by Rye Curtis
I am not sure if I can make it, I said.
The man unsheathed the long strange knife from his hip. It looked to me like the kind of spey blade I had seen our cowboys use to geld the workhorses, only larger. He must have heard my breath quicken because he told me he was not going to hurt me and he set about digging mud from the treads of his boots with the point of the blade. Go to sleep, he said. You’ll have to leave at daybreak. You won’t see me, but I’ll be with you as far as the keyhole. Go into the keyhole. Then you’ll be on your own.
You are not coming with me?
No, he said. I’m sorry. But you can make it after the keyhole.
I asked him why he was wearing a shirt over his face. He did not reply, only worked at his boots. I wanted to ask him more questions, but I decided against it. At the time I did not know what to make of him. I was nearly sure he meant me no harm, but I could not guess what a man would be doing out there with his face covered up like that. I suppose at the time I took a comforting notion that he was an eccentric hermit of some kind or an earthbound angel or somehow both of those peculiar things at once. The man said nothing more and after a spell I curled up there next to the fire and drifted off watching the light of it flash the blade of his knife and dance over his white mask.
The fire had smoldered out and the masked man was nowhere to be seen. The sun had yet to rise. A fearsome and colorless light haloed the big mountains. Beyond them, I imagined, lay civilization entire. Painted homes and fenced lawns, watered gardens of little foreign flowers, cats belled and little old dogs tethered to telephone poles, and clothed men and women following those sidewalks and roads paved for their shod feet and wheels. Streetlights aglow.
I got up and brushed myself off. I had left a pitiful and fetal shape in the grass. The notion crossed my mind that as long as I had lived I had not lived long enough. I had gone from Mother’s belly to that fearful swale in the Bitterroot in the blink of an eye. And all those years in between had not set me right for what I was to face out there. God makes us one way, and we make ourselves another. It is a mighty troublesome misadventure to learn this in the evening of your life.
When I was the librarian at Clarendon Elementary School I often watched a wall clock tick away the minutes of the day with not much else on my mind other than the passage of time itself. The library was located in the basement of the school building and it was cold and musty and there were no windows to speak of, only high cuts of fogged glass that put out the same light no matter the hour of day. I had the idea that my library was where time went when it was wore out and needed some shut-eye. I thought that to live forever a person would only need to sit in that library and watch that wall clock. I retired and left Clarendon Elementary School and forgot about that wall clock. Well, I can sure tell you it did not forget about me and suddenly there I was out in that wilderness an old woman. And even more suddenly here I am at my desk and an older woman yet.
The hatchet lay on the ground. I wiped the dew from the blade and returned it to my purse. On a flat rock near the softly smoking coals was a small compass and a little red canteen the masked man must have left for me in the night. I stowed them in my purse and then I struck off downriver, thinking all the while that Father Time was slinking around after me in step with that tagged bobcat.
The National Transportation Safety Board arrived on an overcast day in September to clear and catalog the crash site. They came in three blue helicopters. Men with rubber gloves photographed and removed the decomposing remains and zippered them away into thin shellwhite bags like amniotic sacs. Lewis watched the men count two bodies and bag the wallet she had found in the fuselage. They photographed the place and the wreckage they would leave behind to rust and fall apart and a straight-backed bald man glided around with a clipboard and took notes.
That evening in the helicopter back to the airfield Lewis asked this man what he figured had caused the crash. He told her that he did not know yet, but said that he was not getting paid enough to find out, for his grandfather had been a butcher and the smell of old meat turned his stomach. Whatever had caused the crash, he was close to certain that Cloris Waldrip had perished along with the others, even if they could not find her remains.
The next day Lewis drove down the mountain and tacked to the telephone poles in the town there flyers of Cloris in black-and-white. Help the United States Forest Service find Cloris Waldrip. Nobody save Pete volunteered, yet Lewis did receive a phone call in the night from a man who told her that Cloris looked as he believed his mother, missing since 1953, would look after thirty-three years. Lewis told him that Cloris did not have any goddamn children and had been born and raised in Texas. The man cursed in a language that was not her own and hung up.
