Ruthie Fear Read online

  “I can do whatever the fuck I want,” she’d answered. Which left him shrugging and secretly proud.

  Security guards in tactical assault gear stood on either side of the entry gate, corralling the protesters in the parking lot. From time to time, a car exited the labs. While the driver hunched low over the steering wheel, the guards made a wall to let the vehicle pass, clamping their shoulders together and squaring the toes of their polished black boots. They looked nervous beneath their visors, unused to having their weaponry so openly matched. Ruthie wondered if the protest could turn into a firefight. Any stupid misunderstanding might start either side shooting. The animal rights protesters seemed to have the same idea, and were huddled in the far northwest corner of the lot, out of any lines of fire. Kent and Terry came over to meet her father, and Ruthie edged away through the crowd, smelling a peculiar blend of chewing tobacco and natural deodorant, until she was directly against the tall, black, spike-tipped iron fence.

  She wanted to see the labs up close. She and her father had driven by dozens of times—it was only a few blocks from the lumberyard—and she’d viewed it in the distance from the hills around Wiley King’s ranch, but she’d never actually stopped to look around.

  It was huge, faceless, bureaucratic, and disappointing. The complex seemed to have been designed to avoid any suggestion of menace. An American flag flew atop a flagpole. The new buildings were light gray, light yellow, and beige. In back were the old brick originals from the spotted fever days. Four stories tall and neatly kept with white trim and manicured lawns, they reminded Ruthie of the university buildings in Missoula. When the first townspeople learned scientists would be studying the infected ticks inside, they’d sued to have the labs closed. The judge threw out the lawsuit, but ordered a moat be built around it to protect the town, since ticks can’t swim. Ruthie didn’t see any moat. Maybe it had been filled in, or maybe history was more boring than people claimed. The labs had expanded when she was little, as its charter and funding grew, and she remembered huge semi trucks hauling in steel beams for the intricately vented and whirring warehouse. The newest addition was a glass L-shaped office suite folded around the back. All the windows were tinted. There was no sign of movement nor activity, save for a thin trickle of steam escaping from one of the vents. It was strangely silent and gave the protesters the feeling of performing solely for the security guards, who knew as little about what went on inside as they did.

  Ruthie tried to imagine evil scientists torturing helpless rabbits with the deadliest diseases in history. Or worse, running experiments on drifters and Indians, placidly documenting their suffering, then dumping their bodies into a steam-vented incinerator or flushing them out into the river. But she felt her anger withering. Protesting the labs was like screaming at an office park. It was like banging the handle of a toilet. Here was another hateful aspect of the modern world she discovered: it was designed to make terrible things seem normal.

  “I bet I could take out the head guy.”

  Ruthie turned, startled. She hadn’t expected to see Badger. His parents were too reclusive for such events. He wore camo cargo pants, his horseshoe belt buckle, and a tucked-in American flag T-shirt tight across his wide chest. His brown eyes stared down at her from below his mussed brown hair. His forehead was growing above his temples. She realized he was already balding at fifteen. He held an antique Weatherby shotgun with a stag’s head carved into the stock, and pointed the barrel up toward the top office window.

  “Not with that,” Ruthie answered. She calculated the distance and decided that—as long as she knew which window was his—with her rifle she could. Targeted shots along a low centerline would at least wound him.

  “He’s Dutch, the head scientist. Like from Holland. My dad saw him in the Super 1.” Badger joggled the shotgun around in a way that, if it was loaded, was very dangerous. “Said he looked like a Nazi.”

  Ruthie hadn’t known about the labs’ director. Now that she did, she didn’t care. Badger’s dad thought everyone who wasn’t from Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, or Utah was depraved. “What’re you doing here?” she asked.

  “My uncle,” he said, nodding toward a tall man in a hunter’s-orange baseball cap. “He thinks it’s contaminating the groundwater on his farm. But this mountain lion stuff is crap. Even if they are infected, once one bites you, you won’t live long enough to worry about getting sick. Remember that Cub Scout who got eaten a couple years ago? My coach was part of the rescue team. He said they found pieces of him up in the trees.”

