Ruthie Fear Read online

  “God, he’s disgusting,” Ruthie said. “He’s been watching me like that since I was five.”

  “He’s scared of us,” Pip said. “You know he has totems all around his scrapyard? To protect it.”

  “From what?”

  Pip shrugged. “I don’t know. Indians. Witches.”

  “He should be worried about pedophile hunters.”

  “I sometimes try to kill him with my eyes,” Pip said. “Like this.”

  Ruthie smiled and the two girls trained their eyes on Len. Ruthie imagined beading the sight of her .22 exactly over his heart. He reddened and turned away.

  “See, he’s scared,” Pip said.

  Ruthie laughed.

  The ball sailed through the air toward the end zone. The crowd held its breath, following the spiral path. It arced down toward outstretched hands. Touched fingertips, bounced off, fell to earth. The town sighed. Glory delayed, again. Ruthie took the bottle from Pip and drank deeply. She watched Badger jog off the field and wondered what any of them would prove to be.

  10.

  Rutherford stood in the bathroom in his underwear covering himself with elk piss from a squeeze bottle. It was four-thirty a.m. and the darkness was just beginning to bleed from the sky outside the window.

  “Jesus, Dad, you can put it on over your clothes,” Ruthie said.

  “No. They can tell,” he answered. “It’s got to mix with the sweat.” His chest and belly were paper-white. His face, neck, and forearms were still darkly tanned from the work he’d done on the Stock Farm Club that summer. He’d been part of a landscaping crew adding another nine holes to the golf course. Rutherford had been forced to denude sagebrush hills where he’d once hunted lynx, while fat Californians sliced balls wildly on the fairways below. He’d hardly spoken to Ruthie in the evenings when he came home, drinking beer after beer on the porch and looking across the yard at the darkness of No-Medicine Canyon.

  In the mirror, his body was a wiry sprig of muscle, barely five and a half feet tall. Slightly bowlegged, with a long chest, short legs, and a pregnant bump of belly. He was a stunted but surviving thing, like the high-altitude trees that live in the driest soil. The white briefs he wore were old and ragged, but his neon-orange socks were brand-new. He stared at himself, rubbing the piss into his pecs under the fluorescent light. Ruthie was relieved. Bowhunting season always lifted his spirits, at least temporarily.

  “Where the hell did you find those?” she asked.

  He glanced down at his feet. “Seventy-five percent off at Whipple’s. Apparently they wouldn’t sell.”

  “Can’t imagine.”

  Rutherford shrugged. “I better not smell that bacon burning.”

  The bathroom and kitchen were practically on top of each other in the narrow trailer. Ruthie turned around and switched off the burner. Everyone else she knew put the scent on over their hunting gear, once they were out in the woods. Not straight onto the skin. She’d have to leave the windows open all morning to clear the air, and freeze her ass off. She scooped the bacon onto a paper towel. Then she opened the door behind her and dumped the grease from the pan off the steps onto the dead patch of lawn where they always dumped their bacon grease. Cold clean air rushed in. She could just make out the shape of her blind in the trees by the creek. Serviceberry bushes had grown up to cover the sides. It felt like another lifetime since she’d kept vigil inside, watching for the creature in the canyon.

  “That Badger boy coming over?” Rutherford asked.

  “He might.”

  Rutherford leaned out of the bathroom and peered at her. He’d put piss in his hair, too, slicking it back, and looked weirdly suave, like a banker in a movie. “Just stay out of my room. And if I come home and hear anything, I’ll shoot him in the leg, and who knows but my aim might slip a little to the center.”

  Rutherford leaned back into the bathroom and began pulling on his jeans. “He’s a big sack of shit, I’ll give him that. Had a nice game last week.”

  Ruthie wondered if her father would be more disappointed if she didn’t sleep with Badger. Rutherford claimed to have lost his virginity at eleven to a girl from Cut Bank who’d come down to Darby for Logger Days, so maybe fourteen was a given to him. As soon as he left, Ruthie planned to get back in bed and sleep away the Saturday morning, not worry once about homework or any other school bullshit, but she knew instead she’d spend it tossing and turning, prodding the silver stud in her lip with her tongue, waiting for Badger, and worrying over what she should do.

