Ruthie Fear
Page 24
He grunted. “Must be something in there. Don’t know if I’d call it a head.”
“You’re not curious?”
“My stomach’s twisted. And I can’t think straight in this goddamn smell. It’s worse than the old mill.”
Ruthie nodded, dimly remembering coffee-colored smoke belching from the plant where her father had worked for her earliest childhood. During the winter, inversions had been so bad she couldn’t see ten yards in front of her hand, but it had never made her eyes burn like this.
Rutherford rocked back on his heels and spat in the dust. “Sylver makes omelets on Sunday morning, you know that? I’d be eating a goddamn omelet right now.” His belly looked ready to pop out of his shirt and catch a tan. Sunlight gleamed off the handle of the Governor. Ruthie was glad he’d shot one of the creatures, too. Glad it hadn’t just been her. A vulture slowed overhead, circled, then changed its mind and carried on south across the sky. Ruthie stared after it, expecting more to follow.
Instead, from the crest of the mountains, a phalanx of planes appeared, flying east. Twelve private jets with gold stripes along their sides. Ruthie had forgotten Angel’s Landing. It jarred her to think of this hidden town now. Castles around a man-made lake in the roadless woods. A private chef, a private school. The silly fantasies she’d had as a little girl. The jets flew in a slant, like ducks, and disappeared over the Sapphires. Their parallel contrails streaked across the sky.
“Where the hell are they going?” her father asked.
“Fuck ’em,” the fire chief said. “They clear out every time the wind changes. You know they’ve got their own fire department?” He shook his head in disgust. “Bunch of asshole commandos.”
He lit a match. “Everybody stand back.” He dropped the flame to the trickle of gas at his feet. A pulsing thread of blue fire jumped forward, growing and turning yellow as it rushed toward the corpses. It leapt up the sides and immediately burst into a wild orange ball. Sparks shot to the sky. The flames crackled. Heat radiated outward and the crowd began to back away.
“Goddamn,” the fire chief said, also stepping back, surprised by the fire’s strength.
A plume of black smoke funneled up from the center of the pile. The smell sharpened, growing harsher, taking on a cutting edge that caught in Ruthie’s throat. Holding her breath, she watched the flesh melt. Ooze poured forth in popping gusts. It sizzled, smoking mightily. The flames roared and churned, something gleeful in them, as if the creatures had been meant to burn. The fire grew, quickly engulfing the entire mound.
“Come on,” her father said, taking her arm, a sudden urgency in his voice. Ruthie felt it, too. The heat was too strong, too sudden. The smoke too harsh. Dalton began to cough. His shoulders shook. Tears streaked down his cheeks, mixing with sweat. Wide-eyed, he looked at Ruthie, hacked again, then ran.
Ruthie raised her arm over her mouth and followed. She weaved between the bumpers. Her heart banged in her chest. Her father leapt into his truck as Hose shouted for him to get the fucking thing out of the way. The tears in Ruthie’s eyes made it difficult to see. Fingers shaking, hacking and coughing, she opened her door. The big wheels of her father’s F-350 screeched on the gravel as it peeled away. She pitched into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut. The air was better inside, but it still felt like a giant fist was squeezing her lungs. She turned the key in the ignition, put the truck in reverse, then joined the crush of traffic exiting the lot.
The last thing she saw in the rearview mirror was the firemen desperately spraying jets of water onto the flaming pyre. Then they, too, turned to flee, two of them dragging the prone body of the chief between them, the black smoke billowing over their heads.
DANETTE AND JUDY had abandoned their coffee and stood in the sunlight in front of the diner watching the growing black cloud. Their wide faces were slack-jawed in disbelief. Kiley Pompey sat on the curb beside them with tears in her eyes. Terry and Billy French leaned together in front of the bank, still and silent. Sorrow was written on Terry’s face. Something darker on his brother’s. Parents and kids in church clothes clustered on the sidewalk. Homeless men gaped on the corner. All of them transfixed, heads upturned to the fingers of black smoke reaching across the valley.
Repent, Father Mike should have said.
