Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

Forgot to make sure the pantry light was off, Mr. Waldrip said, looking past me out the window.

I told him that I believed it was.

I took a sweet from my purse and unwrapped it. I was partial to caramels then but I do not eat them now. I have lost the taste for them. Sleep had not come easy in the Big Sky Motel the night prior for the proximity of the highway and I was tired. I ate the caramel and I laid my head back against the seat. Mountains skirted the window and I dozed off listening to Mr. Waldrip talk of center-pivot irrigation.

I woke to Mr. Waldrip’s hand on my knee. The little airplane was shuddering something terrible and he leaned forward to try and see into the cockpit. I was nervous to begin with up in the air like we were. Other than the jet airplane that had flown us to Missoula, I had only ever been on an airplane once before. It was June 1954 and I had just had my fortieth birthday and we flew to Florida to visit Mr. Waldrip’s ailing brother, Samuel Waldrip. We also saw the beach.

Mr. Waldrip took his hand from my knee and said, I’m pretty sure now I left the pantry light on.

I wondered then why he woke me up to tell me something so silly, but I did not say so. I think now he wanted my company. That dab of jelly was still there on his chin. I opened my purse for a tissue and suddenly the airplane lurched. My stomach rose against the buckle of my seatbelt. I leaned over and looked into the cockpit. Terry’s arm was jerking at the controls, his elbow held out high and jittering. The airplane leveled and I leaned back.

Mr. Waldrip asked Terry if something was wrong. Terry did not answer. He was face-forward like the last thing he had a mind to do was look back at us. I fixed my eyes on the back of his head. I recall being mighty afraid of the expression that might be on the other side of it.

The little airplane lurched again. I did not want to, but I looked out the window anyway. A range of fearsome mountains reached for us like an open claw meaning to snatch us out of the sky. The airplane leveled out again. Sun glared off the wing like it does off a seep pond and I covered my eyes. Mr. Waldrip put his hand back on my knee. I looked at him.

It’s okay, Clory, he said. It’s just some bumps, same as the road you dislike.

What road?

The road you complain about in the east pasture.

I told him I did not think I would complain about a road.

The little airplane whined and out my window the propeller had slowed such that I could make out each blade. It occurred to me that I did not know how an airplane stays in the air at all, and I made up my mind that we were all of us idiots for ever setting foot in one. The nose tilted downward and I could tell that we were descending because my arms were light and all my insides seemed to float. The back of Terry’s head frightened me even more now, such like it was the flat featureless haired face of Satan himself.

I got ahold of Mr. Waldrip’s hand and I turned to him. He would not look at me. Neither of the men would look at me. I imagine they dared not see their own fears confirmed in the wild horror laid out on a woman’s face. Mr. Waldrip put his eyes ahead.

Out the window I saw the mountains rise up around us. The airplane shuddered and my seat vibrated.

Our hands were clammy together now, and I looked back to Mr. Waldrip.

Still he faced forward and said to no one in particular: What is it?

Terry did not answer him.

I did not answer him.

I have always been powerfully baffled that I did not pray then. Instead, I took Mr. Waldrip’s face in my hands and pushed his cheeks together. He looked mighty scared and ashamed like a little boy and scarcely like himself at all. Never in all our years of marriage had I known he had in him an expression like that. I let go of his face and put my head on his chest. Gracious, how embarrassed we would be if this came to nothing!

I heard inside Mr. Waldrip that same old heartbeat going quicker and quicker, and then his voice in his chest muffled and big, like the way our pastor, Bill Dow, preached into his new microphone. Suddenly it was unfamiliar as if it had originated from some awful dimension in which I did not hold any belief.

He gasped and said that I was a wife. I like to believe he meant to say that I was a good wife, but before he could correct himself, the little airplane hit.

The noise was too much for ears. I do not know how noise like that comes about. Perhaps the impact had fractured all known sound into pieces I could no longer recognize on their own. Terry wailed out a thing horrible and unmanly and I recall being awed by the way people show their fear of God in such times. We all of us then did not behave as we had for nearly all of our lives. I can still only describe the noises Terry made as a turkey endeavoring to gobble in English. I believe to this day he said God save Mrs. Custard but I still do not have the faintest notion what he might have meant by it.

Mr. Waldrip did not make a peep and was torn from me, and all that I glimpsed were the scuffed-up soles of the alligator-skin boots I had given him years before on an occasion I cannot now recall. An object knocked the wind from me and came to rest on my shoulder. I do not recall when I realized that we had stopped moving, only that the caramel I had eaten had worked its way back up my throat.

Forest Ranger Debra Lewis, a thermos of merlot between her thighs and a .44 revolver at her hip, drove the sunbleached dirt road to Egyptian Point, an overlook up the mountain where teenagers from the foothills drugged and drank and had sex. A bowlegged Shoshone woman named Silk Foot Maggie lived adjacent in a mobile home and had radioed into the station about a bonfire and curse words and phantoms in the woods. Lewis had tossed a can of bear spray into the backseat of the green and tan 1978 Jeep Wagoneer in case the kids were belligerent.

She came upon two pickup trucks parked at the trailhead. The noonday sun knotted black shadows under them and there slept two pale bulldogs chained to the hitches. Lewis pulled over and fixed in the rearview mirror the campaign hat she wore over feathered brown hair shorn just at her shoulders in the cut of a schoolboy. She took a sleeve of her uniform to a row of winestained teeth and buffed them.

She hiked the trail up to Egyptian Point, the can of bear spray in one hand and the thermos in the other, until she came to the place. Voices carried on the wind and a coat sleeve disappeared into a mott of white pine. She clipped the thermos to her belt and wedged the bear spray into a coat pocket. Monoliths of granite encircled the clearing. Smoke unspooled from a smoldering pit of busted lawn chairs and a torn plastic bag. Blackened beer cans twitched at the foot of a disfigured drugstore mannequin adorned with a crown of used condoms. Curse words and Christian names lay coupled and carved and painted over rock faces and trees. From behind a bank of spruce and granite came whispers and pairs of eyes spun there in the shade.

Now you honyockers listen up like all your lives depended on it, Lewis said. Cause I just might decide that they do.

She stumbled around in a circle, crossing her legs like a dancer. She touched the revolver at her hip.

You can’t do what you’re goddamn doin up here, she said. You can’t drink alcohol or smoke whatever it is you’re smokin here. This’s a protected region. Past that old sign back there it’s the wilderness. I’m the goddamn law out here. I’m the adult here. Go on home, goddamn it, go on home.

No response came.

If I don’t see you goofballs comin down in a hurry, I swear to God I won’t be happy. I got the license plates on those outfits down there.