Ruthie Fear

by Ruthie Fear (retail) (epub)

  Ruthie remembered her visions of the first women settlers in the valley. Going mad after bearing children in the face of the wild. “The last thing this valley needs is more people.”

  Pip nodded absently. “That’s true.”

  “I met a woman in the Super 1 yesterday who moved here from Boston. Since when have they heard of Darby in Boston?”

  “From a magazine, most likely. The next one of these ‘best small town in America’ reporters who comes through, you’re going to have to shoot.” Pip picked up her glass and tipped an ice cube into her mouth. She crunched it with her molars. “These new people won’t even know Wiley King ever lived here. It’s strange—with him gone, there’s nobody for everyone to hate anymore. Just the labs.”

  Ruthie leaned close to her friend and whispered, “I love his music.”

  Pip laughed out loud.

  “ ‘My Fellow Lonesome Rider,’ oh my God, I listened to it all the time when we were in high school.”

  “You never told me!” Pip threw her head back and sang, “May you one day escape the darkness and experience the light.”

  “Shhh,” Ruthie hissed. “My dad will disown me.”

  “I liked Wiley, too. Other rich people were way worse than he was. The summer I worked cleaning houses, there was one family that dumped chlorine in their stretch of Rye Creek because they wanted the water clear. It killed everything. At least Wiley was trying to protect the fish in the slough.”

  “Seriously, don’t let my dad hear you. I can’t remember anything making him as happy as finding out Wiley was dead.”

  Pip grinned. One of her new jobs was helping Rutherford keep the books for his beetle business. Bitterroot Beetle Works had grown dramatically after being featured in an article on “genuine Montana” in a popular hunting magazine. Now skulls arrived from as far away as Louisiana, and Rutherford was making payments on a new truck. Ruthie could hardly believe it when she found a white leather couch in the living room of his trailer. He’d seen one on a Florida cop show and ordered it the next day.

  The two women laughed. Down the street, a shadowy figure moved between a pair of trash bins. Nearly as short and decrepit as the bins themselves, the man quickly ducked behind one.

  Pip squinted into the darkness. “Old fucker. I expect he’s hoping to see us cast a spell.”

  “Or make love in the grass.” Len was hidden now, but Ruthie knew he was still there. “You think anyone would mind if I ran him over with my truck?”

  THE NFL PLAYER who bought Wiley King’s land was Jon Sitka. He was unlike anything the valley had expected. A quarterback for twelve seasons, winner of five division titles and a conference championship, veteran of nearly ten thousand snaps and two Pro Bowl appearances. They’d imagined him to be a grinning colossus who would arrive by private jet, like those of Angel’s Landing and the Stock Farm Club, to retire with his feet up on oaken outdoor furniture, loudly telling tales of last-second touchdown drives and willing cheerleaders. Instead, he was the picture of great, fumbling helplessness. A creature lost and in awe of the world, knocked back to innocence by repeated blows to the head. A bear without fur, yet so fragile as to leap aside at the sight of a squirrel.

  Ruthie had planned to despise him, due to her father and everyone else’s insistence that she do the opposite, but when he walked into the diner for the first time, her determination fell away. Here was a man at war with his own nature, a feeling she knew well. She saw it before she even heard him speak, simply in how he hung in the doorway, filling it awkwardly, letting in the cold, the screen door banging against his back, as if he needed to be invited to step all the way in.

  When she told him he could sit anywhere he liked, he stared around the diner. Taking in each table, Pip smiling at the counter, Cook in his hairnet through the order window, the old pictures of Fort Owen on the walls, the faded portrait of Father Ravalli, the flowers Ruthie had set out by the register, and her behind them. His head was shaved and he seemed entirely devoid of hair save for the blond threads on his arms. His neck reddened in embarrassment. He shuffled over to the smallest table by the window, where she knew instinctively he would sit every time he came in from then on.

  All the other diners stopped to watch him. One old man even let the beans slip from his spoon, so great was his distraction. Sitka was the biggest man any of them had ever seen. His dimensions seemed not quite real, as if the diner would need to be torn down and rebuilt to accommodate him. His hand covered the entire back of the chair when he pulled it out, and the silverware and place setting looked like a doll’s. He sat with a creak that threatened the floor. The chair back barely reached the middle of his spine. His thighs pressed against the tabletop. Sighing, he turned to the window and gazed out over the roof of the high school.

