Ruthie Fear Read online

  She probed the darkness. Green blades of grass, tall in the spring, wavered in front of her eyes, dividing her vision by oscillating degrees. Straining to see farther, using the yellow in her irises, she channeled her entire being into the canyon. The sounds of the outside world ceased. The sun was swallowed by blackness. She felt herself standing on the edge of a giant open maw—an abyss of incomprehensible depths into which all previous explorers had fallen. Moses’s body shook as if he felt it, too. Only the dark of the canyon remained.

  A shadow slid over another shadow. Ruthie froze. She gripped Moses. Something was moving.

  The creature took shape slowly, awkwardly. A tall feathered thing, it lurched toward the creek on two long, spindly, double-jointed legs. Each step was tentative, as if it were just learning to walk. Its feathers were gray and slightly iridescent. Its body curved into a single, organ-like shape. A kidney. Misshapen and lumpy, frighteningly perched atop the thin legs—taller than the saplings on the shore. A monster, deviant in its unsteadiness. But what horrified Ruthie, what made her want to scream, was that it had no head.

  Its chest continued roundly over its collar and back along the ridge of its spine. Nothing protruded. No way to see nor hear nor smell, no orifices at all. Yet it paused by the creek and leaned forward as if it wanted to drink.

  Ruthie felt like she was caught in a dream, unable to run, seeing a future of death. She wondered how the creature had grown. She imagined it wriggling, maggot-like, from the mouth of a dying elk, before growing to its terrible size. It reminded her of the tumor-ridden lamb that Len Law had shown off in front of her school, or the mold that grew around the drain of her shower.

  Moses began to growl deep in his throat. His wiry hackles rose. The creature lifted one of its pronged feet and dipped it into the water. It stood like this helplessly. The current rushed around its thin ankle. Ruthie was sure it would be knocked over. She didn’t see how it could get up again. Sudden pity mixed with the fear and revulsion in her chest.

  The growl in Moses’s throat crescendoed to a harsh, hysteric yap.

  “No!” Ruthie hissed.

  The creature twisted toward them. It faced Ruthie with its feathered mask. The feathers trembled. Sensing her. Knowing she was there. She wondered if it navigated through vibration, like a bat. She could feel trucks on the highway when she pressed her ear against the dirt. The creature shied backward, stumbled, straightened on its stilt-like legs, and shuddered away into the darkness.

  The canyon was empty again. Ruthie parted her lips. No sound came out. Cold sweat ran down her neck. She felt a terrible importance, as if fate were for a moment balanced in her hands. Hers and her father’s and that of all the others in the valley. Moses looked up at her with the whites of his eyes showing, frightened and begging for a treat, the way he did when a truck horn scared him in the night.

  4.

  Rutherford lay shirtless on the couch in the trailer’s narrow living room with the cartridge of a freshly oiled Glock on his belly. Wheel of Fortune played on the TV at full volume. Terry had gone. The carpet was filthy with crumbs, oil drips, and the wrappers of cheese singles, which Ruthie had planned to eat for dinner. An open beer stood on the table by her father’s head. Two empties and a full can were keeled over beside it. Ruthie panted in the doorway, her reddish hair—chopped short to avoid the recurrence of lice—sticking up, her cheeks flushed from the sprint across the yard. Moses charged in past her and shook himself furiously.

  “I saw something,” she said.

  Rutherford’s eyes rolled away from the TV but he made no move to sit up.

  “A creature.”

  “A creature?”

  She nodded rapidly. “It went up into the canyon.”

  “A canyon creature. Shoot it next time. We can sell it to the university.” Rutherford pronounced all five syllables, as if it were a disease. Hair made a scraggly divide down the center of his belly, and his feet, propped on the couch arm, were frighteningly long and pale.

  “It had feathers and no head.”

  “Sounds easy to shoot.”

  “Dad.” Ruthie hated being a child; no one listened to her.

  “I’d do it myself except it ain’t headless creature hunting season. But you, you can’t get in trouble for poaching when you’re six.”

