by Rye Curtis
But one night the young man decided he had to go beating on his wife. I heard the commotion and crept from bed. Mr. Waldrip did not wake. I went to the sitting room and from there I saw their shadows warring on their window blinds. I was not snooping. I am not one of these bug-eyed women who hardly does a thing but leans on a windowsill. Still I watched them from my sitting room for a good spell, quietly, like it were a shadow play.
Of course I had not heard what had been said between them, however the next morning that pitiful little Chihuahua dog was strung up by the wire in their porch light and the young couple had come up missing. The limbless animal swung dead there like a pendulum for a day or two before the mailman cut it down. I did not think to do it myself. That poor little Chihuahua dog! Often as not it is the helpless and the meek that pay the debts of others. Shortly thereafter the house was put up for sale and I never heard word of them again. I worried I had showed myself a big ole coward for not having acted in some way better than what I had, at the least to have spared that poor creature the indignity of swaying in the hot breeze like a windchime struck dumb. But I did nothing and told not a soul. I spoke of it only to God and it is unclear his opinion on the matter.
I thought about this young couple once out in the Bitterroot and teared up, not for them or their little Chihuahua dog, but for myself and those mighty cruel occasions on which I had been shown my awful lack of character. I fear I may be what psychologists call a narcissist. The very nice black therapist here at River Bend Assisted Living, Melinda, does not think so, but I do. Perhaps she simply does not know me well enough.
I had been in the wilderness for ten days now, and I had counted three days since I had found the mysterious note. I followed the creek down like the note had said to do until the creek became more what I would call a river. Far ahead it disappeared into a thick wood. It seemed this river could wind on into the depths of that wilderness without end.
Each night as darkness fell I would spot a flickering light ahead and soon find a fire burning and a fresh trout laid out on a log or a rock. I had gotten to where I could clean one well enough with the little black hatchet, but I sure made a mess of the first. I toted along the steel pot I had found the rabbit in, and every night I fried the trout in the bottom of it and scraped it up and ate it off the blade of the hatchet like a pirate from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
One cloudy day more helicopters zoomed over to the big mountain where our little airplane had gone down. I counted three of them. They were blue and one was wide and very loud. I waved and hollered but it was no good. They could not see me. I went on down the river slow as a graveyard.
I do not imagine I made much more than four miles a day. Naturally I was younger then than I am now, but I was still an old woman and I was unaccustomed to traversing such difficult terrain, much less while carrying all that I was in my purse and in the pockets of Terry’s coat. The most Mr. Waldrip and I ever did was take a leisurely stroll after dinner, less than a mile out to the west pasture, where there was a polled steer cross-eyed and roped to a lazy old windmill. Occasionally kids would glue a corncob pipe in the poor creature’s mouth for mischief.
Miss Lauper’s song that Terry had sung prior to his passing rattled on stubbornly in my head. At the time, not knowing how the melody was meant to go, I only heard it in Terry’s broken plainchant: If you’re lost you can look and you will find me, time after time…You might suppose I would not want to hear that song ever again. But now that I have heard it performed by Miss Lauper I do not mind it, though it is not as musical as Ruth Etting’s “Crying for the Carolines” or most anything sung by Perry Como.
On what I counted as the fourth night of my journey downriver, black clouds covered the sky. The wind picked up and the smell of rain filled the air. There blinking ahead was another fire. I made some haste to it. It was burning hot and was hissing and sputtering as the first of the rain came. Nearby on a felled spruce lay a thin creature akin to a squirrel, cleaned and with little blood. Being special tired that day and not very hungry, I decided to hide best I could from the rain and eat the inscrutable creature in the morning.
