Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

That’s a lot of blood, Polite said. Did she lose the hand?

No. She poked it. She’s all right.

Did you or any member of your team do anything else or leave anything else behind while you were here last Tuesday that we should know about?

Like I said, I drew that goddamn thing on the table.

Anything else?

There’s a thing, a sculpture of a goddamn eagle out there layin in the dirt. That’s what she poked her hand on.

You brought a sculpture up here?

No. It was here.

Well, you see, I just don’t know where to place that in the situation at hand, Polite said.

Lewis went to the bunk beds on the far wall. She put a palm to the bottom cot and plucked up a strand of hair and held it up between two fingers to the morning light at the small window. Then she let it fall to the floor and went outside. She took from her pack the thermos of merlot and drank in the mist and the trees.

Polite came outside and stood alongside her. He stroked his elbow through the sling. Are you all right, Ranger Lewis?

Yes. Why?

It would appear you are drinking red wine from a vacuum container.

Lewis screwed the cap back on the thermos and held it down at her side.

Anything I can do, Ranger Lewis?

I don’t expect there is.

Why don’t you try me?

Lewis glanced at the man. He had a tired face. She unscrewed the thermos cap and they stood there listening to the flashbulbs snap within the shelter. You ever notice you can’t get intimate to yourself, Lewis said, let alone another person?

I know that I have noticed that before, yes. Can I tell you something? I went on a Caribbean cruise last summer to meet new people, and I only stayed in my cabin by myself and read fifty-seven issues of Life magazine. Hated myself even more than before we pulled out of the harbor.

I expect I’m what you’d call a wino.

Too much drink can be a problem. On the cruise I had too much drink. Too much. Nobody saw. Had the chain on the door.

Lewis drank from the thermos. I figure I’m wantin to get closer to someone, but I don’t know if I ought to do that with this person. Might be inappropriate for me to pursue. I can’t tell what kind of closeness it is.

Why not?

Goddamn. I’m sorry. This is goddamn unprofessional.

I asked. Here. Can I tell you something else? On the last day of my cruise I was intimate with a woman who was bound to be the most unattractive woman on the ship. Maybe on any ship. She had a portrait of her stillborn son tattooed on her lumbar region. Right here, you see. It was one of the most miserable things I ever saw. Colton, she named him. Bad name too. That’s nothing you want to look at when you’re, well, you know.

I expect not.

Agent Polite sighed and smiled. It’s good to talk to someone. Can I tell you something else about myself I haven’t told anyone? I dislocated my shoulder in an automobile accident resultant of too much drink. Left the bar, drove head-on into a statue of an honored astronaut. Bad thing. All anyone else thinks is that I did it to keep from hitting a dog.

Thanks for sharin that story. I figure we ought to get back in there.

That’s right. Right. I don’t envy you being interested in someone you cannot or will not pursue. But you only got to decide how much you want to be governed by either impulse or regret. You do something and it may or may not be the right or the wrong thing. Maybe it turns out it is the right thing. But how do you ever know if it was? You see, maybe it turns out we’ll never know right from wrong because we can’t see all consequences to all possible actions and that’s why some middleaged people go on cruises.

I’m just goddamn dissatisfied.

Agent Polite nodded and retrieved from a pocket in his windbreaker a cocktail sword and chewed it. He looked at his polished shoes and then at the sky. I don’t have much to say about that part of it, Ranger Lewis. Except that I’m dissatisfied too.

The helicopter took off from the clearing as the sun fell and Lewis, lips purpled and tight, sat in silence beside Agent Polite while the night draped over the mountains a senseless fog, and the wilderness entire dimmed beneath. She drank from the thermos and wiped on a sleeve a clowncolored mouth. She could see in the window glass the whites of Polite’s eyes flash over her.

When they reached the airfield she stumbled from the helicopter and vomited into a garbage can. She figured that Polite would not let her drive home. Yet he did, and she did, up the mountain in the dark, sweeping before her white headlights across the dewed black road and the roadkill there opalescent like broken glass. She drove with one hand on the radio tuning the static for a signal, eyeing now and again the passenger’s seat and the weatherworn book there: The Joy of Lesbian Sex.

Ithought you’d gone home, said the masked man. He was thinner than when I had left him a fortnight ago and his clothes were more ragged. He had on a different mask cut from a button shirt pictured with colorful Easter eggs. I am sure I was just an awful sight to behold, wild and filthy in dried blood and dirt like I was, outfitted in those silly stockings and that pink short top like a horrific and aberrant youth. Worse yet I had been relieving myself by the mouth of the cave where I could lean and the mess had piled up into an awful black cone about the size of a plump toddler. Vermin had tunneled through it and slept inside. It is a funny thing that I was not more embarrassed by the state I was in. I simply stood there boldly relying on my walking stick and shook my head.

He asked me what had happened and I told him that I had gotten lost and injured my ankle and had been eating bats.

How bad is it? he said.

They do not taste terribly different to quail.

I meant how bad is your ankle.

It is mending now, thank you, I said.

Those people didn’t come this way?

I shook my head again and asked how he had found me.

I wasn’t looking for you, he said. I was coming back because I’d left something at the shelter. Then I saw the smoke. I was afraid it’d be you.

What did you leave at the shelter?

Nothing.

Did you get it?

He told me that he had and then he said that he was afraid he would have to leave me there. He wanted to help me, he said, but nothing had changed and he still could not take me any further. He said he could leave me some jerky to see me through and told me that if I continued on east I would come to the trail that would take me to the road.

How far is the road?

You could probably make it in a few days, he said. Where’s your bag?

I told him that I had lost it. Where will you go? I asked.

Where will I go?

I nodded.

Better you not know that.

Will you go back to the shelter?

No, ma’am, he said. Can’t.

May I accompany you? Heavens, I asked him this before I had thought much about what it meant!

He said nothing for a moment and then: Don’t you want to go home?

I told him I did not want to be alone.

He thought about this some and knocked sickled figures of mud from the heel of his boot. I’m sorry, he said.

Please, I said. I do not know what I would do anymore, even if I were to make it home.

He went silent again for a spell looking at me. Wind flapped in his mask. They won’t find you, he said at last. If you come with me they’ll never find you.

That is just fine, said I.

He cocked his head and righted it again. He said nothing else about it and set about building up the fire and boiling hardtack in a small iron skillet which hung from the duffel he bore on his back. We suppered as the sun went down and it was not long before I fell asleep sitting up against the cave wall, watching the flames put the masked man’s rambling shadow to the stone like I were witness to the origins of mankind. I knew then that he did not want to be alone any more than I did.