Kingdomtide

by Rye Curtis

Appreciate you, Eric, that’s goddamn helpful.

  Is it? Eric darted again his eyes to the girl. Jill stared ahead out the windshield. This about that sicko goofball from Phoenix?

  No, Lewis said. A plane went down some weeks back and we’re lookin for one of the survivors. A seventy-two-year-old woman, name of Cloris Waldrip.

  The man whistled and started back shivering and shook slowly his unhinged and chattering head. Seventy-two? Tell her kin to bury an empty box and get on with they lives.

  Lewis brought Jill back to the station that afternoon and poured in secret a mugful of merlot from a bottle behind her desk and set to writing a report on the smoke over the Old Pass. Pete was in the kitchenette, Claude at his desk. Jill smoked cigarettes at the window overlooking the snow and the wilderness. She pressed a thumb to the pane.

  Claude looked up from a pamphlet on cryptology. You’re markin up the glass.

  Jill sat in an extra chair and stubbed the cigarette out on the brim of the mug she held between her legs.

  She can mark up the goddamn glass if she likes, Claude, said Lewis, and she drank off another mug of merlot and showed Claude a middle finger.

  Claude mumbled something about the station getting overcrowded and that Cornelia was attracted to fingerprints like a shark is to blood, and though he wanted to find her, he warned them all that he was afraid of what she might do if her appetite were whetted. The old dog under his desk sucked the ends of his bootlaces and he went back to the pamphlet and stroked the blue tip of his nose.

  The girl’s prints shone on the pane. In the reflection given back Lewis could see Pete in the kitchenette raising up his head now and again from the embroidery hoop in his lap. After a time he set the hoop aside and dragged a stool next to Jill and told her how his wife had dumped out all the houseplants on their bed and had left a note explaining that she had gone to make love with a docent at the Museum of Automobiles.

  I didn’t know what a docent was, Pete said, so I spent an hour and a half just lookin round the house for a dictionary. Couldn’t find one so had to drive out to the library. Time I got there it’d closed. Took me a day and a half to figure it out. It means tour guide. Most women are just usin a man to make themselves feel all right about growin old.

  Some people are deprived of oxygen when they are young, Jill said.

  Lewis went back to the report in front of her and radioed into headquarters and got Chief Gaskell on the other end. She told him that she had spoken with Eric Coolidge that morning, who the night before had witnessed smoke rising near the Old Pass. Lewis suspected that Cloris Waldrip could have found her way to one of the shelters there and she told Gaskell that she needed to helicopter a team in and search the place.

  Listen, Debra, I thought we’d settled this. Over.

  John, she’s out there and we’re runnin out of goddamn time. There’s new information in this case. Eric saw smoke. Over.

  Eric Toothlicker Coolidge also gets in the buff and hangs himself upside down from the trees because he’s under the delusion it’s good for his brain. Just the other day I got a call from a very unhappy camper who had the misfortune to happen across him like that. Over.

  Reckon it is good for his brain? Pete said.

  Lewis turned and put a finger to her lips. Claude had gone out front with the old dog and the door had not latched. A sidelong breeze shuffled the flyers and bulletins on the corkboard to Lewis’s right. She caught sight of the black-and-white composite sketch that showed the smooth, dark-eyed face of the wanted young man from Arizona.

  Ranger Lewis? Ranger Lewis, come in. Over.

  She turned back to the radio. It could be the Arizona Kisser. Over.

  Do you have any credible reason to believe that? Over.

  The FBI think he’s hidin out in the area. Well, Eric Coolidge sees smoke comin from a shelter. Maybe he’s hidin in one of those goddamn shelters. There’re only three shelters in that quadrant. It’s worth checkin out, John. Over.

  There’s a miner’s road that runs up the Old Pass by the McMillians’ dugout. Truthfully I don’t have a chopper for you. But you’re welcome to drive up there with Claude in a couple days after the snow’s thawn a bit and check it out. I don’t care much either way. Very unlikely. But I don’t know. Drive up there close as you can and hike on in through that notch on the old trappers’ trail. That’s the best I can do for the time being. But you be careful. Over.

