“I think it’s quinoa.” Sitka stopped. “What? No. Why wouldn’t it have a head?”
“I saw a creature once without a head.” Ruthie paused. “When I was a girl. It was in the canyon behind my trailer.”
Sitka considered this for several seconds. His expression didn’t change. Still impossible to surprise. He set the Tupperware down. “You’re sure it was real?”
Ruthie shook her head. “No. But I was then. It was shaped like a kidney, with insect feet on two long, double-jointed legs. Taller than you, taller than some of the trees. Its body was covered in gray feathers and it lurched when it walked, as if it were just learning. Pip and I looked for it for years. I think she still does.”
Pale afternoon sunlight reflected off the snowy hills through the windows. Ruthie watched Sitka lower his bald head. She wondered when he’d last been outside.
“Were you scared?” Sitka asked.
She nodded. “I hated it. It reminded me of pollution and all the horrible things I was learning about. How whales were choking to death on plastic bags, baby pelicans getting trapped in oil spills, the clear-cuts.” She remembered wanting to crush the creature like a mosquito against a rock.
“Back East, everything is paved over,” Sitka said. “I never thought much about animals when I was little. Just sports and TV and schoolwork.” He’d grown up in New Jersey, a place she equated with a crowded parking lot. He paused. “I didn’t even know there was a natural world.”
“I felt that in Las Vegas. I ended up almost shooting someone.”
“When I first got here, it was like I’d come to another planet,” he said.
The sound of the front door opening upstairs interrupted them.
“Hello?” The voice echoed off the high ceilings. Ruthie looked at Sitka in bewilderment. It was her father.
“What’s he doing here?”
Sitka laughed. “He drops off a goose just about every week.”
“Oh, Christ.” Like a tithe. “Do you ever eat them?”
“Not really. I give them to Hector or else they just pile up in the freezer.”
Her father’s footsteps approached overhead. “Ruthie? You here? I saw your truck outside and the door was open.”
She knew she hadn’t left the door open. She looked down at her nakedness, then across at Sitka. She swore to herself. “I’ll deal with him,” she said. “Then let’s find out what Hector saw.”
Sitka smiled. “You’re lucky, you know. Does he always follow you around?”
“He just wants to hunt your pond.” Ruthie pulled on her jeans and sweatshirt. She patted down the sides of her hair and looked in the mirror to make sure she was presentable. Then she jogged up the carpeted stairs.
Rutherford looked tiny in the massive living room, half cocky, half afraid. He was dressed the same as always—thrift store jeans, a black T-shirt, and canvas coat—even though he could afford new clothes now. He grinned at her, showing the gap of his missing incisor.
“Christ, this place is big,” he said. “Look at that chandelier.”
“Just because my truck is parked someplace doesn’t mean you can waltz inside.”
“Been wanting to come in here for years. You know I built the roof?” His eyes darted around the room as he spoke. “That was a shit job. Three straight months in the sun. The fucking roof never ended. And look at the thanks I got.” He set the bloody butcher-paper package of goose on the table. He wiped his hands on his jeans. “That’s for Jon.” He caught sight of Wiley King’s gold records over the fireplace and went toward them, squinting. “The son of a bitch. I never met one person who actually likes his music.”
Ruthie didn’t respond.
Rutherford turned back to her and his face lit up like a boy’s. “Think if he saw us now. Right here in his living room, with his fancy records.” He raised his arms.
“All right, Dad.” Ruthie couldn’t keep from smiling.
“He’d roll over in his grave.”
“I imagine he’s rolling as we speak. You know you don’t have to keep bringing Jon geese. He likes you. You’re not going to get kicked off your pond.”
“I want to.” Her father shuffled over to the fireplace and stooped to peer up the chimney. “Have you seen the size of him? He needs all the meat he can get.” He picked up the fire poker and tested its weight, as if its mass would determine the quality of the entire mansion. “Where is he anyway?”
“Downstairs.”
“Should I fry her up?” Rutherford said, pointing the poker at the goose. “We could all have dinner.”
“Time for you to go,” Ruthie said. “I’ll walk you out.”