Lewis tipped back the brim of her campaign hat and looked up at the spruce. The wind pulled at empty broken boughs stained dark and hung with flies black and fat like overripe fruit. Dark bands of old blood candycaned the trunk to the ground. She drank from the thermos of merlot.
Pete leaned against the spruce and shrugged the video camera on his shoulder. He wore an orange reflective vest which bore the word Volunteer and a matching baseball cap pulled down over the coif. Lewis figured he looked like an imbecile someone had taken hunting for small birds.
Come out from under there, Pete.
He looked up to the top of the spruce. He pressed a hand to his malformed sternum and gripped a plastic whistle there. He stepped back. Lord, my life’s sure gone weird.
That’s where we found Richard Waldrip.
It sure does give off a smell, don’t it?
And they knocked him down three days ago.
Pete did not take his eyes from the rotten place, thumbing the whistle as a Catholic would a rosary. There ain’t no guessin at it, he said. The man who was up there sure couldn’t’ve guessed he’d end up in a tree in Montana. No guessin at it. No guessin at it at all.
They hiked down a ways and found Claude writing in a notebook before a mossy clearing the size of a school bus.
No sign of your old woman, he said.
Lewis brushed a mosquito from her cheek and left there a stroke of blood. Looks like somebody came through here, she said.
Claude whispered the name Cornelia and touched a tissue to the blue end of his nose. I don’t expect we’ll find anything. I’d say the skeeters alone could have drunk her up. We got a long hike back to the truck and I got to walk Charlie.
Lewis told the two men they would search the place for an hour more and she went off ahead, calling out to the forest, Mrs. Waldrip! Mrs. Waldrip! Cloris!
She took from her chest pocket the picture she had been given of the Waldrips. She looked again at Cloris, the small face and orb of white hair. She drank from the thermos and strode on calling for the lost woman.
She let the men off at Claude’s cabin and drove alone back to the station. She drank a mug of merlot at her desk and listened to the static purr in the radio receiver. Nothing to be heard in it. Outside the window the range was turning dark.
A motor rumbled out on the road.
Not long afterward Bloor stepped into the station and held open the door behind him. Here followed a sizeless teenaged girl. Her thick amber hair was middleparted in curls down her back and she was bucktoothed.
Lewis swallowed the last of the mug and set it on the desk and stood to better look at the girl. She figured the most unusual part to her was that over her face lay a perfect web of rosy scars outward from her nose.
Bloor passed over the girl a chalky hand and introduced her as his daughter. She’s almost a perfect carbon copy of her mother, he said. Jill, this is Ranger Debra Lewis.
Do you ever leave this mountain? the girl asked. She spoke with a strange Northwestern accent and a slight impediment.
Probably go down an average of two times a week, Lewis said.
Bloor brought from a pocket a cake of chalk and passed it from palm to palm. We were driving by and saw the light on, he said. You’re working late, R
anger Lewis. I hoped we could convince you to let us rescue you. Give you some dinner.
Was just fixin to lock up and head home.
Gaskell phoned me today, Bloor said. He told me you took your men and hiked all the way up to the crash site to look for Mrs. Waldrip’s body? That’s quite a drive, quite a hike.
Weren’t lookin for her goddamn body. I figure she’s hikin down. She left the airplane alive.
Bloor clicked his tongue and looked past Lewis out the window behind her. Do you know what you are, Ranger Lewis?
I expect you’re about to tell me.
A fascinating and indefatigable woman.
Lewis turned to the window herself. Off in the mountains mist fell in the moonlight as if spun from it. All right, she said.
Jill moved now through the dim station, blinking her eyes and chewing a little finger. She swatted as if to shoo a fly Lewis could not see, then came around to the corkboard on the north wall and pointed to a picture pinned there: a police composite sketch of a young man with a strong jaw and short dark hair. Jill asked who it was.
