Ruthie Fear Read online

  Rutherford nodded, squinting out at the water.

  “We’ve started work on the new church playground. Sure could use some help next week if you have the time.” Father Mike raised up on his elbow and faced Ruthie. “Going to be a place for you and all your friends to play.”

  “I only have one friend,” Ruthie said.

  “Well, then it’s a place where you can make some more.” He smiled at Rutherford. “I was glad to hear the patch worked out on your roof. Len came through for a lot of people.”

  Rutherford reluctantly mumbled affirmation. Len had given him the sheet metal piece from his scrapyard for free, but Rutherford had been somber when he brought it home. “I’ll eat shit for this for the rest of my life,” he’d muttered.

  “The Lord provides,” Father Mike said, gazing out at the lake in satisfaction. Rutherford led Ruthie away. He found a secluded spot on the beach and squatted on his haunches. He hadn’t brought a picnic or blanket or swimsuit or floaties or anything like the other families. He hadn’t even brought a towel. Just his knife. Ruthie wished he were more like the other fathers, joking and laughing in the sun. Cannonballing off the dock. She looked back at Father Mike’s wife’s red toes, glinting in the sun.

  “You see that buoy?” Rutherford said, pointing out to where the water flattened. “Don’t go past it.”

  The orange oval appeared to be floating exactly in the middle of the lake. Past where even an otter would go. Ruthie’s palms went clammy. She looked down at the rocks. She didn’t want to get in. She only had her underwear to swim in. Watching the other girls in their fluorescent bikinis, she saw how pathetic this was. Why had she insisted they come? She should’ve stayed on the deck with Moses and hidden food for the otters. Seen if she could find a thunderbird egg by the creek.

  A fat toddler ran into a circle of girls all wearing comically large snorkels. His soaked underwear clung to his butt. The girls screamed and shooed him away. He turned to Ruthie and began to toddle up the beach toward her. His skin was so tan it nearly glowed, with a sheen to it, like oil. She hissed at him. He stopped and stuck out his tongue. There was something on it, a piece of candy or pebble or some wicked little talisman. She felt threatened. She searched around her feet for a rock to throw if he came any closer.

  All around, people were talking, laughing, tossing neon balls. The snorkel girls watched her. One of them giggled. Their eyes felt hot on her, burning. Ruthie picked up a kidney-shaped green rock striated with pale veins. It was solid in her hand. A hint of the power of holding her father’s shotgun. Rutherford absentmindedly flicked the blade of his knife in and out. When one of the mothers caught his eye, he glanced away, reddening. He was shy, too, Ruthie realized. Out of place and embarrassed. Used to his friends in the Sawmill Bar, as unsure of how to talk to the mothers as Ruthie was to their kids. It didn’t seem right. One of them should know what they were doing.

  The toddler took another step toward her. He grinned, showing little yellow corn teeth. Ruthie looked at her father, now cleaning his nails with the knife tip. She looked down at the rock in her hand. It was shaped like the creature, with the same inscrutable menace. The boy waggled his belly at her. She could see his penis through his wet underwear. Without thinking, she raised her arm and threw the rock. Hard.

  It struck the boy on the shoulder. The grin fell from his face into a blank expression of shock. There was a long moment—as the bruise formed and blood began to seep from its blue-black center—when he and Ruthie simply stared at each other, bound together by an intimacy she’d never felt. One of awe and cruelty. I am stronger than you.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and his mouth broke open. He began to wail.

  Ruthie covered her ears, suddenly afraid.

  The rocky beach was swept out from under her feet. Her father slung her over his shoulder and she saw the lake and the boy wobbling upside down as he hustled with her off the beach, away from the other parents, over the bridge, and back to the cabin.

  SMALL YELLOW BUTTERFLIES swirled over the creek in the late afternoon sun. Ruthie sat on the bank and watched. They were so delicate and sheer they seemed to be somewhere between matter and air. Their flight had a pattern to it, moments of unison, like a murmuration of swallows controlled by music only they could hear. The susurrus of wings. Ruthie held out her hand, perfectly still, hardly breathing.

