The Hermit's Story

by Rick Bass

Billy would stare at my face for a full minute. His mind was going, gone—over the next ridge—and I wonder what he must have thought, looking at me—wondering if I was a devil, or an angel. I hope that he still recognized me as his neighbor.

  “Cut those lodgepole pines behind your house, as soon as they die,” he said, “those beetle-killed ones. Get ’em down on the ground where it’s damp, so’s the eggs can’t hatch and spread.”

  Billy would stare out at my crooked, wandering fences. He’d open his mouth to say something else, but then would close it. We’d be out on my porch.

  “Shit. I can’t remember what I was going to say.” Billy would rub his head, the side of his face. “Shit,” he’d sigh, and just sit there—having forgotten, even, that he was on his way to go cut wood.

  “Let me take you to a doctor,” I said once: a notion as foreign to Billy, surely, as taking him to Jamaica.

  “No. No doctors. I’ve got to pull myself out of this one.”

  ***

  It was exactly like slipping, like walking down a hill pasted with damp yellow aspen and cottonwood leaves in the fall, going down too steep a trail. Your hand reached out and grabbed a tree, and you saved yourself from falling.

  His body was still strong—his arms, and his saw-wielding, maul-splitting back as broad as ever—but he was talking slower, and his face looked older, and so did his eyes. They looked—gentler.

  “Amy,” is what he’d say, sometimes, as he looked out at my half-assed fence—unable to remember what it was he wanted to say.

  Instead of cutting wood, he’d go back toward his cabin—park on one side of the road, get out, and wander through the woods as if drawn by lodestone (or the smell of the bread) to the pond, where Amy might be sitting on the bench reading, or writing a letter back home, or feeding the eager, expectant swans.

  Billy would sit on the bench next to her as he must have when they first met, when they were so raw and unquestionably young and so far from danger.

  Amy would come over to my cabin sometimes, on the days that Billy did manage to find his way back into the bottom to cut still more firewood. She was a strong and content and whole woman, her own life held together as completely as Billy’s, make no mistake about it, and with much more grace, much less muscle—but she was also worried: not for herself, or about being left alone, but for Billy.

  There is romantic nonsense these days about the beauty of death, about the terrible end becoming the lovely beginning, and I think that’s wrong, a diminution of the beauty of life. Death is as terrible as birth is wonderful. The laws of physics and nature—not romance—dictate this.

  It occurs to me that sometimes even nature—raw, silent, solemn, and joyous nature—fears, even if only slightly, rot.

  ***

  “I’m angry at him,” Amy said one day. “He’s getting worse.” Amy had brought a loaf of bread over and we were sitting on my porch. We could hear Billy’s saw running only intermittently—long pauses between work.

  “I feel guilty,” Amy said. “I feel bad for being angry and afraid. I try to remember all we’ve had—and all that he’s given me—but I can’t help it. He’s always been the same, and now that he’s changing, I’m angry.”

  “Maybe he will get better,” I said lamely.

  “He’s changing so fast,” Amy said. “Never any change before, and now so much of it.”

  ***

  The times when Billy went into the woods to cut logs for all his various fires—the times when he went past my cabin without stopping—he would often miss the turnoff for the small road that went into his woods, and he would just keep going—a mile or two, I suppose. Then I’d hear him stop, and he’d back up the road in reverse, engine groaning—backing all the way to the turnoff—embarrassed, at first, and telling me about it, laughing, on my front porch the next day (as if I’d not been able to see it clearly, with my own eyes, from where I was sitting); but then as it happened more often, he stopped talking about it.

  I’d sit there every day and watch him drive past in reverse, backing the big empty truck to a spot where he could turn around and go back into the woods and down onto the land his family had owned for more than a hundred years.

  It must have struck some chord in Billy—going backwards like that, with the engine straining, things falling away from him, out the front windshield, getting smaller rather than larger. He took to doing it all the time—driving backwards—even while going to the mercantile for groceries.

