Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

After I was dry I was hungry again. At home Mr. Waldrip and I ate small portions. I seldom thought much about food except for that we needed to eat and I had to decide on what to cook for supper. But out in the Bitterroot I was sure I could eat a whole burrowed generation of rabbits and whatever it was the antlered creature in the water had once been. I prayed aloud again asking the Lord to spare me from starvation. As I prayed I heard rise that same sound I had heard two days before, a clatter over the mountains, a rattle in the blue sky. Past the northern ridge hung a tiny black spot.

Bless me, it was a helicopter!

I put my arms up and hollered loud as I could. I made not words but guttural fricatives. Oh Lord, let me be loud enough to reach them, let them see me! I threw off Terry’s coat and scrambled over that field waving naked and wild and unashamed. The helicopter turned towards me! I tripped over a rock and fell, scratching up my chest on a bristly kind of sticker weed. When I brought my head up again the helicopter was gone and the sound with it.

I sat a spell and worried I had broken something, but I counted my ribs and it appeared I was fine. I had bloodied my elbows up pretty good. I did not bawl nor allow myself much disappointment. I feared it would be too much. If I stopped to despair of ever being found or worry that was my last chance of rescue, or if I kicked myself for leaving the little airplane, I might not go on at all. Instead my only thought was: Now I know they are looking for me.

That night I went to sleep by the fire thinking of Mr. Waldrip and what a lovely evening we could have been sharing in the rental cabin if the little airplane had not gone down. The sight of Mr. Waldrip at the dinner table came to mind, knifing his way through a sweating steak. Even in my imagination he still had the dab of jelly on his chin. It is a difficult thing to relate, the loss of a lifelong companion, but here I will suggest to you that it is akin to losing your name. Such as if you and no one else in the world knows what to call you. It is not something I like to dwell on.

A pungent odor woke me in the morning. You may not believe me, because I am a funny old woman and you could think my mind is a nest of dead spiders. But I mean to tell you that when I opened my eyes I saw a big ole trout laid out on a rock. A note was pinned to it by a twig through the gills. It appeared to be written on a piece torn off a brown paper bag from a grocery store. In the blue block letters of a child’s penmanship were the words: Go Downriver .

Koojee.

Lewis and the two men in the station looked up.

Bloor leaned in the doorway. He rolled in his palms a fresh cake of chalk. I’m terminating the search, he said.

Lewis stood at her desk and knocked to the pineboards a mug of merlot and coffee and cursed it where it broke.

I’d say it’s time, Claude said.

The old dog at his feet raised its head to look at the halved mug on the floor. Claude was untangling a telephone cord at his desk. A busy signal burred dully in the receiver.

Bloor returned the chalk to a pocket in the orange windbreaker and stepped into the station. We’ve flown over for three days now without any sign of them. They’ve been missing for close to a week. If somehow they survived impact, there’s little hope they could’ve survived this amount of time exposed in those mountains. But we cannot let it get to us. We did our best. You know, Ranger Lewis, people die all the time all over the world and we know nothing about it.

The old dog wheezed and got up and went to the spill and lapped at it. Everybody watched.

Pete grunted and all turned. He sat atop a stool in a corner of the kitchenette, hunched over an embroidery hoop. He wore a white coif like Lewis had seen actors wear playing medieval peasants on television. The video camera framed him from a tripod.

Claude sighed. What is it, Petey?

Pete brought up a needle and scratched the red stubble of his neck. Back in Big Timber my little nephew got his head caught on fire Fourth of July and I just happened to be standin by with a full squirt gun. You don’t count on there bein a miracle like that for these people?

Bloor said that he did not and asked Pete what he was doing. Claude answered on his behalf that he was needlepointing.

Pete took the slack off a ball of magenta yarn at the foot of the stool. I’m prayin it’ll keep my mind off my heart.

And the hat? Bloor said.

Pete straightened the coif. Found it in Claudey’s closet. Figured it’d kind of go with my new peaceful attitude.

My mom used to work at a Renaissance fair, Claude said.

Bloor looked at the two men and turned to Lewis. I’ll tell you something, Ranger Lewis. When I worked in Yellowstone a man came to us about his nine-year-old boy disappearing from their campsite. We mounted a fullscale search for the child for two weeks, you know. Vast amount of resources apportioned. Come to find the man had killed the boy back at their home in Boise weeks earlier and fed him down the garbage disposal. In the meantime an albino girl about my daughter’s age had been reported lost in Pine Park, but my men and I were exhausted that night and I know we didn’t look as hard as we could’ve. We found her body the next day under a dogwood. Dead of exposure, white as an onion.

All that goddamn story means to me is we ought to hurry up, Lewis said.

The dog had finished with the spill and now was at licking the dust from her boots.

My wife always told me that true wisdom was to know when a situation was hopeless.

Pete raised the embroidery hoop in Bloor’s direction. Your wife sure must have been a fine woman, Officer Bloor.

Thank you. You have no idea.

Claude held taut before him the length of telephone cord. He hung up the receiver. The Waldrips were an older couple. I’d say maybe explodin on a mountainside’s a better way to go than dyin slow in some smelly bed. He clapped once his hands and the old dog quit licking Lewis’s boots and looked at him. I’d say they had their fair share of life, wouldn’t you say that?

Goddamn it, Lewis said. We don’t know what they had.

Claude retrieved a tube of ointment from his desk drawer. My uncle Jack is eighty-six and he doesn’t even know what he is. I’d say Hi, Uncle Jack sounds to him like somebody clearin their throat.

Terry Squime is a young man, Lewis said. Just married.

Now that is a durn sad thing right there, said Pete. I bet it’s real sad to be a widow.

Lewis took up her campaign hat from the desk and held it at her side. Outside fine clouds clung to the range like unearthly cobwebs.

Listen, Bloor said. It’s just too many man hours and funds to apportion and bad for the ozone. My department is removing itself. You know, Cecil’s already left early this morning.

Bloor stood now in the middle of the station, his head tilted as if he were listening to the ceiling. Lewis could not see clearly his face for the dimness of light, but figured she saw there a slow smile and closed eyes, an expression she had seen before on a televised judge adjudicating a most heinous crime and finding in it some cruel and selfish humor. The old dog watched him too from the floor.

Lewis dropped her campaign hat back to the desk. What in the hell’re we doin up here, then?

You all right, Debs?

I’m fine, Claude, goddamn it. You don’t need to keep askin me that.

Bloor neared her and leaned close. There’s something important I’d like to discuss with you, Ranger Lewis. If you would. I need the perspective of a woman.

Lewis eyed the man.

Bloor passed two fingers over the back of her hand, leaving there an equation of chalk. This mountain’s got me confused like I’ve slipped down a hole, he said. My wife always told me it was good for a man to get the perspective of a woman when he’s confused.