Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

The rest of the day I sat bewildered with my back to a wall of limestone and my legs stretched out in a place of sun, turning my wedding ring on my finger. Mr. Waldrip’s grandmother Sarah Louise Waldrip had bequeathed him the ring, and she used to tell a mighty tall story about how her husband had traded it off a gypsy for a sack of flour and a flintlock pistol. The story goes that the gypsy came back in the night and shot to death the sheepdog they had and stole every other single thing in the house, even the curtains, but left the ring. If I had been a superstitious person I might have been worried some about that.

I was not injured in any serious way far as I could tell. I had the cut on my forehead and the arthritis in my knees was acting up. I had wet myself and was mighty embarrassed about that, but this account should tell the whole of the story, even the unpleasant parts I would rather leave out. Perhaps especially the unpleasant parts. I could not see Terry from where I sat behind the little airplane, but bless you, I listened to him holler and jabber all day about people I did not know doing things I could not reconcile with logic. Often I looked down the escarpment at Mr. Waldrip’s boot. I endeavored to will myself back to the edge where his body lay in the treetop below, but I could not.

How did I not shed a single tear then? I do not know. It is funny the way our minds put themselves at ease in times of distress. I do not recall having a complete thought for some time. Different physicians have offered the same opinion that I was in shock. They may be right. Could be I still am.

When the mountains began to go dark I appealed to the heavens. Dear Lord, I said, please do not let me die on this mountain in the dark. Please save me, Lord.

Gracious, was there ever a more selfish woman born?

Then Terry lowered his voice and said, You? Yes! A boy? I don’t think so. There are two of me in every bathtub. Pardon me, excuse me, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to find out. Are you finished, Dr. Kessler? This gas is scary. I can’t move. I’m tripping that I’m on a mountain.

I went to the airplane and kept around the side so I would not have to look at Terry. I could only see his legs dangling from the seat and I could smell him. I asked him how he was feeling.

Grown up, he said. I’m feeling grown up. I’m too big for my britches.

Good, I said. I spoke calmly so he would not holler anymore. I asked him what we should do.

My head hurts, he said. Do I have cavities? Bathwater! Waitress!

The sun was partly down past the far mountains. They were a grand shade of purple. It all looked the way Mr. Waldrip’s mother used to watercolor when she got old and as loony as a bullfrog and decided that painting was her vocation and got to wearing her slippers on her hands. All of her paint would run together and it was unlikely anyone could guess what she had meant anything to be.

I rounded the airplane to get a better look at Terry. He had his eyes open. They were vacant and gleaming like the marble eyes in the trophies that Mr. Waldrip’s hunting friends had all hung up on their walls to their wives’ dismay. I never let Mr. Waldrip keep any of his own in the house. I have always had the opinion it was macabre to hang heads on a wall.

Terry was chewing on that broken piece of jaw. I shuddered at the sight of him. I had never before witnessed such a helping of violence. Mr. Waldrip and I did not go to the kinds of pictures that had it. I had seen people pass away, but not like that. Father had gone at peace in a goose-down bed five years before, and Mother shortly thereafter in a similar manner at the age of ninety-three. Davy got the ague and died sleeping in his bed when he was eleven years old. God rest his soul.

There was a hole over Terry’s right ear. I say a hole, but what I ought to say is that a good portion of his head was missing. It had gotten scooped away somehow or another and some of it was on his shoulder like an epaulet of melon pulp. He had started singing quietly in falsetto a song called “Time After Time,” which I have since learned was made popular a couple years before by a young lesbian named Cyndi Lauper. Dear Mrs. Squime later informed me that Terry had never mentioned the song nor would it have been the kind of music she would have expected him to enjoy and she could not fathom why it appeared on his lips before his death.

I sat on the ground in front of him. I suppose I did not want to be alone, even if he was not particularly good company. He sang that song over and over again until I had learned all the words. The last of the sun was gone and above us shone a bright full moon. Terry got quiet after a while. His marred face did not move anymore. His eyes were stuck wide open yet they no longer looked about unseeingly and the blue in them had grayed. I was then sure he had finally passed. I had never seen a thing like it and I hoped then that I never would again. It haunts me yet.

I climbed back into my seat in the little airplane. It was colder now. My coat had been in my bag and that was missing with the other half of the airplane, which officials found some weeks later scattered across the north side of the peak in nearly the shape of a hexagram. In the bright red suitcase that had fallen on me during the crash I found a wool sweater with a colorful zigzag pattern such as I had seen some young people wearing on television. It is mighty fine luck that Terry was a large man, for his clothing yielded a wealth of fabric and proved very useful against the cold. I wrapped myself in the sweater and sat back again in my seat.

It was terribly quiet then, save for the memory of Terry’s song yet warbling in my ears. I endeavored not to worry on my situation, or worry that Mr. Waldrip was still in that spruce. And I made an effort not to stare at the back of Terry’s head. From where I sat it looked eerily the same to how it had before we had fallen out of the sky, such as if some pieces of the world had halted in time and others had gone on.

After it was plenty dark and I could not guess what time it was, I climbed ahead to the cockpit where a small yellow light blinked in what remained of the controls by Terry’s legs. It was a radio. My heart leapt! I grabbed the receiver and held it to my mouth. I recall shaking wildly and warming up around my neck and behind my ears. I held down the button on the side of the receiver and said, many times, My name is Cloris Waldrip, help, my name is Cloris Waldrip, help, is anyone there? My name is Cloris.

Lewis, eyes bloodshot and lips purpled, scrubbed a dark stain from her uniform. She rinsed the olivedrab shirt and held it to the light over the kitchen sink. She sank it back into the water and took up a brass badge and washed it under the faucet. She passed a thumb over the relief of a conifer and set the badge aside and looked out the window above the sink. The small pinewood cabin overlooked a dim and narrow wooded ravine and the mountain range beyond.

She left the uniform to soak and went to the living room with a glass of merlot. She sat on the couch and turned on the transistor radio on the end table, but there was no signal. Over the fireplace was mounted the head of a runt doe her ex-husband had shot when he was a boy. She watched a wasp land on the dusty black nose. She heard voices out front. Lewis turned down the static on the radio. Boots thumped on the steps to the porch. She finished the glass of merlot and switched off the radio and went to the door. She opened it to the screen.

Ranger Claude Paulson leaned on the frame. He had a nose the color of gunmetal after a bad bout of frostbite, but Lewis figured his face was handsome otherwise. He lifted from clean dark hair a campaign hat and held it at his waist. Hey, Debs, he said, sorry to bother after nine like this on a Sunday. Saw your light on.