  Ruthie found herself walking toward him with the coffeepot in her hand.

  He turned from the window when she filled his cup. She remembered her father’s plans, the bounteous deliveries of meat, but from the look in Sitka’s wide eyes, she figured a person could hunt his pond whenever they liked, without him even knowing. He gestured out at the snowcapped mountains. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “It’s so beautiful.” Awe brought out the web of pain-wrinkles around his eyes.

  It had been a long time since Ruthie was amazed by the beauty of the valley. The feeling returned her to girlhood. “You should see them in a couple months when the larches are turning. They look like they’re on fire.”

  “I might have to close my eyes.”

  Ruthie smiled. She found herself lingering by his table, staring up at the peaks, wanting to tell him about the winged skeleton shattering across the sky, or the anchor tree like Sasquatch alone on the mountainside. The grip of a butterfly’s feet on her fingertip, otters speaking to her in the night.

  25.

  Some things aren’t meant to be seen. Ruthie Fear froze. She stared at the juniper tree in the shade of the rock outcropping on the ridge. A white foot poked out from its shadow. A paw. A right hind-paw. She didn’t want it to be, but it was.

  The antlers went heavy in her arms. Her heart began to pound.

  Jon Sitka approached behind her, and she felt the weight of him, his dimension and smell, the pain held in his battered body. The way he leaned toward her, his shoulder centimeters from hers but never quite touching. His pond lay sparkling below them; for Ruthie, its memory was so powerful that every time she saw it she heard the sound of cracking ice and saw her father plunging into the dark water. She and Sitka were shed-hunting on Sitka’s ranch in the early spring, walking the faint game trails over the hills looking for fallen antlers in the last slushy snow. She had an armful and he’d found only one: a buck’s first, with two small tines no longer than his pinkie. He held it tenderly as if it might break. It had been in an eagle’s nest on the rocks and Ruthie had felt a pang of fear watching his big, damaged body clamber up to it. Both his knees were rebuilt, he had slipped discs in his back, countless concussions. Any new exertion made him wince. He carried bottles of painkillers in his pockets.

  The paw was snow-white and skewed out in a wrong, painful way. Ruthie didn’t want to see the rest of the animal, but she knew she had to. She reached out, as if to drop the antlers and grab Sitka, turn him around, and walk him home, but instead she stepped forward.

  The coyote had chosen to die beneath the tree. She could tell as soon as she saw the rest of its body. It had come there for that purpose, had used the last of its strength to find the safety of the only shade on the wide sagebrush hillside. Perhaps it was a place it had been before, where it had slept on cold nights, or where its mother had taken it for shelter as a pup. The way its body lay was peaceful. The gray and white and ocher fur along its back curved slightly to its head, which rested across its thin front legs. But the skewed hind leg spoke to the suffering of its final moments, a last desperate clawing, striking out at death.

  “Oh no,” Sitka said quietly. Ruthie knelt beside the animal. For a moment she was afra
id to touch it. She set the antlers down and pulled the glove from her right hand. She looked up at Sitka. His orange hunting cap—which she’d bought him so he wouldn’t get shot as he lumbered around his now-open land during hunting season—was pushed back on his forehead, and his hairless face was awestruck: at the coyote, at death, at the wildness the valley kept hidden past the roads, and at her, the woman who’d led him here. He hunched over and his lips parted in a familiar expression of confused wonder, as if something extraordinary were about to happen.

  Ruthie laid her palm across the coyote’s spine. She was surprised by the warmth of its fur. It had just died. She worked her fingers deeper as though they might still find a spark. She felt the sharp knots of its vertebrae and the muscles of its back.

  “What happened?” Sitka asked, his faith in her piercing. He knelt, took off his glove, and laid his hand beside hers. They looked like father and child’s: one large, one small.

