Ruthie Fear

by Ruthie Fear (retail) (epub)

  By the time Ruthie passed the checker, the stadium was full. She and the cowboy found a seat in the upper row and squeezed together beside a fat man with suspenders reefed down the center of his bulging breasts, neatly dividing each in two. He grinned at them from the midst of his crumpled face, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “Here we go,” he said, and turned back to the ring. He hunched forward, gripping a betting ticket and staring at the trodden dirt as if water might spring forth from the dust. Ruthie felt the tension roll off her cowboy in the way his knuckle brushed her thigh, and how his shoulders perked when a man walked by with a tall, sweating can of beer. She admired his simplicity: love of beer and hatred of lines. A slow, determined crawl across the ice, free of the dark, slipping desires that plagued her, and the ghosts that haunted her memory.

  A small electrical storm crossed the Red Rock Canyon mountains. Its dark clouds were lit from within by a brimstone light, as if dragons might be waiting in the wings. Ruthie pictured these celestial leviathans diving between tridents of lightning. Impossibility always near, even as she approached twenty-one. She felt her dress sliding up from her knee in the heat. She felt her cowboy watching her. She wondered if they might spend years together without uttering another word. If they might never lie. She brought her eyes back down to the stadium, confused by the limits of weather and time: apocalyptic in one place, perfectly calm and warm here just across the valley, perhaps blizzarding at that very moment in the depths of No-Medicine Canyon, where her creature waited.

  Three women on horseback held flags aloft as they galloped in a circuit around the ring. The rodeo clowns stood at ersatz attention in the center, their painted faces thrown back, bloated white-gloved hands over their hearts. The national anthem played tinnily from loudspeakers mounted all around. The cowboy tipped his bare head to hers. He was balding in the doleful shape of a horseshoe. “Might go and find us a beer,” he whispered, and the spell was broken. He sounded like every other man.

  Ruthie nodded, envying the shortness of his memory. One line braved, on to the next. She remembered how her father had held two beers at once along with the end of her ponytail as she tried to bolt off at the Ravalli County Fair when she was a little girl. He’d looked very small watching the bus pull away from the station in Missoula, amid a crowd of vagrants, junkies, parents, and lovers. She kept her hands palm-down on her legs to hide her scars.

  The bull was holstered in the pen below the bleachers. After the cowboy had disappeared into the crowd atop the stadium steps, Ruthie watched its wide black shoulders ripple and bang against the boards. Confounded by the small space, verging with muscle, its hide taut, the entire body a pulsing, raging heart. The head was lowered forward, hooves dancing on the hot dust. The announcer spoke a name and the rider appeared on the rail. A young man, not much older than her. He paused for a moment, then lunged onto the bull’s back. A tremor ran through the crowd as he settled himself, shifted the saddle, and gripped the horn with his gloved hand.

  The bull stilled, knowing in some deep, half-remembered place that freedom was near. If only it let the rider sit, it’d soon be able to spray its sweat and violence in the wide-stamped ring while the crowd screamed its name. The rider coiled the lead rope around his palm: once, twice, three times, yanking it tight after each pull. Trying to battle and surrender to the bull at once. To become one with it, and tame it through this illusion. His shoulders jutted beneath his checkered shirt; his sharp, sparsely bearded chin poked from the shadow of his hat brim. Ruthie imagined his face to be shifty and cool, reptilian, with eyes that lingered a beat too long. The opposite of the wide blank docility of her cowboy’s. She wondered if it was a womanly pleasure the rider found astride the beast, all that power between his thighs. If it manned and unmanned him both in his quivering depths.

  He leaned back and nodded to the rodeo clown, then thrust his chest forward over the bull’s shoulders.

  The crowd went quiet. The rider tugged the lead rope and raised his left arm. He locked his eyes on a spot between the bull’s shoulders. The gate banged open. They flooded out. The crowd roared, pure hell unleashed. Hot dusty breath caught in Ruthie’s throat. The bull’s pent-up fury was of such stomping, bucking proportion that the rider’s grip lasted barely a second before he was discharged brutally headlong, and with a dancer’s pirouetting grace, as if it had held this, too, in abeyance, the bull lowered its head and caught him on its horn, ramming the dulled point into his gut, then tossing him forward and off and leaping after to bludgeon him with dancing hooves. All before the clowns were off the rail.

