Ruthie Fear

by Ruthie Fear (retail) (epub)

  But here she was, by the side of the highway. “This is new,” she said, looking at the gravel and the mountainside plunging off beyond the guardrail. Patches of dirty snow still clung to shadowed places below the guardrail. Blood smeared one of them. The broken remains of a doe on the other side of it.

  Sitka shook his head. “Not for me. I’ve laid by a thousand different roads.” A hatchback full of college students with kayaks strapped to the roof zoomed past toward Missoula. Sitka stared straight up at the clouds, like patches of snow themselves on the blue sky. Sometimes, when the pain in his back caused him to squirm on the buzzing cushions of his gigantic chair, he seemed to glow, as if his suffering were elevating him to a higher plane. He’d told her he had no family left. His parents had stolen money from him, his sister lived in Thailand.

  “At least you’re not paralyzed,” Ruthie said.

  He grunted. “Would you roll me over and stand on my back? It helps sometimes.”

  She got her hands under him like a side of beef but she never would’ve been able to move him if he hadn’t helped, propping himself up on his elbow and flinging over so he thudded onto his chest. He groaned, his mouth in the dirt, his dusty ass raised. Any remnants of sexual thoughts Ruthie had disappeared. She stood and surveyed the broad plain of his back. “Should I take off my shoes?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” His voice was muffled by the dirt.

  She stepped her boot onto his spine and pressed down lightly, then lifted her other foot. He sighed at her full weight. She walked back and forth on his soft, muscled width. He felt like a wrestling mat, and she thought of Dalton Pompey, married now with three children and three fewer fingers, who’d tried to have sex with her one day after practice. She’d pushed him off, afraid that Badger would walk into the gym. Maybe she should’ve done it. Given herself a memory. She pressed down harder. Had her life really changed? Or had she only graduated to a better football player? She felt the huge bunches of muscle below Sitka’s shoulders, like the whorled knots in a cedar trunk. No, this one was kind. All that maimed power turned in on itself. She had yet to hear him say a cruel word about another human being, and though he watched fishing shows for hundreds of hours, he winced every time the angler withdrew the hook from a fish’s lip. His forehead creased in amazement when she spoke of her childhood, the hunting and fights, as if her life had been a frontier fairy tale. She knelt between his shoulder blades and gripped the back of his neck. Her hand wasn’t big enough to get around it, so she just squeezed, feeling the sharp stubble of his hair, squeezing and releasing, as tightly as she could. He softened beneath her, melting into the gravel. She realized she could lie down on top of him and curl up like a cat.

  “Mmmm,” he said. “Just leave me here.”

  “They’d need a crane to get you out.”

  “It’d be a sky burial. Like the Vajrayanas in Tibet.”

  She wondered how he knew about that. Sometimes he’d get so glazed and confused he couldn’t answer the simplest question, then he’d mention a culture she’d never heard of.

  “An act of generosity,” he went on. “For the vultures and the crows.”

  Ruthie pursed her lips and looked up the road. “You do have a lot of meat.”

  “WHAT ARE WE DOING OUT HERE?” Sitka asked, when they were across from each other in the largest wood booth in the back corner of the Lumberjack Bar on Graves Creek. There were no windows but they could hear the current through the open door. He was wedged in sideways with his left leg straight out in a way that would be painful for a normal person but seemed to give him relief. Ruthie’s fingers were cold as she picked at the label on her beer bottle. “I mean, why did you get me this morning?”

  “Len Law,” she said finally. “He’s my neighbor. He’s got all the sheep and junked-up trailers at the end of Thornton Loop. I . . . I told him I was going to rape his mother and kill his dog.”

  Sitka raised his eyebrows. Ruthie had yet to see him truly surprised. Maybe being blindsided so many times during games had knocked the ability out of him. “Why’d you do that?”