  It was real hard: watching him whom I admired and respected, whom I wanted to emulate, disappear, as if being claimed by the forest itself.

  ***

  Other people, however, began to shy away from Billy, in the manner that animals will sometimes avoid another of their kind when it becomes sick.

  He no longer seemed to be in that secret seam between wildness and gentleness—the hidden fissure. Amy seemed as safely and permanently ensconced there as ever—but Billy seemed to have suddenly jumped—in the flip of a heartbeat—out to the far end, the very edge of wildness.

  I don’t mean he was tortured or even unhappy during this last sea change, the fluctuating tremors of the forest claiming him back; if anything, I think there was more sweetness, wildness, and pure joy in it for him than ever—lying there listening to Amy’s masterful piano-playing and watching out the open cabin door the ghostly shapes of the swans, watching them as if they had gathered, silently, to watch him.

  The great coolness of the net of night, the safety of autumn evenings coming down on them again and again, with the days growing shorter, and less conflict, less ambition, less trouble in Billy’s mind as the coils and loops and convolutions of his brain smoothed out and erased themselves.

  The smell in the valley, as always, of her bread baking.

  People in town said that whenever Billy came into the mercantile for groceries, he would walk into the store and just stand there, unable to remember what he had come for.

  He would have to borrow the mercantile’s radio and call Amy on the shortwave and ask her what it was she needed.

  I could see the fright in Billy’s eyes, every time I saw him, and in Amy’s, too, as the fall progressed and the light snows began.

  ***

  I remember walking one starry night after the snow was down—early November, and cold—just out walking, going down the road toward town, to the saloon for a beer or two and a breath of fresh air—and Billy’s truck came over the hill, sputtering and rattling, from a direction that was away from his cabin. I was glad to see that he was not driving backwards—not at night.

  I was a long way past his cabin, a long way up the road. It had been more than an hour since I had gone across the bridge over the little creek by where he lived—the swans paddling in slow circles in the creek, white like ghosts in the moonlight, with the moon’s blurry reflection wavering in their ripples, and ice beginning to form on the creek’s edges. I imagined that the swans were waiting for Amy’s next sonata, these beautiful birds for whom music was an impossibility.

  I walked on farther, past the yellow lights of Billy and Amy’s cabin, up the hill. I had assumed Billy was at home, that they were both at home, maybe sitting in bed and playing a hand of cards or two before going to sleep, as Amy had told me they often did—playing cards, that is, if Billy could still remember how.

  So I was surprised to see him come driving slowly over the hill, his truck slipping on the fresh snow a little; and he stopped, recognizing me in the glare of his headlights—recognizing me, I could tell, but not able to remember my name.

  “Hop in, bub,” he said. “I was just out looking at things.”

  I did not believe this was so. I was certain he had forgotten which cabin was his, and I tried to think of a way to tell him when he passed it—wondering if I could say something like, “Is Amy still baking tonight?” and point up the hill toward the yellow squares of light, piecy-looking through the trees.

  It was a full moon, and I was surprised to see that B
illy was driving with the heater on, and that his windows were rolled up. It was hot and stuffy in the truck. A shooting star streaked in front of us and then disappeared over the trees, and Billy, who was driving with both hands on the wheel, leaning forward and watching the road carefully, looked up at it but said nothing.

  Deer kept trotting across the road in front of us, red-eyed in the glare of the headlights—some with antlers, some without—and Billy would turn the lights out immediately whenever he saw a herd of them—in November and December, they were beginning to bunch up and travel together, for protection, and for warmth—and I sat in my seat and gripped the high dashboard, certain that we were going to plow right through the herd.

  “What are you doing, Billy?” I said.

  He drove intently, slowly, but not slowly enough for my liking. I kept waiting to hear the thud of bodies, and to feel the jolt—and then when we were past the spot where we should have struck the deer, he would turn the lights back on, and the road in front of us would be empty.

  “Sheriff told me to do that,” Billy would say each time it happened. “The noise of the truck scares ’em off the road. If you leave the lights on, you blind ’em, and they can’t decide which way to go—that’s how you end up hittin’ ’em—but if you turn your lights off, they can think straight and know to get out of the way.”

