Ruthie Fear

by Ruthie Fear (retail) (epub)

  Ruthie’s money dwindled. Every day in the city it took so much to survive. She lost weight. She grew desperate and smiled at an older man in a casino bar. He bought her sweet pink martinis and told her about his work on an industrial dairy farm. How it was mostly just computers, but still someone, a real person, had to wean the calves from their mothers. Had to listen to them bellow. His thick forearm touched hers; a gold chain circled his wrist above a Navy tattoo gone muddy. He showed her his room key from one of the fancy hotels on the strip, but at the last minute insisted they go back to hers.

  Ruthie led him. She wondered if her mother had dreamt of a place like this, and ended up in the same lonesome hallway.

  The man’s belly was taut as a melon beneath his shirt. He used it to push Ruthie through the door. She stumbled into the edge of the bed, and when she turned around he was grinning in the dim light as he shot the bolt in the lock. “You’re a little wildcat, aren’t you?” he said.

  Two neon points from a sign outside reflected on the TV screen. In them, Ruthie saw the eyes of the wolf as her father had through the scope of his gun. Yellow-wild, frozen on a sagebrush hillside by a stand of juniper. Frightened and alone. They woke the animal inside Ruthie. The man stepped toward her. He unbuttoned his shirt. A gold crucifix hung between his hairless breasts.

  “I can always tell.” A gold cap shone on his left incisor. He gripped her hips roughly and shoved her forward onto the bed.

  Listening to him unzip his pants behind her, Ruthie reached into her bag. She felt the cool metal grip of the Desert Eagle. She remembered her father’s shooting lessons. How to breathe into the shot. She rolled over and pointed the gun at the man’s throat. She held her finger over the trigger guard. She let him see the lacy scars all down the inside of her forearms, as wild as he could want.

  His eyes widened. He made a choking sound. His expression flicked from confusion to terror. He stepped back and lifted his hands.

  “Give me forty dollars,” she said. “Or I’ll kill you and take everything you have.”

  RUTHIE PACKED HER SUITCASE and dragged it to the bus station in the dawn. She used the man’s forty dollars to buy a ticket. From the pay phone, she called Pip and told her she was coming home.

  20.

  Rutherford stood waiting for her on the dock. It had been three months since Ruthie had returned from Las Vegas, but he still waited for her outside whenever they met, as if he were afraid she might decide to leave again. Lake Como was empty, swept clean of the boats, tubes, and Jet Skis that littered its surface during the summer. A stinging wind gusted off the water—gray now, in late November. His hands were dug into the fleece-lined pockets of his jacket.

  The sun sank into the snowy teeth of the Bitterroots. It lit the treetops and revealed a galaxy of silver minnows circling the pylon under the dock. “Sorry I’m late,” Ruthie said. “The diner . . .”

  Rutherford shook his head. “Happy birthday.”

  Ruthie was twenty-one. The milestone meant little to her. Rutherford raised his chin at the frozen sheets on the far, shaded shore. At forty, there was resignation in his eyes, but below it the old ice-crawling stubbornness still lingered. “Might get real snow this year.”

  Marshall Mountain to the northeast had shuttered after a series of warming winters, and other ski areas nearby were close to doing the same.

  “When I was a kid we’d skate across. The whole lake froze solid. We used to drill through and fish. Kent stuck his dick in the hole once. Only way he could get a bite.” Rutherford smiled, half wolfish, half shy. “I reckon it’s still shrunk.”

  Gray hairs flecked his beard. They made Ruthie want to hug him. “That’s about the last thing I want to think about,” she said.

  “You get enough in tips to buy me a beer?”

  “It’s in the truck.”

  “How’d it feel to buy now that you’re legal?”

  “About the same.”

  He nodded, and together they walked up to the cabin. It was the A-frame they’d come to when she was a girl, after the earthquake. It belonged to a young lawyer from Seattle now. Rutherford’s old boss at the mill had died. His children sold it off. The lawyer had hired Rutherford to make repairs and watch over it for the winter, giving him permission to stay when he wanted as part of the deal. Ruthie wondered if the lawyer knew her father was liable to move in. Even though it was run-down from years of neglect, it was about a thousand times nicer than his trailer.

