Ruthie Fear

by Ruthie Fear (retail) (epub)

  Ruthie didn’t see any difference. No food, no minerals, either one could kill you. “My dad says he used to skate across Lake Como when he was a kid.”

  Cook nodded. “Sure, back in Utah we used to skate all the time.”

  “It’s hardly frozen solid in my entire life. Seems like there’s a better chance it’ll catch fire.”

  But Cook was drifting away, his mind on food. “Deer, squirrels, moose, sheep. All of them needs a lick. Not just goats.” He patted the sides of his hair and smoothed back over the graying tail. “What do you suppose it tastes like, gasoline? Same as its smell?”

  “Christ, Cook.” Ruthie rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand. She could see him pondering a recipe. Car parts and antifreeze stewed in petrol, boat hulls over wet nails. He’d get himself a TV show. His maroon hairnet a wild attempt at fashion. She pictured him down on all fours in the road next to Pip. Ponytail flopped over, licking away. The whole town flabby-assed and panting, sucking up gas.

  Push the button.

  Enough. The loneliness was breaking her down. She tossed the cigarette aside and walked across the road. Rapped on Badger’s window. His eyes widened as he hauled it down. “Come over tonight,” she said.

  ROSE PAINTINGS ON THE WALLS, rose bedspread, even a tall crystal rose Ruthie had paid too much for at the mall in Missoula. In her head, she still sometimes thought of herself as Rose. What kind of a father names his daughter after himself? Pharaoh bumped into her legs as she went from the kitchen to the bedroom. His whole butt wagged; he was unused to being in such a small house. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. “You fend off intruders.”

  Pharaoh nodded at her, smiling, drooling, the least threatening guard dog in creation. In danger of besmirching the reputation of pit bulls everywhere.

  Ruthie drew the curtains out of habit. She didn’t worry about Len watching her anymore. She’d hardly seen him since Badger’s beating, so carefully did he avoid her. She considered the brushstrokes of Wild Woman with Tame Horses as she unclasped her bra from under her work shirt. All hair and flanks swirling around her face, which was clearly based on a fantasy of the painter’s: too perfect. A younger, better version of herself. Lips the color of roses. Ruthie shrugged out of the bra and savored the brief, cool weightlessness.

  The teardrop mirror on the dresser reflected the sharpness of her face. New wrinkles, a vein in her forehead she had yet to reckon with. It was true what they said: you make an expression long enough, it sticks that way. But she found herself beautiful, too, when she tilted her chin up to the right.

  She took off her jeans and sat in her underwear on the edge of the bed. The only time she cried at movies was when a horse ran in slow motion. Something about the grace of it. Body and mind working together so perfectly. A feeling she’d never quite achieved. She looked down at her knees. What exactly was the plan? Badger? Jesus. Like she wanted every step to be backward. Spend her whole life crawling in the muck while the diner men watched her ass fatten and her breasts sag.

  But maybe this could be different, a change in the whole system. A correction. And in the one difference, a whole host of others to come, like pulling a plug.

  •

  BADGER PRESSED RUTHIE against her bedroom wall and tried to kiss her. She could feel his heart hammering beneath the years’ accumulation of fat and longing. His hands trembled like a teenager’s.

  She pushed him back. “Stop it.”

  Badger withered. The form went from him like a popped balloon. He backed away. He looked down at his tented pants in shame. Apparently his difficulties in the bedroom didn’t extend to hers. Ruthie wondered what he’d told his wife. Janine was known to keep close tabs on him, calling 911 when she couldn’t reach his cell. “What’d you want me over for?” he asked.

  “Don’t pout. Take your boots off,” Ruthie said. He sulked on the edge of the bed and did as he was told. Ruthie stood over him and stripped off the rest of his clothes. Uniform shirt, undershirt. His hairy breasts spilled forth. “Up now.” He reddened but obeyed. Uniform pants, frayed boxers covered in peaches. She left his holey black socks on—his feet would be too much. Turned him around and shoved him, unwieldy, onto the bed.

  The surprise took him a moment to register. He was naked on all fours. She watched him find himself there. The helplessness. The slight breeze on his asshole. His eyes widened in shame and pleasure and she felt a warmth in her own abdomen. “You going to get undressed?” he asked hesitantly, looking back at her through his legs.

