Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

After she had tamped down the grave she threw aside the shovel and got in the Wagoneer. She swerved back and forth down the mountain road to the large white cabin at the windless dead end. She went to the front door and rang the electric doorbell. The windows showed a light was on and a shadow toiled inside. She waited. She banged a fist on the door. The night was still and a far wolf bemoaned a thing she could not know, the way sentenced dogs had done from the chain-link kennels behind her father’s clinic.

The door opened onto Bloor posing in an argyle bathrobe. Ranger Lewis? What’s wrong?

What?

Your shirt’s on inside out and you drove over the hedge.

Get on the horn and get your goddamn chopper up here first thing tomorrow mornin.

She went to turn but Bloor brought her inside by the shoulder and closed the door. He gestured to the couch.

Lewis did not sit. She leaned against a wall and lifted heavy eyes to the high white ceiling over the atrium. She sniffed the air. The homunculus of cat bones and refuse slouched in a corner of the room. God, she said. Damn.

Can I get you a glass of water?

Reconsider the search for Terry Squime and the Waldrips, she said. Merlot if you have it.

Bloor went to the kitchen and brought back a glass of water. She shook her head at it. Bloor lowered himself to the couch and set the glass on the table. He took from the robe pocket a worn cake of chalk and rolled it over his fingers. Ranger Lewis, he said. Try not to get unduly upset about the problems of strangers.

Not upset.

Have a seat.

Lewis shook her head again. No, thanks.

We’re here for the common good, you know. Please sit down.

Lewis stood where she was and put a finger to her chin. You want me to give up on those goddamn people.

Do you think maybe why you’re so upset might have something more to do with the unresolved conflicts in your own life than with our missing persons?

Don’t talk to me like I’m some goddamn goofball.

I’m sorry. Maybe it has something to do with being up on this mountain all the time? Are you happy up here?

Bein on this mountain all the time is my goddamn job. This’s my job. How about that merlot?

Bloor stood from the couch and held her by the shoulders. You’ve had too much to drink, Ranger Lewis. Koojee.

Please don’t say that word.

You’ve had too much.

Usual amount.

Lewis dropped her head toward the floor and saw under the hem of the argyle robe Bloor’s feet flashed over with blond hair and chalk dust. She looked back up to his face. It was equine and highbrowed like that of an aristocrat in some old movie she had seen.

All right, she said. I’m sorry to come here like this. Late. It’s goddamn unprofessional and inappropriate.

Bloor stroked circles over her shoulders and left there in white what a child might draw of a sun. You know, I’ve been in SAR a long time now, he said. One summer I found the body of a boy who’d been lost in the Sonora Desert for three days. Looked and smelled like a roast pig. Only wanted an apple in his mouth. Later I commissioned a haunting portrait of his body from a friend in Saratoga Springs who usually does portraits of cats. I wish I’d brought it. I’d have liked you to see it. In the portrait the boy does have an apple in his mouth. Albeit he looks a bit like a cat too. You see what I’m telling you?

Not at all.

My wife always told me to make something of something else, Ranger Lewis. Especially those things that make you want to scream at a closed door, you know.

All right. I don’t know what she meant at all, but all right.

Bloor let go of her shoulders and stepped backward into the living room and raised his long arms. He lifted a hand as if to swear on a Bible and then he pointed at the homunculus. Sublimation, Ranger Lewis.

You ought to throw that thing out, she said. It stinks.

It’s art.

Take me out there one more time. I’ll put it all to rest if we don’t find anything and you never have to see me again. I can get Gaskell to okay the extension. Just get on the horn with your man about the chopper.

He won’t want to fly on a Sunday.

Just one more flyover is all I’m askin for, Lewis said. I know they’re out there just waitin for us under a goddamn tree. I know where to go. I can see it, goddamn it.

The pilot dipped an old helicopter between the mountains and struck out westerly over a yawning gulch in the batholith. He wore a ratty beard down to his lap and a helmet plastered with discolored bumper stickers and Christian symbols. The high winds shook the blades and he gripped the stick and sang a falsetto hymn.

Lewis pressed flat her nose to the glass and cast her bloodshot eyes over the land below. Bloor nudged closer to her seat and touched her knee. She turned from the window and vomited in her lunch box.

We’ve only got a few hours up here, Bloor said over the headset. Daniel has to make his evening worship at eight.

Lewis nodded and wiped her mouth with her shirttail. She clasped the box and held it in her lap. We should push farther out, she said. Claude was out near Darling Pass when he picked up the signal and he said it was weak. It could’ve been a goddamn fluke of reflection.

My wife would’ve enjoyed spending some time with you.

Lewis rolled her eyes and turned back to the window and brushed the damp from her brow. The valley and the gray mountainsides went by.

The pilot sang louder now, a hymn about fishermen, and barreled them farther out into the rough wind, past a mountain hung with clouds and over another pastured valley and braided forest. They circled a place where Lewis figured she had seen something moving, but there was nothing to be seen there and they flew on. The pilot snapped his fingers and warned them that they had forty minutes before they had to turn back.

You know, Adelaide always told me that we give up on people all the time in the course of our lives, Bloor said. At some point we all have to give up on each other and leave each other to our own demises, you know? There’s no real rescue in the end. I wish them the best. I really do. Koojee.

Lewis clapped a hand over her mouth and held back the sick and did not speak but watched yet the chaparral valley.

The pilot screamed the cadence of another hymn and brought the old helicopter around a tall mountain into a downdraft and dropped altitude. He lisped a curse word to the sky and grappled with the stick. He wailed anew a birthday song for Methuselah. Then Lewis braced herself and caught sight of a glint of steel and a black ring of condors down below. She put a hand on Bloor’s knee and she called out for the pilot to shut up and turn back. The pilot quit his singing and touched his headset and told her that he did not abide yelling. He circled back. There the wreckage of a small airplane lay on the mountainside.

The pilot lowered the old helicopter onto a level elevation up the mountain. What a calamity, he said.

Lewis was out before the skids touched down. She ran for the wreckage and slowed to a stop before she had reached it. A severed arm still in its sleeve lay at her boots. The fingers were balled, gnawed to five glaucous points. Red ants coursed over them like veins yet leading blood.

Bloor peered over her shoulder.

Lewis stepped over the arm and went on to the wreckage and covered her mouth against a stench the same as that of the burn pile out back of her father’s clinic, where often the fire did not find all of the animal and left anatomy behind to rot in the ash. She came around to the other side of the airplane. A naked body with one side peeled of its flesh was laid upon a slab of stone like some miscarried sacrifice, its abdominal cavity vacant and no face to be seen. A round load once a head now a muddy orb glittered, fasciae left here and there white in the morning sun like embroidered silk. Lewis stared and tightened her grip on her mouth. She heard footsteps behind her.