Ruthie Fear Read online

  “No, I’ll follow you.” Ruthie scanned the rows for where she’d left her father’s truck.

  Dalton looked at her doubtfully.

  “Then we can go straight back to your place, after you beat his ass.” She smiled and blinked and felt the brush of air from the extended length of her eyelashes in mascara.

  Dalton’s face brightened. He hustled his balls again. “Good idea.”

  RUTHIE LOST THE JEEP in the scrum of traffic leaving the high school. She knew she should just go home, that her father would sleep better knowing she and his truck were back, but it felt too good to drive in the warm fall night. She’d gotten her license that summer and driving alone still hadn’t lost its miraculousness. The smell of fallen leaves made the air papery and clean. The river, at its lowest point, seemed to speak over the rocks. Telling of ancient people who’d camped on its shore and lost beasts that drank from its water. Moths flitted up through the halogen lights over the football stadium. Their dreams sizzled away in the heat of the bulbs. Ruthie turned north onto Highway 93 and drove past the Lake Como turn and the golf course and the road up to Wiley King’s mansion. She felt she could go on to Missoula, or farther still, up through the Flathead Reservation to the border. All the way to where roads ended in the Yukon.

  Her foot was bare on the gas pedal. The high, pinching heels she’d worn were shed on the passenger seat beside her. She hardly glanced at Hooper’s Landing. The wide dirt lot was filling with trucks. White moonlight illuminated the river; the bridge at Woodside Crossing was a distant shadow. She hoped Badger would know she’d gone home alone.

  Lucky Lil’s Casino and gas station in Corvallis was lit up pink and purple, casting wavering reflections on the hoods of the gun-racked hunters’ trucks: in from the mountains to lose what money they’d made in meat. The sky was black and close, and each star held the promise of a world of icy perfection. Walking across the lot—junk-food-packed shelves visible in the brightly lit store, the warm air soft on her shoulders—Ruthie thought the stars might come raining down on her like shards of glass.

  The clerk stared at her in her dress and bare feet as the door slid open. Two truckers also turned to stare, and Ruthie felt herself both shrink and enlarge. Prey. To be pinned, twisting, beneath their hairy bodies. But also able to wreck them with the lightest touch, the very tip of her finger. Desperate lonely old men. She could dance across their bones. She walked quickly over the linoleum, conscious of her body beneath the light fabric, wondering down which darkened road Badger planned to take Tracy, or if at that moment Dalton was punching his teeth in.

  Maybe they’d make each other come. She smiled, glad to be alone.

  Six flavors of Slushee filled the clear turning cylinders against the back wall: Blue Raspberry, Sour Apple, Hawaiian Punch . . . none of this world. She stared at the vivid ice and imagined the tropical fantasy country each came from. What sheer bathing suit she’d wear there. How she’d dive like an arrow into the waves. She wanted to escape the valley, and her memory of the elk. She was so engrossed that she didn’t notice the masked thief enter the store behind her. Only when he raised the gun from his hooded sweatshirt did something (death) click into place in her mind.

  Every nerve within her went electric, every hair raised. She stood perfectly still. She watched in her periphery as he crossed to the counter and shouted at the clerk. His voice was shrill and young, his command an impossible contradiction: “Get the fucking money out of the register and don’t fucking move.” He waved the gun. It was a Magnum. Big dumb cowboy gun, liable to blow up in his hand. Liable to shoot a yard wide of where he aimed. Reason enough for Ruthie to stay exactly where she was. To sink into the linoleum. To disappear. The clerk was frozen as well, until he sparked into motion, reaching for the cash register, the money.

  And the night might have passed that way, a dream of her sixteenth year, were it not for the muzzle flashes that flamed out of the parking lot, followed by the roar of high-precision hunting rifles. Two holes were punched through the plate-glass window and Ruthie threw herself to the floor in time to see the thief spin wildly, scattering folded money as he fell back into a rack of motor oil by the door.

  The shots continued in quick succession, rat-tat-tat, splitting her ears, splitting open the night, exploding the Slushee cases over her head and sending gouts of ice pouring down around her. A shelf of Coke cans crashed through the glass doors of the cooler. They landed at her feet, hissing like angry snakes. Time slowed to nothing, each neon millisecond endless. Her ears rang. A display of chips careened into the candy aisle before pitching over.

