Ruthie Fear Read online

  She tried to duck farther behind her book when he came back into her room, but it was no use. He leaned over her and narrowed his pale eyes.

  “You been in my room?”

  Ruthie shook her head.

  “What’d I tell you?”

  Her cheeks were on fire. She was frozen, her heart pounding.

  “I told you one thing.” He hacked a wad of phlegm from his throat and held it in his mouth.

  Ruthie stared up at him wordlessly. Terrified and embarrassed. He’d never laid a hand on her, but she never knew exactly what he might do.

  He leaned forward and spat onto the sheet beside her. A huge green wad, the size of a silver dollar. It quivered there, flecked with black from his chew.

  “How do you like it?” he asked. The fluorescent hall light flickered behind him and his shadow reared up the wall, double his size.

  Ruthie sat perfectly still beside the misshapen orb, unable to speak. She wanted to throw up. The phlegm trembled with each of her shaking breaths. Her father turned and went out, slamming the door.

  Men and fluids. That’s all it was. Ruthie wished she could look down past the burning chandelier inside herself—the heat of her anger and desire—to something pure.

  11.

  That winter, the Happels moved away to a trailer in Hamilton after M. Happel got a job canning for the new organic brewery there. Their land was sold to a developer. Bulldozers razed the shack, cleared away the tires and car parts, and were swallowed up in the first snow. Leaving an empty property that Rutherford stared at through the frost-covered window, as if a dreadful city might suddenly spring forth. Snow fell throughout November, harkening the coldest winter of Ruthie’s lifetime.

  At the end of November, on her fifteenth birthday, when the nights were already dropping below zero, Rutherford gave her a .30-06. “There’s nothing too big for you now,” he said.

  “What about the space elk?” she asked, trying to cheer him up with memories of their summer nights on the mattress in the yard. “The forty-pointers as big as school buses.”

  He smiled wanly, cupping his hand around the sputtering candle on her birthday cupcake. “I forgot about those,” he said. “The biggest thing I ever shot was a bear on Stonehouse Trail by Rye Creek, when I was your age. He was almost seven hundred pounds. Now it’s a five-hundred-dollar-a-night guest ranch, and they won’t let me drive through.”

  In December, Ruthie moved a space heater into her closet room and slept in a sleeping bag in long underwear, socks, and a sweater while the wind rattled the sheet-metal siding and whined through the single-pane windows. Her father snored by the woodstove in the living room with the wolfskin rug draped over his shoulders. He was still passed out when she left for school, beer cans scattered at his feet. She stepped carefully around him onto the creaking porch and eased the door closed behind her.

  Pip waited for her in the street. Ice coated the pavement but she still wore short pants and sneakers, her legs paler than the frost. Ruthie walked slowly beside her, dreading class. “What’s happening to our valley?” she asked.

  “It’s filling up,” Pip answered.

  “Do you remember after the mill closed, how the newspapers said the town would die?”

  Pip nodded. “They said everyone would have to move to Seattle or Denver to find a job.” She paused. “Instead, everyone who doesn’t need a job is moving here. I snuck into one of the mansions they’re building up Trophy Road. I lost track when I tried to count the rooms.”

  “What do you think they put in all of them?”

  Pip shrugged. “Books. Antiques. Junk.”

  “I’d take any house. I don’t care how big. Our trailer is freezing.”

  “My uncle says winters were always like this when he was a kid. The whole river froze. You’d see deer walking across.”

  Ruthie nodded. “My dad, too. He talks about ice fishing.”

  They parted ways in front of the cafeteria. From the window of her homeroom, Ruthie saw Pip walking away from the school. She wondered where her friend was going, but Ruthie also liked to be alone.

