Kingdomtide

by Rye Curtis

  I had not gone but a quarter mile when I heard a long whistle come from a particularly shady place in the trees to the southeast. I stopped and put my hand to my ear. It sounded like the cattle pens on a windy day, slow and in the register of a school-aged boy. I have always had good hearing, I imagine because I had lived a quiet life up until that time. Mr. Waldrip, on the other hand, had lost much of the hearing in his right ear to his shotgun.

  I followed the whistle through the trees until it got to where it sounded like the noises a woman makes when she is with a man. Not but fifteen yards ahead, nestled under two crooked pines, was a little blue tent. Heavens, I was excited!

  I endeavored to holler out and make myself known to whomever it was inside making the racket, but my throat seized up with too much excitement. When I reached the tent, suddenly the noises quit. I went to announce myself again but could not. I was trembling. Instead I rapped on the side of the tent.

  Not a thing happened.

  At last I managed to say, Excuse me, help, pardon me, I am Cloris Waldrip, I have been in an aviation accident.

  No answer came from within.

  I do not know much about tents. I have never cared too much for sleeping outdoors. When I was a girl Father took me once out on the prairie and we slept under the stars in the bed of the wagon on top of the horse blankets. I imagine what he really wanted to do was get away from Mother for a night. Davy had passed away only the summer before and a woman had just been elected governor of Wyoming and Mother did not think that was a very good idea. She was not good company for quite some time.

  This tent had zippers. It was dingy and its blue color was faded in a streak where the sun had gone over it that same way for a good long while. At the bottom the nylon was bulged and was darkly discolored like the apron of a fry cook. I was starting to get uneasy. I nudged it with my foot and announced myself again. Not a thing happened. Then I worked up the courage and reached down and unzipped the opening. Out came a smell like that of the icebox after the power had been out.

  There was no one inside the tent! There was a big paper bag of groceries that had molded, and a swoll-up blackened plastic jug labeled as orange juice sitting upright next to an unopened package of paper plates and plastic cutlery. I could not for the life of me figure out what had made the noises I had heard. Perhaps it was the wind. To this date I do not know.

  I hollered out. I hollered and hollered so loud I believed I would bust my throat. I had just had enough of it out there. The horror of that empty tent bothers me yet. How had it come to be there, and to what purpose or by what treacherous event had it been abandoned? I worried I had stumbled into some special kind of puzzled hell.

  After I had hollered for a spell I sat my back against a pine and took a rest. My throat was sore and I was dizzy. I watched that tent and waited to see if the noises would start up again.

  Something moved behind me.

  Ma’am, said a hushed voice. Ma’am.

  I turned and spotted him. The masked man was crouched in the trees! Dear me, I was surprised! I had thought for sure it was that mountain lion that walked backwards come for me. I was sure relieved to see the man again but when I opened my mouth to say so, he shot up a gloved finger to quiet me.

  He looked about and crept out jangling for all the stuff he carried. He came up beside me and whispered, Are you all right?

  I nodded and asked why he was whispering.

  Why’re you screaming? he said.

  I told him my mind was playing tricks on me.

  He crept to the tent and knelt at it and zipped it back up, then stood up and lined up his eyes with the holes in the mask. From an overpacked duffel on his back hung a little tackle box, a pan, and three rusty old traps for small animals. A fishing rod poked up behind him as if he were meant to be hooked on a wire like a streetcar.

  What happened here? I said, pointing at the tent and trembling.

  A gale filled the woods just then and flapped the stained nylon. Just as quick as it had come the wind was gone and all was still again. It was mighty spooky.

  I don’t know, he said, and looked to the sky. We need to leave.

  I took one last look at that terribly vacant tent. Then the man sallied forth into the trees and I followed after him.

  I thought you could not accompany me, I said.

  It’s too early in the season for snow, he said, but I think it’s coming anyway. You’d have gotten caught in it. Come on, we have to hurry.

