The Hermit's Story (16 page)

Jick is so fucking
cheap.
There's not any electricity up here. Jick runs a big filthy Army-issue generator that throbs, like a grouse's summertime chest-drumming, all the time; when I get to within two miles of the place, I can smell the diesel. And he pisses directly into the little river that runs past his store; he stands out on his dock at night and pisses straight into the river. He's horrid.

Jick shows movies in the summer and fall, runs a projector outside under the stars, sets up a little pissant movie screen and shows films every night at dusk: horrible films like
Spiderman
and
Kung-Fu Man
and
California Dreaming.
Almost any kind of film, celluloid, flickering beneath the valley stars, would be terrible compared to the sweet brief fact of the valley and the river itself.

He's just a man. I know I shouldn't get so upset, or judgmental: he is just
one man,
in the woods—but I think I respond so strongly because I still use him, perhaps even still need him—those times when I'm low on gas, or when I want to buy a bottle of pop. He's just a little grass burr in my otherwise seamless life. I can't imagine how perfect it would be, if only he didn't—what? Exist? Is that evil? To wish him away?

Walter. Walter was a loser. There was a period there for about six months where I did not think he was a loser—and perhaps I was blind to it, or maybe, during that brief period, he really wasn't a loser—but then I could scent it. What was between us started going away, going bad—not dramatically so, but just in the usual unpleasing, unsatisfying manner—and a year or so later, he sold Jick the box of hair, which I didn't even know he'd been keeping.

***

Why I moved up here used to be important, but what matters now is my life right now—this day.

My mother, who lives two thousand miles away, would like a grandchild. I'm thirty-eight years old. I don't have a plan, no six-month or twelve-month or eighteen-month goal—no do or die last chance desperate hope. I'm only speaking my heart's truth, not my mind's truth:
I think I would like a child.
I have been thinking about it pretty much every day for several years now. But it probably won't happen. And I'm afraid that if I pursue it, I'd make a mistake—a big mistake.

I try to live very carefully—I try to live
right
—and I would not be comfortable rushing out and trying to change all of the years that have preceded these: trying, suddenly, to become someone I'm not. Trying to seek a man for his semen's sake, and for timeliness rather than love.

I don't have a phone, thank God. But Mother writes. She tells me that all the eggs I will ever have are already in my body, and that they have always been there, since birth. She calls them zygotes. I don't tell her that they're called eggs when they're unfertilized, and only zygotes once they've been fertilized and the embryo's growing.

She tells me that I'm losing one each month—and that someday soon I'll run out. She tells me it's like I'm bleeding to death. Great stuff.

My hair's long. I swear I'll never cut it again.

I wish the hair in Jick's glass display case would fade, or rot. But it doesn't. It's just as red and vibrant as the day it was cut. It won't ever change. The hair on my head will turn gray or silver, but the hair in that box will still be a beautiful red.

And Jick knows it. He smiles that vapid snake-smile at me whenever he sees me wanting my hair back.

***

I paddle a lot. I live on the river—upriver from puppy-killing Jick—but sometimes my slow drifts carry me past his store. Often, I paddle at night, because I do not like to be seen—I like to just drift and float, stroking only occasionally, and look at the night mountains.

I like the way the water sounds at night. I like the way the canoe glides, sucks, and surges. The power in my arms, the dip, pop, and pull of my shoulders. Stars fly across the mountains in cold meteor showers. Big fish, beavers, and otters lurk beneath me. Geese and ducks and mergansers cluck and gabble along the river's edge under the grassy cutbanks. It's all out there, at night. You can get closer to things, at night.

I like my life. I like it a lot.

***

I drift past the mercantile. That's when I've seen Jick flapping his urine into the river's clear flowing current. I've glided above the stony bottom, the current beginning to move a little faster—the falls only a few miles downstream. He represents something—my dislike for him goes beyond simple chemistry—but I don't know what it is. Some kind of stunted boundary, I think. He's always trying to
change
things.

