Ruthie Fear Read online

  14.

  When Terry French’s brother Billy got foreclosed off land his family had used for four hundred years, he put out the word that anyone could hunt there. It was known elk country, fields the animals grazed every fall on their way down from the high country, and on the first day of open season trucks packed the shoulder, some squeezed in frontwise and leaning halfway into the gully by the road. A traffic jam off the West Fork, probably the first in history. Badger had to park a quarter mile away in front of Terry’s place. Ruthie looked back at all the trucks.

  “You sure about this?” Badger asked.

  Her father had warned her not to come. “Bunch of jerkoffs with machine guns,” he’d said. Terry had gone to visit Delilah in Arlee to avoid the melee, disappointed in his brother. Terry and Rutherford’s idea of elk hunting involved covering yourself in elk piss, bushwhacking for miles before dawn, lying in wait all day risking your life, then just before dark shooting some massive bull with an arrow, chasing it until it died, butchering it in the dirt, and loading your pack so full of meat it was too heavy to lift. You had to lie down to put it on, then roll over onto all fours and pull yourself up against a tree, before hiking miles out in the dark. Ruthie had gone with them once and sworn never to again. Now Rutherford complained about having to share his meat.

  Ruthie nodded and hopped down from the truck. Badger’s baggy camo pants clashed with his red varsity jacket so jarringly that for a moment she wanted to shoot him. She still vacillated between affection and disgust, sometimes feeling overpowered by both. He claimed they were in love. They walked silently along the road in the frigid morning. The sun was rising over the Sapphires and Badger kept looking at it and squinting like he had something to say.

  Lawn chairs were set up between the trucks, and the hunters had brought not only hunting rifles but military-grade AKs, bump-stocked AR-15s, and modified Desert Eagle sidearms. They were passing them back and forth, clicking the bolts, feeling the weight, and peering down into the barrels like they could detect the most microscopic miscalibrations. Ruthie had the .30-06 her father had given her. She’d used it to kill antelope and deer on her own but never something as big as an elk. She wanted to prove to him that she could.

  Most of the hunters were strangers, weekenders in from Missoula and Salmon. Meadowlark Thompson and his father were the only two she recognized, sitting behind a camo pop-up blind in the back of their truck. The blind was completely unnecessary, ridiculous even, flanked by a half dozen other trucks on both sides, but they looked smug and content in its shade, drinking beers from an open cooler. Meadowlark glared down at Ruthie as she passed. He was still fat but much taller now, with the same dull, mean cloddishness he’d always had. When Badger looked up, Meadowlark quickly looked away.

  “What’s that about?” Badger asked.

  “Nothing,” Ruthie said. “I knew him in middle school.”

  They set up in a gap between trucks. Badger laid down his pack and took out a Budweiser tallboy. He popped the tab and drank. Then he tipped the can toward Ruthie. She took it, her fingers going numb around the icy aluminum. The beer tasted metallic and nauseating but she was glad for the warmth that flooded through her. They unslung their guns from their shoulders and unzipped the soft shoulder cases.

  Billy’s land was on a rise in the foothills of the Sapphires, several hundred feet above the valley floor. A gentle incline stretched out underneath them all the way to Wiley King’s electric fence and the distant shapes of the Rocky Mountain Labs on the Bitterroot River. Willow and ash shaded the bank of the West Fork at the far edge of Billy’s property. Billy and Terry’s father had farmed here but the brothers let it go to seed. Invasive knapweed grew among the old wheat, its thick spiky stems looking Jurassic. A million years from home.

  The elk were crowded in the far corner of the field by the woods, slowly grazing their way toward the center. Ruthie counted twenty-six of them. A tacit agreement had been struck by the hunters to wait until they got to open ground, so everyone had a clear shot. Like the game at the fair where you shot down a parade of wooden ducks. Her father had been right: It was a bullshit way to hunt, but Ruthie couldn’t turn back. She felt pressed forward by Badger and the other men.

