Ruthie Fear Read online

  RUTHIE

  FEAR

  a novel

  Maxim Loskutoff

  W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  For the wolves

  Approximately seventy miles long and up to fifteen miles wide, the Bitterroot Valley is sheltered by the majestic Bitterroot Range to the west and the Sapphire Mountains to the east. Watered by the Bitterroot River and its tributaries, the valley climate is mild. The valley provides easy forage for bear, elk, moose, deer, mountain goat, cougar, muskrat, and beaver.

  Coniferous trees cover the mountain slopes and deciduous softwoods line the valley waterways. Edible plants and berries flourish throughout the valley including bitterroot, camas, huckleberries, chokecherries, serviceberries, and strawberries.

  In 1850, Major John Owen established a trading post on the original site of St. Mary’s Mission. It was the first permanent white settlement in Montana, and welcomed Indian, Trappers, gold seekers, and settlers.

  Long before, the Bitterroot Valley was home to the Flathead Indians, who called themselves “Salish.”

  —MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  Since our forefathers first beheld him . . . [the whiteman] has filled graves with our bones . . . His laws never gave us a blade of grass nor a tree nor a duck nor a grouse nor a trout . . . You know that he comes as long as he lives, and takes more and more, and dirties what he leaves.

  —CHIEF CHARLO

  I

  1.

  The year Ruthie Fear was born, her father shot the last wolf in the Bitterroot Valley. He strung it up by the hind feet from the peak of his shed. Nearly pure white, it was so big its snout grazed the dirt. It twisted slightly, front paws dragging, in the hot, still afternoons. Ranchers and tourists came from as far away as Ennis to see. They stood in clusters around the Fears’ trailer, laughing and spitting and toeing the dirt. They paid a dollar to pose for pictures. Some put their arm around the wolf and grinned. Others stared silently into the camera. All were shorter than the wolf was long.

  When the interest waned, Rutherford cut the wolf down, skinned it, and turned it into a rug. He replaced its eyes with pieces of colored glass. He folded its ears back and shaped its jaws into a perpetual snarl. He laid the rug down to fill the trailer’s narrow living-room floor. It looked enraged and confused there, claws still fixed to the ends of its flattened legs, as if wondering where its spirit had gone. Ruthie’s mother left soon after, and the only place Ruthie would fall asleep was on the wolfskin rug. With her cheek on its shoulder and her small fingers wound through the white fur on its back. It looked less angry then. She screamed uncontrollably when lifted away, and slept there until she was four years old. Rutherford claimed, for the rest of her short life, that this was what had made her so stubborn and wild.

  Ruthie knew it was simply having to live in the world of men.

  2.

  The first time Ruthie Fear went hunting with her father, she saw a huge winged skeleton flying in from the north. It approached over the dawn-lit mountains, wings stretched across the horizon, undulating on currents of air. Each bone rose and fell discretely, hinged together like vertebra and marked by shafts of light. The skull pointed toward her. Its shadow slid over the earth. An alien, Ruthie was sure, some creature that glided from world to world on gravitational tides and had died in between, the heat of a thousand suns slowly stripping away its flesh.

  Only five, she felt the vastness of the universe. Saw herself as a single dot. Imagined skimming through the cosmos beside this hunter, without fear or hunger, passing strange worlds and towering nebulae of green and purple gas millions of miles across.

  Her father’s Auto-5 shotgun broke her reverie, and shattered the skeleton into a mass of flapping, twisting parts. One tumbled down to the ice-covered pond before them. It landed silently in a puff of snow. The rest of the flock reassembled, carried on, and were lost in the shadow of the Sapphire Mountains. Her father cursed and lowered the gun. White frost clung to his red beard. “Pulled too early,” he said. His orange cap was the brightest piece of the morning world. Ruthie struggled to understand: one moment the skeleton, the next a dying goose. Smoke threaded up from the gun barrel in a mirror of her father’s breath. The goose dragged itself across the ice with a broken wing, making not for the shore but the center as though it would be met there in safety by a healing force.

