by Rye Curtis
Do you think maybe why you’re so upset might have something more to do with the unresolved conflicts in your own life than with our missing persons?
Don’t talk to me like I’m some goddamn goofball.
I’m sorry. Maybe it has something to do with being up on this mountain all the time? Are you happy up here?
Bein on this mountain all the time is my goddamn job. This’s my job. How about that merlot?
Bloor stood from the couch and held her by the shoulders. You’ve had too much to drink, Ranger Lewis. Koojee.
Please don’t say that word.
You’ve had too much.
Usual amount.
Lewis dropped her head toward the floor and saw under the hem of the argyle robe Bloor’s feet flashed over with blond hair and chalk dust. She looked back up to his face. It was equine and highbrowed like that of an aristocrat in some old movie she had seen.
All right, she said. I’m sorry to come here like this. Late. It’s goddamn unprofessional and inappropriate.
Bloor stroked circles over her shoulders and left there in white what a child might draw of a sun. You know, I’ve been in SAR a long time now, he said. One summer I found the body of a boy who’d been lost in the Sonora Desert for three days. Looked and smelled like a roast pig. Only wanted an apple in his mouth. Later I commissioned a haunting portrait of his body from a friend in Saratoga Springs who usually does portraits of cats. I wish I’d brought it. I’d have liked you to see it. In the portrait the boy does have an apple in his mouth. Albeit he looks a bit like a cat too. You see what I’m telling you?
Not at all.
My wife always told me to make something of something else, Ranger Lewis. Especially those things that make you want to scream at a closed door, you know.
All right. I don’t know what she meant at all, but all right.
Bloor let go of her shoulders and stepped backward into the living room and raised his long arms. He lifted a hand as if to swear on a Bible and then he pointed at the homunculus. Sublimation, Ranger Lewis.
You ought to throw that thing out, she said. It stinks.
It’s art.
Take me out there one more time. I’ll put it all to rest if we don’t find anything and you never have to see me again. I can get Gaskell to okay the extension. Just get on the horn with your man about the chopper.
He won’t want to fly on a Sunday.
Just one more flyover is all I’m askin for, Lewis said. I know they’re out there just waitin for us under a goddamn tree. I know where to go. I can see it, goddamn it.
The pilot dipped an old helicopter between the mountains and struck out westerly over a yawning gulch in the batholith. He wore a ratty beard down to his lap and a helmet plastered with discolored bumper stickers and Christian symbols. The high winds shook the blades and he gripped the stick and sang a falsetto hymn.
Lewis pressed flat her nose to the glass and cast her bloodshot eyes over the land below. Bloor nudged closer to her seat and touched her knee. She turned from the window and vomited in her lunch box.
We’ve only got a few hours up here, Bloor said over the headset. Daniel has to make his evening worship at eight.
Lewis nodded and wiped her mouth with her shirttail. She clasped the box and held it in her lap. We should push farther out, she said. Claude was out near Darling Pass when he picked up the signal and he said it was weak. It could’ve been a goddamn fluke of reflection.
My wife would’ve enjoyed spending some time with you.
Lewis rolled her eyes and turned back to the window and brushed the damp from her brow. The valley and the gray mountainsides went by.
The pilot sang louder now, a hymn about fishermen, and barreled them farther out into the rough wind, past a mountain hung with clouds and over another pastured valley and braided forest. They circled a place where Lewis figured she had seen something moving, but there was nothing to be seen there and they flew on. The pilot snapped his fingers and warned them that they had forty minutes before they had to turn back.
You know, Adelaide always told me that we give up on people all the time in the course of our lives, Bloor said. At some point we all have to give up on each other and leave each other to our own demises, you know? There’s no real rescue in the end. I wish them the best. I really do. Koojee.
Lewis clapped a hand over her mouth and held back the sick and did not speak but watched yet the chaparral valley.