  All right. Let me know if anything changes about that goddamn chopper. Over.

  You hang in there, Ranger Lewis. Let me know if there’s anything we can do for you down here. Marcy says hello. She says she’s had you in her prayers. We all have. Over.

  V

  We traveled the day under low dark clouds. The masked man looked back every several yards or so to see I had not fallen behind. In the cold his breath steamed off his round head like a baked potato. I kept up with him sure enough, but he must have been going slower than what he was accustomed to. Often he ran his finger under the mask to get an itch. No doubt it was mighty uncomfortable to go so long with a shirt wrapped around his head like that, with naught but two little eyeholes to see his way. He did not quit, however. Bad weather was coming and a great urgency to get us to safety spurred him on.

  We passed a cold night around a fire in a rocky glade. He had built the fire in the dried-out rib cage of a bighorn sheep we had found there. For supper we had some wafers from his duffel. Afterward he slept with the mask on turned away against a pine, silent as a log. The alien shadows of the sheep bones threaded over the rocks and his back, and I drank hot water from a horn he had given me. I slept fast the whole night.

  The next morning we set out again. We went on the same as we had the day before and said very little. We pulled on and on and did not rest again until nightfall. My legs ached and my back was very sore. We passed another cold night in the dirt around a scant fire. The next morning we picked ourselves up again and carried on all day.

  The snow arrived that next evening just before dark. An early clear moon broke the clouds and lit up the snowfall through the pines. It started soft and gentle like cottonwood seeds blown about the banks of the Red Creek back in Texas. It was very doom-ridden and beautiful.

  I hugged Terry’s coat around me and kept the pace. It sure was a good thing we had struck out that morning when we had, being that the snow picked up in a swell. Just when it was so heavy that I could hardly see my hands in front of me, a small log cabin appeared ahead in the last of the light. The cabin was not in much of a clearing. I suspected the foundation had been laid where the pines that had been felled to build it had once grown. Their yet living brethren grew very close against it and thick blue moss checkered the northernmost side. Two small, dark windows of dirty glass on either side of the door chattered in the rising wind. The roof was pitched, and up from it there was a blackened and crooked smokestack. It was an eerie place.

  The man shoved open the door with his shoulder. I followed him inside. The first thing he did was to set his duffel down and light one of those fire-starter sticks and toss it in an iron stove similar to one Grandma Blackmore used to have in her sitting room. He then lit an oil lamp on a table in the middle of the room. He pulled out a wooden chair and shook a snowy glove at it.

  The oil lamp flickered over the dingy interior. I will tell here some about the cabin. A dresser missing a leg was leaned in a dark corner and a clothesline was strung across the room. A pair of trousers and several shirts that hung there bounced shadows over two bunk beds attached to an adjacent wall. The yellow foam cots to them were without any covers and their corners had been gnawed by some desperate birth of vermin. Yellow rope like Mr. Waldrip used to use around the ranch was coiled in another corner of the cabin. On the table were some empty cans with the lids peeled back that were labeled to have once contained pear halves and kidney beans. On an unopened can of beet slices sat a lone dead fly, dusty and upright. I knew the thing was dead because it tumped over when I sat down at the tabl
e.

  The masked man cleared the table and dumped the empty cans outside in the snow, as if he were embarrassed the place was untidy.

  What is this place? I asked him.

  The government built these in the fifties in case someone got lost, he said.

  The man pulled out the other chair and sat down. He straightened the mask again so that his eyes lined up with the holes in it and the print of the pancakes was over his mouth. He took off his gloves and unlaced his boots and pulled them off, sending mud and snowmelt to the puncheon floor, then he set them by the stove to dry and pulled off some funny striped socks and hung them inside out on the clothesline. They smoked in the heat like rashers of bacon. He looked up at me in what little light there was and he cocked his head as if I had confused him, same as how Mr. Waldrip’s Labrador Sally used to do when Mr. Waldrip asked her a question. The man shook his head and went about rubbing his feet at the stove.

