Kingdomtide

by Rye Curtis

  Jill blew a ring of smoke. She nodded at the hot tub. I heard you both.

  Heard what?

  You and my dad copulating in the Jacuzzi.

  I don’t know what you mean.

  Last week, the night I got here. I heard you having sex.

  No. Lewis watched yet the squirrel work the newborn like a nut. Maybe you heard some goddamn animals.

  I convinced a boy to copulate with me, and after we did he told the school my vagina looked like an old army boot.

  Lewis poured the coffee out off the deck. Boys can be mean.

  Men who act like whatever they think men are supposed to act like should be gassed. Women who act like whatever they think women are supposed to act like should be gassed too.

  Maybe we need the people we don’t like. For some reason.

  Maybe, Jill said, swatting at nothing. Like we need gnats for the ecosystem? Maybe if we lose all the annoying people it could be the end of society.

  Lewis turned again to the window. Bloor was behind the glass in shadow still watching. He smiled and held up a chalked hand.

  I’m beginnin to think your dad doesn’t give you enough credit, Lewis said.

  When my mom was sick she couldn’t move her body. She couldn’t even talk. And he would get her from her wheelchair and copulate with her on the living room rug. Up until the week she died.

  Maybe that’s romantic.

  It’s not, Jill said.

  Lewis watched the girl suck her cigarette. Smoke swam from a perfect nose, light catching the pattern of scars on her face.

  The girl said: I would like to be one of those people that change many times before they die. I could be married to a man in Tokyo and he cheats on me when he’s volunteering for UNICEF in Africa. I could be a librarian with an Iranian-American girlfriend. She’s a hot dog vendor in Central Park. I could have a shoe store that floods, gets mold, and is condemned, and I become a counselor at a homeless center. I could be in jail for fish gambling with a son in Newfoundland. As long as it’s different from this and everything else.

  Don’t you figure you ought to finish high school first?

  Jill stubbed the cigarette out on the railing and turned to Lewis. You could take me seriously.

  You just might regret not finishin school.

  Do you regret anything?

  Probably.

  If somehow that old lady is still alive out there, do you think she regrets anything?

  Well, you can goddamn ask her when we find her, Lewis said.

  If the crash didn’t kill her, she has probably killed herself by now.

  Lewis looked back to the pine. The squirrel had gone.

  She checked the rearview mirror. Jill, asleep in the backseat, jostled against the window. The old dog lay balled on the floorboard under her feet. Pete, his red hair matted under the coif, sat in the seat next to the girl and worked at his needlepoint. Lewis imagined him as an ugly peasant woman living in Holland before the discovery of America. Over the three hours she had been driving he had raised the video camera now and again and taped Jill and the embroidery hoop and the dog and the nape of Claude’s neck in the front passenger’s seat. He had once fixed it on her and caught her drinking from the thermos of merlot.

  She drove them on for near an hour more over worsening roads and darker forest, and often they stopped and dragged away a fallen branch in their path and Lewis would sneak around to the back of the Wagoneer and refill the thermos from a bottle she kept hidden there.

  Jill woke when the engine quit and the others had climbed out and slammed the doors. She blinked at Lewis as if she had forgotten her and asked if they were there. Lewis told her they were and that they would walk side by side and comb the forest trail until they came to Black Elk Creek, where they would continue on for about a mile more and then turn back before dark if they had not found Cloris Waldrip. Her guess, she said, was that Cloris would be at the creek.

  She gave Jill and Pete reflective orange vests and the team followed an overgrown trail marked by wooden posts rotted thin and washed pale red. They chanted in round Cloris, Cloris, Cloris, Mrs. Waldrip. Claude kept time with a machete on the pines and the old dog wavered at his heels. Downward to a scrub valley they went like a pilgrimage in prayer, and Pete hauled about his neck the video camera, wheezing and halting to clutch at his pigeon chest and to straighten the coif.

  Don’t get left behind, Petey, Claude said. We’d never find you.

  They left the forest for the grass and the few windspiraled pines of the wide valley. Ahead of them was the river. They spread out and Pete and Claude went together. The dog trotted after them. Carrion hunters patterned the peaks.

