Ruthie Fear

by Ruthie Fear (retail) (epub)

  “Watch your mouth,” Badger said.

  “The Frenches?” Ruthie said.

  “And you.” Len turned to Badger, his indignation making him wild-brave. “Out there doing whatever she says, panting like a whipped dog. You got no pride. What’s your wife think?”

  Ruthie’s mouth went dry. She felt a ringing in her ears. “You racist old shit,” she said. She saw on Badger’s face the same expression he’d had after the homecoming dance, faced off with Dalton Pompey in front of Dalton’s truck. Tiny helpless rage, like a much smaller man trapped inside his body, screaming to be let out. And worse now, compounded by the years of thinking it would change, that something would finally be understood.

  “You might have crossed the line,” Badger said quietly, shifting his bulk to block the door. “Nobody in this town likes you much.” He paused. “You know why Kelly from dispatch sent me, even though you told her not to? Because she’s married to Guzman, who works at the nursery. And how many times have you called the cops on Guzman just for walking to his truck at night?”

  Len blinked and took a step back. “Just a second, now.”

  “Who’re you going to call?” Badger tracked him slowly, his big body suddenly nimble, the old athlete still in the balls of his feet. Moving with a controlled rage, as if he’d been waiting for this moment since he saw Ruthie kiss Sitka in the street. He pinned Len in the corner. “The police?”

  “I don’t have to take this,” Len said. “My granddaddy was ten times the lawman you are.”

  Daylight slanted through the blinds. Ruthie looked at the window as if she might will herself through it. Outside, birds were chirping, insects buzzing. Sitka would just be getting home. Badger knotted his hands through the old man’s shirt. Len drew into himself, his entire frail body flinching as Badger lifted him off the floor and threw him onto the carpet. He made a choking sound when he hit. He cursed and mumbled, holding his arm, his eyes wildly roaming the room.

  “I’ve heard about you when you were young,” Badger said, standing over him. “How you’d jerk off in that chair you carved over Lake Como. How they had to run you off. You remember that?” He grabbed the wisp of gray hair on Len’s skull and jerked his face up.

  Len’s lips worked silently, spittle bubbling out the sides.

  “You and your kin have been plaguing this town for long enough,” Badger said. “If there’s a curse in this valley, it’s you.”

  He tightened his grip and yanked the gray head from side to side.

  “Stop it,” Ruthie said. “That’s enough.”

  Badger looked up, and she saw in his eyes all the years of not being the person he wanted, of trying so hard and failing a bit more each day. He wetted his lips and dropped the hair. “All right, Ruthie,” he said. Then he kicked Len hard and clean in the stomach.

  Len curled into a ball on the carpet. He clutched his ribs, fighting for air. Tears filled the lines on his cheeks.

  “You let me know when you want to press charges,” Badger said.

  28.

  As soon as the snow melted in the high country and the road became passable, Ruthie drove Jon Sitka to the Lost Horse Lookout. They sat shoulder to shoulder looking up the canyon with their legs dangling off the rocky edge. “I want to live there,” Ruthie said, nodding to the far peak where her fire lookout would be. Fifty miles from any road, with a panoramic view of the wilderness.

  Sitka took her hand. “All right,” he said.

  THE FIRST TIME Sitka blacked out, Ruthie thought it was a game. In the months since they’d begun sleeping together, he’d never pressed her face hard into the mattress. But she didn’t mind. Usually she wished he was more forceful; too often he treated her like she might break. Then his fingers tightened around her throat. She found she couldn’t breathe. She struggled. She was drowning, suffocating. Her excitement turned to fear. She saw flashes of white light on a growing black plain.

  The blackness had nearly overpowered her when she heard a strangled moan from above, and as suddenly as he’d begun, Sitka toppled off and she was free, gasping in a tangle of sheets on the mattress.

  It took her several seconds to catch her breath, and for the flares of light to leave her eyes. When they did, she heard Sitka crying. “I’m sorry,” he said, over and over, from the edge of the bed. He was slumped naked off the side with his back to her, elbows planted on his knees, and his huge head folded over in his hands. Carefully, Ruthie touched her throat. It was bruised, tender. She was dazed. She didn’t know what had happened. She found that she wanted to comfort Sitka, and was briefly revolted.