  Lacking chairs, she and Badger crossed the gully—their boots crunching through the trickle of half-frozen water at the bottom—and sat on the buckrail fence on the other side. He made a joke about Indians and fences. A single elk calf had split off from the others and was making its way on gangly legs along the north edge of the forest. Run, Ruthie urged it with her mind. She checked the action on her rifle and loaded five rounds into the magazine. The cold metal hurt her fingers as she snapped them in. The crosshairs were sighted at a hundred yards with a slight rise against the grain. She figured the elk were closer to a hundred twenty-five away, but it was a clear, windless day and they were hardly moving. No trick to it. Just sight, breathe, and shoot, as she had ten thousand times on the range behind the trailer. Easy. One of the hunters had even brought a payloader to lift the dead animals into the trucks. Ruthie watched her breath twist up from her mouth. The cold air stung her cheeks. She set the gun across her thighs and swung her legs to keep warm. She felt her body small beneath her bundle of clothes. Was this any better than spotlighting? Ruthie banished the thought.

  Early snow dusted the Bitterroot Mountains across the valley. They looked sharp in the clarified morning air, as if she could cut her hand running it across the serrated peaks. She wondered where exactly she’d hide if she had to escape to the high country, like Pip had said. Rock climbers had discovered the huge, split-crack faces in Blodgett Canyon, and their Sprinter vans were just beginning to leave the national forest campground for the season, pasted with NATURE BATS LAST bumper stickers and smelling of sweaty crash pads. Two had been killed in a fall that summer. Her father hoped, futilely, that the danger would keep more from coming. Ruthie knew what the Salish had learned two hundred years before: More always came. Like a new gold rush, adrenaline instead of minerals. She turned and looked at the line of trucks behind her. There was something festive about their arrangement, all nosed together and mis-angled along the road. A holiday feeling, flags flying from the hoods, the gathered hunters drinking and shouting back and forth. She was surprised not to see Father Mike with a doomsday sign, pretending he was the kind of guy who killed all his own meat.

  “Are we going to get shot?” she asked, realizing they were positioned twenty yards in front of the other hunters.

  Badger smiled and squeezed her knee. “You’re such a girl.”

  “Because I don’t want to get shot?”

  He ignored her. “When we play Stevensville next week, I think Conner Reeves is going to come after me. He took Derek out last season. Fractured his pelvis. He and Levi are friends.”

  Ruthie watched the elk continue their methodical journey out from the trees, heads bent to the grass. She didn’t want to think about Levi—the wobbled look in his eye after Badger hit him. The lone bull, an eight-pointer with a shaggy beard and broad, tall haunches, stood imperiously among the females, not deigning to eat, raising his head to the first rays of sun knifing over the mountains. Ruthie lifted her rifle and squinted through the scope for a better look at his face.

  “He’s not as fast as he was,” Badger went on. “But he’s bigger. Derek thinks he puts metal plates under his shoulder pads.”

  In the wavering close-up of the scope, the bull looked back at Ruthie. His black snout and the heavy ridge of his brow formed a pointing arrow with the antlers spread overhead. The brown eyes were impassive, seeking only the warmth of the sun. Her irritation at Badger turned to sadness. She saw the bull dead in the grass, blood leaking from his thick neck. The men crowding around him for pictures, holding up his rack so his slack jaw and this same arrow of his consciousness faced the camera. The payloader rumbling in to scoop up his broken body and dump it into the bed of a truck.

  You shouldn’t be here, she thought.

 
But it was too late. Meadowlark started the hunt by blowing mightily into his bugle from behind the blind. Badger hopped down from the fence and lay on his stomach, sighting his rifle. Ruthie followed. She steadied the butt against her shoulder and felt the stock cool on her chin. She slid the bolt forward, pushing one of the rounds from the magazine into the chamber. Her legs stretched behind her. Her body and the rifle were one length, her eyes pointing where it would shoot. The men cheered. Every one of the animals looked up toward the road, and Ruthie understood why her father only hunted alone, or with Terry. There was a communion between hunter and prey, one that held either respect or mockery, and when it turned to mockery, the whole act was poison. She inhaled, trying not to think. Shots split open the morning and a fusillade of bullets shredded the air above her. Death in laughing flight. Badger’s breath turned guttural as he squeezed the trigger.