  “I don’t know, it just came out. He’s been haunting my property ever since I moved in. Watching me. He’s been watching me since I was a girl. He’s a seventy-five-year-old racist and he sniffs around like a teenager.” She took a drink. “Whenever I come outside he tries to tell me what needs fixing, and I know he’s looking through the windows at night. I can’t change clothes in my own room without checking the blinds. Early this morning, he was at the end of my walk.” She put the bottle down and pulled the last silvered strip off the glass. “Just standing there staring, as if he doesn’t mind everybody knowing what he’s doing. And I lost it. I don’t know why it makes me so mad, but it feels like . . . like he wants to have me and then curse me.”

  Sitka nodded slowly.

  “Like he wants to fuck me and then burn me like a witch.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Sitka set the beer down. “Don’t think like that. Don’t let those things in your head.”

  “I know it’s probably not that bad, but you don’t know what he’s like. I’ve known some men . . . and he’s the worst in the valley.”

  “I know men,” Sitka said. “And I know curses. The Cowboys, when I played for them, they had a Haitian guy who’d come in with little bones and feathers and put a hex on whoever we were up against that week. Saying so-and-so was going to get his arm broke or his knee blown out or concussed. Usually it came true, too. When I got traded, I got this.” He lifted his shirt to show her a small coiled rune tattooed on his massive rib cage. “For when I had to play against them. It’s a shield.”

  “Does it work?”

  Sitka shrugged. “I can still walk sometimes. And I didn’t have to kill anyone’s dog.”

  Ruthie smiled. Little crumpled balls from the beer label littered the tabletop. “It was just the worst thing I could think of,” she said. “I don’t know where it came from. His mom’s about a hundred, she hasn’t left her trailer in years. She might already be dead in there. Sometimes a meanness just comes through me. It’s like it’s coming from somewhere deep in the earth and I can’t help myself. The first time was when I was seven, I threw a rock at a little boy for no reason.” She lifted the bare bottle but didn’t drink. “In high school, I had my boyfriend punch a kid whose family I didn’t like. Another time I told my dad I could see why my mom left. It was the same. The worst thing I could think of.”

  “I’d say trying to scare off the old pervert next door is different from the things we say to people we love when we’re mad at them.” Sitka rested his palm on the edge of the table. “You want me to talk to him?”

  “No.” Ruthie shook her head slowly. “I can handle it. I’ve been handling it my whole life.”

  “It might be easy. Men around here seem to love me.”

  “Oh, some of them hate you, too. They hate anyone with a house and a fence like yours. Even if you let the hunters back in.”

  Sitka pondered this. He looked down at his hands. It seemed hard for him to fathom that anyone could not like him. It was a problem Ruthie had found in other men as well. They imagined that if they acted with magnanimity in their station, everyone in the whole world would love them. Women knew better. They learned early on that envy and meanness come from nothing and nowhere and would always remain.

  Only one other couple was in the room: a pair of leathery bikers leaning against the bar rail. They were sniping at each other about the shake-a-day—if the payout warranted another try—causing their neck waddles to twitch over their beers. They were the kinds Ruthie saw in the early afternoon in every bar she’d ever been to. Man and woman worn down to wrinkled twins. Oscillating between love and hate. Gone back to their holes before the night crowd came in.

  “This place used to be famous,” Ruthie said. “You can’t tell now, but when my dad was a kid they had shuttles from Hamilton and Missoula. They’d pick you up on the street and bring you back the next morning. Big-time bands played
and they never stopped serving. People came from all over and slept in the field. My dad says he kissed a famous country music star here once, but he wouldn’t tell me which one.” She stopped, touched by her father’s lies.

  “I didn’t have a beer until I was twenty-two. My dad said it would make me soft.”

  Ruthie tried to picture Sitka’s father. She saw a hulking shadow in a recliner, a fist like a cinder block gripping a protein shake on its arm. Dead fish eyes glittering. Who steals money from their own child? She tipped the neck of her bottle toward Sitka. “Well, cheers, we’re catching up.”

  A wedge of sunlight slanted in through the door. Sitka’s eyes followed the lazy pattern it made on the floorboards, the motes of dust rising through the golden air. “That meanness was all I had as a kid,” he said. “I’d have killed someone on the football field if I could’ve, and been proud of it. Harder, meaner, stronger. That’s all he wanted from me. It’s not in the ground, it’s in here.” He tapped his chest. “Waiting, all the time, and some people let it take over.”