The Arizona Kisser, Lewis said. The FBI figure he’s hidin out here somewhere.
Out here?
Maybe. He was last seen in Idaho buyin bulk foodstuffs.
Jill asked what the man had done, and Lewis told her that he was wanted for questioning about the disappearance of a ten-year-old girl.
Jill turned and rubbed her eye. Is he attractive to you?
The Kisser?
Yes.
Don’t guess I ever thought about it.
We took Jill to the ophthalmologist today before driving up, Bloor said. He put away the chalk. Apparently she has myodesopsia. Floaters.
No, I’m haunted by the ghost of a gnat, Jill said, and she picked a place in the air with her finger.
It’s not something you’d normally see in a young person. Koojee.
Goddamn sorry to hear that.
A scented candle burned low on the dinner table. Lewis sat across from the girl, drinking a glass of merlot and squinting often at her in the poor light. The girl held her scarred face by her palms, her thin elbows at either side of a plate untouched. Her father sat at the head of the table and showed them both in alternate a slow winecolored smile. His hands lay chalked white and forgotten on the arms of his chair.
Lewis looked beyond him to the fetid homunculus now leaned in the opposite corner like an alleyway drunk. It gazed mindlessly back at her. You guys got any special plans while you’re up here? she said.
No, Jill said.
Bloor stood and emptied a bottle of merlot to the brim of a glass. He set the glass before the girl. In most countries it’s legal to drink at her age, he said.
Jill took up the glass and gulped it down. You’re drunk and you want us drunk to keep your ego company, she said.
Bloor laughed and shook his head and told them to go out back to the hot tub and get to know each other while he cleaned up. He curtsied to them and the homunculus and left to the kitchen.
Jill pressed a thumb to the empty glass and held it up to the candlelight. Just in case, she said, and showed Lewis the whorl of a thumbprint. So they will know I was here.
Pardon?
She held Lewis with her blue-painted eyes. In case he murders us.
Lewis excused herself and went down a hall to a clean white bathroom. She rinsed her mouth and combed through her hair a row of wet fingers and sat on the lid of the toilet. The barrel of the revolver in her holster clinked against the porcelain.
When she returned to the table Jill had gone out back to the deck and Bloor was still in the kitchen. She took a bottle of merlot from the table and joined the girl’s small figure at the deck railing. The plaid cotton dress the girl wore was draped on the wind. Rain fell far away in the mountains, and the treetops bristled like the hackles of many thousands of enormous dogs.
Lewis drank from the bottle and held it out. You think you’ll like it up here?
Jill took the bottle. Do you think being in these mountains for a long time can make a person nuts?
Lewis looked at the small face. Anglewise the girl recalled to Lewis a beautiful and fineboned boy in her high school class she had never had the courage to befriend. I’m not nuts, Lewis said. And I’ve lived up here eleven goddamn years.
I think it’s nuts that people believe what other people say about themselves.
You ever listen to Dr. Howe?
No. What is that?
Lewis took back the bottle and swigged it and loosed a mouthful down her front. You lookin forward to spendin time up here with your dad?
Jill lit a cigarette. He says he has anxiety and depression like it’s an excuse to be selfish. She took back the bottle and finished it. Are we going to get in?
The hot tub was in a corner of the deck, wood-paneled and etched with suns and crescent moons. The two uncovered the water and Jill stripped down to black underpants and a brassiere. The girl stood lean before Lewis, her bony shoulders drawn in against the chill.
Lewis stripped too and the cold raised the dark hair on her arms and she folded her winestained uniform on a deck chair and set the revolver on top. She wore tan briefs and a white undershirt.
They got in the hot tub and circled each other in a clockwork of pale suds until they both found a corner. They did not speak yet. Jill kept her head back and upward to the night sky. She pinched the bridge of her nose and swatted often at nothing. By the green of the lights in the water her small face and fatless body glowed like the vision of a drowned girl.
