Kingdomtide

by Rye Curtis

  Jill put a bloodbrown cigarette in her mouth and lit it. Why do they call him the Arizona Kisser?

  Kissed some young girls in Arizona I was told, Lewis said. I don’t know much else about it. I don’t want to.

  Bloor came from the sliding glass door and carried with him another bottle of wine. He kissed the air twice and went to the hot tub and pulled the cover from it and set the bottle on its edge. A mass of black hair tumbled and rolled in the water. Ah, koojee!

  Lewis peered drunkenly at it from her seat. What now, goddamn it?

  Looks like a skunk got in here.

  Bloor chalked his hands and drew by its tail the thing from the water. He held it aloft before them. Limp and matted, it steamed in the cold and ran dark water to the deck boards. The animal did not smell, all Lewis could smell was chlorine. Death, like a crazed taxidermist, had fixed open the skunk’s eyes and mouth in a maniacal snarl. The flesh slid from the tail and the body thudded to the deck and Bloor was left holding a length of fur like a necktie.

  Whoops, he said, and he knelt and picked up the rest of it and laughed once and slung the body over the railing and into a tree, where it landed draped over a high bough.

  What good is that? Lewis said. Now it’s goin to stink of dead skunk out here.

  I’ll get it down tomorrow.

  Jill stood and set her empty glass on a little wood table by the chairs. She went to the sliding glass door and before she went inside the cabin she held on Lewis her blue-painted eyes and smiled a smile Lewis could not figure.

  Bloor clapped and pointed to the hot tub. Do a little tubbing with me, Ranger Lewis.

  There was a goddamn skunk dead in there not a minute ago.

  You know, the water is chlorinated. My wife always told me that chlorine could kill anything.

  Why’d she always tell you somethin like that?

  Bloor stripped his clothes and sank his naked body inch by inch into the green waters until nothing save the wispy crown of his blond mullet remained above the surface. Lewis watched the man a moment, drank off another glass of merlot, stripped naked, and climbed in after him.

  They bobbed in the water and Lewis spoke low about how she yet believed Cloris Waldrip had been in the old wilderness shelter. It was her, she said.

  Bloor did not respond, he only hummed to himself. The wind moved the pine where the skunk lay snagged, its eyes wide and tungsten in the light from the kitchen window, and Lewis recalled the way she had found Mr. Waldrip, caught aloft in the grave heights of the mountain spruce.

  Bloor went silent and took her by the shoulders and pulled her to him.

  Stop, she said.

  He let her go. What is it?

  She took up the bottle of merlot and drank deeply and set it back on the edge of the tub. All right, she said.

  Bloor took her again by the shoulders and kissed her. He stroked the bruised places on her arms and pinched her. My leopard, he said. He turned her over and was almost inside her, humping shortly at her backside. She watched a rind of black skunk hairs ride the surface of the wild green water. After less than a minute he climbed from the tub and finished off the side of the deck. She got dressed and replaced the campaign hat to her damp head.

  Are you not going to stay, Ranger Lewis?

  I need to go home, she said.

  You know, I wish you’d stay.

  I got to change my uniform. See if I can’t get the blood out of this one. I’ll be by to get your goddamn daughter in the mornin.

  The sodium lights were dark at the Crystal Penguin when Lewis drove by again. She passed the place slowly and leaned out the open window in the warm night. She drove the Wagoneer high up the mountain to Egyptian Point, listening to late-night reruns of Ask Dr. Howe How. The radio signal came and went. A caller she had heard before spoke from a heavy voice about the relativity of pain and suffering and why some people cry when a dog dies. Have they not known true tragedy and loss? said the voice. Lewis drank from the thermos of merlot she had filled at Bloor’s cabin before leaving. She had also stolen a full bottle from his pantry and had wedged it in the passenger’s seat and it clunked and thunked next to her up the unpaved road.

  When she pulled up to the trailhead the blue pickup truck with the missing tailgate was parked there. She flipped down the visor and in the mirror rubbed a thumb over her teeth, then licked the thumb and drew it to the edges of her mouth and across her eyebrows. She removed the campaign hat and ran a hand through her hair. The holster she unbuckled from the belt of her trousers and closed the revolver in the glove compartment. The dial clock in the dashboard showed 2:40 a.m. before she took the key from the ignition.