  The familiar deck still stood over the creek. Ruthie saw where she’d sat on the edge, her legs dangling, searching for otters in the rushing water. The deck’s shadow slanted over the remains of a vegetable garden. The wire fence was rusted and bent; the beds crumbled. Ruthie carried the case of Busch Light and her overnight bag inside. Rutherford was waiting in the kitchen. All the appliances and fixtures had fallen into disrepair. They smelled of mildew and gas. He leaned on the yellow countertop. It was bubbled and peeling up at the edges. He chopped down one of the bubbles with the blade of his hand. “People sure used to like ugly shit,” he said.

  Ruthie handed him a beer. She remembered how pristine the cabin had seemed to her as a little girl. “They still do.”

  “Your mom, back when we were in high school, she wanted a house with shag carpet in every room. Lavender shag. She talked about it all the time. Even the bathroom, so her feet would never get cold. You believe that?”

  Ruthie didn’t know how to respond. Since her return, Rutherford had begun to speak about her mother. As if he were making space for her in his mind again, now that he was in his forties and unlikely to remarry. It was an intrusion to Ruthie, who felt her mother had no right to come back, even if it was only in her father’s mind.

  “What did you want?” Ruthie asked.

  “Back then?” Rutherford looked at the strange little cuckoo clock hanging beside the fridge. A frightened-looking bird popped out when he banged the side. “I don’t think I ever knew. Maybe that was part of the problem.” He opened the beer and took a drink. “When I shot that wolf I thought I was going to be someone. I had your mom and you, and I don’t know . . . I thought I’d be some kind of great hunter. Get on TV. Hunt things no one else could find. Catch the last this or that. But that isn’t really a thing, is it?”

  “No, not really.”

  He shrugged and stretched his fingers in front of his chest. They were bent and scarred from decades of missed hammer swings, saw nicks, pulling cartridges from hot barrels. Ruthie wondered what her mother had done with these years. If her nails were lavender, her cuticles perfectly trimmed. Her husband the kind of man who golfed in the evenings.

  “I got you something,” Rutherford said.

  Ruthie hoped it wasn’t another gun. There were already five in her studio apartment and two in her truck.

  “It’s out back.”

  She followed him to the rear door. A chain-saw-carved bear stood in the center of the barren yard. Nearly her height, painted black with a pale snout, it looked forlornly across to the creek, its paws hanging in front of the sharp-cut fur on its stomach. Raymond Pompey sold them at his nursery and she knew her father had gotten it at cost. Probably it had an extra claw. “What am I supposed to do with that?”

  “Thought it’d look good in your new place,” her father said.

  She sighed, imagining it staring at her from across her small apartment, taking up an entire corner. “Thanks, Dad.”

  He nodded and took a drink.

  Back in the kitchen, Rutherford returned to his station by the counter. “The guy who owns this place ain’t much older than you. He has a Japanese car. Electric. Its clearance is about eight inches. Rich and stupid. I guess I should’ve gone to law school.” He looked at the blue bird still sitting wide-eyed on the end of the clock’s extended tongue. “I sure would’ve given it to them then.”

  THEY WALKED THE PATH by the water. It wound over tree roots and around boulders. To the south, the rocky public beach where Ruthie had thrown the rock
at the boy curved along the shore to the dam. The two long docks reached out in front of the concrete embankment and spillway. She hadn’t been to the lake since high school. She avoided it. The memory of the toddler made her question her own decency, and she preferred to spend her free time in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness with Pip, or wandering the foothills of the Sapphires. Away from other people.

  “I hope she got her carpet house, and I hope the whole place stinks like cat piss,” Rutherford said.

  Ruthie was quiet. She was trying to enjoy herself. It was her birthday and her only night off. Moss was splashed over the boulders and up the sides of trees. It was a bright day, and somehow colder for its brightness. They followed clouds of their own breath. Rutherford’s eyes skipped from tree to path to lake. He pointed out a bald eagle, nuts a squirrel had hidden for the winter, deer tracks.

  A pileated woodpecker paused from hammering its red head against the side of a lodgepole pine. Ruthie looked into its black eye, wondering if the pecking would eventually damage its brain. The cold air tightened the skin on her face. She drew her lips back to stretch it out.

