Ruthie Fear Read online

  Moses went back to gnawing. Ruthie’s throat burned. Her eyes watered. She wished she was inside next to her fan. Her father’s friends argued over whether there had always been this much smoke in late summer. Kent Willis said that a properly managed forest would never burn. When one did, it was because of the liberals who’d killed off the logging industry. “They used to have ’em out by ten the next morning,” he said. He’d been a logger himself, until a bucking accident put him on permanent disability.

  The smoke trapped the heat in the valley and gave it a hacking denseness reminiscent of humidity. The air felt ripe for destruction and chaos. Rutherford strode across the overgrown yard to the plywood target stand at fifty yards. He used a staple gun to bang a neon-yellow paper target into place. Then he turned to Ruthie and pointed at the black bull’s-eye like she might not know what it was. Old bullet shells, the squashed copper nubs of the bullets themselves, and splinters of plywood littered the range. It was his proving ground. His kingdom. Ruthie was surprised by how badly she wanted to do well. She was often embarrassed by her father, and complained bitterly about him in her mind, but there was nothing she wanted more than for him to see her as strong. He smacked the target with the flat of his hand, then went into his shed and came out carrying an old .22 rifle and a box of shells.

  “This was my first gun and now it’s yours,” he said.

  Ruthie nodded. He nodded back.

  “As long as you ain’t trying to stop a bear, it’ll do the job. Small-caliber is why, that means low-velocity. When you hunt something big, you’ll need a bigger gun, but shooting hasn’t got much to do with the gun at all. The gun is just the size of the bang, and any jackass can make a bang. It’s about looking with your hands.” He leaned the rifle against the hay bale that served as a table behind the firing line. He motioned for her to stand then crouched behind her so they were one height, his knees on either side of her. He held her empty arms and pulled her back gently into his chest, planting them both, as one creature, firmly in the dirt. “First you’ve got to learn how to look at your target without a gun. Just look. Look and breathe.” Ruthie stared at the yellow circles on the black sphere. They seemed to draw her in like the eddy in Como Creek. “Don’t see anything else.”

  The planes and smoke and mountains fell away. The bull’s-eye was a void, a pit, the dark center of the universe. Ruthie began to feel dizzy. Gently, Rutherford raised her arms with his and straightened them, palms together, her hands forming a blade pointing at the target.

  “Line your top thumb up with your eye and the bull,” he said. “Let your eye become your hand. Keep breathing. Keep it still. If you trust your eye, you’ll shoot where it’s looking.” Ruthie sighted over the ridge of her knuckle, and felt her father’s whiskers scratch her cheek. She smelled the sawdust in the collar of his shirt, and the beetles—repopulating even at that moment in the shed—beneath it. She felt his collarbone against her shoulder and the way blood and life coursed through him. It was the closest she could ever remember him holding her. She stared into the center of the bull’s-eye and felt the power of the smoke and flames overhead. It was a feeling of freedom.

  “Don’t let that thumb move when you pull the trigger. Breathe into it. Nothing moves—not your eyes, not your arms, not your hands, not your toes. Pretend you have roots and the only part of you that can move is the little twig of your index finger.”

  Carefully, Ruthie freed that finger.

  “Okay,” he said, and she pulled the invisible trigger.

  At that moment, as if she had fired some kind of magical bullet, a phalanx of planes emerged from the huge plume of smoke above the mountains. Their engines roared. Ruthie and her father looked up. Moses leapt to his feet and turned in a circle, barking. One after another the planes flew east low over the valley. Twelve of them, all sleek and white with gold stripes along their sides. Private jets, emerging like a mirage from the unmapped woods. Moses ran after them yapping, his years falling away in puppy-like excitement.

  “Fire must have changed direction,” Rutherford said, tipping his head back to follow the planes’ flight.

  “Who are they?”

  “Rich people. Assholes. From Angel’s Landing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a town for people with so much money they don’t want anyone else to be able to find them. You have to have your own plane to get there.”