  After a minute he got up and went to the dresser. He rifled through it and brought back a light pink shirt with pictures on it of a blue castle and a white horse. He also provided me a pair of yellow socks and glittery dark purple stockings. Newspapers would later describe them as spandex leggings. Here, he said, and he put them on the table. He faced a corner to give me some privacy.

  I thanked him and removed Terry’s coat and hesitated in my ragged and damp clothes, the threadbare zigzag sweater and blouse and the torn skirt.

  I won’t look, he said.

  I removed my filthy clothes and arranged them on the table. He had already seen me as naked as a nickel, but I mean to tell you it was still something mighty unique disrobing in a room with a man who was not Mr. Waldrip. I took the dry clothes from the table and dressed. They were small even for a small woman such as myself. When I put on the shirt I imagined I could smell the little girl who must have left it there. Such of apples and a mowed lawn. I did not think on it much at the time.

  When I was a little girl I dreamt of having many children. When Mr. Waldrip and I were married we made an effort right away. That is what you did in those days. Mary Martha Hart, an acquaintance of mine from the Women’s Historical Society, was pregnant within weeks of her wedding. She was seventeen. She had a baby boy who grew up to become a well-liked singer in Las Vegas. He had hair like a cockatoo and sang songs about lonesomeness. Another woman in my congregation, Joycie Farwell, had twins, a boy and a girl. The boy grew up to be a pink-eyed lunatic. He held some people hostage in a Red Lobster restaurant someplace in North Dakota, until one of the hostages realized he was holding not a pistol but a carrot stained black with shoe polish. I suppose what I am wanting to suggest here is that children are not a good thing to a certainty, so perhaps not having them is not necessarily a bad thing.

  Finished, I said.

  The masked man turned from the corner and looked me over. It was a funny outfit. I never will cease to be amazed that young people dress the way they do. I suppose often the clothes people wear only make sense to the people wearing them. He did not say a thing about my getup.

  Then he sat a spell with his back to the stove, reading a book that looked like it had been in water. I asked him what it was and he told me that I would not like it. I told him that I had been a librarian for a good many years and I was interested in literature. The shape of his mouth changed under his mask and he held the book cover towards me so that I could read the title. The lettering on the cover was a faded purple. It read: The Joy of Lesbian Sex: A Tender and Liberated Guide to the Pleasures and Problems of a Lesbian Lifestyle by Dr. Emily L. Sisley and Bertha Harris.

  I found it in the dresser, he said, and he held the book in front of his mask again and read on.

  I sat there and listened to the wind toss snow against the smokestack and whistle in the unceiled walls. The lantern light played over the man and for the first time since the little airplane had gone down I wondered how it would be to return to Texas. The first thing I would have to do is to unlock the front door with the key Mr. Waldrip kept hid under the stone shaped like a steer. My ferns and zebra plant would be dried up like old goats. Our poor cat, Trixie, would have eaten all the food we had left her and she would be hunting mice to survive, something I did not believe she could do. I imagined her laid out skin and bones at the base of the front door, poor thing.

  I thought about the life I would have without Mr. Waldrip. It did not make a lick of sense to me. Night after night waking to turn to him in bed just to find him gone and then remembering the whole awful story. Riding to doctor’s appointments in that paddywagon of old fools the city provides these days. Taking walks by myself, down to the bluestem pasture where the idiot bull is tethered with that corncob pipe in its mouth.

  No, home did not make a lick of sense without Mr. Waldrip, and I was afraid I myself would not make a lick of sense back in Texas after all I had seen out in the Bitterroot.

  Snow was on the ground for two days. The masked man and I stayed warm as dogs around the stove, consuming rations of beans and canned beets. We scarcely spoke. When it came time to sleep, we bade each other good night, our teeth as red as roses. I slept on the bottom bunk and he on the top. He seldom rolled over in his sleep and it would have been easy to believe that he was not up there at all, but for the sag in the grate underside the bed. I had not slept so near a man who was not Mr. Waldrip for many years. Still I slept well. It was nice to have a soft place to lay my head.

