by Rye Curtis
Soon he was on top of her. The pair of bald eagle shorts roiled with the cork in the green water. He grappled with her. Together they flailed in the foam and splashed and he held her still by the shoulders. He could not penetrate her for he was not erect. He pressed himself to the inside of her thigh and rotated his hips like an exotic dancer. A light rain had begun to fall and he asked a question into her open mouth so that it rang in her head as if they had shared a voice. What can I do for you?
What?
What do you want me to do? What do you like?
I don’t know, she said. Whatever.
He held up two fingers and took them underwater and he pinched at her sides. Lewis laughed and he held her there. His face was set humorless and empty like a death mask. He pinched her harder and she quit laughing, and he went on pinching her under the water many times as she watched black rain fall from the sky.
IV
For three nights fires smoked downriver in the twilight. Victuals were put out for me on a flat stone or a log. The first night it was trout and crawfish. The next I believe I ate a vole of some kind. The animal had a similar skeleton to critters I had exhumed from stacks of old newspapers and gardening periodicals in Mother’s basement after she passed. On the third night it was a cleaned and halved feline. Its big ole head had been left on and it had a numbered yellow tag in one of its ears, and I am nearly certain it was the very bobcat that had been tailing me. I believe the number was 147, if I recall aright, but I cannot put my life on it. I have a powerful memory, but this has been some time ago now.
I never could get enough to eat. I was working up a mighty big appetite even on my pitifully slow pace across the floodplain. The masked man had said that I would not see any more of him, and sure enough he had not showed himself since instructing me on how to get to the highway. Every night however while I had the supper he had provided I kept my eyes on the woods. I suspected he was watching me.
One day I saw a fox chase something through the grass. I recalled a dog we had when I was a girl, a spirited little dog with a happy face. Before long the dog grew old and very ill and I overheard Father tell my brother it had outstayed its welcome. Davy cared a good deal for that little dog. Pepper, its name was. I thought about how we had all loved this dog when it was playful and well, but when it got to knocking blindly about the house, dragging its hind legs and messing behind the furniture, we were ready for it to be gone. Father took it out to the pasture and shot it. I have had occasion to think about this; about how conditional we are when it comes to love and affection.
On the fourth day I came to an inviting shallow in the river that led out to a braid bar of red sand. At that time I did not smell at all like myself. Or perhaps I smelled more like myself than I ever had in the civilized world of soap and detergents. Whichever way it was, the sun was high and hot, and I took it in my mind to cool off and have another bath. I had not had one in some days, out of modesty, being that I had the idea the masked man was out there watching me. At the riverbank I kept an eye out for him. But there were only the mountains and the eternal snow blown from their peaks, the valley, the nice grass. The valley was narrowing and yellow-flowered shrubs grew thickly in the fields. Firs and pines bordered it all. It was a mighty fine spot.
I took Terry’s coat and the zigzag sweater from around my waist where I kept them cinched by the arms when it was warm enough. I unbuttoned my blouse. The masked man could be watching me right then. I went ahead and disrobed all the same and there I was in my pitiful undergarments. The holes in my stockings made funny shapes of my skin. Since I had grown old my body had gone soft and misshapen like the crab apples at the foot of my crab apple tree in our backyard. Like most women my age I wore practical undergarments. The manufacturers like to call the color flesh color, though I am not sure whose flesh they had in mind when they decided to call it that. Maybe there is some poor person out there who is this color they call flesh color, but I do not think it is likely. I have never worn dark-colored underclothes, and I have always had hard work believing, as I know many do believe, that we are primarily on this earth to attend the sexual purposes of men.