Perhaps the strangest thing Jick does is to gather the skulls of winter-killed deer and elk. He collects them, waits until he has ten or twelve in a bag, and then puts them in a vise out in his back yard, down by the river, and goes to work on them.

He sands off the long nose-bone of the deer, and the mandibles; he sands and smoothes the cranium into a rounded shape, so that it looks like a human skull, and then he sells those in the mercantile, too, tells people that they're Indian skulls he's found, or the skulls of pioneers.

When I paddle past and see him altering those skulls, turning the bones of wild woods creatures into the skulls of humans, it sends shivers down my spine.

Some nights, passing Jick's place, I'll see he has his movie going, and there'll be six or eight or ten or twelve people out there on the lawn, under the stars, watching. There's a spot upriver where, in the night, I can come around the slow bend, beneath the great snag with the osprey's nest in it, and see all the way across the meadow, and I can see the blaze and flicker of the film being shown: I can see it like a warning, and I always turn back and paddle slowly, strongly, back upriver.

***

In the summer, I like to swim at night. The water's warmer. I like to go on a long hike, hiking through the woods all afternoon, and then come back down to the river at dusk and undress. I like to float downstream on my back, and then turn over and swim back upstream, and then float back down, watching the darkening sky and the bats and the stars. I'll do this again and again; swim upstream, then float downstream a couple hundred yards, swim back upstream, to my cabin, then float back downstream, watching the mountains. During my period, I let myself slough off and away, into the river.

One egg per month. All the eggs I will ever have are already in me. I release one per month. But I am not bleeding to death.

***

On the windy day, which was like no day any of us had ever seen before, we found ourselves gathering outside the mercantile. Jick has a radio with a big antenna rising from the roof of his store, and he can run it off his generator and pick up stations as far away as Spokane, which was where the last big fire started, sixty years ago—the one that burned all the way to Whiteflesh before stopping at the Fishgut River. We knew Jick would probably charge us fifty cents each for listening to the news on his radio, but it was where we all began to show up, to check in with each other—outside his store. We had to bring our saws with us to cut paths through the trees that kept blowing over and falling across the road in the high winds. There was smoke and ash blowing everywhere. It seemed quite possible at the time that it was the end of the world. We didn't know if it was a huge forest fire to the west, or a volcano, or nuclear fallout. No one was melting the way I understood happened with nuclear attacks, and we've always kind of believed, anyway, in our deepest hearts, I think, that our valley would be exempt from all that stuff: that not even
that
could reach us up here.

Jick wasn't in; he was up on the mountain. Someone had given him a box full of sled dog puppies to gas. Jick performs that service for a dollar a pup, and some people, when they have to get rid of their dogs, take the dogs to Jick just to avoid the guilt, or bad karma, or to keep from upsetting the kids.

Too many times, I've seen Jick's truck heading slowly up that mountain.

He drives all the way up to the mountaintop: not for any spiritual reason, I'm sure, but simply because that's how far all the roads on the mountains in this valley go—to the top—and also because, I'm afraid, he savors the ride.

Thinking about it. About gassing those pups. About keeping his world exactly the way it is—exactly the way he wants it.

People talk about Jick's dog-killing, make jokes about him behind his back—about how he sits up there with his truck idling, looking down over the valley, over the blotchy griddle-squares of sweep-away clearcuts. He has a dryer hose that he can hook from his truck's muffler to go directly into this gassing box he's rigged up. People joke about how he sits up there with his aviator sunglasses on and scans the valley below and hums, listening to some tape in his tape deck. He must feel the truck vibrating, idling, and perhaps he thinks about how the pups are writhing and coughing, and then, finally, settling into sleep, lying down all on top of each other in that gassing box, up on top of the mountain.

Several of my friends, back in real towns, have had abortions. Two have had miscarriages. I have had neither.