  The first time she’d thought of sex, outside the framework of June and Reed Breed, was in seventh grade when a boy named Meadowlark Thompson said he was going to rape her. He was a fat, aggressive bully, two years younger, whom she’d taken to torturing at recess. She’d twist his arm, rub his face against the side of the slide, or chase him, as she’d been doing that day, until he wept from exhaustion and embarrassment. She socked him in the stomach and left him doubled over, but his words remained in her mind. A vague unease, the same one she felt every time she saw Len Law, suddenly became clear. Terry French was the only one of her father’s friends he trusted enough to leave alone with her. None of the others, even those like Raymond Pompey who had daughters themselves. When Rutherford went to the Sawmill Bar at night, Ruthie was her own babysitter. He told her to use her .22 if any man besides him came to the door.

  Ruthie felt drawn to violence. Badger had gotten in a fight for her at school the day before with a boy named Levi Jensen. The Jensens were known spotlighters, the lowest form of hunters, who drove dark roads at night, caught game in their headlights, and blasted them without even stepping out of their trucks. No sport, no skill to it, just pure slaughter. You could do it dead drunk or on amphetamines. It brought the veins out on her father’s forehead, and he often threatened to lay nail strips across certain back roads to flip their deer-laden trucks coming home. Channeling her father, she’d told Levi that his family was trash, in the hall after school when she knew no teachers were around. He’d called her a cunt in response, and Badger, in his customary place behind her, hit him so hard in the face he fell back into the lockers clutching his eye. He hadn’t been able to stand upright and had pulled himself away, fighting back tears. Badger looked scared then, rubbing his fist, and Ruthie had felt fear swell inside her own chest. She’d wanted Levi hurt, but she hadn’t predicted the wobbled panic in his visible eye, so similar to the little boy she’d hit with the rock.

  Rutherford’s bow lay on the couch. His quiver with three arrows leaned by the door. “Why don’t you take the Glock, too?” she said. The only method to get close enough to a bull elk to kill it with an arrow was to cover yourself in female piss and bugle like another male. It got them so confused and excited they’d practically trip over you. But lying in the middle of the forest bugling and stinking doesn’t just attract elk; every couple years a bowhunter would get mauled by a grizzly. Ruthie preferred for her father to hunt with a gun. Recently, she’d found herself worrying about him in all sorts of ways: his loneliness, his debts, even his beetles. She dabbed the hot grease off the bacon with the paper towel and slid the pieces into a plastic bag.

  Rutherford shook his head, buttoning up his shirt and coming into the kitchen. “Glock’s too much weight.” He had a crazed purity when it came to hunting. He liked to hamstring himself: carrying only three arrows, bringing no compass, and never having a radio or any way to call for help. The chance of getting eaten was part of the thrill. He stuffed the bag of bacon into his jeans pocket as Terry French’s truck rumbled into the driveway. Ruthie knew that before they went into the woods they’d smear each other with green and black paint, a ritual startling in its intimacy, leaning in to each other’s faces, rubbing long strokes down each other’s necks, emerging transcribed and altered. It was in these moments that she understood their friendship: two beings united in the woods. Terry filled with the power of his ancestors and her father by dreams of the animal he wanted to be.

  “If the
y ask me what to do with the bear that ate you, I’ll tell them to let it go,” she said.

  Rutherford grinned by the door. He slung the bow over his shoulder and stooped to pat Moses, who barely lifted his gray head from his bed. “No, you won’t,” he said. “You’ll avenge me. You’ll come for my bones.”

  THE TRAILER HAD FIVE ROOMS. The living room on one end opening into the kitchen, then the bathroom and Ruthie’s tiny room along a hallway leading to her father’s larger bedroom on the other end. Already six feet tall, Badger didn’t seem to fit anywhere. He nearly stepped on Moses, who growled half-heartedly. Badger’s scraggly beard and bulging biceps made him look like a parody of both man and boy. He wore new clothes to fit in with his teammates. He didn’t say anything about the shoddy furniture or cramped dimensions. Only how lucky she was that her father left her alone. His parents made him leave his door open whenever he had guests. Ruthie sat beside him on the living-room couch. He spread his legs against the coffee table and placed his hands on his knees. He filled the silence with pointless chatter about his coaches and how the whole offense had to run sectionals until they puked. Finally, to shut him up and because she’d noticed that the knuckles on his right hand were swollen from punching Levi, Ruthie leaned toward him. She felt his chest tremble with her fingertips, and poked her tongue against his lips. He made a choking sound and welcomed her with such enthusiasm that for a moment she was afraid he’d try to swallow her. Mercifully, he tasted like the peppermint he must’ve sucked on the drive over, with only a hint of Skoal underneath.