The rain did not last all night, thank goodness, and I managed to keep the fire burning. At last the sun rose over the mountains, and the trees and the grass glittered and reminded me of the awful gaudy jewelry Catherine Drewer wore every Sunday to impress upon the congregation how well her pepperhead husband was doing in the oil business. I wrung out Terry’s coat and put my shoes out to dry. I got a stick and skewered the strange skinless creature I had been given and burned away its limbs and ate little of it. I kept the rest in the pot and traveled on downriver. After a while I was near in a trance. My body ached and like an old salt lick my head was not all there. I felt the way I had when Mr. Waldrip had taken me to the hospital for an endoscopy and a young nurse with old hands had given me some tablets the color of cream. I made little progress down the river that morning.
Afternoon came and the sun burned and insects chattered. Not the way they do in Texas, where it sounds like there are rattlers hanging in the mesquites. No, these insects in the mountains are more soft-spoken. All creation seems to whisper.
I do not hold any belief in devilment or magic, but those savage mountains had begun to work a kind of spell over me. As often as I looked to them on the horizon I could not for the life of me get familiar with them. They seemed to shift and collapse in the manner of waves on an ocean. Not long ago I watched a television program on the Public Broadcasting Service about the expedition of Lewis and Clark. I learned that a travel companion of theirs, Sergeant Patrick Gass, wrote that the mountains in the Bitterroot were the most terrible mountains he had ever beheld. I am inclined to agree with him.
I got mighty dizzy and lost my footing. I caught myself and climbed up on a rostrum of granite to get my bearings, but I went on being mighty dizzy for some time and then I was just plain ill. Unable to stand, I crawled on my hands and knees to the riverbank and splashed water on my face. I watched some little tadpoles go by and I was sick in the water.
I lay there and listened to the water play against the reeds and imagined I was listening to Mr. Waldrip run himself a bath after a day hunting with his friends Bo Castleberry and Bob Guffine. Mr. Waldrip was not one for showers. He liked to take his time in the tub and mull the day over. He would take his open palms to the water and perform a measure of percussion so distinctive I doubt I will ever hear the like of it again.
Shortly my feet were sweating and I had been sick three times. Heat filled my eyes the way it does when you have a fever, and I could have placed my hand on my Bible and sworn I saw Mr. Waldrip watching me from a nearby mott of spruce. I shut my eyes.
I got to wondering if it was not God that had led me downriver, providing my supper and building fires, but Satan himself. My gracious, I feared I had been led astray. Poisoned by the consumption of that unknown creature, some kind of wrong spider feline escaped from a demon’s kennel, ailed with an ague incubated by the malarial climate of hell itself. I knew I had not correctly atoned for my sins. Perhaps all that I had done poorly in life had sought me out and found me there at the end of a purposeless parable.
Now I ought to put down here some about Garland Pryle.
The trouble with Garland began at the grocery store his family owned. It was the only grocery in Clarendon at the time. He worked there in an emerald-green apron that matched the color of his eyes. He would have been twenty years old and I twenty-four. I had not been married very long to Mr. Waldrip and we were both of us still very young. I wish it were true for me to say that Garland lured me against my better judgment to his parents’ home one evening while Mr. Waldrip was in Colorado at a cattle auction. But this Cloris Waldrip will not dishonor the memory of her dear departed husband by dealing poorly with the truth. I will commit to this account that it was I who stole Garland aside one rare day of heavy rain and gripped him by the belt of his apron in an aisle of canned peas and begged him to
take me home under his umbrella. I have always wondered if Mr. Waldrip knew what had happened somehow or another, and for whatever kind or pitiful reason just never said a word about it.
I sat up and put my back to a stump by the river and kept my eyes shut against the sun. The blood in my eyelids made a monstrous wall of thumping red. Beads of sweat chased each other off my forehead and down my arms and tickled me something terrible like the little black flies and mosquitoes that pestered me most hours of the day. However I did not move. I was sick again and still I did not move nor open my eyes. I was a mighty pitiful sight.
A very nice doctor would later suggest to me that I had most surely ingested giardia from drinking unclean water out of my late husband’s boot. However I hold to this good hour that it was the animal I had eaten the species of which to this day I cannot name.