He squinted at the ceiling. “Fine, fine. I’m supposed to meet Terry anyway. We’ll do dinner another time. I just wanted a peek.” He set the poker down. He took a deep breath, inhaling the whole room, and stuck out his chest. “Old Wiley would shit himself if he saw me here, that’s for sure.”
AFTER WATCHING her father’s truck drive away, Ruthie walked around the side of the mansion and looked up at the hills of Sitka’s ranch. In the twilight, they formed a rolling white plain that rose steadily in a seamless incline to the Sapphire Mountains, which stood as great white mounds themselves. Holy and silent in their stillness. Sitka owned nearly a thousand acres. Wiley King’s old bait feeders were knocked down and decaying along the slough. The owl talons, Ruthie was sure, still clung to the fence. The headless creature suddenly felt real to her again after talking about it with Sitka. For many years it had been a specter in her mind, lingering at the edges. She wondered what was loose here and what was loose in Sitka’s brain, if the two were somehow conjoined. If by killing whatever was on his land she might also fix the break inside him. She pulled her hat over her ears. It was a stupid thought. One her father would have.
A stinging wind gusted down the hillside. She scanned the white distance. The valley was changing rapidly. A Thai restaurant had opened in Hamilton, two blocks from the labs, and they were putting a bike path along the Bitterroot River all the way to Missoula. Soon it would be lined with condos and breweries and coffee shops. Traffic lights blinking over standstill roads. Car dealership balloons dancing in the wind. Ruthie loved the winter for all the people it kept inside. The tourists it swept away and the houses and towns it covered over. An erasure, a hint of what the valley once was. When she could have struck out alone over the roadless mountains, following game trails through the pines. The sound of wolves howling in the distance. Her tracks vanishing behind her in the snow.
31.
Sitka disappeared that spring. At first, when Ruthie came to the mansion looking for him, she thought he’d been robbed. The dining room table was upended and a bronze horse had been used to smash the huge mirror over the stairs. Drops of blood spattered the wood floor. Her heart jumped in her chest. “Jon,” she called, running down the stairs.
The basement was trashed. The glass wall of the gym lay in shards. An elliptical had been thrown into the TV. More blood stained the walls. Water pooled around the overturned refrigerator. Bloody footprints crossed the white carpet. He was gone. She felt it suddenly, an emptiness inside her as much as in the room.
He hadn’t left a note, but she pieced together what had happened from the destruction around her. Sitka had been working out. Perhaps feeling the strain of their last conversation—another argument in which she’d urged him to let himself be more intimate with her—he pushed himself harder. Adding more weight to the bench press, lifting against the tension, the final snap. He’d been on the bench when he blacked out. He’d thrown the barbell clean through the glass wall. Then followed, cutting his feet when he lifted the elliptical. Attacking the fridge, the TV. Mindless in his rage.
His bloody tracks led upstairs to the dining room table and the mirror. Ruthie assumed he’d come back into himself when he’d seen his face in its shattered surface. She imagined him gripping his head as he had on the edge of his bed. Trying to root out the broken place. Leaving bloody finger
prints. Then bandaging his feet, looking around the mansion—which held nothing he needed to take—and walking out.
V
32.
The fall when Ruthie Fear turned thirty, a flock of more than two thousand Canada geese died after landing on the waste pond behind the Rocky Mountain Labs. Everyone in the diner talked about it for several days, wondering what would happen if there was a flood or if the water leached into the ground, but soon conversations turned back to zoning disputes and grazing rights and new developments, and the labs once again became the domain of Kent Willis and his few acolytes, who still muttered about Ebola lions and an earthquake that most people were too young or new to the valley to remember. The labs’ director assured the city council that the waste met all federal standards, and alarm sensors had been installed to scare away any other birds. Rutherford bemoaned the loss of the geese as a hunter, but knew the smarter, fatter fowl preferred his beloved pond anyway, where he continued to hunt almost every weekend below Jon Sitka’s deserted mansion. Ruthie figured there should be a sign at both ends of the valley warning all animals away. If they didn’t get shot or run over, they’d die when they tried to take a swim.
