by Rye Curtis
I sat in that little old log cabin and watched my filthy old clothes burn up in the stove. It must have come late afternoon when I looked out one of those dirty windows for the masked man to appear. My hope was that he would return after he was sure that the search party had taken me and gone. I was ready to surprise him and tell him that I had decided that I wanted to stay with him there.
Naturally near as soon as this thought had danced into my head I was struck by what plain nonsense it was. Most people do not want one thing all of the time; in other words, I changed my mind right away. Gracious, what on earth was I doing? I needed to get out of that place and go back to Texas! My heart got to skipping like a bean on a skillet and I jumped up from the stove. I got my purse and wrapped myself in Terry’s coat and I hurried out of that log cabin quick as I could, hollering my name.
Not far into the woods my toe struck something hard and I tumbled face-first to the ground and broke open my lip. I did not hurt anything else. What I had tripped over was a figure of an eagle done in some kind of tarnished metal. Of all the unusual things. To this day I do not know how a thing like it had come to be there. I looked very briefly at it as I recovered and could learn nothing about it. The mystery of it still bothers me. Perhaps one of my readers will know the answer.
I picked myself up and hurried on. I imagine I looked as silly as Catherine Drewer when she used to prance and snort past all our windows doing what she called her little aerobic walk. I told my dear asthmatic friend, Nancy Bowers, that I thought Catherine looked like a village idiot with rectal disease, and Nancy laughed so hard that she got to coughing and had to go home. She was in bed for the rest of the day. Dear Nancy passed away from complications with her asthma some years ago.
A terrible panic got ahold of me as I feared I had forfeited my last opportunity to get back to Clarendon and mourn my husband at First Methodist with some familiar faces and dear friends like Nancy Bowers and Louise Altore and Pastor Bill. Suddenly I was mighty homesick again. I might have even been glad to see stupid old Catherine Drewer again, but I am not certain about that.
I had expected to come to the lookout from which I had glimpsed the search party in the ravine, but I did not. By and by I was in some unfamiliar place. All over the ground lay strange shapes of icy snow kept by the shade of the greatest trees. Not knowing where to go, I plopped down in the crook of an exposed root to catch my breath and suck on my busted lip. The wind picked up and the trees clawed and leaned over each other like the inebriated revelers Mr. Waldrip and I used to see in front of the Empty Cupboard roadhouse on our way home from a Saturday-night picture in Amarillo. I shut my eyes for a spell and imagined I was there with Mr. Waldrip, sitting in the truck and not saying a word to each other, just driving home, listening to the road. When I opened my eyes again and looked around at the trees I was mighty confused about the way I had come and uncertain I could find my way back to the log cabin.
I would come to learn later that I had gone in the opposite direction from where the search party was approaching the log cabin. If I had gone out the door and to the left instead of the right I would have run smack into them. They would arrive at the log cabin later that evening.
Sometimes it is awful hard not to see the humor in something aggravating like that. It is hard not to see it in the sad things too. A real important rodeo man from Borger got himself killed riding a mechanical bull in a bar in Dallas. Hit his head on a light fixture. It is not funny, but it always tickled me something terrible when Mr. Waldrip would tell it. I laugh as I write this now. I wonder if this rodeo man’s mother ever laughed about it. I have a hard time thinking she ever did.
I was turned around and lost. So I just settled down in those roots as a chorus of wind and darkness tuned up in the mountains. I did not laugh about anything at all right then. I could not yet see the humor in it. Instead I went back to hollering and hollering, Help me, I am Cloris Waldrip.
I sat balled up in Terry’s coat shivering and hollering all night long like a crazy person until I lost my voice and could scarcely whisper. My lip was swollen up pretty good too and I was slobbering like a mule. When the sky started to lighten and the sun was just below the mountains, it was not a minute too soon. I was nearly froze to death.
Suddenly I heard something stalking through the woods. Whatever it was stopped just yards shy of where I was, but I could not see it for all the trees. There was a patter like something piddling on the ground. My thought was if it was not a mean old bear or that backwards mountain lion it might be one of the search party. I managed to pick myself up and peek around the pines, but I could not see what the thing was. I endeavored to say out my name but all that I could muster was a ghastly groan. The pattering stopped. I limped over.
Whatever it was gave a shriek and lit out of there with some haste. I chased after it, but it was awful quick and I lost track of it in the dark. I kept on in the general direction.
I did not see the drop.
My legs went out from under me and I was thrown down a slope of cold mud and stone! I tore off a whole fingernail clawing at the rock to slow my descent but I slid out over the lip of an overhang anyway. I caught the edge by my gory fingers. I could not turn my head to know how far the drop was. My legs swung free in open air and I stretched them out as far as I could to find ground if there was any. My purse had slipped off my shoulder and it lay in front of me on the overhang. I could not let go to grab it. I am sure I was a pitiful sight, dangling there in those glittery purple stockings and that pink shirt doused in black mud. My fingers burned and blood spurted from them. I was not fooling myself that I could hang there for eternity.
So I let go. There is something to be said for the graceful acceptance of the inevitable.