Sometimes I feel like fresh meat, waiting. I feel like yielding, like giving myself up to it. Sometimes, I want it. But only sometimes.

***

We were all standing around the store in the swirling smoke, waiting for him to come back down with the dead pups. The strange strong wind kept knocking trees down across the road. We could hear Jick's chainsaw up on the mountain as he tried to work his way back down, clearing away the wind-felled trees, and I knew he was hating those pups for the mess they'd gotten him into.

Because the mercantile was locked, we had to wait outside his door. There's one pay phone outside his store, one phone line coming in from a smaller town downriver, but that line had long ago gone dead.

There was so much smoke in the parking lot that it was hard to see one another. I saw my friend Mary and her husband, Joe, and moved over to stay close to them.

The smoke just kept getting thicker and thicker. It was green smoke. Deer were running down the streets like horses, panicked, and I remembered the movie
Bambi
from when I was a child, from when I was growing up. I wondered if the circle of childbearing was going to end, if I would be the one to stop that circle: to step slightly to the side, and let childhood, in our family, stop.

I couldn't see that far at all, in all that smoke. Cars and trucks kept gliding in, appearing through the smoke with their headlights blazing, creeping down the road—deer, and one moose, running ahead of them—and everyone was gathering at the only place we knew to gather, the mercantile.

No one had heard anything. Our radios never picked up anything but static and crackle in the valley, even under the best conditions. Mary and I stood next to the window. We could see my hair in the display case. It looked like it was waiting for something. I felt separated from something. It would have pleased me, I think, in that moment, for the whole valley to have burned down: if only the hair would burn with it.

We stood around, made braver by one another's presence—some people smiling thin smiles—and finally we saw Jick's headlights moving toward us from out of the smoke and wind.

He took up a collection to start the generator, explaining that it had been through a lot of wear and tear lately. Some of us had money and some didn't. Mary gave Jick a dollar.

If the radio told us to evacuate, I don't know if we would have or not. Sue and Bill had their two boys with them, as well as the baby; Sue stayed in the truck with a wet handkerchief over the baby's mouth, while Bill and the boys stood outside and scuffed their boots at the ground and listened as Jick brought his radio out on the porch.

I saw one of Bill's boys go over to the back of Jick's truck and stare at the dead puppies, which were all stretched out neatly, soft and gray. I saw the boy pat one of the dead puppies, stroking its head. I think a little boy would be nice. I know I'd like a little girl.

A girl!

The radio squelched and whistled, crackled and drifted. Finally, Jick found a station—a country music station. A song by Charley Pride was playing. We stood there in the smoke and listened to that, waiting for it to be over, and when it was, another song came on.

Jick turned the tuner and found another station—a bunch of commercials—and then when the commercials were over, a disc jockey came on and said that he was going to play twelve in a row.

We found a news station, finally, near the end of the dial, but there wasn't any mention of fires, or about our valley burning up, or any other kind of disaster. More music began to play instead.

People began to grumble and stir, moving back toward their trucks. I think we all felt both endangered and protected, isolated and yet safe. If it had been real bad, I reasoned, then the people in real town would have been coming for us, trying to save us.

Still, there was the knowledge that the fires could be very close, and that we could all burn up overnight.

Maybe people in real town didn't know what was going on up here!

We certainly couldn't get out of the valley. We were locked in by all the thousands of wind-felled, and wind-falling, trees—by the forest collapsing on itself, the younger trees without deep roots getting blown over like grass, offering no fight at all, nothing but fodder for the forest floor.

I must live right,
I thought, driving home slowly—getting out to cut several more trees out of my way, and watching carefully through the smoke for more falling trees.
If I get through this,
I thought,
I will live even more strongly than ever—
though I was not frightened, and it was not the foxhole kind of promise one often makes in such times of danger.

This day, the windy day—the day Jick came driving in with all those gassed baby pups—it was more like just a simple vow, and a positive thing. I felt good about my vow:
I will live harder.