When I was a girl, not more than eleven years old, Mother and Father would take me and Davy to a swimming pool in Amarillo. There was a small changing room that smelled of surfactants and chlorine and the floors were slick and rocky such as the inside of a cave. It often happened that a bald man with a sunburnt head would watch me from a little oval window at the top of the wall. Either he was a giant or he must have had to climb up on a chair to see in. Only the crest of his pink head and his beady eyes were visible in that foggy little oval window. I did not holler and I did not say a word to anyone. I have wondered from time to time about myself and why it was that I disrobed even though I knew that man was watching me. I suppose most everyone likes to be desired, often even in the most undesirable of circumstances. Perhaps it is our greatest flaw as people.
I removed my brassiere and rolled down my stockings and folded my clothes in the grass. Feeling strangely light, I did a turn, entirely naked to the natural world. I have always had a slight figure and I have always taken care of it as best I could. But out there in the Bitterroot, for the scarcity of provisions and the great deal of walking, I had grown so thin I had nearly misplaced my shadow.
I looked down at myself. I will admit here in this account that as a girl I often had prideful and immodest thoughts. I have since learned that is considered by many psychologists to go hand in hand with what is thought to be the natural development of a woman. I never knew much about psychology until in recent years when people became interested in mine. It is curious to see how people try to understand one another with what seems to me a confused science, not much better than phrenology, which was popular in my parents’ day. A mind endeavoring to understand another mind is like using a hammer to fix another hammer. Anyway, psychology might be closer to poetry, but less helpful. Particularly when it comes to discussing sex.
Nowadays women are allowed their sexual desires. Back when I was young the existence of a woman’s sexuality was a dirty little secret that everyone shared. I recall wanting men to notice me when Mother would walk me and Davy down Main Street to the old First Methodist church house dressed in our Sunday clothes. That was before they tore it down and built the one on Washburn Street. I preferred the old one. I had a blue cotton dress that I thought looked just darling on me for how it complemented the color of my eyes. One Sunday when I was fourteen years old, Mother took me aside and warned me that I was not to walk in the manner I had been walking, or to look at men in the manner I had been looking. She called me a little fire ant and was sure that I would find trouble someday. In one way of looking at it, she was right, but I never did half of the things that Phyllis Stower did, and she ended up more or less the same as myself, except that God gave her four healthy children, all of whom are alive and well as I write this and have children of their own.
I stepped out onto the sandbar. The water came up to my ankles. It was mighty cold, but I was determined to have a bath. I waded out and it came up to my knees. When you get older your balance is not what it used to be, and the current was stronger than I had anticipated. It took me by surprise and toppled me, and I went under!
My body seized up in that cold like I had been stuck with a cattle prod. I kicked and clawed at the rocky riverbed. Suddenly there were no rocks to grab ahold of. I struggled to the surface and got my head above it. The trees and the riverbank had changed and now it was all rushing by. I could no longer see where I had folded my clothes.
I endeavored to holler out but I was too cold and water filled my mouth anyway. I gulped and spat and coughed like a crazy person. Locked helpless in that current, I caught my breath before plunging underwater again. It was terrifically difficult on my lungs and my arms. I was very scared. Just before I went under again a figure sprang past me along the riverbank. Dear me! That is what I said to myself.
Something crashed into the
water ahead of me. I wiped my eyes best I could and made out a great big rotted log. A deep voice hollered for me to grab on. I swam in earnest and reached for it. I grabbed the end of it just in time! Suddenly the water rushed past me. I had disturbed some insect, perhaps a centipede, that lived in the log and it stung me right between the fingers. I did not let go even though it was terribly painful.
When I blinked away the water, the masked man stood at the riverbank with his heels dug in, hauling on that log. Gracious, what a sight! His huffing and puffing over the noise of the water grew louder the closer I got. It sounded the way Mr. Waldrip’s ranch manager, Joe Flud, would grunt and growl whenever a cow was calving and he had to wrestle it into the chute.
Before I knew it I was close enough to make out the print of the pancakes on the white mask. The cotton over his mouth sucked in and blew out in a damp oval. He dropped his end of the log and drug me out of the water by the pits of my arms onto the bank. I was flat on my back, gasping for air. There I was cold and naked and wet as a Baptist, but I was alive.
