“I believe you saw something, but you didn’t know what it was, so you made it up. Like the flying skeleton.”
Ruthie found herself too angry to speak. She wished she could grow a hundred feet tall and kick Rutherford on his couch into the canyon. Then he’d see. She tried to imagine life with another family in another town. Going out to dinner, shopping at the mall. She stepped back onto the porch, grabbed the screen door with both hands, and slammed it as hard as she could. The hinges rattled. Her father’s prone figure was lost behind the mesh.
“You’re sleeping outside if you broke that door!” he yelled after her, the TV volume crackling back on. “Goddammit.”
THE CREATURE REMAINED in Ruthie’s mind like a bruise, aching whenever her thoughts bumped against it. She was determined to see it again. Determined to prove to her father that it had been real. She picked a spot in the trees facing the canyon on the edge of their property and made Rutherford help her build a blind.
“Thank Christ you didn’t ask for a dollhouse,” he said.
They scavenged wood from the dump and nails from behind Whipple’s Feed Store. Len Law watched them from beside his pickup. A scrawny, decrepit man, he owned the town scrapyard and often appeared when Ruthie and Pip were playing on the shore of Lost Horse Creek. Once he’d knelt before her and said, “You know what the Indians used to do with little girls with yellow in their eyes?”
She shook her head.
“Send them off into the mountains.”
Now he crossed his arms and called to her father across the lot. “Lean times?”
“We’re getting by,” Rutherford answered shortly.
“Must be hard on your own. No woman at home. . . .” Len’s narrow eyes lingered on Ruthie as she climbed into her father’s truck. She clenched the nails in her fists; the sharp points dug into her palms. Her father had told her that Len’s grandfather Hark was Darby’s first sheriff. Hark Law had done something so bad before he was fired that adults spoke of it only in whispers, and wouldn’t tell Ruthie no matter how often she asked. The Montana Café and Sawmill Bar passed by.
Back on their property, with the mouth of No-Medicine Canyon before them, Rutherford built a two-by-four frame. Ruthie held the weathered front boards in place while he started the nails, then they switched so she could pound them home. She banged ferociously, holding the hammer with both hands, gritting her teeth, not satisfied until the nail head was snugged well below the dented wood. She hit one so hard on its edge that sparks shot out.
“That nail do you wrong?” Rutherford asked, grinning. It confused her that her anger always made him proud.
Ruthie glared up at him. She blinked the sweat from her eyes.
“Lord knows what’ll happen if you ever hit a knot. Might burn down the whole woods. Blind won’t do you no good then.” Rutherford nodded toward their cleared yard. The teal trailer was set at the same angle across the driveway where the delivery company had left it, up on cinder blocks. Ruthie’s mother had had grand plans for its placement, along with flower boxes, teal curtains, and a welcome mat. The plans disappeared along with her. The canyon loomed behind Rutherford. Dark and menacing even in the summer heat. He knelt to measure Ruthie’s height with his hands. “You’re getting big now. Longer than a rifle.”
Ruthie refused to be flattered. She gave the edge of the blind a final hard whack with the hammer. It was a ramshackle box with a plywood roof and floor, but she was proud of it—her first idea to become reality. Her father straightened and hitched up his jeans. “You’ll be hunting on your own in no time.”
“I’m not going to hunt anything,” Ruthie said.
“Oh no?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m going to spring all the traps in the woods.”
Rutherford smiled. “All of them? You’ll find yourself pulling butterflies out of spiderwebs.” His missing incisor, chapped lips, scraggly red beard, and sun-weathered cheeks made him look older than his twenty-five years. Ruthie never knew what to say when her teachers asked what he did. She always lied about his beetle business, claiming he was a builder, and imagining a fridge full of vegetables and chicken nuggets.
Mosquitoes whined up from the water. The creek was high with snowmelt from the mountains. Whenever Rutherford was out—working or using whiskey to get properly drunk—Ruthie would sneak into his room. She’d get down on her knees and look at the guns underneath his bed, including the CMMG Banshee, his pride and joy. A $1,400 piece of machinery with a silenced suppressor and .300 Blackout ammo that shot through walls. He’d bought it with his small severance from the shuttered mill. Some nights he’d sit on the couch with the barrel across his lap, staring at the door as if he hoped for an intruder, so he might prove what the beast could do. A showgirl in gold lingerie was superimposed over the glittering Strip on the poster of Las Vegas above his bed. It reminded Ruthie of the night sky erupting from the ground. A place where man had built the stars. As different from the dilapidated trailer parks and potholes of Darby as the sun was from the moon. “I’m coming,” she’d whisper, before returning the gun to its place and tiptoeing out from Rutherford’s room.
He took the hammer from her and walked across the yard to the shed where the wolf had hung. Along with the beetles, meat freezer, and gun safe, it held all manner of tools, antlers, shoeboxes full of bones and feathers, wildcat drawings he’d made as a boy, and Indian artifacts he’d found. You could hardly move inside. The rotten smell was enough to keep Ruthie out most of the time. One of his hand-drawn flyers for Bitterroot Beetle Works was nailed to the door. The rest were on bulletin boards across the valley. Ruthie slapped a mosquito on her neck. She looked down at her own blood in the mangled legs on her palm. She imagined splattering the creature like this, squashing it against the face of a rock.
Her father returned with his circular saw, trailing a long orange extension cord. He had a plunging, downhill gait when on his own property, with none of the careful alertness he carried in the outside world. Moses snapped at the cord, then barked outright when Rutherford powered on the saw. Loud noises always made him aggressive. He flung his small body into the air at the blade and Ruthie feared he might get cut in half. “Git!” her father said, and stomped the ground. Moses reluctantly backed away. Using Ruthie’s measurement, Rutherford cut a slit for her eyes in the front planks. Sawdust gusted out on the breeze. The blisters on his hands were turning to calluses, rough white patches outlining the ghost of a haft. “There,” he said. “Now you can learn how to look.”
“I know how to look,” Ruthie said.
He shook his head. “All the chain stores and gas stations where everything is the same make your eyes go dull. The mall you’re always going on about. You’ve got to teach yourself how to see again. A tree isn’t just a tree. It’s a certain tree, with certain sap and certain needles. Certain parts, like a person. Some you can eat, or use to stanch a wound. They might save your life.” Sawdust clung to his beard. One shoulder was slightly lower than the other—exaggerated by how he held the saw—from the same snowmobile accident that had taken his tooth. “You thought you saw a creature but you couldn’t tell me what it was. Nothing in the wild is ever the same. If you think a rock looks like another rock, you ain’t looking hard enough.”