KINGDOMTIDE
Rye Curtis

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Rye Curtis 2020

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Rye Curtis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008317690

Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008317713

Version: 2019-12-04

Dedication

For Mimi

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

I

I no longer …

Forest Ranger Debra …

All was quiet. …

Lewis, eyes bloodshot …

Mr. Waldrip and …

II

Tuesday morning Lewis …

Hateful swarms of …

The pilot swung …

The day after …

III

Koojee. …

In 1972 a …

Lewis, naked save …

Two days of …

The National Transportation …

IV

For three nights …

In the blue …

I had made …

Bloor, carrying a …

V

We traveled the …

The old dog …

No doubt many …

Lewis swerved the …

VI

A nice young …

Unclothed, Lewis sank …

I thought you’d …

VII

They sat in …

I was to …

The grim figure …

I do not …

Lewis goose-stepped over …

Every fall the …

VIII

The carcass of …

There are all …

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

I

I no longer pass judgment on any man nor woman. People are people, and I do not believe there is much more to be said on the matter. Twenty years ago I might have been of a different mind about that, but I was a different Cloris Waldrip back then. I might have gone on being that same Cloris Waldrip, the one I had been for seventy-two years, had I not fallen out of the sky in that little airplane on Sunday, August 31, 1986. It does amaze that a woman can reach the tail end of her life and find that she hardly knows herself at all.

I sat by the window and my dear husband, Mr. Waldrip, sat on my right. He had his hands busy fiddling with a ragged cuticle. My husband was a kind, bird-faced man and he wore strong glasses. He was born in Amarillo, Texas, to an awning salesman and a midwife. I first ever laid eyes on him in the summer of 1927 at a county dance in the town hall. This was after his family had moved the some sixty miles east from the big noisy boomtown of Amarillo to little ole Clarendon, where I was born and raised. He was a terribly handsome boy, tall and dark-haired. However he wore a little blue cap that made him look mighty silly. We were both only kids. I had just turned thirteen. He gave me a pitifully wilted rose he had stolen from Mrs. Mckee’s garden.

On that morning in August of 1986 he had a dab of jalapeño jelly on his chin. It had been there since our complimentary breakfast at the Big Sky Motel in Missoula, Montana. I was going to tell him to use the handkerchief I had embroidered with his initials and given him some many Christmases before, but he had already begun for the pilot a monologue on rainfall. Such was his custom with men he had just met.

Mr. Waldrip had arranged for us to take a scenic flight to an airfield near a cabin we had rented in the Bitterroot National Forest. The pilot he had hired was a strong, well-groomed young man by the name of Terry Squime. Terry was not a hair over thirty and was newly wed. He showed us a photograph of his bride. She was pretty and resembled Catherine Drewer, a rude and frustrating brunette woman I knew from our church, First Methodist, only Mrs. Squime was quite some years younger and had a jaw less like a shoehorn and a nose less like an old mushroom. When I would later come to know Mrs. Squime, whom I have cautioned against reading certain passages of this account, I would find her to be a pleasant and selfless young woman, and to be very little like Catherine Drewer at all.

Mr. Waldrip carried on about rainfall and the nuisance of beavers and I returned to looking out my little window. The Cessna 340 is a little twin-propeller airplane of six seats, and ours had taken off from an airfield outside of Missoula and was flying south over the Bitterroot Mountains. I mean to tell you these are mountains, the kind that remind a person, no matter how old they are, that they are infinitely young to the earth. These mountains are edged and scalloped like gigantic kin to the arrowheads my little brother, Davy, God rest his tiny soul, unearthed in Palo Duro Canyon when we were small. I had lived seventy-two years in the Texas Panhandle and mountains are not a geological feature you will find in that country. The land is as flat as flat can be, level with what is level in the constitution and spirit of the people who walk it. We plains folk are a grounded people and rarely see a mountain. But having seen what I have now seen of them, when I say these were mountains, you would be right to believe me.

I was then fifty-four years married to Mr. Waldrip. We lived in a little brick ranch house in the orbital shade of a municipal water tower that serviced the some two thousand thirsty souls in Clarendon. Only the day before we had locked up the front door and had taken the truck to the airport in Amarillo, where we had then flown, with a quick stop in Denver, to Missoula on a jet airplane. We did not often venture far from our little house, and this was to be the first trip we had taken in a good long while. We had spent the first night of it under a full moon in the Big Sky Motel, off I-90, an establishment with damp carpets and laminate wood. Mr. Waldrip was not a poor man, but neither was he an extravagant man. I had come to terms with this early on in our marriage.

Mr. Waldrip hesitated half a second on the subject of rain gauges and Terry took the opportunity to ask how long we were planning to stay in Montana.

Just a few days, Mr. Waldrip said. Our pastor and his wife had the best time up here. Figured we’d get ourselves a cabin, do some fishin and kick back. But we sure need to get back this comin Thursday.

Mr. Waldrip likes to pretend he is not retired, I said.

Terry looked back. What kind of work did you do, sir?

I bought a cattle ranch in ’45. We sold it a year ago September.

Well, I bet you two will have a great time up here, Terry said.

We’re countin on it, Mr. Waldrip said, and he pulled the cuticle from his thumb. A point of blood rose on the nail and he stanched it on his blue jeans.

Doing Mr. Waldrip’s laundry, you might come across several pairs of blue jeans peppered with blood like that. If you did not know him, you could mistake him for a fighting man. But the only physical altercation I ever recall him having was with a mean old possum that had got itself snagged on a nail under our porch. Mr. Waldrip had his small ways of fidgeting. I suppose it was the result of his mind always being a few steps ahead of the rest of him, quick as he was, and it made him nervous trying to catch up.

Did you work, Mrs. Waldrip? Terry asked.

I had taught English in elementary school and was the librarian for forty-four years, and I told him so. I retired two years ago, I said.

Now we only got time for relaxin, said Mr. Waldrip, patting my knee.

Any kids? Terry said.

Never did get around to it, Mr. Waldrip said.

I turned back to my little window. The blue sky and the pane gave back my reflection. It reminded me of the oval portrait of my great-grandmother June Polyander which had hung over her bed until she passed away in her nineties. I fixed my hair. I wore it like many of the ladies at First Methodist. Permed up, we called it. When I was a young woman it had been the color of lovegrass in winter and I had worn it longer then. It started going gray in my forties. The grayer and whiter it went, the more Mr. Waldrip said I looked like a dandelion going to seed.

I have never been a great beauty—my nose is too much like a man’s to earn that appellation—but I have always done my best to be presentable. A spiky-haired woman named Lucille Carver came to church often as not looking like she had been fired there out of a cannon. I never could understand why she would let herself out of the house like that. I had always supposed it had to do with a disrespect for worship and a disregard for femininity, but now I am not so sure. That warm Sunday in August I wore a pleated tan skirt and a white blouse, and I was carrying my nice leather purse. I am mighty glad now that I was also wearing my most comfortable pair of walking shoes.

I suppose women like me are a phenomenon of the past. In Dallas I saw a young woman with long, screwy unwashed hair hold a restaurant door open for a man. I thought at the time that this young woman was without a sense of decorum and propriety. However I think now she was a sign of the times. Maybe something good and new of the future.

I spent my entire life with women to whom I felt akin, sitting in the fourth pew from the front at First Methodist. I know that each of them have had their hardships and have suffered one way or another. Mary Martha had been born with an odd-shaped kidney that did not work the way it ought to and caused her much pain and turned the whites in her eyes the color of egg yolk. Sara Mae lost her little boy in an accident involving a tire swing, and Mabry Cartwright never married, being that her teeth might as well have been woodchips and her breath the wind over a feedlot. I do not know how my trials and tribulations tally against those of any of these women. We do not know anyone’s suffering but our own. However I do sometimes wonder if any of them could have survived the Bitterroot.

Forgot to make sure the pantry light was off, Mr. Waldrip said, looking past me out the window.

I told him that I believed it was.

I took a sweet from my purse and unwrapped it. I was partial to caramels then but I do not eat them now. I have lost the taste for them. Sleep had not come easy in the Big Sky Motel the night prior for the proximity of the highway and I was tired. I ate the caramel and I laid my head back against the seat. Mountains skirted the window and I dozed off listening to Mr. Waldrip talk of center-pivot irrigation.

I woke to Mr. Waldrip’s hand on my knee. The little airplane was shuddering something terrible and he leaned forward to try and see into the cockpit. I was nervous to begin with up in the air like we were. Other than the jet airplane that had flown us to Missoula, I had only ever been on an airplane once before. It was June 1954 and I had just had my fortieth birthday and we flew to Florida to visit Mr. Waldrip’s ailing brother, Samuel Waldrip. We also saw the beach.

Mr. Waldrip took his hand from my knee and said, I’m pretty sure now I left the pantry light on.