I thought again about how they might discover my body, terribly defiled and molested and inhabited by all manner of crazy wildlife. Likely my bones would be flung far and wide and no doubt the investigators would not be able, nor possibly see it necessary, to reassemble and identify them as having once belonged to an old Methodist from Texas named Cloris Waldrip. I wondered too if they would be able to tell how old I had been by the marks in my bones as they do with the rings in a tree.
Soon the afternoon had all but gone and the sun was hidden among opposite mountains and the colors of the valley deepened like day-old bruises. I mustered what little strength I had left and took the hatchet from my purse and scratched my given name into that stump. In my life I had not ever once considered that I would come to rest unburied at the foot of a grave marker of my own making, especially not one so evil and poor. It seemed as if my name there were a curse word meant to condemn me for all that I had done wrongly in my days. I suppose it just goes to show how awful little we can control the outcome of our decisions. Cloris. What a terrible word it was cut into that pale wood.
What I next recall was this: two eyes bodiless above me in the dark, the sky mighty black behind them, no starlight nor moon to it. Two bright emerald-green eyes such like those of Garland Pryle gazing down at me from the heavens. Here may be the face of God, I thought, bared before me. Or perhaps that of an angel lowered into the Bitterroot. A strong warm hand held the back of my neck and another cradled my head and raised me up. Then a soft voice told me to drink and I felt on my lips the cool brim of what I imagined was a silver chalice. The voice was gentle but strong like that of the masculine young woman who tended the service station back in Clarendon. Stokely, I want to believe her name was. She wore powder the way Chinese women do in costume plays. I drank. I do not recall the taste. I slept. I dreamt.
I dreamt of a humid room with no clean light where a translucent man shaped like a water tower stepped carefully around me with boots the size of cast-iron skillets. He endeavored not to wake me, but he did not know that I had been awake for centuries. I dreamt of a palace of mirrored floors where I could see up a gown I wore as I wandered its ornate halls, and in this palace was a woman with red hair. I could see up her gown too and under it was a series of inverted mountains and cosmic voids and angry children in multitude. But I dreamt most vividly of the little Cessna 340 airborne from Missoula, and in one of its bright windows I had a vision of a woman I had never seen before, a sad woman with dark hair cut short same as a man’s, looking for someone in those merciless mountains, her countenance incorruptible and without fear.
My dreams ended there and I could not blink nor shut nor open my eyes anymore and I woke to find that it was still very dark yet. I sat up and I put my fingers where I had scratched my name into the stump. I endeavored to get my wits about me. Firelight played over my name. Out at the river a man sat crosslegged by a twisted fire, stirring it with a smoking stick. Behind him the river shone in the firelight like a macabre river of blood. A white shirt masked the man’s face. The shirt had eyeholes cut out of a printed image of eggs and pancakes and the arms of it were tied around the back of the man’s head over a wild mane of long dark hair like a neckerchief. I suspect the shirt was made to be worn by the employees of a diner.
I had a notion the man was watching me, but he did not turn his head in my direction. He was a dread frightful sight, dirty and shadowy. However I was not all that afraid. I had put it together that this must have been the man who had been building fires for me every night and giving me supper. Despite the mask and his appearance, I was hopeful. And I mean to tell you at the time, as funny as I was feeling, I was not very sure if he was of this world or not. Either way sure enough there he sat.
I waited a little while before I asked him who he was.
The masked man looked up from the fire and dropped the stick. He wiped his hands on his blue jeans. He made no reply.
Then I asked him if he was an angel.
Still he said nothing and stood up at the fire, casting out a maniacal shadow. He looked like some timber-born deity. He was lean and must have stood five foot nine in his socks but his big old boots put him taller than that. He had on his hip a magnificent scabbard like I had seen worn in Shakespearean plays at the Little Theater in Amarillo. Later I would get a closer look at it and see that it was intricately metalworked with a bas-relief of what I have determined to be the English Battle of Marston Moor in 1644.