  She carried the bottle of merlot up the trail in the dark. She listened for voices in the trees and watched for the light of a bonfire. As she neared the place she saw the glow against the rocks. Ahead a group of boys cackled crazily like a coven of witches. She stopped at the edge of the clearing and stood there and listened. She clutched to her chest the bottle of merlot.

  The boys chittered high and breathlessly. One of them boasted about a new used car, and another spoke about how telephones would be able to read minds in twenty years’ time and how marriage would be obsolete and how psychotherapy would be done by coin-operated machines in bars and gas stations.

  Then a voice like an icepick split through the rest of them. She’ll be here any minute.

  No she won’t. She ain’t comin, faggot. It’s all fancy lies for sissy girls who drink diet pop and kiss boys with gay haircuts.

  We stay up here long enough, she’ll come.

  My peepaw said he saw her up here once. Said she came up from the rocks ridin a big armadillo and moanin. She had one eye and no teeth and red hair and she had her tits and dick out and everything. He said she was hot as hell even though she was what she was.

  Why moanin?

  Because she died orgasmin against her will. It’ll echo off the mountains for eternity, my peepaw says.

  That can’t happen, can it? Orgasmin if you don’t want to?

  I heard it can.

  Lewis held tight the bottle of merlot. She took a breath and stepped forward almost into the light so that she would be seen, yet just as she was there she turned on her heel and set off back down to the Wagoneer.

  VI

  A nice young reporter from a Boston newspaper once asked me in the most darling accent if I had ever considered taking my own life during my ordeal out in the Bitterroot. My answer at the time was no. However if this is going to be any kind of an honest document, I ought to come clean and apologize to her and put it down here that not only had I considered taking my own life, but I had endeavored to do it. And it was not the first time.

  I had a mighty sad spell back in the summer of 1941 after Dr. Josiah Dove had made it known to me that I could not become pregnant. I was twenty-seven years old and embarrassed and blind envious of the women I knew who had managed it. I had the terrible notion that I was not a complete woman. Women do not worry as much about that these days, but back then in Texas motherhood was one of the awful few respectable stations in society we had.

  So in the middle of a summer night I drove Mr. Waldrip’s truck out to our ranch headquarters and found where the cowboys kept the bovine medicine in a dirty old drawer. After drinking all the vials I could stomach, I wandered sick as a dog out into the pasture and collapsed on a fence post like a scarecrow. Come morning I woke up there very well rested and was surprised, and relieved, to be alive. I hopped back in the truck and stopped by the grocery store for some eggs so that I would have a story for Mr. Waldrip. Bless his dear heart, he never did know much about what my crazy head was up to most of the time. If he did, he never cared to let on.

  Out there in the Bitterroot I sat up the night with my back to the washout, letting little critters crawl all over me. I hollered out my name until the sun rose behind the clouds. I could not put any weight on my right leg without it giving me a good deal of trouble. If I was going anywhere it was going
to have to be on my belly like a snake. But I did not know which direction to go and my purse was up there out of reach on top of the overhang. The most useful items in it were the hatchet, the red canteen, and the compass. I was sad to have lost Mr. Waldrip’s boot too. I had the idea then it would have been easier to perish over a month prior in that little airplane with Mr. Waldrip and Terry.

  This is when I decided to take my life out in that wilderness. I had visions of Mr. Waldrip spotted miserable with flies, an empty bed, and the obituaries that would run in the Amarillo Globe News and the Clarendon Tribune. Bless you, I saw our tragic names banal and blurry in cheap newsprint. I envisioned the article about our demise lining the kennel of a new family’s first puppy dog, our likenesses specked and distorted with mess. I am aware many of the ladies at First Methodist are sure to judge me here on account of suicide being a sin. But there is not much that I can do about that.

