The Hermit's Story

by Rick Bass

  With their backs now turned, he felt himself fading already from their consciousness—becoming as strange and irrelevant as the cold coals of their old winter-fires that lay scattered like trash across the barren, temporary snowscape.

  As if, even though he stood on the bridge right before them, they could already no longer see him. As if they had chosen to no longer be able to see him.

  He kept yelling, but the wind had changed now and was carrying his words away, and they could not even hear his shouts.

  The brightly colored walkers reached their huts, opened the doors, and disappeared inside. Jerry watched for a moment longer—half expecting the huts to fall through the ice—but when no tragedy ensued, he got back into the truck, where Jim, with his head still lowered, wanted to know what all the yelling had been about.

  “Nothing,” Jerry said. “Nothing, really. I just got scared for a minute, was all. I’m all right now. I was just scared, was all,” he said. “It’s okay now. It’s better.”

  Real Town

  JICK WAS UP ON the mountain gassing dogs when the windy day blew through. It was their last chance. Some chance.

  He has a hank of my hair, which he bought from my ex-boyfriend after we broke up and the ex left the valley. Jick keeps the hair in a little display case in his store. He sells it for ten dollars a lock. He puts the glass box of it up by the window, so that it catches the light. It glows red. Jick knows how much it unnerves me, and he thinks I will buy it all back someday. But I don’t have any money. I have to just look at it. He’s sold two locks of it so far, both to tourists. People will buy anything.

  He runs the store here, jacks the prices up so high that you’ve got to be really desperate to buy something. It’s fifty miles to town, and Jick gets a not-so-secret thrill every time someone admits that paying his price is better than driving a hundred miles round trip.

  Three dollars for a box of envelopes that costs next to nothing in town, in real town; a dollar for an old drying-out lemon that someone needs for a recipe; two dollars and fifty cents for a quart of milk.

  It’s dark in the store, and Jick’s got all these skulls nailed to the log rafters with dopey little hand-lettered cardboard signs under each of them, identifying the skulls’ previous owners: BEAR, RAVEN, MOUNTAIN LION, COYOTE. He’s got Stuffed animals on the checkout counter: blue grouse, and ruffed grouse, and a moldy weasel, tiny and lithe, with beady eyes and little whiskers that remind me so much of Jick that I sometimes feel there are two of him whenever I’m in the store. Which is not often. A gallon of gas—two bucks a gallon, versus a dollar and nine cents in real town. A six-pack of beer (don’t ask!) in case friends drop in for the night. But the higher prices are about the only cost we pay for living away from real town.

  It’s a strange paradox: some people in the valley find themselves wanting to keep Jick in the valley, and in business—because it is worth it, when that lemon is needed, or a can of coffee, or a length of copper tubing, a rubber washer. Nobody up here wants to make an unnecessary trip over the pass and down the cliff road into town. So a lot of folks go by there every now and then, just to buy a little something, to try to encourage him to hang on. But then we get to feeling robbed, wasteful, after we’re home, and we resolve not to go back there for another three months, or a month.

  I go in there about once a year. I tell myself he can’t help who he is, how he is. I get all ready to forgive and understand him. But then I see my red hair on display there and I want to cry. I feel like he’s robbed me of something. Not my hair, but something invisible. Something he’s too dumb to even know about.

  “You’re not going to be able to sell any of it,” I tell him. “Please let me have it back. Please let me take it home.”

  I’m always angry whenever I ask him this. Because his reaction’s always the same.

  He smiles. A feeling of happiness comes into him. He looks glassy-eyed and eager both, like one of those people in the airport who ask you for things.

  He takes his sweet time answering. He wants to engage me. He tastes his question. I almost imagine that in a second a little forked tongue will flicker out from between his lips.

  “You don’t understand,” he’ll say. “I bought it from Walter.” I’d cut Walter’s hair about two or three times a year, and he’d trim mine.

  “How much did Walter charge you for it?”

  Jick shakes his head slowly, wall-eyed and grinning, as if disbelieving his luck, or that I don’t understand the situation and the joy that red-hair-in-a-box brings him. “That’s not the point,” he’ll say, or “That’s not the right question.”

  Walter’s long gone.

  ***

  Jick putters around, fusses with stuff. He thinks, dreams, and schemes. Summer is his favorite time of year, because occasional lost tourists will wander through the valley, thinking there must be some back road up here that goes into Canada. But there’s not.

  Twelve dollars for camera film!

  Some of Jick’s putterings involve gathering elk dung—the pellets—and sticking four toothpicks into them, so that I suppose they look like some kind of cute little animal. I don’t know what he thinks goes through tourists’ minds. He’s never sold one of those elk pellets that I know of, but still he gathers the dry elk shit in great quantities and spends a good bit of his time in the fall and winter sticking toothpicks into his herd of shit. He’s got one whole shelf lined with them, near the checkout counter. His disdain for tourists, his disgust, is so obvious to the rest of us, and to them, too, I’m sure. He thinks they’re dumber than he is—the worst insult of all!

  Jick wanders the dry streambeds in the fall, too, picking up smooth river stones, which he carries back to his store and paints with the slogan I ♥ REAPER. Reaper is the name of our valley. They used to grow hay along the little river. Summers are real short. But it’s good sweet hay. Four dollars a bale.

  Some of the river rocks that Jick finds are layered silicates, algae-encrusted quartzes, agates, and opals, and whenever Jick finds one of those, he brings it home and tosses it into the big tumbling rock polisher that he keeps running in his store, twenty-four hours a day. The damn thing just runs and runs, makes a low growling sound, wearing those sleek stones down to their bare, irreducible rock core. Jick is forever pouring polishing grit—his own concoction of river and ground-up glass and motor oil—into his tumbler, and when he has each of the rocks polished, he sells it, like everything else. It seems unholy, selling part of the river itself, to passers-through. And I hate the sound, the twenty-four-hour sound, that’s always growling away in his store, the stones always being worn down. You hear the stones’ grinding sound whenever you walk in, and it is like the one I imagine he must hear all the time in his terrible brain.

  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 acros
s 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.