  Ruthie kept her eye on the gun barrel. Badger was getting more strident by the week. He’d been named All-State for football, the first freshman to receive the honor in nearly a decade, and now a crowd of sycophant boys and cheerleader girls followed him through the halls. She imagined the lion in a frenzy over the Cub Scout, tearing and shaking the way Moses used to when he got a new chew toy. She’d only seen a lion once, deep in the wilderness past Twin Lakes, and even then it was barely a shadow. They were as elusive as they were powerful. The only animal her father was afraid to hunt with a bow. “You should be careful with that,” Ruthie said.

  “It’s not loaded.” Badger stuck the shotgun barrel under his chin and grinned. Ruthie imagined his oblong head exploding like a firework. She smiled back and his grin widened. The crowd jostled toward the fence as a car pulled out from the labs, and he was pushed into her. Smelling his spice cologne, their hands touching, she felt a familiar jolt of yearning: wanting him, being repulsed by him . . . was this what love was? He leaned close to whisper in her ear, “Maybe I’ll come over later.”

  ON THE DRIVE HOME, Ruthie’s mind wandered as her father bragged about the show of force they’d put on, how the government eggheads had stayed locked in their offices, and how they’d think twice before being so careless with their experiments next time. It made her happy to see him excited—his eyebrows bunched under the brim of his baseball cap, gesturing with his fist over the steering wheel—even though she knew the labs would continue tomorrow exactly as they had today. She wondered if he even believed what he was saying, or if men came to believe things by repeating them loudly, over and over.

  The clouds were still massing above the mountains. Treetops swayed along the road. The trunks blurred together, seeming close enough to touch. Long evening light reached over the Bitterroots. It contracted the distances, throwing shadows from trees to cars. Ruthie felt like she could stretch out from the passenger window and run her hand through the alfalfa fields. She wanted to walk into the approaching storm and emerge anew. She imagined the Ebola lions running free through the valley while all the hunters were away protesting them. Their huge, muscled bodies leaping from mountainside to tree to roof, ecstatic with disease, devouring every chained dog, every loose cat, every caged bird, every baby from its crib, and the walker-bound crones in the nursing home. Upending trash cans and tearing down clotheslines, their jaws red with blood and their eyes yellow with ancient, crazed fire.

  Yes yes yes.

  She squinted up at the mountains, hoping to see a long thread of them padding home. Exhausted and full.

  13.

  Sheriff Don Kima pulled into the Fears’ driveway in early July. The air was hot and stuffy inside the trailer. Badger was away at Bible camp and Ruthie had planned to watch TV all morning, target-shoot for a couple hours, then find Pip and drink with her in the woods. Her father only had time to grab his pistol as the cruiser’s door slammed. “What’d you do?” Ruthie said, jumping off the couch in the cotton shorts and T-shirt she’d slept in.

  “Nothing.” His voice was tight. His eyes flashed around the trailer for anything that might be illegal.

  “Please,” she said, watching the sheriff make his slow way up the walk. “It’s Don. Put the gun down.”

  He gritted his teeth and set it on the table by the door. “Wait outside.”

  “Don’t start shooting in there,” Sheriff Kima called. “I don’t want any trouble.”

 
Ruthie opened the door and stepped down from the cement porch into the heat of the day. The sheriff approached slowly. A tall, lanky, graying man in a wide Stetson, he had a deep hatred of drunk drivers, having lost his oldest daughter to one on the East Side Highway. Ever since, a permanent exhaustion had brought the bones out against his skin. Ruthie wanted to despise him, but his flinty dignity reminded her of western movies.

  “What’s his mood like in there?” he asked.

  Ruthie stopped, looking into his tired eyes. “I wouldn’t do anything sudden.”

  “Maybe you can help him understand: it’ll be a lot worse if someone other than me has to come out here.”

  “You going to put him in jail again?”

  A hawk drifted overhead. The sky was blue and clear. The sheriff wiped his hand on the front of his uniform and sighed. “I don’t plan to, but it’ll be up to him.” He paused. “I know things aren’t easy here.” He held her gaze, then continued to the trailer steps. He stopped in front of the door, touched his hat, shook his head, then rapped his knuckles against the edge of the screen.