The streets were empty; everyone had left their cars to watch on foot. Rutherford pulled up beside Ruthie, rolled his window down, and shouted that he was going home to check on Sylver. Ruthie nodded and gunned through downtown, thinking of Pharaoh alone in the mansion. She passed the high school, her house, the trailer park—Kent Willis gone from his driveway—and Whipple’s, back to Willow Creek Road. The new-harrowed fields flashed by. They were deserted also. The whole valley empty as its residents streamed toward the pyre.
Ruthie prayed that Pip was far away.
She slammed to a stop in front of the mansion. Dry leaves were scattered across the porch. The paint-flaking columns spoke grandly of ruin. Still Wiley King’s as much as Sitka’s or hers. She stumbled to the door. Pharaoh was waiting inside, panting. He tried to jump up on her legs but fell down weakly. Ruthie locked the heavy door behind them and leaned back against it. “It’s okay, boy,” she whispered, barely able to speak. Pharaoh followed her slowly from room to room as she closed all the windows. Even here, miles away, the acrid smell polluted the air. She touched her chest, hoping the pain and tightness would fade. She sank down on one of the leather couches and stared across at the open mouth of the fireplace. The gold records gleamed above it. She rested her hand on Pharaoh’s heaving ribs. What was happening?
The pain in her throat intensified. It took on a searing, acidic quality, as if the tissues were being eaten away. She tried to swallow some moisture and found it catching, dripping, falling straight down to her stomach. A siren wailed in the distance. Cold fear seeped up through the tree of her limbs. She had to leave. Drive to Missoula, a hospital. She’d promised to meet Pip. But she felt exhausted. Pharaoh whimpered.
Slowly, she pushed herself up. Supporting her weight on the wall, she made her way to the kitchen. She almost collapsed, but caught herself and regathered her strength. Something warm would help. Hot water with lemon like for a sore throat. She set the kettle to boil and looked at the clock in the knot of sunlight above the stove. Only ten a.m., still three hours before she had to be at work. She leaned forward and peered through the window. The black cloud blocked out the mountains. It billowed and pulsed, a faceless beast, still growing. So much smoke, but she remembered how dense the creatures were, and how readily the fluid in their bodies had burned.
A tickle began at the base of her chest and worked its way up into a wracking cough that knocked her forward over the sink. Pain seared her throat. She spat, wiped her eyes, and then looked down in horror at the pale tissue in the large red glob stuck to the drain.
Ruthie gagged, beginning to panic. She gripped the edge of the counter and spat again. Blood came, and more tissue. She saw the creature as she had at dawn, its lurching, helpless path. The way it had leaned over the water. She felt sick. What had she done?
Sweat dampened her palms. She stared desperately out the window. The morning was silent. No more sirens or gunshots. Nothing stirred in the trees. Only a single contrail divided the blue sky, moving much too fast for a regular plane.
Military. She wondered if everyone else had already left; if they’d fled like the rich. If she was the last woman in the valley. Then on the driveway far below her she saw a man running. Large and staggering in his beige uniform, his cruiser wrecked behind him. He weaved up the cracked pavement, barely able to stand, driven by a last desperate strength. He nearly made it to her front walk before pitching forward to lie motionless on the edge of the grass.
Ruthie stumbled to the door. The effort made her dizzy. She could barely unlatch the bolt. Blindly, she ran down the walk to where Badger lay. She fell to her knees beside him. He looked up at her. His wide face was contorted. Sweat poured down his cheeks. The
remains of his brown hair was mussed back from his high forehead. Ruthie, he mouthed.
She touched his chest. Felt the desperate kick of his heart within. It was a song she’d listened to many times as a girl. One she’d longed for, loved, feared, loathed, and then come to feel something else: the knowledge that it was only that—a man’s heart, a bloody motor always running down, a soft and scared and changing thing. She heard in its music Sitka’s also, and her father’s. Always her father’s. With Sylver now, she hoped.
She wiped the sweat from Badger’s cheek. His lips worked, trying to form a word.
I know, she mouthed.
The pain left Badger’s face. It was all he wanted. Pharaoh crawled outside and lay beside them. Ruthie held both their heads in her lap. She couldn’t speak. Something had melted away: her voice box, her trachea. She looked across the valley. The shadow of the black cloud advanced over the shining path of the river and the turn for Red Sun Road. The teal dot of her trailer disappeared. The patchwork of farms and trailer parks on either side. Only the white tip of Trapper Peak rose from the blackness to the sky.
