Ruthie Fear Read online

  Finally, he appeared on the ridge by the Happels’ collapsed fence. He approached shamefaced, his head low, stump tail quivering, as if the whole quake had been his punishment for pissing on the bathroom rug, or chewing up one of Ruthie’s shoes. She got ahold of his collar and didn’t let go. She pressed her face into the wiry fur on his back. He licked her hand. She took him back to the trailer and Rutherford crouched to pat his head. “Good boy,” he said.

  Ruthie picked Moses up and watched her father clamber onto the windowsill to survey the damaged roof. In motion, his big hands and feet made it look like he still had room to grow. As if he might yet turn into someone else. His face, though, was aging rapidly. The seething, backed-against-the-wall expression he held when observing the new mansions being built on the Mitchell Slough by Wiley King’s friends had etched permanent lines in his forehead. His eyes remained so pale as to seem almost unreal.

  He balanced his level on the edge of the roof. Ruthie prayed the trailer hadn’t been knocked askew. Everyone in the valley knew the story of old man Pascal, Pip’s father, who’d gone crazy when he couldn’t get his trailer back to level after the mudslide that killed his wife. It was a common problem in a valley marked by hills and defiles. The slant turned him insomniac and he grew paranoid with grief, refusing to leave his property, forgetting to feed his daughter. In the end, he shot himself, and his body slid from his bedroom to the kitchen, ending up against the bathroom door, where Pip found it.

  “At least we’re flush,” Rutherford said, hopping down and going to check on his beetles.

  Aftershocks. Ruthie wondered if there’d be any warning, or if they’d come from nowhere like the first quake had. She listened to her father curse inside the shed. She knew she should go in to help, but the idea of the beetles swarming over her bare arms, scurrying up toward her nose and mouth, wanting to feed, was too much for her to bear. Rutherford came out looking pale. “Bins fell,” he said. “Most of them are gone.”

  “Maybe they’ll come back,” Ruthie said softly.

  “They ain’t dogs.”

  All the Fears’ belongings were off the shelves inside. The TV lay facedown on the floor. It looked tragic there, like it couldn’t get up. Ruthie set Moses in his bed, told him to stay, and ducked around the tree branch coming in through the ceiling. She heaved the TV upright. A large crack split the screen with little spiderwebs coming out on both sides.

  “Goddammit to hell,” her father said, coming in behind her.

  The screen didn’t even flicker when she tried to turn it on. How would they eat without its voices in the background? They’d been standing on a bowl of Jell-O the whole time. Why had no one told her? Curses, calderas, government experiments. Already she’d seen a headless creature and felt a mountain rise beneath the road. What else were they hiding?

  “Is Charlo’s curse real?” she asked.

  Her father snorted and sank down onto the couch amid plaster from the roof. He ran his hand over the stubble of his hair. “Hell no. He was just the last Indian around for people to blame. First they blamed him for spotted fever, then crop failures, droughts, and now earthquakes, I guess.”

  “Bitty Law, at school, said you’re an Indian lover.”

  Rutherford grimaced. “You just stay away from the Laws. They got poison in their blood.”

  Ruthie paused. “Why do we live here?”

  “What?”

  “It’s . . . it’s not safe. The people are mean, there’s no work, and we don’t even have a house.”

  “Where should we go? San Francisco? New York? Think I could be a banker there? Suck people dry and live in a glass box while you play with dolls all day?” Rutherford gripped his knees. “I didn’t ask for this.”

  Silently, Ruthie crossed the wolfskin rug to her small room. She straightened her shelves and placed her stuffed eagle back on the bed. She lay on her back and did what she was most ashamed of: she wished for a mother.

  AT CHURCH ON SUNDAY, the choir stood up to sing, the organist struck a low note, and the entire congregation jumped from the way the floor vibrated. Ruthie figured instead of a sermon Father Mike should just point at each person and say, “Repent,” to save himself a lot of trouble.