  27.

  The early summer heat had gathered by the time Ruthie and Sitka left the bar. Ruthie turned on the air conditioner, an automotive luxury neither she nor her dad had ever been able to maintain, and drove east along Lolo Creek past an old schoolhouse and a ranch that had burned in one of the fires of Ruthie’s youth. Only the hearth and chimney remained of the main house. The white fence had also been spared. The wrought-iron gate looked tragic guarding the burned-out waste. A two-story townhouse had been hastily erected in the far corner with the insurance money, but all the grandeur of the former ranch was lost.

  At the 93 junction, they turned south into the Bitterroot Valley. The Second Nature Taxidermy lot was full of trucks. A pile of antlers lay bleaching in the sun. A naked plaster woman kicked her feet from the steel tub above the awning of the Hayloft Saloon. Ruthie saw shimmering figures atop tractors in distant fields. WIFE LEFT. GONE TO EUROPE. EVERYTHING MUST GO, was spray-painted across three huge sheets of plywood in front of Happel’s used car lot. Ruthie squeezed her eyes shut and opened them, wanting to laugh. Happel’s wife in Europe? With her sallow face and dumpy legs? She remembered when they were too poor to rebuild their shack after the earthquake. How long and strange life was. After another mile, Terry French’s pawnshop came into view. The hand-lettered marquee read the same as it had for her entire life: french pawn, and then below: Guns: An Investment That Shoots. Ruthie imagined turning off the highway and smashing through the Old-West-style plank building. Artillery, Indian jewelry, and belt buckles scattering in her wake. Hauling Terry into the backseat and taking him with them over Skalkaho Pass to Philipsburg.

  A disjointed arrow of ducks flew overhead. Bang, bang, bang.

  Sitka rolled his head toward her. “I heard ducks have a corkscrew penis,” he said.

  “Who told you that?” Ruthie was fairly certain she knew more about ducks than he did. They passed Hooper’s Landing and the Lake Como turn. The outskirts of Darby came into view: a tire shop and Whipple’s, with the bulk of the high school beyond. Whipple had retired and his sons now ran the store, fighting to stay in business with the new Wal-Mart in Hamilton. Ruthie tried to picture a mallard’s undercarriage. Saw a literal corkscrew, steely and sharp, creeping out from beneath the feathers.

  “The females developed corkscrew vaginas as a protection because there’s so much duck rape,” Sitka went on. “So the males got corkscrew cocks.”

  “Do you know anything useful?” Ruthie asked, slowing in front of the diner, and thinking for the thousandth time that she’d spent too much of her life there. “Like how to change a tire or cheat the IRS?”

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “Just how to throw the old buttonhook.”

  DEPUTY BADGER WAS WAITING on Ruthie’s porch, leaning against the railing in his uniform. Another figure lurked in the shadows, but it wasn’t until she parked that she realized it was Len Law. Shrunken and pale like a decrepit goblin against the siding of her house, his last wisps of gray hair pushed back crazily from his skull.

  “You’ve got company,” Sitka said, rising up on his elbows from the reclined seat.

  Ruthie nodded. She shut the engine off and handed him the keys.

  “Want me to stay?”

  “Better if you don’t.” She could feel Badger’s eyes boring through the tinted windows. They’d hardly spoken in the past two years. He’d studiously avoided her, even in the diner and Super 1 checkout line. She could feel the strain in him when he did, like he was telling himself a story he didn’t believe, but it was a relief to her. This was the first time he’d been to her new house. She hoped it didn’t herald more visits. Ruthie got out and rounded the hood, feeling Sitka’s steady, fragile bulk as he came to take her place in the driver’s seat. He stopped awkwardly to hug her goodbye. She stood up on her tiptoes, took his cheeks in her hands, and pressed her lips to his.

  Sitka turned bright red. His lips slowly parted. He touched her hips. She held him, warmth filling her chest, for as long as she could.

  “I’ve been wanting to do that for months,” Ruthie said, leaning back and looking into his blue eyes.