  “Shut up,” Ruthie said.

  Badger winced but didn’t move. She saw him go breathless. His neck flushed red.

  “You’re going to do what I say,” she said.

  He sighed in relief, all his years of failure suddenly given deep and sensuous meaning. “Yes,” he said softly.

  Badger’s belly drooped, bearish, toward the bedspread. His hairy shoulders were still somehow cop-like. His cock waved tentatively below him. His thighs quivered. Blue eyes fixed on her rose pillowcase. Pharaoh whimpered on the other side of the closed door, hating to be left out.

  Ruthie nodded. It would do. “Good boy,” she said.

  Both man and dog went quiet.

  A car passed on Whispering Pines Road. Headlights intruded. Badger swayed his ass gently from side to side. Ruthie set her hips against him. He moaned. She ran her nail down the gully of his spine. She imagined all men were much the same from this angle. Muscles widening around the shoulder blades, a smattering of freckles. Hair on the shoulders and then again on the ass. The nape of his neck imperfectly trimmed. The bald spot like a rear-facing eye. Arms straining to hold his weight. She felt a twinge of affection. So pathetic you could come all the way around to loving them. Men, that is. She slid her hand over the pouch of Badger’s belly and down to pubic hair. He sucked in his breath, as if he might cry.

  A BRICK CAME IN through the window. Janine close behind. Clairvoyant right to the bottom of her husband’s wayward soul. She used the shotgun butt to clear away the remaining glass. Poked her head through the rose-covered curtain. Flinched at the scene, but her makeup held her face in place like a cast.

  Behind the door, Pharaoh barked apoplectically.

  Ruthie stared back at Janine. Both women motionless. An age-old connection between them: Oh, is this one yours? Badger was still planted on all fours, his chest heaving. The door was unlocked, Ruthie thought. No need to smash the window. Pharaoh wouldn’t hurt you. She almost laughed at her lack of fear. She’d been thinking about the end of the world all day. Maybe this was it. A shotgun blast to white light. But no, Janine would never shoot her, not with all her projects left undone, so much makeup to sell, babies yet unborn. Badger ducked his head, his paradise despoiled.

  Janine’s jaw began to work. Veins appeared as ridges in the foundation on her forehead. Tendons strained to keep her head attached to her shoulders. Her eyes skipped over her husband and lingered on Wild Woman with Tame Horses. The shotgun was pointed ceilingward. Her legs were still outside.

  “This?” she said. “Like this?”

  Ruthie straightened and wiped her palm on her jeans. Clearheaded, cruel, more so than she could remember. She could walk over and put her lips around the shotgun barrel. Make eye contact. She could take her pistol from the bedside table and shoot them both.

  Badger was frozen. As if he thought, by remaining motionless, his wife wouldn’t be able to see him.

  Glass shards shone on the floor, their wide-flung pattern percussive. Ruthie remembered walking across the desert in the night, the temperature of the air matching her body, the dry earth sinking below her bare feet.

  Janine gave a last look and came to some decision. She leveled the shotgun and fired over Badger’s back, neatly obliterating Wild Woman with Tame Horses.

  Plaster showered down around the mangled canvas. Ruthie stared at the plate-sized hole in the wall. Dust rose. “Oh, come on,” she managed. But Janine was already gone.

  AFTER MIDNIGHT, the goats retur
ned. They gathered in the road in front of the Montana Café. A fine place, lots of drippings. They lowered their heads and licked the salt. Young and old, thin and fat, whole families. Tongues searching between the tiny rocks and particles of tire rubber. Minerals traveling down their throats and through their bodies. Animating limbs, nerves, the whole living engine.

  Ruthie climbed out through her busted window. She walked past the Whispering Pines Trailer Park and crossed the schoolyard. She thought of Pip when they were young. Running through the night, her legs white as snow. The fertility icon she’d found. All their plans for the creature. Ancient, flaring passions. Back in Len’s time, both of them would’ve been burned as witches. Faced off above crackling brush on the courthouse lawn. No place in this country for passionate women, or Indians, or wolves, or buffalo, or . . . Ruthie approached the goats in the moonlight. All the houses were dark. Badger had gone away to his cruiser to drive out the night on endless patrol. The goats looked up but didn’t move. Didn’t seem to fear Ruthie. Why should they? She wanted nothing from them except to watch them live.