  Instead, he went with Corinthians. A young priest, he was new to the valley from Boise, and enthusiastic. His voice rose to fervid heights: he knew the sanctifying value of a good old-fashioned natural disaster—the kind you never saw coming—in bringing people back to God. The pews were packed. Rich and poor. White and Salish. The rich families were up front: boys wearing suits to match their fathers’, girls in frilly, flowerlike dresses. Rutherford had slicked his hair back and had the stunned, blasted look of three days sober. Ruthie could smell his aftershave from two seats away. Kent Willis—likewise shellacked—sat with his neighbor Danette and her roommate Judy Conklin behind them. All the Happels and Laws and Pompeys were scattered throughout the pews. Ruthie’s teacher was there, too, with her children. Pip sat alone in the back by the door. Her notebook was clutched against her chest.

  Sunlight streamed through the stained-glass Christ crucified above the altar. It cast a radiant spectrum of red, orange, and gold that shone on Terry French’s long black braid. He sat beside Ruthie with his niece Delilah. Both girls fidgeted on the hard wood. Ruthie couldn’t remember ever coming to church except on Easter, when they gave away cooked chickens. She’d never seen Terry there before. His brown fingers rested on his knees, notched and busted and perfectly still. He seemed to be in the pew and not in it at the same time. She wished she had this power: to be in one place while her mind occupied another. Delilah had a small bead thunderbird purse in her lap. She was visiting from the Flathead Reservation, where her mother’s house had fared worse than Terry’s hogan.

  “Look for an egg along the river,” she said, when Ruthie leaned over to whisperingly ask if thunderbirds were real. “Then you’ll know.” Delilah gazed up at the heavy beams in the rafters. Ruthie followed her eyes. She was sure she’d seen an egg beside the river before. If these beams came down it wouldn’t matter who was rich, none of them would survive. It would be the end of the valley. The thorns on Christ’s head had blood on their tips. They looked gruesome. His eyes expressed more misery than salvation. Ruthie decided it was better to die most anyplace besides a church.

  After the service, there was a fair in the parking lot, where people had brought clothes, food, and other things to give away. Delilah and Ruthie kicked a rock back and forth while Rutherford shamefacedly took an armful of blankets from Father Mike’s pretty young wife. The hole in their roof hadn’t fixed itself, and nights were cold, even though summer was coming. Others took mittens and gloves and Ruthie saw a pink bike she wanted but knew her father wouldn’t let her have. She asked Delilah how her house was in Arlee.

  Delilah shrugged. “It wasn’t that good to begin with.”

  Ruthie had never been to the reservation. Only eighty miles away, it was another world to her. As full of mystery as the sky.

  Father Mike parted the men around his wife. “Let this bring us together,” he said.

  A singing group from Lolo started playing children’s songs. Delilah disappeared into the crowd. Ruthie stood on the edge looking after her. Pip had left before the service was over. Ruthie remembered the way Pip’s uncle had held his hand over his chest. She hoped he was okay. The band had a hen in a cage. For the grand finale, they let it out and stood it on a bucket. The hen seemed quite pleased and stomped its foot, adding a tuneful cluck to the music. Ruthie wasn’t impressed. One night through her window she’d seen an owl pass overhead and heard music too beautiful to describe.

  Only the mountains remained unshaken, as tall as ever against the sky—seeming to chastise the little crowd beside the church. They formed the edges of a bowl around the valley that could easily be recognized for the lake it once was, fifteen thousand years before, complete with waveforms etched high on the hillsides. Ruthie had found shells there among the rocks and switchgras
s. Little mollusks that once trawled the depths. Fragile, impermanent. She’d never seen the ocean but she pictured it as a giant gray animal with eyes of mirrors and a mouth big enough to swallow the sun.

  She kicked the rock across the pavement toward the basketball hoop. She wished she could fly away over the backboard, the church steeple, and the mountaintops.

  Happel and his wife, daughters, and nephew stood off by themselves. Their arms were loaded with plastic bags full of food. Rutherford led Ruthie over and he and M. Happel began to talk about where work might be, while the nephew looked at Ruthie with hungry, leaden eyes.

  “I heard the whole highway slid into the river over by Lee Metcalf. Might be years before they can get traffic through,” Rutherford said.

  “Maybe they need hands there,” Happel answered.

  Rutherford shook his head. “State jobs. Contract work. You have to be union.”

  “Lots of houses here need rebuilding.”

  “You’d think. But my phone ain’t ringing.”

  Happel looked down at the ground. “It didn’t have to sneak up on us like that,” he said.

