Good, I said. I spoke calmly so he would not holler anymore. I asked him what we should do.
My head hurts, he said. Do I have cavities? Bathwater! Waitress!
The sun was partly down past the far mountains. They were a grand shade of purple. It all looked the way Mr. Waldrip’s mother used to watercolor when she got old and as loony as a bullfrog and decided that painting was her vocation and got to wearing her slippers on her hands. All of her paint would run together and it was unlikely anyone could guess what she had meant anything to be.
I rounded the airplane to get a better look at Terry. He had his eyes open. They were vacant and gleaming like the marble eyes in the trophies that Mr. Waldrip’s hunting friends had all hung up on their walls to their wives’ dismay. I never let Mr. Waldrip keep any of his own in the house. I have always had the opinion it was macabre to hang heads on a wall.
Terry was chewing on that broken piece of jaw. I shuddered at the sight of him. I had never before witnessed such a helping of violence. Mr. Waldrip and I did not go to the kinds of pictures that had it. I had seen people pass away, but not like that. Father had gone at peace in a goose-down bed five years before, and Mother shortly thereafter in a similar manner at the age of ninety-three. Davy got the ague and died sleeping in his bed when he was eleven years old. God rest his soul.
There was a hole over Terry’s right ear. I say a hole, but what I ought to say is that a good portion of his head was missing. It had gotten scooped away somehow or another and some of it was on his shoulder like an epaulet of melon pulp. He had started singing quietly in falsetto a song called “Time After Time,” which I have since learned was made popular a couple years before by a young lesbian named Cyndi Lauper. Dear Mrs. Squime later informed me that Terry had never mentioned the song nor would it have been the kind of music she would have expected him to enjoy and she could not fathom why it appeared on his lips before his death.
I sat on the ground in front of him. I suppose I did not want to be alone, even if he was not particularly good company. He sang that song over and over again until I had learned all the words. The last of the sun was gone and above us shone a bright full moon. Terry got quiet after a while. His marred face did not move anymore. His eyes were stuck wide open yet they no longer looked about unseeingly and the blue in them had grayed. I was then sure he had finally passed. I had never seen a thing like it and I hoped then that I never would again. It haunts me yet.
I climbed back into my seat in the little airplane. It was colder now. My coat had been in my bag and that was missing with the other half of the airplane, which officials found some weeks later scattered across the north side of the peak in nearly the shape of a hexagram. In the bright red suitcase that had fallen on me during the crash I found a wool sweater with a colorful zigzag pattern such as I had seen some young people wearing on television. It is mighty fine luck that Terry was a large man, for his clothing yielded a wealth of fabric and proved very useful against the cold. I wrapped myself in the sweater and sat back again in my seat.
It was terribly quiet then, save for the memory of Terry’s song yet warbling in my ears. I endeavored not to worry on my situation, or worry that Mr. Waldrip was still in that spruce. And I made an effort not to stare at the back of Terry’s head. From where I sat it looked eerily the same to how it had before we had fallen out of the sky, such as if some pieces of the world had halted in time and others had gone on.
After it was plenty dark and I could not guess what time it was, I climbed ahead to the cockpit where a small yellow light blinked in what remained of the controls by Terry’s legs. It was a radio. My heart leapt! I grabbed the receiver and held it to my mouth. I recall shaking wildly and warming up around my neck and behind my ears. I held down the button on the side of the receiver and said, many times, My name is Cloris Waldrip, help, my name is Cloris Waldrip, help, is anyone there? My name is Cloris.
Lewis, eyes bloodshot and lips purpled, scrubbed a dark stain from her uniform. She rinsed the olivedrab shirt and held it to the light over the kitchen sink. She sank it back into the water and took up a brass badge and washed it under the faucet. She passed a thumb over the relief of a conifer and set the badge aside and looked out the window above the sink. The small pinewood cabin overlooked a dim and narrow wooded ravine and the mountain range beyond.
She left the uniform to soak and went to the living room with a glass of merlot. She sat on the couch and turned on the transistor radio on the end table, but there was no signal. Over the fireplace was mounted the head of a runt doe her ex-husband had shot when he was a boy. She watched a wasp land on the dusty black nose. She heard voices out front. Lewis turned down the static on the radio. Boots thumped on the steps to the porch. She finished the glass of merlot and switched off the radio and went to the door. She opened it to the screen.
Ranger Claude Paulson leaned on the frame. He had a nose the color of gunmetal after a bad bout of frostbite, but Lewis figured his face was handsome otherwise. He lifted from clean dark hair a campaign hat and held it at his waist. Hey, Debs, he said, sorry to bother after nine like this on a Sunday. Saw your light on.
That’s all right, Lewis said.
Claude lived next door in a small blue-washed cabin with an old golden retriever he called Charlie. He had no curtains to his bedroom window and Lewis often saw him in bed reading or asleep, mouth agape. Most mornings she had a cup of coffee and merlot and watched him iron his uniform. Once she had seen him awake past midnight naked at the foot of his bed weeping into the dog’s coat.
Lewis opened the screen door and a man staggered up the steps behind Claude, struggling with a video camera as if it were a cinder block. Pigeonchested, the man propped himself against a post, jaundiced there under the porch light. He swung the video camera off his shoulder and trembled a hand over his skinny neck. He scratched at the red stubble down past his shirt collar. Evenin, ma’am.
Claude jabbed a thumb over his shoulder and introduced the man as Pete and said that he was an old friend from high school. He’s goin to be stayin with me and Charlie for a little while.
My old lady left me, Pete said.
Goddamn sorry to hear that.
I’ll be all right, ma’am, thank you. Claudey’s agreed to put me up while I’m hurtin.
Claude told Lewis the plan was for Pete to help him finally get the ghost of Cornelia Åkersson on tape with his new video camera. He said that it would also do Pete some good to volunteer in the Friends of the Forest program and get some fresh air.
Pete glanced behind him at the dark mountain road. So it’s just you and Claude the only rangers up here? Maybe I’ll be some help, then, while I’m hurtin.
Pete’s had some ciders.
We been out lookin for that one-eyed ghost you got up here, Pete said. He retied a meager auburn ponytail and adjusted the strap to the video camera. Claudey here wants me to get a picture of her, but I told him I ain’t any good at takin pictures. He’s always had more faith in me than what I got in myself. I know Claudey since we’re in high school back in Big Timber. It sure is good to be with old friends while you’re hurtin.
Lewis nodded and looked to Claude. The porch light showed the dog hair on his uniform. He turned in his hands the campaign hat like he were steering a car.
So what is it, Claude?
I’d say that’s a hard one to say.
We got a distress call over the radio, Pete said.
Claude put up a hand. I’ll give her the information, Petey. We can’t say we know it was a distress call. All we can say is we heard a humanoidal voice say cloris. Thrice it said it. Cloris, cloris, cloris. Like that. It was garbled.
Cloris?
Cloris.
I tend to frighten, so it spooked me some, Pete said.
What’s a goddamn cloris?
I can’t say that I know, Claude said. If it’s some kind of code, I can’t say that I know