Kingdomtide. Rye Curtis

make anybody feel better about anythin.

      Pete shrilled like a hag and turned off the video camera. He poured two mugs of coffee. You sure are funny, Ranger Lewis. He gave Claude a mug and kept one for himself, then put a hand to the wall and faced the window and sipped. He gestured out the window. Ain’t enough to mention it’s just plain gorgeous.

      White clouds lay banked high in the mountains and below in a valley went what Lewis figured to be a herd of elk. Sentient points of black in an otherwise senseless landscape.

      Sometimes I’d like to live in a goddamn city, she said. With all kinds of goddamn people around.

      Pete brought to his malformed chest the coffee mug and nodded as if troubling at a riddle. The rest of the morning he drank coffee and videotaped angles of the station and listed for Lewis the infidelities his wife had committed in their toolshed under the cover of darkness, and told how she had contracted syphilis from a nineteen-toed lounge singer who mowed the lawn next door.

      She just got to where what she had weren’t enough for her, Pete said, adjusting an angle on Claude’s wastebasket. And look what it got her. Look what it got me. She’s selfish and makes a real good play of makin you think it’s healthy. Boundaries, she calls it.

      Claude sighed and threw away the empty tube of ointment. The old dog raised its head and lapped its ragged mouth. Don’t tell her about all that. Talk about somethin regular. My God.

      What kind of work you do, Pete?

      He’s in finance, Claude said.

      I put some money I’d saved workin at the cannin factory in my nephew’s TV game. It’s doin better than just makin hens meet.

      Ends meet, Claude said.

      Now I got some money in a cheddar-flavored soda pop I got real high hopes for.

      The sun now stood high in the window above a coalblack thunderhead beyond the mountains. Lewis poured another mugful of merlot in secret. She told the two men that there was not a goddamn thing going and that they could start hunting Cornelia’s ghost and leave her to finish out the day alone.

      Cornelia’s nocturnal, Claude said. I’d say you know that.

      Pete hoisted the video camera to a shoulder and asked Claude to tell him more about Cornelia’s ghost for he did not entirely understand what they were doing.

      Claude leashed the old dog at his feet and stood from his desk and went on to explain how Cornelia Åkersson had been born male in Sweden in 1841, but had feminine features and chose to live as a woman. He told how she had come to Montana in 1859 with her husband, Odvar, in a caravan from the Boston seaport and how she was only eighteen years old when three men from the caravan camp raped her and found out what she was. Thereafter they pulled her teeth and left her in the Bitterroot to die, Claude said. Then they murdered Odvar and tossed his body in a crick.

      Pete had leveled on Claude the video camera. You been sayin she’s got one big eye.

      Her eyes’ve grown together in the center of her forehead, Petey. Happens to greater shades over time. These mountains keep most of the souls of their dead, so we’ve got lots and lots of shades here. Even the spirits of prehistoric animals that died millions of years ago. I’d say that’s the reason why Cornelia rides aback the phantom of a megafaunal armadillo from the Cenozoic called a glyptodont. Imagine gettin that picture.

      I can’t, Pete said. He took his eye from the viewfinder and turned off the video camera and let it go slack about his neck. You ever go snipe huntin when you was a kid?

      Lewis told again the men to leave her to it and they went out and took the dog. She refilled the mug from the bottle under her desk. She sipped at it and filed a vandalism report on a campground boulder that Silk Foot Maggie had spray-painted gold and covered in cat hair and rubber nipples.

      After a while a transmission came in over the radio. Lewis leaned over the paging microphone.

      Ranger Lewis here. Over.

      We got somethin developin here, Ranger Lewis. Yesterday the wife of a small aircraft pilot named … Terry Squime … contacted Missoula authorities concerned about her husband’s whereabouts. She said he was due back in Missoula late Sunday. Due back after he was to fly a pair of senior citizens to Lake Como. An elderly couple named Richard and Cloris Waldrip. Over.

      Cloris Waldrip? So Cloris is a goddamn name? Over.

      Yeah. Turns out. Over.

      You figure they went down, John? Over.

      We checked at the cabin the Waldrips were supposed to be at, but they’re not there. Proprietor said they never were. Squime’s flight path was to be over your way. I’m dispatchin search-and-rescue. You’ll act as department liaison for this thing. Go with them, chopper over, and check it out this afternoon. Expect a Steven Bloor with a team in about an hour. Bloor’s a real interestin fella, you’ll like him. Poor guy’s a widower. He’s a good guy, a good old bud from the National Guard. You two can help each other. Hopefully you guys can beat the storm. Over.

      Roger that. Over.

      This’s some excitement. How’re you holdin up up there? Over.

      I’m fine, John. Over.

      Good. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. If you ever need to talk, we’re here for you. Marcy says she’s here for you too. Over.

      Thank you. I’m all right. Over.

      Well all right. We’re all prayin for you. Marcy included. That’s what the ranger community is for. Carin for the land and servin people. Over.

      Thank you. That everything? Over.

      That’s everything, Ranger Lewis. Out.

      Out the station window dark thunderclouds lay slung over the mountains like blueblack viscera jumbled and discarded as if the heavens had been hunted and gutted the way Lewis often found the carcasses of poached bears and elk ditched on service roads. The elk had gone from the valley, and wind from the stormhead combed the grasses and shook the forests and moaned through the station. In the wind Lewis figured she heard a woman orgasm. She shivered. She finished a mugful of merlot and poured another. She turned from the window to the front of the station and put a hand to a cheek and figured she had a fever. She watched the door and strained to hear again the woman.

      Then the pineboard steps croaked without, and the door opened.

      A tall man ducked into the station and removed a pair of sunglasses. He took a hand to a mullet of feathery blond hair, so sparse it was in front that the ruddy dome of his skull gleamed underneath. He wore civilian clothes—hiking boots, a button-up, and khakis—save for a bright orange windbreaker which bore the letters SAR.

      The man hung the sunglasses on his shirt and showed bright white teeth like those of children in beauty pageants. He said, Koojee.

      Lewis stood and drew a sleeve across her mouth. Sorry?

      Do you have kids?

      No.

      The man shook his head. My daughter, he said. His voice was faint and high and he sucked over each word as if it were a lozenge. Her disgusting boyfriend clerks at a dollar store and has a dead tooth. Political, everything is always political, you know. I’m a progressive man, but …

      Are you with search-and-rescue?

      He clicked his teeth together and nodded. I hope you’re the ranger I’m here to see. I misplaced the name John gave me. Wrote it down on a napkin. A waitress threw it in my beans.

      Ranger Lewis.

      Ranger Lewis, of course, my apologies. Please take your seat.

      That’s all right.

      You prefer to stand?

      Yes.

      The man closed his eyes and sighed. He opened them again and raised an arm to the window behind her. There’s a storm waiting