I said, My name is Cloris Waldrip.
He took a cautious step closer and in a deep and steady voice asked me how I felt.
Better, I told him.
Anyone else survive?
I shook my head.
How many people on the plane?
Two others, I said. The pilot and my husband.
The masked man sat back at the fire and picked out another stick and stirred the coals. I’m sorry, he said.
It is mighty strange the words people say to comfort each other. I hear them often in the halls here at River Bend Assisted Living. And I allow that there is no better recourse in the face of the grieving and sorrowful than to apologize, as if it were the fault of every man and woman who had ever begat a child that anyone should ever hold grief in their heart. I imagine that we are all culpable in every loss, every familiar window shuttered, every summer swimming pool drained, because surely we are loss itself. I am inclined to think that we alone on this earth know such a thing as grief exists, though my dear grandniece has informed me that some whales mourn their dead.
I sat against that stump and wrapped my arms around my legs and at last bawled into my knees like a crazy little girl until my face was fuzzy and fat like a dish sponge. I carried on that way for some time and when I did finally look up the man had gone but the fire still burned hot and bright.
Lewis, naked save for her boots, spun slow ovals in the living room and guzzled down a glass of merlot. She steadied herself at the mantelpiece and looked to the head of the doe mounted above. She smacked her lips and toppled over to the couch. Night blacked the windows and the radio sizzled after Ask Dr. Howe How ended with a frustrated caller complaining about the biennially scheduled anal sex in his marriage. Lewis grabbed a bottle of merlot from the coffee table and drank from it.
The regional office had mailed a photograph of Richard and Cloris Waldrip. Lewis took it up and studied it for maybe the dozenth time that hour. The old couple smiled together in front of dormant lovegrass and busted and blown mesquite. All but the woman’s hair keeled in the wind. Far behind them a white church house bowed askew, the copper steeplecross candescent like a branding iron held to the sky.
Lewis eyed again the doe’s head above the fireplace and looked back to the photograph. She looked closer at Cloris, the white hemisphere of hair, the miniature face and pinched smile. She left the photograph on the coffee table and stumbled from the couch. After she had dressed in her uniform and buckled the holster to her waist, she pulled from the wall the doe’s head nail and all and took it with her out the front door. She went around back of the cabin and got a shovel. She came back around to the front and dug a shallow hole in the gravel driveway and
buried the head.
After she had tamped down the grave she threw aside the shovel and got in the Wagoneer. She swerved back and forth down the mountain road to the large white cabin at the windless dead end. She went to the front door and rang the electric doorbell. The windows showed a light was on and a shadow toiled inside. She waited. She banged a fist on the door. The night was still and a far wolf bemoaned a thing she could not know, the way sentenced dogs had done from the chain-link kennels behind her father’s clinic.
The door opened onto Bloor posing in an argyle bathrobe. Ranger Lewis? What’s wrong?
What?
Your shirt’s on inside out and you drove over the hedge.
Get on the horn and get your goddamn chopper up here first thing tomorrow mornin.
She went to turn but Bloor brought her inside by the shoulder and closed the door. He gestured to the couch.
Lewis did not sit. She leaned against a wall and lifted heavy eyes to the high white ceiling over the atrium. She sniffed the air. The homunculus of cat bones and refuse slouched in a corner of the room. God, she said. Damn.
Can I get you a glass of water?
Reconsider the search for Terry Squime and the Waldrips, she said. Merlot if you have it.
Bloor went to the kitchen and brought back a glass of water. She shook her head at it. Bloor lowered himself to the couch and set the glass on the table. He took from the robe pocket a worn cake of chalk and rolled it over his fingers. Ranger Lewis, he said. Try not to get unduly upset about the problems of strangers.
Not upset.
Have a seat.
Lewis shook her head again. No, thanks.
We’re here for the common good, you know. Please sit down.
Lewis stood where she was and put a finger to her chin. You want me to give up on those goddamn people.