  Ruthie had sighted on a cow at the edge of the herd, a vacant-looking mature with no calves. But by the time she fired, in the cacophony of noise, she didn’t know if her bullet hit it or someone else’s. The cow pitched and staggered, shot through the gut. Keening wails rose from the herd, punctuated by bellows as the animals crashed into one another, trying to escape. Blood sprayed from hide to hide. Calves were trampled in their mothers’ panic. Most of the bullets seemed not to have been targeted at all, as if the hunters cared nothing for their tags, or the regulations against killing mothers with calves. The spray ripped the animals apart in repeating waves.

  Ruthie lowered the scope from her eye. She couldn’t watch. The ground trembled as the herd scattered and collapsed. The calf she’d seen before was tangled in a section of barbed-wire fence, its leg broken. It lowed at its fallen mother. The sound made Ruthie sick. She slotted another round forward. She knew she should end the calf’s suffering but she felt all her strength draining away. Her finger was lead over the trigger. She couldn’t pull it. She laid the rifle down. She pressed her face into the dirt. She remembered how close she’d felt to animals when she was a little girl, as if she were a part of the natural world. More bullets whined overhead. Badger’s breath beside her reminded her of the straining sound he made when his fists were planted in the sheets by her shoulders. She didn’t think she could ever sleep with him again. She stared at the micro-world in front of her, the clumps of dirt and pebbles between the blades of grass. Bugs and worms and organisms too small to see wiggling through their kingdoms underneath.

  When the shooting finally stopped, Ruthie lay perfectly still. Men shouted. Meadowlark complained loudly about ruined meat. “Better not break my fucking teeth on your townie fucking bullets.” Triumph mixed with the rank smell of burnt flesh in the air.

  A cloud passed in front of the sun. Its shadow darkened the sky. Slowly, Ruthie looked up.

  Most of the elk were dead. Those still alive were down on their knees, dripping blood. Their eyes roamed helplessly. The mothers tried to find their calves, the calves tried to find their mothers. In this desperation, Ruthie saw the whole western movie, all three reels, from fifty million bison roaming the open plains to the first wagon train to the massacre that left the fields empty. The bull had tried to run for the woods. He’d made it farther than any of the others, but was toppled at the tree line, panting. The powerful bellows of his lungs shook his rib cage. Red foam dripped from his mouth. He stared into the trees, willing himself to their protection.

  It was the worst thing Ruthie had ever seen, and she was a part of it. She had to close her eyes again. In the rushing darkness of her mind, she hated everyone. Herself most of all.

  Badger touched her shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Before somebody gets yours.”

  15.

  The red-and-gold HOMECOMING sign lay trampled and alcohol-reeking amid soda cups and a single translucent jelly sandal. Bright lights shone from inside the gym, where the dance had been. The cinder-block building looked small and tired beneath the mountains. Chaperones shouted into the bathrooms, clearing them out. Ruthie stood pressed against the grille of Dalton Pompey’s F-150 in the parking lot. Dalton faced her. His beery lips shone with her lip gloss. He’d been kissing her and rubbing against her thigh, up and down, tirelessly, as if by generating enough friction he might ejaculate and suddenly become a man.

  Ruthie tilted her head away from the smell of gin on his breath. She’d felt angry and lost ever since the hunt. It had left her unable to look at Badger without hearing the straining sound of his breath. He’d fractured Meadowlark’s eye socket with a single punch after she told him she couldn’t see him anymore, just as he’d hit Levi when they first met. Their relationship bookended by violence. Silver-edged clouds drifted over the moon. Police cars waited in the road. Blasts of diesel billowed from trucks. Headlights cut across the darkened lanes, briefly illuminating girls in pastel spaghetti-strap dresses frozen like deer in the sudden light. The diesel made Ruthie’s eyes water. She was half drunk. She felt herself drifting up into the stars. Dalton grunted contentedly. She found Orion’s belt and the Big Dipper nailed in place in the heavens. She almost laughed, remembering that it had been Dalton who first told her about black holes so many years before, one night when their fathers were drunk. Now she could feel the exact shape of his penis against her thigh.