Ruthie looked up at the hooked finger for the last time. She saw a bald eagle streaking toward it like a fresh-shot arrow. Then the eagle dropped, suddenly, into the smoke.
38.
Ruthie Fear’s spirit lingered in the sky above the ranch. As spirits often do, wanting to see how things turn out. Time became fluid. Days and weeks passed like the river that divided the valley below. All was still, all was silent. The black smoke cleared. Ranchers lay in the fields beside their dead cows. Cars littered the roads, their drivers slumped over the steering wheels, their engines turning until they ran out of gas. The lights in the stores blinked off one by one. The bodies on the sidewalk reached out for one another. When night fell, a darkness as pure as ink covered them.
Innumerable stars punctured this curtain. Dawn brought a glistening radiance. Weeds and vines grew up the sides of the buildings. Grass appeared in a crack on the roof of Whipple’s Feed Store and spread steadily outward.
Ruthie was waiting for something, but she didn’t know yet what it was.
A convoy of military trucks entered the valley from the north. She saw them spread out on roads through Darby, Hamilton, Corvallis, Stevensville, all the little towns where she’d spent her life. She saw men in white hazmat suits take readings with handheld instruments. She saw them walk through the high school. She saw them converge on the labs, and she saw the equipment they carried out. She saw them drive past her father’s trailer, and walk into No-Medicine Canyon. She saw Rutherford’s face in the window, pale and empty beside Sylver’s.
None of it held much interest for her. Even when they came for her body, zipping it along with Badger’s and Pharaoh’s into polyurethane bags and taking them away to be buried under concrete with all the others, she watched with little emotion. She knew the flesh now held no more of her than the rocks and the trees.
She waited in a haze. Unthinking but present.
Some months later, after the first snow had fallen, when all the hazmat men had gone and only huge barricades remained behind them, blocking the roads into and out of the valley, sealing it off as the ice dam had once sealed off Lake Missoula, she saw a black speck moving on the snowy ridge near Skalkaho Pass. It wakened her fully. She flew toward it without knowing why. The rising ground blurred beneath her. It was the first time she’d moved this way, and she was amazed by how quickly she shot through the air. The speck took on fur as she approached. Legs and paws, a long bushy tail. The sloping back, heavily muscled neck, long muzzle, and powerful jaws of a wolf. Its coat was black as charcoal, as if it had spent the past thirty years running through a fire.
It raised its head as she drew to a stop above it. Its ears twitched forward. It looked up at her. Its eyes were like light on water—alive with twin flames. Its lips rested over its teeth. Muscles shifted beneath the black fur. It sniffed, unconcerned, greeting her as it did all the other spirits that moved through the air of the West.
Then it lowered its head, turned back to the mountainside, and loped over the snowy ground and down from the Sapphire Mountains into the Bitterroot Valley.
Acknowledgments
To Dave Wallace, as always, for setting me on this path. To Chris Clemans, for his tireless wisdom, and the memory of his mother, Anita Shreve. To Tom Mayer, for believing in this book before it existed. To my readers Panagiotis Gavriiloglou, Grant Munroe, Kurt Pitzer, Mikkel Rosengaard, and Janie Taylor, for their kinship in words. To my old friend Brian Furey, for first showing me the Bitterroot Valley. To my parents, Candace and Doug Loskutoff, for their enduring love. And to all those who walk with light in a darkening world.
Special thanks to the Corporation of Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Brush Creek Foundation, Playa, Jentel, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency, Willapa Bay AiR, Oak Springs Garden Foundation, Monson Arts, and the James Merrill House, where sections of this book were written, and the Chicago Tribune, Narrative, and Distinctly Montana, where sections first appeared, in different form.
Aho, the wolves have returned.
ALSO BY MAXIM LOSKUTOFF
Come West and See: Stories
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Maxim Loskutoff
All rights reserved
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830
Jacket design: Steve Attardo
Jacket illustration: Christina Mrozik
Book design by Chris Welch
Production manager: Beth Steidle
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Loskutoff, Maxim, author.
Title: Ruthie fear : a novel / Maxim Loskutoff.
Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020008284 | ISBN 9780393635560 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780393635577 (epub)
Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3612.O7733 R88 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008284
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS