Kingdomtide

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?