The pilot screamed the cadence of another hymn and brought the old helicopter around a tall mountain into a downdraft and dropped altitude. He lisped a curse word to the sky and grappled with the stick. He wailed anew a birthday song for Methuselah. Then Lewis braced herself and caught sight of a glint of steel and a black ring of condors down below. She put a hand on Bloor’s knee and she called out for the pilot to shut up and turn back. The pilot quit his singing and touched his headset and told her that he did not abide yelling. He circled back. There the wreckage of a small airplane lay on the mountainside.
The pilot lowered the old helicopter onto a level elevation up the mountain. What a calamity, he said.
Lewis was out before the skids touched down. She ran for the wreckage and slowed to a stop before she had reached it. A severed arm still in its sleeve lay at her boots. The fingers were balled, gnawed to five glaucous points. Red ants coursed over them like veins yet leading blood.
Bloor peered over her shoulder.
Lewis stepped over the arm and went on to the wreckage and covered her mouth against a stench the same as that of the burn pile out back of her father’s clinic, where often the fire did not find all of the animal and left anatomy behind to rot in the ash. She came around to the other side of the airplane. A naked body with one side peeled of its flesh was laid upon a slab of stone like some miscarried sacrifice, its abdominal cavity vacant and no face to be seen. A round load once a head now a muddy orb glittered, fasciae left here and there white in the morning sun like embroidered silk. Lewis stared and tightened her grip on her mouth. She heard footsteps behind her.
You see, Bloor said, there’s another one. This part always puts a cloud in my stomach. Koojee.
Lewis turned where Bloor was directing a chalked finger. There in the height of the trees beyond the edge a bloated corpse was roosted black with slow flies. Lewis figured it looked like a fat man wearing a skinny man’s clothes. She wiped her eyes and figured she was crying for the brightness of the sun.
She went back to the wreckage. Again she held a hand over her mouth against the smell and put her head through a hole in the fuselage. A raccoon with but one eye to turn the light watched her from under a seat, waiting. The strewn interior stank of urine and sour hair and was knobbed with dark droppings. Lewis picked up from the floor a tan-colored wallet. She withdrew her head to the daylight and opened it. Inside were club cards, a laminated Psalm about the Kingdom of God, and a Texas state identification card for Cloris Waldrip. Lewis squinted at the tiny smudge of a picture, the dome of white hair. She handed the card to Bloor, who looked at it and gave it back and told her to return it to where she had found it. Lewis put the card back in the wallet and leaned into the fuselage again and put the wallet back on the floor, then she withdrew her head and took a deep breath.
Bloor came around and looked inside the fuselage. Then he too brought out his head and took her hands in his. She recalled the dryness of her father’s skin after he had worn a pair of surgical gloves. They stood sweating in the sun. Bloor searched her eyes. The high winds intoned a solemn pitch in the wreckage, and from the helicopter came the faint music of the bearded pilot, who sang:
A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell,
And very hard I find the task
Of governing it well…
I count two bodies, Lewis said at last.
Bloor brushed a fly from her cheek. I bet the third’s somewhere around here, he said. Maybe fell out a couple miles back. Probably dragged off and eate
n by goats and scavengers. It’s not the kind of thing we like to think about. But it’s likely the truth, you know.
I count two goddamn bodies, she said. Two men. Where’s Cloris?
Two days of mighty fine weather were had and I recovered on the riverside by the stump into which I had scratched my name. I count it was the 14th of September by then and I had not seen hide nor hair of the masked man since the night my fever had broken. But when I slept the fire did not burn out and still I woke to crawfish or trout in the steel pot. Even then I asked myself if I had ever seen the masked man at all.
I have put it down here before that there is some question about what an old mind will do. At seventy my Aunt Belinda was convinced that there was a pride of mountain lions behind the facility where she spent the rest of her days. The facility is in Franklin, Tennessee, where it is my understanding that there are no or very few mountain lions. What she had been watching out her window, according to Cousin Oba, was a party of derelicts and vagabonds so inebriated they could hardly be upright. So drunk they were that they slunk around on their hands and knees, crawling and growling in the alleyway. You never know what fantasies a mind will conjure.