I wondered then why he woke me up to tell me something so silly, but I did not say so. I think now he wanted my company. That dab of jelly was still there on his chin. I opened my purse for a tissue and suddenly the airplane lurched. My stomach rose against the buckle of my seatbelt. I leaned over and looked into the cockpit. Terry’s arm was jerking at the controls, his elbow held out high and jittering. The airplane leveled and I leaned back.

Mr. Waldrip asked Terry if something was wrong. Terry did not answer. He was face-forward like the last thing he had a mind to do was look back at us. I fixed my eyes on the back of his head. I recall being mighty afraid of the expression that might be on the other side of it.

The little airplane lurched again. I did not want to, but I looked out the window anyway. A range of fearsome mountains reached for us like an open claw meaning to snatch us out of the sky. The airplane leveled out again. Sun glared off the wing like it does off a seep pond and I covered my eyes. Mr. Waldrip put his hand back on my knee. I looked at him.

It’s okay, Clory, he said. It’s just some bumps, same as the road you dislike.

What road?

The road you complain about in the east pasture.

I told him I did not think I would complain about a road.

The little airplane whined and out my window the propeller had slowed such that I could make out each blade. It occurred to me that I did not know how an airplane stays in the air at all, and I made up my mind that we were all of us idiots for ever setting foot in one. The nose tilted downward and I could tell that we were descending because my arms were light and all my insides seemed to float. The back of Terry’s head frightened me even more now, such like it was the flat featureless haired face of Satan himself.

I got ahold of Mr. Waldrip’s hand and I turned to him. He would not look at me. Neither of the men would look at me. I imagine they dared not see their own fears confirmed in the wild horror laid out on a woman’s face. Mr. Waldrip put his eyes ahead.

Out the window I saw the mountains rise up around us. The airplane shuddered and my seat vibrated.

Our hands were clammy together now, and I looked back to Mr. Waldrip.

Still he faced forward and said to no one in particular: What is it?

Terry did not answer him.

I did not answer him.

I have always been powerfully baffled that I did not pray then. Instead, I took Mr. Waldrip’s face in my hands and pushed his cheeks together. He looked mighty scared and ashamed like a little boy and scarcely like himself at all. Never in all our years of marriage had I known he had in him an expression like that. I let go of his face and put my head on his chest. Gracious, how embarrassed we would be if this came to nothing!

I heard inside Mr. Waldrip that same old heartbeat going quicker and quicker, and then his voice in his chest muffled and big, like the way our pastor, Bill Dow, preached into his new microphone. Suddenly it was unfamiliar as if it had originated from some awful dimension in which I did not hold any belief.

He gasped and said that I was a wife. I like to believe he meant to say that I was a good wife, but before he could correct himself, the little airplane hit.

The noise was too much for ears. I do not know how noise like that comes about. Perhaps the impact had fractured all known sound into pieces I could no longer recognize on their own. Terry wailed out a thing horrible and unmanly and I recall being awed by the way people show their fear of God in such times. We all of us then did not behave as we had for nearly all of our lives. I can still only describe the noises Terry made as a turkey endeavoring to gobble in English. I believe to this day he said God save Mrs. Custard but I still do not have the faintest notion what he might have meant by it.

Mr. Waldrip did not make a peep and was torn from me, and all that I glimpsed were the scuffed-up soles of the alligator-skin boots I had given him years before on an occasion I cannot now recall. An object knocked the wind from me and came to rest on my shoulder. I do not recall when I realized that we had stopped moving, only that the caramel I had eaten had worked its way back up my throat.

Forest Ranger Debra Lewis, a thermos of merlot between her thighs and a .44 revolver at her hip, drove the sunbleached dirt road to Egyptian Point, an overlook up the mountain where teenagers from the foothills drugged and drank and had sex. A bowlegged Shoshone woman named Silk Foot Maggie lived adjacent in a mobile home and had radioed into the station about a bonfire and curse words and phantoms in the woods. Lewis had tossed a can of bear spray into the backseat of the green and tan 1978 Jeep Wagoneer in case the kids were belligerent.

She came upon two pickup trucks parked at the trailhead. The noonday sun knotted black shadows under them and there slept two pale bulldogs chained to the hitches. Lewis pulled over and fixed in the rearview mirror the campaign hat she wore over feathered brown hair shorn just at her shoulders in the cut of a schoolboy. She took a sleeve of her uniform to a row of winestained teeth and buffed them.

She hiked the trail up to Egyptian Point, the can of bear spray in one hand and the thermos in the other, until she came to the place. Voices carried on the wind and a coat sleeve disappeared into a mott of white pine. She clipped the thermos to her belt and wedged the bear spray into a coat pocket. Monoliths of granite encircled the clearing. Smoke unspooled from a smoldering pit of busted lawn chairs and a torn plastic bag. Blackened beer cans twitched at the foot of a disfigured drugstore mannequin adorned with a crown of used condoms. Curse words and Christian names lay coupled and carved and painted over rock faces and trees. From behind a bank of spruce and granite came whispers and pairs of eyes spun there in the shade.

Now you honeysuckers listen up like all your lives depended on it, Lewis said. Cause I just might decide that they do.

She stumbled around in a circle, crossing her legs like a dancer. She touched the revolver at her hip.

You can’t do what you’re goddamn odin up here, she said. You can’t drink alcohol or smoke whatever it is you’re smokin here. This’s a protected region. Past that old sign back there it’s the wilderness. I’m the goddamn law out here. I’m the adult here. Go on home, goddamn it, go on home.

No response came.

If I don’t see you goofballs comin down in a hurry, I swear to God I won’t be happy. I got the license plates on those outfits down there.

She faced about to leave and saw crouched in an alcove between two pornographically defaced boulders a teenaged girl with white hair and an overbite. The girl wore nothing save a brassiere and did not blink. She watched Lewis and palmed her small breasts, her bony ribs working fast. Her face was dirty and her forehead marked in soot like that of a supplicant on Ash Wednesday. Lewis was thirty-seven and figured the girl for at least twenty years younger than her. She looked once in the girl’s eyes and returned to the trailhead where she sat in the Wagoneer and drank from the thermos of merlot until the lithe figures of cackling teenagers swept two by two from the woods like mythical waifs and left in their pickups as the sun fell behind distant peaks.

Lewis drove back in the direction of the small pinewood cabin she had lived in for the past eleven years. It sat off a mountain road in an alpine forest near vacation homes left vacant. She drank again from the thermos and listened to the only clear radio broadcast to reach up the mountain.

You’re listening to Ask Dr. Howe How, I’m Dr. Howe, and it’s time for our last caller until I’m back on tonight. Thank you for joining us today. What can I do for you, Sam?

A tired and dolorous voice belonging neither distinctly to a man nor a woman asked how it was that people could so resolutely misunderstand one another.

Before Dr. Howe could respond, Lewis swerved out of respect to miss a roadkill and spilled the thermos over her uniform. She took the Lord’s name in vain and the radio signal went to static and Dr. Howe’s answer was lost.

All was quiet. Then I heard a whistle that could have been a kettle. I opened my eyes. I am not certain that I was ever unconscious, but it is my understanding that it is often hard to know about that sort of thing. A bright red suitcase, not one I recognized, pinned my shoulder. My guess was that it was Terry’s. I heaved it off. Where my window had been there was now a wide gash in the fuselage, as if someone had pried open a can of peas. I undid my seatbelt.

I had come to the end of a world in that little airplane, and in such a terrible calm I climbed through that gash and was born again into another. The airplane had stopped on an escarpment of granite up near the peak of a high rocky mountain, the nose not three yards from the edge where a jungle of tall conifers rose from below, nodding. All about were mountains. Two big ones flanked ours and farther out a snow-capped range repeated into the blue distance like all there were and all there had ever been in the history of the world were mountains.

I touched my forehead. Blood. My face was covered with it and in a piece of broken glass I saw that I had a small cut over my eyebrow. I looked like an Indian brave in warpaint. I hollered for Richard loud as I could. I only ever used Mr. Waldrip’s Christian name when addressing him directly, a habit I learned from Mother.

The sun was out and the day was warm. It is a strange thing that such a pleasant and beautiful place can seem so mean-spirited. The mountain was high up, but no snow was on the ground and all about hairy plants with mighty pretty scarlet flowers grew from the rock. I later learned they are called mountainside paintbrushes. The airplane had been halved down the middle. The tail of it was gone.

I looked back at Mr. Waldrip’s empty seat. I hollered for him again. My eyes returned to the treetops below the escarpment. One of Mr. Waldrip’s alligator-skin boots was right side up at the edge. I started for it. As I went I looked back at the little airplane and saw the nose of the cockpit had been shorn away. Most of the flight controls were gone and Terry sat there in the open air still in his seatbelt. He was slumped over. I was sure he had passed.

