Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

I got to say if you expected we’d be stayin overnight it’s inappropriate to bring that girl out here. Let alone Pete.

I don’t figure we’ll be stayin the night.

Claude looked her over. Lewis figured he was looking at the washed stains and missed buttons on her uniform. She tucked in her shirt.

Debs, I’m worried, he said.

Goddamn it. Don’t be goofy.

I’d say we’re not the people we were when we started. Have you noticed?

I expect we’re not.

Lewis went on and the rest followed.

Pete came astride Jill and hoisted the video camera to a shoulder and framed her. You doin this for your college applications?

No, said the girl.

College sure is a good thing. I didn’t go to it. And look at me.

Look at you for what?

Pete lowered the lens. I’m forty years old volunteerin for a search on a mountain, just to keep from killin myself on account of my broken heart. My best pal from high school’s losin his mind about the ghost of a one-eyed shemale and his colleague here’s losin hers about a lost old lady. I can’t find no comfort in anybody left in my life. I’d be losin my cool if I hadn’t let Jesus take the wheel years ago.

Seems like he has fallen asleep at it, the girl said in her strange accent.

Pete scratched his neck and rotated his eyes high towards his brow like he were looking for an answer inscribed there on the inside of his skull. You sure do got a good head on your shoulders, he said.

The party struck onward for a time without words, kept only by the measure of their breath and the dog snuffling and jangling its tag and the clap of the snowmelt in the trees and now and again Lewis belting out ahead the name of the lost woman. Dark started to come on and the sky deepened to the color of the smoke they had followed there.

Lewis brought out a flashlight from her pack and stopped and shone the beam over her followers. They squinted back at her, resembling nothing so much as the terminally ill dogs and cats held dimly in the death kennels behind her father’s clinic. She would say the same strange words to them that her father used to say to those doomed pets: Alea iacta est .

They neared a pair of dim windows parallactic and deep in the forest. Lewis smelled pine burning. The sky was dark and big and the air cold and the party put over the trees and granite forms tines of pale light. Lewis stopped and leaned against a boulder. The rest of them stopped behind her. None spoke. The old dog panted at their feet.

In the shadows ahead crossed a bluish body, stooped and slow. Lewis moved towards it and the toe of her boot struck something. A bronze of a perched eagle lay in puddling snow. When Lewis looked up the body was gone. She focused her eyes on the shelter. She drank from the thermos and jogged ahead, calling out Cloris, Cloris, Cloris, Mrs. Waldrip!

Behind her Claude called for her to be quiet and slow down.

Lewis reached the door and put an ear to it. Mrs. Waldrip, this is the United States Forest Service, are you in there?

Claude came up beside her. Jill followed, lighting another cigarette. Pete stood back.

Lewis drew the revolver and held it upright in one hand and the flashlight against it in the other. She leaned into the door and it gave way.

Careful, Debs.

Don’t goddamn worry about me.

She went slowly into the shelter and aimed the revolver and the flashlight at the floor. She asked the dark for the lost woman. A small coal fire burned in an iron stove. Cloris? she said. She brought up the flashlight. The light slipped over the log walls and the minor furniture and the dust and smoke in the air yet did not illuminate any human form. Lewis holstered the revolver and removed her campaign hat and wiped sweat from her forehead. A clothesline crossed the room, hung with a pair of dirty green striped socks. Lewis took the end of a glove in her teeth and pulled it from her hand, then pinched a sock and felt that it was damp. She knelt at the stove and looked into the fire. A grouping of brass buttons glowed in the embers.

Claude had ducked into the room and the dog dragged its nose along the floor behind him. I’d say we just missed someone, he said.

Jill was close to the door and looking around at the room.

Lewis stood and replaced the campaign hat and pocketed the gloves. Goddamn it. Why do you figure she’d leave?

I’d say those don’t look like the kind of socks worn by an old lady, Debs.

I don’t like this all that much, Pete said from the doorway.

Lewis picked up from the table in the room a warped hardcover book. The Joy of Lesbian Sex: A Tender and Liberated Guide to the Pleasures and Problems of a Lesbian Lifestyle by Dr. Emily L. Sisley and Bertha Harris. She set it down. She asked Jill for a lighter and lit the lantern on the table and then went to a window and cupped her hands and looked out the unclean glass. Trees gnashed in the dark.

Lewis turned back to the team. They were leaned about, orange vests glowing in the murk. The dog had curled up already near the stove.

Lewis pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. She took an index finger and drew on the table a spiral in the dust. We’ll stay here tonight.

No, Jill said. I don’t want to.

Lewis took the thermos from her pack and drank. She wiped her mouth. Don’t worry, she said. We’re not in any goddamn danger.

What if they come back? Jill said.

Pete took one step through the doorway. Who? What if who comes back?

This is it, Debs, said Claude. I’m not helpin you look for her anymore. Don’t care even if we get John to get us a chopper. I won’t be party to it. It’s not healthy.

It’s a good thing to help somebody if you can, Ranger Lewis, Pete said, but it ain’t if you can’t. Learnt that from the hard way, at the end of a hard road of domestic torture.

They agreed to set out again for the trailhead at first light. Pete and Claude huddled upright at the stove with the dog like a covey of quail. Lewis and Jill took the bunk beds, and from the bottom bunk Lewis watched Claude fall asleep. Pete, the stovelight awash in his eyes, stared at the door. Claude whined through his blue nose, dreamspeaking low and gospel. Jill lay on the top bunk. She was quiet and still. Lewis could not know if the girl slept or not.

Lewis did not sleep and was awake suckling the last of the merlot from the thermos and listening to the loud fire of pine they had built in the stove quiet and die out. The revolver lay on her chest. Some hours into the night after she had closed her eyes, she opened them again and looked out from the bunk. Jill stood in the room.

What’s wrong?

The girl came closer and moonlight in the small window touched her dark curls and the scars on her face. Can I sleep with you?

Lewis sat up on her elbows and sucked merlot from her teeth and looked at the girl. She recalled a waterspotted painting of Artemis that had hung near the basin in the restroom of her father’s clinic. What?

Can I sleep with you?

In here?

I don’t want to be up there by myself.

Why not?

I’m cold and I’m scared.

Aren’t you too old for that kind of thing?

I’m not too old to be cold and I’m not too old to be scared.

Lewis studied the girl and said: All right.

She moved to one side and Jill brought a sleeping bag down from the top bunk and laid it on the cot. She climbed into the bunk and pushed her back against Lewis and her hair fell about and smelled the way of bloody cats shampooed after surgery.

Can you hear that?

Hear what?

It sounds like someone copulating.

Lewis raised an ear to the air. It’s probably just some goddamn animal.

It’s hard for me to sleep without music playing, Jill said.