  What d’you think of it out here? Lewis said.

  You should see Tokyo, Jill said.

  Lewis tightened the straps on her pack and spat in the grass. You been there?

  No.

  How d’you know then?

  I’ve seen images in a magazine.

  What about bein out in goddamn nature?

  Tokyo is nature, said the girl.

  Lewis sucked her teeth. Maybe you’re right. Maybe this isn’t all that different.

  They went on and the team reached the river and stopped there. Jill sat on a rock and lit a cigarette.

  Don’t you goddamn leave that out here, Lewis told her.

  Claude and Pete milled about downriver some hundred-odd feet away. The dog snuffled around and ate grass and gagged. Pete set the video camera on a stump and fixed it on Claude, who stood before him gesturing wildly to the water and forming claws of his hands and making a speech Lewis could not hear.

  Jill brushed the hair from her blue-painted eyes and swatted at nothing in the wind. Do you hate your ex-husband?

  Lewis brought from her pack a thermos of merlot and unscrewed the lid. She pushed back her campaign hat and drank. Already it was late afternoon and the mountains swayed blue over the river. Why’re you askin me that goddamn question?

  The girl shrugged.

  No, Lewis said. I don’t hate him.

  Do you love him?

  Sometimes he’d fix cucumber sandwiches and bring them to the station. We’d have lunch together. He’d hold my goddamn hand, tell me he loved me. Maybe I loved him then.

  Why?

  Never said a bad word to me. I said more to him than he ever did to me. Maybe that’s really why it turned out the way it did. I’m not an easy person. I gave him trouble for nothin. But sometimes I’d catch him just lookin at me like I was the only goddamn thing he’d ever seen. I expect that’s the troublin part. He was a goddamn good man to me.

  I used to love a cat but then I realized that was ridiculous, Jill said.

  Lewis shook her head and licked the merlot off her lips. Talked to one of the other wives at the courthouse when he was bein sentenced. Told each other how goddamn sorry we were and how goddamn bad it all was what he’d done to us. But she said somethin. She said she thought what they’d had was one of a kind and it hurt her that it wasn’t. I figure we all’d like to have somethin nobody else does.

  That woman is sad and stupid, Jill said, and she put out the cigarette on the rock and flicked the butt to the river. There’s no such thing as one of a kind.

  I figure you’re right about that.

  Do you believe he loved you?

  Lewis drank again from the thermos and burped and spat redly in the grass. Somebody lies that much you got to wonder. But I figure he was also sharin the best parts of himself with three goddamn women, and takin care of them and maybe he really was lovin them. You can’t know. The judge asked him why he did it, and goddamn Roland said he couldn’t see his way to a life without any one of us and maybe he was a greedy man but a life with just one person he loved wasn’t enough for him. He said he had so much love to give and if it was a crime to give it then lock him up and give the key to a fish.

  If people can believe they love cats, Jill said, I bet they can believe they love more than one person.

 
Lewis took another drink from the thermos. The girl balanced on the rock, hugging her legs, her locks of hair near too heavy for the wind, the sun turning in them and the scars of her face.

  Your dad sure doesn’t give you enough credit, Lewis said.

  The girl said nothing.

  I expect you’re a little bit like him.

  We are all the same boring person, said the girl.

  Claude whistled to them from downriver and waved his arms. Pete waved too and went to whistle and instead yipped like a small dog and fell into a fit of coughing. He doubled over and Claude knocked him on the back until he straightened up.

  Lewis and Jill walked down to join them and Jill lit another cigarette on the way. When they came close Claude did not say a word but raised an arm and unfurled a finger at the stump of a downed spruce.

  Lewis neared it and knelt before a row of letters hacked crudely into the wood. She ran her fingers over them, then stood and cupped a purpled mouth and tottered in a circle. She called for the lost woman. She dropped her hands and cast her rosy eyes over the valley. I goddamn knew it, she said.

  Jill knelt at the stump and smoked the cigarette.