  I decided I would make a noose of the glittery stockings. I pulled them off and twisted and knotted them and looked around. Mist was on the ground and dew in the trees. I scooted over to a low branch and looped the stockings over it and slipped my head through the noose. I did not want to be discovered that way, hanged half-naked by the silly clothes of a child. What an awful sight! But when you want nothing more to do with this world you do not get a say about what goes on in it without you.

  I propped myself up against the tree. All I had to do was let my legs go out from under me and let the noose do its job. I fixed my eyes on that silvery balloon high up in that pine, shining against the grayest of heavens. I let my weight go. My face got very hot and went numb. My sight turned dark.

  I came to with my back flat on the ground and a lather in my mouth. I sat myself up and rubbed my neck. It was mighty sore. The stockings were still on the branch.

  I then decided I would crawl for as long as I could and that is how I would meet my end and that would be that. I undid the stockings from the branch and put them back on and got on my belly. With my fingers in the dirt I drug my bad leg behind me and crawled in no particular direction, only the way that seemed to be the least troublesome and was downhill. For over an hour I went on like that, expecting to expire. On occasion I was mighty thirsty and stopped to suck on some funny shapes of ice left in places of shade.

  By and by I came to a series of stony outcrops. Beneath one of them yawned a dark cave that you could just about pull a wagon through. At the mouth was a little plateau of rock and a polished dark place of creosote where I supposed there had once burned many fires. I imagined the centuries of Indians who had been there. There was also a smooth bowl such as an ancient mortar wore into the rock. I have learned that these are sometimes called gossip stones. In it was pooled some murky water where frogs had been breeding.

  I crawled across the plateau to the cave and lay in front of the mouth. The sun had come out and the day was getting warm. A cool breeze blew from the entrance as from an air-conditioned department store. I hollered into it but my voice was small from the hanging. I do not know who it was I had expected to answer me. It gave back in a long echoing volley, as if the cave spiraled into that mountain all the way to the Far East where the Oriental people live and they were hollering back. I was too afraid to go too far inside. It was very dark and the air within smelled like damp carpet. I passed the day outside the cave and then the night. A mossy log was my pillow and I was hungry and mighty cold. I worried a bear or perhaps that lonely backwards mountain lion would return to the cave and have me for supper.

  The next day I endeavored to build a fire so that someone might see the smoke and so I could boil up some of that foul water. The problem was this: I did not have matches nor a lighter.

  I thought about what I did have. I felt the breast pocket of Terry’s coat. I still had my Bible and Mr. Waldrip’s glasses. I recalled Mr. Waldrip sitting out back on a hot day, reading something or another. The sunlight would catch his glasses and his book would start to smoke if he lingered on it for too long.

  To make a tedious sort of story short: with much trouble I managed over the course of the day to set a fire with Mr. Waldrip’s glasses and a few pages of Genesis for kindling. I know that some people will shake their heads at this bit of blasphemy, but I would only say to them that the rules history makes for us do not always hold up in practice. I mean to tell you I sure was pleased with myself that afternoon. I lay back before my fire and considered myself a worthy descendant to that cavewoman in the diorama at the Panhandle Plains Museum.

  That afternoon it looked like rain. I crawled around on my belly and gathered any dry firewood that turned up and piled it at the mouth of the cave. This took some time. Then I had some words with myself and got so brave I could have played chess with a rattlesnake. I used a stick from my fire for a torch and scooted my way inside the cave.

  The cave was dry and it was empty as far as I could tell, up to where my torch warded off the dark. The walls of it were smooth and the floor grew white crystals the size of rolling pins. I moved the pile of dry wood inside the cave just in time. The rain started coming down. When I lit the wood pile with my torch, the fire warmed the cave considerably and the smoke drew out into the storm. It rained the rest of that day.

  When the rain quit and night fell, every star there was came out. All was as still as death. I had not eaten anything since I had left the shelter the day before and I was very hungry. Then an awfully strange squeaking commenced in the cave. I must have known what it was all along. Bats. We do not get many bats in Clarendon and I had probably not seen but two in my life. I was mighty unnerved. But more than anything else I was hungry.

