Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

You see, Bloor said, there’s another one. This part always puts a cloud in my stomach. Koojee.

Lewis turned where Bloor was directing a chalked finger. There in the height of the trees beyond the edge a bloated corpse was roosted black with slow flies. Lewis figured it looked like a fat man wearing a skinny man’s clothes. She wiped her eyes and figured she was crying for the brightness of the sun.

She went back to the wreckage. Again she held a hand over her mouth against the smell and put her head through a hole in the fuselage. A raccoon with but one eye to turn the light watched her from under a seat, waiting. The strewn interior stank of urine and sour hair and was knobbed with dark droppings. Lewis picked up from the floor a tan-colored wallet. She withdrew her head to the daylight and opened it. Inside were club cards, a laminated Psalm about the Kingdom of God, and a Texas state identification card for Cloris Waldrip. Lewis squinted at the tiny smudge of a picture, the dome of white hair. She handed the card to Bloor, who looked at it and gave it back and told her to return it to where she had found it. Lewis put the card back in the wallet and leaned into the fuselage again and put the wallet back on the floor, then she withdrew her head and took a deep breath.

Bloor came around and looked inside the fuselage. Then he too brought out his head and took her hands in his. She recalled the dryness of her father’s skin after he had worn a pair of surgical gloves. They stood sweating in the sun. Bloor searched her eyes. The high winds intoned a solemn pitch in the wreckage, and from the helicopter came the faint music of the bearded pilot, who sang:

I count two bodies, Lewis said at last.

Bloor brushed a fly from her cheek. I bet the third’s somewhere around here, he said. Maybe fell out a couple miles back. Probably dragged off and eaten by goats and scavengers. It’s not the kind of thing we like to think about. But it’s likely the truth, you know.

I count two goddamn bodies, she said. Two men. Where’s Cloris?

Two days of mighty fine weather were had and I recovered on the riverside by the stump into which I had scratched my name. I count it was the 14th of September by then and I had not seen hide nor hair of the masked man since the night my fever had broken. But when I slept the fire did not burn out and still I woke to crawfish or trout in the steel pot. Even then I asked myself if I had ever seen the masked man at all.

I have put it down here before that there is some question about what an old mind will do. At seventy my Aunt Belinda was convinced that there was a pride of mountain lions behind the facility where she spent the rest of her days. The facility is in Franklin, Tennessee, where it is my understanding that there are no or very few mountain lions. What she had been watching out her window, according to Cousin Oba, was a party of derelicts and vagabonds so inebriated they could hardly be upright. So drunk they were that they slunk around on their hands and knees, crawling and growling in the alleyway. You never know what fantasies a mind will conjure.

When I had got back enough of my strength I aimed to continue on downriver. I prayed that the masked man was still out there somewhere watching over me. The night before I planned to depart I sat awake waiting for him to appear until I could not help but fall asleep.

I woke late in the morning and there were no victuals of any kind, but I boiled some water and filled up Mr. Waldrip’s boot and in the late afternoon I set out downriver anyway. I looked back at my grave marker. It struck me how strange it was to be leaving it behind, like I was a ghost errant from the tomb. Dark soon overtook me and it was not long before I had to stop. I had not gone far, I do not suppose more than a couple of miles.

The masked man was no place to be seen, and I did not have a way to build another fire nor did I have a thing to eat. Thank goodness it was another warm night. I sat for a spell in the dark and a pretty blue mist rolled over the river shimmering under what little moonlight escaped the clouds. Frogs croaked and crickets chirped and animals I did not know spoke tongues I could not fathom. A bobcat prowled the brush, its eyes like silver dollars. This bobcat had been stalking me for a couple days. I had spotted it once in the daylight. It had a little yellow tag in its ear. After a little research I would later learn that it was a particular variety of lynx bobcat being studied by some students at the University of Montana at the time.

I had been fiddling all day with a piece of crawfish stuck in my teeth. It had been bothering me something terrible and I just could not keep my tongue off of it. I had sucked at it for hours like a dolt with no manners, such as I had known Mr. Waldrip’s hunting friend Bo Castleberry to do after he had chewed the meat off a handful of quail and left nothing on his plate but a tidy cairn of bones and shot.

I went to a shallow place in the river and washed my hands and face. I popped out my dental bridge and washed that too. I must note here that I have a dental bridge not because I did not take care of my teeth. (I did and we all ought to.) Haunting my father’s bloodline is a blight of geriatric gum disease and tooth decay. Grandma Blackmore used to tell of my Saxon great-great-grandfather, Wetley Blackmore, wearing false teeth carved from a piece of black marble stolen from the steps of the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter in Cologne, Germany.

Well, while I was fiddling with that piece of crawfish my dental bridge slipped from my fingers and plopped right in the shallows! I plunged my arms into the cold water but could not reach the riverbed, so I held my breath and put my head under. The water was terribly cold and the current very swift. The tips of my fingers could just about reach the bottom. I did this for a good long while, but I did not find my dental bridge in the cold muck and smooth stones nor in the handfuls of unknowable black mud I brought up and threw back. I lay there on my stomach on the bank of that river in the dark, cold and mighty frustrated, dragging the tips of my fingers over the stones and sediment. Still I could not find the little thing.

When I sat up again and wiped my hands on my skirt I was colder than I guess I had ever been before. I stood up, shivering and sopping wet, and faced that black wood behind me where the valley narrowed. I was then despondent. I hollered like a crazy person with no articulate language into the trees, which all bowed and swayed like gargantuan congregants of the same whispering cult. I do not doubt but that the sounds I made were of angry nonsense, like a coyote on a pulpit.

After I had hollered all I wanted to, I hugged myself in Terry’s coat and prayed without words that the masked man would return and help me again. And I prayed aloud that I was not the same as Aunt Belinda and that the masked man had not just been a phantom of a very tired, frightened, and desperate old mind.

I sat up the night shivering something terrible and tonguing my gums. I was just as cold as an electric chair in Wisconsin and damp and I expected that would be the end of me. I was sure to die of exposure that night.

Around when I had just near about given up hope, there came a rustling from the trees. I had the awful notion that it was not the masked man but something else. Perhaps it was the tagged bobcat or the menacing gopher the size of a toaster oven I had escaped the day before. Or perhaps it was a larger presence, a perilous predator such as a grizzly bear with a hankering for old women. Shaking like a sickly devil with the cold, I got up and fixed my skirt. I reached for the hatchet in my purse. I raised it out in front of me, not too sure what I would do with it in battle against a grizzly bear or a mountain lion. I listened. Whatever it was had stopped moving.