Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

She faced about to leave and saw crouched in an alcove between two pornographically defaced boulders a teenaged girl with white hair and an overbite. The girl wore nothing save a brassiere and did not blink. She watched Lewis and palmed her small breasts, her bony ribs working fast. Her face was dirty and her forehead marked in soot like that of a supplicant on Ash Wednesday. Lewis was thirty-seven and figured the girl for at least twenty years younger than her. She looked once in the girl’s eyes and returned to the trailhead where she sat in the Wagoneer and drank from the thermos of merlot until the lithe figures of cackling teenagers swept two by two from the woods like mythical waifs and left in their pickups as the sun fell behind distant peaks.

Lewis drove back in the direction of the small pinewood cabin she had lived in for the past eleven years. It sat off a mountain road in an alpine forest near vacation homes left vacant. She drank again from the thermos and listened to the only clear radio broadcast to reach up the mountain.

You’re listening to Ask Dr. Howe How , I’m Dr. Howe, and it’s time for our last caller until I’m back on tonight. Thank you for joining us today. What can I do for you, Sam?

A tired and dolorous voice belonging neither distinctly to a man nor a woman asked how it was that people could so resolutely misunderstand one another.

Before Dr. Howe could respond, Lewis swerved out of respect to miss a roadkill and spilled the thermos over her uniform. She took the Lord’s name in vain and the radio signal went to static and Dr. Howe’s answer was lost.

All was quiet. Then I heard a whistle that could have been a kettle. I opened my eyes. I am not certain that I was ever unconscious, but it is my understanding that it is often hard to know about that sort of thing. A bright red suitcase, not one I recognized, pinned my shoulder. My guess was that it was Terry’s. I heaved it off. Where my window had been there was now a wide gash in the fuselage, as if someone had pried open a can of peas. I undid my seatbelt.

I had come to the end of a world in that little airplane, and in such a terrible calm I climbed through that gash and was born again into another. The airplane had stopped on an escarpment of granite up near the peak of a high rocky mountain, the nose not three yards from the edge where a jungle of tall conifers rose from below, nodding. All about were mountains. Two big ones flanked ours and farther out a snow-capped range repeated into the blue distance like all there were and all there had ever been in the history of the world were mountains.

I touched my forehead. Blood. My face was covered with it and in a piece of broken glass I saw that I had a small cut over my eyebrow. I looked like an Indian brave in warpaint. I hollered for Richard loud as I could. I only ever used Mr. Waldrip’s Christian name when addressing him directly, a habit I learned from Mother.

The sun was out and the day was warm. It is a strange thing that such a pleasant and beautiful place can seem so mean-spirited. The mountain was high up, but no snow was on the ground and all about hairy plants with mighty pretty scarlet flowers grew from the rock. I later learned they are called mountainside paintbrushes. The airplane had been halved down the middle. The tail of it was gone.

I looked back at Mr. Waldrip’s empty seat. I hollered for him again. My eyes returned to the treetops below the escarpment. One of Mr. Waldrip’s alligator-skin boots was right side up at the edge. I started for it. As I went I looked back at the little airplane and saw the nose of the cockpit had been shorn away. Most of the flight controls were gone and Terry sat there in the open air still in his seatbelt. He was slumped over. I was sure he had passed.

When I reached the edge of the escarpment Mr. Waldrip was some half a dozen yards down, splayed out prone across the top of a large spruce. He was mighty high up off the ground. I hollered at him if he was all right but I ought to have already had the answer to that. He did not move and I could see blood was welling in the seat of his blue jeans. I hollered his name again. I worried he was hung there paralyzed and could not answer me. There was not a thing in the world I could do. I could not reach him, and if I had been able to reach him, what good would it have done? That was when it first occurred to me to pray. I knelt down at the edge of that escarpment and looked out over an immense valley and I prayed: Our Father, who art in heaven, Mr. Waldrip is down there in a tree, and he is badly hurt. Please help us, please help us, please save us, Lord…Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he shall pluck my feet from out the net.

I prayed that way for some time until Mr. Waldrip’s blue jeans had gone plum-colored. I doubtless would still be knelt there in prayer had it not been that behind me there was such a scream like I had never heard before. It was a high-pitched sort of cry, very wet and moronic. Best way I know to describe it, and it is a distasteful notion for which I hope to be forgiven, is that it was how I imagine a simple person would holler if they were immolated.

Well, I hollered too and threw my hands up over my face. Finally I turned and lowered my fingers. My dear! Terry had come to and was chewing the blood in his mouth, screeching that awful way in repeat. One of the residents in my building here at River Bend Assisted Living in Brattleboro, Vermont, has a son, Jacob, who is in a wheelchair and cannot move his body, not even his eyelids. It is awful. His eyes must be shut at night and opened come morning by a caretaker, who is a stout large-headed woman in white with a little squirt bottle of saline on her belt that she uses to mist his eyeballs at two-minute intervals throughout the day. Jacob might not blink, but he sure can scream. That is about all he can do. When I hear him in the halls I am reminded of Terry.

I took some steps forward. Terry was not in a good way at all. He had spit up a segment of his jaw which yet held several of his teeth in it and it had dropped into his shirt collar. One of his blue eyes was black entirely. He did not act like he could see out of either of them. He kept up his crazed screaming, and I matched each one. My hands shook and my heart jumped like a jackrabbit. There we were, just hollering at each other. In some better world the whole performance might have been comical.

Terry was upright some several feet off the ground, belted in his chair, exalted like a terrible overseer of terrible doings. I stood before him, continuing to holler myself silly, without the wildest notion as to what to do. I could just have about reached his shins to comfort him, but I did not want to touch him, and I sure felt bad about that. My whole family were Methodists and I was taught to keep charity and compassion in my heart, but there was not a thing in the world I could have done for that man.

After an awful spell, like a baby he calmed on his own accord and was cooing. He raised up his arm such as to issue an edict and said sweet as can be: Is it over?

Pardon? I said.

Excuse me, I’ve always been honest with my dentist. Am I at the dentist? Just a minute. Are we dead yet?

My husband is in a tree, I said, pointing behind.

Good for him, Terry said. He was always climbing that tree.

After that he said the word waitress some twenty times and soiled himself. Then he bawled and asked for his mailman so that he could post a letter to a relative for whom he had forgotten the name and address. He was carrying on like he believed he was having a tooth pulled on gas at his dentist’s office. I took a notion to ask him what we ought to do but decided against it. Poor man.

He said: Waitress, bathtime, waitress, bathtime for Samantha. I’ve carried a torch for my mailman for years, but it was never going to work out. He’s late. Late. Pull the tooth already, this gas is making me sick. I want to go home.