From the following April to October, mountain bikers zoomed back and forth from Missoula along the freshly paved path by the Bitterroot River. Neon in their spandex, helmets gleaming in the sun, happily pumping past the place where Father Mike’s body had riddled up on the rocks. They stopped in front of the diner to hydrate. Ruthie watched them through the open door. They held water bottles several inches from their mouths, squirted the water into their throats, and let it splash down their chins in a way she found grotesquely sexual. Then they eyed the little town appraisingly, clearly wondering if they could live out here. How quaint and quiet that life would be.
Ruthie watched with growing anger. The valley was being paved over. Alone, there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t stand going into the Wal-Mart in Hamilton because it made her too sad to see the people she’d known all her life looking so tiny and overwhelmed amid the endless fluorescent aisles.
THE ICE MACHINE, firewood, and a community bulletin board lined the wall behind the four checkout lanes in Super 1. The store was tiny compared to the big chains, and still rented DVDs. It was only a matter of time before it was gone. Like the buffalo. Like the passenger train. Shopping after her shift, Ruthie was surprised to discover that she was capable of being nostalgic for things she despised.
Waiting shoppers clogged the aisles: a barge-like woman carefully inspecting the items in her packed cart before setting them on the conveyor, three teenage girls holding identical baskets of Diet Coke and Twizzlers, a buff guy in a tank top joggling on his toes. Ruthie didn’t recognize anyone except for Kiley Pompey, Dalton’s niece, manning the second register. The valley’s population had doubled in Ruthie’s lifetime. The new people were outdoorsy types. They could work remotely. She remembered the newspaper’s prediction that Darby would die after the mill closed. Now corrugated steel bungalows with solar-panel roofs lined Lost Horse Creek, parking lots sprawled across former pastures, and only the newspaper was gone.
Early winter darkness pressed in on the windows. Bitter cold, yet with no snow. Ruthie weighed her options. The far-left line was the shortest but the barge woman had already set aside several items in anticipation of price checks or a battle over expired coupons. She looked like the type who rarely went out in public and needed conflict when she did, to justify her lonesome life. The buff guy was joggling even more rapidly. He looked like he wanted to lift something heavy, starting with the gray-haired old lady tottering in front of him.
Just go. Ruthie maneuvered the cart on its rickety wheel into the lane behind the teenage girls. All three wore matching volleyball warm-ups. “His parents were upstairs,” one of them said. “Like ten steps away.” Ruthie thought of herself at that age: the afternoons she’d spent with Badger in the trailer, the feeling that each moment was of vital importance. She wondered, if she had a daughter, would she turn out this way. She imagined the girls at practice. Eyes wide, chins upturned, their young arms outspread like wings as they watched the ball sail over the net, holy with anticipation.
“He was out cold,” the girl went on. “We weren’t even sure if he was still alive.”
“Madison had to pepper spray him to wake him up. Pepper spray.”
They laughed.
Ruthie squeezed the cart’s handle. Brightly boxed frozen meals mocked her from the cart. The girls were watching the shaggy-haired checker mumble to himself as he ran items across the scanner. They hadn’t even glanced back to note that Ruthie was there. She was becoming invisible as she aged.
The only news of Sitka she’d received was a letter from a neurology center in Houston, thanking her for supporting her loved one while he participated in a CTE study in former professional football players. That letter had come more than a year ago. Ruthie still spent many nights in the mansion, sleeping crosswise in the king-sized bed. The maid and Hector had been let go, so the property’s upkeep fell to her. She’d cleaned up the glass and blood, and righted the dining-room table, but left the broken TV on the wall. It was the only thing that had truly belonged to Sitka. She thought of selling the bronze horses but never did. She set up a target range in the field behind his deck and resumed her practice of shooting every evening, as she had when she was a girl. Occasionally she broke a figurine or one of the southwestern vases on the shelves, to distract herself from her sadness. The emptier the mansion became, the more like him it seemed. A great quiet space to hear her thoughts.
