Deacons surrounded Father Mike on the shore. Their heads bowed, praying fervently as foamy water harried the robes around their feet. Two had worn galoshes in preparation. Another peeked down nervously at his suede loafers. Father Mike was already ankle-deep, oblivious to the cold, gazing above the crowd at the snowcapped mountains with a desperation on his face that Ruthie could tell had little to do with God. His brown hair was thinning and the youthful enthusiasm she remembered from after the quake had dissipated into a middle-aged disillusionment. His wife was nowhere to be seen. Ruthie felt it in the air then, the energy of a prizefight, not a Sunday service. Even the children hanging from the branches had a malevolence in their expression.
“Beer?” Rutherford asked. Several women turned their heads. Ruthie nodded. She wished she’d worn something other than her shapeless red Whipple’s T-shirt and ripped jeans. She pulled herself up into the back of the truck and took the beer he handed her. She popped the tab. Her former classmates always stared at her. A few months in Vegas, a few scars, a few boyfriends, and they acted like she was Jezebel reincarnate. She didn’t care what they thought, but she would have liked to have done herself up a little. Shown them what they could look like without their ratty kids and twelve-pack-a-day husbands. Father Mike caught her eyes from way out in the river; his torn expression made her look away.
Inadvertently, her gaze settled on Len Law, sharing a tattered blanket with his three scrawny children and his sister Eleanor in her wheelchair. Ruthie tried to shift her eyes away but it was too late. Len smirked. “Thought you’d left us for good. This little valley wasn’t enough for you.”
Ruthie didn’t answer.
“Figured you’d be a star by now. Have your own show on the Strip.” He winked at Eleanor. His youngest daughter was sucking a rock and tugging the spokes of the wheel of Eleanor’s chair.
“I just missed the people here too much,” Ruthie replied.
The conversations around them quieted. The deacons on the riverbank raised their arms. Her father nodded to the current and the priest. “He might best have waited a couple months.”
Ruthie shrugged. “Maybe it’s better to be fast if you’re going to walk across.”
“Dearly beloved,” Father Mike began. “We are gathered here today to bear witness to God’s love. To see His power over all things, and the mercy He has bestowed upon us.” He lifted his trembling fist and Ruthie saw a blueness at his lips, the cold of the water already seeping up through his body. “I have fasted and I have prayed and now God has given me a vision. He has commanded me to show you the true power of His love.” Ruthie scanned the upturned faces in the crowd. What were they expecting? A miracle? A humiliation? “For those of you who question His place in the modern world. Who look around at the violence and degradation and lies and ask, ‘Where are you, Father? Why have you forsaken us?’ Today I will show you how close He is. I will walk into the water and He will lift me up and guide me to the far and holy shore.” The priest paused, seeming to lose strength, before regathering himself. “May His will be done.”
“May His will be done!” the crowd answered, in a smattered attempt at unison.
The deacons began to lead the Lord’s Prayer. Ruthie found herself mouthing along, “Our father, who art in heaven . . .”
Father Mike took a deep breath at the “Amen.” The crowd’s attention turned to him fully, all the devout and disbelieving and curious. “Watch me now, and bear witness to His power.” He turned and waded deeper into the river, hesitating only a moment on an unsteady rock, his cassock twisting around him. Ruthie saw worry in the deacons’ eyes. They glanced at each other as if one of them should intervene. But who would stand in the way of a miracle? Father Mike stumbled against the current and pushed farther. The crowd shouted after him. He stopped with the water swirling around his midsection. Only his head and torso were visible, like a disembodied creature. Ruthie couldn’t imagine the strength it took to remain there. She’d been knocked over by water at her knees this time of year. She felt a stab of fear. She remembered the crazed look in his eye at the football game. When would he rise? Would no one help him? But all were frozen: watching, waiting. Veins rose on his bluish forehead. His lips twisted into a strangled grin, straining against the great forces beneath. “Hallelujah!” he shouted.
“Hallelujah!” a sole woman answered.
No one else spoke. Father Mike lifted his arms. The crowd gasped, as if he might suddenly stride onto the churning surface, but instead he succumbed, and the river bowled him headlong into the current.