When I reached the edge of the escarpment Mr. Waldrip was some half a dozen yards down, splayed out prone across the top of a large spruce. He was mighty high up off the ground. I hollered at him if he was all right but I ought to have already had the answer to that. He did not move and I could see blood was welling in the seat of his blue jeans. I hollered his name again. I worried he was hung there paralyzed and could not answer me. There was not a thing in the world I could do. I could not reach him, and if I had been able to reach him, what good would it have done? That was when it first occurred to me to pray. I knelt down at the edge of that escarpment and looked out over an immense valley and I prayed: Our Father, who art in heaven, Mr. Waldrip is down there in a tree, and he is badly hurt. Please help us, please help us, please save us, Lord … Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he shall pluck my feet from out the net.

I prayed that way for some time until Mr. Waldrip’s blue jeans had gone plum-colored. I doubtless would still be knelt there in prayer had it not been that behind me there was such a scream like I had never heard before. It was a high-pitched sort of cry, very wet and moronic. Best way I know to describe it, and it is a distasteful notion for which I hope to be forgiven, is that it was how I imagine a simple person would holler if they were immolated.

Well, I hollered too and threw my hands up over my face. Finally I turned and lowered my fingers. My dear! Terry had come to and was chewing the blood in his mouth, screeching that awful way in repeat. One of the residents in my building here at River Bend Assisted Living in Brattleboro, Vermont, has a son, Jacob, who is in a wheelchair and cannot move his body, not even his eyelids. It is awful. His eyes must be shut at night and opened come morning by a caretaker, who is a stout large-headed woman in white with a little squirt bottle of saline on her belt that she uses to mist his eyeballs at two-minute intervals throughout the day. Jacob might not blink, but he sure can scream. That is about all he can do. When I hear him in the halls I am reminded of Terry.

I took some steps forward. Terry was not in a good way at all. He had spit up a segment of his jaw which yet held several of his teeth in it and it had dropped into his shirt collar. One of his blue eyes was black entirely. He did not act like he could see out of either of them. He kept up his crazed screaming, and I matched each one. My hands shook and my heart jumped like a jackrabbit. There we were, just hollering at each other. In some better world the whole performance might have been comical.

Terry was upright some several feet off the ground, belted in his chair, exalted like a terrible overseer of terrible doings. I stood before him, continuing to holler myself silly, without the wildest notion as to what to do. I could just have about reached his shins to comfort him, but I did not want to touch him, and I sure felt bad about that. My whole family were Methodists and I was taught to keep charity and compassion in my heart, but there was not a thing in the world I could have done for that man.

After an awful spell, like a baby he calmed on his own accord and was cooing. He raised up his arm such as to issue an edict and said sweet as can be: Is it over?

Pardon? I said.

Excuse me, I’ve always been honest with my dentist. Am I at the dentist? Just a minute. Are we dead yet?

My husband is in a tree, I said, pointing behind.

Good for him, Terry said. He was always climbing that tree.

After that he said the word waitress some twenty times and soiled himself. Then he bawled and asked for his mailman so that he could post a letter to a relative for whom he had forgotten the name and address. He was carrying on like he believed he was having a tooth pulled on gas at his dentist’s office. I took a notion to ask him what we ought to do but decided against it. Poor man.

He said: Waitress, bathtime, waitress, bathtime for Samantha. I’ve carried a torch for my mailman for years, but it was never going to work out. He’s late. Late. Pull the tooth already, this gas is making me sick. I want to go home.

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.

That’s all right, Lewis said.

Claude lived next door in a small blue-washed cabin with an old golden retriever he called Charlie. He had no curtains to his bedroom window and Lewis often saw him in bed reading or asleep, mouth agape. Most mornings she had a cup of coffee and merlot and watched him iron his uniform. Once she had seen him awake past midnight naked at the foot of his bed weeping into the dog’s coat.

Lewis opened the screen door and a man staggered up the steps behind Claude, struggling with a video camera as if it were a cinder block. Pigeonchested, the man propped himself against a post, jaundiced there under the porch light. He swung the video camera off his shoulder and trembled a hand over his skinny neck. He scratched at the red stubble down past his shirt collar. Evenin, ma’am.

Claude jabbed a thumb over his shoulder and introduced the man as Pete and said that he was an old friend from high school. He’s goin to be stayin with me and Charlie for a little while.

My old lady left me, Pete said.

Goddamn sorry to hear that.

I’ll be all right, ma’am, thank you. Claudey’s agreed to put me up while I’m hurtin.

Claude told Lewis the plan was for Pete to help him finally get the ghost of Cornelia Åkersson on tape with his new video camera. He said that it would also do Pete some good to volunteer in the Friends of the Forest program and get some fresh air.

Pete glanced behind him at the dark mountain road. So it’s just you and Claude the only rangers up here? Maybe I’ll be some help, then, while I’m hurtin.

Pete’s had some ciders.

We been out lookin for that one-eyed ghost you got up here, Pete said. He retied a meager auburn ponytail and adjusted the strap to the video camera. Claudey here wants me to get a picture of her, but I told him I ain’t any good at takin pictures. He’s always had more faith in me than what I got in myself. I know Claudey since we’re in high school back in Big Timber. It sure is good to be with old friends while you’re hurtin.

Lewis nodded and looked to Claude. The porch light showed the dog hair on his uniform. He turned in his hands the campaign hat like he were steering a car.

So what is it, Claude?

I’d say that’s a hard one to say.

We got a distress call over the radio, Pete said.

Claude put up a hand. I’ll give her the information, Petey. We can’t say we know it was a distress call. All we can say is we heard a humanoidal voice say cloris. Thrice it said it. Cloris, cloris, cloris. Like that. It was garbled.

Cloris?

Cloris.

I tend to frighten, so it spooked me some, Pete said.

What’s a goddamn cloris?

I can’t say that I know, Claude said. If it’s some kind of code, I can’t say that I know it. And what for, to what end?

Maybe you misheard it.

Maybe. Maybe. Don’t think I did.

What sounds like cloris?

Morris, Pete said.

Where were you?

Out by Darling Pass.

See your goddamn ghost?

Claude smiled. All right now, Debs. No need to have fun at my expense.

Pete raised a red eyebrow. You don’t believe in the ghost, Ranger Lewis?

I’ve never seen it.

I guess it’s hard to believe in somethin especially when you can’t see it, Pete said. I tried to believe my wife loved me. But after a while she said she wanted to make a change in her life before change was too late to be made. She said I was repressed. Sometimes she likes to use words I ain’t never heard of to make me feel bad about my education. But I told her she ain’t goin to get another way of life like she wants, not at thirty-nine lookin like she’s sixty-nine, not a clean tooth in her gourd.

Pete’s had some ciders, Claude said.

Did I tell you what she said, Claudey?

Why don’t you tell me later?

No, go ahead, Lewis said. What’d she say?

Said I had a weird heart in a weird chest. Said I looked like an ugly woman with derelict breasts.

I’m sorry, Petey. She shouldn’t talk about you like that.

Well, I’ll be all right. I know I got a weird chest, had it all my life, born with it. Pectus carinatum. But a weird heart? Been wrackin my brain tryin to know what she meant by that.

Sorry again about the hour, Debs, Claude said, turning to her. Just thought I’d brief you on this cloris word in case you thought we should act on it in some way didn’t occur to me.

Lewis steadied herself on the doorjamb and looked up to the dark sky. She recalled the coat of a black Labrador she had once watched her father euthanize in his clinic. She looked back to Claude. You don’t need to check on me every goddamn weekend. I’m all right.

I know that.

All right, she said. Man’s voice or woman’s?

Couldn’t say. I’d say might’ve been a woman or a young boy.

Pete fanned out a hand of small fingers. To me that voice had the sound of a forlorned woman, he said importantly.

All right. I’ll make a note of this tomorrow mornin. You two ought to get on home before Cornelia eats you guys’ tongues and takes you to Neptune.

Come on now, Debs, don’t poke fun.

What’s that? Pete said.

The goddamn ghost Claude’s got you lookin for, Lewis said. Gums off tongues, hair, and balls.

She closed the door on the two men, then she went back to the kitchen sink. The stains in the uniform had not come out. She dropped the shirt in the wastebasket. She had another glass of merlot and took a long bath with another bottle and listened to Ask Dr. Howe How. A thunderous woman phoned into the program and asked how it was that she and her husband seemed to be behaving like unrealistic and impractical people. She asked if it were common for people to behave like characters they had seen on television. In a reedy and pragmatic voice like that of a physician in surgery, Dr. Howe offered that, yes, it was common, perhaps because to do so was easier than assessing and acting on our authentic impulses and concerns.

Lewis switched off the radio and climbed from the bath. She dried herself and stood naked to her bedroom window looking out at the dark pines and the valley below. She took to the fogged pane the tip of a finger and outlined her tall reflection. Beyond, in the forest, distant flashlights worked the dark and struck the trees. Lewis figured it was the men searching yet for the ghost of Cornelia Åkersson.

She wiped the window clear and returned to the bathroom to vomit in the sink and then went to bed where she slept a restless night of dreams she was sure she had dreamt but none of them could she recount upon waking. In the morning she said to herself, God only knows what happens to me in my goddamn dreams.