Ruthie marveled at the strength it had taken her father to care for her in the years after her mother left. Suddenly understanding the way a heart breaks over and over again, at something new each day.
Some evenings she walked up to the pond and pictured herself crawling across the ice. A lone, determined figure on the creaking white void, precariously suspended above frigid depths.
THE SLIDING GLASS DOORS past the firewood hissed open and a short, dirty man wearing green fatigues and a tattered brown sweatshirt stumbled into the store. He stopped in the bright light and looked up, as if surprised to find people in a place he’d expected to be abandoned. His face was so wrinkled and leathery it took Ruthie a moment to find the features: sunken puckered lips, bent nose, and bright blue, twitching eyes. He looked like all the other vagrants who gathered around the bus stop, or on the shoulder of the highway trying to hitch a ride over the pass into Idaho.
“Hey,” the man said. His voice rose to address the store. “Hey!” He took three more steps and stopped in front of a table of discount cupcakes. He squinted at the red Christmas frosting, then turned to face the waiting customers. “You better watch out.”
He sucked in a raspy breath, gathering his strength, and Ruthie felt a jab of fear. Was this a shooter? She remembered the fluorescent lights exploding in Lucky Lil’s, glass raining down around her. Just that morning she’d read about three children shot in an Oklahoma elementary school. Not to mention Parkland, Sandy Hook, Umpqua. But she’d never heard of a massacre in a grocery store. Was this a new breed? Would the pathetic image of her body pitched forward over a cart full of frozen broccoli fettuccine and chicken parmesan come to represent the next step in American decline? She cursed herself for leaving her pistol in the truck.
“It’s coming,” the man said. “I’ve seen it. Aisle five, the reaper. Do you even know? I’m from here.” He stamped his foot. “Right here. And all you . . . you . . .” He paused, his lips twisting as he reached for the word. “Tourists. Fucks. You come here and it’s coming. I’ve seen it. I’ve heard it.”
A blue-vested manager appeared from Produce. Brown-haired, pale, and over-young, she approached slowly between the potatoes and the onions, clearly hoping the man would disappear.
“Sir,” she said.
“This used to be a lake!” the man went on. “You don’t even know. A lake of water, and then a lake of fire!”
Ruthie found herself forgetting her fear as his words rang in her head.
“Excuse me, sir,” the manager said again, and reached out to touch the man’s shoulder. As soon as her fingers were an inch from his sweatshirt, an internal sensor tripped in his head and he swung around and smacked her arm away. The manager shrieked and the man stumbled back as though stung, a stream of unintelligible invectives issuing from his mouth. Ruthie and the other customers watched in stunned, motionless silence.
Then the muscular man sprang into action: tossing his basket onto the conveyor, sprinting across the linoleum, and grabbing the back of the man’s sweatshirt with both fists. The man screamed, trying to twist free, and the muscular man swung him roughly to the floor. He planted his fists into the man’s dirty shoulder blades, pivoted neatly, and drove his knee into the small of his back, pinning him. Then he looked up, sweaty and proud, like a golden retriever with a squirrel in its jaws and no idea what to do with it.
The checkers stared at him with shocked eyes.
The homeless man flailed and shouted, then went still.
A hush fell over the Super 1. Ruthie heard the hum of the ice machine, the distant hiss of produce misters. The teenage girls leaned together, their eyes wide. The bright frozen tableau of the prostrate man, the muscular jogger, the stunned manager, and the huddled girls struck Ruthie briefly as beautiful: a portrait of humanity awash in the modern world. She thought of a line she’d read in a photography magazine years before. “It’s just light reflecting off surfaces.”
Just light. . . . The thought drifted through Ruthie’s mind.
The manager broke the reverie by profusely thanking the muscular man, fumbling through her pocket for her cell phone, and calling the police. The shoppers began to talk quietly among themselves—Ruthie even joining in to offer that, yes, this valley had been a lake fifteen thousand years before, one of the biggest in the world—and then came a strange interval when the giddy relief dissipated and they were simply waiting: for the police to arrive, the man to be taken away, and the store to revert to the beep and chatter of normalcy.
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