The Hermit's Story (15 page)

“I did a good job on that one,” he said. “I might have filled the bubble a little full, which is probably what's causing the increased discomfort you're experiencing, but I wanted to be sure. Six more days,” Dr. Le Page said. “It's all going to be all right,” he said. “You'll be like a new man. You won't ever see twenty-twenty out of that eye again, but your sight will return to you. It should start getting better even by the end of the week. Six more days,” he said, and shook hands with them both and sent them on their way, with the morning still young and half a hundred other patients still waiting in line behind them to see him that day, and then as many the next day, and the next.

***

On the drive home, both men were quiet, listening to the morning radio. Jim rode with his head tipped down, concentrating on not vomiting. He wanted nothing more than to get home to his cabin, build a small fire in the stove, and sleep. If he could, he would like to sleep the whole remaining six days, and longed for some pill or prescription that would allow him to do this: to by-pass the recuperative time and instead slumber away that expanse of time as would some creature hibernating beneath a dense winter shell of snow and ice.

Jerry was depressed as always by the endless bounty of strip malls that formed the fabric of the journey between Spokane and Coeur d'Alene—but finally, after a couple of hours of traffic lights, Costcos, Pizza Connections, and Kmarts, they were back into the country and heading home, and Jerry began to relax, knowing that even if he was not returning home to love, he was at least returning to beauty; as the sun rose higher, burning off the morning's valley-bottom fog, he felt again both a guilt and a gratitude for having been blessed with good eyesight.

The day seemed extraordinarily beautiful to him—the longer-rayed sunlight of early spring was so much softer and richer than had been the short blunt light of winter—and, though trying not to feel Pollyanna-ish, he took it upon himself to comment to Jim on all the beautiful things he was seeing: to be Jim's eyes for him that day. To remind Jim of all the beauty that he had to look forward to upon his recovery.

It all looked so dreamlike to him that day. An old red hay truck, goggle-eyed and coming up the road toward them, listing under the burden of immense round bales of hay. The new sunlight on the yellow straw of the hay as the truck passed. So much color.

The snowy white crown and tail of a mature bald eagle wheeling above them in the cerulean sky, framed by the emerald forest beyond.

“Would you look at that,” Jerry heard himself exclaiming.

In Sandpoint, a logging truck crossed the road in front of them, loaded with such behemoths that it had taken only five logs to fill the trailer—old growth Douglas fir, with chartreuse clusters of lichens still clinging to the bark of the newly cut logs and sap still oozing from their cuts, glistening like sugar glaze in that new light.

“There's a sight you don't see every day anymore,” Jerry said, referring to the size of the logs.

Jim said nothing, not even a grunt, and instead continued to ride silently, holding his aching head in his hands.

Jerry remembered what Dr. Le Page had said about the bubble's slow dissolution—how it would be absorbed into Jim's bloodstream, and then into the lungs, before being emitted as breath, as exhalation, so that Jerry was breathing in the dissolved gas of Jim's eye bubble, there in the cab of the truck.

Jim continued to ride in silence, head down, eyes squeezed shut. Jerry glanced at him and then back at the road, and tried to hold on to the sunny optimism that the day was reawakening in him.

Maybe when I get home it will be different,
he thought.
Maybe she will have decided she loves me again, or that even if she doesn't, she will work toward getting to that place again. Maybe.

He felt something shift within him, something as subtle yet significant as a cloud passing across the sun. He looked out the other window, out at the deep blue expanse of Lake Pend Oreille. They were on the long narrow bridge that spanned its eastern harbor, heading into town from the south.

In the summer the lake was festooned with the bright flags of yachts and sailboats, but at the moment there were no boats out on its blue depths; the winter's ice still extended several hundred yards out toward the open water, still white and brilliant in some places, but in other places it was beginning to discolor back into translucent opaqueness, with mercury-colored trails of slush revealing the paths where ice fishermen had trudged earlier in the winter.

The charred stubble where their warming fires had earlier burned (bright and warm but in no way able to burn down through the thick winter-plate of ice) remained, piles of coal and stump as random and ill sorted upon the paling ice now as bones or entrails cast there by druids interested in some prophecy already gone away. It was an astoundingly lonely visage, and made more lonesome still—Jerry felt the strange thing inside him click or slip or slide further, even as if against his will—by the sight of one or two fishing huts still set up out on that waning ice; and then, somehow horrifically, he saw that some of the ice fishermen were still out there, walking out across that thinning egg-colored ice, carrying their poles and buckets and avoiding narrowly the soupy channels of disintegrating ice but pushing forward nonetheless—risking it all, risking everything, as if not out of joy but deadly habit.

From a distance, Jerry could see how dangerous it was. Already there were man-sized craters of open water out on the shelf ice, in which rested, as if in some paradoxical semblance of tranquillity, the season's first returning ducks and geese and even swans.

It wasn't just old people, either, who were streaming out to those distant huts; Jerry could see that plenty of the ice walkers were young people, young men and women walking together, still strong in their youth but certainly old enough to know better.

It was terrible to watch. Finally he couldn't stand it. Jim was dozing, having just drifted off to sleep—his head rocking up and down like a dead man's—but Jerry couldn't help it. He pulled over to the side of the road—Jim sat bolt upright for a second with the catch of fear, then remembered his instructions, and lowered his head once more—and Jerry got out of the truck and began shrieking at the distant, colorful figures making their way across the ice.

“Hey!” he shouted. “You goddamn fools! Hey!
Motherfuckers!
” he shouted, beginning to curse now for all he was worth. “Go back!” He waved at them across the distance, and a few of them stopped and stared at him, and, unable to discern his words, only his gestures, began to wave back at him.

“Go
back!
” he ranted. “Oh, you goddamned fools, go back!” But he was unable to make himself heard to them, and after a few moments of waving back to him, they drifted on farther out across the ice, leaning into the mild south wind on the bright, sunny, beautiful day, as he stood there on the bridge in full sight and continued to rant and howl.

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.”

J
ICK 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.