Lewis stopped the Wagoneer to clear from the road a flattened goshawk. She sailed the carcass like a discus into the trees below and marked the incident in the notepad she kept in her chest pocket. The sun was not yet up, the road still dark. She drove on and came to the one-room cedar structure perched high up the mountain. She unlocked the front door under a sign wood-burned with National Forest Service Backcountry Station and went inside.

In the kitchenette she started a pot of coffee and took three aspirin and splashed her face at the sink and clicked on the space heater. Her desk was flush against a large westfacing window with a view of the same wooded valley she could see from her cabin. Mist sat in the evergreens and was just burning off under a rising sun. Great clots of dark birds turned in the sky. Lewis took off the campaign hat and set it to a hook on the wall. She sat and powered on the radio equipment on the desk and waited for it to warm up. She leaned over the paging microphone.

Ranger Lewis to Chief Gaskell. Ranger Lewis to Chief Gaskell. Come in, Chief Gaskell. Over.

Mornin, Ranger Lewis. Readin you loud and clear. What’re you doin at the station this early? Over.

Somethin was buggin me, couldn’t let it wait. John, you know any-thin about a cloris? Over.

What’s a cloris? Say again. Over.

Cloris. I don’t know. I was hopin you would. Over.

I don’t. Over.

Is it not code? Stand for somethin? Over.

Not anything I know. Over.

Ranger Paulson received a transmission over his handheld last night out by Darling Pass, worried it might’ve been a distress call. It just said cloris. Thrice it said it. Cloris, cloris, cloris. Could’ve misheard. Over.

Cloris? Say again. Over.

Cloris. I’m spellin it C-L-O-R-I-S. Cloris. Over.

Cloris. Copy. Cloris. I’ve never heard of that. Cloris. I’ll check around. Darling Pass? Was Claude out lookin for that ghost he says rides that turtle? Over.

Goddamn Cornelia. He was. Over.

He’s a strange bird. How’re you holdin up up there? Over.

Lewis leaned back and looked out the window. A black beetle was climbing the inside of the pane and appeared there an immense animal using for stepping stones the peaks beyond. She hunched again for the microphone. I’m all right, John, thanks. Over.

All right, well you let me know if there’s anything I can do. We’re thinkin about you. Marcy says she’s thinkin about you too. Divorce is hard times under any circumstance. Over.

Appreciate it. Over.

That everything, Ranger Lewis? Over.

That’s everything. Out.

Lewis stood from her desk and went to the kitchenette and poured a cup of coffee and splashed a little merlot in it from a bottle hidden in a cutout behind the cabinet and turned again to the window. She went back and leaned over her desk and flicked away the beetle.

Mr. Waldrip and I had a calendar of 1986 from First Methodist pasted to the pantry door. Prior to us leaving on our trip to Montana, Mr. Waldrip had circled the 31st of August with black pen and had neatly written in the appointment we had with Terry Squime for the flight to our cabin in the Bitterroot National Forest. I have always thought it noteworthy that the 31st happened to fall on the first Sunday of Kingdomtide. If you are not a Methodist of a certain age likely you have not heard of Kingdomtide. It is meant to be a season of charity and unity in the Kingdom of God observed after Pentecost and before Advent. Not many churches observe it anymore. For me, ever since my time in the Bitterroot, it has turned out to be a season of considerable hardship and grief.

I now have the calendar here with me at River Bend Assisted Living on the wall above my desk. Mr. Waldrip could not have foreseen he was marking the day he would wind up in a tree and I would be stranded in the wilderness, but that is just the way these fateful moments go. Often we do not know the significance of a thing until it is good and well in the past. It is seldom now that I shut my eyes without I should see that calendar and the first Sunday of Kingdomtide circled in the glittery dark you can find on the inside of your eyelids. I fear it may be the last thing I ever see.

There was painful little sleep to be had that first night. I must have said my name into the radio near to a thousand times. I was hoarser than a pioneer preacher on a Monday. I was not certain whether the radio still worked, but I made an effort nevertheless. When I did endeavor to get some shut-eye, I learned how mighty afraid I was. I did not care for staying in that little airplane with Terry’s disfigured body looming up in a terrible silence, but I came to reason it was a sight better than sleeping out in the open with the dark and all the unknown critters that call the dark their home.

When I woke the sun was high and my shoulder and knees ached something terrible. I was getting thirsty. Dried blood flaked off my forehead like paint off an old prairie home. A filthy latticework of scratches and scrapes covered my arms. I was not even sure they were my arms. They seemed to belong to some old and pitifully treated indigent woman. I sat up and climbed out through the gash in the little airplane.

Terry was still strapped in his seat, warped up like an old cigar-store Indian left out in the weather for a considerable long while. His fingers had buckled into an array like buzzard talons and his jaw was crooked and dried out. I cannot know what on earth compelled me but I covered my mouth and went closer to him. Tiny gnats danced on his opaque eyes and I studied the way the bigger flies throned the tongue in his gaping mouth like little green potbellied despots.

I left Terry and went to the edge of the escarpment and stood next to Mr. Waldrip’s boot. My poor husband was down there yet caught in that spruce. He had not moved. I prayed then and there that this would be the most heartless sight to which I would ever bear witness. I got a handful of pebbles and chucked them at him. Some missed entirely and others bounced clear off his back. Mr. Waldrip did not move. I was reminded of when he had been hospitalized for his back surgery in 1974. When they put him on the morphine he went quiet and helpless. I had never seen him like that before. I had certainly never seen him deceased before. He was a mighty sweet man, dear Mr. Waldrip, God rest his soul. I miss him very much.

A young black woman who is a therapist here at River Bend Assisted Living has told me that there is a woman in Switzerland with one of these doubled surnames that are fashionable today, Elisabeth KŸbler-Ross, who believes that there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I am sure that she means well, but I do not believe she has it exactly right. The stages of grief are myriad and you could not endeavor to name them all. A stage for every recollection, for every ever-failing memory, and these stages are nameless and they are many, so that cast before you is a measureless spectrum of unparticular nostalgia and loss. Grief is the cold end of the night, I believe.

I turned back to the airplane and decided I would try the radio again. By then I had grown used to the foul way Terry smelled so that I did not even flinch when I crawled in around his legs and took hold again of the receiver. I said the same thing I had said all night prior: Help me, my name is Cloris Waldrip. Our airplane went down.

I repeated this at intervals some one hundred times or better. I was getting mighty hungry and thirsty so I looked for my purse and found it had tumped over on the floor next to my seat. I put back what I could find: my gallbladder medication (which I had nearly finished and did not especially need to take anymore, thank goodness), a packet of tissues, my little copy of the King James Bible, my house keys. I did turn up a handful of my caramels under the seat, but I could not find my copy of Anna Karenina nor my pocketbook. I did not imagine I would need my pocketbook, but I would have liked to have had the copy of Anna Karenina. I could not find any water.

I backed out of the fuselage with my purse and I unwrapped a caramel and ate it on a short boulder close by so that I could still hear the radio should anyone come through. It was a Monday and I usually had my Panhandle Ladies’ Breakfast Club on Mondays out at the Goodnight House. (Colonel Charles Goodnight was a celebrated cattleman who helped settle the Panhandle, and his family have kept up his fine estate as a landmark of historical significance.) We often ate on the veranda. Had Mr. Waldrip not convinced me to go on this crazy trip, I would have been sat between Sara Mae Davis and Ruth Moore, the sun in Ruth’s dyed orange hair like a Christmas light, both of them yammering about the new establishment in downtown Amarillo that was said to be an iniquitous place for women who liked women and men who liked men.

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.

I put on Terry’s big coat and was very small in it. I crawled back into the fuselage, and under Terry’s seat I found a plastic sack containing a small black hatchet and an old blue umbrella. I was sure happy to find these. There was also a tennis ball with the word stress written on it in marker and a flashlight that would not turn on so I left it where it was. I rolled up the issue of Time magazine and the tore-up map and put these in my purse. I climbed out of the fuselage and did not once look back at the little airplane. In hindsight, I ought to have left a note telling anyone that might come along where I had gone.

At the edge of the escarpment I picked up Mr. Waldrip’s boot and stuffed it toe-first into my purse as far as it would go. After scouting around I found a suitable enough slope with soft dirt and loose rocks. I dug in the heels of my shoes and carefully climbed down to the floor of the woods below. I had not been in the dirt like that since I was a little girl. After I had caught my breath I pushed on through the trees.

I had not gone far when I spotted Mr. Waldrip’s glasses on the ground. I looked up. Mr. Waldrip was hung above me in the spruce. His arms were out wide as if to greet me in a way he had never done before. His head sat mauve and swollen on his shoulders at a funny angle. There were no cuts nor blood to his face. The expression on him was one I had seen when someone talked to him about a drought. That dab of jalapeño jelly was still on his chin.

I recall wanting to bawl, but I did not. I suppose some things are just too sad that tears cannot do them justice.