  On afternoons when her father was at work—laying Sheetrock or plowing mountain roads—and Badger was at practice, Ruthie would put on country music, turn up the electric heater, and make quesadillas in the frying pan. That evening, she found only a single tortilla next to the case of Busch Light in the fridge. Rutherford wasn’t buying more groceries to accommodate all she was eating. She put on Wiley King and drank two of Rutherford’s beers in retaliation, then shot a packet of hot sauce and defrosted one of the plastic-wrapped cuts of venison from the freezer. She cooked it sizzling in oil. She sang along while she waited. She secretly loved Wiley King’s music, and knew most of his songs by heart. A small, sharp rebellion. She danced, too, kicking out her legs and spinning, making an S pattern out of the kitchen and around the coffee table in the living room, her toes curling on the wolfskin rug. Moses watched in confusion from his bed, occasionally mustering a yap, unsure whether to be excited or afraid.

  “What?” she said, leaning down, holding his cheeks, and touching her nose to his. His small body was so frail she could feel the bones, but still his eyes sparkled and he licked her cheek.

  She arranged her closet room so everything she owned was within reach at all times. Rutherford complained about her crap being everywhere, but she didn’t like drawers. She liked to see her things. Her stereo CD player with the four-disc changer—her most prized possession, which Terry had given her from his pawnshop—sat by her twin bed. Her small armoire was crammed beside it, holding what little jewelry she had: a single cubic zirconium earring her mother had left, a bear-claw pendant her father had made, and the small malachite cross she’d saved up to buy after the earthquake and worn every Sunday until she was eleven. Lip studs of different colors. Boxes of bullets were stacked by the door where her new rifle leaned. She practiced every day, calibrating the scope through wind and snow, and even in whiteout conditions it was not unusual for her repeated shots to be invisible as they punched through the bull’s-eye. She’d stopped shooting competitively. Her only goal now was to be better than her father.

  After practicing, Ruthie would flop onto her bed, below the pictures of animals she’d cut from magazines, and her mind would leave the trailer and travel along game trails over the Bitterroot Mountains to Angel’s Landing, where the rich lived in their castles around a man-made lake. Where jacuzzi tubs were the size of her room. Where her cook would make her anything she wanted. Where Moses, eternally young, held dominion between a queen’s guard of two huge Doberman pinschers. Other days, she visualized herself on the shore of a remote glacier-cut lake with a wolf at her side, their reflections mirrored in the glass-still water.

  When she heard her father’s truck in the drive, she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep, so she could stay in her imagination a little longer. But she was always distracted by the sound of him sighing as he dropped his keys onto the table, shuffled over the linoleum, took a beer from the fridge, and popped the tab with its familiar, fizzing snap.

  Loneliness lined his face. None of the women he’d been with since Ruthie’s mother had lasted. Only one, a stenographer from Lolo with a pink streak in her hair, had taken the time to remember Ruthie’s name. The heads in his reserve freezer dwindled as winter went on, and the beetle colony kept multiplying. Several hundred thousand now, their post-quake shortage long forgotten. Most of the valley’s new residents sent their game to one of the fancy taxidermists in Lolo. Rutherford mused about taking out an insurance policy on the colony and setting fire to the shed. Sometimes, when Ruthie came home late at night, she’d find him passed out on the couch clutching a pillow so tightly that the ligaments in his neck stood out, his lips working. Beer cans littering the carpet below him. His breath like a motor breaking down. She covered him with a blanket then, and, if her mood was right, laid her cool hand on his forehead and held it there until the tension and heat began to dissipate and he softened ben
eath her, his slack jaw falling open and the years falling away, until he looked no older than the boys she saw every day in school.

  On his thirty-fifth birthday, just after the first thaw, Rutherford and Terry drove into the yard with a topper camper loaded onto the back of Terry’s truck. Arguing the entire time, they mounted it on poles driven into stumps on a flattened spot at the wood line, past the burn pile and the dump truck, near Ruthie’s old blind. It looked like a demented watchtower there, with the short ladder up to the door.

  “Guest room,” Terry said, shrugging as he passed Ruthie in the yard.

  Inside was a loft bed, a stove, a small wood cabinet, and a padded bench. Nothing else. The side window looked out on Happel’s former land. Rutherford kept it empty save for a shotgun, radio, and whatever hunting magazine he was reading at the time. He wanted it as clean as Ruthie was messy. It became his sanctuary, and he retreated into it whenever Badger came over, or he and Ruthie fought, or if he wanted to be alone. As the nights warmed, he took to sleeping in the loft bed. Carrying Moses out in the evenings and setting him atop the ladder, then climbing in after him. He said he liked the feeling of being in the woods, but Ruthie knew he was slightly afraid of her now that she was becoming a woman. His eyes avoided the changes in her body. He pretended not to see the tampons she put in their cart in the Super 1. They never spoke of what had happened in his bed, and he avoided Badger, always finding reasons to disappear when he came over.

