the orange windbreaker and stepped into the station. We’ve flown over for three days now without any sign of them. They’ve been missing for close to a week. If somehow they survived impact, there’s little hope they could’ve survived this amount of time exposed in those mountains. But we cannot let it get to us. We did our best. You know, Ranger Lewis, people die all the time all over the world and we know nothing about it.
The old dog wheezed and got up and went to the spill and lapped at it. Everybody watched.
Pete grunted and all turned. He sat atop a stool in a corner of the kitchenette, hunched over an embroidery hoop. He wore a white coif like Lewis had seen actors wear playing medieval peasants on television. The video camera framed him from a tripod.
Claude sighed. What is it, Petey?
Pete brought up a needle and scratched the red stubble of his neck. Back in Big Timber my little nephew got his head caught on fire Fourth of July and I just happened to be standin by with a full squirt gun. You don’t count on there bein a miracle like that for these people?
Bloor said that he did not and asked Pete what he was doing. Claude answered on his behalf that he was needlepointing.
Pete took the slack off a ball of magenta yarn at the foot of the stool. I’m prayin it’ll keep my mind off my heart.
And the hat? Bloor said.
Pete straightened the coif. Found it in Claudey’s closet. Figured it’d kind of go with my new peaceful attitude.
My mom used to work at a Renaissance fair, Claude said.
Bloor looked at the two men and turned to Lewis. I’ll tell you something, Ranger Lewis. When I worked in Yellowstone a man came to us about his nine-year-old boy disappearing from their campsite. We mounted a fullscale search for the child for two weeks, you know. Vast amount of resources apportioned. Come to find the man had killed the boy back at their home in Boise weeks earlier and fed him down the garbage disposal. In the meantime an albino girl about my daughter’s age had been reported lost in Pine Park, but my men and I were exhausted that night and I know we didn’t look as hard as we could’ve. We found her body the next day under a dogwood. Dead of exposure, white as an onion.
All that goddamn story means to me is we ought to hurry up, Lewis said.
The dog had finished with the spill and now was at licking the dust from her boots.
My wife always told me that true wisdom was to know when a situation was hopeless.
Pete raised the embroidery hoop in Bloor’s direction. Your wife sure must have been a fine woman, Officer Bloor.
Tha
nk you. You have no idea.
Claude held taut before him the length of telephone cord. He hung up the receiver. The Waldrips were an older couple. I’d say maybe explodin on a mountainside’s a better way to go than dyin slow in some smelly bed. He clapped once his hands and the old dog quit licking Lewis’s boots and looked at him. I’d say they had their fair share of life, wouldn’t you say that?
Goddamn it, Lewis said. We don’t know what they had.
Claude retrieved a tube of ointment from his desk drawer. My uncle Jack is eighty-six and he doesn’t even know what he is. I’d say Hi, Uncle Jack sounds to him like somebody clearin their throat.
Terry Squime is a young man, Lewis said. Just married.
Now that is a durn sad thing right there, said Pete. I bet it’s real sad to be a widow.
Lewis took up her campaign hat from the desk and held it at her side. Outside fine clouds clung to the range like unearthly cobwebs.
Listen, Bloor said. It’s just too many man hours and funds to apportion and bad for the ozone. My department is removing itself. You know, Cecil’s already left early this morning.
Bloor stood now in the middle of the station, his head tilted as if he were listening to the ceiling. Lewis could not see clearly his face for the dimness of light, but figured she saw there a slow smile and closed eyes, an expression she had seen before on a televised judge adjudicating a most heinous crime and finding in it some cruel and selfish humor. The old dog watched him too from the floor.
Lewis dropped her campaign hat back to the desk. What in the hell’re we doin up here, then?
You all right, Debs?
I’m fine, Claude, goddamn it. You don’t need to keep askin me that.
Bloor neared her and leaned close. There’s something important I’d like to discuss with you, Ranger Lewis. If you would. I need the perspective of a woman.
Lewis eyed the man.
Bloor passed two fingers over the back of her hand, leaving there an equation of chalk. This mountain’s got me confused like I’ve slipped down a hole, he said. My wife always told me it was good for a man to get the perspective of a woman when he’s confused.
Lewis looked over his shoulder at the two men and the dog watching her. What goddamned thing’s got you confused?
I have something to show you, he said, and he asked her if he could pick her up there at the end of the day.
She told him all right.
He smiled and turned from her and nodded once to the ceiling before he strode from the building.
Pete stared after him and pushed the medieval coif up his forehead. That’s one strange bird, he said.
After Bloor picked her up they drove in his black truck down the mountain road. Out the corner of her eye Lewis watched him steer with hands chalked to the wrists. She sipped from the thermos of merlot. The inside of the cab was marked everyplace with handprints and scuffs of chalk.
In my eleven years up here I never been department liaison, she said.
Never had anybody lost up here?
We had a couple drunk hikers go missin for a couple hours till their wives found them. Only time I found anybody was about three years ago. I found Ranger Paulson after he’d got turned around in the woods behind his cabin and ruined his goddamn nose. I just know Terry Squime and the goddamn Waldrips are alive out there. They need somebody to keep lookin for them.
A woman’s intuition’s a powerful thing.
I’m not talkin about a woman’s goddamn intuition, Lewis said.
Have you enjoyed my company while I’ve been up here?
Lewis fixed on the man a pair of bloodshot eyes. His cheekbones were low and his thin blond mustache shone through like glass. I don’t know, she said. I guess it’s been all right to have some fresh faces up here.