  Pete sidled up alongside the girl, a hand splayed over his pigeon chest. Reckon you’d lend me one of those? My heart’s uneasy.

  Jill shook a few cigarettes from the pack and offered them.

  Pete pulled one and pressed it between his lips. He lit the cigarette and looked the girl over. Thank you kindly. Can I tell you, I see you growin up into a fine middleaged woman. Not like my wife.

  Claude removed his campaign hat and wiped with the back of a hand his blue nose and snapped for the dog. The dog heeled and Claude came around to Lewis. He put a hand on her shoulder. I’d say there wasn’t any positive reason she put her name in this stump, Debs. I’d say it suggests she’s dead. She hoped we’d find this to let us know that. I’m impressed with this woman.

  It ain’t all that good a whittlin job, Pete said. I seen children what can woodwork better than that.

  It’s not her craftsmanship that I’m impressed with, Petey.

  Jill flicked her cigarette to the river and watched the others quietly. The scars of her face grew pink in the sun.

  Lewis kicked the dirt. The goddamn body?

  I’d say consumed by some wild animal, Claude said.

  It’s a damn shame, Pete said. I’d bet she must’ve been some lady to get down here and carve in that wood, even if she didn’t carve it all that well.

  I don’t see any indication of wild animals, Lewis said. No blood, no hair, no bones, not even a goddamn kneecap.

  Jill looked around at the grass. I don’t see anything either.

  Claude ran a hand over his clean black hair. You’re gettin real peculiar about this Cloris Waldrip, Debs.

  Lewis swigged from the thermos of merlot and dribbled down her front. She wiped her face and showed a winedrenched middle finger to the man. You spend your nights in the forest lookin for a gingerheaded cyclops that rides a goddamn armadillo.

  Claude said nothing, then wrinkled his forehead. There’s no need to be rude, Debs. I’d say it just stands to reason she’s gone.

  I had made my way aimlessly for two long and terrible days through those strange woods and I was yet to come to the old trail like the masked man had said that I would. All I saw were trees and more trees. My gracious, there were trees!

  The canopy splintered up the sun and made me mighty dizzy. It was the same effect that occurred whenever Mr. Waldrip would drive me in the truck down Goodnight Street in Clarendon. The street was lined with tall old elms, and they splintered up the sun that same way. Riding on that street was like having some crazy person switch a light on and off in your face. I endeavored to keep a true heading east with the little compass the man had left me, but the trees got the best of me and sent me to winding like a snake in a saloon. I tell you now that if I were never to see another tree again before I leave this world that would be all right with me.

  I was uneasy that the masked man was not watching over me anymore. I felt direly alone like I had the night Terry had passed on in such awful confusion. The notion crossed my mind that I had been abandoned by God in some blighted fairyland. Unusual sights greeted me. Sickly and tonedeaf songbirds perched in the trees on their peeling feet and there were yellow-eyed rodents sluggish and balding and afflicted with sores. There were colorless insects the size of hands, like you could find at the bottom of the ocean, and black butterflies floated on the mist. The bare branches of dead trees clacked together above me while I watched a slimy frog eat another slimy frog. There was a shrub like a black person’s hair around which schooled hundreds of bioluminescent flies.

  Being that the air here was stale and little sound would carry on it, I heard only my breath like sand on paper. The ground was full of downed branches all busted up like it were the floor of a charnel house. There was a decrepit evil there and everything appeared to be ill. I was afraid, but it would take a night in the rain for the dread of it all to finally set in and for me to admit to myself how very alone I was.

  That night came after what I counted as my third day in that strange forest. This is what happened: the rain was gentle to begin with but by and by it started coming down in buckets. Then I was lucky enough to arrive at a large wall of limestone. It reminded me of the facade of the old Texas State Bank in downtown Amarillo. I am not an authority on the subject, but I have read that all manner of native people once called the Bitterroot their home, so I am inclined to believe I had stumbled onto the ruins of an ancient edifice of some kind such as those in Petra halfway across the world. I climbed up on a ledge of the limestone, got up close under a kind of awning, and covered myself in Terry’s coat. There was a rectangular cut in the floor of the stone and rainwater was sucking through it like a storm drain in a street.