When I had got back enough of my strength I aimed to continue on downriver. I prayed that the masked man was still out there somewhere watching over me. The night before I planned to depart I sat awake waiting for him to appear until I could not help but fall asleep.
I woke late in the morning and there were no victuals of any kind, but I boiled some water and filled up Mr. Waldrip’s boot and in the late afternoon I set out downriver anyway. I looked back at my grave marker. It struck me how strange it was to be leaving it behind, like I was a ghost errant from the tomb. Dark soon overtook me and it was not long before I had to stop. I had not gone far, I do not suppose more than a couple of miles.
The masked man was no place to be seen, and I did not have a way to build another fire nor did I have a thing to eat. Thank goodness it was another warm night. I sat for a spell in the dark and a pretty blue mist rolled over the river shimmering under what little moonlight escaped the clouds. Frogs croaked and crickets chirped and animals I did not know spoke tongues I could not fathom. A bobcat prowled the brush, its eyes like silver dollars. This bobcat had been stalking me for a couple days. I had spotted it once in the daylight. It had a little yellow tag in its ear. After a little research I would later learn that it was a particular variety of lynx bobcat being studied by some students at the University of Montana at the time.
I had been fiddling all day with a piece of crawfish stuck in my teeth. It had been bothering me something terrible and I just could not keep my tongue off of it. I had sucked at it for hours like a dolt with no manners, such as I had known Mr. Waldrip’s hunting friend Bo Castleberry to do after he had chewed the meat off a handful of quail and left nothing on his plate but a tidy cairn of bones and shot.
I went to a shallow place in the river and washed my hands and face. I popped out my dental bridge and washed that too. I must note here that I have a dental bridge not because I did not take care of my teeth. (I did and we all ought to.) Haunting my father’s bloodline is a blight of geriatric gum disease and tooth decay. Grandma Blackmore used to tell of my Saxon great-great-grandfather, Wetley Blackmore, wearing false teeth carved from a piece of black marble stolen from the steps of the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter in Cologne, Germany.
Well, while I was fiddling with that piece of crawfish my dental bridge slipped from my fingers and plopped right in the shallows! I plunged my arms into the cold water but could not reach the riverbed, so I held my breath and put my head under. The water was terribly cold and the current very swift. The tips of my fingers could just about reach the bottom. I did this for a good long while, but I did not find my dental bridge in the cold muck and smooth stones nor in the handfuls of unknowable black mud I brought up and threw back. I lay there on my stomach on the bank of that river in the dark, cold and mighty frustrated, dragging the tips of my fingers over the stones and sediment. Still I could not find the little thing.
When I sat up again and wiped my hands on my skirt I was colder than I guess I had ever been before. I stood up, shivering and sopping wet, and faced that black wood behind me where the valley narrowed. I was then despondent. I hollered like a crazy person with no articulate language into the trees, which all bowed and swayed like gargantuan congregants of the same whispering cult. I do not doubt but that the sounds I made were of angry nonsense, like a coyote on a pulpit.
After I had hollered all I wanted to, I hugged myself in Terry’s coat and prayed without words that the masked man would return and help me again. And I prayed aloud that I was not the same as Aunt Belinda and that the masked man had not just been a phantom of a very tired, frightened, and desperate old mind.
I sat up the night shivering something terrible and tonguing my gums. I was just as cold as an electric chair in Wisconsin and damp and I expected that would be the end of me. I was sure to die of exposure that night.
Around when I had just near about given up hope, there came a rustling from the trees. I had the awful notion that it was not the masked man but something else. Perhaps it was the tagged bobcat or the menacing gopher the size of a toaster oven I had escaped the day before. Or perhaps it was a larger presence, a perilous predator such as a grizzly bear with a hankering for old women. Shaking like a sickly devil with the cold, I got up and fixed my skirt. I reached for the hatchet in my purse. I raised it out in front of me, not too sure what I would do with it in battle against a grizzly bear or a mountain lion. I listened. Whatever it was had stopped moving.