They came to a shoulder of broken trees and rusted dumpsters and he pulled the truck over. The sun was nearly down and gold light lay aslant on the ground. He turned the ignition off and the lights in the cab went out and Lewis studied the shape of him in the murk. The motor cooled and it was quiet.
Bloor got out and Lewis followed him in the sundown, toting the thermos, and he led her behind one of the dumpsters.
This morning I brought my trash here and I found this, he said.
There leaned a stinking homunculus crudely composed of garbage and cat skeletons glued and woven together with electrical tape and melted dinner candles. It had for a head the yellow skull of a bobcat and for eyes a halved tennis ball. It wore a redly stained ranger’s uniform and used tampons for earrings.
Goddamn Silk Foot Maggie.
Who?
State allows her to live up across from the point, Lewis said. She does this kind of thing. Don’t know why.
Bloor bowed his great torso over the hodgepodged carcass and looked it over. She’s an artist?
I don’t know if you’d call her a goddamn artist.
I thought it was especially fascinating because of the uniform. It’s yours. Ranger Lewis. Says it right there.
It’s vandalism, Lewis said. You got to burn or goddamn bury somethin if you don’t want her to get her goofy hands on it. It’s a pain clearin these goddamn things up. This what you wanted to show me?
I need a vacation. You know, my wife always told me I was a hungry vulture eating dead hearts, but one day I’d get tangled in some power lines and they’d all start beating again in my stomach.
I don’t know what the hell that means.
I need recreation, Ranger Lewis. I spoke to Cherry and extended my stay.
You want to stay way the hell up here?
I’ve fallen in love with it, Bloor said, and he went on to tell Lewis that he did not yet know how long he would stay, but that he was driving down the mountain Wednesday to pick his daughter up from the bus station and that she would be staying with him for a time. He said that Chief Gaskell had suggested she volunteer in the Forest Service.
Goddamn Friends of the Forest?
I’m hoping it’ll pull the fog off her, Bloor said. And it’ll look good on her college applications.
Flies haloed the skull of the homunculus and some muddy color dripped from its pawed appendages.
We already got goddamn Pete Trockmorton participatin in some limited capacity.
She could benefit from a conversation or two with a strange bird like Pete.
Goddamn it. I don’t guess I can see any goddamn harm in it.
He thanked her and told her how rare Jill Bloor was. He said that he would never say she was slow, but that she had not developed the way some people her age might have for when she was a baby he and her mother had answered an advertisement for test subjects in a study at Seattle University. He told how the experiment had involved her mother behaving coldly with her and then comforting her and then behaving coldly again and how they had photographed hours of her crying.
I don’t expect a child’d understand any of that, Lewis said.
No. And then we homeschooled her in the sunroom until the lymphoma finally got Adelaide. Koojee. I couldn’t keep working and maintain my passions while continuing her education myself. So I enrolled her in a public school, you know. I’m telling you I think the confusion in her upbringing has left a mark on her.
I ought to be headin back.
Bloor took the cake of chalk from a pocket and passed it over his fingers. I like to get involved, you know. Now that I know she’s sexually active there’s little left unsaid between us. I keep a calendar of her cycle on the refrigerator door back in Missoula.
You got any goddamn gloves in your truck?
I might.
Don’t much want to use my bare hands to get rid of this, Lewis said, glancing at the homunculus.
I’d like to have it if you don’t mind. If you think this Silk Foot Maggie wouldn’t mind.
Lewis looked to the creation and back to Bloor. Do what you want, she said.
Bloor smiled. I’m sure you’ll be a valuable influence on her.
Who’s that?
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My daughter.
I don’t know somebody like me has any business bein an influence on anybody.
Why do you say something like that, Ranger Lewis?
You can call me Debra.
I would prefer to call you Ranger Lewis, if it’s all the same to you.
She drank from the thermos of merlot and eyed the man. I don’t figure I’m a people person, she said. Sometimes I just don’t give a goddamn about anyone. I have to work at it. Remind myself everybody else still exists even when I’m not lookin at them. You figure sayin somethin like that tells you somethin about me?
My wife always told me that people are the most fearsome and unruly animal ever to have walked the earth, but that it was possible to train them not to shit on the carpet.
Lewis spat in the dirt.
Bloor brought a tarpaulin from the truck and he wrapped up the homunculus and laid it carefully in the truck bed. He stopped Lewis before she climbed in the passenger’s side and he pulled her close to him and held her. He gave her a pat on the back and apologized for the behavior of her ex-husband. I don’t want you thinking that all men are created equal, he said.
He let her go and she looked to his white hands. Why do you do that with your goddamn hands?
I don’t like them getting too moist, he said. One of those quirks you get when you’ve got an active mind, you know. Adelaide always told me it was the clearest indication that I was mentally ill. I stopped for a while, but I picked it up again after she died.
He drove them up the dark mountain road and let her off at her pinewood cabin. The tarpaulin flapped in the bed of his truck as he drove away. When Lewis undressed later that night she found on the back of her uniform a handprint left in chalk.
In 1972 a handsome young couple moved into the little yellow house next door to ours below the water tower. They were clean and had good postures and they looked after their lawn. They had a little legless Chihuahua dog they had found stuffed in a vase abandoned on the side of the road. On warm evenings they took that little dog out in a kind of tiny bespoke wheelchair. People got a kick out of that. This couple was well-mannered and they went to the Episcopal church off Pond Street.