Your dad mentioned you want to volunteer for the Forest Service, said Lewis. Goddamn Friends of the Forest program.
The girl said nothing.
You’re welcome to if that’s what you want.
He told me you would be a good influence.
I don’t figure he’s right about that. I don’t know what I’m doin most of the time.
I don’t need a good influence, the girl said. I’ll be eighteen in November. I plan to leave.
Where’re you plannin to go?
Maybe out of the country. But I don’t want to sit around this cabin and watch my dad try to understand himself. So I’ll help you look for that old lady while I’m still here.
Good. I’m sure she’s anxious to be found.
They sat in silence for a time in the tub and Bloor came from the cabin, bared to the flesh save for a pair of small shorts patterned in bald eagles. He carried yet another bottle of merlot and three glasses. He showed Lewis a garish smile purpled like her own and he slid into the water between them the length of his white body and let out a joyful groan.
My gals, he said. My tub gals. I’m a lucky man tonight. Jill, I’m intoxicated. I don’t normally like to get this intoxicated. I wanted to tell you how grateful I am you’re here. You know, we’re going to have a meaningful experience together and when you’re my age you’ll look back on this time up here with your dad and think how formative it was. It is essential you learn about hard work and the value of a day spent in the service of others. We’re both going to get better up here, you know.
Clouds stopped the stars, and the girl’s face was dark turned away from the green lights below.
Bloor pulled the cork from the bottle and dropped it into the water. He poured three glasses. Ever since your mom died I’ve been turning into someone I always worried I could be but never was before, he said.
Jill turned from the sky and looked at her father.
The fringe of his mullet had gotten wet and was stuck together like the feathers of a sick bird. He trained his gaze on the cork in the water. What does it want from me?
What does what want from you? Lewis said.
Bloor nodded at the cork. That.
He’s drunk, Jill said. We don’t have to answer him.
Bloor drained his glass. How did your partner’s nose turn blue, Ranger Lewis?
You don’t have to talk to him.
Lewis drank off her glass. It’s all right, she
said, and told the story of how three winters ago Claude had gotten lost in a snowstorm looking for his dog. Lewis had found him at daybreak, balled up under a ventifact of sandstone with a face frostbitten nearly black, mumbling about a redheaded one-eyed shade he had seen riding a giant armadillo. His nose just hasn’t gone back to normal, Lewis said. Maybe his mind hasn’t either. I never hear the end of it about that goddamn ghost. I reckon that’s round the time I developed a real taste for merlot. Roland never liked it.
Bloor held his hand to the sky and palmed the moon. People need to do whatever it is they want to do while they still want to do it, he said. Give in to our temptations before we can’t even care enough to be tempted anymore. Someday we won’t have any temptations at all, Adelaide used to say.
Jill looked at her father and climbed from the hot tub and wrapped herself in a towel. Good night, she said, and she took with her the bottle and slid open the door. Before she went inside she glanced once over her shoulder and met Lewis with an expression she could not place.
Lewis raised a steaming hand from the water and bade the girl good night.
Jill slid the door to and Lewis found Bloor’s eyes walled and following his daughter through the picture window. He mouthed at the ends of his fingers like a suckling infant.
Are you feelin all right?
Are you, Ranger Lewis?
Lewis sent her eyes roving to the wild dark. The trees reeled blackly there in the wind. Mrs. Waldrip’s still out there, she said. I’ll bet she’s goddamn terrified. Just goddamn terrified. And we’re sittin drunk in a goddamn bathtub doin not a goddamn thing but talkin shit about stuff we don’t understand.
Bloor brought her to him through the water. Let’s not get upset about dead strangers tonight. He put his hand behind her neck and drew her head level with his. He did not kiss her yet but brought his lips to within half an inch of hers and told her that she was a powerful woman. He put out his tongue and licked her bottom lip. Lewis put her arms around his neck and kissed him.