Kingdomtide

by Rye Curtis

  I thought you’d gone home, said the masked man. He was thinner than when I had left him a fortnight ago and his clothes were more ragged. He had on a different mask cut from a button shirt pictured with colorful Easter eggs. I am sure I was just an awful sight to behold, wild and filthy in dried blood and dirt like I was, outfitted in those silly stockings and that pink short top like a horrific and aberrant youth. Worse yet I had been relieving myself by the mouth of the cave where I could lean and the mess had piled up into an awful black cone about the size of a plump toddler. Vermin had tunneled through it and slept inside. It is a funny thing that I was not more embarrassed by the state I was in. I simply stood there boldly relying on my walking stick and shook my head.

  He asked me what had happened and I told him that I had gotten lost and injured my ankle and had been eating bats.

  How bad is it? he said.

  They do not taste terribly different to quail.

  I meant how bad is your ankle.

  It is mending now, thank you, I said.

  Those people didn’t come this way?

  I shook my head again and asked how he had found me.

  I wasn’t looking for you, he said. I was coming back because I’d left something at the shelter. Then I saw the smoke. I was afraid it’d be you.

  What did you leave at the shelter?

  Nothing.

  Did you get it?

  He told me that he had and then he said that he was afraid he would have to leave me there. He wanted to help me, he said, but nothing had changed and he still could not take me any further. He said he could leave me some jerky to see me through and told me that if I continued on east I would come to the trail that would take me to the road.

  How far is the road?

  You could probably make it in a few days, he said. Where’s your bag?

  I told him that I had lost it. Where will you go? I asked.

  Where will I go?

  I nodded.

  Better you not know that.

  Will you go back to the shelter?

  No, ma’am, he said. Can’t.

  May I accompany you? Heavens, I asked him this before I had thought much about what it meant!

  He said nothing for a moment and then: Don’t you want to go home?

  I told him I did not want to be alone.

  He thought about this some and knocked sickled figures of mud from the heel of his boot. I’m sorry, he said.

  Please, I said. I do not know what I would do anymore, even if I were to make it home.

  He went silent again for a spell looking at me. Wind flapped in his mask. They won’t find you, he said at last. If you come with me they’ll never find you.

  That is just fine, said I.

  He cocked his head and righted it again. He said nothing else about it and set about building up the fire and boiling hardtack in a small iron skillet which hung from the duffel he bore on his back. We suppered as the sun went down and it was not long before I fell asleep sitting up against the cave wall, watching the flames put the masked man’s rambling shadow to the stone like I were witness to the origins of mankind. I knew then that he did not want to be alone any more than I did.

  The next morning he was up dousing the fire I had kept going for more than a week. If you’re really coming, he said, come on.

  I followed him with my walking stick into the woods. We walked for a day and come dark made camp in a dry sandy draw beneath a spruce chewed up with terrible little red snickering beetles. For supper we boiled up some more hardtack and furry jerky and slivers of a slow gray squirrel that he had stamped to death on the way. We slept. We set out again in the morning, exchanging not word one.

  We pulled on that way over the course of the day and then we reached a shallow gulch upon nightfall. A skinny cold creek ran through it, silver under the moon. White pine grew bare and twisted here and there but most common was mountain grass and flows of scree.

  The masked man was stopped before the gulch. He indicated a place with his glove. A particularly large and devilish pine had grown into five bone-white digits like an enormous skeletal hand. A lean-to hut as long as a school bus, partly hidden from view, was nestled against the palm of it. The hut was made up of branches held together by yellow rope and strips of many-colored fabrics and it looked sturdy enough. For a door cover it had what I took for a child’s bed linen, being that it was printed with the repeat likenesses of a muscled character I had seen before on cereal boxes in the grocery store.

  The masked man led me down a little path to the hut. He pulled back the sheet. Inside it was as dark as the inside of a cow and he set about lighting a fire in a little stove that had once been a bulk can of pitted olives. He also lit a kind of lantern he had made with a pine knot set in the broken skull of some toothy critter. Then I could see the place. At one end was a pallet of twigs and cloth where I assumed he had been sleeping. All kinds of clothes were piled in a corner near the pallet and a funny Swedish kind of hat hung from a sprig off the pine. Letters which spelled out the word Russia were carved into one of the load-bearing rafters. The hut looked like it had been lived in for a spell.

  He moved the clothes to the opposite corner of the hut and in the space left he rolled out a blanket printed with illustrations of a maniacal dolphin. You can take my bed for tonight, he said. I’ll make you one tomorrow.

  I told him I was perfectly comfortable on the ground, which was not just me being polite. By that time I was mighty used to it. Still he insisted. I thanked him.

  We ate more jerky he produced from a folded sweater. He was always a dear to remember that I did not have all my teeth, and he generally boiled everything until it was soft. It was very delicious. After all, I had been eating bat for weeks. He also cooked up wild tubers and berries for better nutrition. I was very tired and I fell asleep as soon as I had eaten. I do not even recall shutting my eyes.