  What are you doing? she asked herself.

  Badger’s excitement rattled the room. He pressed her back against the couch arm. His body felt much too large, crushing, but also exciting in its size. Warmth rushed through her pinned abdomen. His need was choking, overwhelming. She suddenly felt she couldn’t breathe. She pushed him up, slid out from under him, and stepped quickly across the wolfskin rug to the bathroom. She paused to glance back at his bewildered face, then shut the door, turned the fan on, and sat on the toilet. She unzipped her pants but left them on. She looked down at her knees. She took deep breaths. She was on the verge of something, excited and afraid. Badger was still only a few feet away.

  The single bulb over the mirror cast a sickly, greenish glow. Ruthie turned to see half her face in the mirror. Her short hair framed her sharp features. Her neck seemed too thin to hold her head. The yellow ring around her pupil had faded to pinpricks in the slate-gray iris, giving her eyes a wolfish ferocity. The red in her hair had darkened to nearly black. She pursed her lips so the new stud glinted. It made her look older than she was, which was why she’d gotten it. She hoped that when she came out, Badger would lift her up and press her against the wall.

  Instead, he was sitting exactly where she’d left him, staring at her with dumb, childlike expectation. A little boy trapped in a man’s body. “Let’s go in there,” she said, nodding to her father’s room. “It’s bigger.”

  Some of the color left Badger’s wide face. “When’d you say he’s coming back?”

  “Even if they don’t fill their tags they’ll stop at the Sawmill on the way home, so who knows? Late.”

  Badger looked at her grimly. He had seventy pounds and six inches on her father, but was correct in guessing that Rutherford could put him down. She’d seen her father choke out a wounded buck on the side of Red Sun Road when he didn’t want to waste a bullet. She pushed open his thin door, making a note to return the mound of dirty clothes that had wedged it closed. After turning thirty, Rutherford had taken down all the posters except the one from Las Vegas. It was the only city he’d ever visited, and the memory was a source of pride. Ruthie knew only that her mother had been with him. The showgirl looked over his unmade bed with an expression both inviting and blank, as if nearing the end of her shift. The strip glittered behind her with its miraculous starlight. “I’m going there someday,” Ruthie said. “My dad went when he graduated high school.”

  Badger tugged his belt, looking up at the poster. “My dad says that’s where you go when you’ve given up on yourself.”

  “Well, he’s a sheepherder.”

  Badger was stung. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. He’s just not the person to ask about Las Vegas. Ask him about Minnesota. Or Scotland. Someplace with sheep.” Badger’s parents had homeschooled him to protect him from the immorality of public school.

  A skewed Glacier Bank clock—a giveaway for opening an account—was the only other decoration on the walls. An orange sleeping bag was kicked down to the corner of the bed along with a rumple of blue silk sheets. Two yellowed pillows showed signs of regular abuse, throttled over the course of Rutherford’s wolf dreams. Different-caliber bullets were scattered across the top of the dresser along with a box of tissues, two small antlers, a rabbit’s foot, scratched lotto tickets, and several knives. A samurai sword rested proudly on a stand. Ruthie was suddenly embarrassed—it was the room of a child, not a father—but Badger hadn’t noticed. He was frozen in the doorway, staring at the bed. “Come on,” she said, sitting on the edge and patting the mattress beside her.

  The toes of Badger’s boots were planted in the carpet. His thoughts were so plain on his face she could practically hear them.

  “Or you can go home. I’ve got homework I should be doing.”

  Reluctantly, as though he were being pulled, Badger stepped forward.

