Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

Claude looked up from a pamphlet on cryptology. You’re markin up the glass.

Jill sat in an extra chair and stubbed the cigarette out on the brim of the mug she held between her legs.

She can mark up the goddamn glass if she likes, Claude, said Lewis, and she drank off another mug of merlot and showed Claude a middle finger.

Claude mumbled something about the station getting overcrowded and that Cornelia was attracted to fingerprints like a shark is to blood, and though he wanted to find her, he warned them all that he was afraid of what she might do if her appetite were whetted. The old dog under his desk sucked the ends of his bootlaces and he went back to the pamphlet and stroked the blue tip of his nose.

The girl’s prints shone on the pane. In the reflection given back Lewis could see Pete in the kitchenette raising up his head now and again from the embroidery hoop in his lap. After a time he set the hoop aside and dragged a stool next to Jill and told her how his wife had dumped out all the houseplants on their bed and had left a note explaining that she had gone to make love with a docent at the Museum of Automobiles.

I didn’t know what a docent was, Pete said, so I spent an hour and a half just lookin round the house for a dictionary. Couldn’t find one so had to drive out to the library. Time I got there it’d closed. Took me a day and a half to figure it out. It means tour guide. Most women are just usin a man to make themselves feel all right about growin old.

Some people are deprived of oxygen when they are young, Jill said.

Lewis went back to the report in front of her and radioed into headquarters and got Chief Gaskell on the other end. She told him that she had spoken with Eric Coolidge that morning, who the night before had witnessed smoke rising near the Old Pass. Lewis suspected that Cloris Waldrip could have found her way to one of the shelters there and she told Gaskell that she needed to helicopter a team in and search the place.

Listen, Debra, I thought we’d settled this. Over.

John, she’s out there and we’re runnin out of goddamn time. There’s new information in this case. Eric saw smoke. Over.

Eric Toothlicker Coolidge also gets in the buff and hangs himself upside down from the trees because he’s under the delusion it’s good for his brain. Just the other day I got a call from a very unhappy camper who had the misfortune to happen across him like that. Over.

Reckon it is good for his brain? Pete said.

Lewis turned and put a finger to her lips. Claude had gone out front with the old dog and the door had not latched. A sidelong breeze shuffled the flyers and bulletins on the corkboard to Lewis’s right. She caught sight of the black-and-white composite sketch that showed the smooth, dark-eyed face of the wanted young man from Arizona.

Ranger Lewis? Ranger Lewis, come in. Over.

She turned back to the radio. It could be the Arizona Kisser. Over.

Do you have any credible reason to believe that? Over.

The FBI think he’s hidin out in the area. Well, Eric Coolidge sees smoke comin from a shelter. Maybe he’s hidin in one of those goddamn shelters. There’re only three shelters in that quadrant. It’s worth checkin out, John. Over.

There’s a miner’s road that runs up the Old Pass by the McMillians’ dugout. Truthfully I don’t have a chopper for you. But you’re welcome to drive up there with Claude in a couple days after the snow’s thawn a bit and check it out. I don’t care much either way. Very unlikely. But I don’t know. Drive up there close as you can and hike on in through that notch on the old trappers’ trail. That’s the best I can do for the time being. But you be careful. Over.

All right. Let me know if anything changes about that goddamn chopper. Over.

You hang in there, Ranger Lewis. Let me know if there’s anything we can do for you down here. Marcy says hello. She says she’s had you in her prayers. We all have. Over.

We traveled the day under low dark clouds. The masked man looked back every several yards or so to see I had not fallen behind. In the cold his breath steamed off his round head like a baked potato. I kept up with him sure enough, but he must have been going slower than what he was accustomed to. Often he ran his finger under the mask to get an itch. No doubt it was mighty uncomfortable to go so long with a shirt wrapped around his head like that, with naught but two little eyeholes to see his way. He did not quit, however. Bad weather was coming and a great urgency to get us to safety spurred him on.

We passed a cold night around a fire in a rocky glade. He had built the fire in the dried-out rib cage of a bighorn sheep we had found there. For supper we had some wafers from his duffel. Afterward he slept with the mask on turned away against a pine, silent as a log. The alien shadows of the sheep bones threaded over the rocks and his back, and I drank hot water from a horn he had given me. I slept fast the whole night.

The next morning we set out again. We went on the same as we had the day before and said very little. We pulled on and on and did not rest again until nightfall. My legs ached and my back was very sore. We passed another cold night in the dirt around a scant fire. The next morning we picked ourselves up again and carried on all day.

The snow arrived that next evening just before dark. An early clear moon broke the clouds and lit up the snowfall through the pines. It started soft and gentle like cottonwood seeds blown about the banks of the Red Creek back in Texas. It was very doom-ridden and beautiful.

I hugged Terry’s coat around me and kept the pace. It sure was a good thing we had struck out that morning when we had, being that the snow picked up in a swell. Just when it was so heavy that I could hardly see my hands in front of me, a small log cabin appeared ahead in the last of the light. The cabin was not in much of a clearing. I suspected the foundation had been laid where the pines that had been felled to build it had once grown. Their yet living brethren grew very close against it and thick blue moss checkered the northernmost side. Two small, dark windows of dirty glass on either side of the door chattered in the rising wind. The roof was pitched, and up from it there was a blackened and crooked smokestack. It was an eerie place.

The man shoved open the door with his shoulder. I followed him inside. The first thing he did was to set his duffel down and light one of those fire-starter sticks and toss it in an iron stove similar to one Grandma Blackmore used to have in her sitting room. He then lit an oil lamp on a table in the middle of the room. He pulled out a wooden chair and shook a snowy glove at it.

The oil lamp flickered over the dingy interior. I will tell here some about the cabin. A dresser missing a leg was leaned in a dark corner and a clothesline was strung across the room. A pair of trousers and several shirts that hung there bounced shadows over two bunk beds attached to an adjacent wall. The yellow foam cots to them were without any covers and their corners had been gnawed by some desperate birth of vermin. Yellow rope like Mr. Waldrip used to use around the ranch was coiled in another corner of the cabin. On the table were some empty cans with the lids peeled back that were labeled to have once contained pear halves and kidney beans. On an unopened can of beet slices sat a lone dead fly, dusty and upright. I knew the thing was dead because it tumped over when I sat down at the table.

The masked man cleared the table and dumped the empty cans outside in the snow, as if he were embarrassed the place was untidy.

What is this place? I asked him.

The government built these in the fifties in case someone got lost, he said.