  She waited a long time, until her hand ached from being out-held and she wasn’t sure she could keep it still any longer. Then suddenly a butterfly landed on her fingertip. Its yellow wings stilled like twin sails closing, and she was amazed by the tiny, strong grip of its feet. The pincers were too small to see, yet their hold was unfailing. She concentrated on the feeling. It seemed important: the strength of these delicate creatures, the sure power of their feet, the goodness of being held, and how things that seemed helpless could sometimes be the strongest.

  She didn’t know if she should be sorry about the boy, or if she’d only headed off his violence with her own.

  THAT NIGHT, RUTHIE STAYED AWAKE in bed in the cabin’s loft and listened to her father, Terry French, Kent Willis, and Raymond Pompey talk about Wiley King in the living room below.

  “He’s got his foot on our throats and it won’t ever be enough,” Kent said.

  “I been hunting that pond since I was a boy,” Rutherford answered. “And my dad before that.”

  “My dad’s dad before that,” Terry said.

  “My family used to go there for mushrooms in the spring,” Raymond said. “Asparagus, too.”

  Rutherford’s voice rose. “Half-assed country star moves in and puts up a big fence like he owns the entire valley. Starts baiting ducks. It’s goddamn low-down. We got rights to that land. We been using it for generations.”

  “They’re taking your ancestral land?” Terry asked.

  “Yes,” Rutherford said.

  “Land you thought belonged to you by birthright because your people had been using it for generations?”

  “Exactly!” Rutherford paused. “Oh, I see what you’re doing. Cut the Indian shit. This is serious.”

  Ruthie peered down from the loft at Terry’s face half smiling in the firelight. Kent grunted. “He’s got three lawyers in from Seattle, trying to say the slough is a ‘man-made feature,’ not subject to public access laws. They know people are too distracted rebuilding to put up much of a fight. If he wins, it’ll be closed off all the way from Pine Road to the West Fork.”

  Tense silence fell as this injustice churned through the men’s heads. Ruthie wondered if this was part of Charlo’s curse, too. She didn’t know if it was better to hate the rich or become rich. She stared across the ceiling—the firelight turned the pale wood beams gold—and said a prayer for her father not to do anything stupid.

  LATER, AFTER RUTHERFORD’S friends had left and he lay sleeping in the twin bed beside hers, Ruthie silently listed as many endangered species as she could: black rhino, mountain gorilla, Amur tiger, bonobo. In her mind, these disappearing animals were enormous, like dinosaurs. Bigger than the cabin, big enough to knock aside trees. She imagined herds of them thundering over the mountains. She wanted to stay awake to see the otters.

  Her father wheezed, sweating out the beer he’d drunk. He gripped the pillow tightly with both arms, his thighs clamped together. The pillowcase was damp even though the night was cold. He always sweated and clung in his sleep, traveling the course of his wolf-plagued dreams. One of Ruthie’s worst memories was coming out of her room as a toddler to find him passed-out drunk, pantsless on the couch, his testicles squeezed back between his thighs like two tortured little eggs. The image refused to leave her as she aged. She felt betrayed by it.

  They were going home in the morning. Most of the other families had already left. There were no fires across the creek, no marshmallows. The stars were hidden by low thick clouds advancing from the east. An armada of them, like a hundred-year wagon train moving west across the plains. Ruthie watched through the loft window, lyi
ng crosswise over the twin bed, her bare feet sticking off the side. She rested her chin on the web of her fingers. She pictured tunnels where the otters lived stretching for miles beneath the cabin. A place where she and Moses could escape. Far from slough wars or corn-toothed toddlers. No shame, no fear. The only thing her father had said to her about the boy was, “If you’re going to go after someone, it’s best to have a reason.”

  Wind began to blow in the trees. The tops of the pines swayed deeply. They called through the windows in silence, as if stirred by a noise too huge for her to hear. She sat up. Cones fell and bounced off the deck. Lightning flashed in the distance, but no thunder came, nor rain.

  Dry lightning. It would surely start more fires in the tinder of the late summer woods. Ruthie pictured a crackle in the branches, a bang, falling sparks, and a single flame spreading over pine needles, then whooshing up trunks to light the sky orange. Before pouring back down with new strength through the deadfall.

  Disaster was always nearby. The quake had taught her that.