  Sitka turned even redder. “Me, too.” He smiled, gulped down a breath, and stepped away. He raised his hand to Badger.

  Badger raised his back, clearly against his will.

  “I’ll come by the diner in the morning, and . . . and see you then,” Sitka stammered. Aglow, he pulled himself into the Yukon and started the engine. He waved to Ruthie. Her heart thudded. She waited for him to pull away, then turned back to her yard. The edges of her lawn were overgrown at the chain-link fence, but she’d cleared the vegetable bed, and a row of tomato starts were growing up the wood stakes. She’d taken out the handicap ramp and painted the house’s trim marigold. The chain-saw bear her father had given her wore an old pair of aviator sunglasses by the porch. Ruthie felt she glimpsed a brighter future.

  “Where you been?” Badger asked.

  “Tried for the hot springs but it was closed,” she said, coming up the front walk.

  “I could’ve told you that. Been shut down all week. Maybe let me know next time you’re going.” Jealousy gave his voice a hard edge. He turned to Len, his palm on the butt of his gun. “Len here says you’re planning to rape his mom and kill his dog.”

  Ruthie felt the eyes of her neighbors on her back. “Why don’t we talk inside?”

  “You said you were going to,” Len said. “Don’t try to squeeze out of it. I been in this neighborhood sixty years. I won’t be made to feel unsafe. And what’re you doing with that football boy?”

  Ruthie unlocked the door. “Inside.”

  Len narrowed his eyes and looked at the deputy. “She make the rules now?”

  “Oh, get in there,” Badger said.

  “I told them not to send you. Still all wrapped up—” Len stopped, seeing the look in Badger’s eye. He sucked his teeth and reluctantly stepped into the small living room. He peered around his sister’s former house at the mismatched furniture and the TV. Ruthie had little interest in decorating, picking up objects that caught her eye in the thrift store and setting them down on her shelves at random. Wolf and bear figurines, dream catchers, old Forest Service posters, rocks and teeth and antlers that she’d found. Seeing it now, she was suddenly worried that she’d replicated the childishness of her father’s room.

  “Eleanor used to have it real nice in here,” Len said, wrinkling his nose. He turned to Badger. “I want it on the official record in case something happens to me. So everyone knows who done it.”

  Badger closed the door behind him. They all three stood in the semidarkness. Badger scuffed his boots on the welcome mat. A strangely large ruby glinted on his wedding ring. Clearly his wife had picked it out. His belly sagged over his belt. He and Janine had been married for six years and still had no children. Rumors of his impotence swirled around the valley; people smirked at him in the grocery store. He turned to Len. “How’s she going
to rape your mom, anyway? No one’s seen her in years.”

  The two men stared at each other. “That’s not fair to ask,” Len said finally. “To make me picture it.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to if you want to press charges. Gonna need a full statement. Diagrams.” Badger grinned bloodlessly. He balled his fist and set it on the back of Ruthie’s recliner. She’d stopped in the entrance to her kitchen. He looked at her like she’d owe him after this. She wanted to climb out her window. She should’ve kept driving with Sitka. Gone home to his mansion and never left. These were the last two men she wanted in her living room. Len kept glancing at her bedroom door, as if hoping it would swing open so he could fill in the spaces in his fantasies. See where she slept. All her lacy underthings.

  “Used to be families on this block,” Len said. “Nothing like this ever would’ve happened.”

  “You need to stay the hell away from my property,” Ruthie said. “And stop watching me. I ought to press charges on you.”

  Len huffed. “Watching you? I’ve been looking out for you your whole life. You and your daddy both. Who do you think gave you a patch for your roof when your trailer was fit to blow away? Or made sure you and Pip didn’t get kidnapped, always out playing alone in the woods?”

  Ruthie was too stunned to speak. He thought he’d been helping her?

  “I’ve kept an eye on this neighborhood longer than you’ve been alive,” Len went on. “We came to this valley when it was savage. Couldn’t fetch water without facing a bear or Indian, and both were worse. My grandpa knew what it took to keep it safe. You come in here, ungrateful, hanging around with the Frenches, sleeping with a new man every night—”