  Puffy white clouds moved over the Bitterroot Mountains. The kind that look solid enough to stand on. Angel clouds, if you believed Father Mike. Ruthie stared at them to avoid the nephew’s eyes. She turned to see if Terry was nearby. Maybe he’d known the quake was coming; maybe there’d been some sign that her father and Happel were too blind to see. But he was already over at his truck. Loading the pink bike into the bed, with Delilah up on the wheel well tugging the handlebars.

  7.

  The screams from Lake Como sounded panicked in the distance. Ruthie sat on the edge of the cabin’s back deck. Her scratched legs dangled over the creek. The skin on her ankles was pale where her socks had been. She searched the rushing water for otters and listened to the other children, wishing they would go away. Or at least shut up. She’d seen a show about otters on TV. She knew the only way to see one was to make them forget you were there.

  Cleanup crews had traversed the valley and it was hard to find remaining signs of the earthquake. Passing Whipple’s store, Ruthie could hardly believe she’d seen a truck overturned in the intersection just three months before. Moses lay beside her in the sun. His head rested on his paws, then jerked up to snap at the fly circling his ears in the August heat. A duck bobbed in a shallow eddy. Ruthie flicked her dirt-blackened toe in its direction. “Git.”

  The duck looked up at her with brown glassy eyes. A pair of nostrils were carved from its beak. There was something frightening—almost horrific—about them, as though they’d been bored out by a dentist’s drill. Its orange feet struggled against the swirling current. Ruthie felt a tug of fear. She decided that otters don’t like ducks.

  “Go on, now. Git!” She looked around for something to throw, but the deck planks were bare save for a scattering of pine needles.

  Lodgepole pines towered above the opposite shore of the creek. A firepit was centered in the clearing beyond. At night, families camping on the lake roasted marshmallows there. The cabin behind Ruthie belonged to Rutherford’s former boss at the mill. He’d offered it to them for the weekend while the caulk, glue, and coating dried on the metal patch Rutherford had finally installed on the roof.

  The cabin felt like another world from the trailer, although it was only ten miles away. Huge picture windows faced the creek. Lacy dish towels hung by the stove; fluffy mats covered the bathroom floor. It smelled like wood instead of bacon grease, and the shower didn’t shriek when you turned it on. There was no mold. All the lights worked; her father’s dirty clothes weren’t strewn over the couch. Ruthie would’ve stayed forever.

  Discovering a bottle cap in her pocket, Ruthie turned it over in her fingers, found a grip, and hurled it at the duck. “Git!”

  The duck didn’t move even when the bottle cap splashed the water by its body. It continued to stare at Ruthie, orange feet churning. She scooted her butt forward. She tested the lingering Popsicle-stickiness of her fingers by pressing one of the scratches on her leg, making it sting, and then pulling her fingers away. Her legs were scratched all through the summer from forays into the woods with Pip. The flash of pain shifted her mind. Maybe the duck couldn’t move. Maybe it was stuck, struggling to stay afloat. Could it die like that? The possibility opened up a new realm of emotions. Ruthie was sorry about the bottle cap. She wanted the duck gone, not dead. Out of her life, not the world. The same feeling she often had about her father.

  She turned and found his figure through the sliding glass door: leaned forward in the recliner in the cabin’s main room, watching stock cars race on the fifty-inch TV, a beer in his right hand. His body was tense, his rapt expression on the verge of anger. Ruthie knew he was thinking of Wiley King, even while he followed the cars around and around. In the confusion after the quake, King and his rancher friends had tried to close the Mitchell Slough to hunters. King had set up bait feeders on his property, since it was illegal to hunt ducks that had been baited. “I’m feeding ducks all over my place,” he told Lad Pompey at the Ravalli Republic. “And I won’t stop.” Rutherford had stayed out of it at first, until Kent Willis wrote a letter to the editor calling Wiley a “California carpetbagger” and got himself and all of his friends banned from the pond where Rutherford had hunted since he was a boy. This struck Rutherford as an act of tyranny directly in the lineage of King George, and in late-night conversations he could be heard suggesting solutions ranging from tarring and feathering King to burning down his mansion—which he’d helped build. His determination worried Ruthie, who’d seen the furtive, hollow-eyed expressions of the foster children who passed through her classes each year.

