Kingdomtide by Rye Curtis

Author:Rye Curtis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

Snow hung low the boughs and cauled the granite forms roadside and stilled the tall grass. Lewis drove Jill in the Wagoneer, yawing edgewise an alpine forest, static humming low on the radio, tire chains biting into the last of a paved road that had earlier been plowed. Lewis put to purpled lips the thermos of merlot. She sipped and turned the Wagoneer up a dirt road mottled with ice and mud.

Jill watched her from the passenger’s seat. Are we going to get stuck out here?

No, I won’t get us goddamn stuck. Lewis drank again from the thermos and replaced the lid. She gave the Wagoneer some gas.

Are you drinking wine out of a thermos?

No.

They drove on for some miles over the dirt road, guttering heavy places of snow and spitting past boarded-up hunting lodges. Leeward a hut with no windows hung a poorly butchered carcass, bottom up, frozen to a muddy icicle. Lewis did not stop to write a ticket. She drove on without speaking until she told Jill how she had received word that morning that the NTSB had faulted human error for bringing down the Waldrips’ airplane.

Terry Squime must’ve lost control, Lewis said. Like he just decided he didn’t know how to fly anymore. The goddamn body was too far gone for them to figure if he’d had a seizure or an aneurism or anythin like that, but they didn’t rule any of that out.

Jill said nothing and worked the handle and brought the pane down and got a cigarette. She struck a match in a book and lit it.

They said there could’ve been some turbulence and he panicked, Lewis said. Stress-related. Didn’t rule out it could’ve been depression and he took the Waldrips with him. He’d just gotten married and it hadn’t been going well. Apparently he’d been meetin men in motels. His mailman too.

Jill pulled on the cigarette and put her lips close to the window. Depression and mailmen, she said.

Lewis followed a road of black mud rutted in parabolas. A lake flashed beyond a belt of dying trees. She turned at a totem pole nailed over with snakeskins and filthy socks and a clothesline hung with the parts to a bear costume frozen at crazy angles. She slowed to a stop before a hut of plank wood leaning off the side of the road. A rusted pipe in the roof smoked green. An ironing board used for a door slid away from the entrance and a head poked out. A dark-skinned man appeared there in swimming trunks and a diving mask pushed back over curls of long icy hair. He saw what they were and came caped in a beach towel sprinting for the passenger’s window, eyes wide, high-stomping through the snow in tieless combat boots.

Lewis told Jill to roll down the window all the way. Jill sighed and cranked down the pane and leaned back so that Lewis could talk to the man now resting an arm on the side mirror.

Hiya, Eric, what in the hell you doin in your swim attire?

Dogpaddlin, the man said.

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