For a moment, no one moved. Then with a shout the entire crowd began to run along the riverbank, Badger among them, plunging out of his cruiser, suddenly wide awake, stumbling and hitching up his gun belt. Kent Willis beside him, moving faster than Ruthie had thought him able. The crowd trampled the reeds, tripping and smashing through the underbrush, children leaping from the trees, as the priest was borne into the rapids. His body sailed below the bridge at Woodside Crossing and was dashed against the rocks on the other side, before being lost again, twisted and sluiced in a cacophony of white spray.
Ruthie found herself alone with her father and Terry in the parking lot, save for a lost, weeping child and a knot of teenagers so dazed they’d forgotten the lit cigarettes in their fists. She touched the stud in her lip with her tongue. Rutherford muttered what sounded like a Hail Mary. He shook his head. Ruthie slumped back against the wheel well. She remembered the priest in his collar and vestments shopping in the Super 1, or filling up his truck at the Sinclair. Something reassuring in his uniform: a link to ancient order, rituals fighting against the dark.
Terry walked slowly over to them. “I didn’t need to see that,” he said.
DRIVING BACK TO DARBY, Ruthie passed Sheriff Kima standing on the bridge, looking down wearily at the fire team all roped together below him on the river’s rocky shore, dragging Father Mike’s body from the current. The priest’s cassock had been torn off and he had nothing left on but his shoes. Ruthie saw the frail blueness of his flesh, and wondered who could bear the weight of a godless world. Cruelty without reason. Suffering without reward. It was what she’d felt when Nathan died in her arms: an emptiness opening inside her. Kima shook his head, seeming ready to toss his gun and badge into the water and walk away.
A new hotel was being built by the river. Three stories of steel balconies girded by pine railings. Constructed in the same alpine-ski-lodge style as the organic brewery in Hamilton. Sunlight reflected blindingly off the plastic-covered windows. Rebar littered the rocky dirt. Ruthie turned to the spring’s snow-white peaks. She saw the strings holding the valley together, as thin and taut as fishing wire.
•
THE RUMOR SPREAD like a pox through the Montana Café. From old man to old man, then from Pip Pascal to all others, that a week earlier Father Mike had discovered his wife in bed with another man. A much younger man, a ranch hand, hardly more than a teenager. A boy, the old men surmised. In her work apron, pouring coffee, Ruthie watched them chew this vision in their minds as they would a tender piece of meat, their mouths going dry. The pastor’s pretty wife, of the broad forgiving hips and honeysuckle hair, astride a hairless teenager. Pinning him down, rocking over him with her flushed body. One of them sighed and Ruthie slipped and poured hot coffee on his gnarled hand. He yelped and jerked the hand away and looked up at her, stunned tears springing to his eyes.
“Sorry,” she said, dabbing his hand with the hem of her apron. Of all her customers, she hated the gossiping, pinching, leering old men most, but now, in grief, she felt consumed by a benevolence so overpowering that she wanted to crumple up every check and kiss every wrinkled forehead. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
The old man looked up at her, gratitude and suspicion clawing at his worn face.
She smiled at him, but the pain in his hand was already forgotten.
“He wanted us to see,” the old man said. “He wanted us to see.”
Looking around at the faces in the diner, Ruthie felt kinship with each one. The couple holding hands across the table, the couple refusing to look at each other, the father and son sharing a plate of pancakes, even Len arguing with his wife at the darkened table in the corner. She realized she was already three years older than her father had been when she was born. Pip was flushed with sorrow on her customary stool at the counter, drinking coffee and talking rapidly to a pair of truckers. Ruthie touched her arm as she refilled her cup. “Don’t forget to eat something today.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Pip was saying. “Anybody should have the right.” She’d been a staunch supporter of suicides ever since finding her father. The young woman version of Pip was much like the girl had been: speaking whatever crossed her mind, scrapping to get by, always in short pants with her backpack full of supplies. She was often gone for days, and then she’d reappear at Ruthie’s door with strange objects she’d found in the wilderness. Ruthie knew she still hunted for the headless creature, though they never spoke of it.