  Near the cabin, rushes and willows grew along the shore. Ruthie wriggled beneath the lowest rung of the deck’s railing and dropped onto the soft dirt. Moses stood at the edge. He looked down over the five-foot drop, across at her, and decided to stay where he was. Up above, the mountainsides were blackened from the Short Draw Fire, which had ravaged the Bitterroots the summer before. The fire had gotten national news coverage when the separatist Mormons in Pinesdale ejected federal firefighters at gunpoint, saying they’d caught them sabotaging a water line. Rutherford told her the Mormons were worried the feds would find all their extra wives and artillery. Ruthie dug her toes into the dirt. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled beneath the low bush branches to the water. A thorn caught her arm and scratched her anew. Sunlight glinted on the creek’s surface. Needles drifted past. The algae on the rocks undulated in the current.

  Up close, the duck’s eyes were nearly black. Its emerald head bobbed as it paddled. The eddy was on the far side of the creek, in a bend where it widened. Pine needles, mossy twigs, and water skimmers swirled around the vortex. It reminded Ruthie of an open mouth. The yawning entrance to No-Medicine Canyon. The duck seemed unable to escape.

  “You’re not very good at being a duck,” Ruthie said.

  The duck went still. Their eyes held for a moment and then she watched in horror as it began to swirl faster and faster, being drawn into the eddy, orbiting the churning darkness, its compact body as helpless as a moon. “Dad!” she screamed.

  RUTHIE FOLLOWED HER FATHER across the narrow wooden bridge. She kept exactly four steps behind him, stretching her legs to mirror his stride. She landed on her toe in the center of the bridge and paused. On one side, an old wooden water wheel was slowly collapsing. On the other, a metal chute ran down beside the rock dam. Keeping her left foot in the air, Ruthie grabbed the railing and pivoted, sweeping her leg out behind her in a karate kick. She peered down at the water in the chute. Green algae grew on the metal sides. Tendrils reached toward her among the sediment.

  “It’s for the fish,” Rutherford said from the far end of the bridge. She waited for him to go on, to explain what the fish did in there. Why they needed a ramp. His right hand rested on the handle of the knife in his belt loop. After he’d scared the duck from the eddy and sent it wingin
g up the creek, she’d insisted he take her to the lake. She could tell he wished he was still in front of the TV.

  “Do otters use it, too?”

  Rutherford’s brow furrowed. “No. I don’t know. Come on.”

  Ruthie took a deep breath and looked up at the line of blackened spear trees along the ridge. She imagined the flames sweeping down the mountainside. Bears fleeing into the creek. Dozens of them, charging and crashing through the water like Rutherford had done in the icy pond years before. Their brown fur charred, their eyes hooded with ash.

  She was so caught up in her thoughts that she didn’t notice the children until they were all around her.

  The lake was shattered with sunlight. Motorboats knifed across the center. Jet Skis bounded over their choppy wakes. Brightly colored donuts floated aimlessly with sunburnt swimmers in their centers. Directly above the lake’s western tip, the familiar shape of Trapper Peak pierced the blue sky. Two canoes moved along the piney shore beneath it. Lake Como had been named by a Jesuit priest who thought it looked like Italy, but now a huge dam blocked off one side. The concrete wall and holding tank, along with the two long docks from the public beach, gave it the odd aspect of blighted civilization on one end and unspoiled natural beauty on the other. A metaphor for the valley. Terry called the lake by its Salish name, Logs-Under-the-Water, which made a lot more sense.

  Above, a particularly large and misshapen tree stood alone on a clear-cut patch of the mountainside. It looked like Sasquatch with one knee raised, thundering up to higher ground. Ruthie stared at it, feeling overwhelmed by all the people.

  Rutherford followed her eyes. “When they clear-cut, they always leave one tree to tie off their equipment to,” he said. “They call it the anchor tree. Usually it’s bent or damaged, one they can’t get much value out of.” He trailed off, as if there might be a lesson in this, but found none.

  Together they walked down to the water. The shallows around the dock were roiled with children: splashing, screaming, jumping, disappearing beneath the pylons. Mothers and fathers dozed in angled pairs on the rocks, occasionally jerking awake to shout at a child drifting away from shore. The air smelled of sunscreen. Father Mike and his wife lay beneath a checkered umbrella, looking healthier than all those around them, glowing in their modest swimwear. Father Mike turned toward the Fears. Ruthie noticed that his wife’s toenails were painted red. “Some kind of day,” he said.