When Mr. Waldrip and I were a young couple, we would argue about small infractions just as young couples do. I recall one summer night in the backyard of our new home under the water tower when the cicadas were very loud and I was as mad as a wet hen and we had raised our voices at each other. About what I do not now remember. But while I was still hollering and pointing up and pointing down and going red in the face he had calmed. He smiled. He reached out and brushed away my hair and said, No matter how angry you get, Clory, I always know you still got your kind little ears.

Standing under his body then, I wished to be the woman I was when he had loved me the most. Mr. Waldrip always said I was the most whip-smart woman or man he had ever met and that I could outword a dictionary. I thought that if I could manage to be that woman for just minutes at a time, maybe I just might survive this ordeal. Perhaps I had a way out of this immense and terrible place. So I fixed my hair around my ears best I could, knelt down, and picked up Mr. Waldrip’s glasses. I stowed them in the breast pocket of Terry’s coat and set out through the trees in the direction of the smoke.

II

Tuesday morning Lewis sat at her desk before the wide window and watched with bagged eyes the light change on a page of the Missoulian. She had come into the station again before sunrise and by the time Claude and Pete arrived she had already drunk two cups of coffee and a mugful of merlot from a bottle she kept under her desk. She had read twice the front-page story on the disappearance of a ten-year-old girl, vanished from her bed in the middle of the night. She flipped back to the newsprint photograph. The girl wore a deely bobber and smiled crookedly before a painted canyon landscape.

You read this about the missin girl? Lewis said. The Hovett girl? Sarah Hovett?

Claude was hunched over the narrow desk at the west wall, touching ointment to the blue end of his nose. I did, he said. He laid a hand on the head of the old dog snoring at his feet. I’d hate to know what happened to her.

I sure do appreciate y’all havin me in your place of work, Pete said from the kitchenette. He steadied the video camera on the counter and put an eye to the viewfinder, recording the percolator drip. I appreciate the company durin these tryin times.

We know you do, Claude said. Don’t use up all the tape on pictures of coffee.

Lewis folded the newspaper and dropped it in the wastebasket. I can’t figure why sittin up here on a goddamn mountain with us’d make anybody feel better about anythin.

Pete shrilled like a hag and turned off the video camera. He poured two mugs of coffee. You sure are funny, Ranger Lewis. He gave Claude a mug and kept one for himself, then put a hand to the wall and faced the window and sipped. He gestured out the window. Ain’t enough to mention it’s just plain gorgeous.

White clouds lay banked high in the mountains and below in a valley went what Lewis figured to be a herd of elk. Sentient points of black in an otherwise senseless landscape.

Sometimes I’d like to live in a goddamn city, she said. With all kinds of goddamn people around.

Pete brought to his malformed chest the coffee mug and nodded as if troubling at a riddle. The rest of the morning he drank coffee and videotaped angles of the station and listed for Lewis the infidelities his wife had committed in their toolshed under the cover of darkness, and told how she had contracted syphilis from a nineteen-toed lounge singer who mowed the lawn next door.

She just got to where what she had weren’t enough for her, Pete said, adjusting an angle on Claude’s wastebasket. And look what it got her. Look what it got me. She’s selfish and makes a real good play of makin you think it’s healthy. Boundaries, she calls it.

Claude sighed and threw away the empty tube of ointment. The old dog raised its head and lapped its ragged mouth. Don’t tell her about all that. Talk about somethin regular. My God.

What kind of work you do, Pete?

He’s in finance, Claude said.

I put some money I’d saved workin at the cannin factory in my nephew’s TV game. It’s doin better than just makin hens meet.

Ends meet, Claude said.

Now I got some money in a cheddar-flavored soda pop I got real high hopes for.

The sun now stood high in the window above a coalblack thunderhead beyond the mountains. Lewis poured another mugful of merlot in secret. She told the two men that there was not a goddamn thing going and that they could start hunting Cornelia’s ghost and leave her to finish out the day alone.

Cornelia’s nocturnal, Claude said. I’d say you know that.

Pete hoisted the video camera to a shoulder and asked Claude to tell him more about Cornelia’s ghost for he did not entirely understand what they were doing.

Claude leashed the old dog at his feet and stood from his desk and went on to explain how Cornelia Åkersson had been born male in Sweden in 1841, but had feminine features and chose to live as a woman. He told how she had come to Montana in 1859 with her husband, Odvar, in a caravan from the Boston seaport and how she was only eighteen years old when three men from the caravan camp raped her and found out what she was. Thereafter they pulled her teeth and left her in the Bitterroot to die, Claude said. Then they murdered Odvar and tossed his body in a crick.

Pete had leveled on Claude the video camera. You been sayin she’s got one big eye.

Her eyes’ve grown together in the center of her forehead, Petey. Happens to greater shades over time. These mountains keep most of the souls of their dead, so we’ve got lots and lots of shades here. Even the spirits of prehistoric animals that died millions of years ago. I’d say that’s the reason why Cornelia rides aback the phantom of a megafaunal armadillo from the Cenozoic called a glyptodont. Imagine gettin that picture.

I can’t, Pete said. He took his eye from the viewfinder and turned off the video camera and let it go slack about his neck. You ever go snipe huntin when you was a kid?

Lewis told again the men to leave her to it and they went out and took the dog. She refilled the mug from the bottle under her desk. She sipped at it and filed a vandalism report on a campground boulder that Silk Foot Maggie had spray-painted gold and covered in cat hair and rubber nipples.

After a while a transmission came in over the radio. Lewis leaned over the paging microphone.

Ranger Lewis here. Over.

We got somethin developin here, Ranger Lewis. Yesterday the wife of a small aircraft pilot named … Terry Squime … contacted Missoula authorities concerned about her husband’s whereabouts. She said he was due back in Missoula late Sunday. Due back after he was to fly a pair of senior citizens to Lake Como. An elderly couple named Richard and Cloris Waldrip. Over.

Cloris Waldrip? So Cloris is a goddamn name? Over.

Yeah. Turns out. Over.

You figure they went down, John? Over.

We checked at the cabin the Waldrips were supposed to be at, but they’re not there. Proprietor said they never were. Squime’s flight path was to be over your way. I’m dispatchin search-and-rescue. You’ll act as department liaison for this thing. Go with them, chopper over, and check it out this afternoon. Expect a Steven Bloor with a team in about an hour. Bloor’s a real interestin fella, you’ll like him. Poor guy’s a widower. He’s a good guy, a good old bud from the National Guard. You two can help each other. Hopefully you guys can beat the storm. Over.

Roger that. Over.

This’s some excitement. How’re you holdin up up there? Over.

I’m fine, John. Over.

Good. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. If you ever need to talk, we’re here for you. Marcy says she’s here for you too. Over.

Thank you. I’m all right. Over.

Well all right. We’re all prayin for you. Marcy included. That’s what the ranger community is for. Carin for the land and servin people. Over.

Thank you. That everything? Over.

That’s everything, Ranger Lewis. Out.

Out the station window dark thunderclouds lay slung over the mountains like blueblack viscera jumbled and discarded as if the heavens had been hunted and gutted the way Lewis often found the carcasses of poached bears and elk ditched on service roads. The elk had gone from the valley, and wind from the stormhead combed the grasses and shook the forests and moaned through the station. In the wind Lewis figured she heard a woman orgasm. She shivered. She finished a mugful of merlot and poured another. She turned from the window to the front of the station and put a hand to a cheek and figured she had a fever. She watched the door and strained to hear again the woman.

Then the pineboard steps croaked without, and the door opened.

A tall man ducked into the station and removed a pair of sunglasses. He took a hand to a mullet of feathery blond hair, so sparse it was in front that the ruddy dome of his skull gleamed underneath. He wore civilian clothes—hiking boots, a button-up, and khakis—save for a bright orange windbreaker which bore the letters SAR.

The man hung the sunglasses on his shirt and showed bright white teeth like those of children in beauty pageants. He said, Koojee.

Lewis stood and drew a sleeve across her mouth. Sorry?

Do you have kids?

No.

The man shook his head. My daughter, he said. His voice was faint and high and he sucked over each word as if it were a lozenge. Her disgusting boyfriend clerks at a dollar store and has a dead tooth. Political, everything is always political, you know. I’m a progressive man, but …

Are you with search-and-rescue?

He clicked his teeth together and nodded. I hope you’re the ranger I’m here to see. I misplaced the name John gave me. Wrote it down on a napkin. A waitress threw it in my beans.

Ranger Lewis.

Ranger Lewis, of course, my apologies. Please take your seat.

That’s all right.

You prefer to stand?

Yes.

The man closed his eyes and sighed. He opened them again and raised an arm to the window behind her. There’s a storm waiting for us, he said.

I’m ready to go.

The man came closer. No, Ranger Lewis, he said. He looked her over. If we chopper out there in this weather and go down, who’ll rescue us? He put out a hand. A fine white dust covered his fingers. Steven Bloor, he said. Search-and-rescue.

Lewis took his hand. Don’t you figure since it’s an emergency we ought to go anyway? Weather be goddamned?