  “They live back there?” Ruthie asked, awed by the idea.

  He nodded. “Terry backpacked in once. It’s sixty miles from the nearest road, the last thirty bushwhacking. He got all the way to the security perimeter. He says they have a man-made lake and a real one, a golf course, a runway, even a little grocery store.” Rutherford blew a piece of ash from his beard. “It’s a bunch of Russians and Chinese. I hope the whole place burns.”

  Ruthie watched the planes until they disappeared over the Sapphires. Her cheek itched where her father’s whiskers had been. She wondered if the rich were fleeing to another secret hideaway, in other mountains, with another man-made lake. She tried to picture a town so deep in the woods that it had no roads. Was there a school? A restaurant? She saw, vaguely, castles. A drawbridge. She decided she wanted to live there.

  Rutherford stood and retrieved the .22. “You ready?” he asked.

  Ruthie nodded.

  “Always assume a gun is loaded. All the ones in my room are, and from now on you’ll keep this one by your door. An unloaded gun is just a stick you can’t throw straight. Keep it loaded with the safety on. People will tell you that’s dangerous, but they’re the ones who want to take them away. You understand?”

  “Yes.” Ruthie took the gun. She held it, remembering how the skeleton had shattered across the sky. She felt that once she pulled the trigger, she’d leap forward in wisdom and years. The thought scared her.

  “Good.” Her father knelt again and gently raised the gun in front of them. His chest pressed against her back, shoulders against her shoulders, arms over her arms. He placed the stock into her hands along with his and pointed toward the target. “Hold it here.” Ruthie touched the grain. Gripped it. It was like any other polished wood, a banister or cabinet handle, cool and smooth, yet different also. She could feel the bucking explosion that would take place, and the violence it would send forth. “Now put your other finger over the trigger like this. Not on the trigger, just over it. You only touch the trigger when you’re going to shoot. That’s the most important thing to remember: only touch the trigger when you’re going to shoot.”

  The barrel moved with their hands, steadying toward the target. “The velocity of this gun is low, and the bullets are light, but they can still kill someone.” Ruthie imagined the creature lurching and twisting away from the sight, trying to escape up the canyon. She decided the first person she’d shoot was Len Law. Then all the whalers in Japan. “Keep the butt firm against your shoulder. It’s going to buck a little, and a big gun would buck a lot, but it’ll only hurt if you don’t keep it firm. A bigger caliber could break your nose or knock your eyeball out if you flinch.” Ruthie’s heart started pounding. Knock her eyeball out? It seemed like too much to keep track of: breathing and touching the trigger, keeping the butt on her shoulder and her eyeballs in her head. She struggled to hold her finger over the trigger and not on it. The rifle barrel felt much too long to control.

  “Breathe,” Rutherford said. He slid his hand over hers and clicked the safety off. The rifle’s weight was spread evenly between all four of their hands. His heart beat behind hers. She stared at the target. She willed the rest of the world away. “Now.”

  She pulled.

  With the first shot, she hardly noticed the plywood splinter above the target, she was so worried about the butt punching her shoulder. She felt it, but only a little. Relieved adrenaline rushed through her. She could do it.

  Her second shot blew a hole in the target’s second yellow ring and she couldn’t help but shriek with excitement. Her father laughed. “
Look at you,” he said, and drew his arms away. Suddenly bereft, Ruthie pulled the trigger as the barrel fell, kicking up dirt ten yards in front of her.

  “Careful!” Rutherford said, yanking the gun upright and holding her again. “Jesus, you want to shoot your damn foot off?”

  She did not, but nor had she wanted him to let go.

  The morning drew on, the fiery light going from purple-red to the deepening orange smoke haze of midday. The rifle steadied in Ruthie’s arms. Her aim improved. Spent shells glinted in the grass around her feet. Her father watched, grunting in appreciation each time she hit the target. An instinctive switch occurred within her. She began firing not for his love, but through it. Channeling his skill, which he’d used to fell the last wolf across two hundred yards of rolling sagebrush hillside, and so many other animals besides, and finding that she could dwell there. The barrel an extension of her eye, the trigger extra length to her finger, the butt molded to her shoulder, and the lines between her and him slipping away. She watched as the target ripped apart.