The front door jingled as Terry and Billy French entered. They sat at the small table by the window. Terry carried a heaviness in his body and Billy was similarly weighted down. The loss of his land had hardened Billy, and Nathan Gardipe’s death—whose mother he knew well—had hardened him further still. Wider and shorter than his brother, with the same long black braid, he was in conflict with the world. Fighting against it, drinking against it, falling down against it. Married and divorced, struggling to support his daughter Delilah, who was now in nursing school in Spokane. Ruthie sighed. She turned and looked at Cook through the service window. An escaped Mormon from Utah, his ponytail was tight and unscathed beneath its hairnet as he baptized a basket of french fries in hot oil.
“You ever hear of a priest killing himself?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I thought they were the ones who were supposed to keep the rest of us from doing it.”
“The fewer priests, the better,” Billy said loudly, leaning back in his chair. “My people learned that a long time ago.”
The diner went silent. Len stopped eating to stare.
“All right, brother,” Terry said quietly.
The sound of Cook’s knife on the cutting board could be heard in the kitchen. Even Pip stopped talking. Ruthie crossed the linoleum to Billy’s table. She leaned over and filled his coffee cup. “Maybe not today,” she whispered. He watched her closely. After Nathan was killed, the county judge had ruled that the Gardipes were culpable for the damage to the convenience store, rather than the hunters. A decision the majority of the valley agreed with, but which Ruthie and the Frenches found despicable. The Gardipes had to sell their house to cover the cost. Nathan’s mother now lived in a rented trailer in Ronan.
Always ready to make things worse, Len broke in. “It’ll probably bring some more tourists to town,” Len said. “You know they still go taking pictures of the spot where that Cub Scout got eaten.”
“Now, there’s an idea,” Billy said, keeping his voice loud enough for the whole diner to hear. “Ruthie, you and me could go in on something together: a tour of the valley for all these new people. Show them where Father Mike went under, the sites of all the hit-and-runs, the graves of Charlo’s people, and where Nathan got shot down at Lil’s. There has to be at least one white sheriff who got killed in Hamilton. He’ll be Custer, the big draw. A new Wild West show. You be the pretty white girl, I’ll be the solemn Indian. We can charge ten bucks a head.”
Len snorted. “You both know that boy got what he deserved.”
The coffeepot was suddenly heavy in Ruthie’s hand.
“You go in someplace and try to rob it, you’re liable to get shot. Doesn’t have anything to do with being an Indian.”
Billy clenched his fist on his knee. “Oh no? Same as when your grandpa hung those four on the courthouse lawn?”
Len paused. “That was a case of sabotage. Everybody knew they made my little sister sick.”
“He lost his badge over that. He should’ve been shot.”
“I can’t listen to this nonsense. After all my family has done for this valley. We brought law to a heathen swamp.”
“And you took the name. Biggest joke I ever heard. We’ll be sure to have your junkyard on the tour. Show them all the totems you have to protect yourself since you’re so proud of what your family’s done—your grandpa who killed himself and your daddy who ran off.”
Len huffed and turned to his eggs. He glared at his wife. “Don’t need to debate with no damn Indian,” he muttered.
Ruthie set the coffeepot down on the Frenches’ table. To hell with the rest of the customers. It had been a bad day and it was only getting worse. She dug her fingernail into the edge of the laminate, remembering Father Mike’s blue flesh. She spoke to Billy. “Do you think it was better here, before all this?”
Billy was quiet for a long moment, glowering at Len. Then he looked around. His eyes paused on his brother. Their paths had diverged when Billy married and moved to the reservation, and they’d had many differences over the years, but they remained as close as any two people Ruthie knew. The heat began to go out of him. He shrugged. “There were fewer of us,” he said. “Maybe that’s as better as it gets.”
22.
Ruthie sat on her apartment building’s front porch in the warm evening light. The setting sun smoldered the horizon in a gradient of violet, pink, and orange, so beautiful she found it hard to look at. Two raccoons emerged to sniff a rabbit rug on the highway and were chased off by approaching headlights. She imagined the rabbit hopping down the yellow lines, wanting to escape the valley, amazed by the clearness of the territory, the expanse of pavement shooting toward the mountains, then blinding light and the engine’s roar.