The fall was not far, thank goodness, but when I hit the ground my legs gave out and I twisted my ankle and knocked my head on a rock. Gracious, it hurt a great deal and I went loopy for a spell. I was sure I heard a woman above on the overhang saying my name as the sun came up. I lay on my back with my legs splayed out at the bottom of this steep escarpment, in a damp place of rocks and coarse brown shrubbery, and did not move. Above me a barkless and dying tree grew from the overhang. Snagged on a bare high branch was the kind of silvery balloon you could find with the misted flowers in the supermarket or deserted in a corner of some hospital room’s ceiling. It was printed with pink words that I could not make out.
When first it caught my eye I took it for a helicopter. My heart dropped when I realized it was only a balloon. My sister-in-law, Rhonda Lee Waldrip, had brought me a balloon like that when I had my gallbladder removed in September of 1978. I accidentally let go of it on the walk from the hospital back to Mr. Waldrip’s truck. It was a windy day, as they often are in Texas, and that balloon vanished into the sky mighty quick. I had the funny notion that this could be that very same balloon. It is amazing the distances they can travel.
I lay still and felt my body for injuries, but as I have put down here before my bones were strong. I had taken a spill in the grocery store a year before and had given a very nice young couple there in the produce aisle a big scare, but I was not injured.
After a time I sat up to put some weight on my ankle, but it gave me a terrible pain and I toppled over. I lay on my back like an upset turtle and considered the many mistakes I had made out there in the wilderness. It was a miracle I had survived for this long. I watched the treetops upside down and imagined Mr. Waldrip up there instead of that balloon, like deadwood that had not yet made it to the ground. But there was only that silvery balloon flapping before a big sky filling with clouds and daylight.
I set myself upright and slid under the overhang. My back was against a wall of mud and roots where it had been washed out, and I stretched out my legs and looked at my bloody fingers. I was mighty hungry and desperately thirsty. I commenced to telling myself that all I had to do was to wait and the search party would find me. They were looking for me. I had seen them.
In 1983 a m
an bought a spit of land down the road from our ranch. It was not more than an acre or two of caliche. He built on it a peculiar little structure, a kind of Indian sweat lodge. All hides and painted leather flagging loudly in the wind. He was not any kind of Indian that I know about. He was as white a man as I had ever seen. He wore white slacks and no shirt and a colorful little hat like a Bundt cake.
Every Thursday afternoon Mr. Waldrip would drive out to the ranch so that he could meet with our ranch manager, Joe Flud, by the cattle tanks in the east pasture. I tagged along whenever we got lunch at the El Sombrero and he did not have the time to take me home afterward. Mr. Waldrip and Joe would stand out in the grass and I would wait in the truck.
From where Mr. Waldrip parked I could see on down the road to that unusual dwelling, and a young and pretty girl, could be the prettiest girl I have ever seen, would show up on a bicycle from the north road in a swell of dust. She wore a fine cotton dress only ever a shade of blue and her flaxen hair was always combed nicely down her back. She came at 1:30, without fail, all of the Thursdays I was there to bear witness to it. She would disappear into that strange place behind a flap of buffalo hide and not come out until at least an hour had gone by. I could not then fathom why this beautiful girl, so young and vital, would be paying a visit to this unattractive and oddly costumed older man.
My awful suspicion had always been that she was going in there to give herself to the man for money. However turning it over out there in the Bitterroot, I was struck that perhaps the girl was there not because he would pay her, but because she wanted to be there. I supposed it was not impossible that she desired this unusual little man. She had ridden there of her own free will, if any of us have any free will at all. Though I often wonder if we are not all set upon roads we cannot see, enslaved to masters unknown. I have come to believe that who or what we desire cannot be helped. We are doomed from the moment we are able to know what it is that we want. And I do not blame people for knowing what they want. I only blame them for doing anything and everything to get it without a thought to the consequences.
To set this account straight, I have since done some research and met with some of the right people and discovered that the man’s name was Tom Calyer, and that the girl’s name was Lucy Calyer. She was his daughter and she lived with her mother not far down the road. I have even met with Lucy. She was kind enough to pay me a visit here in Vermont, where I have lived nigh on two decades now, since briefly returning to Clarendon after the Bitterroot to settle my affairs. As I had anticipated, Texas without Mr. Waldrip proved inhospitable and full of melancholy. Despite my newfound distaste for trees, I came to Vermont, a place that had appealed to me since I was a little girl and had seen watercolors of its seasons in a picture book about our United States. I had an apartment in Burlington, until my hip started acting up and I moved to River Bend Assisted Living in Brattleboro, some dozen years ago now. Anyhow, this Lucy Calyer happened to have moved to Connecticut and she assured me it was not far and that she would be pleased to pay me a visit for I have become something of a celebrity since my ordeal. We had a lovely visit. She is just as beautiful as she ever was, married and with two children of dark skin and the most darling noses you will ever see. She promised me that her father was a gentle and peaceable man, a man interested in living off the land the way that more ancient folk had done.
I include this anecdote here to suggest that there is no way to speculate nor pass judgment on the nature of a thing safely from a window, and the awful truth of the matter is that often as not all anyone can understand about a person is what they understand least about themselves.