  He was gone when I woke in the morning, but a fire was burning in the stove and a pot of meat was simmering for breakfast. I B BAK was spelled out on the ground in small rocks. I spent the day patrolling the creek with my walking stick and peering into the shallows for a slow fish I could thump. Fish were easy for me to eat, but I never did catch one.

  That evening I was relieving myself against a rock face some good ways down the creek when the man showed up around the bend with his tackle box and fishing rod and a line of three trout. He was not wearing his mask. My goodness, we startled each other! He dropped the trout in the dirt and hid his face before I could clearly see it. I endeavored to cover myself up without making a mess.

  I’m sorry, he said, his back to me, tying the shirt around his head.

  I put my clothing, such as it was, back together and stood up. You cannot come and go as you please like that, I snapped. I never know where you are!

  He apologized again.

  I accepted his apology and told him that I was sorry I had snapped at him.

  I cooked the trout on the stove with some wild onions he had found growing in the woods above the gulch. At the time it was the best thing I had ever smelled. The man sat in the corner of the hut and watched me from behind his mask. I was wrapped in a blanket he had given me. The weather had turned cold once the sun had gone and outside the wind sang unknowable songs in that big old strange-fingered pine.

  We ate our supper in silence. The inside of the hut was poorly lit, but the stove and the pine-knot lantern put out enough light to feed our shadows. Once we had finished and I had set aside the piece of shale I had been using for a plate the man looked at me again. His lively green eyes were balanced in the holes of his mask and his mouth twitched under it. He got up and went to the far corner of the hut and retrieved a big green glass bottle from behind the stack of firewood there. He held it up and gently shook it at me.

  What is it? I asked.

  Dutch courage, he said. I went back for it at the shelter. Not many pleasures out here. The ones we have start to get pretty valuable.

  I told
him that I seldom imbibed. Clarendon is in a dry county and Mr. Waldrip had been a teetotaler. As I recall I had only ever had a real drink of alcohol on Christmas Eve in 1969. Mr. Waldrip and I had driven out to spend Christmas with my niece, Mary, and her husband, Jacob, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I drank a glass of champagne, said something inappropriate about their cat, and went to bed.

  The man unscrewed the cap and folded up the bottom of his mask just under his nose, to where the short bushy beard on his chin showed, and he took a swallow from the bottle. I could not tell you if he liked it or not, but he took a measured rest like a man playing a trumpet in a concert band and had another gulp.

  I had the notion that I might as well drink, considering my situation. I put my hand out for the bottle. He got up and brought it to me. I took it and drank. The alcohol burned my throat and I coughed. Drinking gin out of the bottle is a thing I imagine you must practice a good deal before there is any grace to be found in it.

  He brought me some water in the goat horn. I drank it and then I swallowed from the bottle again and coughed again. It was not long before I was good and well in my cups. I dabbed my face with Erasmus’s fur. The man sat crosslegged by me near the stove and we shared the bottle between us and listened to the wind like a regular couple of cowpokes on the drive.

  Struggling to keep the giddiness from my voice, I told him that I did not know how to thank him for everything he had done for me.

  That’s all right, he said, and he swallowed some more.

  I took the bottle back from him and had another gulp and coughed and my ears got hot. Then I asked him why he lived out there in that desperate way.

  Long story, he said.

  I have the time, said I.

  He said nothing to that.

  What about your parents? I asked.

  What about them?

  Do you visit them?

  No.

  They must miss you.

  They don’t.

  Sure, they must.

  You don’t know what you’re talking about.

  I do. You are a big-hearted angel. I surely would have been long gone had you not been kind enough to look after me.

  He got the bottle back from me and drank. He looked at the fire in the stove and breathed through his nose, drinking all the while. He yanked the bottle off his lips with a great smack. I watched your plane go down, he said. I was setting traps in the valley and I saw it come over the mountain. Saw it hit before I heard it. Didn’t think anybody could’ve survived. I stayed out there for two nights to see if a rescue effort would come. When nobody did I thought I’d get up there fast and salvage some supplies from the wreck before anybody’d show up. Thought maybe I could get a radio. I kept my distance and watched the mountain with my binoculars. I hiked up in the morning a few days after it crashed and I nearly made it there before nightfall but I saw your fire on the way. Then that storm came and I saw you.

  I saw you too, I said. In the trees.

  He said he knew that I had, and he said that he had waited out the storm and followed me down to the creek the next morning and had heard me praying. He said that it was then he had realized why I had left the little airplane. The fire I had seen in the valley was his.

  So it’s kind of my fault you’re still out here, he said. I’d tried not to have a fire in the wide open like that at all in case a rescue effort was coming. But it’d rained and I was too cold in the morning. I thought I was going to get sick if I didn’t warm up.

  I asked: Why do you not want anyone to know you are out here?

  Nobody’s supposed to be out here, he said.

  You could have left me and continued on up to the airplane, I said.

  I felt responsible.

  Your parents reared you right. You are a decent man.

  Decency, he said. Yeah, that’ll be it.

