She knew not every girl lived like this. Some had mothers who sang lullabies.
Moses began to tremble. What was in there? Ruthie smelled something from the canyon’s depths: a rot, a dead thing come back to life. She crouched beside Moses and rested her hand on the wiry fur of his neck to calm him. He was a Yorkie, always alert, save for in midwinter when he grew depressed. His breath came in quick pants. Together they stared into the shadows.
She probed the darkness. Green blades of grass, tall in the spring, wavered in front of her eyes, dividing her vision by oscillating degrees. Straining to see farther, using the yellow in her irises, she channeled her entire being into the canyon. The sounds of the outside world ceased. The sun was swallowed by blackness. She felt herself standing on the edge of a giant open maw—an abyss of incomprehensible depths into which all previous explorers had fallen. Moses’s body shook as if he felt it, too. Only the dark of the canyon remained.
A shadow slid over another shadow. Ruthie froze. She gripped Moses. Something was moving.
The creature took shape slowly, awkwardly. A tall feathered thing, it lurched toward the creek on two long, spindly, double-jointed legs. Each step was tentative, as if it were just learning to walk. Its feathers were gray and slightly iridescent. Its body curved into a single, organ-like shape. A kidney. Misshapen and lumpy, frighteningly perched atop the thin legs—taller than the saplings on the shore. A monster, deviant in its unsteadiness. But what horrified Ruthie, what made her want to scream, was that it had no head.
Its chest continued roundly over its collar and back along the ridge of its spine. Nothing protruded. No way to see nor hear nor smell, no orifices at all. Yet it paused by the creek and leaned forward as if it wanted to drink.
Ruthie felt like she was caught in a dream, unable to run, seeing a future of death. She wondered how the creature had grown. She imagined it wriggling, maggot-like, from the mouth of a dying elk, before growing to its terrible size. It reminded her of the tumor-ridden lamb that Len Law had shown off in front of her school, or the mold that grew around the drain of her shower.
Moses began to growl deep in his throat. His wiry hackles rose. The creature lifted one of its pronged feet and dipped it into the water. It stood like this helplessly. The current rushed around its thin ankle. Ruthie was sure it would be knocked over. She didn’t see how it could get up again. Sudden pity mixed with the fear and revulsion in her chest.
The growl in Moses’s throat crescendoed to a harsh, hysteric yap.
“No!” Ruthie hissed.
The creature twisted toward them. It faced Ruthie with its feathered mask. The feathers trembled. Sensing her. Knowing she was there. She wondered if it navigated through vibration, like a bat. She could feel trucks on the highway when she pressed her ear against the dirt. The creature shied backward, stumbled, straightened on its stilt-like legs, and shuddered away into the darkness.
The canyon was empty again. Ruthie parted her lips. No sound came out. Cold sweat ran down her neck. She felt a terrible importance, as if fate were for a moment balanced in her hands. Hers and her father’s and that of all the others in the valley. Moses looked up at her with the whites of his eyes showing, frightened and begging for a treat, the way he did when a truck horn scared him in the night.
4.
Rutherford lay shirtless on the couch in the trailer’s narrow living room with the cartridge of a freshly oiled Glock on his belly. Wheel of Fortune played on the TV at full volume. Terry had gone. The carpet was filthy with crumbs, oil drips, and the wrappers of cheese singles, which Ruthie had planned to eat for dinner. An open beer stood on the table by her father’s head. Two empties and a full can were keeled over beside it. Ruthie panted in the doorway, her reddish hair—chopped short to avoid the recurrence of lice—sticking up, her cheeks flushed from the sprint across the yard. Moses charged in past her and shook himself furiously.
“I saw something,” she said.
Rutherford’s eyes rolled away from the TV but he made no move to sit up.
“A creature.”
“A creature?”
She nodded rapidly. “It went up into the canyon.”
“A canyon creature. Shoot it next time. We can sell it to the university.” Rutherford pronounced all five syllables, as if it were a disease. Hair made a scraggly divide down the center of his belly, and his feet, propped on the couch arm, were frighteningly long and pale.
“It had feathers and no head.”
“Sounds easy to shoot.”
“Dad.” Ruthie hated being a child; no one listened to her.
“I’d do it myself except it ain’t headless creature hunting season. But you, you can’t get in trouble for poaching when you’re six.”
More than once, Ruthie had seen the game warden’s white truck pull into the driveway and heard the storm of cursing it elicited from her father. On the TV, a woman jumped up and down, screaming at a new car. Rutherford shook his head at the male contestant standing dejectedly behind her. “Damn fool could’ve kept the Wheel.” He reached around on the carpet for his oil rag.
“Dad!” Ruthie yelled.
The TV made a brief static crackle when he muted the volume. He rose up on his elbow and turned toward her, jostling the cartridge to the floor. “Dammit, Ruthie, can’t you see I’m busy?”
She clenched her fists in frustration, her heart pounding.
“Last thing I need is your bullshit.” He took a long drink, shook the last drops from the upside-down can onto his tongue, then tossed it aside. He located the full one behind his head and his mood immediately brightened. “Maybe it was an emu got loose from Del’s farm. Remember the one on top of your school last year?”
“Emus have heads,” Ruthie said. “And necks.”
“Still don’t know how it got up there. That beak looked sharp enough to skewer old Del.” Rutherford grinned at the memory. He sank back down and popped open the beer. “Fucking dumbass, chasing it around with a net. Supposedly they go for five thousand dollars a pop if you can breed ’em.” The gap of Rutherford’s missing incisor showed where a snowmobile had tossed him face-first onto a stump when he was in high school. “Don’t know why I’m mucking around with beetles.”
“It wasn’t an emu.”
“A deer with mange, then. They lose all their hair and look like demons.”
“Deer have heads, too!”
“Keep your voice down. You’re making my goddamn head hurt. Hasn’t that fool teacher taught you what an imagination is? You don’t know what you see when you’re six.” He looked around the small, crummy room as if to prove his point. “You think you do, but you don’t. You’ll learn that as you get older. The world ain’t all you think it is.”
What did he know of the world? Ruthie wondered. Expired hunting tags were tacked to the wood panel wall by his scope and elk bugle. Envelopes from the bank accumulated on the kitchen table until he burnt them with the last wood of the season. The only food they ever had enough of was meat. He was angry at the rich, the government, and Ruthie’s departed mother in varying order and intensity. The only cultivation he’d done of their barren acre was to install a meat freezer and gun safe along with his beetle bins in the storage shed, and erect plywood targets at twenty-five, fifty, and one hundred yards, to shred with bullets every summer. “You don’t believe me,” she said.