  As it happens, the autumn of 1986 had awfully strange weather. People wore sweaters in Florida and seep ponds froze in Texas. One day people could be out on the beach scarcely clothed and the next they could be in by the fire drinking hot cider. It is my understanding that the climate is confounded for what mankind has done to the earth. It does not surprise me that we would bring about our own destruction and the destruction of our unfortunate neighbors. It would appear that we hate ourselves and the civilization we have made. Cities are bigger and technology is stranger and young people are growing younger and consuming information for which I cannot see purpose nor end.

  I have put here before that our darling grandniece Jessica lives in Phoenix, Arizona. She puts in hours of time air-conditioned at her computer gazing into that Internet. I know she sees meaning in it that I cannot. When I look into that white box I am blinded by the all-colored light and the insurmountable absurdity of it all. I do not know much about the science of it, but I am afraid that when Jessica is my age she will see a stifling hot world wracked with wars fought by the poor and waged by celebrities, and from what I understand, Phoenix is going to catch fire, burn up, and blow away.

  I thanked the masked man for coming for me. You are a decent man, I told him.

  He said not a word and pulled on ahead.

  Bloor, carrying a bottle under his arm and two glasses between his fingers, led Lewis upstairs to a candled master bedroom. On a wall hung three oil paintings of leprous zealots cradling headless lizards, and on a bedside table was a framed photograph of Jill adolescent and frowning at a lobster claw.

  Bloor poured a glass of merlot and handed it to Lewis. I had some personal items shipped up from Missoula, he said. He nodded at the photograph. She used to be my little pal.

  She still up or has she gone to bed?

  He shook his head. Grief looks different to a teenager, he said. And anything and everything looks very different to Jill Bloor.

  Lewis drank off the glass in one gulp. Picture windows kept the night and the black mountains. Across the room was a sliding glass door to a dark terrace.

  Bloor asked if she had heard from Gaskell.

  He’s sayin it’s too spendy to give any more goddamn time to it. Said he wasn’t even sure the carvin spelled out her name. I figure he’s just gettin pretty goddamn tired of hearin about it.

  Bloor raised a finger to the paintings on the wall. I got these in today. A Norwegian artist. She’s in jail awaiting trial for molestation charges. It’s interesting what turns a person on, don’t you think?

  I don’t know if it’s all that interestin.

  What turns you on, Ranger Lewis?

  Lewis hooked a thumb in her belt and looked at the paintings again. Usual things, I expect.

  What are those?

  I don’t know, kissin, goddamn slow dancin, nothin interestin.

  Bloor neared her and set his chin on top of her head and wrapped around her his long arms. He swayed and danced her in a small circle. You know, he said in a high reedy voice, my wife always told me she could remember the night she was born. She said she was born premature in a night car on a train somewhere between Yakima and Spokane. Her mom never could remember the name of the small town it was they were passing through at the time, but Adelaide swore it had a G in it and the streetlights were the color of dried menstruation.

  Your goddamn wife.

  He waltzed her gently across the room and pushed her to the bed. He stood over her. The light on the landing through the open doo
r set him in shadow. He clapped together his hands and sent up a cloud of chalk. Lewis sat up on her elbows to better look at him.

  He unbuttoned his shirt and kissed the air for each button undone. He laid his body next to hers and dragged his nose up her arm to her shoulder and left there a glassy circuit like the track of a snail. Remove your uniform, he said.

  Jill still up? Shouldn’t we shut the goddamn door?

  Let’s leave it open. What do you think?

  Why in the hell would we do that?

  It’s sexy.

  All right.

  Lewis undid her uniform and rolled out of it and dropped it to the floor. The holstered revolver thudded to the carpet.

  Now the undertop.

  She undid the brassiere and threw it aside. Now she only wore underpants.

  Bloor made a noise in the back of his throat like that of a rock dropped in a pond. He held aloft his forefinger and thumb and rubbed them together and studied them in the low light. He brought them down and took her left nipple between them. How long were you married, Ranger Lewis?