  Ruthie shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  But she did. It was young, barely more than a pup, with no sign of any wound. There were plenty of ranchers among Sitka’s neighbors who left poisoned meat on their fence posts for this very purpose. Coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, Indians—they’d staked claims against them all. Ruthie strove to keep Sitka’s vision of the valley pure. She wanted him to see it untarnished, and she craved moments when she saw it this way, too: old forest hiding the clear-cuts. She looked down at the willow trees around the pond, where her father could now be found every weekend morning, happily blasting geese. Sitka’s mansion was below it, with a view of the Rocky Mountain Labs amid the low, strip-mall skyline of Hamilton at the base of the mountains.

  Mountains and strip malls, pond and labs, hillside and poisoned coyote. The dichotomies were sometimes so jarring they made Ruthie dizzy.

  Blood pulsed in Sitka’s hand. The threads of hair on Ruthie’s pinkie rose toward his thumb. His smell had become as familiar to her as that of the sage. He’d been a regular in the diner throughout the winter, and now at the beginning of spring they’d begun to walk together every evening after her shift. One night, they’d seen the aurora borealis dance green across the northern heavens from this very hill. But they’d never held hands, never kissed. She didn’t know if he was frightened, or in love with someone else. She didn’t ask because she didn’t want to spoil what they had. When they walked, she could feel her heart swing in her chest. It was a happiness like none she remembered.

  “Look.” He nodded west to where the sunset had begun to turn the sky from blue to a purple and crackling orange. The colors were so vivid they seemed unnatural, as if the scientists in the labs were altering the very composition of the atmosphere. “It’s like fireworks,” he said. “Like halftime.”

  He looked down at his hand resting on the coyote’s back. It was so large he could easily have picked the animal up and held it in his palm, as Ruthie would a rabbit. “That was stupid. It’s not like halftime at all.” He shook his head.

  “Maybe it is,” Ruthie said. Feeling a pause in the air around them.

  DESCENDING ALONG the two-strand barbed-wire fence that separated Sitka’s land from the ranch beside his, Ruthie saw something white clenched around the lower wire. Talons. Disembodied from the rest of the bird. She knelt, letting Sitka go ahead in his slow, limping walk. They were owl talons, their grip so tight they remained even though the rest of the bird was ripped clean away. Its gray, white, and brown feathers were strewn across the ground. Its body was gone. Eaten or plundered. She touched the right talon. She gripped the ankle where it had been ripped asunder and tried to pull it loose. The talons held; they were so tight she’d need a saw. Every ounce of the bird’s strength had riveted it in place, fighting whatever had caught it. And what was that? What was loose on this hillside? What ate owls?

  Sitka’s wide back grew smaller below her. From a distance, he seemed half man, half bear. He moved gingerly but with a power that cowed even Badger. His presence turned men into boys, searching wide-eyed through their pockets for scraps of paper for him to sign, in perpetual awe of the professional athlete. The gladiator sailing home across the sea. Sitka had gone through the fire and come out softer than before. A miracle, Ruthie felt. She looked at the labs. The ugly, winking face of the modern world.

  If a monster did come, she saw her body curled beneath Sitka’s as the coyote’s was beneath the tree. Safe for all time.

  26.

  The hot springs at Jerry Johnson were closed due to E. coli, so Ruthie and Jon Sitka laid a trapline going to each bar on the way back to Darby. She piloted his huge, gleaming Yukon while he lay fully reclined in the passenger seat. It was painful for him to sit upright, and Ruthie wouldn’t let him drive when he was on painkillers. He’d eventually get a look in his eye where she could tell it hurt enough that he wouldn’t mind going over the guardrail.

  Highway 12 twisted along the Lochsa River. Kayaks tumbled on the high, foaming water. The kayakers seemed suicidal to Ruthie. She expected to see them flipped and dashed on the rocks around each turn. It would serve them right. All the rock climbers and mountain bikers and kayakers were ruining the wild just as surely as the miners and loggers had. Even in the deepest wilderness, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing chalk marks, treads, and carabiners. Little reminders that they’d been there first, and had their experience. Cedar groves towered to the left, and the windward side of the Bitterroots, more densely forested due to precipitation from the coast, rose to the right. They felt unfamiliar to Ruthie, though they were the same mountains, the same wilderness, where she’d spent her life. She sighed and focused on the road. She’d picked Sitka up that morning wanting only to get as far away from Len as possible, and thinking the hot springs would settle her mind. It was a long stretch before the next bar, the Lumberjack, on Graves Creek. Clear over Lolo Pass.

