Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

Something moved behind me.

Ma’am, said a hushed voice. Ma’am.

I turned and spotted him. The masked man was crouched in the trees! Dear me, I was surprised! I had thought for sure it was that mountain lion that walked backwards come for me. I was sure relieved to see the man again but when I opened my mouth to say so, he shot up a gloved finger to quiet me.

He looked about and crept out jangling for all the stuff he carried. He came up beside me and whispered, Are you all right?

I nodded and asked why he was whispering.

Why’re you screaming? he said.

I told him my mind was playing tricks on me.

He crept to the tent and knelt at it and zipped it back up, then stood up and lined up his eyes with the holes in the mask. From an overpacked duffel on his back hung a little tackle box, a pan, and three rusty old traps for small animals. A fishing rod poked up behind him as if he were meant to be hooked on a wire like a streetcar.

What happened here? I said, pointing at the tent and trembling.

A gale filled the woods just then and flapped the stained nylon. Just as quick as it had come the wind was gone and all was still again. It was mighty spooky.

I don’t know, he said, and looked to the sky. We need to leave.

I took one last look at that terribly vacant tent. Then the man sallied forth into the trees and I followed after him.

I thought you could not accompany me, I said.

It’s too early in the season for snow, he said, but I think it’s coming anyway. You’d have gotten caught in it. Come on, we have to hurry.

As it happens, the autumn of 1986 had awfully strange weather. People wore sweaters in Florida and seep ponds froze in Texas. One day people could be out on the beach scarcely clothed and the next they could be in by the fire drinking hot cider. It is my understanding that the climate is confounded for what mankind has done to the earth. It does not surprise me that we would bring about our own destruction and the destruction of our unfortunate neighbors. It would appear that we hate ourselves and the civilization we have made. Cities are bigger and technology is stranger and young people are growing younger and consuming information for which I cannot see purpose nor end.

I have put here before that our darling grandniece Jessica lives in Phoenix, Arizona. She puts in hours of time air-conditioned at her computer gazing into that Internet. I know she sees meaning in it that I cannot. When I look into that white box I am blinded by the all-colored light and the insurmountable absurdity of it all. I do not know much about the science of it, but I am afraid that when Jessica is my age she will see a stifling hot world wracked with wars fought by the poor and waged by celebrities, and from what I understand, Phoenix is going to catch fire, burn up, and blow away.

I thanked the masked man for coming for me. You are a decent man, I told him.

He said not a word and pulled on ahead.

Bloor, carrying a bottle under his arm and two glasses between his fingers, led Lewis upstairs to a candled master bedroom. On a wall hung three oil paintings of leprous zealots cradling headless lizards, and on a bedside table was a framed photograph of Jill adolescent and frowning at a lobster claw.

Bloor poured a glass of merlot and handed it to Lewis. I had some personal items shipped up from Missoula, he said. He nodded at the photograph. She used to be my little pal.

She still up or has she gone to bed?

He shook his head. Grief looks different to a teenager, he said. And anything and everything looks very different to Jill Bloor.

Lewis drank off the glass in one gulp. Picture windows kept the night and the black mountains. Across the room was a sliding glass door to a dark terrace.

Bloor asked if she had heard from Gaskell.

He’s sayin it’s too spendy to give any more goddamn time to it. Said he wasn’t even sure the carvin spelled out her name. I figure he’s just gettin pretty goddamn tired of hearin about it.

Bloor raised a finger to the paintings on the wall. I got these in today. A Norwegian artist. She’s in jail awaiting trial for molestation charges. It’s interesting what turns a person on, don’t you think?

I don’t know if it’s all that interestin.

What turns you on, Ranger Lewis?

Lewis hooked a thumb in her belt and looked at the paintings again. Usual things, I expect.

What are those?

I don’t know, kissin, goddamn slow dancin, nothin interestin.

Bloor neared her and set his chin on top of her head and wrapped around her his long arms. He swayed and danced her in a small circle. You know, he said in a high reedy voice, my wife always told me she could remember the night she was born. She said she was born premature in a night car on a train somewhere between Yakima and Spokane. Her mom never could remember the name of the small town it was they were passing through at the time, but Adelaide swore it had a G in it and the streetlights were the color of dried menstruation.

Your goddamn wife.

He waltzed her gently across the room and pushed her to the bed. He stood over her. The light on the landing through the open door set him in shadow. He clapped together his hands and sent up a cloud of chalk. Lewis sat up on her elbows to better look at him.

He unbuttoned his shirt and kissed the air for each button undone. He laid his body next to hers and dragged his nose up her arm to her shoulder and left there a glassy circuit like the track of a snail. Remove your uniform, he said.

Jill still up? Shouldn’t we shut the goddamn door?

Let’s leave it open. What do you think?

Why in the hell would we do that?

It’s sexy.

All right.

Lewis undid her uniform and rolled out of it and dropped it to the floor. The holstered revolver thudded to the carpet.

Now the undertop.

She undid the brassiere and threw it aside. Now she only wore underpants.

Bloor made a noise in the back of his throat like that of a rock dropped in a pond. He held aloft his forefinger and thumb and rubbed them together and studied them in the low light. He brought them down and took her left nipple between them. How long were you married, Ranger Lewis?

Twelve years, she said.

Bloor rolled her nipple. What really drove you two apart? Being up here all the time? The drinking? The other wives?

Lewis lay still and kept her eyes on the ceiling. She winced as Bloor tightened his grip on her. He pinched her once hard and she batted away his hand. Goddamn it, she said. What kind of search-and-rescue man are you?

The light from the landing carved out the dark in his face, the pools for his eyes, and the broad scythe of his brow. He grinned and his cheeks dug deep channels that left his expression wooden and mystic like a church house grotesque.

Bloor climbed on top of her. He unbuttoned his trousers and thrust himself meekly against her abdomen and she watched the doorway over his shoulder. He took chalked fingers and pinched her side. She wriggled yet he held her to him and pinched her still.

Do you want to hear something painfully honest? he said.

All right. Goddamn it.

I know I shouldn’t, but sometimes I get angry that I have a…I don’t want to say slow daughter, but a daughter that has a hard time understanding the finer points of human interaction and higher concepts.

Your daughter’s not slow.

Bloor told Lewis how Adelaide had bought a dreamcatcher on the day Jill was born and that he had hung it in her bassinet and one day in the summer, when Adelaide was not feeling well, she left the baby under the living room window and fell asleep on the couch. He told how it did not take long for the sun to burn all but the shade of that dreamcatcher right onto the baby’s face, fair as she was, and how when she woke she screamed and screamed. Her cheeks were blistered, he said. We had to take her to the hospital. She doesn’t know, you know.