  “What was that?” she asked, when she could speak.

  “I blacked out,” he said. “It happens sometimes from exertion. When my testosterone or adrenaline go up. The doctors say it’s from CTE, but they don’t know why, or when it’s going to happen, or if there’s any way to stop it. They don’t know anything.” He shook his head, then gripped his forehead, his fingertips going white. Ruthie stared at his pale, hulking form on the edge of the bed. So here it was: the thing that had popped loose in his brain. She’d been waiting for it. Their time together had been too good, too easy. She’d expected the ground to start to shake.

  “It’s why I waited so long and never kissed you,” he said. “I was scared I’d ruin everything.”

  The bedroom walls were bare and the massive gray bed was the only piece of furniture. Ruthie felt she was on a ship drifting away from shore.

  “Exertion,” she said.

  He raised his tear-streaked face to hers. “I could have killed you.”

  She shook her head. “No man is going to kill me.” Her mind was a jumble. She feared the pull she felt toward violence. Badger and Sitka seemed to have separated the two halves that men carried inside, and distilled them down to their pure essence. Brutality and calm. Dark and light. “Does it happen other times?” she asked.

  He looked away. “It can. When I get angry or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Or it just can.” He looked at her helplessly. “I can’t control it. Usually I just hurt myself. Punching walls. I broke my leg kicking through a shower door. Severed an artery. That’s why I moved here. They’ve tried all sorts of things. The doctors . . . tests. They’re afraid I’m going to kill myself. I thought if I just lived alone, quietly, in the mountains for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t hurt anyone and I might come to understand what it all was for. Then I met you.” He stopped.

  “You should have told me.”

  His neck glistened with sweat. Sadness shone in his eyes. “I know. I was afraid you’d leave me. And I felt better with you than I ever have in my life. Seeing the world the way you do, all the beauty, the mountains and forests, the animals. Being a part of your life here in this valley is the best thing that ever happened to me. I felt like I was becoming whole. I thought I could control it.”

  Ruthie smelled herself and Sitka mingled in the air. Two animals, dashed together.

  “I thought my life could be different.”

  “It can.” The old stubbornness gathered within Ruthie. She saw his broad back moving away on the hillside, owl feathers scattered in the sage. She refused to let him go. “I know it can.”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth this.”

  She saw how his entire being had been pushed one way, and he was now fighting to go another. The shape of his life. She hated the games old men forced young men to play in pursuit of their lost dreams. Wars and conquest and football. “I’ve changed,” she said. “I’m not the same girl I was. I’m not my father. You can be different, too.”

  29.

  The valley was shrouded in smoke. Ruthie, Billy, and Terry French sat on lawn chairs on the riverbank at Hooper’s Landing. Ruthie didn’t usually deign to fish here—the shit-fed hatchery trout tasted pre-frozen—but it was the closest spot to Darby and the air by the water was easier to breathe. She watched the fire planes curve over the mountain peaks to discharge plumes of
red retardant on the burning trees below. People hardly remarked on the fire season anymore, except to say whether it was early or late. This year it was late. September was nearly over and the fires continued to burn. Ruthie imagined her bright red bear burrowing into his den, hungry and frustrated.

  “Father Mike’s not the only crazy white man to kill himself in this river,” Billy said, tying a hook on to the line of his spinning rod and threading on a grasshopper from the perforated beer can at his feet. Ruthie had caught the hoppers that morning in the field behind her father’s trailer, when they were still sluggish in the dew. “Old Hark Law came down here during the coldest January I can remember, back when we were kids and winters got cold like they’re supposed to. The river was in overflow, frozen solid on the banks with the water underneath getting pushed up and freezing again. He lay down on it and went to sleep. Was a solid block by the time he was found. Whipple Sr. had to come down with a blowtorch to thaw his body out.”

  “He killed himself,” Terry said. “That’s all. And it was better than he deserved.” He shook a hopper from the can and held it up. Its front walking legs waved wildly. “I’ll be glad when all the Laws are gone from this valley.”

