Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

The National Transportation Safety Board arrived on an overcast day in September to clear and catalog the crash site. They came in three blue helicopters. Men with rubber gloves photographed and removed the decomposing remains and zippered them away into thin shellwhite bags like amniotic sacs. Lewis watched the men count two bodies and bag the wallet she had found in the fuselage. They photographed the place and the wreckage they would leave behind to rust and fall apart and a straight-backed bald man glided around with a clipboard and took notes.

That evening in the helicopter back to the airfield Lewis asked this man what he figured had caused the crash. He told her that he did not know yet, but said that he was not getting paid enough to find out, for his grandfather had been a butcher and the smell of old meat turned his stomach. Whatever had caused the crash, he was close to certain that Cloris Waldrip had perished along with the others, even if they could not find her remains.

The next day Lewis drove down the mountain and tacked to the telephone poles in the town there flyers of Cloris in black-and-white. Help the United States Forest Service find Cloris Waldrip. Nobody save Pete volunteered, yet Lewis did receive a phone call in the night from a man who told her that Cloris looked as he believed his mother, missing since 1953, would look after thirty-three years. Lewis told him that Cloris did not have any goddamn children and had been born and raised in Texas. The man cursed in a language that was not her own and hung up.

Lewis tipped back the brim of her campaign hat and looked up at the spruce. The wind pulled at empty broken boughs stained dark and hung with flies black and fat like overripe fruit. Dark bands of old blood candycaned the trunk to the ground. She drank from the thermos of merlot.

Pete leaned against the spruce and shrugged the video camera on his shoulder. He wore an orange reflective vest which bore the word Volunteer and a matching baseball cap pulled down over the coif. Lewis figured he looked like an imbecile someone had taken hunting for small birds.

Come out from under there, Pete.

He looked up to the top of the spruce. He pressed a hand to his malformed sternum and gripped a plastic whistle there. He stepped back. Lord, my life’s sure gone weird.

That’s where we found Richard Waldrip.

It sure does give off a smell, don’t it?

And they knocked him down three days ago.

Pete did not take his eyes from the rotten place, thumbing the whistle as a Catholic would a rosary. There ain’t no guessin at it, he said. The man who was up there sure couldn’t’ve guessed he’d end up in a tree in Montana. No guessin at it. No guessin at it at all.

They hiked down a ways and found Claude writing in a notebook before a mossy clearing the size of a school bus.

No sign of your old woman, he said.

Lewis brushed a mosquito from her cheek and left there a stroke of blood. Looks like somebody came through here, she said.

Claude whispered the name Cornelia and touched a tissue to the blue end of his nose. I don’t expect we’ll find anything. I’d say the skeeters alone could have drunk her up. We got a long hike back to the truck and I got to walk Charlie.

Lewis told the two men they would search the place for an hour more and she went off ahead, calling out to the forest, Mrs. Waldrip! Mrs. Waldrip! Cloris!

She took from her chest pocket the picture she had been given of the Waldrips. She looked again at Cloris, the small face and orb of white hair. She drank from the thermos and strode on calling for the lost woman.

She let the men off at Claude’s cabin and drove alone back to the station. She drank a mug of merlot at her desk and listened to the static purr in the radio receiver. Nothing to be heard in it. Outside the window the range was turning dark.

A motor rumbled out on the road.

Not long afterward Bloor stepped into the station and held open the door behind him. Here followed a sizeless teenaged girl. Her thick amber hair was middleparted in curls down her back and she was bucktoothed.

Lewis swallowed the last of the mug and set it on the desk and stood to better look at the girl. She figured the most unusual part to her was that over her face lay a perfect web of rosy scars outward from her nose.

Bloor passed over the girl a chalky hand and introduced her as his daughter. She’s almost a perfect carbon copy of her mother, he said. Jill, this is Ranger Debra Lewis.

Do you ever leave this mountain? the girl asked. She spoke with a strange Northwestern accent and a slight impediment.

Probably go down an average of two times a week, Lewis said.

Bloor brought from a pocket a cake of chalk and passed it from palm to palm. We were driving by and saw the light on, he said. You’re working late, Ranger Lewis. I hoped we could convince you to let us rescue you. Give you some dinner.

Was just fixin to lock up and head home.

Gaskell phoned me today, Bloor said. He told me you took your men and hiked all the way up to the crash site to look for Mrs. Waldrip’s body? That’s quite a drive, quite a hike.

Weren’t lookin for her goddamn body. I figure she’s hikin down. She left the airplane alive.

Bloor clicked his tongue and looked past Lewis out the window behind her. Do you know what you are, Ranger Lewis?

I expect you’re about to tell me.

A fascinating and indefatigable woman.

Lewis turned to the window herself. Off in the mountains mist fell in the moonlight as if spun from it. All right, she said.

Jill moved now through the dim station, blinking her eyes and chewing a little finger. She swatted as if to shoo a fly Lewis could not see, then came around to the corkboard on the north wall and pointed to a picture pinned there: a police composite sketch of a young man with a strong jaw and short dark hair. Jill asked who it was.

The Arizona Kisser, Lewis said. The FBI figure he’s hidin out here somewhere.

Out here?

Maybe. He was last seen in Idaho buyin bulk foodstuffs.

Jill asked what the man had done, and Lewis told her that he was wanted for questioning about the disappearance of a ten-year-old girl.

Jill turned and rubbed her eye. Is he attractive to you?

The Kisser?

Yes.

Don’t guess I ever thought about it.

We took Jill to the ophthalmologist today before driving up, Bloor said. He put away the chalk. Apparently she has myodesopsia. Floaters.

No, I’m haunted by the ghost of a gnat, Jill said, and she picked a place in the air with her finger.

It’s not something you’d normally see in a young person. Koojee.

Goddamn sorry to hear that.

A scented candle burned low on the dinner table. Lewis sat across from the girl, drinking a glass of merlot and squinting often at her in the poor light. The girl held her scarred face by her palms, her thin elbows at either side of a plate untouched. Her father sat at the head of the table and showed them both in alternate a slow winecolored smile. His hands lay chalked white and forgotten on the arms of his chair.

Lewis looked beyond him to the fetid homunculus now leaned in the opposite corner like an alleyway drunk. It gazed mindlessly back at her. You guys got any special plans while you’re up here? she said.

No, Jill said.

Bloor stood and emptied a bottle of merlot to the brim of a glass. He set the glass before the girl. In most countries it’s legal to drink at her age, he said.

Jill took up the glass and gulped it down. You’re drunk and you want us drunk to keep your ego company, she said.

Bloor laughed and shook his head and told them to go out back to the hot tub and get to know each other while he cleaned up. He curtsied to them and the homunculus and left to the kitchen.