  A group of football players, including Badger, approached, looming over their cheerleader dates. The boys all had red-and-gold Darby Eagles varsity jackets on over their suits. Badger stopped in front of Ruthie and Dalton and spoke in the loud, ass-slapping voice of a huddle. “Courtney tripped over the speaker and when she tried to get up her tit fell out. Her whole tit.”

  “Even Mr. Holden saw it,” Derek said.

  The girls giggled. “She was so drunk.” Slowly, reluctantly, Dalton withdrew himself and straightened, adjusting his belt to hide his erection. Ruthie smoothed the front of her dress.

  “Surprised he didn’t go in for a feel.”

  “It was real, too. I thought for sure she stuffed.”

  “I knew they were real,” Badger said, glaring at Ruthie in the darkness.

  “Bullshit,” Dalton said. He looked diminished in his father’s suit—fraying and a size too small—without one of the letterman’s jackets over the top, though as a wrestler and an upperclassman he had one, too.

  Badger’s eyes flashed. Behind him, a massive rusted eagle guarded the entrance to the football stadium. Its eyes had been spray-painted red. The wings seemed to extend from Badger’s shoulders, as if he might rise, infernally screeching, into the night. “Shut up, faggot,” he said.

  Dalton went white. “What’d you say?”

  “I said to shut your mouth about what you don’t know about.”

  Ruthie untucked the gum from beneath her tongue. She knew she should intervene. But she felt not quite herself in the tight, light blue dress. It was the most girlish thing she’d ever worn. Her father had looked away the first time she put it on. She felt lithe, dangerous, like her body could slip free and become part of the moonlight. Like she could walk into the highway and get in the back of the first truck that stopped. Badger had taken Tracy Trimble to the dance to hurt her, and Ruthie had taken Dalton for the same reason, but now she felt the night expanding around her.

  “You never hooked up with Courtney,” Dalton said.

  “I sucked her tits and she blew me.” Badger looked at Ruthie again.

  “You liar,” Dalton said. “Cut Bank is going to take your head off in the playoffs.”

  “At least I made the team, you fucking JV dropout.”

  Ruthie remembered the two of them slapping water back and forth in the community pool on Athlete Day the summer before. Practicing wrestling holds. Holding each other’s heads against their breasts like oversized, grunting babies. She looked across at the swooping neck of Tracy’s pink, coral-patterned dress, the way her breasts pushed eagerly against the glittery fringe.

  “I have a job,” Dalton said. “I can’t play games and fuck sheep all summer like you do.”

  “I’m goin
g to kill you,” Badger said. His teammates laughed nervously.

  Dalton shook himself like a bear cub, hustled loose his balls, and fell into a two-point stance. “Bring it, then, cocksucker.”

  They were both big and broad with creatine shoulders and veins popping from their forearms. Maxing out daily in the weight room, marking the results on the chalkboard, using their bodies like they wanted to burn them out. Ruthie sympathized with this desperate faith in slamming into things. Ever since the elk, she’d been searching for something so hard it wouldn’t break when she hit it. As if by hammering away at herself she might finally expose the person she wanted to be. Badger started thrashing out of his suit jacket but Derek caught him by the shoulder. “Not here,” he said, jerking his chin at Mr. Holden, standing with his arms crossed in the school’s lit doorway, as the Spanish teacher dejectedly gathered up the discarded cups.

  “I’ll take you anywhere,” Dalton said.

  How romantic. Ruthie pictured them on the moon, wrestling naked in the lunar light, tossing each other into the air of its lesser gravity.

  She smiled. She’d drunk more than she’d realized.

  “Can we please just go?” Tracy said, touching Badger’s elbow. He shrugged her off.

  “Hooper’s Landing,” he said. “Right now.”

  “I’ll be there.” Dalton put his arm around Ruthie. He pivoted and hurried her toward the road. Fight, fight, the word crackled across the parking lot like electricity. Already she knew half the school would come. She stumbled to keep up, looking back at Badger, who stared after her in the moonlight with raging eyes and the eagle’s wings stretched over his head.

  “You can ride with us,” Dalton said. He flagged down a lifted Forest Service Jeep full of his fellow wrestlers, blasting heavy metal music so loud the doors vibrated.