  This made her sad. Though she wanted the space, too.

  The war against Wiley King had long ago been lost. A slew of lawsuits and electrified fences had left her father with nothing to do but mutter darkly about someday reclaiming his pond. Kent Willis’s obsessions had shifted to the Rocky Mountain Labs, where rumors of experimental testing on live subjects had peaked with the story of Ebola-infected rabbits escaping and being eaten by mountain lions. These lions now supposedly roamed the foothills, crazed with disease. Willis reveled in it. He’d come over to the Fears’, plant himself on the couch, and deliver a long lecture about what it meant to live near a biosafety level four lab, and the U.S. government’s long history of testing chemical weapons on its own citizens. Ruthie could tell this held little interest for her father, who believed the federal government was evil but only in a massive way beyond his purview, like hurricanes or genocide. He nodded absently while Willis rambled, looking out the window at his topper in the trees.

  He’d reached an aimless place in his mid-thirties. Ruthie saw it in the deflated, stoop-shouldered way he walked across the yard, a solitary figure on the dry grass, skirting patches of melting snow. He’d shot the last wolf, he’d had a daughter, otherwise this was all he’d ever be. She wished for him to have an enemy again. For that fire to give purpose to his life, even if it put him in danger.

  “What about the condos they’re building on the West Fork?” she asked. “That’s near where you and Terry hunt, isn’t it?”

  He looked at her over his beer and nodded wearily. “It’s all going. By the time you’re my age, the whole valley will be a shopping mall.”

  The thought disturbed Ruthie. Missoula had already grown to fill its valley to the north, and was spilling over the hills into Lolo, with new box stores, strip malls, and developments. “Then I’ll burn it down,” she said.

  “I hope you do.” He sighed and clicked on the TV. “But they’ll just arrest you and build it again.”

  MOSES DIED at the end of March, after arthritis made him unable to walk. Rutherford and Ruthie buried him in the woods between Ruthie’s blind and the new topper. It only took a few shovelfuls each to make a hole big enough. He’d shrunk down to almost nothing at the end. But his eyes still looked to Ruthie the way they had when she was a girl, and they’d still lit up whenever she or her father walked in the door. Neither wanted to be the first to shovel dirt back over him. He’d been a part of the entirety of what Ruthie could remember of her life. They stood together in silence. Rutherford’s eyes were wet. It was the first time Ruthie had seen him cry. She put her arms around him. He leaned against her and the tension left his body, as it did when she laid her hand on his forehead at night.

  “Shit,” he said.

  After dark, when they’d smoothed the dirt over Moses’s grave and made a cross of rocks, they sat side by side on the yellowed mattress. Rutherford wondered aloud if his old escaped beetles would find Moses under the ground. Ruthie looked up at the stars and imagined his little body twisting away through the black of space.

  12.

  In the following weeks, stirred up by Kent Willis and others, citizens of the Bitterroot Valley became so concerned over animal testing and the perceived lack of containment at the Rocky Mountain Labs that they organized a protest. Rutherford reluctantly agreed to attend with Ruthie. Moses’s death had pushed him into a deep depression. Days passed when he hardly left the couch, watching TV with the volume so low she could barely hear it. His only sustenance Busch Light, cheese singles, and the occasional elk sausage. Work had begun in earnest on Happel’s former land next door; the engines of earth movers rattled the trailer windows. Ruthie wanted Rutherford to get angry again.

  The protest took place on a windy Saturday in late April, outside the labs’ high spiked fence in Hamilton. A day when the layered clouds above the Sapphire Mountains contained the entire spectrum of gray, with the dark innermost threatening an evening thunderstorm. Looking up through the window of her father’s truck as they drove north from Darby, Ruthie saw crows cutting across the sky. She felt a sense of portent, of forces gathering. Perhaps the Ebola-ridden lion queen herself would come down to reclaim her throne.

