Читать книгу Kingdomtide - Rye Curtis - Страница 15

The pilot swung the helicopter low over gray slopes of scree high above the tree line. Lewis squinted against the crags of sunlit granite, upthrust from the depths of the mantle some eighty million years ago. She brought slowly to her lips a thermos of merlot.

Bloor, long legs folded childlike in the seat next to her, knees level to his chin, turned upon her his pale face. His voice squelched in her headset over the beat of the blades. Have you ever been to Macao?

Lewis shook her head.

An older man with clubbed fingers sat across from them. He watched the window. Bloor had introduced him as Cecil. Keep your eyes peeled, he said.

I left Jill with her grandmother and spent last winter in Macao, Bloor said, and he made a show of looking out the glass. Had to get away. Met a six-foot-three Pekinese woman named Chesapeake. They pick their own English names, you know. She picked Chesapeake. Her friends referred to her by a Chinese word that means ladder. You’re tall too, Ranger Lewis.

Cecil looked up. Keep your stupid eyes peeled.

Cecil’s a longtime rescue paramedic, Bloor said. Works even though he has COPD. He doesn’t like me very much.

These people we are lookin for, they are dead, Cecil said. He turned back to the window. Sun filled his eyes yet he did not squint.

Koojee, said Bloor.

They flew onward over intrusions of granite set in the earth like molars in a jaw, and they each of them searched the ground below, wearing now sunglasses as the day grew brighter. Wind shear drove the helicopter down and Lewis squeezed the thermos in her lap. The air smoothed and she drank. Bloor watched her behind yellow lenses and asked her if she considered herself an ethical person.

Lewis wiped her mouth and ran a tongue over wine-red teeth. She tightened the lid to the thermos. Not sure, she said.

Bloor brandished a finger white with chalk. I give a share of my time and skills for the wellbeing of others, so for the sake of universal balance I allow myself particular ethically selfish pleasures. Chesapeake was an ethically selfish pleasure.

Lewis smiled and unscrewed the lid to the thermos. She drank and rescrewed it.

What ethically selfish pleasures do you allow yourself, Ranger Lewis?

Goddamn, I’d have to think about that.

I hope you do.

Cecil put up a hand. Do you need me to peel them for you?

Thank you, Cecil, Bloor said.

The pilot circled two other mountains and passed over a bleak forest. Lewis kept her eyes to the land and blinked little. In the glass she could see Bloor turn his head to look at her. Twilight was already upon them when the pilot warned that they ought to turn back before they lost the light.

Goddamn it, Lewis said.

Cecil had not turned his head for a time. At long last he shuddered it around to them like some rickety piece of theater on a set of pulleys. It’s difficult to think anyone of any age could survive down there at all, he said, and he coughed on the plump ends of his fingers.

As the pilot began to fly them back toward the station, Bloor spoke about the depression of people without ambition.

These are the eighties, you know, he said. I’ve seen thirty-year-olds dressing like teenagers. I’ve always been ambitious. Do you enjoy your work out here, Ranger Lewis?

They passed the black edge of the mountain in the oncoming dark. Yes, she said.

My daughter will be eighteen the third of November. I’ll tell her about you, remind her that there are ambitious women out there.

Be quiet, Cecil said. You’re makin the pilot crazy.

One more thing, Cecil. Then you can wire my jaw shut if you want. Listen, Ranger Lewis. I apologize if this is too forward. Sometimes I’m too forward. Have dinner with me this evening? I’m renting a large lonely cabin and I’d appreciate the company. We can go over the case and discuss our options.

Lewis watched unsteadily the man’s face.

She drank a bottle of merlot at her kitchen sink and put on a clean uniform and then drove to a stately two-story cabin built of pine and painted clean white, stilted dark and alone in a far dead end overlooking the east valley. Down below in the foothills a little town glowed. No wind battled the trees and stars spun like rowels in the glassy firmament. Lewis parked the Wagoneer in the gravel driveway. She took up from the passenger’s seat a four-dollar bottle of merlot and picked off the price tag.