  The sound of small, scuttling feet wafted into the loft. Ruthie stared at the ceiling, her eyes wide, then slowly, carefully, she dropped out of bed. The feet pattered across the deck. Her heart began to pound. She crept to the ladder and down. The bottom rung creaked. She froze. Her father’s breathing paused, then with a hitch resumed. Shafts of moonlight divided the living room. Moses’s eyes shone in his bed by the door.

  “Shhh,” she whispered, coming toward him. Obediently, he set his head down on his paws. A lone ember glowed in the woodstove.

  Low dark forms moved outside the glass door. Ruthie bent at the waist, her hair hanging in her face. She held up her hand. The otters went still. Their eyes gleamed in the stormy night. Their flat noses twitched, long translucent whiskers quivering. Their skulls were softball-sized and almost perfectly round. Ruthie wanted to hold one in her hand. Feel its weight, its softness, the gentle tremble of the eyeballs beneath the lids. She counted three of them. Four. She knelt and placed her palms on the cool glass.

  “You came,” she whispered.

  They crowded around, staring up at her, before bending to snuffle between the planks for the hamburger she’d tucked away. They gulped the hamburger, chewing with their mouths open, their sleek bodies lost in shadow. They nudged one another as if they had something to tell her. Ruthie stared back. She wondered if they’d seen the headless creature, too. If they knew there was a wrongness in the woods. Their jaws worked. They nodded their heads back to swallow. The clearing across the creek was milky in the moonlight. The towering pines swayed above it. The air was full of restless gatherings, as if a new and inconceivable face were about to show itself. Ruthie touched the door’s handle. For an instant, lightning turned the night white. The otters quickened, snuffling and pawing.

  Above in the loft, the bed creaked and Ruthie knew her father was awake. That he’d stood and was watching her and the otters at the glass.

  8.

  The fire that started that August night burned until October. Pushed by high winds, it rushed into the backcountry. Torching over ridges and through canyons, avoiding the places the Short Draw had burned the summer before, it crossed into Idaho where the Selway-Bitterroot connected to the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness, and raged there in the roadless woods until it consumed nearly a hundred thousand acres and killed three smoke jumpers.

  The same day they died, on the other side of Trapper Peak, Sheriff Don Kima arrested Rutherford for his role in dynamiting Wiley King’s duck feeders and a section of his fence. Rutherford pled temporary insanity, due to the pressure the quake had put on him. Unimpressed with this excuse, the judge sentenced Rutherford to three nights in jail. He had to pawn several of his guns to Terry to pay the fines. The chances of ever hunting his favorite pond again seemed as remote as the return of the bison. Ruthie stayed with Terry during her father’s absence, sleeping on the small cot in Terry’s one-room cement hogan on the West Fork of the Bitterroot River. Pictures of college basketball players were taped to the walls above an array of old bead jewelry from his pawnshop. Things too holy to resell filled most of the shelves: a necklace of bear claws, buffalo-hide war drums covered with blue dogs and running horses, ceremonial corn maidens. A former basketball star himself for the Darby Eagles, he had two TVs angled together so he could watch two games at once. A woodstove sat in the center of the floor, its black pipe reaching up through the roof. Except in midwinter, Terry left the front door open for light and air. Now it was closed against the wildfire smoke. Ruthie kicked the blanket down to her feet in the claustrophobic heat. As she tried to sleep, Terry slowly circled the stove.

  “What’re you doing?” she asked.

  “Walking.”

  “Why?”

  “To relax.” He wore plaid slippers, sweatpants, and a T-shirt from a powwow fifteen years before. His long hair was loose and in the dishevelment of his face she saw, just for a moment, a mother.

  “I think I’d relax more lying down,” she said.

  “Why don’t you go to sleep?”

  “I’m not tired.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Tell me a story.”

  The woodstove was empty, cold, but she imagined how the room would feel with its crackling fire. The shadows dancing on the wall. It was the first night she’d slept away from her father, and she was anxious. Terry sighed, still walking. “All right, I’ll tell you a story about your dad when he was a little older than you.”

  Ruthie nodded.