  Trying to push down her fear, Ruthie went on around the trailer. As soon as she was out of sight, she broke into a run. She crossed the yard. Rocks jabbed her bare feet. She stopped, panting, in front of her father’s shed. It was unlocked. The rotten beetle smell inside was as strong as ever. She looked at the bins, the little armored bodies of the adults and the wormlike, squirming larvae. She remembered watching her father put a fresh head inside, and started to panic. Was the sheriff going to take him away? What had Rutherford done? She didn’t know where she’d go if her father was arrested. She couldn’t stay with Terry forever. Moving quickly, she unlocked the gun safe. The heavy door swung open. Shotguns, rifles, semiautos, and fully automatics were clipped in place along the back wall. A dozen handguns were arranged neatly in front of them. It was the most organized part of her father’s life. She reached in and took down the Mossberg 500—a tactical, pump-action shotgun. Her father had taught her that its short barrel and high velocity made it the most effective weapon at close range. “The best way to clear a room,” he’d said.

  Ruthie felt cold sweat on her neck. It’s just for protection, she told herself. She wasn’t going to shoot the sheriff. Just do what her father had taught her. She dropped an extra handful of cartridges into her shorts’ pocket and ran back across the yard. The rusting dump truck and yellowed mattress looked like relics of another existence in the bright sun. A single cloud rested over Trapper Peak. A magpie flew off a fence post and landed on the gold payloader that sat dormant above one of the fresh-dug foundations on Happel’s former land next door. Ruthie didn’t see how her life could change on a day so calm.

  A pair of cinder blocks were stacked against the trailer wall beneath the open kitchen window for a situation such as this. Her father had shown her all the best defensive positions on the property, and how to deal with intruders inside the trailer. She climbed onto the rough concrete blocks, hunched below the windowsill, and listened. The voices in the living room were clear. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rutherford said. “I ain’t set foot there since Happel left.”

  “You haven’t wondered why the work stopped all of a sudden?” Sheriff Kima said.

  “Work stops all the time. When you stop getting paid. Ask anyone from the mill.”

  “It also stops when someone cuts the fuel lines in all the equipment. Salts the gas tanks. Rips out the starters. Slashes up the tires so bad they can’t even tow them out. Six figures’ worth of damage, they tell me.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that.”

  Ruthie gripped the gun. She leaned against the sheet-metal siding and held her breath.

  “That’s criminal mischief. Four years minimum, and with your record, they won’t send you to the county lockup in Hamilton like last time. You’ll go to State, Deer Lodge. With the real criminals. What would happen to Ruthie if you got sent there?”

  Rutherford’s voice rose. “I told you I don’t know a goddamn thing about it. You come into my home and threaten me? Threaten my daughter?”

  “Dammit Rutherford, I’ve known you your whole life. I’m not threatening you. I’m telling you not to be a goddamn dumbass fool. This is right next door. Who else would have a reason to stop a development like that? Nobody gives a shit. I know you see this property and all the woods around it and most everything else in this valley as yours, but it’s not. And when these big-money people come in, they don’t take kindly to their investments getting fucked with. They’ll call the state police and I don’t know who else if it keeps up. There won’t be anything I can do.”

  Rutherford was silent. Ruthie could feel the gears grinding in his head. When his voice came, it had the hysterical, cornered tone that she remembered from his arguments with the game warden when she was little. “What about Reed? Go bother him. Or another developer. They pull this shit all the time, for the insurance.”

  “Look, I came here as a friend,” Kima said. “To try and help you. I’m taking no notice of the gun you’ve got pointed toward me there on the table, and whatever else you’ve got squirreled away on this property. But when the state police come, they’ll blow your door down. Take you out flat and impound everything you own. I’ve seen it before.”

  Silence. Then movement as the sheriff stepped back outside. “Be smart. Do it for your daughter. If anything else happens next door, they’re coming.”

  Rutherford didn’t reply.

