Only the mountains remained unshaken, as tall as ever against the sky—seeming to chastise the little crowd beside the church. They formed the edges of a bowl around the valley that could easily be recognized for the lake it once was, fifteen thousand years before, complete with waveforms etched high on the hillsides. Ruthie had found shells there among the rocks and switchgrass. Little mollusks that once trawled the depths. Fragile, impermanent. She’d never seen the ocean but she pictured it as a giant gray animal with eyes of mirrors and a mouth big enough to swallow the sun.
She kicked the rock across the pavement toward the basketball hoop. She wished she could fly away over the backboard, the church steeple, and the mountaintops.
Happel and his wife, daughters, and nephew stood off by themselves. Their arms were loaded with plastic bags full of food. Rutherford led Ruthie over and he and M. Happel began to talk about where work might be, while the nephew looked at Ruthie with hungry, leaden eyes.
“I heard the whole highway slid into the river over by Lee Metcalf. Might be years before they can get traffic through,” Rutherford said.
“Maybe they need hands there,” Happel answered.
Rutherford shook his head. “State jobs. Contract work. You have to be union.”
“Lots of houses here need rebuilding.”
“You’d think. But my phone ain’t ringing.”
Happel looked down at the ground. “It didn’t have to sneak up on us like that,” he said.
Puffy white clouds moved over the Bitterroot Mountains. The kind that look solid enough to stand on. Angel clouds, if you believed Father Mike. Ruthie stared at them to avoid the nephew’s eyes. She turned to see if Terry was nearby. Maybe he’d known the quake was coming; maybe there’d been some sign that her father and Happel were too blind to see. But he was already over at his truck. Loading the pink bike into the bed, with Delilah up on the wheel well tugging the handlebars.
7.
The screams from Lake Como sounded panicked in the distance. Ruthie sat on the edge of the cabin’s back deck. Her scratched legs dangled over the creek. The skin on her ankles was pale where her socks had been. She searched the rushing water for otters and listened to the other children, wishing they would go away. Or at least shut up. She’d seen a show about otters on TV. She knew the only way to see one was to make them forget you were there.
Cleanup crews had traversed the valley and it was hard to find remaining signs of the earthquake. Passing Whipple’s store, Ruthie could hardly believe she’d seen a truck overturned in the intersection just three months before. Moses lay beside her in the sun. His head rested on his paws, then jerked up to snap at the fly circling his ears in the August heat. A duck bobbed in a shallow eddy. Ruthie flicked her dirt-blackened toe in its direction. “Git.”
The duck looked up at her with brown glassy eyes. A pair of nostrils were carved from its beak. There was something frightening—almost horrific—about them, as though they’d been bored out by a dentist’s drill. Its orange feet struggled against the swirling current. Ruthie felt a tug of fear. She decided that otters don’t like ducks.
“Go on, now. Git!” She looked around for something to throw, but the deck planks were bare save for a scattering of pine needles.
Lodgepole pines towered above the opposite shore of the creek. A firepit was centered in the clearing beyond. At night, families camping on the lake roasted marshmallows there. The cabin behind Ruthie belonged to Rutherford’s former boss at the mill. He’d offered it to them for the weekend while the caulk, glue, and coating dried on the metal patch Rutherford had finally installed on the roof.
The cabin felt like another world from the trailer, although it was only ten miles away. Huge picture windows faced the creek. Lacy dish towels hung by the stove; fluffy mats covered the bathroom floor. It smelled like wood instead of bacon grease, and the shower didn’t shriek when you turned it on. There was no mold. All the lights worked; her father’s dirty clothes weren’t strewn over the couch. Ruthie would’ve stayed forever.
Discovering a bottle cap in her pocket, Ruthie turned it over in her fingers, found a grip, and hurled it at the duck. “Git!”
The duck didn’t move even when the bottle cap splashed the water by its body. It continued to stare at Ruthie, orange feet churning. She scooted her butt forward. She tested the lingering Popsicle-stickiness of her fingers by pressing one of the scratches on her leg, making it sting, and then pulling her fingers away. Her legs were scratched all through the summer from forays into the woods with Pip. The flash of pain shifted her mind. Maybe the duck couldn’t move. Maybe it was stuck, struggling to stay afloat. Could it die like that? The possibility opened up a new realm of emotions. Ruthie was sorry about the bottle cap. She wanted the duck gone, not dead. Out of her life, not the world. The same feeling she often had about her father.
She turned and found his figure through the sliding glass door: leaned forward in the recliner in the cabin’s main room, watching stock cars race on the fifty-inch TV, a beer in his right hand. His body was tense, his rapt expression on the verge of anger. Ruthie knew he was thinking of Wiley King, even while he followed the cars around and around. In the confusion after the quake, King and his rancher friends had tried to close the Mitchell Slough to hunters. King had set up bait feeders on his property, since it was illegal to hunt ducks that had been baited. “I’m feeding ducks all over my place,” he told Lad Pompey at the Ravalli Republic. “And I won’t stop.” Rutherford had stayed out of it at first, until Kent Willis wrote a letter to the editor calling Wiley a “California carpetbagger” and got himself and all of his friends banned from the pond where Rutherford had hunted since he was a boy. This struck Rutherford as an act of tyranny directly in the lineage of King George, and in late-night conversations he could be heard suggesting solutions ranging from tarring and feathering King to burning down his mansion—which he’d helped build. His determination worried Ruthie, who’d seen the furtive, hollow-eyed expressions of the foster children who passed through her classes each year.
Near the cabin, rushes and willows grew along the shore. Ruthie wriggled beneath the lowest rung of the deck’s railing and dropped onto the soft dirt. Moses stood at the edge. He looked down over the five-foot drop, across at her, and decided to stay where he was. Up above, the mountainsides were blackened from the Short Draw Fire, which had ravaged the Bitterroots the summer before. The fire had gotten national news coverage when the separatist Mormons in Pinesdale ejected federal firefighters at gunpoint, saying they’d caught them sabotaging a water line. Rutherford told her the Mormons were worried the feds would find all their extra wives and artillery. Ruthie dug her toes into the dirt. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled beneath the low bush branches to the water. A thorn caught her arm and scratched her anew. Sunlight glinted on the creek’s surface. Needles drifted past. The algae on the rocks undulated in the current.
Up close, the duck’s eyes were nearly black. Its emerald head bobbed as it paddled. The eddy was on the far side of the creek, in a bend where it widened. Pine needles, mossy twigs, and water skimmers swirled around the vortex. It reminded Ruthie of an open mouth. The yawning entrance to No-Medicine Canyon. The duck seemed unable to escape.