  “Had enough in there?” a man shouted from across the lot.

  Ruthie was curled up too tightly to answer, her arms protecting her neck and face. But the thief yelled back from some last well of helpless rage, “Fuck you!” and fired two useless rounds through the ceiling.

  The whole store seemed to explode. A row of fluorescent lights on the twelve-foot ceiling disintegrated, the tube shards drifting like snow through the dust. Fragments of glass sprayed like grenade shrapnel, shredding whole shelves of canned goods and gum. Ruthie squeezed her eyes shut. She wondered where her mother was. If it was a place where things like this didn’t happen. Where you could go into a gas station at night and not get caught in a firefight. The fire alarm began to wail. Who would tell her father if she died?

  “Enough?” the voice shouted again.

  “Enough!” Ruthie screamed, her voice raking out from her throat, and the clerk, also miraculously alive, echoed, “Enough! Enough!”

  Rivers of cold beer rushed from the cooler and a punctured aerosol can wheezed in a slow circle. The alarm howled relentlessly. Blindly, Ruthie began to crawl through the carnage, desperate to escape the store, to get outside where she could breathe, unconscious of the broken glass causing blood to flow from her palms and knees, and the cold Slushee ice covering her arms.

  Two hunters darted across the lot outside like infantrymen in a dream of combat, their long rifles held at ready.

  They were already standing over the thief when Ruthie came upon him in the doorway. One kicked the Magnum away from his hand. The other nudged his shoulder with a heavy boot. It flopped limply back into place. They gazed around the ruined store in wonder, admiring their handiwork, their scoped rifles at port arms in front of their down vests.

  “Got him,” one of them said.

  Unthinkingly, Ruthie reached out to the thief across her path. He appeared dead in the pool of blood and motor oil, but when she touched his hand his fingers grasped at hers.

  “He’s alive,” she said. His fingers were warm, almost hot.

  “Better not touch him,” one of the hunters said.

  “Time to get you out of here, girl,” the other said, reaching down to pick her up.

  “No,” Ruthie answered. And perhaps it was something in her voice, or the blood running down the hand she raised against him, but both men stepped back. They mumbled to each other about waiting for the paramedics, the excitement turning to fear in their voices. Neither wanting to be responsible for damage to a young girl in a light blue dress.

  A crowd formed in the parking lot behind them. The usual assortment of the shocked and curious and relieved. Not me. Him, but not me.

  Ruthie pushed up the thief’s black knit ski mask and a string of bubbly spit looped from his mouth. He was barely older than she was, with a long, acne-pocked face. His skin was mottled bronze and black hair spilled out behind. His brown eyes tried to catch hers but couldn’t hold. One of his wounds was sucking air. Ruthie wondered which school he went to, if it was on the reservation, if they’d had a dance that night as well. His shirt was a mess of blood. The bullet must have wobbled after passing through the plate glass, because the exit wound was the size of a beer can below his shoulder. Life was pouring out of him. Ruthie looked up. The hunters stared down at her. Everyone else hung back.

  No one was coming to help.

  She bent over his face, half remembe
ring the CPR certification she’d had to get before going backcountry hunting. She was afraid to move the boy out of the muck, or press down on his bloodied chest. She took his head in her hands, the closest she’d ever held a stranger. He stared up at her. His eyes finally caught hers. They shone with a hopeless intensity, as if he wanted to tell her everything at once. The story of his life up until that moment. The story of the valley. His lips moved. He struggled for air. A name, perhaps his mother’s. Ruthie wiped the bloody spittle from around his mouth. She pinched his nostrils shut. She bent forward and pressed her lips to his.

  A shock of energy greeted her so strong that she felt like her whole body was on fire. She pushed air from her lungs into his. Sometimes we can breathe for each other. He shuddered. His fingers clutched hers. Sirens approached in the distance. She tasted his blood on her lips, an intimacy she could hardly bear. She closed her eyes and saw the boy standing on a vast plain beyond the Bitterroots, a plain that stretched to the curve of the earth: lakes, rivers, and the steam plumes of sulfur hot springs. She breathed again. She saw his spirit rising. She saw herself in Angel’s Landing, though this time not with her castle or Moses but alone, running down the airstrip, with nothing behind her or ahead save for the unmanned woods.