  “He used to think he could survive in the woods without any help. During spring break—I think we were twelve—he went up Bear Creek with nothing but his .22. He said he’d stay there on his own for the whole week, killing what he needed to eat and using the furs to keep warm. We thought he’d be back in a day or two at most. But on the third day there was a blizzard, a bad one, you know the kind we get in March, and he was still gone. Twenty inches fell overnight with windchill to twenty below. Me and Billy went looking for him as soon as the sky cleared. We found his tracks a few miles in, full of blood. We thought he must be hurt and started calling him. But he wouldn’t answer. Finally, we found him sitting in front of a doe he’d shot. He was covered in her blood and guts, all frozen to him, and her organs were dumped out in the snow. He’d sawed her rib cage open and wedged himself inside to keep from freezing. Lucky he was so small.” Terry laughed. “I’ve never seen a sorrier sight, and he stank worse than his beetles. But he still didn’t want to come home. He said he could make it the whole week.” Terry paused his circling and pulled the blanket up to Ruthie’s chin. She blinked sleepily in the warm, smoky air, trying to imagine her father alone in the cold, trembling inside a fresh-killed doe. “I think he would’ve, too. He’s the stubbornest fool I ever met.”

  “You think he’s okay?” she asked softly.

  Terry nodded. “He’ll be fine. I’ve been to jail. It’s easier than sleeping inside a deer.”

  THE NEXT NIGHT, sitting on the edge of the cot, Ruthie noticed that Terry’s circling had worn a path in the cement floor. A smoothness lighter than the surface around it. This struck her as madness. How long, how many nights? . . . Why didn’t any of the men she knew have a wife? The sound of the river outside reminded her of the sound of the highway, and she felt bad for this, as though she were betraying them both. She looked down at her bare feet on the cool floor. She wiggled each toe in turn. The rhythm of Terry’s passage was like the hand of a clock.

  “Is this valley cursed?” she asked.

  “What?” He slowed. “Who told you that?”

  “Len Law. He said so after the earthquake.”

  “He might be cursed.” Terry pursed his lips. “He’s all twisted up inside. You know his grandfather was the first sheriff of Darby. They had a big house on the river.”

  “What happened?”

  Terry paused. Ruthie could tell he was editing the story because she was a child.

  “Tell me,” she said.
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  “His grandfather did bad things and finally got in trouble for them. He lost his job. Then he killed himself. And his son—Len’s father—left the valley. No one’s ever seen him again. Len’s mom had to sell their house to take care of all her kids, and they ended up where they are now.”

  “He thinks that’s Charlo’s fault.”

  Terry smiled. “He blames it on one Indian or another.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  Terry gently pushed Ruthie’s shoulders back onto the bed so she was lying down. “A lot of men don’t make sense. You’re going to have to learn that.” He patted her arm. “I’m still surprised by the bullshit I hear.”

  She wondered if he would believe her if she told him about the creature. She was suddenly very sleepy. “Are you lonely?” she asked.

  “Not usually. I have the pawnshop, friends, my brother. But yes, sometimes I am.”

  “You should get married,” she said.

  He laughed, his large head and chest framed by the dim lamplight, his shadow connecting him to the stove. “You’re probably right. Now go to sleep. We’ll pick up your idiot father in the morning.”

  •

  RUTHERFORD—SEEMINGLY UNCHANGED by his stint in jail, if slightly more agitated—came home determined to teach Ruthie how to shoot. He’d planned to wait until she was ten, but now believed the matter was too urgent, with Sheriff Kima and the rest of local law enforcement in the pocket of corrupt landowners. As he readied the targets for her first lesson, Ruthie watched the fire planes curve over No-Medicine Canyon and up into the mountains, where they disappeared in the huge plume of smoke that billowed and pulsed as if from a volcano. Wide, heavy-bellied ships of the sky, their twin rotors were so loud they made the ground vibrate. Moses looked up from the antler he’d been chewing and barked. Rutherford had told Ruthie that some of the planes carried smoke jumpers and others the retardant she’d seen them spew over the treetops in great red arcs. She wondered what the animals thought of this sticky red rain. If they knew it was there to put the fire out. If it clung to their coats. If somewhere in Idaho a little girl like her would look up from her homework and see a bright red bear crashing out from the woods.