  The cold air stung Ruthie’s throat. Sudden warmth ached behind her eyes. She mourned the loss of the winged skeleton much more than the goose dying in front of her. The impossible distances it had crossed. The freedom to move from galaxy to galaxy, feeding on light, while her own life was confined to the trailer she shared with her father, and the valley that surrounded them. The goose collapsed. Only its unbroken wing continued to beat weakly against the ice in steady, desperate cadence. Her father cursed again. He breached the stock and emptied the spent shells into the snow. Gunpowder’s acrid ammonia smell wafted out. “Point away,” he said, handing Ruthie the shotgun. “Not at me, not at you.” Ruthie gripped the warm barrel to her chest. She wished the skeleton had passed overhead. That it had streamed on to Las Vegas or Cancún or one of the other exotic places, populated by bikini-clad women, on the posters on her father’s bedroom wall. He was only twenty-four, not much more than a child himself.

  Together they stood before the world.

  He turned and picked his way down through the brush to the edge of the pond. He paused on the shore, his eyes narrowed against the cold, his eyebrows drawn together in determination. “Never do this,” he said.

  He lay down on his stomach and spread his arms. Paused there for a moment, a supplicant flattened with his chin to the snow, then pushed off the snowy bank with his legs and slowly pulled himself over the creaking surface by the elbows. His arms in a crooked V above his head, his body flat, one ear cocked to the shifting sounds beneath. Heat seemed to ribbon off him, an invader on the blank white void, only the goose also moving within it. Willow forest on three sides, and the snowy roof of former country star Wiley King’s unfinished mansion—on which Rutherford had found temporary work after the closing of the mill—a white slope in the distance.

  The wing beat like a heart, whomp, whomp . . . whomp, slowing, failing, a bloody motor running down. A trickle of red reached out to meet her father, to guide him, as a serpent to its lair. Ruthie wanted to scream, but she was afraid even that sound would crack the ice. She held her breath. Her father inched farther out. Ten feet from the shore, twenty. His gloved hand reached for the bird’s black foot. Nearly touched it, when a sound like another gunshot split the morning and two white walls tipped up to form a canyon, sluicing both man and bird into the dark water below. Then flopping back to horizontal, only the jagged vein between the sheets revealing the break.

  For a moment, Ruthie did not move nor scream. She was trapped between reality and her imagination. What had been real? Her father on the ice or lost in the dark water below? The flying skeleton or the flock of geese? Her booted feet in snow or skimming along beside a huge winged creature in the black of space?

  The ice violently upended into a mountain and her father’s orange hat burst forth. Icy water gushed off his cheeks. He howled. His arm thrashed free from the water holding the struggling bird by the feet. He flung it toward Ruthie. It skidded into the snowbank on the shore. It looked oddly unharmed there, only dazed, with all the blood washed from its feathers and its wound temporarily frozen shut. Rutherford brought his elbows down onto the ice, breaking it again. He twisted his shoulders like a bear and lurched toward Ruthie. She stood frozen in terror holding the shotgun. His approach was relentless, smashing through the ice in the waist-high water, his face contorted. Monstrous, beastly, a killer who would kill
again. For an instant, she was so afraid that she thought to level the barrel to her father’s chest, pull the trigger, and send him back beneath the ice. Seal it above his head; the massive skeleton once again winging south across the sky.

  3.

  Ruthie Fear felt the nearness of unseen beings. On fall trips into the national forest to poach firewood with her father, she searched for them in the bushes between the trees. Patches of larch flamed ocher in the midst of the evergreen forest. The smell of butterscotch wafted from ponderosa bark. Ruthie walked carefully, avoiding fallen branches. Like the winged skeleton, the beings seemed to follow her; only their shadows remained by the time she whirled around.

  “All this land used to be free,” her father said, stopping to appraise the trunks surrounding a small clearing. “Free game, free wood.” He’d been a stacker at the mill and now worked whatever construction jobs he could find. He tapped the head of his ax against a young ponderosa, and nodded at the dull tock. He stepped back. “Now the government thinks they get to decide who uses it.” Ruthie watched him brace his feet and shake loose his shoulders. The tree he’d chosen was twice his height, with a straight, reddish trunk and thin branches growing thinner to the needles at its top. The ax’s haft doubled the length of his arm. The blade’s concave head gleamed. A maul. Ruthie couldn’t remember where she’d heard that name, but it seemed fitting. What her father was about to do to the tree was what a bear would to him.