  III

  16.

  "You’re on gravel now, but if you get with God it’s blacktop all the way,” the old woman said, handing Ruthie a bottle of water from a cardboard pallet, on the hot bus to Las Vegas.

  Ruthie rubbed her eyes. She emerged from the blurred half sleep that had carried her out of the Bitterroot Valley and down through Idaho. It was a trip she’d dreamt of her whole life, and then, in the exhaustion from packing and saying goodbye to her father, she slept through the whole thing. Her mouth was parched from the recycled air in the bus and the whiskey they’d drunk the night before. “Thank you,” she said.

  The old woman smiled. Her dark brown cheeks shone with sweat. Her gold tooth flashed when the sun broke through the clouds. She spoke of the Mayan calendar and its misplaced portents. “The world didn’t end this time,” she said. “But it will soon.”

  Happy birthday, Ruthie wanted to answer, drinking deeply of the cool water. My fellow lonesome rider. May you one day escape the darkness and experience the light. Lines she’d memorized from her favorite Wiley King song. She was twenty but felt much older. She’d stopped being young the moment the boy died in her arms.

  Ruthie raised her eyes to the window, thinking of her child self and expecting to see a winged skeleton flying low over the bus, its shadow stretched out on either side. Or if not the skeleton, then the buckshot Rutherford had fired from his shotgun that day, bursting from the clouds to dent the roof after fifteen years of flight.

  But she saw only the early summer sky of Utah, bleached to Technicolor and as wide as a dream. The sky of western movies, with the Wasatch Mountains marching jaggedly south beneath it. They passed silent Mormon towns and then they passed sprawling resort casinos and Ruthie wondered if the devout and the debauched lived close together so they might see their opposite reflections in the mirror, each secretly pining for the other.

  Las Vegas appeared at dusk. Its red and gold lights called out from the desert in swirling, garish patterns. Desires etched against the outer dark: a circus tent, a pyramid, a golden tower. On a billboard, a man fed a woman a cherry, dangling the fruit just above her parted lips. Airplanes glided silently to earth. A shaft of white light shot from the pyramid and pierced the sky. Ruthie rested her cheek on the plexiglass. She thought of the thousand paths she could walk, the shapes her life could take. She had $300 in her bag, the most money she’d ever had at one time, saved from a winter of shifts at the Montana Café. Five cellophane-wrapped Bibles leaned against the waters beneath the old woman’s seat. The old woman began to pray, her voice rising and falling, speaking for their entire fallen race.

  Ruthie didn’t believe the world would end. Even if human beings were banished from it, its molten heart would continue to beat for a billion more years until it was re-enveloped by the sun. And even then for a few moments more, as the dying goose’s wing had continued to slap the ice. My fellow lonesome rider. Cars crowded in below the window. The bus slowed. Anxiety made Ruthie grip the arm of her seat. She’d never been on a road with more than four lanes before. She touched the stud in her lip with her tongue. She wanted to remain in the safety of the bus’s artificial womb, breathing the circulating air and drinking water the old woman had brought. See the city through thick glass.

  They exited the highway onto a street so jammed with traffic the bus couldn’t fully merge. The long cabin remained wedged halfway in the intersection amid a storm of honking. Drunken tourists streamed around both sides, carrying shopping bags, cameras, souvenir cups, and beer bottles held by the neck like small, glinting clubs. One man stopped and pounded the luggage hold with his palm. He looked up at Ruthie and his loose, midwestern face was mottled with rage. He seemed ready to explode. With a wheeze, the bus pulled away and the man stood in the road gaping after it.

  “The dark one is in him,” the old woman said, craning her head around.

  Ruthie wondered if for her Satan had an address in this very city, a bed they’d shared. She thought of Badger’s angry, innocent face. The way violence had marked their time together. He’d gotten engaged soon after graduating, to a cheerleader at Stevensville High named Janine, and Ruthie felt herself to be a star freed from the planets that had held it in place.