  More than once, Ruthie had seen the game warden’s white truck pull into the driveway and heard the storm of cursing it elicited from her father. On the TV, a woman jumped up and down, screaming at a new car. Rutherford shook his head at the male contestant standing dejectedly behind her. “Damn fool could’ve kept the Wheel.” He reached around on the carpet for his oil rag.

  “Dad!” Ruthie yelled.

  The TV made a brief static crackle when he muted the volume. He rose up on his elbow and turned toward her, jostling the cartridge to the floor. “Dammit, Ruthie, can’t you see I’m busy?”

  She clenched her fists in frustration, her heart pounding.

  “Last thing I need is your bullshit.” He took a long drink, shook the last drops from the upside-down can onto his tongue, then tossed it aside. He located the full one behind his head and his mood immediately brightened. “Maybe it was an emu got loose from Del’s farm. Remember the one on top of your school last year?”

  “Emus have heads,” Ruthie said. “And necks.”

  “Still don’t know how it got up there. That beak looked sharp enough to skewer old Del.” Rutherford grinned at the memory. He sank back down and popped open the beer. “Fucking dumbass, chasing it around with a net. Supposedly they go for five thousand dollars a pop if you can breed ’em.” The gap of Rutherford’s missing incisor showed where a snowmobile had tossed him face-first onto a stump when he was in high school. “Don’t know why I’m mucking around with beetles.”

  “It wasn’t an emu.”

  “A deer with mange, then. They lose all their hair and look like demons.”

  “Deer have heads, too!”

  “Keep your voice down. You’re making my goddamn head hurt. Hasn’t that fool teacher taught you what an imagination is? You don’t know what you see when you’re six.” He looked around the small, crummy room as if to prove his point. “You think you do, but you don’t. You’ll learn that as you get older. The world ain’t all you think it is.”

  What did he know of the world? Ruthie wondered. Expired hunting tags were tacked to the wood panel wall by his scope and elk bugle. Envelopes from the bank accumulated on the kitchen table until he burnt them with the last wood of the season. The only food they ever had enough of was meat. He was angry at the rich, the government, and Ruthie’s departed mother in varying order and intensity. The only cultivation he’d done of their barren acre was to install a meat freezer and gun safe along with his beetle bins in the storage shed, and erect plywood targets at twenty-five, fifty, and one hundred yards, to shred with bullets every summer. “You don’t believe me,” she said.

  “I believe you saw something, but you didn’t know what it was, so you made it up. Like the flying skeleton.”

  Ruthie found herself too angry to speak. She wished she could grow a hundred feet tall and kick Rutherford on his couch into the canyon. Then he’d see. She tried to imagine life with another family in another town. Going out to dinner, shopping at the mall. She stepped back onto the porch, grabbed the screen door with both hands, and slammed it as hard as she could. The hinges rattled. Her father’s prone figure was lost behind the mesh.

  “You’re sleeping outside if you broke that door!” he yelled after her, the TV volume crackling back on. “Goddammit.”

  THE CREATURE REMAINED in Ruthie’s mind like a bruise, aching whenever her thoughts bumped against it. She was determined to see it again. Determined to prove to her father that it had been real. She picked a spot in the trees facing the canyon on the edge of their property and made Rutherford help her build a blind.

  “Thank Christ you didn’t ask for a dollhouse,” he said.

  They scavenged wood fr
om the dump and nails from behind Whipple’s Feed Store. Len Law watched them from beside his pickup. A scrawny, decrepit man, he owned the town scrapyard and often appeared when Ruthie and Pip were playing on the shore of Lost Horse Creek. Once he’d knelt before her and said, “You know what the Indians used to do with little girls with yellow in their eyes?”

  She shook her head.

  “Send them off into the mountains.”

  Now he crossed his arms and called to her father across the lot. “Lean times?”

  “We’re getting by,” Rutherford answered shortly.

  “Must be hard on your own. No woman at home. . . .” Len’s narrow eyes lingered on Ruthie as she climbed into her father’s truck. She clenched the nails in her fists; the sharp points dug into her palms. Her father had told her that Len’s grandfather Hark was Darby’s first sheriff. Hark Law had done something so bad before he was fired that adults spoke of it only in whispers, and wouldn’t tell Ruthie no matter how often she asked. The Montana Café and Sawmill Bar passed by.