  Ruthie waited, clutching the shotgun to her chest, until she heard the cruiser pull away. Then she exhaled in a shaking whoosh and slid down the siding to her knees.

  “THEY DON’T HAVE ANY PROOF. They would’ve taken him in if they did,” Pip said. She was standing at the edge of the clearing off Lost Horse Creek where she’d found the fertility icon years before. It was a place she and Ruthie often came to drink and be alone. Ruthie couldn’t stand still. She paced beneath the ponderosas. Angrily, she rubbed the tears off her cheeks. Was this her fault? She’d wanted Rutherford to have an enemy again, but she hadn’t thought he’d do something like this.

  “The sheriff was just there to threaten him,” Pip went on. “Probably the developer knows the governor, or gives a bunch of money to politicians. That’s how it works with these big projects. My uncle talks about it all the time.”

  Ruthie pushed her hair—which she’d begun to grow out—back from her forehead. Her skin was damp with sweat. She’d run all the way from her yard. The sound of the creek mixed with the gnats whining around her ears. “I wanted him to quit moping around the trailer like he’d been doing since Moses died,” she said. “I didn’t think he’d go next door.”

  Pip glanced around at the trees. “Keep your voice down. As far as you know, he didn’t do a damn thing.”

  “Six figures. You know how much money that is? That’s enough to buy a house. That’s more than everything we own. What am I going to do if they put him in jail?”

  “They’re not going to,” Pip said. She came and stood before Ruthie. She put her hands on Ruthie’s shoulders, then pulled her close and wrapped her arms around her. She spoke into Ruthie’s hair. Ruthie softened against her, smelling Pip’s unusual mossy, treelike smell. “It’s going to be okay. You could go into the woods if you had to. I think you could survive out there for years.”

  “For years?” Ruthie laughed.

  Pip nodded seriously. “I’d help. I think about it all the time. First, you head up into the high country along the Idaho border, stay away from lakes, keep to the woods, don’t light a fire. Move every couple nights. If you timed it right and had a shelter dug out by the first snow, you could make it. The Selway-Bitterroot is more than a million acres. They’d never find you.”

  “You sound like my dad.”

  “Well, maybe he’s not all the way stupid,” Pip said.

  “Mostly he is.”

  RUTHERFORD WAS SITTING in a lawn chair behind the trailer with a beer on his knee when
Ruthie returned. It was after dark and he’d built a fire. He was watching the sparks whirl up to the sky. His lips were pursed and she could see blood around his nails where he’d been chewing them. Ruthie fetched another chair and sat beside him. They were silent for a time. Then Rutherford looked up at her. “That son of a bitch.” His pale eyes gleamed.

  “He was trying to warn you,” Ruthie said.

  Rutherford shook his head. “He wasn’t warning me, he was threatening me. Cops don’t help people like us. Remember that. They’re here to keep the rich people rich and the money in the banks—that’s all they’ve ever done.”

  “Dad, it’s not worth it. A few more fucking condos.”

  The moon lay fat and low over the mountains. Its brilliance obscured the stars, but the wing lights of planes shone white as they passed below. Traveling from city to city, light to light. Ruthie had never been on a plane and she wished briefly that she were among them, on a padded seat, sipping wine, instead of down here, broke and in danger. Rutherford rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. Smoke wafted over his shoulder. He hunched forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “They keep taking things from me. My pond, my woods, my view. It’s like they won’t stop until there’s nothing left.”

  “Dad,” she said again. I’m still here.

  His knuckles were white. He looked up at her, a small man with his back eternally against the wall. Part of the great body of men in the West. “I know,” he said. “But it has to stop somewhere.”

  A FLATBED TRUCK arrived on Happel’s property the next day. The damaged payloader and other equipment were loaded onto it and taken away. New machines replaced them, and by the end of August six foundations—rebar jutting from fresh-poured cement—had appeared at the foot of the mountain, only a stone’s throw from the mouth of No-Medicine Canyon, and adjacent to the range where Ruthie shot every afternoon. Rutherford’s face darkened when he walked by them. Ruthie wondered how the fancy new families would feel watching her shred the targets by their green lawns.