If you speak with my colleagues from Tacoma to Missoula they’ll all tell you that I’m a prudent and professional and progressive man. Tonight that may save our lives. He squeezed her hand and let it go. We’ll wait till tomorrow. I predict the storm will have abated.

In a goddamn emergency—

It’s not much of an emergency, Ranger Lewis.

How do you mean?

If the plane did go down, those aboard are more than likely deceased. Koojee.

Bloor unzipped a breast pocket and brought out a photograph and a small cake of hand chalk like that used by gymnasts. He passed the photograph to Lewis and slapped the chalk between his palms.

Lewis studied the photograph and brushed it clear. It showed a young couple posed in foam Stetsons smiling before a low geyser in a state park.

That’s Terry Squime, Bloor said. The pilot, there on the left. Mrs. Squime sent us the picture. My guess is she’s the pretty woman in the blue hat. Xerox it for your personnel.

You mean Claude?

I probably do. Bloor studied her and pulled out the chair behind the smaller desk against the west wall. He sat down and pocketed the chalk. He stretched out his long legs and thumped the pineboards with the heels of his boots. You know, my wife always told me never to stand while there’s an empty chair in the room.

Do we have any more information on Cloris Waldrip and her husband?

Retired, Bloor said. In their mid to late seventies. Small-town Texans flying up here for a pleasant few days in a cabin. Koojee. You live up here all year round, Ranger Lewis?

What does that mean?

What does what mean?

That goddamn word you keep sayin.

Koojee?

Yes.

It’s a word my wife used to say to express most types of emotional concern. It’s exclamatory. You know, it just stuck with me. So do you live up here all year round then?

I go down for groceries and gasoline.

Bloor put an end of the sunglasses in his mouth and nibbled. It’s not unpleasant up here. Only I get the sense it’d be lonely for an individual with an active mind. Loneliness can be dangerous. You could go nuts. Do you have a companion?

You mean a dog?

No. An intimate companion.

No.

Do you have a dog?

Claude has a dog. I’m divorced.

How long?

Almost three goddamn months now.

Where is your family?

My dad was in Missoula. He’s gone.

Your mother?

Long gone.

I hope I’m not being too forward. Sometimes I’m too forward. My wife always told me I was too forward and that it made people uncomfortable, because forwardness is only permitted in children.

It’s all right.

I’m a progressive man, Ranger Lewis. It’s important to me to become familiar with the people I’m to be working with. I’m a people person. Are you a people person, Ranger Lewis?

Goddamn it, I don’t know.

Bloor took the sunglasses from his mouth. A little about me, he said. I was married in Washington State. Lived in Tacoma, you know. At heart I’m an art collector. I only keep working in search-and-rescue anymore to have a reciprocal relationship with society. Just recently I procured a wonderful piece by a tractor mechanic in Washburn, Arkansas. Jorge Moosely. He uses his comatose mother for his canvas. Paints her head to toe in landscapes, then photographs her. I have his White Water Vapids piece back at our house in Missoula. It’s heartbreaking.

I’m goddamn worried we ought to try and head out there, see if we can’t find—

I don’t want to die out there, Ranger Lewis. Do you? Bloor clapped his legs and stood and left on his khakis two white handprints. I’ll return six o’clock tomorrow morning. He looked once clear into her eyes, winked, and replaced his sunglasses. Lewis recalled a man who had worked as a janitor in her father’s clinic. In the evening hours, when she would work at the clinic after school, she would find this man pacing the blue halls with a carpet steamer, or washing dung from the pens with his thumb on the end of a hose, or folding into the plastic bin next to a lightning-scarred oak the bodies of euthanized dogs and cats. The last time she saw him there he had winked at her too.

That evening Lewis drove the mountain road to her pinewood cabin, listening to Ask Dr. Howe How on the radio. A man with a hurried whisper like that of someone hiding under a desk during a home invasion phoned in with concerns about an inability to throw punches in his dreams. I’m gettin killed in there, Doc.

Lewis turned up the radio and pulled over to a shoulder overlooking a deep gully. She drank from the thermos of merlot and listened to Dr. Howe tell this man that he had gone to sleep with unsettled anxieties of sexual inferiority and that he would do well to remember that all men are created inferior in some way and are therefore all equals. Practice enjoying sex and fulfilling your partner in a respectful intimacy, Dr. Howe told him.

Lewis finished the thermos and climbed from the Wagoneer. She squinted out over the land and the evening mist that settled it and the thunderhead in the mountains. The last of the sun colored her face and was gone. Lightning burned beyond. She touched to her tongue her fingers and wetted them. She sent them into her government-issue trousers and closed her eyes to the dark.

Hateful swarms of mosquitoes kept that steep and rocky little wood. Most of the time there was not a thing to do but go straight through them. I just covered my mouth, pinched my nose, and held my breath. Mosquitoes have always been a special nuisance to me. When I was a little girl our house was by a seep pond and Mother would leave the window open on hot summer nights. You could count on those little winged devils to find out the holes in the flyscreen. I would swat at them until the moon was gone. I am not fond of that awful whine they like to make. Gracious, how gargantuan they sound when they get right up to your ear and sing that song which I imagine is sung in the halls of damnation.

I was slow getting down that mountain, being that I was mighty careful where I put my feet. All about were barrows of rock and motts of twisted pine and big old spruce. I held on to low branches to keep from falling over and stopped often to rest my breath. I was mighty thirsty again too. One good spill dirtied up my skirt and the zigzag sweater, but I managed not to hurt myself. Mr. Waldrip and I had been taking calcium tablets with our breakfast, so my bones were good and strong.

I am sure it was near three hours before I got to that little clearing where I had marked there had been smoke.

When a mind has had seventy-two years’ worth of thoughts, it has the opportunity to start acting a little funny. It runs the way my vacuum cleaner ran after twenty-three years of Mr. Waldrip refusing to replace it. The rubber belts inside go slack and the work of it smells like warm hair and dust. Now, I had never worried much about dementia before; Grandma Blackmore’s mind could skin a buffalo right up until the day she ended her earthly career at ninety-six. Still, as I set my old back to a great spruce and sank to the ground, my worry was that my cognition had fooled me good about the smoke I had seen rising up from the clearing. It occurred to me that it might have been wishful thinking, the way men lost in deserts see lakes where there is nothing but sand. There was not a thing in that clearing save rocks and grass and somewhere a terribly noisy owl. But I was sure I had seen smoke.

Clouds blew in above and the shadows under the trees grew together. Suddenly all was darker. I had a pain in my stomach. I had not yet passed the jelly and toast I had eaten at the Big Sky Motel the morning of our fateful flight. And I was mighty hungry. I sat for a spell holding my stomach as what was left of the sun crowned the mountains. The place had the look of evil and I was scared. True dark would come soon and I had no airplane to shelter in.

I decided that I would build a fire. I set about gathering twigs and sticks and pine cones and I piled them in the flattest place I could find. I drug a rotted log to the pile and sat there. I took out the matchbook from Terry’s coat pocket. Once more I studied the muscled dancing skunk on the cover and then I struck a match. The flame did not want to take to the log and it burned my fingers and went out. Three more matches were left.

Mr. Waldrip and I used to visit the Panhandle Plains Museum in Canyon, Texas, where there are life-sized plaster figures of cavemen and cavewomen, hairy and mean, squatting at the limits of a campfire with paper flames. One of the cavewomen was meant to have set it. My thought was, if she had been able to set a fire back then in that hard way of living, surely I could too.

I tore up some pages from the Time magazine about President Reagan’s colon surgery and stuffed them under the wood. Then I lit another match and dropped it in the makings. It burned some and went out. I tried again with the penultimate match and had not a thing on my mind save that cavewoman. The flame took and slowly wound its way up the tinder. I had never before given much thought to what Darwin called his Origin of Species, but I did then. I can see how it might have come about. The people that could not get a fire going would have perished in the cold. And I suspect it was womankind that spared Man from extinction.

The fire caught into a fine blaze and I watched it there for a little while. I was feeling mighty pleased with myself, so much so that I risked a little cheer out loud. It is true a fire is a great comfort even in the most dire of circumstances, but it does make the dark it cannot reach a great deal darker. I endeavored to keep my eyes from the dark and watch the glow in the rotted log instead. Little bugs trapped there hissed and exploded like popped corn. A poor daddylongleg was scurrying from the heat but its fine appendages singed away and the fire overtook it.

By then my stomach pained me something terrible and my bowels began to move. I hurried to the other side of my fire and looked around at the dark. I do not take any pleasure to include this here, but bless you, I will not shy from relating this story in its entirety. It is important that you believe I am relating the whole and pitiful truth of the strange events yet to come in this narrative. As a tree kept my balance, I undid my skirt and rolled down my stockings and I relieved myself right there in the firelight before all creation.

I have always considered myself a well-bred Texan woman, but I suppose even the best of us have bowel movements. My generation is mighty ashamed of them and precisely why that is I do not know. But I was sure sorry for myself and I teared up a little and swatted away the little black flies and mosquitoes that pestered me. I was a pitiful sight to behold. After I had finished, I kicked some pine needles over it and went back to where I had been sitting before and cleaned my ankles with grass. The notion crossed me that I was more unlike myself than I had ever been before.