  The trail climbed to the top of Left-Behind Point and then wandered through the woods. Pine needles muffled their footsteps. It was dim and the air smelled of sap. Ruthie caught herself breathing deeply. Taking pleasure in the sound of the wind in the branches. She wondered if this was part of getting older: learning how to listen. Cabin roofs were visible down by the water. One of the new ones was a multilayered expanse of green metal.

  “Mormons,” Rutherford said. “Tar sands money.”

  “Fucking Mormons,” Ruthie said, half in jest, and half because they came into the diner, ordered hot water with lemon, and didn’t tip. They were moving down from the oil shale fields in Alberta and buying up property all around. Building mansions that looked like they’d been dreamed up in the dollhouse section of Wal-Mart.

  The trees thinned out, revealing the distant mountains. A quarter moon hung stubbornly in the blue western sky above Trapper Peak. The trail ended on a granite outcrop forty feet over the water. A chair was carved into the rock a few yards above and behind the outcrop, like a lifeguard’s perch.

  “Still there,” Ruthie said.

  Rutherford nodded. Len Law had carved it when Ruthie was a girl. It took him a whole summer. Out with his hammer and chisel every morning, pounding away. The hardest anyone had ever seen him work. No one knew what he was doing until he started sitting there and watching the young girls in bikinis jump off the cliff into the lake. Soon the fathers got together and chased him off. Now it remained like something prehistoric: a cave painting or midden ring, remnant of a lost civilization. Rutherford sat down between the rock arms and Ruthie went to look over the edge. The height rushed up at her, forty feet at least, pushing the air from her lungs. It was amazing to her that anyone ever jumped off, let alone children. The setting sun cast a thousand glittering pins across the water.

  “Do it,” Rutherford said.

  “What?”

  “Jump.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “It’s the perfect time. Your birthday. Nobody around. No boats. No screaming kids.”

  Ruthie turned to him, sitting in the chair, drinking another beer, squinting at the water. His figure small in his stained canvas coat, enjoying the bitter cold. “You jump,” she said.

  “I’m too old.”

  “You’re too scared.”

  He smiled. “We can’t both jump. One of us has to be able to go for help.”

  The bald eagle swept off the branch across the lake and winged over the orange-streaked water, dipping its head at any sign of movement. It rose and fell like a leaf, its body outspread on currents of air. “I’d jump if I could fly like that,” Ruthie said.

  The eagle arced over the trees. Rutherford watched it go, squeezing the sides of his beer can. “There was a time you never saw them. You could go to jail for having a single feather. Now they’re everywhere.”

  The great comeback. The bird everyone in America had joined together to save, so they could be loosed at halftime of the Super Bowl to soar around the stadium while Lee Greenwood sang. When Ruthie was a girl, she’d played with the shoebox full of eagle feathers in her father’s shed. Taking them out and pretending to make headdresses and arrow fletchings. Who knew where he’d gotten them.

  “There was a time you saw wolves, too,” she said.

  THEY MADE SALMON for dinner. Ruthie rubbed it in butter and salt, squeezed lemon on top, then wrapped it in tinfoil and gave it to her father to cook. The night was cold and they stood together in the kitchen. The closed grill smoked on the deck. Across the creek, the ponderosas loomed over the firepit. Not as tall as Ruthie remembered, but still seeming to tower. Light snow began to fall. Feathery flakes drifting down on the branches. The year’s first. Sticking everywhere except the grill’s warm hood. Bringing a quietude, muffling every hard edge, and filling Ruthie with calm.

  Her father breathed raspily at her side. The sound brought back memories of all the years they’d spent squeezed together in the teal trailer. Ruthie was grateful for her own apartment. Never smelling elk piss, never hearing Rutherford curse at the TV, or finding him passed out on the couch. Scrubbing her plate and only her plate before putting it in the clean dish rack. Walking naked from the shower to the bed. Lying on her back on the comforter listening to Wiley King. The small pleasures of being an adult. She leaned into her father’s shoulder.

  “You hear about Wiley?” she asked. A health scare had forced him to decamp to a hospital in Seattle, and rumors about its severity filtered through the diner.