  Billy shrugged, smiling, and cast up the current. He looked fresh out of bed in sweatpants and a rumpled T-shirt, his straw hat pushed back from his forehead, his black hair hanging loose down his back. Terry wore cowboy boots, stained jeans, and a red collared shirt. The brothers looked more alike as they aged. The flesh on their cheeks tightening to the bones beneath. Wrinkles working across their foreheads. Terry stooping slightly to match his brother’s height. Billy standing straighter as his self-consciousness faded away. He and Dawn had moved in together in a double-wide on a small plot of land outside Lolo. They were planning to get married in the spring.

  Ruthie wanted distraction from her life, and her love of Sitka. She was happy for Billy and Dawn but envious also. Somehow a dead son seemed easier to manage than a damaged brain. “Tell me about the winter bear,” she said. “That was always my favorite when I was a girl.”

  “Oh, the winter bear,” Terry said solemnly. “You don’t see those anymore.”

  Billy shook his head. He twitched his fishing pole contemplatively. The split shot twisted in an eddy but the line remained tight. “Not in a long time. Used to be one just about every year. A big old male, who’d given up on denning to roam his frozen range. Knowing he didn’t have many years left.”

  Terry nodded. “Not wanting to waste them asleep.”

  “Out wandering the snow, sooner or later he’d find a patch of open water on the frozen river.”

  “He’d refresh himself, like bears do.”

  “And get his fur all wet. Then he’d roll in the snow and a thick plate of ice would form over his fur.”

  “Armor, hard as steel. Arrows would break against it.”

  “Heavy enough to stop a bullet.”

  “Nothing you could do if the winter bear came for you.”

  The brothers stopped, pleased with each other, having remembered all the old lines. They’d told the story countless times to Ruthie and Delilah in the autumns of their youth. Ruthie held her pole between her knees and clapped.

  “Did you ever see one?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” Billy said. “We wouldn’t be alive if we had.”

  The smoky air hung low over their heads. Occasionally a breeze pushed aside the haze and revealed the flames running down the flanks of the Bitterroots. The fire had nearly reached the foothills and many of the farms west of Stevensville had been evacuated. Firemen shuffled through the diner with soot-stained faces, the steel toes of their boots burned black.

  “Do you think it’s more good than bad? Life, I mean,” Ruthie asked, thinking of Sitka.

  “Fifty-fifty,” Terry said.

  “No, come on, brother. She wants a big, Indian answer.” Billy cleared his throat and cocked his hat farther back on his forehead. He eyed his bobber and nudged the cooler of beers at his feet, settling himself. “Like this: Coyote was sent down by the Old-Man-in-the-Sky to rid the world of evil. He tricked the Elk-Monster into a hole and buried it alive but its hoof remained uncovered, which is why we still have greed and anger. And why that mesa you see to the east is called Evil Hoof.” He nodded to Ruthie.

  Terry raised his beer to his brother in salute. “You should’ve been a medicine man.”

  Billy shook his head. “Too many curses.” He popped open a can. “I would’ve made the whole valley sick.” Gnats hovered over the surface of the rushing water. Cottonwood fluff swirled in the shallows. Ruthie looked across at the spot where Father Mike’s cassock had tangled on the rocks.

  “Were the Laws always the worst?” she asked.

  “They set things off,” Billy said. “But everyone else followed. All the settlers wanted the Indians gone so they could have the valley for themselves. Now it’s filled up and they want each other gone. Rich people want the poor people gone. Poor people want the rich people gone. I might laugh if they weren’t burning the whole place down.”

  A piece of ash floated down on Ruthie’s leg, as if to emphasize his point. Ruthie thought of Dawn alone in her and Billy’s trailer, doing each thing carefully, moving blindly in the light.

  “I think we’re going to get it back,” Terry said.

  Billy shook his head. “The vultures will get it back. The coyote and the crows.”

  Ruthie tried to picture this. An empty place. Vines growing to cover Whipple’s store. The labs being washed away. Coyote padding through the aisles of Super 1. She felt the valley’s long memory in the dirt beneath her feet. All the people it had seen come and go. “You know they’re tearing down Lil’s?” she said. “Putting in some health-food place.”