Hello, I said. Hello?
Nothing answered. Then all of a sudden from the gloom of the trees came a bulky form of arms and legs and skull and soon by the light of the moon I saw that it was him, the masked man after all! I cannot say how very glad I was to see him!
He moved awkwardly and cradled a bundle of firewood in his arms. He walked past me quickly. He sure looked to be a man of real flesh and blood and not some wild senile vision like I had feared. He did not say a word. I do not believe he even looked at me. He dropped the firewood and took from the back of his belt a red baton and one of those little lighters that you flip open. Then he wedged the baton into the firewood and lit it with the lighter and the pile caught.
He came around again past me towards the trees.
Wait! I said. Please wait! Where are you going?
But he did not turn and kept on at a sure pace away from me into the dark. He was gone again before I knew it and I stood shaking wildly and holding on to the hatchet for dear life. I watched the place where I had last seen the growing firelight touch him. It was not long until he came back with more firewood. He lumbered by me again, as if he were in a trance, heaving muddy boots, the mask slipping around on his head.
He dropped the entire armful into the fire and stood in the upwelling of sparks that carried off over the water like little lightning bugs. He fixed the mask and lined up the holes with his eyes. He took a seat in front of the fire then with his face turned away and put out his legs. Neither of us spoke a word. I had forgot about the hatchet. I dropped it and sat down on the other side of the fire and warmed myself. It was mighty good to get warm again.
We did not talk. I stole glances at him through the flames. He wore big floppy leather gloves and a great puffy eiderdown coat the color blue of postmen. Around his neck was a pair of binoculars and around his wrists were bunched many-colored pieces of elastic like the bands to undergarments. He reminded me of a figure somewhere between a storybook marauder and a homeless man named Leonard who Mr. Waldrip used to employ from time to time to clean the dirt from the eaves and repaint the cattle pens. Leonard was good help, but after a while my powder and a dress or two had come up missing from my closet. Not much later Mr. Waldrip said he spotted an ugly and oddly familiar-looking woman in a similarly familiar-looking dress hitchhiking on an I-40 access road. I do not hold this transformation aga
inst Leonard, but I do not believe it is nice to steal things.
Finally I said to the masked man: Has God sent you here to help me?
He watched the fire. His eyes gleamed like metalwork in the holes of the mask.
I told him that I was very frightened.
He looked up at me. Where are your teeth? he said.
It was a moment before I had an answer. I lost them in the river, said I.
In the river?
I told him that it was a dental bridge.
Can you chew all right?
Middling, I said.
It occurs to me that in nature if an animal is old and toothless surely they are not long for this world. This must have occurred to the man too because he looked at me with some worry in his pretty emerald-green eyes. Nowadays civilization keeps a person alive much longer than ever before. I mean to tell you there is a lawyer I know from First Methodist, Dalton Mills, who is 104 years old as I write this and has divorced three wives and has had six different cancers removed from his neck and is all but blind. He has a stainless-steel machine that breathes for him while he sleeps and he smells deathly of olives and talcum powder. I have no concern of his reading this, so I will say that if he were an elephant the herd would have left him behind to die many years ago, which, I am told, is what elephants do.
The man looked back to the fire. Then he said: If you keep downriver you’ll come to a forest in little under a week. If you keep moving all day. The river will go left, and you’ll want to go right. Into the forest. Watch for two tall pines that make the shape of a keyhole like to an old-timey house. Go between them, straight ahead into that keyhole. You’ll meet up with the old Thirsty Robber hiking trail. There’ll be a sign with a wooden flower. Follow the trail and you should hit the highway.
How far is it to the highway?
Far, he said. But it’s your best way out. You’ll have to hurry. It’s not safe out here and bad weather’s coming.