Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

The girl shrugged.

No, Lewis said. I don’t hate him.

Do you love him?

Sometimes he’d fix cucumber sandwiches and bring them to the station. We’d have lunch together. He’d hold my goddamn hand, tell me he loved me. Maybe I loved him then.

Why?

Never said a bad word to me. I said more to him than he ever did to me. Maybe that’s really why it turned out the way it did. I’m not an easy person. I gave him trouble for nothin. But sometimes I’d catch him just lookin at me like I was the only goddamn thing he’d ever seen. I expect that’s the troublin part. He was a goddamn good man to me.

I used to love a cat but then I realized that was ridiculous, Jill said.

Lewis shook her head and licked the merlot off her lips. Talked to one of the other wives at the courthouse when he was bein sentenced. Told each other how goddamn sorry we were and how goddamn bad it all was what he’d done to us. But she said somethin. She said she thought what they’d had was one of a kind and it hurt her that it wasn’t. I figure we all’d like to have somethin nobody else does.

That woman is sad and stupid, Jill said, and she put out the cigarette on the rock and flicked the butt to the river. There’s no such thing as one of a kind.

I figure you’re right about that.

Do you believe he loved you?

Lewis drank again from the thermos and burped and spat redly in the grass. Somebody lies that much you got to wonder. But I figure he was also sharin the best parts of himself with three goddamn women, and takin care of them and maybe he really was lovin them. You can’t know. The judge asked him why he did it, and goddamn Roland said he couldn’t see his way to a life without any one of us and maybe he was a greedy man but a life with just one person he loved wasn’t enough for him. He said he had so much love to give and if it was a crime to give it then lock him up and give the key to a fish.

If people can believe they love cats, Jill said, I bet they can believe they love more than one person.

Lewis took another drink from the thermos. The girl balanced on the rock, hugging her legs, her locks of hair near too heavy for the wind, the sun turning in them and the scars of her face.

Your dad sure doesn’t give you enough credit, Lewis said.

The girl said nothing.

I expect you’re a little bit like him.

We are all the same boring person, said the girl.

Claude whistled to them from downriver and waved his arms. Pete waved too and went to whistle and instead yipped like a small dog and fell into a fit of coughing. He doubled over and Claude knocked him on the back until he straightened up.

Lewis and Jill walked down to join them and Jill lit another cigarette on the way. When they came close Claude did not say a word but raised an arm and unfurled a finger at the stump of a downed spruce.

Lewis neared it and knelt before a row of letters hacked crudely into the wood. She ran her fingers over them, then stood and cupped a purpled mouth and tottered in a circle. She called for the lost woman. She dropped her hands and cast her rosy eyes over the valley. I goddamn knew it, she said.

Jill knelt at the stump and smoked the cigarette.

Pete sidled up alongside the girl, a hand splayed over his pigeon chest. Reckon you’d lend me one of those? My heart’s uneasy.

Jill shook a few cigarettes from the pack and offered them.

Pete pulled one and pressed it between his lips. He lit the cigarette and looked the girl over. Thank you kindly. Can I tell you, I see you growin up into a fine middleaged woman. Not like my wife.

Claude removed his campaign hat and wiped with the back of a hand his blue nose and snapped for the dog. The dog heeled and Claude came around to Lewis. He put a hand on her shoulder. I’d say there wasn’t any positive reason she put her name in this stump, Debs. I’d say it suggests she’s dead. She hoped we’d find this to let us know that. I’m impressed with this woman.

It ain’t all that good a whittlin job, Pete said. I seen children what can woodwork better than that.

It’s not her craftsmanship that I’m impressed with, Petey.

Jill flicked her cigarette to the river and watched the others quietly. The scars of her face grew pink in the sun.

Lewis kicked the dirt. The goddamn body?

I’d say consumed by some wild animal, Claude said.

It’s a damn shame, Pete said. I’d bet she must’ve been some lady to get down here and carve in that wood, even if she didn’t carve it all that well.

I don’t see any indication of wild animals, Lewis said. No blood, no hair, no bones, not even a goddamn kneecap.

Jill looked around at the grass. I don’t see anything either.

Claude ran a hand over his clean black hair. You’re gettin real peculiar about this Cloris Waldrip, Debs.

Lewis swigged from the thermos of merlot and dribbled down her front. She wiped her face and showed a winedrenched middle finger to the man. You spend your nights in the forest lookin for a gingerheaded cyclops that rides a goddamn armadillo.

Claude said nothing, then wrinkled his forehead. There’s no need to be rude, Debs. I’d say it just stands to reason she’s gone.

Ihad made my way aimlessly for two long and terrible days through those strange woods and I was yet to come to the old trail like the masked man had said that I would. All I saw were trees and more trees. My gracious, there were trees!

The canopy splintered up the sun and made me mighty dizzy. It was the same effect that occurred whenever Mr. Waldrip would drive me in the truck down Goodnight Street in Clarendon. The street was lined with tall old elms, and they splintered up the sun that same way. Riding on that street was like having some crazy person switch a light on and off in your face. I endeavored to keep a true heading east with the little compass the man had left me, but the trees got the best of me and sent me to winding like a snake in a saloon. I tell you now that if I were never to see another tree again before I leave this world that would be all right with me.

I was uneasy that the masked man was not watching over me anymore. I felt direly alone like I had the night Terry had passed on in such awful confusion. The notion crossed my mind that I had been abandoned by God in some blighted fairyland. Unusual sights greeted me. Sickly and tonedeaf songbirds perched in the trees on their peeling feet and there were yellow-eyed rodents sluggish and balding and afflicted with sores. There were colorless insects the size of hands, like you could find at the bottom of the ocean, and black butterflies floated on the mist. The bare branches of dead trees clacked together above me while I watched a slimy frog eat another slimy frog. There was a shrub like a black person’s hair around which schooled hundreds of bioluminescent flies.

Being that the air here was stale and little sound would carry on it, I heard only my breath like sand on paper. The ground was full of downed branches all busted up like it were the floor of a charnel house. There was a decrepit evil there and everything appeared to be ill. I was afraid, but it would take a night in the rain for the dread of it all to finally set in and for me to admit to myself how very alone I was.

That night came after what I counted as my third day in that strange forest. This is what happened: the rain was gentle to begin with but by and by it started coming down in buckets. Then I was lucky enough to arrive at a large wall of limestone. It reminded me of the facade of the old Texas State Bank in downtown Amarillo. I am not an authority on the subject, but I have read that all manner of native people once called the Bitterroot their home, so I am inclined to believe I had stumbled onto the ruins of an ancient edifice of some kind such as those in Petra halfway across the world. I climbed up on a ledge of the limestone, got up close under a kind of awning, and covered myself in Terry’s coat. There was a rectangular cut in the floor of the stone and rainwater was sucking through it like a storm drain in a street.