Kingdomtide

by Rye Curtis

  His mother was apparently one of these restless women who saw no need for a husband and was, as he put it, always searching for affection from strangers. He said she would keep the local bars until they shut and she never spent a night at home if she could help it. To hear him tell it she was a pretty good narcissist. When she showed him any motherly care at all, he said, it was on account of she was seeing him as an extension of herself at the time. But being that they had often lived out in the country, he had passed much of his leisure time outdoors and had liked to go off on his own and hunt or fish. He turned out a very able outdoorsman.

  He also told me a pitiful story that no doubt many of my readers will find relevant. I do not include it here to suggest anything about his character in particular, save that he told it to me and I felt sorry for him. Along sometime in his boyhood years he lived across the street from a pretty young girl who had immigrated from Bulgaria. She was in the class ahead of him and he would see her in the halls of their schoolhouse. Well, one day after school this girl approached him and invited him to a county fair. They went together and he bought her some ice cream. It was there that she took him aside and held her mouth an inch from his and taunted him something terrible about how she knew he wanted to kiss her. She called him a little pussy boy and said to him that she would never kiss him, not in a million years. He said that all he was able to do was to smell the sugar on her breath and be satisfied best he could with that.

  I suppose people tell stories partly because we can tell them over and over again. You can get mighty familiar with a story and know it inside and out, front to back. But while a story has something of the true world to it, mostly it does not. You can get a handle on a story. I hold that much of what confounds young people today is that they can seldom discern the difference between a narrative and the actual events of the natural world. However if you pay close enough attention before long in your years you come to learn that there is no retelling a life and it is by your own secret hand that you are the author of your own demise. In life, no choice is made without it comes to an irrevocable end.

  I believe the date of the fire was November 5th. The weather was mighty fine and the sun was out and I spent the day by the creek. A fall chill was in the air but there was plenty of sun to keep it off. I sat on my favorite rock and plaited reeds for no particular purpose while the man checked his traps and deadfalls he had set on the other side of the creek. He was sidewinding away down the gulch until he appeared to be no more than another little old shrub or stone on the floodplain. He had said he was getting us ready for the winter. By and large it was much the same as any other day out there. When he came back he was toting a mangled badger by the tail. The poor animal was old and drooling blood from a withered gray snout. I pulled some cattails to stew with it.

  That night the sun set earlier than it had yet out there and I recall remarking that fall was sure deep upon us now. The man cleaned the badger outside the hut by the light of the pine-knot lantern and I built up the fire in the stove and listened to the poor creature’s innards falling and sticking in the grass. I peeked out from behind the old sheet we used for a door as he worked the animal with the spey blade. A gust kicked up and filled his long hair and blue coat such that he looked like a man from an older time, out of an age past when the wind blew from uncharted territories and languages had fewer words.

  He brought in the cleaned badger and set about cutting it up. He said: Do you know what I was just thinking about out there?

  No, I said. What was it? I had not wanted to seem too eager, but it was unusual for him to offer any conversation.

  I was thinking it’d be great if I could change my appearance whenever I wanted. I could be somebody else. I could have a different life every day. One day I’d turn into a beautiful woman and head out in the big city and see what that was like. Or another day I’d turn into just a regular guy in high school and go to a school dance. Or I’d be a child and go see a movie and meet some people there. Another day I could be a white man with green eyes on the beach, another I could be a black woman with brown eyes. Could be anything.

  I had some questions. Would only your appearance change? I asked him. Would you change? Would you be obliged to act differently, being that I suppose you would not truly be any of these people?

  Once you look a certain way, he said, you don’t have to act too much to be what everybody else tells you you already are.

  I asked him why he wanted this shape-shifting ability.

  He quit cutting up the badger. He got a scrap of cloth and wiped the blood from his hands and said: Some people’re granted access to experiences others aren’t. I want to experience as many of them as I can. And I kind of always just thought that whatever I was, I was too many things for anybody to accept that they could all belong in one person. Do you know what I mean? For example, I knew a man back home who said sometimes he felt like he was a woman. Most people just want you to be one thing and won’t allow you to be anything else. I guess it’s easier that way for them.

  We had our supper and went to sleep. In the night the wind came up again and blew in cold through the chinks in the hut and woke me. The man slept curled up on his pallet. I tucked Erasmus’s fur around my neck and turned to the stove and built up the fire. I warmed myself, listening to the wind, and soon I was back asleep.

  I woke up again in the night, this time not for the cold but for the intense heat. Gracious, it was like the Texas sun on my face. I opened my eyes and above me churned an immense vortex of smoke and flame!

  Fire! I mean to tell you I could not see a thing past it. I coughed like a steam engine and covered my face with my hands. I endeavored to holler out for my friend but all I could manage to do was cough.

  I heard him hollering my name over the noise of the conflagration. Mrs. Waldrip! Mrs. Waldrip!

  I spun about and looked for him in the chaos. My dear, I could not see him!

  Suddenly he burst from the fire, swaddled in flame and smoking like some birth of damnation, hollering out in pain. He rolled me in Terry’s coat and a blanket and swept me up in his arms, then he carried me out like a child. Cool air was on my face and the wind blew away the heat.

