The man came closer. No, Ranger Lewis, he said. He looked her over. If we chopper out there in this weather and go down, who’ll rescue us? He put out a hand. A fine white dust covered his fingers. Steven Bloor, he said. Search-and-rescue.
Lewis took his hand. Don’t you figure since it’s an emergency we ought to go anyway? Weather be goddamned?
If you speak with my colleagues from Tacoma to Missoula they’ll all tell you that I’m a prudent and professional and progressive man. Tonight that may save our lives. He squeezed her hand and let it go. We’ll wait till tomorrow. I predict the storm will have abated.
In a goddamn emergency—
It’s not much of an emergency, Ranger Lewis.
How do you mean?
If the plane did go down, those aboard are more than likely deceased. Koojee.
Bloor unzipped a breast pocket and brought out a photograph and a small cake of hand chalk like that used by gymnasts. He passed the photograph to Lewis and slapped the chalk between his palms.
Lewis studied the photograph and brushed it clear. It showed a young couple posed in foam Stetsons smiling before a low geyser in a state park.
That’s Terry Squime, Bloor said. The pilot, there on the left. Mrs. Squime sent us the picture. My guess is she’s the pretty woman in the blue hat. Xerox it for your personnel.
You mean Claude?
I probably do. Bloor studied her and pulled out the chair behind the smaller desk against the west wall. He sat down and pocketed the chalk. He stretched out his long legs and thumped the pineboards with the heels of his boots. You know, my wife always told me never to stand while there’s an empty chair in the room.
Do we have any more information on Cloris Waldrip and her husband?
Retired, Bloor said. In their mid to late seventies. Small-town Texans flying up here for a pleasant few days in a cabin. Koojee. You live up here all year round, Ranger Lewis?
What does that mean?
What does what mean?
That goddamn word you keep sayin.
Koojee?
Yes.
It’s a word my wife used to say to express most types of emotional concern. It’s exclamatory. You know, it just stuck with me. So do you live up here all year round then?
I go down for groceries and gasoline.
Bloor put an end of the sunglasses in his mouth and nibbled. It’s not unpleasant up here. Only I get the sense it’d be lonely for an individual with an active mind. Loneliness can be dangerous. You could go nuts. Do you have a companion?
You mean a dog?
No. An intimate companion.
No.
Do you have a dog?
Claude has a dog. I’m divorced.
How long?
Almost three goddamn months now.
Where is your family?
My dad was in Missoula. He’s gone.
Your mother?
Long gone.
I hope I’m not being too forward. Sometimes I’m too forward. My wife always told me I was too forward and that it made people uncomfortable, because forwardness is only permitted in children.
It’s all right.
I’m a progressive man, Ranger Lewis. It’s important to me to become familiar with the people I’m to be working with. I’m a people person. Are you a people person, Ranger Lewis?
Goddamn it, I don’t know.
Bloor took the sunglasses from his mouth. A little about me, he said. I was married in Washington State. Lived in Tacoma, you know. At heart I’m an art collector. I only keep working in search-and-rescue anymore to have a reciprocal relationship with society. Just recently I procured a wonderful piece by a tractor mechanic in Washburn, Arkansas. Jorge Moosely. He uses his comatose mother for his canvas. Paints her head to toe in landscapes, then photographs her. I have his White Water Vapids piece back at our house in Missoula. It’s heartbreaking.
I’m goddamn worried we ought to try and head out there, see if we can’t find—
I don’t want to die out there, Ranger Lewis. Do you? Bloor clapped his legs and stood and left on his khakis two white handprints. I’ll return six o’clock tomorrow morning. He looked once clear into her eyes, winked, and replaced his sunglasses. Lewis recalled a man who had worked as a janitor in her father’s clinic. In the evening hours, when she would work at the clinic after school, she would find this man pacing the blue halls with a carpet steamer, or washing dung from the pens with his thumb on the end of a hose, or folding into the plastic bin next to a lightning-scarred oak the bodies of euthanized dogs and cats. The last time she saw him there he had winked at her too.
That evening Lewis drove the mountain road to her pinewood cabin, listening to Ask Dr. Howe How on the radio. A man with a hurried whisper like that of someone hiding under a desk during a home invasion phoned in with concerns about an inability to throw punches in his dreams. I’m gettin killed in there, Doc.
Lewis turned up the radio and pulled over to a shoulder overlooking a deep gully. She drank from the thermos of merlot and listened to Dr. Howe tell this man that he had gone to sleep with unsettled anxieties of sexual inferiority and that he would do well to remember that all men are created inferior in some way and are therefore all equals. Practice enjoying sex and fulfilling your partner in a respectful intimacy, Dr. Howe told him.
Lewis finished the thermos and climbed from the Wagoneer. She squinted out over the land and the evening mist that settled it and the thunderhead in the mountains. The last of the sun colored her face and was gone. Lightning burned beyond. She touched to her tongue her fingers and wetted them. She sent them into her government-issue trousers and closed her eyes to the dark.
Hateful swarms of mosquitoes kept that steep and rocky little wood. Most of the time there was not a thing to do but go straight through them. I just covered my mouth, pinched my nose, and held my breath. Mosquitoes have always been a special nuisance to me. When I was a little girl our house was by a seep pond and Mother would leave the window open on hot summer nights. You could count on those little winged devils to find out the holes in the flyscreen. I would swat at them until the moon was gone. I am not fond of that awful whine they like to make. Gracious, how gargantuan they sound when they get right up to your ear and sing that song which I imagine is sung in the halls of damnation.
I was slow getting down that mountain, being that I was mighty careful where I put my feet. All about were barrows of rock and motts of twisted pine and big old spruce. I held on to low branches to keep from falling over and stopped often to rest my breath. I was mighty thirsty again too. One good spill dirtied up my skirt and the zigzag sweater, but I managed not to hurt myself. Mr. Waldrip and I had been taking calcium tablets with our breakfast, so my bones were good and strong.
I am sure it was near three hours before I got to that little clearing where I had marked there had been smoke.
When a mind has had seventy-two years’ worth of thoughts, it has the opportunity to start acting a little funny. It runs the way my vacuum cleaner ran after twenty-three years of Mr. Waldrip refusing to replace it. The rubber belts inside go slack and the work of it smells like warm hair and dust. Now, I had never worried much about dementia before; Grandma Blackmore’s mind could skin a buffalo right up until the day she ended her earthly career at ninety-six. Still, as I set my old back to a great spruce and sank to the ground, my worry was that my cognition had fooled me good about the smoke I had seen rising up from the clearing. It occurred to me that it might have been wishful thinking, the way men lost in deserts see lakes where there is nothing but sand. There