  His arcing flight and crashing fall astonished Ruthie. It seemed impossible the instant after it had occurred. Like peering through the fabric of what ought to be into the darkness of what is. She thought of her cowboy oblivious in the beer line, his head cocked, one knee skewed, fingering his belt buckle impatiently, longing for each tall, sweating can being carried by, wondering what calamity had sucked the sound from the night.

  The bull was corralled but the fallen rider didn’t move. The fat man beside Ruthie licked his lips and shook his head. He dropped his betting ticket to the pavement. His grin fell in on itself. “Hope that wasn’t your first ride, missy,” he said. “They don’t all end like that.”

  Ruthie stood up. She climbed the stairs and was gone from the ring before her cowboy returned.

  SHE WALKED OFF into the desert just as she’d imagined: alone with the dusty wind. Her bare feet carried her back toward the lights of the city, in the yellow dress with her boots in her hand. It never grew cold, even in the deepest hours of night. The temperature of the air and the temperature of her body seemed so perfectly aligned that she was no longer sure where her skin ended and the rest of the world began. The ground was dust and flat rocks, an unchanging expanse into which she dug her toes and felt herself sink, the slightest bit, with each step. Neither cacti nor thorns harried her way. Coyotes yipped in the distance and once she heard the hoot of an owl above the faded roar of the freeway.

  The city lights before her vanquished all but the brightest stars. The sky pulsed with bluish ribbons, faint traces of atmosphere. Ruthie’s thoughts were indistinct, her mind calm. She saw Nathan turning in slow motion as the bullets punched through the window. Badger glowering before the rusted eagle. The bull-rider floating eternally through the air. Suspended in amber before the fall. Every place the warm wind touched her skin awoke. She felt she was inhabiting her body in a new and secret way. She felt June Breed walking beside her, the June Breed of her youth, lips parted, back arched. Ruthie lifted her dress over her head and carried it also, trailing behind her in the dirt.

  The Red Rock Canyon mountains stood to the west. Much smaller than the Bitterroots or the Sapphires, but not lacking in majesty for the way they erupted like fists from the flat plate of the desert floor, smashing upward as though through porcelain, and remained there crumbled but unbroken, calling out to the sky. Ruthie felt their power. She imagined the storm all around her, trident lightning and brimstone depths, dragon wings rushing overhead. She walked with her chest out like the prow of a ship. She felt she was meeting her spirit here, in the dry depths of the outer world, a thousand miles from home.

  Grief ran through her. Nathan’s face filled her mind. It had taken him several minutes to die. In the end, they’d been two helpless children. She stopped. Tears fell down her cheeks. She’d finished high school as though nothing had happened, and now she didn’t know where to begin. She knelt in the dust. She placed her hands on the earth. She saw Dawn Gardipe, his mother, leaning against her daughters in the wind. She saw the teal trailer of her childhood and the creature lurching away into the darkness. Felt her father and the elk standing behind her. The city rose from the desert like a burning temple.

  18.

  The Bacchanal Buffet at Caesars Palace looked out on the Garden of the Gods pool complex. Ruthie sat alone in a gold-trimmed booth and watched women in white bikinis dive off the steps of the Temple of Dionysus. The buffe
t itself was half the length of a football field. Piles of spare ribs, tri-tip, oysters, char-grilled T-bone, and chilled crab legs turned to stations of tacos and sushi, dozens of plates of watermelon salad, and a chocolate fountain drizzling over lava cake. It was the most food Ruthie had ever seen. Diners shuffled dazedly past with mounded plates. Some were so fat they blocked Ruthie’s view entirely as they leaned forward to lance meat with long chrome serving forks.

  She’d come with her first paycheck from the cantina. Growing up hungry made her determined to try everything. She wanted to feel like Wiley King, or one of the residents of Angel’s Landing—rich—but instead she felt overwhelmed. Slightly nauseated, and nervous to leave the booth. Whenever she went out in the city, she saw herself as a less-elegant version of the women streaming around her. Clicking on heels out of taxicabs, laughing and screaming in bachelorette parties, on the arms of clean-shaven, suit-wearing men. Even the mothers wielding children up the escalators of luxury hotels seemed more in control, more present in their own lives.

