Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

I opened up my eyes and took the tin from the river. I studied it for a minnow or a crawfish or some other unfortunate critter I might have caught. But the only thing in that tin was an odd little feather floating on top of the water. When I looked up, great pulpy tufts of them were blowing around me, maelstromed in the breeze, twisting and curling and alighting on the river like white and gray mayflies. It was a mighty strange but beautiful sight to behold.

I looked around to see if I could know where they were coming from and I peeked on down through the trees to where I had left the man. He was some ten yards or so downriver and I could just see his boots between the boles. Those little feathers clouded the whole place, frothy white like the burp of the sea.

I made my way back to him with the tin of water under my arm, righting myself with my walking stick. More and more of these little feathers came with each gentle gust of wind. They festooned the trees and the granite and stuck in the grass and sure enough it got to where it looked as if a weird and otherworldly snow had fallen.

I hollered to the man: Do you see this?

I rounded a tree and found him on his side in a place of sun. His down coat was partly snagged on a branch, making for a posture that held his arms up an inch above the ground in the manner of an orchestra conductor. His coat was tore open and the down of it spilled out and the wind was carrying it off in great big dollops. I dropped my walking stick and went to his side quick as I could. I knelt there by him and unhitched him from the branch. Then I rolled him on his back and brushed the feathers from his face.

I have heard it said before that often as not when people pass away they look as if they have only gone to sleep. I do not believe that anyone who says this has ever truly seen a dead person. If you know the face at all you can see death in it by the way the face settles or looks stopped on some unknown eternal thought. When Davy passed away there was an open casket at the wake. I was only a young girl but I recall looking at my little brother embalmed and rigid there in his little coffin and believing that someone was meaning to trick me. He did not look like the little boy I knew and cared for. I was certain he was an effigy in wax, fabricated by some nitwit who had not known him at all.

I have corresponded with a kind physician in Michigan, Dr. Rebecca Alcott, and what she believes happened was that the man had endeavored to stand and this had put too much strain on his already septic and traumatized system and caused cardiac arrest. He had fallen to the ground dead, but not before catching his coat on a low pointy branch and spilling the stuffing to the breeze.

I sat there for a spell with his body in the sun and the gleaming goose down and the wind. When I got up again I gathered from it what I could use and left it behind.

The carcass of an elk swung from an eyebolt screwed into the eave of a hunting shack. It was half-flayed like a man with one arm in his coat. Lewis cut the engine, honked the horn, and leaned across the passenger’s seat to crank down the window. She called out a name.

A black head cocked wildly from behind the shack, then came the rest of the large man. He bounded shoeless to the Wagoneer in a tuxedo too small for him. His wiry hair was pulled back into pigtails and he wore his mustaches old-fashioned and curled with lard. Ranger Lewis, he said as he reached the Wagoneer and rested a forearm on the open window of the passenger’s door. Workin on a Sunday?

Almost didn’t recognize you, Eric.

Yap, tryin out somethin for this woman I met down the mountain last week. I bought this here money suit off a destitute ombudsman in Missoula.

Looks nice.

Thank you, Ranger Lewis. You look nice too.

Feel like hell. I quit drinkin this weekend. Got another call in about you, Eric.

What’d I do this time? T’weren’t somebody in one of those tents I fell all over last week, was it? They got to put them suckers up in the tent area. If I go to the spigot for some potable in the night, which is my unassailable right, I cain’t see them tents just the way I cain’t see a hat on a flea.

No, wasn’t them. Somebody made a report you were swimmin in the nude close to the campgrounds.

Which area?

Goddamn Clover, I think it was.

So you’re tellin me I cain’t swim in the buff up here? What century’d the nekkid body get to be so offensive? If you cain’t get nekkid up here what’s all this for?

There’re rules of common decency, Lewis said. Bylaws and codes, nationwide for all parks and recreational zones. Especially if there’re children around. Goddamn decency.

Eric shook his head and twirled in his fingers the end of a mustache. My great litterbox, he said. Why’s one silly offense mean more than another? I cain’t no longer see the beginnin to the sense and the end to the nonsense.

Just stay away from the campgrounds. That’s all you got to do, goddamn it. All right?

All right, all right, Eric said. Hey, you guys ever find that old lady you was lookin for?

No. She never materialized.

Now that is sad. Old ones love a spot named for their bones so their kids can visit.

Lewis leaned back and started up the engine and spat out the driver’s side window. Could you tell me somethin?

Hope so.

Why’re you livin out here like this?

Well, Ranger Lewis, people generally don’t like me.

Lewis nodded. Let me ask you, you seen anythin at all out of the ordinary recently?

Eric turned his greased face to the sky and squinted at the cold fall sun. His dark eyes watered. I seen so many things out the ordinary, I just cain’t tell what the ordinary is anymore.

But what about smoke, you see any more over there on the Old Pass?

There’s been a lot more smoke comin from up that way than there used to be. Almost like you got campers like it was back in the sixties when people wasn’t afeared to lose sight of a radio tower. One night I saw what I surmise was a big stinky fire goin. I’ll say, look.

Lewis looked to where the man pointed. There were peaks high in the clouds and the snow there turned off them into the sun, and the trees formed a meniscus below tunneling out into oblivion and there she spied a cut of white near lost in the daylight.

That goddamn smoke?

Yap. Must be.

Lewis shook her head. She shifted out of park and clasped together her hands and leaned on the wheel. Who knows who’s up there, she said.

The next day she went into the station early and turned on the space heater and the coffee percolator and as dawn came in the wide window she read the Missoulian under the weak bulb at her desk. The newspaper was a day old, dated Sunday, November 9, 1986. On the front page next to an article about Iran was a newsprint picture of the missing girl. Sarah Hovett still missing, authorities assume the worst.

Lewis finished the newspaper and dropped it in the wastebasket at her feet. She brought in a cardboard box from the Wagoneer and cleared out her desk. She filled a plastic sack with the empty wine bottles she had hidden in the space between the desk and the wall and she went to the sink in the kitchenette and emptied the thermos of merlot. The merlot circled the drain and she recalled how it was to help her father wash the bone saws and lancets after surgery at the clinic.

It was 9:05 a.m. by the wall clock when Claude came through the station door. He stopped in the doorway. I’d say we usually do that in the spring, don’t we?

Lewis was wiping down the desk with a damp rag. She dropped it. Claude, you’ve been a real goddamn good colleague, she said. But I can’t find the joy in this job anymore.