  I carried my torch deeper into the cave, banishing that immense dark. I looked up to a ceiling of sleeping bats. The research I have done tells me they are uninterestingly called big brown bats. They are not the eerie variety that drink blood and serve as the subjects of scary stories. But heavens, there must have been hundreds of them! It is a testament to my hunger that the sight of that horde inspired only one idea: thumping one on the head and taking it to the fire to cook for supper.

  Maybe you will not believe me, but I tell you now that is just what I did. I picked out a nice juicy plump one and pushed myself up onto one leg and balanced on the wall. I thumped that bat with a loose rock and dispatched it where it hung. It fell dead at my feet and suddenly the rest were screeching and swarming around me. I was knocked on my bottom as they flew from the cave.

  I skewered the one I had got on a sprig of pine and put it on the fire to scour. The leathery wings crisped and the body bloated and burst open. To my shame the poor creature turned out to be a pregnant female. It turns out that all of them were. I had stumbled on what I now know chiropterologists call a maternity colony.

  I ate all of the mama bat and her unborn offspring anyway, save the bones. I did feel sorry for it, but not too sorry to go without supper. I had a hard time of chewing it, being that I could only use my molars, having lost my dental bridge to the river. Bat does not taste terrible, I will allow. It tastes something like quail.

  I would spend near twelve days in that cave in total. To my mind it began to seem I had been there for months. Before too long I was able to hobble about upright. I had turned up a gnarled and hooked branch that I used for a walking stick. I clacked about the rock with it like a pitiful shepherd of bats and vermin, the pink shirt and glittery stockings all dark with filth. My hair was tangled and crazy. I imagine I must have looked like a lunatic cave witch belonging to some period of time unkept by history.

  After dusk the bats would return to the cave and I would sneak up to one in its sleep and thump it with the end of my walking stick. Eventually the rest of them did not even wake during my culling and depredations. I became better at cooking them too. I used a flat piece of limestone that I could place over the fire, rather than scorching them on a stick. For a drink I boiled the water in the pool outside the cave by heating up stones and dropping them in. I have since been told this is a technique go
ing back to the first days of man. I ended up accidentally boiling many a tadpole that way and I ate them too.

  I do not recall thinking much about anything at all during my time in the cave. It was as if I had become an involuntary function, much like how I understand a lung to work, or the heart. I had made up my mind to survive, but I do not recall arriving at the decision. I went on about my desperate business like I had been consuming bats and boiling spoiled water with stones all of my life. Being mighty weak, I spent a good many hours of the day with my back to the cave wall, watching the sun slide across the rocks.

  One night, about a week into my stay at the cave, I woke to a pained cry such as that of a child or a deranged bird. I stood with my walking stick and looked out from the cave to the dark woods. The night was still and the fog glowed. After a spell, the cry came again, louder. I am familiar with the high-pitched bellering of weaning calves. I recall the cry a little Gelbvieh calf made when it could not move for a nasty protuberance on the side of its head, and Joe Flud had to mercifully euthanize it with the .22 caliber wheel gun he carried in his boot. There was a like fear and sadness in the cry growing out in the woods.

  I tightened my grip on my walking stick. Out of the dark there came this little kid mountain goat, the color of caliche, not much bigger than a tomcat. Its little knees buckled and it settled to the rock and whistled at me. A creditable zoologist has recently informed me that mountain goats are the only extant species of their genus and are not authentically goats. They are more closely related to antelopes and make bird calls when they are young. I was hesitant but I took a step closer to it. It was a pitiful and sweet little thing, I dare even the hardest heart to say otherwise. My dear, was it precious! It lay still and did not move when I was upon it.

  Hello there, I said to it. What is all this crying about?

  It was transfixed by the fire. Its tiny body worked like a pair of bellows with each little breath it took. I sat close and reached over slowly and touched its fur. It did not shy away, nor did it appear injured in any way that I could tell. It could not have been more than a couple days old. My guess was that it had lost its mother before it had learned how to get along without her. The same thing had happened to one of Mr. Waldrip’s cowboys and this left him a bad-mannered and ill-tempered young man with an awful malice for all brown-haired women. He later found his way to a penitentiary in Illinois for punching to death a bank teller who would not marry him.