Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

To set this account straight, I have since done some research and met with some of the right people and discovered that the man’s name was Tom Calyer, and that the girl’s name was Lucy Calyer. She was his daughter and she lived with her mother not far down the road. I have even met with Lucy. She was kind enough to pay me a visit here in Vermont, where I have lived nigh on two decades now, since briefly returning to Clarendon after the Bitterroot to settle my affairs. As I had anticipated, Texas without Mr. Waldrip proved inhospitable and full of melancholy. Despite my newfound distaste for trees, I came to Vermont, a place that had appealed to me since I was a little girl and had seen watercolors of its seasons in a picture book about our United States. I had an apartment in Burlington, until my hip started acting up and I moved to River Bend Assisted Living in Brattleboro, some dozen years ago now. Anyhow, this Lucy Calyer happened to have moved to Connecticut and she assured me it was not far and that she would be pleased to pay me a visit for I have become something of a celebrity since my ordeal. We had a lovely visit. She is just as beautiful as she ever was, married and with two children of dark skin and the most darling noses you will ever see. She promised me that her father was a gentle and peaceable man, a man interested in living off the land the way that more ancient folk had done.

I include this anecdote here to suggest that there is no way to speculate nor pass judgment on the nature of a thing safely from a window, and the awful truth of the matter is that often as not all anyone can understand about a person is what they understand least about themselves.

Lewis swerved the Wagoneer down the mountain and Jill held pressure on the hole in her hand and they arrived at Marcus Daly Hospital in the foothills at about nine o’clock that night. The building was two stories and gray and outside three drunk and bloodbathed men studded with car-window glass smoked cigarettes and glittered under a streetlight like figures of crystal. Lewis refilled the thermos from a bottle of merlot in the back. Then she opened the passenger door for Jill and together they went under a flickering neon sign which read Em gency .

They sat side by side in a row of seats, the blood on their clothes browned in unfathomable glyphs, and they waited for an hour in a small waiting room with a tank of paling fish before a young woman beckoned them wordlessly through a door. A man in a stained cotton smock, there in a long room partitioned with sheeting, introduced himself as the doctor and washed his hands at a sink. He was wearing sunglasses and a devil’s beard. Jill sat on a papered bed and Lewis swayed and leaned against a partition and watched the doctor straddle the girl’s knees from a stool and unwrap the bandage from her hand. He turned it over like he were buying a cut of meat from a butcher and told her that the puncture would not need but a single stitch. He told them he would be right back and he left.

I’m sorry about your hand, Lewis said.

Do you think you’ll ever see your ex-husband again?

Hope not. Why?

Jill shook her head. Will I make friends and then someday never want to see them again?

I expect so. It’s only natural.

I will not want to see them anymore? Or they will not want to see me? Or we do not care enough to see each other?

Well, things change, Lewis said. Your mom not ever tell your goddamn dad that one?

Is it not true that there are people you used to know and don’t keep in touch with now so it would make no practical difference to you if they were dead?

I don’t want anyone to die, Jill, Lewis said. I’d like to figure they’re out there doin all right even if I don’t hear from them.

Even your ex-husband?

I don’t want the goddamn man dead.

But you don’t want to see him ever again?

No, I don’t want to see him again.

Do you think you would find out if he had died or if he was doing well?

Goddamn it, I don’t know.

Jill swatted at nothing and slung blood across the linoleum. Maybe you wouldn’t find out, she said. He might as well be dead now. It would make no difference to you.

Goddamn, well if I don’t know about it I figure it doesn’t.

Everyone I’ve met over thirty is a low-grade psychopath, said the girl.

Down at the other end of the room a young girl with a leg in a cast screamed. Her eyes were fixed in terror on the bed next to hers, where a skinny bearded man flopped around naked on his back, pissing in his own face and singing a song about rutted roads. Bored nurses restrained him and strapped him down and spoke kindly to him as if they knew him well. They repositioned the sheeting and hid him from the ward.

The doctor returned and put the stitch in and Jill did not flinch and he called her a sweet girl and rolled back and forth on the wheeled stool. He pressed his crotch to her knees. There you go, sweet girl, he said. All better for baby.

That’s enough of that, goddamn it, Lewis said, and she took Jill by the arm and they left.

In the Wagoneer they wound back up the mountain. Every quarter mile on the paved road their headlights brightened a shot-up sign warning of falling rocks. Jill sat with her knees to her chest, tethered to a line of smoke sucking out through the cracked window.

Lewis drank from the thermos. I forgot to call your goddamn dad from the hospital. I expect he’s worried we’re not back yet.

Jill tapped the end of the cigarette in a soda can between her thighs. She did not speak.

Lewis drove on and passed the Crystal Penguin convenience store. Townyouths from the foothills glowed a faux-sunset color under the store’s sodium light. Greasy haired, frail and feminine, the three teenage boys grinned from their perch in the bed of a parked blue pickup truck missing a tailgate. They lifted thick amber bottles and whooped slow in the cadence of a siren. A fatless mohawked boy in wireframe glasses waved and flicked a bejeweled tongue.

Jill waved at the boys with her bandaged hand and said, I wonder how long we’ll know each other, Ranger Lewis.

From a ways down the road Lewis spotted Bloor waiting for them under the deck light. He sat unmoving in a rocking chair, his arms folded and his boots up on the railing. Lewis brought the Wagoneer to a stop in front of the white cabin just after midnight. He stood from the chair.

Lewis turned to Jill. Thanks for helpin out. I’m sorry you got hurt.

I’m sorry we didn’t find what you were looking for, said the girl.

Together they walked up to the white cabin and Bloor raised at them a chalked finger.

We had to overnight in the shelter, Lewis said.

What happened to your hand?

She poked it pretty bad. Had to take her to the goddamn hospital.

Bloor met his daughter at the bottom of the steps to the front deck and took her hand and inspected the bandage. Koojee. Are you all right?

Yes.

Bloor looked at them both and brought them into the cabin. Lewis and Jill sat on the white couch and Bloor prepared salmon and asparagus in the kitchen, reciting phrases of lyrical poetry he had written about how worried he had been that he had lost them both. The three ate at the dinner table and drank together two bottles of merlot, and Bloor asked them what had happened the night before at the shelter and they told him little save that Cloris Waldrip was not there.

After they had finished Bloor took their plates and Lewis and Jill went out to the back deck with another bottle of merlot. They sat in the outdoor furniture and drank under the clear night.

Jill put a bloodbrown cigarette in her mouth and lit it. Why do they call him the Arizona Kisser?

Kissed some young girls in Arizona I was told, Lewis said. I don’t know much else about it. I don’t want to.