Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

How come?

I think about every little sound. Music covers them up.

There’s no music here and I’m not singin.

When I was a kid I had a cassette of Jimmy Durante singing. When a side would end I’d wake up and turn it over.

You’re still a goddamn kid.

Some minutes passed in silence and Lewis figured Jill had fallen asleep for she breathed slowly and twitched. Lewis touched the girl’s hair and smelled her neck. The floor creaked and she looked out to the dark. Pete stood at the stove, the video camera shouldered. The black eye of the lens gazed back at her. The tape ran in the dark. Lewis did not move.

Pete squinted past the viewfinder and lowered the video camera to the floor and knelt in the corner of the room where they had stacked firewood.

The others were sleeping yet and Lewis, hunched over in her coat and hat against the chill, crept from the shelter into the dawn. She trudged out past the trees, sucking old merlot from her teeth, and she pressed her back to a wide trunk and took down her trousers. Steam rose and she breathed it in.

A scream broke the quiet and the dog barked.

She pulled up her trousers and ran back towards the shelter, buckling them as she went, and found Jill coming from the woods. The girl slumped in the doorway and the dog jangled up and licked dark blood from her hands.

Lewis told the dog to get and kicked it away and it yipped and went off. Tell me what happened, she said.

Jill raised a bloody hand to the forest. I saw someone. There.

Claude appeared in the doorway wearing backwards his campaign hat. He held out a can of bear spray. Who?

Pete rubbed his eyes and peered over Claude’s shoulder. Are we bein assaulted?

Lewis knelt down and took the girl’s bloody hands in hers and turned them looking for the wound. Where’re you hurt?

The girl held out her left hand. I went out there to pee and I saw somebody. I ran and tripped over a metal eagle. I landed on it with my hand.

Claude held back the bloodthirsty old dog by the collar. A metal eagle?

A statue, Jill said. On the ground.

Pete shook his head. That’s not the kind of thing you’d normally see out here, is it, Ranger Lewis?

Lewis found a perfect hole in the palm of the girl’s hand. You’re bleedin pretty good, she said. You feel all right?

Yes.

Does it hurt?

No, said the girl. Someone is out there.

Cornelia Åkersson.

Goddamn it, Claude. Quit bein a goofball and help me.

Claude gave Lewis a white plastic container from his pack. Lewis broke it open and pulled out a bottle of iodine. This’ll sting. She popped the cap with her teeth and emptied the bottle over the wound. Jill winced. Lewis put some gauze to it. There were no bandages. Here. Give me that goddamn thing. Lewis snatched the coif from Pete’s head and made a bandage of it. What d’you mean you saw someone?

I heard a sound and then I saw something move. There. Jill picked a place in the trees with a bloody finger.

Pete brought up the video camera and aimed it at Jill’s hands. What if it’s that Kisser fella?

Lewis scanned the trees. The sun had not yet risen above the range and the light was little. Wait here.

I ought to come with you, Claude said.

Stay with her, goddamn it, Lewis said. See if you can’t stop it bleedin like that. Goddamn it.

Blood-splattered and stained in merlot, her campaign hat askew, she went onward with crooked footing like a war-weary soldier, sucking her teeth. She drew the revolver and held it in both blood-slicked hands and walked in a ways until she came to an escarpment. She looked out from the trees at the vast woodlands and scrub. She was alone and could not see the others.

Mrs. Waldrip? Mrs. Waldrip? Cloris?

A gust blew through the woods and Lewis heard crinkling above. She looked up. A mylar balloon was tangled high in a bleached dead pine at the edge of the escarpment. In pink block letters it bore the phrase Get Well Soon. Lewis blinked at it and sank to the ground and did not take her eyes from it. She knelt there for a time and watched reverently the balloon brighten in the rising sun until it burned like the bead of a welder’s torch.

When she touched her face it was wet and she figured she had been crying. Behind her voices called out her name and she wiped the wet from her cheeks, blazing them in the girl’s blood, then she stood and holstered the revolver.

She returned to the others at the shelter, where most things were bloodied. The two men stood outside, their hands red. Claude was buttoning his uniform. Jill sat in the doorway, her back to the jamb. Her left hand was bandaged in Claude’s undershirt and Pete wore again the coif, now pied crimson. Jill smoked a matching cigarette. The dog lapped dots of blood from the floor.

Jill was cleaning her good hand in her curls. What did you see?

Just a goddamn balloon stuck in a tree.

No doubt many of you will believe that I am a crazy old bullfrog to have walked away from the search party sent after me. Perhaps I am. It is mighty difficult to know your own mind. I could liken it to when poorsighted Mr. Waldrip misplaced his glasses. Poor darling, he would bump around the house and touch the furniture like a mad faith healer, cussing up a storm under his breath. I was always the one to find the silly things, having the blessing of good eyesight as I do. I imagine that is the way it is with a mind too. You need one to find one. So if you have lost yours, you had better have another to help you find it.

I sat in that little old log cabin and watched my filthy old clothes burn up in the stove. It must have come late afternoon when I looked out one of those dirty windows for the masked man to appear. My hope was that he would return after he was sure that the search party had taken me and gone. I was ready to surprise him and tell him that I had decided that I wanted to stay with him there.

Naturally near as soon as this thought had danced into my head I was struck by what plain nonsense it was. Most people do not want one thing all of the time; in other words, I changed my mind right away. Gracious, what on earth was I doing? I needed to get out of that place and go back to Texas! My heart got to skipping like a bean on a skillet and I jumped up from the stove. I got my purse and wrapped myself in Terry’s coat and I hurried out of that log cabin quick as I could, hollering my name.

Not far into the woods my toe struck something hard and I tumbled face-first to the ground and broke open my lip. I did not hurt anything else. What I had tripped over was a figure of an eagle done in some kind of tarnished metal. Of all the unusual things. To this day I do not know how a thing like it had come to be there. I looked very briefly at it as I recovered and could learn nothing about it. The mystery of it still bothers me. Perhaps one of my readers will know the answer.

I picked myself up and hurried on. I imagine I looked as silly as Catherine Drewer when she used to prance and snort past all our windows doing what she called her little aerobic walk. I told my dear asthmatic friend, Nancy Bowers, that I thought Catherine looked like a village idiot with rectal disease, and Nancy laughed so hard that she got to coughing and had to go home. She was in bed for the rest of the day. Dear Nancy passed away from complications with her asthma some years ago.

A terrible panic got ahold of me as I feared I had forfeited my last opportunity to get back to Clarendon and mourn my husband at First Methodist with some familiar faces and dear friends like Nancy Bowers and Louise Altore and Pastor Bill. Suddenly I was mighty homesick again. I might have even been glad to see stupid old Catherine Drewer again, but I am not certain about that.