I watched the fire take more of the log and exhausted I fell asleep.

I woke to thunder. It was dark yet and wind and rain clashed in the trees. The fire had gone out and the burnt-black wood hissed like a nest of smoking snakes. I backed up to the spruce close as I could, but rain still fell on me. It had created a sump and I was sat right in it. The rain washed out my permanent. I am sure I looked like a sopping wet mouse. I have always disliked the way I look when my hair is wet. I got out the umbrella I had found in the airplane and went to open it but it had a big tear in it and was about as useful as a ceiling fan in an igloo. I chucked it aside and set Mr. Waldrip’s boot out to fill up. I wrapped up tight in Terry’s coat. The rain was not as cold as it could have been, I imagine, but I shivered out of my bones nevertheless. How I did not perish right then and there I do not know.

I was glad that it was not long before the rain turned to scarcely a drizzle. For the better part of an hour the lightning crawled in the night above the trees. The sky seemed to me then like a cracked mirror turning and glinting and giving back all the awful true nature of the earth below, which was a hilly and scorched landscape of soot, a very unlucky and inhospitable place indeed.

One strike was not far away and it lit up a mighty strange presence ahead between the boles of two big pines. The light had come and gone so quickly that I was not too certain what I had seen. My first thought was that it had been the face of a young man, hidden in the dark of a hood. When the light was gone I was stone blind. I screamed out before the crack of the lightning reached me in the dark. I was considerably frightened.

It is a funny thing how I trembled at the notion that another person was out there with me, when another person was just what I had hoped to find. There is just something about strangers. And my thought was: what manner of lunatic would stand quietly in the dark and the rain to watch an old woman suffer? Or was it Terry’s disembodied face regurgitated by that white-eyed raccoon, come to haunt me for what I had taken off his person? Perhaps there are spirits over which God has lost dominion, though I have never given much credence to phantoms.

I kept my eyes on the place in the dark, but when the next bout of lightning lit up the trees, whatever it was had gone. The woods flashed on and off for a spell, and I watched for the face to come back, but it did not. There was only that grand timber, which to me then were like great bars to a cell imprisoning me for convictions I feigned not to understand. I tucked my head to my chest and waited for morning.

Mr. Waldrip’s boot filled up past the ankle overnight, but I only got a little sip that morning before I stumbled and spilt it and would spend the rest of the day as thirsty as a catfish in a catamaran. The morning was overcast but the trees all about were bright and grayly bejeweled with rainwater. The good thing about everything being wet and cool was that the mosquitoes had taken the morning off to do whatever it is they do when they are not out terrorizing us higher creatures.

I did not move for some time. I considered not moving ever again and letting myself perish right there. It might have been the first time that I had entertained the notion of resigning to what many would have said was an inevitability in the case of a seventy-two-year-old woman becoming lost in the wilderness. It most certainly would not be the last. I imagined myself looking something like poor Terry, rigid and squirreled up against that spruce, my jaw off its hinges and flies making a mansion of my skull. I wondered how long my hair would stay in and if I would be found in this most unlovely condition, or never again be beheld by human eyes. I could not decide which fate I most preferred.

I took out the tore-up map and worked to make sense of it, but it could not be done. It might as well have been a swatch of the Chinese wallpaper that insufferable Catherine Drewer had used in her sitting room. I decided to voyage away from the clearing and farther down the mountain, although not before I stepped right in my own mess and had to clean my shoe in the wet grass! I do not mean to offend, and this is again a detail I could have left out, but I believe it contributes to the absurdity of my plight and proves that I am not being false nor grand.

After about an hour I came to a rocky place where I could see out from the trees and down into a valley. My heart jumped! I spotted in the distance the asphalt of a highway, tracing a path back to civilization. I was likely as good as rescued if I could make it down there. With renewed energy and hope I made my way down to the valley. All the while I heard strange noises behind me. I had the notion I was being followed.

I reached the place after a couple of hours and stumbled out of the woods. The highway was not a highway at all but a creek. Gracious, I was disappointed. Although by that time I was mighty thirsty too, so it was hard work to be too disappointed in finding water. I wobbled on like a newborn calf, my stockings tore up pretty good now, and I collapsed at the bank of that creek. I cupped my hands in the water and drank. It was very cold and clear. I had drunk two handfuls when I looked up and spotted in the shallows the hairy corpse of a huge animal! I spat out the water and jumped back. I was nearly sick, but I held my hand over my mouth. The thing had antlers and scraps of hide trailing in the current such as some gowned pagan devil.

I went upstream past this dead monster and filled Mr. Waldrip’s boot. I did my best not to let my imagination wander to what other nasty things might be lying afoul in the water. While I sat sipping from Mr. Waldrip’s boot the light changed color on the mountains all around me. I was hungry and cold so I prayed and then set about building another fire for the night. I piled wood together much the same as I had done the night prior, only I gathered more of it and more dry tinder. I piled the makings near the creek. It was near dark when I sat down exhausted and took out Terry’s matchbook.

The wind was against me and howled wildly over the valley, and the wide sky darkened with clouds. I opened the matchbook to the last match and tore it carefully. I steadied my hand and positioned my back to the wind. I got close as I could to the tinder pile, then said a prayer and struck the match. The matchhead hissed and blackened but did not bring a flame.

Dark came but not before I spotted the silhouette of an animal I took to be a mountain lion prowling a far ridge of rock. Scared and uneasy, and nearly starved, I had my last caramel for supper. It threatened to rain, but the wind chased the clouds from the sky and uncovered the stars and moon. The dark was hardly dark anymore under the bare heavens, which shone down on the grassy fields of the valley, the silvery creek, the woods nearby.

I did not know what next to do. I worried my situation had grown too dire. But I knew come morning I would be compelled to do something, anything at all. The dead monstrosity was yet nearby, its black antlers moonlit and the twinkling water underneath like a bed of lovely gems.

I heard something move in the woods. I recalled the face I was now certain I had seen the night before. I thought of the mountain lion too. My Bible was in my purse and I moved it to the breast pocket of Terry’s coat right over my heart. But I was mighty tired, enough not to be too afraid of mysterious faces and mountain lions. There was not a thing to do but to offer up my prayers to God and succumb to exhaustion.

The pilot swung the helicopter low over gray slopes of scree high above the tree line. Lewis squinted against the crags of sunlit granite, upthrust from the depths of the mantle some eighty million years ago. She brought slowly to her lips a thermos of merlot.

Bloor, long legs folded childlike in the seat next to her, knees level to his chin, turned upon her his pale face. His voice squelched in her headset over the beat of the blades. Have you ever been to Macao?

Lewis shook her head.

An older man with clubbed fingers sat across from them. He watched the window. Bloor had introduced him as Cecil. Keep your eyes peeled, he said.

I left Jill with her grandmother and spent last winter in Macao, Bloor said, and he made a show of looking out the glass. Had to get away. Met a six-foot-three Pekinese woman named Chesapeake. They pick their own English names, you know. She picked Chesapeake. Her friends referred to her by a Chinese word that means ladder. You’re tall too, Ranger Lewis.

Cecil looked up. Keep your stupid eyes peeled.

Cecil’s a longtime rescue paramedic, Bloor said. Works even though he has COPD. He doesn’t like me very much.

These people we are lookin for, they are dead, Cecil said. He turned back to the window. Sun filled his eyes yet he did not squint.

Koojee, said Bloor.

They flew onward over intrusions of granite set in the earth like molars in a jaw, and they each of them searched the ground below, wearing now sunglasses as the day grew brighter. Wind shear drove the helicopter down and Lewis squeezed the thermos in her lap. The air smoothed and she drank. Bloor watched her behind yellow lenses and asked her if she considered herself an ethical person.

Lewis wiped her mouth and ran a tongue over wine-red teeth. She tightened the lid to the thermos. Not sure, she said.

Bloor brandished a finger white with chalk. I give a share of my time and skills for the wellbeing of others, so for the sake of universal balance I allow myself particular ethically selfish pleasures. Chesapeake was an ethically selfish pleasure.

Lewis smiled and unscrewed the lid to the thermos. She drank and rescrewed it.

What ethically selfish pleasures do you allow yourself, Ranger Lewis?

Goddamn, I’d have to think about that.

I hope you do.

Cecil put up a hand. Do you need me to peel them for you?

Thank you, Cecil, Bloor said.

The pilot circled two other mountains and passed over a bleak forest. Lewis kept her eyes to the land and blinked little. In the glass she could see Bloor turn his head to look at her. Twilight was already upon them when the pilot warned that they ought to turn back before they lost the light.

Goddamn it, Lewis said.

Cecil had not turned his head for a time. At long last he shuddered it around to them like some rickety piece of theater on a set of pulleys. It’s difficult to think anyone of any age could survive down there at all, he said, and he coughed on the plump ends of his fingers.