  It had gotten dark, but I fumbled around and turned up some dry pine needles and such for tinder there in a recess like that of a doorway. I hoped to build a fire. In some haste I put together a little pile in that spot. I had one fire-starter stick left. I took it out along with the silly cartoon lighter in Terry’s coat pocket. There was a crack of lightning and I jumped. I dropped the lighter and it skidded away and disappeared right down that drain in the rock! I thought about putting my arm down after it to see if there was a kind of catch basin but it was dark and I could not bring myself to do it.

  I slumped down on those ruins and watched the downpour and set to turning my wedding ring on my finger. I had gotten used to rain. I did not bawl about it, I just set out Mr. Waldrip’s boot and filled the red canteen with the runoff from the rocks. After my eyes had adjusted to the dark I could see the woods, all black and gray. The rain fell very hard and a chill was in my bones. There was not a thought in my head, save that I was cold. I was mighty hungry too so I had the rest of the cereal, which I had hoped would last longer than it wound up doing. I did not much like the salted fish.

  It was after I had eaten up the cereal that I spotted the mountain lion. It crept up out of the rain. Like everything else in those woods the creature looked infirm. It had overlarge shoulder blades that jutted up like panels on a dinosaur. In the dark the animal resembled a kind of winged mythological beast, one that was to guard the limestone ruins in which I sat. Most unusual of all, and believe me or not, the lion walked backwards. It led with its tail sweeping left to right like the head of a snake. Its mouth was slack and rain ran through its teeth. I was mighty scared but I picked up my hatchet and hollered at it loud as I could. Well, that lion lit out of there like a little pussycat. I have since read that mountain lions have an instinctual fear of the human voice.

  I sat in that limestone, hatchet in hand, waiting for the cat to return. It is strange sometimes how the mind wanders off on its own, once danger disperses, and by and by when I was convinced the cat would not come back my way, I got to worrying again over the past, and the tally for and against me. I mean to say I thought of Garland Pryle.


  Ours was no great love affair. I do not want to leave you the misunderstanding that it was. The women of Texas who belong to my generation generally do not talk about sex. You could live your entire life in Donley County and never be sure it was being had by anyone but yourself. But to be direct and to honor the veracity of this account, I will here put it down plainly that I committed adultery with Garland Pryle. I am not proud of it, but there it is.

  It happened twice. The first incident occurred in the lovely little home his parents had on Bent Tree Street. We made love on the dinner table. The second incident occurred one summer afternoon not but a week later in the springhouse behind the grocery store. The springhouse cooled our hot and crazed young blood and we made love on the cucumbers and the squash. I did enjoy it very much. This troubled me for some time, for my amorous mind would fetch him in the night as I lay in bed next to dear Mr. Waldrip, that kindest of men. It bothered me that rainy night out in the Bitterroot, when little else made any good sense anymore and God sure seemed less like Himself than He ever had. I could not fathom the way He had worked in the masked man. I could not fathom the way He had worked in Garland Pryle so many years before. Most of all, I could not fathom the way He had worked in me. I am the greatest mystery to myself.

  This is what frightened me and frightens me yet: I am near to certain I would make the same decision in that little aisle of canned peas if I had to do it over and over again until the end of time. I knew that was true every time I asked for forgiveness on my knees at First Methodist, when all of the congregation whispers selfish prayers to themselves, all of us sinners accounting the balance of our souls in that same slatted wood building, hearing not even the wind howl. I would do it again, Lord. I would do it again, and I am not even sure that I am sorry.

  I did not sleep. I waited for morning as the rain slowed and then quit altogether and the clouds lightened up. I had survived yet another night. Exhausted and cold as I was I picked myself up, wrung out the zigzag sweater, and looked through the drain in the stone to see if I could spot the lighter. I could not see a thing but a trough of black water. In the light the ruins were not as grand as I had imagined them in the dark. I transferred the rainwater from Mr. Waldrip’s boot to the little red canteen and then I studied the compass. I started out again in an easterly direction.