  Ruthie decided it was going to be a game of pretend. Of each pretending they knew what they were doing. Freshman year had only begun a few months before, but she could tell that most of high school would be made up. The girls she’d known in middle school were pretending to be someone else. The person Badger pretended to be with his teammates was different from the person he was when they were alone. Sometimes she felt like the only one who didn’t pretend, which was why other girls called her a bitch and a slut.

  Badger sat down next to her and put his hand on her knee. For all his size, she could feel his heart beating like something fragile trapped inside his chest. He was wearing the same belt buckle as the day they met: a cheap flaking horseshoe on a nickel-plated background. He’d won it at the county fair, and was proud of it. The smell of piss and bacon lingered in the air. Ruthie wondered where her father was at that moment. Lying in the underbrush beneath a lightning-struck tree, Terry bugling, while a bear crept down on them from the ridge above.

  Taking each of her movements as approval for his own, Badger reached for her belt and they stayed this way for a moment, arms crossed, staring at each other. She wondered if anyone had ever lost their virginity at the exact same moment their father got mauled by a grizzly. Probably not. Rutherford had explained sex to her using a light socket and his electric razor’s charger. He’d plugged it in, unplugged it, then plugged it in again, demonstrating how the little red light turned on each time. “See how it fits? See how the light goes on? That’s all there is to it.” Ruthie wanted to get it over with so she never had to talk to him about it again. She hoped the act would open up a new, adult world, like that of June Breed. She freed Badger’s buckle. His eyes widened. She wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders and fell on top of him on the mattress, kicking the sleeping bag off the side of the bed.

  His hands were everywhere then. Tugging up her shirt, pushing down her pants, squeezing her ass, her hips, desperately fighting with her bra. She’d expected the clasp to cause trouble, but not for him to literally not be able to undo it. He twisted and yanked and got such a furious, constipated expression that she rose and reached back herself.

  When the bra fell down off her arms, he gasped. She couldn’t believe her breasts could warrant such a reaction. He cupped his entire hands around them. His lips parted. No sound came out. Ruthie wondered what she was supposed to feel. If it was okay to laugh. Her face got hot. She felt squirmy. She pulled off his shirt. A line of wiry hair ran down his wide chest, through his belly button, to the waistband of his boxers. A smattering of pimples s
urrounded his nipples. The muscles in his shoulders stood out against the skin. Suddenly she felt like slapping him. She did, lightly. Badger’s throat worked. “Ruthie,” he managed. She slapped Badger again, harder. His cock strained against her stomach. She reached into his boxers and held it, then smacked him in the face. He sighed and went still.

  Ruthie put her hand on his throat and rocked against him, wondering if the bear was coming down through the trees.

  AFTERWARD, LYING WITH her head on his chest, feeling his breath slow and the lingering throb within her, Ruthie had visions of the earliest women in the valley, who’d borne children and then fallen into feverish spells. Wandering the woodlands conversing with spirits. Lost in a wilderness too vast to comprehend, grappling with the destruction they’d carried in their wombs. Seeing what the men could not: that the wild land would someday cast them off. She saw Pip on one of her forays, searching for the creature’s tracks in the soft mud by Lost Horse Creek. She saw the bright red bear crashing out from the trees and the last wolf alone on the sagebrush hillside. She saw a mythology of un-birth, of rolling back the generations and watching the forests regrow.

  Badger’s heart beat against her ear like a drum.

  WHEN HER FATHER GOT HOME, elkless and drunk but unmauled, Ruthie was in her room on her bed pretending to do math homework. All the numbers looked squiggly and meaningless. Ruthie’s mind was a jumble. She didn’t know if she should feel proud or ashamed. Whether she was harder or softer than she’d thought. If she was using Badger or falling in love with him. She stayed hidden behind her book. “Get one?” she asked.

  Rutherford shook his head. “Near froze our asses off, and Terry forgot to gas up his truck, so Billy had to come roust us out. Dumbass Indians.” He went into his room. Ruthie listened to him drop his coat and step around the bed. He put his bow in the closet and stopped. She listened for another sound. Nothing. Her heart quickened. She pictured him bending forward over the mattress. Sniffing. His nose acute after a day of tracking game. Examining his sheets, lifting up one corner of the rumpled sleeping bag. The silence drew on. Ruthie’s stomach dropped. The only reason her father ever stayed quiet for long was if he was angry or sad.