The front door of the white cabin opened. Bloor ducked under the transom and peered out at her. His thin black shadow emerged like an insect from a crack in a floor. He put up a hand and rolled his long fingers. Lewis climbed from the Wagoneer.

Without a word Bloor ushered her into the cabin. He closed the door and locked the dead bolt. He waved in a circle a chalked hand and asked her what she thought of the place.

Lewis surveyed the large, open room. A circular steel fireplace burned in the center and a length of dark picture windows lined a wall beyond which lay a stilted deck and a hot tub and a barbecue. Long white couches were angled around a glass coffee table where there sat a bottle of wine. The kitchen was lit up through an open archway and from there came a smell of cooking that recalled a deep basement.

It’s goddamn modern, Lewis said.

I thought so too, Bloor said. He took from her the bottle she had brought and her coat. Do you go everywhere in uniform, Ranger Lewis?

I expect I just got comfortable in it.

It’s a handsome uniform.

I’ve been by here before, Lewis said. It’s goddamn unusual to see a white cabin.

It’s owned by a homosexual man named Cherry. Good guy. You know him?

I know he rents this place out, but I never met him.

Bloor thanked her for the wine and said, I’m sorry if I seem distracted. I just hung up with my daughter. She’s been trouble recently.

I figure she’s the age for it.

Bloor went over to the coffee table and set the bottle there beside the other and took from his chest pocket a cake of chalk and chalked his hands. I don’t want to say she’s slow, but it takes a long time to get her to understand the complexity of a thing. He took up the bottles and held them out for her to choose.

Lewis pointed at the merlot.

Bloor uncorked the bottle with a corkscrew from the table. She was caught today with that clerk with the dead tooth I was telling you about. In the school restroom. Suspended. What do you think of that?

Nothin.

Bloor poured two glasses of merlot. She told me one morning over eggs she wanted to do it. Can you believe that?

Do what?

Sex. I’m a progressive man, Ranger Lewis. Cultured, of this time. Beyond this time, even. But you know, part of me wants my daughter to be the eternal virgin.

I expect that’s only natural, Lewis said.

Bloor smiled and sat on the couch. He patted the cushion next to him. Lewis went over to him and sat. He handed her a glass and raised his. To the Waldrips and Terry Squime, may Light and Love have mercy on them. May they rest in peace.

Lewis raised her glass. That’s premature talk.

The two drank.

How did you meet your ex-husband? I apologize if I’m too curious. My wife always told me that I’m curious in a way that makes people feel probed and unsafe.

Lewis told him that she had met Roland at her dad’s veterinarian clinic when she worked there after school and Roland had brought in his dog to put it down. She told how they had gotten married just after she had left high school and had begun working in the Missoula Parks and Recreation. After a few years, she said, she took the ranger’s position in the Bitterroot Mountains and Roland was put in charge of purchasing in the small-game department at a hunting-goods store. At the time she had not thought anything of him running off on a business trip every other weekend.

He was seeing someone else?

He had a wife in Nebraska, one in Colorado, and one more in Montana. Lewis pointed to her badge.

The man is a Mormon then.

If he is he never told me about it. He’s in prison for trigamy.

Koojee. At least you don’t have kids.

Goddamn it, never needed any.

Kids. You know, when we moved from Tacoma to Missoula I hoped the change of venue would help. But I don’t know. My daughter’s already lost her virginity straddling a toilet. It’s not that I’m made uncomfortable by sexuality. My tenure as a sergeant in the National Guard made sure of that.

Bloor drank off a glass, then reached for the bottle and poured himself another. He stroked together the chalked fingers of his free hand and studied the wine with eyes that did not seem to see.

When my wife passed away three years ago, he said, I thought I’d become a better person. To honor her memory, you understand. I haven’t. Not at all. I don’t know why.

Sorry about your wife.

Bloor looked at the ends of his white fingers. I love people, he said. Do you know what she used to tell me?