  The second night I heard a sound and went to the window. By the light of the moon I spotted that same mountain lion prowling backwards around the cabin. I alerted the man and he said he had seen the mountain lion before too. He believed the creature had an ear infection that gave it a bad case of vertigo. He said that it was merely lonely and confused and a poor excuse for a mountain lion.

  During the day the masked man sat by the stove whittling inscrutable figures with the spey blade and tossing them into the fire. I read the book he had found about homosexual relations between women. It is an interesting book with explicit subject matter. I did not entirely understand all of it, but I am glad that I read it anyway. For the longest time I did not know such a thing as lesbianism even existed. It was not something anyone ever talked about, not like it is today. There was a girl who grew up with us in Clarendon, Edith Pearson, and she played baseball with the boys and was not at all interested in wearing dresses. I have learned this does not make a lesbian, but Edith and another woman, Beth Stout, did live together in a double-wide trailer in Perryton, Texas. The ladies at First Methodist could be mighty cruel about Edith, but I do not now see the point.

  On a cloudy afternoon when the light outside the cabin was bluish-gray on the snow, I recalled an evening Mr. Waldrip and I had attended a performance at Clarendon Elementary School. I was a young teacher there at the time. We sat in the half-dark and watched the children put on a darling play about the first cattlemen in Texas. Not but five minutes in, Mrs. Craddock, the librarian whom I would come to replace, slid from her seat and passed away right there on the auditorium floor. She was about the age I was then sitting in that log cabin. A frail old man I knew to be Mr. Craddock crouched over her and whispered in her ear. He did not shed a tear. Others stood around and folded their hands. Dr. Gainer endeavored to revive her, holding a palm to her forehead and shaking her gently by the shoulders. This did not work. All the children stopped and watched from the stage, stricken in their ten-gallon hats and painted mustaches, save for the slow red-haired boy, Merritt Sterling, costumed like a stalk of Indian grass, who yet performed his part and swayed as if blown by the wind, unaware anything at all had changed.

  Something about Mrs. Craddock’s passing put a special kind of fear in my young heart at the time. Suddenly I was afraid of growing old and dying, afraid of muddling through life putting stock in all the wrong things. I was afraid nothing was as I believed it to be. I did not chew over this discomforting notion for long, however, because the next day at First Methodist Mrs. Taylor, a little woman with a vibrating sicknes
s, stood buzzing like electric hair clippers and led the congregation in prayer for Mrs. Craddock and her family, and I was put at ease that all was safe in God and community. But then and there in that log cabin, when nothing was as it had ever been before, watching where the shirt over that mysterious man’s face was damp with the shape of his mouth, that special kind of fear returned and I worried that I had made a mighty big mistake believing in comfortable things.

  On our third day in that dingy old cabin, the masked man went off to retrieve more water from a nearby spring and to set some of his traps, and I took a chair out front and sat in the early-afternoon sun and watched the snowmelt drip from the trees. I breathed that cool, clean air and I was not frightened anymore. It is peculiar how the human spirit endures. A person can get used to a situation, even if that situation may have once seemed intolerable.

  After I had sat a spell, the masked man came charging back through the woods. He was straightening the mask over his face. I hallooed him and he put a finger over the haunting place where his mouth was and shushed me.

  He squatted close by and pointed to the place in the trees from whence he had come. He was out of breath. He said, Walk straight in that direction and call out your name.

  I got up from my chair and I asked him if he had seen someone.

  Don’t tell them you saw me, he said. Tell them you were alone.

  I have to tell them about you, I said. You have saved my life.

  He said, Please, and he looked back over his shoulder.

  Come with me, I said.

  He pleaded with me again. Pieces of long brown hair stuck out from the eyeholes in the mask like whiskers on a cat. I told him that I would do as he wished. He thanked me.

  Do you suppose they will believe it? I said. It is not an easy thing to believe that a woman my age could survive out here on her own.

  You’ve just got to convince them, he said. He touched my arm with a gloved hand. He rushed past me into the cabin and came out a minute later with his duffel and set out in the opposite direction.