  I had never heard of such a thing and did not believe that he had, either—and it is something that I have never heard of since—but it seemed to give him a distinct pleasure, hunched over the steering wheel and punching the lights off and gliding toward where we had last seen the herd of deer in the middle of the road. He seemed at peace, doing that, and I decided that he was not lost at all, that he just enjoyed getting out and driving at night, and so when we passed the lights of his cabin, I looked up the hill at them but said nothing.

  “Take care, Billy,” I said when he let me out at my place. It was dark, and I felt that he was frightened of something.

  “Take care,” he said back to me. “Do you need a light?” he said, rummaging through the toolbox on the seat beside him. “I’ve got a flashlight, if you need it.”

  It was only about a ten-yard walk to my cabin.

  “No, thanks, I’ll be all right. You take care now, Billy.”

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Take care,” he said again. “Take good care.”

  He drove in a circle in my yard, found the driveway again, and headed up the road toward his house. I stood there and watched him disappear around the bend.

  I watched then as Billy’s lights came back around the bend—he was driving back to my house in reverse; driving slowly, gears groaning.

  Billy backed up in my driveway but didn’t get out of his big truck, just leaned out the window. He seemed embarrassed. “Can you show me how to get home?”

  ***

  He got all the way home in January. He was still trying to cut and load stove wood, as if trying to lay in a hundred years’ supply for all of his and Amy’s fires, on the day that he did not come back—a short winter’s day, as if the apogee of waning light had finally scooped him up, had claimed him.

  Amy and I went into the woods with lanterns. A light snow was falling, flakes hissing when they landed on our hot lanterns. Billy was lying on his side in the snow (having shut his saw off, but with his helmet still on), looking as if he had stretched out only to take a nap.

  Amy crouched and brushed the snow from his face. There were lengths of firewood scattered all around, wood he had not yet loaded in his truck, but already the snow was covering it.

  We lifted him carefully into my truck. I drove, and Amy rode with his head cradled in her lap. She removed his helmet and covered his bare head with her hands as if to keep it warm, or perhaps summon one last surge of force, or even the memory of force.

  I glanced at the tall trees above us, tried to guess which ones would be the next to fall, and wondered if the forest felt relieved that Billy was gone now—if those trees would be free now to just rot, once they fell.

  We rode past the swans’ pond. It was a cold night and earlier in the day Amy had lit a few fires around the edge. The fires were beautiful in the falling snow, though diminished and not putting out much heat. The swans had moved in as close to the small ragged orange fires as they could get without leaving the pond. Their beauty was of no help to them, it seemed; they were cold.

  They watched us, silent as ever, as we passed, the swans graceful and perfect in the firelight, and I rolled my window down, thinking that as we passed some of them would cry out at Billy’s death. But then I remembered it was only for their own death that they sang, and only that once.

  The Prisoners

  ARTIE AND DAVE work together. They are going fishing with Dave’s younger brother, Wilson, who has his own company, even though he is only twenty-eight. He sells and installs cellular car phones and electronic car locks and things like that.

  The three men live in Houston. Wilson is single. Artie and Dave are not; they are in their late thirties. Artie is still in his first marriage, though perhaps not for long. Dave is into his second marriage, but it’s going well. They both have children: Artie, two young sons, whom he is not that wild about, and Dave, two daughters—one with his ex-wife and one with his new wife.

  Dave is wild about both of his daughters, hates to be gone from either of them for more than a few hours, and each time he sees them it is like swimming to the surface from a great depth; when he does not see them, he feels as if his lungs are about to burst.

  Dave’s first wife had left him when they had been living in Orange, New Jersey—had moved to Texas with her boyfriend and received custody of their daughter two years ago—and so Dave followed her down to Texas and got a job there, and was able to see his daughter on Wednesday evenings, plus every other weekend.