  Snowless mountains, rising seas. Sitka floating in the ether like her mother. The beginning and the end. But here, briefly alive. She raised her hands in benediction. Walked among the shaggy heads. Felt anointed in the dry air, untethered and terribly free, like a ghost in a graveyard. Like a queen of spirits.

  34.

  Her father was in love and she was not. The unfairness of this settled squarely on Ruthie’s shoulders, exacerbated every time she saw Rutherford in his high, glowing state. He pushed backward through the diner’s door and spun in wearing his special red boots. He greased his hair down with Crisco. He bought seasonal flower arrangements from the stand in Super 1. Sylver Means had stuck with him for almost a year, and showed no sign of giving up. They were blossoming. A cousin of Terry’s, she was as squat and tough as the engines on which she worked, several inches shorter than Rutherford, wide at the beam, with strong cheekbones and small hazel eyes always in motion, contrasting with her black hair sprayed so rigid it looked like cut glass. She had a daughter Ruthie’s age, and two sons who worked on the oil fields of North Dakota. She’d done a stint on the fields herself, and in addition to knowing how to drive a semi, it was clear she could put a man out of her house, or set him down for good if she had to. She told Rutherford exactly where to put his shirts, and he delighted in it. “Oh, she’s a battle-ax,” he said to Ruthie, and whistled long and low.

  Father and daughter went hiking up Bear Creek, between the great, tumbled draws of granite and sheer, glacier-cut cliffs. They walked a mile to where the exposed roots of a fallen spruce jutted from the hillside. Light wind from the north rustled Ruthie’s hair. It still smelled of the controlled burns that had recently been extinguished. Three young bucks scattered into a stand of pine and she watched them with the out-of-season-hunter’s idle curiosity. Her father stopped above a falls in the creek to catch his breath. Water gone turquoise poured over a series of small cliffs, foaming and swirling in the pools between. Rutherford was a week shy of fifty, with more gray than red in his beard. He squatted on his haunches on one of the flattened boulders in the top pool. Elbows to knees, looking off up the creek, he spoke in a tremulous voice, as if reverting to early, overwhelming boyhood, “I see three things here: the stillness of the rocks, the wild water, and the strength of the blowing trees.”

  Poetry. At first Ruthie thought he was losing his mind. That his physical brain simply couldn’t handle the stimulation of being in love, and had turned to porridge. The strength of the blowing trees? She remembered stories of her customers’ parents succumbing to Alzheimer’s, forgetting their own names, shitting on carpets. Placated to infantile delight by one granddaughter while raging against all the others.

  At least he was Sylver’s problem now. She could change his diapers.

  “Got some deer scat here on the trail, too,” Ruthie said.

  As they hiked on, Rutherford’s mood shifted and he returned to familiar topics: the profligacy of the National Forest Service and the eternally rising price of gasoline. “By next year, if I take every cent I have out of the bank, I’ll barely make it to El Paso,” he said. “The whole trucking industry’s about to come down. Sylver’s got her pension, but the younger drivers . . . Damn country’s in the shitter.”

  Ruthie never watched the news unless it was on in the Sawmill, and even that was too much. She imagined if she listed all the endangered species now, she’d be awake all night. “I think they’d give you enough gas to get across the border,” she said. “As long as you promised not to come back.”

  Rutherford smiled. “I don’t even think they’d let me out of Montana.”

  FOR HIS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY PARTY, Rutherford decided on a Native theme, acknowledging both his third-generation standing in the valley and the rich heritage of Sylver’s people. Succumbing completely to this fit of nostalgia, he emptied out the storage shed (his beetles now lived in a large corrugated hut all their own) and arranged a sort of museum to himself around the yard. Tacking up old taxidermied heads, laying out various traps he’d made, his pencil drawings of wildcats, the box of eagle feathers, and the World War II grenades his grandfather had left, along with an old Navajo rug and two kachina dolls Ruthie had played with as a girl. It made her wonder how she’d survived her own childhood, and what Sylver’s family would think when they came upon it.