  Back on their property, with the mouth of No-Medicine Canyon before them, Rutherford built a two-by-four frame. Ruthie held the weathered front boards in place while he started the nails, then they switched so she could pound them home. She banged ferociously, holding the hammer with both hands, gritting her teeth, not satisfied until the nail head was snugged well below the dented wood. She hit one so hard on its edge that sparks shot out.

  “That nail do you wrong?” Rutherford asked, grinning. It confused her that her anger always made him proud.

  Ruthie glared up at him. She blinked the sweat from her eyes.

  “Lord knows what’ll happen if you ever hit a knot. Might burn down the whole woods. Blind won’t do you no good then.” Rutherford nodded toward their cleared yard. The teal trailer was set at the same angle across the driveway where the delivery company had left it, up on cinder blocks. Ruthie’s mother had had grand plans for its placement, along with flower boxes, teal curtains, and a welcome mat. The plans disappeared along with her. The canyon loomed behind Rutherford. Dark and menacing even in the summer heat. He knelt to measure Ruthie’s height with his hands. “You’re getting big now. Longer than a rifle.”

  Ruthie refused to be flattered. She gave the edge of the blind a final hard whack with the hammer. It was a ramshackle box with a plywood roof and floor, but she was proud of it—her first idea to become reality. Her father straightened and hitched up his jeans. “You’ll be hunting on your own in no time.”

  “I’m not going to hunt anything,” Ruthie said.

  “Oh no?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m going to spring all the traps in the woods.”

  Rutherford smiled. “All of them? You’ll find yourself pulling butterflies out of spiderwebs.” His missing incisor, chapped lips, scraggly red beard, and sun-weathered cheeks made him look older than his twenty-five years. Ruthie never knew what to say when her teachers asked what he did. She always lied about his beetle business, claiming he was a builder, and imagining a fridge full of vegetables and chicken nuggets.

  Mosquitoes whined up from the water. The creek was high with snowmelt from the mountains. Whenever Rutherford was out—working or using whiskey to get properly drunk—Ruthie would sneak into his room. She’d get down on her knees and look at the guns underneath his bed, including the CMMG Banshee, his pride and joy. A $1,400 piece of machinery with a silenced suppressor and .300 Blackout ammo that shot through walls. He’d bought it with his small severance from the shuttered mill. Some nights he’d sit on the couch with the barrel across his lap, staring at the door as if he hoped for an intruder, so he might prove what the beast could do. A showgirl in gold lingerie was superimposed over the glittering Strip on the poster of Las Vegas above his bed. It reminded Ruthie of the night sky erupting from the ground. A place where man had built the stars. As different from the dilapidated trailer parks and potholes of Darby as the sun was from the moon. “I’m coming,” she’d whisper, before returning the gun to its place and tiptoeing out from Rutherford’s room.

  He took the hammer from her and walked across the yard to the shed where the wolf had hung. Along with the beetles, meat freezer, and gun safe, it held all manner of tools, antlers, shoeboxes full of bones and feathers, wildcat drawings he’d made as a boy, and Indian artifacts he’d found. You could hardly move inside. The rotten smell was enough to keep Ruthie out most of the time. One of his hand-drawn flyers for Bitterroot Beetle Works was nailed to the door. The rest were on bulletin boards across the valley. Ruthie slapped a mosquito on her neck. She looked down at her own blood in the mangled legs on her palm. She imagined splattering the creature like this, squashing it against the face of a rock.

  Her father returned with his circular saw, trailing a long orange extension cord. He had a plunging, downhill gait when on his own property, with none of the careful alertness he carried in the outside world. Moses snapped at the cord, then barked outright when Rutherford powered on the saw. Loud noises always made him aggressive. He flung his small body into the air at the blade and Ruthie feared he might get cut in half. “Git!” her father said, and stomped the ground. Moses reluctantly backed away. Using Ruthie’s measurement, Rutherford cut a slit for her eyes in the front planks. Sawdust gusted out on the breeze. The blisters on his hands were turning to calluses, rough white patches outlining the ghost of a haft. “There,” he said. “Now you can learn how to look.”

  “I know how to look,” Ruthie said.