  Blisters from previous firewood expeditions marked the palms of his hands. It was their first season harvesting their own wood. They hadn’t needed to when he worked at the mill. His eyes fixed on a single point on the bark. “The woods will only be for the rich.” He raised the ax and swung it down in a hard, smooth, clean motion. The wedged blade chunked into the wood and he immediately jerked it back, in rhythm, to chunk again. “With them shutting down the mills and the mines.” His muscles strained with each successive chop. The wedge deepened; veins stood out on his arms, his body like the piston of some terrible machine. Splinters shot from the trunk and littered the ground around him. He began to sweat. “All these towns are going to die.” The violence of the work increased, as if he and the tree were pitted against one another—both could not remain standing. The blisters split open on his palms. The tree began to moan. Ruthie covered her ears. Sap leaked from the scaly bark, like the blood on her father’s hands. When the wedge was deep enough, Rutherford circled the trunk, wiped his brow on the shoulder of his T-shirt, spat, and began on the other side. Ruthie watched him, torn between fear and love. His swings slowed, hacking unevenly into the new wedge to create a hinge with the other, but still they did not cease. The treetop swung unsteadily in the breeze coming down from the mountains. It leaned over him.

  Ruthie backed to the edge of the clearing. Would this be what killed him? It seemed fitting: a tree he’d cut falling down on top of him. She touched the bark of another ponderosa and felt its rough, steady life. The butterscotch scent had grown stronger, marred now by suffering.

  The tree fell with a rending creak. Her father hopped to the side as branches popped overhead. It crashed down beside him and for a moment he was lost in the dust that billowed up from the ground. When the trunk settled, neatly bisecting the clearing, he stood over it. Sweat ran down his dirty cheeks into his beard. Broken branches hung like garlands from the pines around him. Sunlight poured through the fresh space above the stump. Rutherford looked at his bleeding palms. He grimaced. “They always put up a fight.”

  ON THE LONG WALK HOME, Rutherford knelt beside Trapper Creek. The large bundle of wood on his back loomed over him as he rinsed his palms in the water. Ruthie—her own, smaller bundle chafing her shoulders—watched the blood slip away in the current: two red, ropy fish elongating as they were carried downstream.

  RUTHIE, RUTHERFORD, and the dog Moses lived at the mouth of No-Medicine Canyon near the southern end of the Bitterroot Valley. Above them, Highway 93 rose to the hot springs and Lost Trail Pass into Idaho. Their teal trailer was set across the driveway in front of a single acre of barren ground eight miles from Darby, Montana. Theirs was the smallest property on Red Sun Road. In the winter, they slept side by side next to the woodstove, the windows sealed with plastic to hold in the heat, a towel stuffed in the crack beneath the door. The sheet metal siding rattled in the wind. Ruthie was often too cold, or hungry. The Bitterroot Range loomed overhead. Ten-thousand-foot peaks seeming to attack the sky with jagged, glaciated teeth. These were mountains that forced Lewis and Clark a hundred miles north and ended, once and for all, their dream of a northwest passage.

  The north entrance to the valley was marked by a sign reading JESUS CHRIST IS LORD OF THIS VALLEY, and the south entrance by a sign advertising Second Nature Taxidermy School, where farm boys with ghoulish ambitions came to learn the modern, fetishized art of embalming. Between these risen corpses, thirty thousand people lived.

  When Ruthie pressed her face against the window of her closet-sized room, she could see Trapper Peak, the tallest in the Bitterroots, hooked like a finger beckoning her above the tree line. Circled by bald eagles and white with snow eleven months of the year, it reassured her that men were small scrabbling things, crawling across the ice unaware of the depths below. The boys in her class made each other bleed with straightened paper clips. Her father’s friends—Kent Willis, Raymond Pompey, and the Salish brothers Terry and Billy French—drank themselves into stupors of displaced rage and stumbled outside to shoot bottles off a busted washing machine. The glass shards glinted kaleidoscopically in the morning sunlight while the men snored in the living room, their arms sprawled tenderly over each other’s chests, showing affection in sleep in a way that would be impossible awake. Tiptoeing around them to the bathroom, Ruthie wanted to fly away. She climbed on top of the toilet and wedged her head through the small window. Her gray eyes had a yellow ring in the irises like the beginning of an explosion, noticed by strangers, that she hoped would allow her to see farther. She tasted a storm approaching in the air. Saw herself zooming over the spent shotgun shells, the glittering pattern of glass, the cannibalized dump truck her father used as a kind of fort—full of discarded whiskey pints and Bowhunter magazines—to perch atop Trapper Peak and look back down on her life, free from its bonds and humiliations.