  “Has anyone ever died on Trapper Peak?” she asked, looking up at its hooked finger.

  Her father grunted at a bright yellow SUV in the oncoming lane. “I hope so.”

  Opposition to the labs was one of the few issues that united the valley’s residents. The millionaires with mansions on Charles Schwab’s Stock Farm Club didn’t like it any more than Kent Willis and his neighbors in Whispering Pines Trailer Park. Nor did the hippies who’d opened a health food store in Stevensville and lived in increasing numbers in sustainable homes built of hay bales and corrugated steel along the East Side Highway. The polygamist Mormons in Pinesdale saw it as an unholy place—and bringer of unwanted federal attention—where man tinkered in the dominion of God. While for the Salish the labs were another blight on stolen land.

  Ruthie had learned about the labs in science class. How their founding was the first act of the Montana Board of Health in 1910, to fight the spread of spotted fever that at that time killed four out of five settlers it infected. The initial cases of the disease had appeared on the west side of the Bitterroot River soon after Chief Charlo was driven from the valley. With each new death, the settlers’ hatred of Charlo grew, as did the legend of his curse. Vigilante mobs attacked the few remaining bands of Salish at the foot of the mountains.

  After successfully determining that the fever came from ticks and containing its spread, the labs’ scope broadened. The biosafety level four facility, one of six in the United States, opened during the Cold War. It enabled the study of maximum-containment pathogens like smallpox, Marburg virus, and Ebola. Pathogens Kent Willis believed weren’t merely being contained, but weaponized.

  Ruthie was surprised by the size of the crowd in the parking lot beside the gate. Sheriff Kima looked surprised, too, leaning back against his cruiser with his hand on the butt of his gun. Usually the desire for privacy outweighed any civic unity in the valley. At least fifty protesters were huddled together in clumps against the wind, with their signs flapping and twisting above them. It was easy to tell liberals from rednecks by who was carrying a gun. Willis held his great-grandfather’s musket at slope arms and had a SIG Sauer P320 at his waist. Terry French had an AK-47 strapped to his back and was being given a wide berth by white people nervous to see an Indian with so much firepower. Raymond Pompey’s jacket was open to reveal his twin shoulder hol
sters and Three Percenter T-shirt. There also seemed to be some confusion between the two factions over what was being protested. The liberals carried signs about animal cruelty and stopping animal testing, with pictures of monkeys in cages and terrible scenes of operations, while the signs of the armed men were solely concerned with the dangers escaped carriers presented to humans and livestock. I SHOOT SICK CATS ON SIGHT read Willis’s, with a crudely drawn, deranged-looking mountain lion in a gunsight. He struggled to keep the banner aloft in the wind with one hand while holding the heavy musket in the other.

  Father Mike stood to the side in his vestments with a sign quoting Isaiah, FOR BEHOLD, THE LORD WILL COME IN FIRE. He had the same overexcited look in his eye that Ruthie had seen at the football game. Lines were etched deeply into his forehead and the hair at his temples was going gray. Rumors circulated through town—he’d become addicted to pills, he’d lost faith—as his sermons became increasingly apocalyptic. Ruthie wondered where his wife was. She wanted to tell him to go home to Boise. The valley seemed to be cracking him.

  Rutherford hopped down from his truck, circled the bed, and leaned in to carefully remove the Banshee from its black leather case. A short-barreled rifle at .300 Blackout caliber with a Cerakote finish and radial delayed blowback, it looked like it belonged in a video game. He relished any opportunity to show it off. He held the barrel gently in his fingers, as if he were afraid to jar the pollen and spoil the bloom. It weighed only four pounds. Ruthie remembered lifting it alone in his room when she was a little girl.

  The wind whipped her eyes. She turned away from her father. She always avoided him when he came in from shooting the Banshee, so postcoital was his expression. He’d told her to bring her .30-06 as well, but she’d been too embarrassed, not wanting to look like some crazed militia girl to anyone she might see from school. “You can’t be ashamed of your gun,” her father had said.