Once, at the Sawmill Bar, a man had squeezed blood from his palm into a shot of whiskey and offered twenty dollars to anyone who’d drink it. Standing in the dim light, with all the male eyes searching up and down her body, Ruthie had taken it, so disappointed in their flimsy, craven bravery that she nearly wept.
Yet still she was trapped among them.
A semi rattled past and she watched its taillights move through town and disappear, then reappear as it slowly wound up the highway to Lost Trail Pass. She imagined the animals there shedding their winter coats on the snowless ski runs and leaving sign for one another in the excitement of spring. She felt this same need: to move, find new people, new territory. She drank absinthe out of a plastic cup. An intern at the Rocky Mountain Labs—a summer fling—had left it behind when he went back to school in Bozeman. He’d been testing adjuvants at the labs. He’d explained how the lipids from soap bark cell walls were used in vaccines. No Ebola or anthrax or monkey testing. Just quality control for purity, day after day. Killing her with boredom. The bitter licorice taste reminded her how he’d bounded up her steps, reaching under her shirt before they were even inside. For some men, the whole world is a playground. The new moon was a single slivered horseshoe trodden in black dirt.
It came as no surprise when the cruiser made its slow way up the street. Even though Badger was married now, he still dropped in whenever he had reason, real or imagined. Ruthie allowed him this if her mood was right, but today had been no good for either of them.
“Can’t find his wife,” Badger said of Father Mike. He shuffled slump-shouldered up the walk. A three-day beard hid his cheeks. Full-grown, he was six-foot-three, with flesh beginning to sag around the muscled blocks of his arms and chest. “No one wants the body.” His voice held a note of accusation, as if tonight Ruthie stood for all women.
“Should’ve left it in the river, then,” she said. “Where he put it.”
Badger paused, swaying in the moonlight. She realized he’d been drinking. “Oh, you’re a hard one, Ruthie Fear.”
“I’m tired. Don’t come here drunk.”
Badger leaned against the porch railing. He looked up at her. She couldn’t tell anymore if he wanted her back or if he jus
t didn’t want anyone else to have her. “We found the boy she was fucking, though. He’s our age. He started crying when he heard.” Badger paused. “Thought we were going to put him in jail.” He hooked his thumb through his belt. The silver bison buckle was of higher quality than the one from the county fair he’d worn when they met, but not so different in size or shape.
“It’s still not illegal for a wife to cheat?”
The apartment building behind Ruthie was empty. Only two of the other units were occupied, by Cook and Pip, and they were both out. She wanted to lock her door and finish the bottle alone in her apartment. Not think about the ranch boy, or Father Mike, or the Laws, or any of it.
“Do you remember Levi?” Badger asked.
Ruthie shook her head. “What do you want?”
“He died in a car crash last year, when you were gone. I had to tell his mother. She had four sons. Levi and his three brothers. You know what she asked me when she saw me on her porch?”
Ruthie waited.
“ ‘Which one was it?’ ”
“I remember the elk,” Ruthie said. “That’s what I remember. And Nathan. Why don’t you arrest those hunters?”
Badger climbed ponderously up the stairs to stand over her. The silver bison shone into her eyes. His whiskey smell made her nauseated. “A man has a right to defend himself.”
Ruthie scooted back the plastic chair. She stood in the fading light. “Is that what it was?”
He shrugged.
“Where’s Janine?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be home helping with her homework?”
“Where are your boyfriends?” He raised his fingers as if he were counting one through five. “At least one of them must be free.”
“Go do your job. Find his wife. I don’t want you here.”
Badger winced, shifting his weight. His uniform strained to contain his gut. Already he was getting heavy without two-a-days, summer tryouts, nightly practice. No more use for running, no more linemen to pop. Nothing to slam into. Only Indians and drunks to harass. A steady slide of weeks and months, a buildup of sadness and disappointment that could, in a heartbeat, turn to anger. Being a cop was liable to make anyone worse, but Badger especially. All that imagined power to wrap around a smallness inside. The little boy caught in the man’s body. “I thought I’d ask you where you’d go,” he said. “Like the cops do on TV. Become a killer to catch a killer. Become a whore to catch a whore.”
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