  Twelve years, she said.

  Bloor rolled her nipple. What really drove you two apart? Being up here all the time? The drinking? The other wives?

  Lewis lay still and kept her eyes on the ceiling. She winced as Bloor tightened his grip on her. He pinched her once hard and she batted away his hand. Goddamn it, she said. What kind of search-and-rescue man are you?

  The light from the landing carved out the dark in his face, the pools for his eyes, and the broad scythe of his brow. He grinned and his cheeks dug deep channels that left his expression wooden and mystic like a church house grotesque.

  Bloor climbed on top of her. He unbuttoned his trousers and thrust himself meekly against her abdomen and she watched the doorway over his shoulder. He took chalked fingers and pinched her side. She wriggled yet he held her to him and pinched her still.

  Do you want to hear something painfully honest? he said.

  All right. Goddamn it.

  I know I shouldn’t, but sometimes I get angry that I have a…I don’t want to say slow daughter, but a daughter that has a hard time understanding the finer points of human interaction and higher concepts.

  Your daughter’s not slow.

  Bloor told Lewis how Adelaide had bought a dreamcatcher on the day Jill was born and that he had hung it in her bassinet and one day in the summer, when Adelaide was not feeling well, she left the baby under the living room window and fell asleep on the couch. He told how it did not take long for the sun to burn all but the shade of that dreamcatcher right onto the baby’s face, fair as she was, and how when she woke she screamed and screamed. Her cheeks were blistered, he said. We had to take her to the hospital. She doesn’t know, you know.

  You never told her?

  Adelaide felt so much shame she made me promise never to tell her. Of course I’ve kept my promise. Who’d want their daughter to know that their mom did something like that?

  Bloor pinched her again. She clenched her teeth and kept her eyes on the light in the doorway. Then Bloor leaned back and gripped again her nipples and gave them two hard turns, kissing the air above him. She yelped once and bit her tongue. He dropped his body down and rocked back and forth against her thigh. She watched yet the doorway over his shoulder.

  The floor creaked. Jill crossed the landing and stopped outside the open door. She and Lewis locked eyes and after a moment the girl went down the stairs to the kitchen and Lewis heard the refrigerator door open and a plate scrape the countertop.

  Bloor finished himself in a chalked hand and streaked the mess on a window above the headboard and fell back beside Lewis on the bed and laughed. That was wonderful, he said.

  Lewis held her damp palms over her breasts. She listened to Jill climb the stairs and saw her cross again the landing.

  Bloor called his daughter’s name.

  She stopped in the doorway. She did not look in.

  Good night, Bloor said.

  Good night, said the girl, and she went on into her bedroom and shut the door.

  Some transient presence tripped a motion sensor outside and a weak light came on and lit up the terrace. Lewis figured it was likely a squirrel but she thought she had seen something else there through the sliding glass door. A thin woman in shadow. It was only late September, yet snow fell without on the terrace in the cold light. Lewis figured it looked like shredded plastic in an old movie, and the spotlit heights of the motionless trees beyond the railing like set dressing to a windless stage.

  Well, that settles that, Bloor said, looking out to the snow. If Cloris Waldrip did survive the crash, she won’t survive the night.

  Snow hung low the boughs and cauled the granite forms roadside and stilled the tall grass. Lewis drove Jill in the Wagoneer, yawing edgewise an alpine forest, static humming low on the radio, tire chains biting into the last of a paved road that had earlier been plowed. Lewis put to purpled lips the thermos of merlot. She sipped and turned the Wagoneer up a dirt road mottled with ice and mud.

  Jill watched her from the passenger’s seat. Are we going to get stuck out here?

  No, I won’t get us goddamn stuck. Lewis drank again from the thermos and replaced the lid. She gave the Wagoneer some gas.

  Are you drinking wine out of a thermos?

  No.