  The buildings were even bigger now that she was among them. They blocked out the sky. She had to tilt her head back to see the tops. Gamblers thronged casinos lit as if by daylight. They stared at the slot machines’ flickering screens. Yanked the levers down. Watched the wheels spin. Lost, lost, lost, lost, won. The old woman reached down and touched the Bibles beneath her seat to reassure herself. The five she’d brought hardly seemed enough to compete with the men on street corners snapping escort cards in their own cracking prayer. A thin willowy branch held over the surging river of avarice. Grab on. Ruthie knew little of faith, but she expected madness, the crazed and ruthless wheel-turns of fate.

  Lacy white scars covered her forearms from the glass on the gas station floor. Usually she hid them to avoid strangers’ stares, but now she looked down at the landscape they formed. Ran her fingertip across the memory. She’d learned the boy’s name in the paper the next day: Nathan Gardipe. Nineteen years old. His family lived on the Flathead Reservation, near Billy French. She’d gone with Terry and Billy to the memorial service in Arlee, where his three tall, defiant sisters had stood like sentinels around his crying mother.

  Ruthie had remained in the back of the crowd, her arms bandaged, feeling like an interloper as the medicine man led the prayers.

  The bus pulled to a stop at a wide intersection. Two liquor stores on one side, the Statue of Liberty shrunken to a profane replica on the other. The roller coaster that twisted above its tarnished head was like the path of its own imagination, constrained in the gathering night. Doomed to an endless, shrieking loop. New York, New York. Ruthie was amazed by its cheapness and majesty. She felt naked under so many lights, amid so much movement. The old woman ceased her prayers and pulled herself up by the seat back in front of her. She turned to Ruthie. “You remember, now, blacktop all the way.”

  Ruthie nodded.

  The old woman smiled, humped her purse over her shoulder, and took up the waters and the Bibles. “If you see Satan, you spit in his eye.”

  The smell of sweat, smoke, and a sad, touching hint of strawberry perfume wafted from her skin as she squeezed past. Her wide frame moved down the aisle to the front. Angel of the Greyhound, patron saint of dehydrated travelers.

  The doors hissed and clattered open as the old woman hobbled down the steps. Ruthie saw her again only briefly: stepping out from around the hood, then swallowed up in a mass of other bodies as the bus carried on. “Okay,” Ruthie whispered to herself. “Here you are.”

  17.

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nbsp; On her first weekend in the city, Ruthie met a cowboy outside the cantina where she’d gone looking for a job. He drove her in his truck away from the Strip to a dusty rodeo ring on the edge of Henderson. The city’s lights were like a mirage behind them. Ruthie was captivated by its size, its noise, the ceaseless churning of its unseen engine. She wore a thin yellow dress she never would’ve worn at home. She felt like running in it out across the desert, with the dusty wind reaching up to touch her skin. She felt like the dream of herself, as if whatever happened here she’d wake up and have it washed away.

  All the cowboy told her about himself were his initials: RW. All she told him, besides her name, was that she came from Montana. They had yet to lie. They stood together in the long line and he took on a distant, enclosed expression below his hat, as if he didn’t care if she stayed or went or disintegrated in a puff of smoke. She looked around, wondering how she could’ve ended up in a place so familiar. It looked just like the ring outside Darby where she’d shot skeet as a girl: ads for saddles and truck parts plastering the clapboard walls, trailers on dusty hillsides beyond, the distant glow of a truck stop. She tried to imagine the cowboy in a more appropriate time: crouched under a rock, a cheroot in his mouth, about to get tomahawked through the skull.

  Around them, locals were distinguishable from tourists by the deep-worn dust in the creases of their jeans and the dark varnish on their belt buckles. She thought she glimpsed Kent Willis and his neighbor Danette by the cotton candy machine, and was surprised by the relief that flooded through her, but it was only a heavyset older couple with rhinestone buttons on their shirts. Children strained against their mothers’ arms. Rock candy glittered crystalline on paper sticks, and the smell of fried sausages mixed with dust and horse manure and the diesel spitting from generators. The caller’s buoyant cry crackled from inside the stadium: “That’s August Hooper on ‘Shine a Little Light on Me.’ ”