Lewis swerved the Wagoneer down the mountain and Jill held pressure on the hole in her hand and they arrived at Marcus Daly Hospital in the foothills at about nine o’clock that night. The building was two stories and gray and outside three drunk and bloodbathed men studded with car-window glass smoked cigarettes and glittered under a streetlight like figures of crystal. Lewis refilled the thermos from a bottle of merlot in the back. Then she opened the passenger door for Jill and together they went under a flickering neon sign which read Em gency.
They sat side by side in a row of seats, the blood on their clothes browned in unfathomable glyphs, and they waited for an hour in a small waiting room with a tank of paling fish before a young woman beckoned them wordlessly through a door. A man in a stained cotton smock, there in a long room partitioned with sheeting, introduced himself as the doctor and washed his hands at a sink. He was wearing sunglasses and a devil’s beard. Jill sat on a papered bed and Lewis swayed and leaned against a partition and watched the doctor straddle the girl’s knees from a stool and unwrap the bandage from her hand. He turned it over like he were buying a cut of meat from a butcher and told her that the puncture would not need but a single stitch. He told them he would be right back and he left.
I’m sorry about your hand, Lewis said.
Do you think you’ll ever see your ex-husband again?
Hope not. Why?
Jill shook her head. Will I make friends and then someday never want to see them again?
I expect so. It’s only natural.
I will not want to see them anymore? Or they will not want to see me? Or we do not care enough to see each other?
Well, things change, Lewis said. Your mom not ever tell your goddamn dad that one?
Is it not true that there are people you used to know and don’t keep in touch with now so it would make no practical difference to you if they were dead?
I don’t want anyone to die, Jill, Lewis said. I’d like to figure they’re out there doin all right even if I don’t hear from them.
Even your ex-husband?
I don’t want the goddamn man dead.
But you don’t want to see him ever again?
No, I don’t want to see him again.
Do you think you would find out if he had died or if he was doing well?
Goddamn it, I don’t know.
Jill swatted at nothing and slung blood across the linoleum. Maybe you wouldn’t find out, she said. He might as well be dead now. It would make no difference to you.
Goddamn, well if I don’t know about it I figure it doesn’t.
Everyone I’ve met over thirty is a low-grade psychopath, said the girl.
Down at the other end of the room a young girl with a leg in a cast screamed. Her eyes were fixed in terror on the bed next to hers, where a skinny bearded man flopped around naked on his back, pissing in his own face and singing a song about rutted roads. Bored nurses restrained him and strapped him down and spoke kindly to him as if they knew him well. They repositioned the sheeting and hid him from the ward.
The doctor returned and put the stitch in and Jill did not flinch and he called her a sweet girl and rolled back and forth on the wheeled stool. He pressed his crotch to her knees. There you go, sweet girl, he said. All better for baby.
That’s enough of that, goddamn it, Lewis said, and she took Jill by the arm and they left.
In the Wagoneer they wound back up the mountain. Every quarter mile on the paved road their headlights brightened a shot-up sign warning of falling rocks. Jill sat with her knees to her chest, tethered to a line of smoke sucking out through the cracked window.
Lewis drank from the thermos. I forgot to call your goddamn dad from the hospital. I expect he’s worried we’re not back yet.
Jill tapped the end of the cigarette in a soda can between her thighs. She did not speak.
Lewis drove on and passed the Crystal Penguin convenience store. Townyouths from the foothills glowed a faux-sunset color under the store’s sodium light. Greasy haired, frail and feminine, the three teenage boys grinned from their perch in the bed of a parked blue pickup truck missing a tailgate. They lifted thick amber bottles and whooped slow in the cadence of a siren. A fatless mohawked boy in wireframe glasses waved and flicked a bejeweled tongue.
Jill waved at the boys with her bandaged hand and said, I wonder how long we’ll k
now each other, Ranger Lewis.
From a ways down the road Lewis spotted Bloor waiting for them under the deck light. He sat unmoving in a rocking chair, his arms folded and his boots up on the railing. Lewis brought the Wagoneer to a stop in front of the white cabin just after midnight. He stood from the chair.
Lewis turned to Jill. Thanks for helpin out. I’m sorry you got hurt.
I’m sorry we didn’t find what you were looking for, said the girl.
Together they walked up to the white cabin and Bloor raised at them a chalked finger.
We had to overnight in the shelter, Lewis said.
What happened to your hand?
She poked it pretty bad. Had to take her to the goddamn hospital.
Bloor met his daughter at the bottom of the steps to the front deck and took her hand and inspected the bandage. Koojee. Are you all right?
Yes.
Bloor looked at them both and brought them into the cabin. Lewis and Jill sat on the white couch and Bloor prepared salmon and asparagus in the kitchen, reciting phrases of lyrical poetry he had written about how worried he had been that he had lost them both. The three ate at the dinner table and drank together two bottles of merlot, and Bloor asked them what had happened the night before at the shelter and they told him little save that Cloris Waldrip was not there.
After they had finished Bloor took their plates and Lewis and Jill went out to the back deck with another bottle of merlot. They sat in the outdoor furniture and drank under the clear night.