  Rutherford nodded. “Something cardiac. They had to airlift him. Let’s hope it’s the big one.”

  THE FEARS ATE across from each other at the long wooden table in the dining room. Initials were scratched into the varnished top: LP and LL and RB, who’d carved a little crossbones by his name—a pirate at supper. Rutherford refused the salad Ruthie had made, and instead poured potato chips onto the plate around his fish. He dug into the center of the salmon with his fork and peered at it, making sure it had been cooked to the rubbery, flavorless consistency he preferred.

  “You know there are TV shows now where you can learn how to cook,” Ruthie said.

  “That right?”

  “There are also ones where you can meet women.” She figured maybe the way to get him to stop talking about her mother was to give him someone else to think about.

  He raised his eyebrows and took a bite. “You think I should go on TV to meet a woman?”

  Ruthie stifled a laugh, imagining her father among the tall, muscular, peroxide-toothed mannequins she and Pip watched on dating shows. “You shouldn’t be alone, is all. Do you ever think about getting another dog?”

  “I told you, I can’t go through losing another one. Not after Moses.”

  “That was seven years ago. You kill animals all the time.”

  “Not ones I’ve lived with. Jesus, Ruthie, I watched them put the needle in. They wanted me there so he wouldn’t be scared. Do you know what that’s like? He was looking up at me . . . I’d never killed nothing that trusted me before. It wasn’t fair.”

  “All right.” Ruthie raised her hands. “Never mind.”

  “Not like you offered to come along, either. Said you had too much homework.”

  “I buried him,” she said.

  “We buried him. And I don’t see you going on any dates.”

  Ruthie drank down the remaining third of her beer. She thought of the man in Las Vegas grinning as he locked the door. The carbonation squeezed back up her throat and made her eyes water. “I’m taking a break, is all.”

  “Me, too,” Rutherford said. “I’m taking a good long goddamn break.”

  Snow blanketed the deck. An inch of it already, and still falling. Only the square of salmon skin and a few chips remained on Rutherford’s plate. He patted his stomach. He grunted and pushed back his chair. He carried the plate to the trash, s
craped the chips and skin off, dropped it in the sink, and left it there.

  “Might use a little more salt next time,” he said, squinting out at Ruthie’s truck being buried in the driveway. She looked up at the loft. She imagined an otter staring down at them, curious to see how they’d changed, if they’d changed at all. Her father turned and followed her eyes to a dark brown stain in the ceiling’s peak.

  “Must be a leak,” he said. “I’ll probably have to stay another few weeks to fix it.”

  21.

  When Father Mike said he was going to walk on water, even Ruthie and her father came to see, though neither of them had been to church in years.

  The crowd filled the sand beach at Hooper’s Landing—Kent Willis, Danette, the Laws, Pip—and kids were halfway up the willow trees, craning their necks like hungry birds. The Bitterroot River had fallen from its spring peak but still ran high and hard past the deep bend favored by out-of-state fishermen and alcoholics too lazy to find a less-trampled hole. All you’d catch here were sluggish, shit-fed trout from the hatchery upstream. Ruthie looked on disdainfully. The women in bonnets and Sunday whites made her feel like a little girl again: trapped. Terry French pulled his truck in across the lot. He slammed the door and leaned heavily against the cab. Three corrugated steel duplexes had been built next to his hogan on Billy’s former land, nearly identical in size to the condos beside her father’s.

  Behind Ruthie, Rutherford clambered onto the bed of his truck, causing the axle to groan and people to look around. He’d worn his cleanest dirty jeans and slung a bolo around his neck to honor the solemnity of the occasion. He fished a can of beer from his cooler, popped it open, and drank. The chunk of turquoise in his bolo was the size of an elk turd. It hung at an angle over his work shirt. He shaded his eyes and looked over the assorted church people. Ruthie felt her cheeks flush. Embarrassed, but admiring him at the same time. Trailer trash of the most stubborn, ramshackle kind. The King of Ravalli County. The opposite of Deputy Badger, newly sworn in, who sat dejectedly in his cruiser at the edge of the lot, looking like he’d slept there, and ignoring the trucks haphazardly blocking each other in.