Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

I spun about and looked for him in the chaos. My dear, I could not see him!

Suddenly he burst from the fire, swaddled in flame and smoking like some birth of damnation, hollering out in pain. He rolled me in Terry’s coat and a blanket and swept me up in his arms, then he carried me out like a child. Cool air was on my face and the wind blew away the heat.

With my eyes closed I lay on my back in the grass. I had a tough time catching my breath.

There was a thud. I opened my eyes, still coughing something terrible. The hut was swallowed up in an enormous fire and great licks of flame jumped all around it like the mad worship of the Pentecostal. The white pine, also ablaze, burned amid the dark like a great bright hand of fire, at once so terrifically beautiful and awful it was like it were the authentic hand of God. I suppose that is the fantasy of a guilty mind. I worry that if I had not put more wood in the stove that night, the conflagration might not have caught and some things might be different now. However I have come to understand that a mighty good deal of life is learning how to abstract guilt to some other notion that will not bother you so much you cannot go on.

I put my hands over my body. Miraculously I seemed to be unhurt. I looked for my friend. He was on his back next to me. His face was black and bunched up in a terrible grimace like an old plum. His clothes smoked and a leg of his blue jeans had burned away and lines of embers yet chased the cloth. This exposed the burnt-black flesh below his knee, which brought to mind the way Mr. Waldrip used to enjoy his bacon.

I jumped up and put out the embers on him with my hands.

He groaned. His eyes were still shut when he asked if I was all right.

I told him that I was fine and asked how he felt.

Not so good, he said.

Your leg is badly burned.

That’s what it feels like.

I told him that I would return. He only grunted. I hurried to the creek and felt around in the dark for the old plastic bucket we kept there. When I found it I filled it up and brought it back to him and I poured the water out over his legs and then his face and washed away the soot. He moaned again and then he was unconscious. I put my head to his chest and listened to his breathing and the slow pump of his heart. I lay awake like that the rest of the night until sunrise, listening to him breathe, and was kept warm by the hut and the white pine burning all around me, hot as the hinges of hell.

The fire burned on into morning. I remember well the paling of it as the sun rose over the mountains and touched the gray ash and the column of smoke. The five-fingered white pine reached up, black and smoking and cracked with veins of dying fire like a piece leftover of a storybook giant’s cremains. The grass was dewed that morning and it was mighty cold, and I huddled up with the man close as I dared to the dwindling fire. Both of us were white with ash like a pair of spirits. I kept a finger on his pulse.

When he finally regained consciousness he sat up to look at his leg. It was a gruesome mess. The flesh was bubbled up with welts and sores and crystalline polyps and it glittered and glowed such as a kind of rare rock formation I had seen with Mr. Waldrip at the Panhandle Plains Museum. The man shook his head and lay back in the grass.

I asked how he was feeling and he said that he would be all right.

I recalled that Grandma Blackmore used to make a poultice of dryweed and mallow root when Davy would scrape up his knees. I told the man that I would go into the woods and find some to make my own.

You’ll just get lost, and then where would we be? After all this. No, I’ll just take some water, please.

I went to the creek and filled the bucket again and brought it back. He grabbed ahold of it and I helped him drink.

I told him that he had saved me again. He said nothing.

Well, not to worry, I said. I am going to get you fixed up.

I went to the smoldering heap under the pine, where there remained only heat and scarcely any flames, and I turned up a stick and skimmed through the ash with it where I assumed his pallet had been. The ash blew up in my face. Finally I turned up what I was looking for and kicked the knife from the fire. The fine oak handle had burned away and the blade and ornamented scabbard were all that was left. Once the blade had cooled enough I used it to cut away the man’s blue jeans. His was the first male sex organ to which I had been exposed since I had seen those of Mr. Waldrip and the vulgar homeless man who hides in the crates by the grocery store. At the time I did not think much on it, but I suppose it is only fitting that I should have seen my friend naked being that he had seen me in my birthday suit too. I covered him with the blanket we had saved from the fire.

The rest of that day I spent giving him drinks of water and watching what was left of the pine burn down. When it had, I set about tossing on any wood I could find to keep the fire going for nightfall.

The grim figure of a small man strolled bandylegged on the side of the road. Lewis’s headlights reached him in the falling murk and she saw that it was Pete. The video camera hung from his neck and he was capped still with the bloodstained coif. He waved his arms. Lewis pulled the Wagoneer over to the shoulder of asphalt at the overlook where he had stopped. She cranked down her window. Coin-operated viewers leaned bent and vandalized with crude symbols and female nudity beyond a shot-up wooden sign which hardly yet read US Forest Service Black Grass Vista. The mountain range blazed red in sundown.

Evenin, Ranger Lewis. I was lookin for you.

What is it, Pete?

Officer Bloor leavin this mornin got me to thinkin. I’ve decided I’ll be goin back home end of the week.

Had enough?

Heart’s on the mend and I reckon it’s just about time to get back to normal.

Best of luck.

Thank you, Ranger Lewis.

She looked at the man, waiting. There anything else? I’m supposed to be pickin up some cigarettes for Jill before the Penguin closes.

I just wanted to give you somethin. Now, I’ll be honest with you, at first I thought about turnin this over to the authorities, or to Officer Bloor. I weren’t sure if it were rightful or not. Koojee.

Don’t use that goddamn word, Pete. It’s not a real word.

It’s not?

Goddamn it, Pete, it’s been a long day.

Pete brought out from the back of his belt a video cassette. That night we were out in that shelter I got spooked, so I was up takin pictures, waitin for Claudey’s one-eyed sex ghost to show her face. But this camera seems to harbor a mind of its own. Pete held out the cassette to the open window.

Lewis turned the engine off and took the cassette. She held it and turned it over. What d’you mean?

You and Jill cuddlin together in that bottom bunk.

I don’t know what you’re talkin about.

I got it on tape. It looked like you guys have somethin more between you than what an average fella’s likely to notice. Couldn’t see much on the tape cause it was dark, but I got enough. I got you givin her a kiss while she was sleepin.

Lewis looked hard at the small man. What in the hell’re you suggestin?

Pete shook his head. I’ve been workin real hard to be honest with my heart up here. It’s the reason I came up to stay with old Claudey, even if he’s popped his noodle a bit. You got to work on yourself and find out who you are to know what you want, or else you’re liable to end up a real scary example of yourself and do somethin bad to yourself or somebody else just happens to be there. Ain’t no need to pretend to be somebody else with me, Ranger Lewis. I ain’t no judge.

Lewis grabbed the thermos from the passenger’s seat and drank. Goddamn it, what do you want from me, you goddamn goofball?