  He shook his head. “All the chain stores and gas stations where everything is the same make your eyes go dull. The mall you’re always going on about. You’ve got to teach yourself how to see again. A tree isn’t just a tree. It’s a certain tree, with certain sap and certain needles. Certain parts, like a person. Some you can eat, or use to stanch a wound. They might save your life.” Sawdust clung to his beard. One shoulder was slightly lower than the other—exaggerated by how he held the saw—from the same snowmobile accident that had taken his tooth. “You thought you saw a creature but you couldn’t tell me what it was. Nothing in the wild is ever the same. If you think a rock looks like another rock, you ain’t looking hard enough.”

  “It wasn’t a deer,” Ruthie said. “And it wasn’t a goddamn rock.”

  Rutherford spat in the dirt. “Learn how to look, then you can cuss at me all you want.”

  5.

  Ever since John Owen’s first white settlement at the fort, the valley’s inhabitants had done everything they could to domesticate its hillsides and riverbanks. Fence it into squares and pave roads between those squares. Slaughter the bears and wolves and mountain lions and bison. Drive out the Salish. Nail crosses to the hilltops. Yet still the wildness encroached, running in flames down the mountainsides each summer and pushing up in tree roots to crack the sidewalks each spring.

  After the closing of the mill, the Rocky Mountain Laboratories became the valley’s largest employer. Founded to fight the scourge of spotted fever, it housed a maximum containment facility, one of the most secure bio labs in the country. The former mill workers hated the scientists for their arrogance and job security; the scientists looked down on the uneducated rednecks who bought new machine guns while living in trailers.

  With no mother, no church, and no interest in what she was taught in school, Ruthie devised her own morality based on the behavior of animals she saw from her blind. In the passage of deer, coyote, beaver, muskrat, and raccoon, she noted life pared down to the core of instinct. Free from the twin anxieties of past and future. She took no sides in the valley’s conflicts, wanting only a house deep in the woods, another dog, a trip to Las Vegas, Len Law’s accidental death, and to prove to her father that the creature was real.

  To the blind’s southeast, Ruthie looked into the mouth of No-Medicine Canyon. The creature taunted her from its depths. Every fern-rustle was a hint. Every moving shadow suggested it would reappear. When her eyes tired of their futile search, she turned her attention north,
where the blind looked over the creek into the yard of June and Reed Breed. Trapper Creek swelled suddenly after leaving No-Medicine Canyon and ran along their property line. The water itself was entirely on the Breeds’ side, making their land, which was lower, verdant with native grasses and wildflowers, their pine trees taller and more bountifully needled, and their air noticeably sweeter. Their house was an actual house; their truck replaced itself every two years. Rutherford considered them rich, and took every opportunity to urinate on their side of the bank.

  On top of this, it was said softly among the older girls at Ruthie’s school that June Breed was adventurous and Reed Breed a cuckold. That she enjoyed her adventurousness as frequently as possible, and that he lingered on it in the most intimate, humiliating ways. When Ruthie heard her father howling over the motor of his miter saw, she assumed it was the fault of such dark, incomprehensible aspects of adulthood.

  On her second day within the blind, instead of a mysterious headless being, Ruthie saw June Breed strip naked on a beach towel in the shade of her garden shed. Mosquitoes whined lazily above her breasts in the early summer warmth. There were lessons in the parting of her lips, the lowering of her eyelids to crocodile slits, and the slow arching of her back, but they were not what Ruthie had expected to learn. She was frightened and enthralled. She wondered if she could become this kind of woman, half melting in the sun. She hoped so. The future took on a new and dangerous light.

  Later in the afternoon, when the sun had finally begun to drop into the Bitterroots, Mr. Breed came out from his office. He looked at his wife, asleep now beneath a horsehair blanket, then punched the trunk of the large ponderosa by their deck. Hard. Twice.

  Ruthie was fascinated. She forgot the creature completely as Mr. Breed rubbed his knuckles and returned inside. What had brought on his violence? Ruthie considered the two dull thocks his fist had made against the bark. She had a vision of her father and his friends standing in front of a fire, kicking at the logs until sparks whirled up around their faces. Kicking harder so the sparks shot higher, showering their heads as they caught at them with open hands.