Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

I had reached into my purse for another caramel when suddenly Terry shuddered and growled! Dear me! Flies blew out like smoke from his nose and mouth in a great retch. I let out a terrific scream and covered my face in horror. I fell to my knees and prayed.

A kind pathologist would later inform me that Terry had eructed. Unpleasant a thing as it is, during decomposition a corpse will build up internal gas that has to escape somehow. I understand the gas is sometimes called cadaverine. It does not sound right to me, but this pathologist was a medical man so I am inclined to believe him. It would be a shame if he were pulling an old woman’s leg.

After I had prayed for some time I opened my eyes. Terry was much as he was before. The flies had resettled him and his mouth was black with them. I was in dread for fear he would move again. After a spell, when finally I decided that he would not and was very deceased, I looked to the sky for the time of day and could not tell what it was. If I had been in our little house I would have been able to tell by the way the light falls through the windows in the sitting room. Living that long in a place makes it something of a clock. Everything tells you the time. You could know the hour by the shadow of a chair leg on the carpet. But out there on that mountain the light fell about so strangely that I was hardly ever too certain.

I guessed it was late afternoon and I decided I would take a look around before dark. I was just then beginning to get my wits about me and think rationally on what I ought to do. Though I do not believe I had as of yet understood my situation entirely. I scouted around the escarpment, but never left sight of the little airplane. The place was not large. It was a narrow chance we had stopped there instead of farther down the mountain in the timber. I found little else besides granite cliff faces, which I could not climb. However I did spot a raccoon with a white eye hiding in a shrub that grew straight from the rock. I watched it for a spell and it watched me back best it could. It reminded me of a pet raccoon that an unusual neighborhood boy had named Duodenum and had kept in a messy dog kennel and fed scraps of cooked meat, except that Duodenum had the whole of its sight.

I went back to the airplane and shuffled some more through the debris in the cockpit and turned up a tore-up map of Montana. There was also an issue of Time magazine from the year prior about President Reagan’s colon surgery. I sat on a rock and read it until the daylight had all but gone. Then I returned to the radio. The little light in it had gone out. I tried it but did not hear the static I had heard before. It occurred to me that I ought to have stayed after it earlier until it had died.

Night fell after what I hold to be the longest day in creation. A gentle rain began and I sat back in that little airplane and held my eyes shut and thought about Mr. Waldrip out there in that spruce. I was mighty thirsty but I was too frightened to go out for a drink of rain. Something rustled around outside. I told myself it was only the white-eyed raccoon and did not open my eyes to find out for sure.

In the morning I woke to an awful shock. Terry had slid out into the aisle and his face was within a foot of mine. His eyes and nose and lips were all but gone. I suspect that the white-eyed raccoon had made a meal of them and was sleeping soundly someplace with a red muzzle. My goodness gracious, I hollered like a steam whistle and scrambled from the airplane. I fell to my knees and shut my eyes and prayed for some time. When I opened them they were on the mountains and the rolling valley. In the valley I saw a thing which at first I took to be swifts flying. But I rubbed my eyes and saw better that it was smoke! Lead-colored smoke over the treetops.

I stood up and dusted off my stockings and tidied my hair. I went up to the edge of the escarpment. The smoke was from a campfire, I reasoned. Here I was to make a fateful decision. Best I stay near the airplane and wait for help? There was no water at hand and I had no way to know if anyone had heard me over the radio. How long would pass before they would know to look for us? Or should I venture down to the smoke with the idea that there might be a campsite? The smoke was at a considerable distance, but I judged I could reach it before nightfall. Although I was concerned I could injure myself (seventy-two-year-old women are not meant to climb anything), that little airplane had become a mausoleum of wickedness and I dreaded another night there more than anything else. Troubling a decision as it was, and fateful as it would prove to be, I made up my mind that I would leave the airplane and make a pull for the smoke. I had a good idea that it was a nice family down there cooking breakfast.

I happened to look down at my side. Mr. Waldrip’s boot was still upright there at the edge of the escarpment. It was full up to the ankle with rainwater. I was then mighty pleased that I had bought him those good alligator-skin boots, being that alligators are waterproof. I knelt down and got that boot and gulped the water until it was gone. I ought to have sipped it and saved some in the toe, but you do not think that way when you are thirsty.

I went back to the airplane. It was cooler than it had been, so I had decided I was going to take the big wool coat Terry wore. If Mr. Waldrip had been there with me he would have done the same thing. I imagine he would have been disappointed with me if I had not salvaged everything I could both from the airplane and from Terry’s person.

I inched closer to him but kept my eyes on the ground. He smelled like a dead horse. I grabbed for him and felt for the seatbelt and unbuckled it. He slid out of his seat and toppled to the rocks with a heavy thud and an upwelling of many flies such as dust beaten from an old cushion. I turned him on his side and worked one arm free from his coat. His joints popped. I told myself I was only loosening up the stiff leg on the old card table we used for bridge night at First Methodist. I rolled him and did the other arm. He ended up on his back, and I was stood over him with his coat. It was a gray color and was patterned with blood and looked now a little like red damask. I had the thought that I had robbed him. I looked him full in the face or what else there remained of it. It had been gnawed away and there was no blood nor flesh to it, only such as would be left on a watermelon rind after a picnic.

I turned out his hip pockets and was careful not to disturb his dignity. The stench was powerful and I held my breath. I found his billfold and a book of matches from a gentlemen’s club called the Polecat printed with a multicolored cartoon of a masculine and muscled dancing skunk. I have never known a man to frequent one of these establishments, although I have been told that many do. I wager I have met quite a few of them and did not even know it. I ought to mention here I do not include the description of the matches as a comment on Terry’s character. Men and women alike lead common secret lives that necessitate common secret places. I pass no judgment on them.

I put the book of matches in the coat’s breast pocket. I opened his billfold and looked through the photographs he kept. There was a photograph of an attractive blond man fishing and another of a young girl holding balloons next to a waterfall. I found the one of Mrs. Squime he had shown us on the airplane. I replaced it and laid the billfold over his heart. It is fortunate that I had worn my good walking shoes, so that I did not need to take his boots. They would not have fit me, and I believe there is an old caution about wearing a dead man’s boots.

A funny thing occurred to me while searching Terry’s body. When I put my hands on another man who was not Mr. Waldrip, even one deceased and bodily abused, something stirred in me and I recalled a boy named Garland Pryle. Garland grew up down the road from me on a little ole alfalfa ranch. Our mothers sat next to each other in the old Methodist church house. He was four years my junior and played war games in the pasture with my brother, looking everywhere for sticks that were shaped the most like firearms. Garland was a mighty handsome, green-eyed boy, and his chin was the finest chin I have ever seen. I will soon tell what there is to tell about Garland Pryle, for I will not cower from the truth as I recall it. But for now all I will say is that while the years can sure put a memory in its place, some memories are darn ornery and like to return at inconvenient occasions.