  The waiter asked if she wanted all-you-can-drink wine. Ruthie shook her head, thinking of the many times she’d opened her refrigerator to find it empty save for a case of Busch Light.

  She washed her hands in the casino bathroom’s marble sink. When she came out, she took one of each entrée, one of every salad, and one of every small plate, and arranged them to fill her entire table. She called the waiter back and told him she did want wine. White, with an ice cube. She’d made nearly $900 in two weeks, tripling her life savings. She took one bite of everything in succession. Then she began to combine them: tri-tip sushi, oyster salad, taco topped with crab. She drank five glasses of chardonnay. She remained in the booth until the staff changed over between lunch and dinner. Then she stumbled out across the casino floor, feeling kinship with the tourists who’d squeezed their gigantic asses into rented mobility scooters and piloted them between slot machines, beeping furiously at anyone who stood in their way.

  Outside, traffic blew by in waves, as if escaping some unseen disaster. There were no animals in the city. Not even rats. Only the white tigers seventy feet tall pawing across billboards, and the crows that constantly circled overhead, somehow unnoticed by tourists and locals alike. They seemed to be the only ones who understood. Scavengers waiting to feed. Ruthie’s stomach hurt. She tried to walk off the discomfort, holding her midsection like she was pregnant. She pulled her hair up from her overheated neck and laughed at herself. The Strip felt endless. A parade of shouting men holding yard-long margaritas and women in crop tops with dangerously long lacquered nails.

  At the MGM Grand, Ruthie followed signs to the lion habitat and stood in the glass tunnel looking up at a lioness sprawled on the ceiling, her tawny legs splayed behind her, a huge beef bone gripped between her front paws. The entire enclosure was walled in glass. The lioness stared across at a fake tree. She seemed to be fantasizing about prey—a plump antelope or zebra appearing in the branches. A waterfall poured over fake rocks into a pond. In Ruthie’s bag was a small Desert Eagle handgun Rutherford had given her as a going-away present. She wanted to use it to shoot out the glass. Set the lions free to rampage over the blackjack tables, as she’d imagined Ebola lions rampaging through the valley years before.

  A little girl with long black hair pressed her palms against the glass and stared in at the lone male. Much larger than the females, he stared back at her, ignoring the rest of the tourists. His mane was a shade darker than the fur on his body. His posture was a mix of laziness and menace; his tail flicked over the pond. His eyes glinted keenly. In two powerful bounds, he was at the glass above the girl. The muscles in his shoulders rippled. The girl looked up awestruck. Ruthie felt a sudden painful nostalgia for this bond between beast and child. The lion opened his mouth and gnawed the curved surface above the girl’s head with his inch-long incisors, leaving a pale smear.

  “What does he want?” the girl asked. Her mother was crouched behind her snapping pictures.

  “He wants to eat you,” Ruthie said.

  The girl’s eyes widened. The mother turned, glaring. Ruthie laughed, and left the casino the way she’d come, past slot machines, their players digging coins out of plastic cups with nicotine-stained talons. Back in the blast furnace of the desert sun, Ruthie walked below a bronze lion ten times larger than those inside, mounted atop a concrete pedestal. She ran her hand over its paw.

  Blue glass edifices wavered in the heat around her. The streets were packed. The cars and people seemed to be orbiting some invisible eddy. Moving faster and faster as they spun into the darkness. Was this man-built chaos what would become of her valley? She pictured skyscrapers standing before the Bitterroot Mountains—Trapper Peak dwarfed in a series of shard-like roofs. The trailer on Red Sun Road lost between condos. Traffic jammed to a standstill. A dozen contrails slicing across the sky.

  19.

  The heat drew the strength from her and left her limp and exhausted in the bathtub of the run-down, off-Strip motel where she’d rented a room. The August sun seemed not to set but lurk just beyond the Red Rock Canyon mountains, exhaling its breath along the packed streets. Stifling, relentless, even at night. The air conditioner in her room panted weakly, hardly cooling the air above its vent. She knelt over it like a penitent. She lay naked on the bed. She showered three, four times a day, but the sweat never left her.

