Only her friend Pip Pascal seemed to understand. An orphan, also motherless, Pip watched the world with the same intensity. She was the only other person Ruthie told about the creature. They sat together on the pavement in the shadow of the gymnasium and Pip drew it in her notebook, ending with a feathered kidney atop two tall menacing spider legs. The idea of a disembodied organ pulsing with life disturbed Ruthie and delighted Pip, who drew other variations: lungs and hearts and bladders, lurching together across the paper void.
“You think it came from outer space?” Pip asked.
Ruthie shook her head. “I think it came from here.” She described how she’d imagined it wriggling out of the mouth of a dying elk.
“They could be coming out of all kinds of animals,” Pip said, in sudden awe.
When any classmate besides Pip tried to talk to her, Ruthie would hurl their ball over the fence into the woods. She forestalled their questions—about her yellow eyes or her short hair or her father—with anger, and was known to bite, scratch, and kick. She didn’t own a single dress. Rutherford bought her jeans and black T-shirts at the same thrift store where he bought his own. They looked like full-sized and miniature versions of each other when they were seen together. The red in Ruthie’s hair glowed like the red of her father’s beard. She accompanied him on every errand in Darby and Hamilton, and on odd jobs after school, to escape the property on Red Sun Road. She studied each detail in the outside world: the way old ranchers sucked their teeth in the Montana Café, speaking only of the weather, how George Whipple watched the stock boys from high behind the counter of his feed store, Kent Willis doing push-ups on his lawn while the radio blared conspiracy theories and his neighbor Danette kept count from her lawn chair.
The teachers placed Ruthie carefully in the back row of desks and only called her name during roll.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” they asked.
“A wolf,” Ruthie answered.
She inspected the carcasses of dead birds and wondered what they would look like if she fed them to her father’s beetles. The delicate, almost impossible architecture of flight. When she learned the fate of sea turtles and the blue whale—choking to death on ten thousand plastic grocery bags—she felt such rage that she wanted to incinerate every ship on the ocean.
Rutherford was little use in matters of morality, as he was adrift in the modern world himself. His conversations with other men in the valley revolved around jobs, guns, engine parts, dogs, what dogs are thinking, and everything being ruined by outsiders. He never punished Ruthie except if she disturbed his things or entered his room without permission. When she came home with a scraped knee from a schoolyard fight, he didn’t ask her who or why, he simply lifted her dirty foot to the middle of his chest, held her calf firmly in his callused hands, and inspected the cut. She could feel his own heart then, as strong as the thud of the ground through her soles. She struggled to keep from flinching as he poured on rubbing alcohol.
The sawdust-and-rot smell from his shirt announced his approach, though generally he left her alone, allowing her to roam free, even as the weather turned cold. His advice was primarily related to hunting and the petty wars he constantly found himself in: with neighbors and the game warden and rich ranchers like the singer Wiley King, whose mansion he’d helped to build. With employers and checkers in the grocery store and tourists who drove too slowly while gawking at the glacier-sheared cliffs of Blodgett Canyon. He defined himself in opposition to the wealthy scientists at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, and the billionaires building eighth homes on Charles Schwab’s Stock Farm Club. He stockpiled supplies, tested his survival skills deep in the woods, and told Ruthie stories of society crumbling, when all the rich and soft—unable to hunt or fend for themselves—would come to him and beg for help.
The only people he trusted were the poor. At the top of a small rise to the south, on land even drier than the Fears’, lived the Happels. A family of fellow former mill workers destitute to the point of subsistence living. M. Happel and his nephew poached firewood beyond the national forest boundary along with the Fears, and often the two men, Rutherford and Happel, met by their sagging fence in the evening to look out at the mountains without speaking, as if they owned all that they could see.
HEAVY RAINS FELL in November, delaying Rutherford’s annual overnight bowhunt with the French brothers in the West Fork Wilderness. Ruthie spent long afternoons in the blind, watching the water pour down on the mouth of No-Medicine Canyon and make a swamp of the Breeds’ yard. The Breeds themselves were gone south to Arizona for the winter. She’d watched them pack up. June humming to herself, barefoot, as she watered the plants in her window boxes one last time. Reed cursing as he struggled to hitch the trailer to the back of their new Silverado. The blind stayed dry but the damp chill seeped beneath Ruthie’s clothes and made her want to burrow into the earth. She wondered if the creature had shelter. A den of some kind.
Sometimes Pip joined her, armed with the large hunting knife she carried underneath her shirt. They carved their names into the wood floor as rain splattered the roof. Ruthie carved ROSE, a name she wished for, more beautiful and deadly than her own, and not a mirror of her father’s. Pip rolled up her short pants and showed the many-armed figures she’d drawn on her thigh, like the ones they saw chiseled in the rocks. They talked about what they’d do if they caught the creature. How they’d lead it through town for everyone to see, then bring it to a veterinarian to give it eyes and ears and a mouth. The houses they’d buy with the reward, the talk shows they’d go on, all the different foods they’d eat.
But it didn’t reappear.
Pip grew bored when the rain ceased, and followed the yellow explosions of larch up into the hills.
Ruthie remained through the first snow and her seventh birthday, held in place by a feeling that she would miss something if she left. Staring out through the slit, waiting, she felt like she could both visit the past—the time of petroglyphs, before highways and power lines and houses like the Breeds’—and prospect the future. When the creature would make its slow, lurching way among grass-covered ruins.
6.
As they were driving home from Darby Elementary on Old Darby Road, Rutherford’s truck suddenly dropped hard to the right. It rolled to the left and slammed onto its axle. He wrestled the wheel around. The beer he’d been drinking leapt from the cupholder and spit foam over the upholstery. Power lines whipped overhead, making a high singing noise. Ruthie clutched her backpack and stared up at them. She was only seven and the world was ending. The road jumped and swung. Her lunch came hot and sour up her throat. She tried to focus on the trees. They were jumping and swinging, too.
“Sonofabitch.” Rutherford’s voice cracked. It was the first time Ruthie had heard him afraid. Even when he’d nearly blown himself up with a scavenged propane grill, he’d simply stared at her from below his charred eyebrows, and told her to go get him some ice. The underpinnings of her existence shifted. Her father couldn’t be afraid. He was supposed to know what to do, always, in all situations. What could she depend on if not him or the stability of the earth? They slowed down horizontally but not vertically. Ruthie tried to pray. The only word that came was help. Help, Dad, help.