  When the storm came, she ran outside to catch frogs in the rain.

  As if in opposition to the mighty peak, No-Medicine Canyon was a dark, narrow portal where wind sprang up of its own accord, to scream and rage and then cease without ever leaving the canyon’s confines. Ruthie feared it instinctively, as did her father. They never went inside. She was sure that twenty thousand years of spirits lived within, beginning with the People of the Flood, a tribe whose marks were washed away when the ice dam broke at Glacial Lake Missoula fifteen thousand years before, but who remained below the dirt. Her friend Pip Pascal had found one of their fertility icons on the bank of Lost Horse Creek. A plump, headless stone figure of mounded breasts and pubis that caused both girls to look down over their own skinny bodies and think, No, this could never happen to us. They found other mysteries along game trails: strange dragging tracks, ancient flint tools, figures with many arms chipped into the west faces of boulders.

  “You should be afraid of every canyon,” Terry French told her, when she asked. He and his brother were the only Indians Ruthie knew, and she came to them with her most pressing concerns. He smiled and palmed her head. His wide, scarred fingers easily curled over her skull to the nape of her neck. “You’re six years old and you weigh forty pounds.”

  Ruthie stared up at him around his thick wrist. Sleep crust stuck in the corners of his eyes. A red rubber band loosely held his ponytail. He smiled down at her. “Now help me get this meat into your freezer so you and your dad don’t starve.” The butchered hindquarters of an elk, poorly shrink-wrapped, dripped blood in the bed of his truck. He handed Ruthie a package of steaks. Reluctantly, she lugged it inside, dumped it on the kitchen table, and left Terry
in the kitchen talking to her father about where work might be.

  She watched the canyon. There was something inside, she could feel it. Water slid down the cliff walls, slicking the granite black as obsidian. Strange ferns and mosses grew along the bottom of what was once a mighty riverbed and now held the low flow of Trapper Creek. Ruthie walked to the edge of her yard and pissed in the soft dirt. She saw the chasm that formed, the power of water. The ferns trembled in the wind. The long shadows held a wet, fecund darkness utterly apart from the dry valley outside. Ruthie shivered and pulled up her pants. She walked as close to the canyon’s mouth as she dared. Moses barked and ran across the yard to her side. She touched his ears. He sniffed the air, worried. Bleached skulls were piled in the far corner by the shed. Hunters from all across the valley brought trophy heads to be cleaned by Rutherford’s dermestid beetle colony inside the shed. It was his only regular source of income since the mill closed. The fifty thousand beetles lived among wood shavings in three large plastic bins beneath heat lamps. In a constant state of voracious hunger, they could remove every shred of flesh from a bear skull in twenty-four hours, leaving the bone porcelain-clean and preserving all the delicate structures within the nasal cavity. Ruthie sometimes snuck in to watch, transfixed, as the beetles swarmed over the flesh, flooding the orifices, adults and larvae working together with a speed that filled her with dread. On the coldest nights of winter, when the heat lamps weren’t enough, Rutherford brought the bins into the trailer and Ruthie had to listen to the larvae squirming over one another as she tried to sleep on the wolfskin rug.

  She knew not every girl lived like this. Some had mothers who sang lullabies.

  Moses began to tremble. What was in there? Ruthie smelled something from the canyon’s depths: a rot, a dead thing come back to life. She crouched beside Moses and rested her hand on the wiry fur of his neck to calm him. He was a Yorkie, always alert, save for in midwinter when he grew depressed. His breath came in quick pants. Together they stared into the shadows.