  “You’re a natural,” he said, crossing his arms and smiling, showing the missing incisor gap he usually hid. His baseball cap was cocked far back on his forehead. Pride crinkled the lines around his eyes. A lone figure in the smoky, apocalyptic light. Warmth spread through Ruthie. She felt at home.

  II

  9.

  Dreaming of heroes, old men filed into the Darby High football stadium. Their lined faces were gold beneath the halogen lights. They wore flannel shirts and canvas jackets. Jeans with bison-skull belt buckles and scuffed boots. Retired from mills now closed: Bonner, Stimson, Darby Lumber. The hulking buildings sagging behind barbed-wire fences. Windows smashed. Ruthie and Pip watched the men from the concrete steps atop the bleachers with a red blanket wrapped around their knees. They sat close together, their arms touching. Gusts of cold October wind ran down from the mountains. The first snow dusted the upper slopes. They were freshmen, but Ruthie didn’t feel like they belonged. Her classmates gossiped about senior boys and homecoming, while she and Pip still hunted for the tracks of a headless creature.

  Pip thought she’d seen it once near the four-wheel track off Lost Horse Road, but it disappeared before she could be sure. “Maybe it wasn’t real,” Ruthie said. “I don’t know anymore. Maybe I made it up.”

  “Maybe this isn’t real.” Pip smirked at the school behind them. Her black bra was clearly visible under her white shirt. She wore short pants through the winter and seemed to hold heat like a filament—snow melted in her tracks. She carried her knife in a purple backpack along with her notebook and a mouthwash bottle full of food-coloring-disguised vodka skimmed from her uncle’s bar. She was tough in a way that came through in her shoulders, not wide but angular, taut with budding muscle. The only activity she and Ruthie didn’t do together was hunt. Ruthie had shot her first deer with her father when she was nine, slotting the bullet behind its ear with her .22 so it died standing up. Pip refused to even hold a gun, hating all weaponry beyond her knife. She marked herself with the knife’s tip, scratching runes in thin trickles of blood on her thighs. Other girls whispered that she was a witch. The principal even had to be called in one day when Len Law showed up at the school and demanded Pip not be in the same class as his twin nieces, because she was trying to pox their wombs. This was doubly ironic to Ruthie, as these were the same girls who slept with dropouts at the kickboxing gym and talked about ways to get rid of a baby if they got pregnant: by drinking bleach, taking a month’s worth of birth control pills, or throwing themselves over the bumper of a truck.

  The earthquake had faded into distant memory in an intensifying sequence of fires and floods in the Bitterroot Valley. The road by the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge was repaired, but Ruthie still felt herself to be on unsteady ground. She kept her few breakable belongings on the bottom shelf, and made sure Moses—so old and gray now that he hardly left his bed except to pee—didn’t sleep under anything heavy.

  Cheerleaders huddled together on the sidelines, their legs bare beneath flared yellow skirts. Red pom-poms clutched to their chests. They looked into the crowd, on display, self-conscious and proud. The football players bumped into each other in bright red spandex, pads transforming their teenage shoulders into blocky battering rams. Michael Badger towered over his teammates. Only fourteen, he was already one of the largest. He looked dazed under the lights, his helmet hanging from his hand by the face mask. Ruthie tried to decide what to make of him, his innocence and size, his potential. They shared homeroom and since the start of high school he’d been a near-constant presence in her life, a looming shadow behind her in the halls. Homeschooled through eighth grade, he knew nothing of her father’s beetle business nor the teal trailer where they lived, and from the joggled, awestruck look in his eye when he talked to her, she thought he might not care.