  With my eyes closed I lay on my back in the grass. I had a tough time catching my breath.

  There was a thud. I opened my eyes, still coughing something terrible. The hut was swallowed up in an enormous fire and great licks of flame jumped all around it like the mad worship of the Pentecostal. The white pine, also ablaze, burned amid the dark like a great bright hand of fire, at once so terrifically beautiful and awful it was like it were the authentic hand of God. I suppose that is the fantasy of a guilty mind. I worry that if I had not put more wood in the stove that night, the conflagration might not have caught and some things might be different now. However I have come to understand that a mighty good deal of life is learning how to abstract guilt to some other notion that will not bother you so much you cannot go on.

  I put my hands over my body. Miraculously I seemed to be unhurt. I looked for my friend. He was on his back next to me. His face was black and bunched up in a terrible grimace like an old plum. His clothes smoked and a leg of his blue jeans had burned away and lines of embers yet chased the cloth. This exposed the burnt-black flesh below his knee, which brought to mind the way Mr. Waldrip used to enjoy his bacon.

  I jumped up and put out the embers on him with my hands.

  He groaned. His eyes were still shut when he asked if I was all right.

  I told him that I was fine and asked how he felt.

  Not so good, he said.

  Your leg is badly burned.

  That’s what it feels like.

  I told him that I would return. He only grunted. I hurried to the creek and felt around in the dark for the old plastic bucket we kept there. When I found it I filled it up and brought it back to him and I poured the water out over his legs and then his face and washed away the soot. He moaned again and then he was unconscious. I p
ut my head to his chest and listened to his breathing and the slow pump of his heart. I lay awake like that the rest of the night until sunrise, listening to him breathe, and was kept warm by the hut and the white pine burning all around me, hot as the hinges of hell.

  The fire burned on into morning. I remember well the paling of it as the sun rose over the mountains and touched the gray ash and the column of smoke. The five-fingered white pine reached up, black and smoking and cracked with veins of dying fire like a piece leftover of a storybook giant’s cremains. The grass was dewed that morning and it was mighty cold, and I huddled up with the man close as I dared to the dwindling fire. Both of us were white with ash like a pair of spirits. I kept a finger on his pulse.

  When he finally regained consciousness he sat up to look at his leg. It was a gruesome mess. The flesh was bubbled up with welts and sores and crystalline polyps and it glittered and glowed such as a kind of rare rock formation I had seen with Mr. Waldrip at the Panhandle Plains Museum. The man shook his head and lay back in the grass.

  I asked how he was feeling and he said that he would be all right.

  I recalled that Grandma Blackmore used to make a poultice of dryweed and mallow root when Davy would scrape up his knees. I told the man that I would go into the woods and find some to make my own.

  You’ll just get lost, and then where would we be? After all this. No, I’ll just take some water, please.

  I went to the creek and filled the bucket again and brought it back. He grabbed ahold of it and I helped him drink.

  I told him that he had saved me again. He said nothing.

  Well, not to worry, I said. I am going to get you fixed up.

  I went to the smoldering heap under the pine, where there remained only heat and scarcely any flames, and I turned up a stick and skimmed through the ash with it where I assumed his pallet had been. The ash blew up in my face. Finally I turned up what I was looking for and kicked the knife from the fire. The fine oak handle had burned away and the blade and ornamented scabbard were all that was left. Once the blade had cooled enough I used it to cut away the man’s blue jeans. His was the first male sex organ to which I had been exposed since I had seen those of Mr. Waldrip and the vulgar homeless man who hides in the crates by the grocery store. At the time I did not think much on it, but I suppose it is only fitting that I should have seen my friend naked being that he had seen me in my birthday suit too. I covered him with the blanket we had saved from the fire.

  The rest of that day I spent giving him drinks of water and watching what was left of the pine burn down. When it had, I set about tossing on any wood I could find to keep the fire going for nightfall.

  The grim figure of a small man strolled bandylegged on the side of the road. Lewis’s headlights reached him in the falling murk and she saw that it was Pete. The video camera hung from his neck and he was capped still with the bloodstained coif. He waved his arms. Lewis pulled the Wagoneer over to the shoulder of asphalt at the overlook where he had stopped. She cranked down her window. Coin-operated viewers leaned bent and vandalized with crude symbols and female nudity beyond a shot-up wooden sign which hardly yet read US Forest Service Black Grass Vista. The mountain range blazed red in sundown.

  Evenin, Ranger Lewis. I was lookin for you.

  What is it, Pete?

  Officer Bloor leavin this mornin got me to thinkin. I’ve decided I’ll be goin back home end of the week.

  Had enough?

  Heart’s on the mend and I reckon it’s just about time to get back to normal.

  Best of luck.

  Thank you, Ranger Lewis.

  She looked at the man, waiting. There anything else? I’m supposed to be pickin up some cigarettes for Jill before the Penguin closes.

  I just wanted to give you somethin. Now, I’ll be honest with you, at first I thought about turnin this over to the authorities, or to Officer Bloor. I weren’t sure if it were rightful or not. Koojee.

  Don’t use that goddamn word, Pete. It’s not a real word.