People have asked me what I had on my mind just as that little airplane went down in the Bitterroot. It is always the young people who ask me that. And I always have to disappoint them. I cannot recall having a thought in my head. My mind was as empty as one of Mr. Waldrip’s Coke bottles out on the back porch, hooting in the wind. However I will tell you that when I nearly drowned in that river I did have something on my mind. I thought of Mr. Waldrip. I wanted for him to be the last thing on my mind before nothing else would go there, so I repeated his name over and over in my head until I saw that I was going to be all right.
Above me was a blue sky and not a cloud in it. The man leaned over me. The mask, wet and clinging to his face, revealed the shape of a bearded jaw. I was sure I could see myself, a pink and naked old woman, in his emerald-green eyes. Being that he had come to my rescue, I knew then he had been watching me when I had disrobed and gone out to bathe.
Are you all right? he asked me.
I told him that I was.
The man wrapped me up in his down coat and made a fire. It was late afternoon and the wind was up. I sat on the ground, rubbing my hand where the little critter had stung me. The fire burned sideways, singeing tall riparian grasses and warning away the mosquitoes and gnats. Fire looks mighty strange and false in the daylight.
The man went back upriver for my things: my purse, the hatchet, the canteen and the steel pot, Terry’s coat and my filthy clothes and Mr. Waldrip’s boot. He disappeared behind a rise of stones and grass. I waited. I put my hands in his coat pockets to keep them out of the breeze and in one pocket I found a small skeleton key. It looked like an antique. In the other was what I first took to be a handkerchief but was instead a women’s undergarment. It was blue cotton and did not have any special thing about it other than that it appeared to be clean. I put it back and did not think much of it at the time.
There naked in that man’s coat I recalled when Father would take us swimming out at Greenbelt Lake. I would sit on the shore, small and wrapped in a towel, letting the Texas sun dry my plaited hair. Father was not a very religious man. He attended church for Mother and the neighbors. He was raised wild in Colorado by nearly blind Grandma Blackmore, an unlettered gold panner. The true breadth of her past was a wonderful mystery to him. He always told big stories that she had been at one time married to a tongueless court jester in Central Europe and had sold petrified monkey hearts in the markets of Marrakesh. I get my storytelling ability from his side of the family. Anyway, he would take me and Davy and we would all swim as naked as newborns. Mother put a stop to that when she found out. She sure could cow my father with the thousand ways she knew to say his name. By the end all he ever did was what she told him to do.
After little more than half an hour the man returned from upriver wearing Terry’s coat and my purse. He set my purse and a neat pile of my clothes and Terry’s coat beside me. He did not say a word and sat with the fire between us and turned away.
I thanked him for helping me again. I seem to be an awful lot of trouble, I said.
He made no reply.
I stood and let his coat fall to the ground and was naked again. The sun was setting then and the large mountain put a limitless shadow over us. All that was left of the day burned a royal color behind the peak. The firelight was not flattering to my naked body. I set about getting dressed. With my stockings in tatters, I rolled them up and stowed them in my purse. I combed back my hair with my fingers and sat back down by the fire.
I told the man that I was dressed and that he could turn back around. Still he had his masked face to the far rocky land.
There’s not enough day left for you to make any headway, he said at last. You should stay here tonight.
I wrapped myself in Terry’s coat and looked at the man through the whipping flames. Will you stay with me?
I can’t stay here, he said.
I asked him why that was, but he would say nothing.
Did Jesus send you? I asked.
No, he said.
My name is Cloris Waldrip, I told him. What is your name?
The man straightened the mask and got up. He produced a square of chocolate in a foil and told me that it would have to do for supper. I took the chocolate and went to touch his hand, but he shied away like a dog with a past. I apologized.