  Billy’s line jerked momentarily, then went still. A reed. Some phantom fish—or Father Mike’s lonesome spirit. “Of course I know,” he said. “Dawn has to drive by every day on her way to work.” He shook his head. “What happened will still be there, though. No matter what they build over it.”

  “Like everything else,” Terry said.

  30.

  Each time Ruthie entered the mansion she felt like a trespasser, even though she had her own key. Walking down the long hall past Charlie Russell prints to the main room with its thirty-foot ceiling and panoramic view of the Bitterroot River. A few miles and a million years from where she’d grown up on Red Sun Road. Some of Wiley King’s belongings had been left behind, including two gold records hanging over the stone fireplace. On the left was “My Fellow Lonesome Rider”—Ruthie’s favorite. She was sure they were replicas but she liked to look at them, as if she now ruled the empire of her father’s vanquished enemy.

  One of Sitka’s former teammates’ wives—an interior decorator—had chosen all the furniture and art. It looked like the fantasy of someone who’d seen western movies but never actually been to Montana. Wagon wheels, Navajo blankets, plump leather furniture. A saddle on a mesquite stand. Horseshoes. Coils of rope. Cast bronze stallions stampeded across the dining room table. A massive antler chandelier hung over the fireplace. Ruthie had asked Sitka where his belongings were, his pictures and mementos and trophies. “I wanted to leave all that behind,” he said. It worried Ruthie, who felt at times that his real life existed elsewhere, apart from her.

  She lingered upstairs before descending to the basement where Sitka spent most of his time, near his giant TV and private gym, in rooms he kept at seventy-five degrees. She wondered if she could ever make the house feel like a home. The only other visitors were the maid and Hector, the property’s caretaker who delivered Sitka’s meals.

  THE FISHING CHANNEL played softly in the background. Ruthie wished Sitka would turn it off. She didn’t want to come while hearing how to properly draw a hooked bass along an eddy current. The room was warm, almost hot. She was sitting in the giant vibrating orthopedic chair with Sitka on his knees before her. Her bare legs dangled around his head. His tongue moved in quick circ
les, then long strokes lengthwise, causing Ruthie’s stomach to involuntarily tremble. His eyes flicked up to hers for approval.

  This was their sex life now. Sitka didn’t allow her to reciprocate for fear that the stimulation would trigger another blackout. She squeezed his ears with her thighs. The image of his face between them had made her come almost instantly at first, but it held less of a charge now. She closed her eyes and let her head roll back. Her mind drifted along with the thrumming of the chair’s motor. The fishing announcer spoke of belly reels, pencil-length sinkers, and a great angler he’d known who kept his bait warm inside his lip. Ruthie imagined how she and Sitka would look to someone peering in through the basement’s egress windows. A giant hairless man prone before a small vibrating woman. She thought of the other deviants she knew in the Bitterroot Valley: the Breeds; Whipple Jr. and his wife, who chained each other to trees in their yard; Len Law lurking outside her window.

  She’d expected to understand the world as she neared thirty, but she felt more dumbstruck than ever.

  “HECTOR SAW SOMETHING on my land today,” Sitka said, walking shirtless to the fridge and taking out a labeled Tupperware container. “He told me when he dropped dinner off. It scared him. He couldn’t get back to his truck fast enough.” A scar ran down Sitka’s side from where he’d had kidney surgery after a late hit in a preseason game. He had a number of other scars, and tattoos besides the rune, including one at his waistline of a bear roaring on its hind legs. Ruthie held her arm up to compare its topography to his.

  “What was it?”

  “Some kind of animal. He only saw it from a distance and couldn’t describe it, even in Spanish. He just said it didn’t look right.”

  “A deer with mange, maybe,” Ruthie said. “They get bald and look like fucking demons.” Sitka shrugged. He opened the container and smelled whatever was inside. The back of Ruthie’s neck suddenly went cold. She realized she had echoed her father from twenty years before. A presence pushed against the edges of her mind, one she still felt every time she looked into No-Medicine Canyon. “Did he say if it had a head?” she asked.