  It’s not?

  Goddamn it, Pete, it’s been a long day.

  Pete brought out from the back of his belt a video cassette. That night we were out in that shelter I got spooked, so I was up takin pictures, waitin for Claudey’s one-eyed sex ghost to show her face. But this camera seems to harbor a mind of its own. Pete held out the cassette to the open window.

  Lewis turned the engine off and took the cassette. She held it and turned it over. What d’you mean?

  You and Jill cuddlin together in that bottom bunk.

  I don’t know what you’re talkin about.

  I got it on tape. It looked like you guys have somethin more between you than what an average fella’s likely to notice. Couldn’t see much on the tape cause it was dark, but I got enough. I got you givin her a kiss while she was sleepin.

  Lewis looked hard at the small man. What in the hell’re you suggestin?

  Pete shook his head. I’ve been workin real hard to be honest with my heart up here. It’s the reason I came up to stay with old Claudey, even if he’s popped his noodle a bit. You got to work on yourself and find out who you are to know what you want, or else you’re liable to end up a real scary example of yourself and do somethin bad to yourself or somebody else just happens to be there. Ain’t no need to pretend to be somebody else with me, Ranger Lewis. I ain’t no judge.

  Lewis grabbed the thermos from the passenger’s seat and drank. Goddamn it, what do you want from me, you goddamn goofball?

  Don’t get me wrong, Ranger Lewis, Pete said. I don’t want nothin. Didn’t get any footage of any special rare sex ghost or anythin like that while I been up here but I got this, and it sure seems rare enough. And like I said, I didn’t know what to make of it at first. You both bein female and bein she’s only seventeen and a subordinate in your volunteer program.

  She’s eighteen.

  Ain’t she just turned it yesterday?

  Yes.

  Still there’s got to be a kind of power imbalance there. Anyway, then I watched the tape over a few more times and I got to thinkin you guys didn’t look all that bad. Like it weren’t wrong you were touchin her and you were both female and she was young and in your care. And there’s always some power thing, ain’t there? Don’t matter who it is. Don’t matter when it is. Don’t matter how old anybody is. Somebody’s got the upper hand.

  I’ve never had the upper hand, Lewis said.

  Point is, this sure didn’t look like somethin bad was goin on, or somethin without heart. Hell, if you got some pictures of the way me and my wife used to look together you’d say better stone those two dead fore there’s another second shared between them, fore they ail the rest of us with their ignorance of love. Watchin you guys in the station today, I can tell you got her best interest at heart. So what I’m tryin to say is thank you, Ranger Lewis. Thank you for showin me somethin real nice.

  Lewis looked down at the cassette and turned it over again. She shook it. Did you show this to Claude?

  No, ma’am.

  Tell him about it? Tell anybody about it?

  No, ma’am, I reckoned it weren’t my place.

  She looked at Pete through the open window. He hunched with his hands in his coat pockets. Lewis shook her head. Leave it to a goddamn man to think he’s surrounded by lesbians.

  Pete smiled and put a hand to his pigeon chest. I sure do appreciate you lettin me in the volunteer program, Ranger Lewis. It’s been a few months of the best therapy a man like me could ask for. Turns out I’m sexually frustrated and I hate women. That’s only cause I don’t have any real respect for myself, but I’d like to think there’s hope for me yet. I know I’m a strange bird, but I’m pretty sure I ain’t a bad one.

  No, you’re not a bad one, Pete.

  Their headlights lit up the rotted wood sign at the trailhead: Egyptian Point. Lewis put the Wagoneer into park and stopped the engine. She cut off the headlights and all was dark. From the passenger’s seat Jill’s smoke scattere
d blue under the moon. The girl opened the door and climbed out and took with her a bottle of merlot from the backseat.

  They made the trail to Egyptian Point. Lewis passed uneven before them a flashlight and spat to the wayside. They came to the clearing and there was no fire in the pit. There was no wind and it was quiet. All they could see was the moon above and the outlines of tall figures made of candle wax and merlot bottles with long wrists of electrical wire and soup bowls for breasts. One of the figures wore an old campaign hat Lewis recognized and the other held a karaoke microphone plugged into its rectum.

  Goddamn it, Maggie.

  Jill sat on one of the logs angled around the pit. She smoked another cigarette and held the bottle of merlot between her small knees and uncorked it with a corkscrew she had brought from the Wagoneer. Lewis dragged to the center of the pit some cordwood from a nearby stack. She took a squeeze bottle of lighter fluid from her coat pocket and doused the logs. She dropped a match in them and caught her trouser leg on fire and stamped it out in the dirt. Firelight fell about and lit the scarred face of the girl where she sat, watching.

  Lewis sat next to her and took the bottle of merlot. She drank and said, I’m goddamn sorry.

  Why?

  I expect your dad leavin this mornin was difficult.

  Jill took back the bottle and drank. No relationship is a citadel. They’re all tents.

  Lewis studied the girl. Goddamn it, your dad really has you figured all wrong.

  Together they drank off the bottle of merlot and Lewis drank what was left in the thermos. She took from a coat pocket the cassette Pete had given her. She shook it once and tossed it on the fire.