  Small trucks pulled billboards for strip clubs along the street below her window. Men asked if they could take her picture. She assumed this was how you ended up on the escort cards filling the gutters. She only lasted three months at the cantina, too humiliated by the red miniskirt and black bodice uniform to stand another shift. Too tired of twisting away from groping hands. It was even worse than the Montana Café. She’d wanted to escape the men of the valley, but found their mirrors here even more abhorrent.

  “Come home,” Pip said, on the phone.

  Ruthie didn’t answer. She was embarrassed to return to the valley. Another Bitterroot girl who’d failed in the wider world. She didn’t know what she’d tell her father or Terry or Badger. Pip described Badger’s wedding. How Father Mike had managed to fit both the glory of Badger’s football career and the rapid approach of Judgment Day into the vows. How the bridesmaids had dressed as cheerleaders and the groomsmen wore varsity jackets over their suits. “Len wasn’t invited but he parked outside so he could watch all the girls in their dresses,” Pip finished. “I can’t believe you made me go on my own.”

  “Thank God I was a thousand miles away,” Ruthie said, unable to hide the loneliness in her voice. “Remember when we tried to kill Len with our eyes?”

  Pip laughed. “I’m still trying.” She paused. “Your dad doesn’t look so good. He’s drinking too much and not eating enough. I hardly ever see him in the diner.”

  Sudden shame rushed through Ruthie. She’d meant to send money home. She felt a pull at her heart.

  “I don’t have anyone to talk to,” Pip said. “Who am I supposed to tell about the idiot tourists who come into Whipple’s looking for bear spray?”

  Ruthie missed her friend. She missed her father. She missed the mountains, the trees, and the sound of the river. She even missed Badger and his helpless need. She wondered if Kent Willis had been right about every wild conspiracy. The leering drunks swinging wildly at one another in the street suggested that beneath the surface all men were crazed by greed and lust. Desperate pillagers in a land with little left to take.

  The burger joints on the strip were full of tourists and the burger joints off the strip were full of people who frightened her. Emaciated in a different way than the junkies and drifters of Montana. Quieter, more snakelike. They ate slowly and watched her, as if sensing that her desperation would soon match theirs. In the overlit neon restaurants, she had moments of PTSD from the gas station. Expecting bullets to punch through the windows, the glass bottles above the bar to lacerate her as shrapnel. She began bringing convenience store food back to her motel room. Unwra
pping the plastic from white-bread sandwiches, spreading mayonnaise from small squeeze-packets, pouring out little bags of chips. Eating off the air conditioner. Praying for snow. She struggled to recall the shocking, strong grip of the butterfly’s feet.

  Terry called and she learned that her father had been in a fight. “He doesn’t pick up when I call,” she said.

  “Probably he’s embarrassed,” Terry said. “He was out cold in the street by the Sawmill when I found him. Doesn’t even know who hit him.”

  “Is he all right?”

  She could hear Terry shrugging through the phone.

  Worry plagued her during job interviews in the backrooms of restaurants. The polo-shirted managers stared at her while she fumbled for words. “Your résumé,” they’d say.

  Dad, she’d think.

  She sat in the yellow light of the motel bathroom and tried to reckon with her face. To make sure it hadn’t changed. She pulled the skin down from her cheek. It seemed to have a greenish cast. She touched her jaw. She tugged her hair back from her forehead. She wished she’d brought the wolfskin rug, so at least she could sleep. She missed Moses.

  Finally, Rutherford answered his phone. “It was just some goddamn tourist,” he said.

  “You can’t do this, Dad,” she said. “You’re older now. You need to take care of yourself.” Of the six light-blue condos that had been built next door on Red Sun Road, two sat empty, two belonged to scientists at the Rocky Mountain Labs, one to a manager at Lost Trail Ski Area, and one to a college student whose parents had bought it as an investment. Rutherford’s anger burned at a low, steady flame.

  He grunted. “It’s bow season soon. Things will pick up. I’m expecting an order of bighorn skulls from the new guide outfit in Sula.”

  “I miss you.”

  Rutherford was silent. “You just do good out there. That’s all I want.”