  The party also marked the opening of The Last Wolf, his great project since paying off the bank and owning outright his square acre of land at the mouth of No-Medicine Canyon. A private bar for him and his friends, where they could drink Busch Light and talk about whatever they wanted, free from the yuppies, scientists, students, and tourists who filled the Sawmill Bar in greater numbers every year ordering IPAs and discussing belay gear and the dying coral reefs.

  The bar was another shed, really. The same model from which he’d hung the wolf so long ago, only upgraded, with fresh paint, a window on the back, and insulation and knotted-pine siding inside. Raymond Pompey had chain-sawed a custom bear to guard the entrance. It wore Rutherford’s trademark jeans and black T-shirt. Through the door, two couches faced a sixty-inch flat-screen TV donated by Terry French from his pawnshop. A cedar bar ran along the back wall with four tall stools. Rutherford had made the bar with wood reclaimed from Darby’s original mercantile, and glazed and sanded the top so lovingly that it had taken on a suspiciously womanly shape, with a knot between where the legs would be.

  “Just don’t want to walk in on him with a power drill and his dick out,” Sylver said to Ruthie, the first time they saw it. It was the first time anyone had seen The Last Wolf, so secretive and proud had Rutherford been of his work. The two women stood side by side in the doorway; Rutherford waited anxiously behind the bar. A moose head he’d taxidermied watched over the couches, along with the old posters from Cancún and Las Vegas. A custom-made dartboard with a picture of Wiley King’s face for a target hung by the single window, courtesy of Kent Willis, who forgave no one, not even the dead. The samurai sword was mounted over the TV. The wolfskin rug covered the floor. Rutherford had had it professionally cleaned, and the fur was as white as it had been when the wolf was alive. Even now, the rug made Ruthie want to lie down, curl up, and go to sleep.

  “It’s nice,” she said. “Really.”

  “Good place for you to sleep when I kick you out of bed,” Sylver said, but sweetly.

  Rutherford blushed. “It’s just for friends. Plan to be open Thursday through Sunday, and Mondays during football season. Dollar a beer, two dollars a drink. Lot cheaper than anywhere else. I hope you’ll come around. It’s not only for men.” His eyes followed Ruthie’s to the floor and his stance softened. He leaned forward over the freshly stained bar. “Your mother left me over that rug,” he said. “Don’t think I ever told you that. It was funny, she was never much for animals, but one day she looked at it and just started packing up. Like it was too much. After that, it was the only place you’d s
leep.”

  “I know,” Ruthie said quietly.

  Rutherford’s pale eyes scanned the small room, as if searching for something more. His worn hands gripped the bar in front of his short, wiry body. He shrugged and his shoulders dropped. “Guess I’ve never known what to be proud of.” He rapped his fist against the wood and looked away. “Except you.”

  The words lingered in the air, as naked as any he’d ever uttered. Ruthie was too surprised to answer. Poetry and open love. He was surely losing his mind. It wasn’t until after he’d walked out from behind the bar and past her without meeting her eyes that a flood of feeling rushed up her throat and threatened to well into tears. His back looked old and bent as he crossed the yard, hardly filling his black T-shirt. His Wrangler jeans were snug to his bony hips. His big hands and feet remained slightly disjointed from the rest of him, the young man still visible in their constant reaching. The person he’d been when he filled up Ruthie’s sky. He stopped and ran his forearm over his eyes before going into the trailer.

  “I been married three times,” Sylver said, beside her. “And do you know why I fell for your father? He’s the simplest man I ever met. Wouldn’t know a snake if it bit his nose. He loves you so much he doesn’t know what to do with it.” She touched Ruthie’s arm, then followed Rutherford across the yard and into the trailer, her stiff black curls barely moving.

  Ruthie found herself alone in the shed’s doorway with tears on her cheeks. She remembered how her father had held her as he taught her to shoot. The steadiness of his hands flowing into hers. The smell of sawdust in his collar. His heart beating against her shoulder. She took in the room of his small dreams. Animals and beer and guns and a little bit of pride. She saw the edges of his life, and how much he’d wanted it to mean something. She wished she could have been more for him: that she’d married Sitka and become the rich wife of a football star, or won more trap-shooting competitions, or become a star herself in Las Vegas, like the showgirl on the faded poster. But she knew he didn’t care.