  They drove on for some miles over the dirt road, guttering heavy places of snow and spitting past boarded-up hunting lodges. Leeward a hut with no windows hung a poorly butchered carcass, bottom up, frozen to a muddy icicle. Lewis did not stop to write a ticket. She drove on without speaking until she told Jill how she had received word that morning that the NTSB had faulted human error for bringing down the Waldrips’ airplane.

  Terry Squime must’ve lost control, Lewis said. Like he just decided he didn’t know how to fly anymore. The goddamn body was too far gone for them to figure if he’d had a seizure or an aneurism or anythin like that, but they didn’t rule any of that out.

  Jill said nothing and worked the handle and brought the pane down and got a cigarette. She struck a match in a book and lit it.

  They said there could’ve been some turbulence and he panicked, Lewis said. Stress-related. Didn’t rule out it could’ve been depression and he took the Waldrips with him. He’d just gotten married and it hadn’t been going well. Apparently he’d been meetin men in motels. His mailman too.

  Jill pulled on the cigarette and put her lips close to the window. Depression and mailmen, she said.

  Lewis followed a road of black mud rutted in parabolas. A lake flashed beyond a belt of dying trees. She turned at a totem pole nailed over with snakeskins and filthy socks and a clothesline hung with the parts to a bear costume frozen at crazy angles. She slowed to a stop before a hut of plank wood leaning off the side of the road. A rusted pipe in the roof smoked green. An ironing board used for a door slid away from the entrance and a head poked out. A dark-skinned man appeared there in swimming trunks and a diving mask pushed back over curls of long icy hair. He saw what they were and came caped in a beach towel sprinting for the passenger’s window, eyes wide, high-stomping through the snow in tieless combat boots.

  Lewis told Jill to roll down the window all the way. Jill sighed and cranked down the pane and leaned back so that Lewis could talk to the man now resting an arm on the side mirror.

  Hiya, Eric, what in the hell you doin in your swim attire?

  Dogpaddlin, the man said. Dogpaddlin in cold water is all you need to stay regular. His teeth chattered. Who’s this pretty baby?

  She’s a volunteer.

  All right, all right, he said. He was nodding and shivering like faulty clockwork. What’re you doin out here on a day like today, Ranger Lewis? Your outfit’s liable to get stuck.

  Somebody called in a complaint about you scarin some goddamn campers.

  I weren’t scarin no campers. Some kids was gettin drunk and drugged and pregnant on my property, so I dressed up like a bear and ran them off with a
croquet mallet.

  Yeah, that’s what they said you did.

  They was on my property.

  With your property line so close to the campgrounds you ought to think about puttin up a goddamn sign or two so this kind of thing won’t keep happenin. If someone gets on your land, just radio the station and me or Ranger Paulson will take care of it. Keep you from ever gettin involved. You still got your radio?

  Yes, ma’am.

  All right then.

  You goin to write me a ticket?

  Hell. I don’t guess I will this time.

  Appreciate it.

  Let me ask you a question, Eric.

  Yes, ma’am.

  Seen anythin noteworthy out here in the past few weeks?

  The man lowered his brow. Suddenly he was still and no longer shivered. How’d you mean?

  Did you see anythin out of the goddamn ordinary? Anythin at all.

  This about them bucks, ain’t it?

  What?

  The man darted his eyes. I saw two bucks mountin each other behind my hobby shed. I’d heard somewhere they do that sometimes but I ain’t never seen it in all my life. Thought it unnatural at first, but I don’t know.

  Anything else? said Lewis.

  Well I tell you what, I did see some smoke last night while I was out in the lake.

  Smoke?

  Maybe t’were the night before. Like a campfire out yonder, twirlin up like this volunteer’s hair here. He nodded at Jill.

  Goddamn.

  Was the faintest little thing too. Looked like it was comin deep from the Old Pass. It caused me to remark to myself cause I was under the guidance we weren’t allowed up there anymore. I assumed it was originatin from one of those shelters.