No.

That I could rule the world with love and compassion.

All right.

I miss her. When I tell people about her I can see it in their faces they don’t understand what a visionary woman she was. They don’t know what she meant to me.

I expect that’s true.

I’ve always lost people, you know. I think it’s why I first started in search-and-rescue. My mom disappeared watering pansies one morning when I was an infant. Nothing left but a pair of size-six clogs and a water hose running. My dad was already long gone, somewhere dead or alive in a country we had no idea about. Some people thought he’d come back and kidnapped my mom and drowned her in one of the Finger Lakes. They never found her. My sister raised me. Then she died of food poisoning in a hotel lobby ten years ago this Thanksgiving. Koojee.

Goddamn sorry to hear that.

Room service killed her. The hotel settled handsomely in court. Now I never have to work another day of my life if I don’t want to.

I figure that’s a good thing.

Losing my wife, Adelaide, was the hardest. We knew each other since we were kids. But I don’t think she ever was a child, you know. She always spoke like she’d been born with a life already lived in her. Most everyone didn’t know what to make of her, so they were vile to her. The boys at school tormented her. But I don’t think any of them ever really had the upper hand. It was even then like she’d wanted them to be vile to her in just the way they were. As if she’d orchestrated the whole thing for a pleasure only she knew about.

Sounds like she was a goddamn special woman, Lewis said. She missed her mouth with her glass and dribbled merlot down the front of her uniform. She blotted the spill with her sleeve and held out the empty glass.

Bloor poured her another. He turned his drawn face to the windows, where a blue light outside showed fog in the trees. A finger-mark of chalk was on his chin. You don’t even know, he said, and he took her fingers between his chalked hands. Thank you for coming over tonight. He pinched the skin of her ring finger hard and filled his lungs like he were to submerge himself in water.

Lewis took back her hand. You’re welcome.

Bloor let out his breath and smiled.

Lewis, rubbing the back of her hand, pulled the Wagoneer crookedly into the driveway. The lights were off in the pinewood cabin and the windows dark. Over the radio Dr. Howe spoke gently to a woman who had phoned in with the name Ronnie and asked how she could be expected to go on and live the life she had come to live when all she had ever wanted was to leave her husband and her three children and sing country-western music all night long in Nashville. Lewis turned off the engine but kept the radio on and listened.

The woman said: I’m three hundred pounds. That’s somethin to do with it. But it ain’t fat that’s in me. I got all this frustration poolin in my belly and my thighs and my ass. I can’t be a country-western singer. I’m morbidly obese and I ain’t got a particularly good singin voice. I count myself betrayed, Dr. Howe. I just knew that’s what I was goin to be when I was a little girl, but here I am now and I’m not and I’m large and I’m tonedeaf. My gran was a singer. Sometimes I go to the downtown library and look through those old microfiches they got of her and the shows she used to put on around town and I just get so frickin jealous, pardon my language. Jealous of my dead gran. That’s low, ain’t it? Tell me it’s low. And then my husband, not long ago I caught him eyeballin my baby sister at the church fish fry. That’s been on my mind. She’s only just able to have a legal drink and weighs nearly a hundred pounds less than me, so I ain’t no competition. Where’s a person like me with all this frustration poolin in them supposed to go to get their self-worth? I’ve just been dismissed and dismissed, even by people that’d say they love me. And I go to doin it to myself, Dr. Howe, I go to dismissin myself and I just sit on the end of my bed while the kids’re at school and my husband is at work and just watch the cat come in and out of the room.

Dr. Howe said: Ronnie, life is about adjusting our expectations. It is what it is, and will be what it will be, like it or not. And I believe that the secret to happiness is to find a way not only to accept and tolerate life as it comes, in any manner it comes, but to find a way to enjoy it in spite of yourself and the conditions it sets. You can’t have everything you want or you would implode and disappear. Do you understand me, Ronnie? You would have nothing at all without all that you believe you do not have.