  A whistle blew. The team circled, raised their white-gloved fists together, and brought them down with a shout. They ran onto the field under the lights; the announcer’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker. The town’s pageants sometimes made Ruthie overwhelmingly sad. She had twice won the girls under-twelve state trap-shooting competition. Rutherford kept the trophies atop the fridge, and she still caught him gazing at them before reaching inside for a beer, but for Ruthie the victories felt hollow. She was sure larger achievements existed in the outside world.

  Pip leaned into her shoulder. “I only want the Indian boys.”

  “The coach hardly lets them play.” Ruthie watched Badger line up beside the quarterback, who received the snap and deposited the ball into his arms. He plunged headfirst into the other bodies. Shedding one, two, before being pulled down in a mass of flailing limbs. Emerging with his shoulder pad askew, grass stuck in his helmet, grinning. Cheers ran through the crowd, followed by low chatter. Men drank from cans in paper bags. They spat chew into plastic soda cups. Rutherford sat beside Raymond Pompey down near the field. He wore his own varsity jacket from fifteen years before—when he’d been the smallest wide receiver on the team, awarded his position through sheer tenacity—and pointed toward Badger in the huddle.

  “Are you going to sleep with him?” Pip asked.

  Ruthie touched the silver stud in her newly pierced lip with her tongue. She liked Badger, but worried that enough touchdowns would make him arrogant or cruel. “I don’t know.”

  “Scott Runningcrane took me to his cousin’s cabin on the Lochsa. I told him if he wanted to do it he had to clean up all the mouse shit and make a fire. It smelled terrible.”

  “And?”

  Pip shrugged. “There was no wood.”

  Ruthie laughed. “Maybe I’ll tell Badger he has to bring me a magic slipper.”

  “He’d probably drive to the Wal-Mart in Missoula and ask.”

  “One of those special Bitterroot kids. They’d send him home with a Cinderella costume.”

  “But just think, if they win state, you could be prom queen.”

  “I think I’d kill myself,” Ruthie said.

  Seconds ticked by in gold on the tall digital scoreboard glowing before the dark mountains. Father Mike and his wife sat in the center of the bleachers in matching down coats. God and football. The priest’s face was flushed with excitement. His voice rose above the others as Badger smashed forward, yard by yard, slamming his helmet into padded chests, his cleats gouging the grass. A holy chaos. Father Mike’s wife looked embarrassed. Ruthie knew Badger by his size and the number thirty-three in gold on his red back. She watched the game as she’d watched the church services she’d attended as a girl: interested but apart. Pip fished the mouthwash bottle from her backpack. She drank and handed it to Ruthie. The blue liquid tasted like gasoline. Ruthie coughed, her throat burning. “Can’t you ever steal anything decent?” She gave it back to Pip, who began picking at the label with her long, bony fingers.

  “This is all a ritual,” Pip said. “The game, the players, all of it. Like in the old days, when the Indians would pierce their c
hests with bone pegs and dance for hours.”

  “At least they had a reason. For the hunt or rain or whatever. Now we have to pretend like the score will make us better than Stevensville.”

  “I read that if the pegs didn’t come out by sundown they’d start pulling and shoving each other to yank them out.”

  Ruthie tried to picture the men she knew, her father and his friends, Whipple and Father Mike, shirtless and pierced around the cottonwood pole. The hardest part was to imagine them dancing. Gesturing toward the game, Ruthie said, “Now they just slam into each other.”

  Pip smiled and nodded. “Until they fall down.”

  The referee blew his whistle and one of the coaches ran onto the field, furiously waving a clipboard. The team stood back. Ruthie still felt deeply her connection to the wild, but the world of parties and school and boys was pulling her in. She’d grown nearly as tall as her father, and despite her cropped hair and thrift-store clothes, she felt eyes on her in the grocery store. A new vibration when she moved. An awareness of her body as something that preceded her mind.

  “Look who’s here,” Pip said, nudging Ruthie with her elbow.

  Len Law stood at the bottom of the bleachers. He’d been absent for much of the summer, bringing his mother to the hospital in Missoula for diabetes checkups. He looked up at the crowd, his eyes searching until they came to rest on the two girls.