Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

I’m goddamn worried we ought to try and head out there, see if we can’t find—

I don’t want to die out there, Ranger Lewis. Do you? Bloor clapped his legs and stood and left on his khakis two white handprints. I’ll return six o’clock tomorrow morning. He looked once clear into her eyes, winked, and replaced his sunglasses. Lewis recalled a man who had worked as a janitor in her father’s clinic. In the evening hours, when she would work at the clinic after school, she would find this man pacing the blue halls with a carpet steamer, or washing dung from the pens with his thumb on the end of a hose, or folding into the plastic bin next to a lightning-scarred oak the bodies of euthanized dogs and cats. The last time she saw him there he had winked at her too.

That evening Lewis drove the mountain road to her pinewood cabin, listening to Ask Dr. Howe How on the radio. A man with a hurried whisper like that of someone hiding under a desk during a home invasion phoned in with concerns about an inability to throw punches in his dreams. I’m gettin killed in there, Doc.

Lewis turned up the radio and pulled over to a shoulder overlooking a deep gully. She drank from the thermos of merlot and listened to Dr. Howe tell this man that he had gone to sleep with unsettled anxieties of sexual inferiority and that he would do well to remember that all men are created inferior in some way and are therefore all equals. Practice enjoying sex and fulfilling your partner in a respectful intimacy, Dr. Howe told him.

Lewis finished the thermos and climbed from the Wagoneer. She squinted out over the land and the evening mist that settled it and the thunderhead in the mountains. The last of the sun colored her face and was gone. Lightning burned beyond. She touched to her tongue her fingers and wetted them. She sent them into her government-issue trousers and closed her eyes to the dark.

Hateful swarms of mosquitoes kept that steep and rocky little wood. Most of the time there was not a thing to do but go straight through them. I just covered my mouth, pinched my nose, and held my breath. Mosquitoes have always been a special nuisance to me. When I was a little girl our house was by a seep pond and Mother would leave the window open on hot summer nights. You could count on those little winged devils to find out the holes in the flyscreen. I would swat at them until the moon was gone. I am not fond of that awful whine they like to make. Gracious, how gargantuan they sound when they get right up to your ear and sing that song which I imagine is sung in the halls of damnation.

I was slow getting down that mountain, being that I was mighty careful where I put my feet. All about were barrows of rock and motts of twisted pine and big old spruce. I held on to low branches to keep from falling over and stopped often to rest my breath. I was mighty thirsty again too. One good spill dirtied up my skirt and the zigzag sweater, but I managed not to hurt myself. Mr. Waldrip and I had been taking calcium tablets with our breakfast, so my bones were good and strong.

I am sure it was near three hours before I got to that little clearing where I had marked there had been smoke.

When a mind has had seventy-two years’ worth of thoughts, it has the opportunity to start acting a little funny. It runs the way my vacuum cleaner ran after twenty-three years of Mr. Waldrip refusing to replace it. The rubber belts inside go slack and the work of it smells like warm hair and dust. Now, I had never worried much about dementia before; Grandma Blackmore’s mind could skin a buffalo right up until the day she ended her earthly career at ninety-six. Still, as I set my old back to a great spruce and sank to the ground, my worry was that my cognition had fooled me good about the smoke I had seen rising up from the clearing. It occurred to me that it might have been wishful thinking, the way men lost in deserts see lakes where there is nothing but sand. There was not a thing in that clearing save rocks and grass and somewhere a terribly noisy owl. But I was sure I had seen smoke.

Clouds blew in above and the shadows under the trees grew together. Suddenly all was darker. I had a pain in my stomach. I had not yet passed the jelly and toast I had eaten at the Big Sky Motel the morning of our fateful flight. And I was mighty hungry. I sat for a spell holding my stomach as what was left of the sun crowned the mountains. The place had the look of evil and I was scared. True dark would come soon and I had no airplane to shelter in.

I decided that I would build a fire. I set about gathering twigs and sticks and pine cones and I piled them in the flattest place I could find. I drug a rotted log to the pile and sat there. I took out the matchbook from Terry’s coat pocket. Once more I studied the muscled dancing skunk on the cover and then I struck a match. The flame did not want to take to the log and it burned my fingers and went out. Three more matches were left.

Mr. Waldrip and I used to visit the Panhandle Plains Museum in Canyon, Texas, where there are life-sized plaster figures of cavemen and cavewomen, hairy and mean, squatting at the limits of a campfire with paper flames. One of the cavewomen was meant to have set it. My thought was, if she had been able to set a fire back then in that hard way of living, surely I could too.

I tore up some pages from the Time magazine about President Reagan’s colon surgery and stuffed them under the wood. Then I lit another match and dropped it in the makings. It burned some and went out. I tried again with the penultimate match and had not a thing on my mind save that cavewoman. The flame took and slowly wound its way up the tinder. I had never before given much thought to what Darwin called his Origin of Species , but I did then. I can see how it might have come about. The people that could not get a fire going would have perished in the cold. And I suspect it was womankind that spared Man from extinction.

The fire caught into a fine blaze and I watched it there for a little while. I was feeling mighty pleased with myself, so much so that I risked a little cheer out loud. It is true a fire is a great comfort even in the most dire of circumstances, but it does make the dark it cannot reach a great deal darker. I endeavored to keep my eyes from the dark and watch the glow in the rotted log instead. Little bugs trapped there hissed and exploded like popped corn. A poor daddylongleg was scurrying from the heat but its fine appendages singed away and the fire overtook it.

By then my stomach pained me something terrible and my bowels began to move. I hurried to the other side of my fire and looked around at the dark. I do not take any pleasure to include this here, but bless you, I will not shy from relating this story in its entirety. It is important that you believe I am relating the whole and pitiful truth of the strange events yet to come in this narrative. As a tree kept my balance, I undid my skirt and rolled down my stockings and I relieved myself right there in the firelight before all creation.

I have always considered myself a well-bred Texan woman, but I suppose even the best of us have bowel movements. My generation is mighty ashamed of them and precisely why that is I do not know. But I was sure sorry for myself and I teared up a little and swatted away the little black flies and mosquitoes that pestered me. I was a pitiful sight to behold. After I had finished, I kicked some pine needles over it and went back to where I had been sitting before and cleaned my ankles with grass. The notion crossed me that I was more unlike myself than I had ever been before.

I watched the fire take more of the log and exhausted I fell asleep.

I woke to thunder. It was dark yet and wind and rain clashed in the trees. The fire had gone out and the burnt-black wood hissed like a nest of smoking snakes. I backed up to the spruce close as I could, but rain still fell on me. It had created a sump and I was sat right in it. The rain washed out my permanent. I am sure I looked like a sopping wet mouse. I have always disliked the way I look when my hair is wet. I got out the umbrella I had found in the airplane and went to open it but it had a big tear in it and was about as useful as a ceiling fan in an igloo. I chucked it aside and set Mr. Waldrip’s boot out to fill up. I wrapped up tight in Terry’s coat. The rain was not as cold as it could have been, I imagine, but I shivered out of my bones nevertheless. How I did not perish right then and there I do not know.