Tomorrow you’ll cut through the forest, he said. The keyhole I told you about is just right down there. You’ll see it in the morning. The man pointed to a place of darkness where the woods began. Just right down there. Stay on the trail. You’ll see the sign, remember? That goes straight east. Watch out for mountain lions. Snakes too. You can reach the highway in a little under a week if you don’t stop too much.
I asked him to please come with me and said that I did not believe I could make it without him.
Ma’am, he said, I’m really sorry. And he gathered up his coat and set off into the dark of the woods.
Being that I was very tired, I slept well and the morning came quickly. The fire was out. I did not look for the man. On the ground was a small box of oats and four salted fish wrapped in newspaper pages of showtimes for a small-town picture house in Idaho. I cannot recall the name of the town. Beside that there were six fire-starter sticks and a lighter which bore the likeness of a silly cartoon pig playing a saxophone. I righted myself and stuffed the cereal box in my purse along with Mr. Waldrip’s boot, which held the hatchet, and stowed the fire-starter sticks and the lighter and the little red canteen in Terry’s coat pockets.
I was by that time mighty curious about the masked man. I had only ever heard of criminals wearing masks in the commission of their crimes. It is not often that you hear about a person hiding their face for an act of altruism and charity. Still, and perhaps I was being silly, it did not yet occur to me that he could be a criminal.
By then I counted that I had been out in the Bitterroot wilderness for twenty-one days. I was getting used to being outside all hours of the day and night. But gracious, I ached something terrible and was as tired as a tumbleweed. I was ready to go home. So I filled up the red canteen the masked man had given me and I stood a little taller when I looked out at those mountains and that wild land. I was a little braver when I faced that dark opening in the thick woods he had pointed out to me. The place shaped the same as a keyhole.
I later learned that back in Clarendon about this time the church held a candlelight vigil for myself and Mr. Waldrip. I was told that most of the congregation turned out. Even Mrs. Holden, who had lost the use of her legs and weighed a good 250 pounds and had to be carried in on a piece of canvas by her four grandsons like she were being pallborne alive. The vigil was held on a warm Wednesday evening on the mowed lawn of the courthouse, they said, and as Pastor Bill began the prayer of the lost, a wild truckful of bibulous hooligans drove plumb through the front window of the pharmacy across the street. By the grace of God no one was hurt, but some took it as confirmation that we were not comin
g back.
I turned around and looked up once more at that great mountain where the airplane had gone down. I thought about the impact and the sound that was not sound. I thought of poor Mr. Waldrip still up in that spruce, and imagined vengeful birds pecking at him as if they had learned he had hunted their kind every season since he could walk. I got one last look at that vile mountain and through the keyhole I sallied forth into the dark wood. What awaited me there I cannot easily forget.
In the blue dawn Lewis tucked the campaign hat under her arm and rang the doorbell to the white cabin. Bloor answered the door.
Thanks for coming to get her again, he said.
More than a week had gone since Jill had arrived on the mountain and every morning Lewis had collected her on heading into the station, and they would ride together without words, listening to the whir of the heater.
It’s on my way, Lewis said.
He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. She’s out back, he said. Having a little trouble getting going this morning.
He gave Lewis a mug of coffee and she went out the sliding glass door and found the girl smoking at the deck railing and staring at something. Lewis went to her and followed her gaze. An emaciated squirrel, perched on the bough of a pine, was turning in its paws a wriggling knot of damp fur.
It’s eating its baby, Jill said. Like Ugolino.
The young squeaked and clicked and the squirrel rolled over the minor skull its bared teeth, stripping flesh like a hand plane. Lewis sipped the coffee and grimaced and pulled from the end of her tongue a toenail clipping. She spat over the railing and flicked the clipping from her fingers, then faced the white cabin. Bloor stood in the window watching them.
Lewis turned back to the girl and lifted the campaign hat to the coloring sky and told her they ought to go for they had yet to collect Ranger Paulson and Pete and would be going a long way out today.