  They were nearly to the top when Sitka spoke hoarsely, “Pull over. Here.”

  “What?” Ruthie turned.

  “Please.” His face was pale. “I gotta get out.”

  The Yukon took a moment to slow, and the tires skidded when she pulled onto the shoulder. They jerked to a stop. A runaway truck ramp rose steeply above them. She pictured careening up it and shooting off the top like Evel Knievel, soaring over the peaks and bouncing to a stop in front of the Sawmill Bar. Sitka shoved open his door and pitched onto the gravel. He squirmed over and lay flat on his back. His huge chest heaved. He was so large that in some positions he looked mythical, like a giant. “The pills,” he said. “By your feet.”

  Ruthie reached into the compartment at the bottom of the door. Felt several bottles and drew out the fullest one: oxycodone, forty milligrams. A horse dose. Enough to put her in a coma. She got out, staying close to the hood as a semi downshifted past, and handed the bottle to Sitka. Half the people in the valley were on pills of some kind. You could see them sitting dead-eyed in lawn chairs while their children played with rusty car parts. The blood was gone from Sitka’s lips. His eyes reminded her of a dog’s: goodness in there but also a profound lack of comprehension. World, why do you hurt me so? Ruthie thought of bending over to kiss him gently on the lips as he swallowed two pills dry, his huge throat working. She thought of unbuckling her jeans and squatting over his face. Rocking against his tongue. Sweet broken football boy. Forever child.

  “Shit,” Sitka said. “Sometimes it just comes up on me.” He paused. “They always talk about brain damage. Brain damage is the easy part.”

  Ruthie knew he was lying. She’d watched his old games. Flying tacklers spearing his helmet. Four-hundred-pound linemen crashing down on him. The hits that bent him backward in half. Football had never mattered much to her, beyond being the site of Badger’s adolescent heroics, but now she saw it for what it was: an operatic snuff film played out in slow motion, in which the bodies and minds of young men were destroyed for the viewing pleasure of millions of drunk imbeciles. The camera zoomed in pornographically on the hits, then backed away in mock respect f
or the motionless bodies on the field, never showing the way their limbs twitched in the fencing reflex, or the blank, wobbled searching in their eyes. Sitka claimed he didn’t remember the second half of the NFC Championship Game he’d played in. Just blurs of red.

  Seeing his head battered this way and that, Ruthie was amazed he’d survived at all.

  “You were good at something. Most people can never say that,” she said.

  Color began to return to his face. The oxycodone silencing his nerves. It was a wonder none of the junkies in the valley had broken into his mansion. Probably they were too scared of him, even though he was the only man Ruthie knew who didn’t own a gun. She’d tried to give him one but he wouldn’t allow it in his house. Ruthie had pawned three of hers after her conversation with Dawn, but had kept one for protection, and three to hunt. Sitka smiled weakly. He patted the ground beside him. Ruthie sat down. Gravel bits poked her butt through her jeans. “When I got drafted I thought I’d won the lottery. Not ruined my life.”

  “What about halftime?”

  He shook his head. “Even halftime was awful. All that yelling.”

  “Sounds like you need another drink.”

  “I need about a hundred.”

  “There aren’t that many bars between here and there.”

  “You think any of them have a hot tub?”

  “You have a hot tub.”

  He shrugged wearily. “I was looking forward to something new. Who knew E. coli was a real thing?”

  His blunt features were somehow featureless; his shaved skull like an oversized thumb. Only the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes revealed his kindness. Men in bars often tried to fight him for his size, so he rarely went out at night. Instead spending his evenings in the vibrating orthopedic chair in his basement—made special for him by doctors in Seattle—watching the fishing channel.

  Ruthie often joined him. Sometimes she dreamt of moving into the mansion with him and becoming a fable of the valley: the poor trailer trash girl from Red Sun Road who married the football star from far away. She’d walk out of the diner wearing diamonds. Buy a mountain and put her name on it, like the M on Mount Sentinel in Missoula. Set Rutherford up in an outbuilding in a distant corner of the ranch, with satellite TV, a fully stocked bar, all the geese of his dreams, and whatever idiotic, oversized trucks he wanted.