  I watched him drink by the light of the stove for a minute or two and then I asked him again the question that yet played on my mind: Why do you not want anyone to know you are out here?

  I’d rather not talk anymore about it, he said.

  Just fine, I said. But if you do not want to be found, what use could you have for a radio?

  The man had another big swallow. It gets really lonely out here. Sometimes I think it’s not worth it. At least maybe if I had a radio I could maybe hear another voice sometime if I found a signal.

  You never got your radio.

  No. Got you, though.

  I smiled and from what I could see uncovered of his face he smiled too. Emboldened by the drink I sat up and reached with both hands for his mask.

  He pulled away and grabbed ahold of my wrists. What’re you doing?

  I would like to see your face, I said.

  That’s not a good idea.

  Are you an outlaw?

  The man only looked at me.

  I am not going anywhere, I said, and you cannot wear that silly thing all of the time. That would be mighty uncomfortable and very likely unhealthy.

  Still he held my wrists. You might not need any more of that booze, he said.

  He sure might have been right about that. I was dizzy and warm. I said: Show me your face, young man.

  He smiled again. I imagine he was amused by what a sotted old loon I was. He had a good smile and I will not easily forget it. He got up from the fire and gave me the bottle. He looked down at me for a moment. Then he reached up and pulled the mask off his head and dropped it to the ground.

  At long last I was gazing upon the bare face of this young man. It was a very handsome countenance, not much more than twenty-eight years on this earth, as I would learn, but one of those faces that would seem young no matter what age it truly was. By the light of the pine knot burning in the critter’s skull it was apparent that it was a face used to terrible worry and concern.

  He sat again and rubbed his eyes.

  Now does that feel better? I said.

  He admitted that it did.

  You remind me of a handsome young man I knew when I was a young woman, I told him.

  What was he like?

  His name was Garland. He was handsome and he was decent like you and he thought fondly of me.

  The man drank and gave me the bottle. It’s good I look like somebody else.

  To my eye you do look a good deal like him. I swallowed from the bottle and this time I did not cough. Please tell me why you are out here, I said.

  The man shook his head. I’m somebody nobody wants to be around.

  That is nonsense.

  He did not take his eyes from the fire in the stove. The wind billowed in the tarpaulin pinned to the thatched roof. You’ve seen how people are, he said. Nobody’s ever welcome. Nobody’d know what to do if they were.

  He got up and took the bottle from me and went to his pallet. He had put together a pallet for me of pine needles and grass and bedsheets. I sat on the end of it and looked at him across the hut. We were not ten feet apart. He lay there for some time. His eyes were glistening.

  I asked him for his name.

  I can’t give it, he said.

  What should I call you?

  After some hesitation he said, Just go ahead and call me Garland if you want.

  I suppose that will have to do, I said.

  He turned on his side and put his palms together under his head. Then he rolled over the other way so his back was to me and told me to snuff out the lantern when I was ready to sleep.

  I had hard work falling asleep. It had begun to rain and I lay on my pallet listening to it on the tarpaulin. The man was asleep on his back, wrapped up in those funny blankets. The stovelight flickered over his handsome face. He had such kind features. For me it was a face cobbled together from memories of handsome young men I had known, all of them long gone now, for men usually live shorter lives than women. In Hedley, not fifteen miles down the road from Clarendon, there is a Baptist church attended entirely by old widows.

  I sat up on my pallet and wrapped myself in my blank
et. As far as I can recall, this is the way it went: I climbed from my pallet as quietly as I could manage and knelt down by him. I leaned over him and put my face real close to his and sure enough I kissed that young man where he lay in his slumber. Lightly there on his bottom lip. I cannot put to reasonable language what it was that came over me, but I suspect it was of the drink and of my growing affection for him. I would imagine that many of the women from First Methodist will denounce me in each other’s company for much of what I have put down in this account. But when they are alone with their thoughts I hope they will know what I have become and see it on some horizon within themselves as well before it is too late.

  The young man stirred but did not wake and I crawled back to my pallet and went straight to sleep. I did not dream that night out in the Bitterroot, but last night a hailstorm filled the streets with ice here in Brattleboro, Vermont, and I dreamt warm in my bed at River Bend Assisted Living. I dreamt that eons after civilization as we know it had come to a disappointing end there appeared a new race of people. I dreamt that they discovered our ruins and were confounded. I dreamt that they genetically reanimated us from fossilized prophylactics excavated from the gutters of our grandest metropolises, and put us in houses and cabins and huts and studied us to find out what it was that we were all endeavoring to do to one another. I dreamt that I had always been one of these test subjects and had only helped to confound them all the more.

  VII

  They sat in a booth at a diner down the mountain. Jill had a soda and Lewis drank coffee and merlot and they ate hamburgers and watched from a window rain darken a leathery mendicant who waved roadside a sign of cardboard they could not read for the wording had bled. After they had eaten, Lewis had the gaptoothed waitress bring out a piece of apple pie with a candle afire in it and the waitress and a chinless cook sang. Lewis mumbled the song with them and refilled her mug from a thermos of merlot under the table. Jill blew out the candle.