“It wasn’t a deer,” Ruthie said. “And it wasn’t a goddamn rock.”
Rutherford spat in the dirt. “Learn how to look, then you can cuss at me all you want.”
5.
Ever since John Owen’s first white settlement at the fort, the valley’s inhabitants had done everything they could to domesticate its hillsides and riverbanks. Fence it into squares and pave roads between those squares. Slaughter the bears and wolves and mountain lions and bison. Drive out the Salish. Nail crosses to the hilltops. Yet still the wildness encroached, running in flames down the mountainsides each summer and pushing up in tree roots to crack the sidewalks each spring.
After the closing of the mill, the Rocky Mountain Laboratories became the valley’s largest employer. Founded to fight the scourge of spotted fever, it housed a maximum containment facility, one of the most secure bio labs in the country. The former mill workers hated the scientists for their arrogance and job security; the scientists looked down on the uneducated rednecks who bought new machine guns while living in trailers.
With no mother, no church, and no interest in what she was taught in school, Ruthie devised her own morality based on the behavior of animals she saw from her blind. In the passage of deer, coyote, beaver, muskrat, and raccoon, she noted life pared down to the core of instinct. Free from the twin anxieties of past and future. She took no sides in the valley’s conflicts, wanting only a house deep in the woods, another dog, a trip to Las Vegas, Len Law’s accidental death, and to prove to her father that the creature was real.
To the blind’s southeast, Ruthie looked into the mouth of No-Medicine Canyon. The creature taunted her from its depths. Every fern-rustle was a hint. Every moving shadow suggested it would reappear. When her eyes tired of their futile search, she turned her attention north, where the blind looked over the creek into the yard of June and Reed Breed. Trapper Creek swelled suddenly after leaving No-Medicine Canyon and ran along their property line. The water itself was entirely on the Breeds’ side, making their land, which was lower, verdant with native grasses and wildflowers, their pine trees taller and more bountifully needled, and their air noticeably sweeter. Their house was an actual house; their truck replaced itself every two years. Rutherford considered them rich, and took every opportunity to urinate on their side of the bank.
On top of this, it was said softly among the older girls at Ruthie’s school that June Breed was adventurous and Reed Breed a cuckold. That she enjoyed her adventurousness as frequently as possible, and that he lingered on it in the most intimate, humiliating ways. When Ruthie heard her father howling over the motor of his miter saw, she assumed it was the fault of such dark, incomprehensible aspects of adulthood.
On her second day within the blind, instead of a mysterious headless being, Ruthie saw June Breed strip naked on a beach towel in the shade of her garden shed. Mosquitoes whined lazily above her breasts in the early summer warmth. There were lessons in the parting of her lips, the lowering of her eyelids to crocodile slits, and the slow arching of her back, but they were not what Ruthie had expected to learn. She was frightened and enthralled. She wondered if she could become this kind of woman, half melting in the sun. She hoped so. The future took on a new and dangerous light.
Later in the afternoon, when the sun had finally begun to drop into the Bitterroots, Mr. Breed came out from his office. He looked at his wife, asleep now beneath a horsehair blanket, then punched the trunk of the large ponderosa by their deck. Hard. Twice.
Ruthie was fascinated. She forgot the creature completely as Mr. Breed rubbed his knuckles and returned inside. What had brought on his violence? Ruthie considered the two dull thocks his fist had made against the bark. She had a vision of her father and his friends standing in front of a fire, kicking at the logs until sparks whirled up around their faces. Kicking harder so the sparks shot higher, showering their heads as they caught at them with open hands.
Darkness reached down into the valley from the Sapphires. Ruthie left the blind and walked through the yard. She passed furniture that had once lived inside the trailer and now lived outside, including a rickety card table beside the bullet-riddled washing machine, a brown recliner, and a sodden yellow mattress. On summer nights when it was too hot to sleep inside, she and her father used the mattress to watch the stars. Rutherford’s rare moments of creativity were spurred by the cosmos and the nearness of wild, killable game. As they were lying on their backs, he told Ruthie stories of planets with forty-point elk the size of school buses. “You hunt them with rocket launchers,” he said. “If you miss, they’ll skewer you on their antlers and toss you out into space.”
How did I end up here? Ruthie wondered. She imagined the giant elk watching the winged skeleton pass overhead. The tines of their antlers so numerous they were like the branches of a willow tree.
As the long hot August days passed in the blind, Ruthie was disturbed to find contradictions within herself. Places of illogic that animals lacked. Just as she had imagined shooting her father in the icy pond, she saw herself dying for him, too. Leaping into the water and heaving him onto the shore with her last breath. Pulling his body from his burning truck only to be engulfed in flames herself. Stepping into the path of a charging bear and beckoning for him to run. Some days she was determined to never hunt an animal as her father did. On others she fashioned guns from sticks and aimed them through the eye slit, massacring every squirrel in the Breeds’ big ponderosa.
NIGHTS GREW COLD in October. Ruthie had trouble sleeping in the confines of her closet room. Cloud shadows loomed between the stars through her window. They transfigured into starships, then became malevolent, light-swallowing monsters. In frightening moments, the rumble of trucks on the distant highway went silent. She clenched a flint arrowhead in her palm. She listened to her father’s fitful snoring through the thin door. She saw the creature looming over the trailer on its stilt-like legs. Felt it bending down toward her. Faceless, eyeless. Silently calling her into the maw.
Leave me alone, she mouthed.
She wrestled with the scope of existence. The way the dark sky and the dark mountains could make her feel both huge and infinitesimally small. How she could see her shadow stretching across her yard like the black finger of God, or cower in her blind at the sound of a branch snapping a hundred yards away. How she felt like a part of the entire breathing world, yet totally alone.
Rutherford kept a separate freezer full of discarded heads in the bunker beneath the shed. He fed them to his beetles in the winter when business slowed to nothing. Occasionally, overtaken by morbid fascination, Ruthie would descend the ladder and open the lid to find the frost-lashed eyes of deer, antelope, and bear looking back at her. Their implacable wondering reminded her of the wolf’s, as if in all animals the body’s final question was where its spirit has gone.
She spent most of her time alone. Emotions stormed through her. Cars passing on the road could make her so angry that she wanted to sow the asphalt with land mines, while the flight of a bee, one of the season’s last, over the withered plants in the Breeds’ flower garden could lift her almost to tears.
At recess, she’d stand on the edge of the playground—a small, solitary figure—and stare up at the tops of the lodgepole pines waving in the breeze. Always in motion, these stationary things. She tried to decipher the messages they transcribed on the sky. Each needled tip writing its story, roots reaching through the ground beneath her delivering messages. She sent herself zooming up the trunks to look back down into her own eyes, and found the yellow rings glowing around the pupils.