  It was in Houston that Dave met and married his new wife, Nancy, and had the new baby, who to him is just as precious as the first. Because Dave owes his ex-wife $896.12 each month in child support, Dave and Nancy and the baby live in a small apartment in a not-very-safe neighborhood. They can’t go for walks at night and, afraid of drive-by shootings, they sleep with lightweight bulletproof flak jackets, with the baby in between them. Dave’s learning to be a real estate appraiser, and in his work he has seen how easily bullets can penetrate thin hollow plasterboard walls. He appraised an apartment in Phoenix into which a pistol had been fired, and he was amazed to see that the bullet had traveled through six walls before going through a refrigerator door.

  Nancy took six weeks off from her job when the baby was born but has now been back at work for a couple of months. There’s a woman they pay over in Bellaire—a forty-minute drive in good traffic, an hour in bad traffic—to watch the baby each day. Under the terms of her maternity leave, Nancy could have taken off eight weeks, but she’s heard that her boss rewards employees who come back to work early.

  Dave has not been at his job as long as Artie has, but he’s better at it, more confident with both people and numbers, and so already he’s a little higher in the company than Artie. The boss likes Dave, and likes the way the work isn’t the most important thing in the world to Dave. The boss knows that Dave’s daughters are what matter to him, and that because of this he doesn’t have to worry about his loyalty: knows Dave’s not going anywhere. And Dave always gets his work turned in on time; he hasn’t been late with a project yet.

  Dave is pleasant-looking, tall, friendly, with blue eyes. He smiles a lot, laughs easily, hides from everyone the thing that used to be rage and despair, about his wife taking his daughter away from him, the thing that is now neither rage nor despair, but some harder, sadder, more deadened thing. You couldn’t tell that thing was in him unless you cut him open with a knife, or unless he opened up and told you—which he isn’t going to do.

  Artie is dark, heavy, sulky. He doesn’t know how to laugh. He can pretend-laugh, can ridicule things, but he hasn�
��t opened up and laughed, hasn’t felt the cleansing opening-up trickling of simple, gurgling laughter since he was about ten or twelve. His skin is as dark as a plum, as if he’s bruised. His eyes are hooded from nonspecific worries, from chronic frowning. He’s about twenty pounds overweight. When he drinks beer he gets friendlier, though not happier. Artie listens to conservative radio talk shows and feels strongly an impending sense of disaster, as if he is in a fast car that is racing flat-out and hard for a concrete wall. He and Dave and Wilson have taken off a Monday from work to go fishing down near Galveston. They’ve hired a guide, whom they’re supposed to meet at daylight, down at one of the Texas City piers on the Gulf. The guide has said that he will take them to wherever the fish are biting. Artie is worried that they won’t catch anything, that the money will be wasted, and on the drive down he keeps pressing Dave and Wilson to reassure him that this is a good guide. Dave and Wilson have been fishing with this guide once before and each caught his limit of speckled trout in only a few hours, though it does not always work out that way, and they tell him this.

  Wilson is driving. He’s got a new truck with leather seats. He doesn’t have a car phone, even though he sells them. He’s read that they cause brain cancer, and so instead all he has is a digital pager, which records the number of messages coming into his answering machine back in Houston. Wilson bought a computer program that pointed out to him that, based on last year’s data, each incoming phone call brings him—on the average—another $152.18 of business.

  The pager is hooked to the sun visor of his truck, and each time it goes off—a rapid series of beeps and clicks—all three men whoop and tally the total: Dave counting with true gusto, elated for his little brother, and Artie sick with green envy but happy at the thought that at least somebody, somewhere, is getting gouged.

  It’s a lot of work for Wilson to go out and answer each of those calls—to drive out and fix whatever’s wrong with the system or to install a new one—but he does it. He has no employees. He’s a one-man show. He won’t even be twenty-nine for another ten months. It makes him seem richer than he already is, though in his mind, it’s a little bit like he’s drowning, or gasping for air—like he can’t quite get enough air—and he doesn’t like that feeling, and he’s trying not to worry about the business so much.