Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

Bloor looked at the ends of his white fingers. I love people, he said. Do you know what she used to tell me?

No.

That I could rule the world with love and compassion.

All right.

I miss her. When I tell people about her I can see it in their faces they don’t understand what a visionary woman she was. They don’t know what she meant to me.

I expect that’s true.

I’ve always lost people, you know. I think it’s why I first started in search-and-rescue. My mom disappeared watering pansies one morning when I was an infant. Nothing left but a pair of size-six clogs and a water hose running. My dad was already long gone, somewhere dead or alive in a country we had no idea about. Some people thought he’d come back and kidnapped my mom and drowned her in one of the Finger Lakes. They never found her. My sister raised me. Then she died of food poisoning in a hotel lobby ten years ago this Thanksgiving. Koojee.

Goddamn sorry to hear that.

Room service killed her. The hotel settled handsomely in court. Now I never have to work another day of my life if I don’t want to.

I figure that’s a good thing.

Losing my wife, Adelaide, was the hardest. We knew each other since we were kids. But I don’t think she ever was a child, you know. She always spoke like she’d been born with a life already lived in her. Most everyone didn’t know what to make of her, so they were vile to her. The boys at school tormented her. But I don’t think any of them ever really had the upper hand. It was even then like she’d wanted them to be vile to her in just the way they were. As if she’d orchestrated the whole thing for a pleasure only she knew about.

Sounds like she was a goddamn special woman, Lewis said. She missed her mouth with her glass and dribbled merlot down the front of her uniform. She blotted the spill with her sleeve and held out the empty glass.

Bloor poured her another. He turned his drawn face to the windows, where a blue light outside showed fog in the trees. A fingermark of chalk was on his chin. You don’t even know, he said, and he took her fingers between his chalked hands. Thank you for coming over tonight. He pinched the skin of her ring finger hard and filled his lungs like he were to submerge himself in water.

Lewis took back her hand. You’re welcome.

Bloor let out his breath and smiled.

Lewis, rubbing the back of her hand, pulled the Wagoneer crookedly into the driveway. The lights were off in the pinewood cabin and the windows dark. Over the radio Dr. Howe spoke gently to a woman who had phoned in with the name Ronnie and asked how she could be expected to go on and live the life she had come to live when all she had ever wanted was to leave her husband and her three children and sing country-western music all night long in Nashville. Lewis turned off the engine but kept the radio on and listened.

The woman said: I’m three hundred pounds. That’s somethin to do with it. But it ain’t fat that’s in me. I got all this frustration poolin in my belly and my thighs and my ass. I can’t be a country-western singer. I’m morbidly obese and I ain’t got a particularly good singin voice. I count myself betrayed, Dr. Howe. I just knew that’s what I was goin to be when I was a little girl, but here I am now and I’m not and I’m large and I’m tonedeaf. My gran was a singer. Sometimes I go to the downtown library and look through those old microfiches they got of her and the shows she used to put on around town and I just get so frickin jealous, pardon my language. Jealous of my dead gran. That’s low, ain’t it? Tell me it’s low. And then my husband, not long ago I caught him eyeballin my baby sister at the church fish fry. That’s been on my mind. She’s only just able to have a legal drink and weighs nearly a hundred pounds less than me, so I ain’t no competition. Where’s a person like me with all this frustration poolin in them supposed to go to get their self-worth? I’ve just been dismissed and dismissed, even by people that’d say they love me. And I go to doin it to myself, Dr. Howe, I go to dismissin myself and I just sit on the end of my bed while the kids’re at school and my husband is at work and just watch the cat come in and out of the room.

Dr. Howe said: Ronnie, life is about adjusting our expectations. It is what it is, and will be what it will be, like it or not. And I believe that the secret to happiness is to find a way not only to accept and tolerate life as it comes, in any manner it comes, but to find a way to enjoy it in spite of yourself and the conditions it sets. You can’t have everything you want or you would implode and disappear. Do you understand me, Ronnie? You would have nothing at all without all that you believe you do not have.

The day after I came to the creek, I prayed by it for a spell, batting away those terrible little mosquitoes and bottle flies. I was knelt in the wet shortgrass, upstream from the decomposing creature. I drank first from my palms and then from Mr. Waldrip’s boot. The water was mighty good and tasted like water from wells dug in Texas when I was a girl.

I was by now very hungry and my stomach growled something terrible. I prayed with my eyes open for a way to feed myself and watched the clear creek for fish but saw none. I watched the grass fields of the valley and wondered if there existed an animal out there slow and dimwitted enough I might catch it. Although I had seen plenty of times the hunting of small birds and seen Father shoot coyotes from the back porch, I had not ever killed a living thing myself, save for flies and mice in our house. But those are just the little ole deaths of a household, not at all like the desperate carnage which occurs in the wild. Even hunting is just a game men play at today, no longer a mortal urgency in this age of convenience. Men hunt not out of hunger, but out of boredom. Though I suppose men do many things nature no longer requires of them.

I got up from the creek and went back to the wood I had piled the night before. I had used up all of Terry’s matches, and I knew of no other way to get a fire going. I considered rubbing two sticks together as I had read about the earliest Indians doing this and had seen it depicted before in a diorama at the Panhandle Plains Museum, although I was sure I possessed neither the technique nor the stamina to ignite them. If I was to catch anything for supper, I would have to have it uncooked. The notion of eating uncooked meat worried me some. I hear that some people in bright cities are fond of eating raw fish, but it does not appeal to me.

I went out with Terry’s black hatchet and stalked the rocky fields. I swung the blade through the tall grass endeavoring to scare up something I might have a chance to thump on the head. This proved mighty foolish and after an hour or so I sat breathless back by the creek. I very much dislike being foolish, so I used my shoelaces to fasten the hatchet to the end of a long stick, and I set about beating the water at every dark shape that went by. No doubt at least one poor little aquatic creature was maimed. Nevertheless I sat hungry, and my arms seized up around the shoulders like the hinges on the cabinet under my kitchen sink.

I looked to that great decomposing animal in the water and I prayed aloud: Oh, heavenly Father, I do not want to starve. If I should join your holy side this day, please let me go quick, please do not let me starve.

My dear! I was sure I would die of starvation.

About midafternoon there was a sound in the sky, a clatter ricocheting off the mountains. It was faint enough that I was not sure I had not imagined it, but before I could see where it was coming from between the sunned peaks, whatever it was had gone. All that was left to be listened to was the trickling of the creek and the cry of the mosquitoes. I have since heard many stories about strange and mysterious sounds in the mountains. The ghost stories about the Bitterroot are especially peculiar and sad.