As the pilot began to fly them back toward the station, Bloor spoke about the depression of people without ambition.

These are the eighties, you know, he said. I’ve seen thirty-year-olds dressing like teenagers. I’ve always been ambitious. Do you enjoy your work out here, Ranger Lewis?

They passed the black edge of the mountain in the oncoming dark. Yes, she said.

My daughter will be eighteen the third of November. I’ll tell her about you, remind her that there are ambitious women out there.

Be quiet, Cecil said. You’re makin the pilot crazy.

One more thing, Cecil. Then you can wire my jaw shut if you want. Listen, Ranger Lewis. I apologize if this is too forward. Sometimes I’m too forward. Have dinner with me this evening? I’m renting a large lonely cabin and I’d appreciate the company. We can go over the case and discuss our options.

Lewis watched unsteadily the man’s face.

She drank a bottle of merlot at her kitchen sink and put on a clean uniform and then drove to a stately two-story cabin built of pine and painted clean white, stilted dark and alone in a far dead end overlooking the east valley. Down below in the foothills a little town glowed. No wind battled the trees and stars spun like rowels in the glassy firmament. Lewis parked the Wagoneer in the gravel driveway. She took up from the passenger’s seat a four-dollar bottle of merlot and picked off the price tag.

The front door of the white cabin opened. Bloor ducked under the transom and peered out at her. His thin black shadow emerged like an insect from a crack in a floor. He put up a hand and rolled his long fingers. Lewis climbed from the Wagoneer.

Without a word Bloor ushered her into the cabin. He closed the door and locked the dead bolt. He waved in a circle a chalked hand and asked her what she thought of the place.

Lewis surveyed the large, open room. A circular steel fireplace burned in the center and a length of dark picture windows lined a wall beyond which lay a stilted deck and a hot tub and a barbecue. Long white couches were angled around a glass coffee table where there sat a bottle of wine. The kitchen was lit up through an open archway and from there came a smell of cooking that recalled a deep basement.

It’s goddamn modern, Lewis said.

I thought so too, Bloor said. He took from her the bottle she had brought and her coat. Do you go everywhere in uniform, Ranger Lewis?

I expect I just got comfortable in it.

It’s a handsome uniform.

I’ve been by here before, Lewis said. It’s goddamn unusual to see a white cabin.

It’s owned by a homosexual man named Cherry. Good guy. You know him?

I know he rents this place out, but I never met him.

Bloor thanked her for the wine and said, I’m sorry if I seem distracted. I just hung up with my daughter. She’s been trouble recently.

I figure she’s the age for it.

Bloor went over to the coffee table and set the bottle there beside the other and took from his chest pocket a cake of chalk and chalked his hands. I don’t want to say she’s slow, but it takes a long time to get her to understand the complexity of a thing. He took up the bottles and held them out for her to choose.

Lewis pointed at the merlot.

Bloor uncorked the bottle with a corkscrew from the table. She was caught today with that clerk with the dead tooth I was telling you about. In the school restroom. Suspended. What do you think of that?

Nothin.

Bloor poured two glasses of merlot. She told me one morning over eggs she wanted to do it. Can you believe that?

Do what?

Sex. I’m a progressive man, Ranger Lewis. Cultured, of this time. Beyond this time, even. But you know, part of me wants my daughter to be the eternal virgin.

I expect that’s only natural, Lewis said.

Bloor smiled and sat on the couch. He patted the cushion next to him. Lewis went over to him and sat. He handed her a glass and raised his. To the Waldrips and Terry Squime, may Light and Love have mercy on them. May they rest in peace.

Lewis raised her glass. That’s premature talk.

The two drank.

How did you meet your ex-husband? I apologize if I’m too curious. My wife always told me that I’m curious in a way that makes people feel probed and unsafe.

Lewis told him that she had met Roland at her dad’s veterinarian clinic when she worked there after school and Roland had brought in his dog to put it down. She told how they had gotten married just after she had left high school and had begun working in the Missoula Parks and Recreation. After a few years, she said, she took the ranger’s position in the Bitterroot Mountains and Roland was put in charge of purchasing in the small-game department at a hunting-goods store. At the time she had not thought anything of him running off on a business trip every other weekend.

He was seeing someone else?

He had a wife in Nebraska, one in Colorado, and one more in Montana. Lewis pointed to her badge.

The man is a Mormon then.

If he is he never told me about it. He’s in prison for trigamy.

Koojee. At least you don’t have kids.

Goddamn it, never needed any.

Kids. You know, when we moved from Tacoma to Missoula I hoped the change of venue would help. But I don’t know. My daughter’s already lost her virginity straddling a toilet. It’s not that I’m made uncomfortable by sexuality. My tenure as a sergeant in the National Guard made sure of that.

Bloor drank off a glass, then reached for the bottle and poured himself another. He stroked together the chalked fingers of his free hand and studied the wine with eyes that did not seem to see.

When my wife passed away three years ago, he said, I thought I’d become a better person. To honor her memory, you understand. I haven’t. Not at all. I don’t know why.

Sorry about your wife.

Bloor looked at the ends of his white fingers. I love people, he said. Do you know what she used to tell me?

No.

That I could rule the world with love and compassion.

All right.

I miss her. When I tell people about her I can see it in their faces they don’t understand what a visionary woman she was. They don’t know what she meant to me.

I expect that’s true.

I’ve always lost people, you know. I think it’s why I first started in search-and-rescue. My mom disappeared watering pansies one morning when I was an infant. Nothing left but a pair of size-six clogs and a water hose running. My dad was already long gone, somewhere dead or alive in a country we had no idea about. Some people thought he’d come back and kidnapped my mom and drowned her in one of the Finger Lakes. They never found her. My sister raised me. Then she died of food poisoning in a hotel lobby ten years ago this Thanksgiving. Koojee.

Goddamn sorry to hear that.

Room service killed her. The hotel settled handsomely in court. Now I never have to work another day of my life if I don’t want to.

I figure that’s a good thing.

Losing my wife, Adelaide, was the hardest. We knew each other since we were kids. But I don’t think she ever was a child, you know. She always spoke like she’d been born with a life already lived in her. Most everyone didn’t know what to make of her, so they were vile to her. The boys at school tormented her. But I don’t think any of them ever really had the upper hand. It was even then like she’d wanted them to be vile to her in just the way they were. As if she’d orchestrated the whole thing for a pleasure only she knew about.

Sounds like she was a goddamn special woman, Lewis said. She missed her mouth with her glass and dribbled merlot down the front of her uniform. She blotted the spill with her sleeve and held out the empty glass.

Bloor poured her another. He turned his drawn face to the windows, where a blue light outside showed fog in the trees. A finger-mark of chalk was on his chin. You don’t even know, he said, and he took her fingers between his chalked hands. Thank you for coming over tonight. He pinched the skin of her ring finger hard and filled his lungs like he were to submerge himself in water.

Lewis took back her hand. You’re welcome.

Bloor let out his breath and smiled.

Lewis, rubbing the back of her hand, pulled the Wagoneer crookedly into the driveway. The lights were off in the pinewood cabin and the windows dark. Over the radio Dr. Howe spoke gently to a woman who had phoned in with the name Ronnie and asked how she could be expected to go on and live the life she had come to live when all she had ever wanted was to leave her husband and her three children and sing country-western music all night long in Nashville. Lewis turned off the engine but kept the radio on and listened.

The woman said: I’m three hundred pounds. That’s somethin to do with it. But it ain’t fat that’s in me. I got all this frustration poolin in my belly and my thighs and my ass. I can’t be a country-western singer. I’m morbidly obese and I ain’t got a particularly good singin voice. I count myself betrayed, Dr. Howe. I just knew that’s what I was goin to be when I was a little girl, but here I am now and I’m not and I’m large and I’m tonedeaf. My gran was a singer. Sometimes I go to the downtown library and look through those old microfiches they got of her and the shows she used to put on around town and I just get so frickin jealous, pardon my language. Jealous of my dead gran. That’s low, ain’t it? Tell me it’s low. And then my husband, not long ago I caught him eyeballin my baby sister at the church fish fry. That’s been on my mind. She’s only just able to have a legal drink and weighs nearly a hundred pounds less than me, so I ain’t no competition. Where’s a person like me with all this frustration poolin in them supposed to go to get their self-worth? I’ve just been dismissed and dismissed, even by people that’d say they love me. And I go to doin it to myself, Dr. Howe, I go to dismissin myself and I just sit on the end of my bed while the kids’re at school and my husband is at work and just watch the cat come in and out of the room.

Dr. Howe said: Ronnie, life is about adjusting our expectations. It is what it is, and will be what it will be, like it or not. And I believe that the secret to happiness is to find a way not only to accept and tolerate life as it comes, in any manner it comes, but to find a way to enjoy it in spite of yourself and the conditions it sets. You can’t have everything you want or you would implode and disappear. Do you understand me, Ronnie? You would have nothing at all without all that you believe you do not have.

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