Sourland

man? At a first glance you might imagine that he was wearing animal hides. And on his feet, hobnailed boots. Before Sophie could pull away Kolk took her arm, and linked her arm through his. He said nothing as they walked through the terminal together. Sophie had no choice but to accompany him. She dared not pull away from him, such a gesture would offend him terribly.

How likely it seemed to her, the disfigured must be vainer than the rest of us.

Awkward to walk with Kolk who limped so markedly. And how self-conscious Sophie was made to feel, walking with a man at whom people — wide-eyed children, rude adults — stared openly.

“S’reebi! Quiet. Sit.”

In the rear of Kolk’s vehicle was a lunging barking dog — a bulldog mix — with splotched steel-colored fur, a milky right eye, quivering jowls and small flattened torn ears. Sophie felt her blood freeze, she feared and disliked such dogs.

Kolk struck the lunging dog on its skull, so sharply you could hear the impact.

“I said sit.”

Sophie said, “He’s — handsome.” With forced warmth Sophie addressed the frantic barking dog, that was throwing itself against the back of the seat. His slobber shook in frothy droplets from his mouth — surreptitiously she wiped it from her face with a tissue.

Kolk laughed. It wasn’t clear why Kolk laughed.

Kolk said not to worry, S’reebi would not dare attack her.

In swirling snow the drive from Grand Rapids north and west into the foothills of the Sourland Mountains took longer than Kolk had anticipated. Though it was early April yet the air was blustery and wintry, and tasted of metal. During the more than three-hour drive Kolk said little as if he were chagrined or resentful or possibly he’d forgotten his guest in the passenger’s seat beside him. Sophie could have wept. How miserable she was shivering in her attractive and inappropriate clothing — cream-colored cashmere coat, light woolen slacks, leather shoe-boots that came only to her ankles. It was clear that Kolk was accustomed to being alone in the jeep — driving long distances with a sort of stoic fortitude — punching in radio stations that came to life, prevailed for a while then faded into static — in the interstices of which Sophie chattered nervously, to fill the silence. The female instinct: to fill up silence. The (female) fear of (masculine) silence. Sophie heard her anxious voice like the palpitations of a butterfly’s wings, throwing itself against a screen.

Kolk said: “You don’t need to talk.”

In profile, seen from the right, Kolk did not appear obviously disfigured. His face was strong-boned, his skin ruddy, weathered. The untrimmed whiskers looked charged with static electricity like those of a mad sea captain in a nineteenth-century engraving. His eyebrows, in profile, stood straight out, gunmetal-gray. His shaved head was stubbled with steel-colored quills. The scalp was discolored, blemished and bumpy as a lunar terrain. In the fingerless gloves his hands were twice the size of Sophie’s, the hands of a manual laborer, or a strangler. The shortcut nails were edged with the kind of grime that could never be removed.

There was little of the young Jeremiah Kolk remaining. This was a fact, Sophie had to concede. Yet the old intimacy between them persisted, unmistakably. Though we are changed we are not different people. He knows this!

Sophie saw that in the rear of the jeep there were miscellaneous articles of clothing — a lightweight jacket, a mangled-looking sweater, a single hiking boot, dirt-stiffened gray wool socks. There were advertising flyers, newspapers that had never been unfurled, unopened envelopes as if Kolk had grabbed his mail out of his P.O. and dumped it into the jeep without taking time to sort it. The frothy-mouthed bulldog lay atop the jacket panting as if he’d been running and had just collapsed in a partial doze. Sensing Sophie looking at him he began to pant more loudly and his pink-rimmed eyes opened wider, glistening.

No! — no! Sophie looked quickly away before the dog began barking.

They’d made their way through the despoiled suburban landscape outside Grand Rapids — minimalls and shopping centers, motels, gas stations, fast-food restaurants, discount outlets. Beyond were desolate winter fields not yet stirred into life. Still the snow continued in lightly swirling white flakes like mica-chips, much of it melting on the pavement.

Kolk gave Sophie a sidelong glance. The exposed teeth were hidden from her, she could see only the unmutilated side of the man’s face, his mouth barely visible amid the bristling beard. The dark-tinted glasses were all but opaque.

If you will be kind to me. Please promise me!

If you will not hurt me. I am the person who has come to you, whom you have summoned.

“How did you learn about — my husband’s death?”

Sophie spoke hesitantly. In her letters to Kolk she had never asked him this crucial question nor had he volunteered to answer it.

Kolk’s reply was an enigmatic shrug of his shoulders. He was staring straight ahead, at the highway.

Sophie persisted: “Did you keep in contact with Matt, over the years? Or with mutual friends? Was that how you knew?”

“I kept contact, yes. With some part of the past.”

Sophie wondered what this meant. Some part of the past?

“But you never called Matt. When we were all still in Madison, you might have called him. Matt had been your friend, he’d been badly hurt when you…”

Was this true? In some way, Sophie thought it had to be.

Kolk hadn’t called Matt, and Matt hadn’t called Kolk. Matt had said stiffly He’s not my friend. We’re out of each other’s life.

All that Sophie could remember with any degree of clarity was following Kolk out of an apartment — not the one in which she and Matt were living at the time, but someone else’s apartment — and into a drafty stairwell. There’d been a smell of cooking odors — curry? A man’s stripped-down bicycle on a stairway landing, leaning against a wall? The circumstances of that incident had almost entirely faded from her mind. Yet vividly she recalled the need to touch Kolk, and the way he’d thrown off her hand.

She wondered if that memory had lodged deeply in Kolk, as it had in her.

Or is it a false memory. Like so many posthumous memories.

A willed hallucination whetted by loneliness and desperation as parched grass whets the wildfire that ravages and destroys it.

By degrees the despoiled landscape had dropped away. In the drafty rattling jeep they were traveling on a less populated state highway. Passing farmland, or what had been farmland — abandoned and boarded-up houses and outbuildings of a bygone era — amid vast swatches of acreage belonging to corporate farms. But all the land lay fallow in the late-winter chill as if in a suspended animation.

Ever more they were ascending into the foothills of the Sourland Mountains. Ever more, the highway was becoming less traveled and houses were farther apart and set back farther from the road. There was no radio reception here — Kolk had given up his radio music in a blaze of static. In the distance was a dramatic landscape of steep hills, small mountains covered in pine woods, a pearlescent-marbled sky through which shafts of sunshine pierced like flames.

Leaving Koochiching County. Entering Sourland County.

Here were signs for small quaintly named settlements: Mizpah — Shooks — Boy River — Elk Hunt — Grygle — Bowstring — Black Duck — Squaw Lake — Leech Lake. Then came Sourland Junction, and Sourland Falls.

Soon then they were passing the vast tract of the Sourland Mountain State Preserve on their right. Kolk asked Sophie if she could guess how large the Preserve was and Sophie said she had no idea — five thousand acres?

More like four million, Kolk said.

Four million! Sophie’s voice registered astonishment.

Kolk must have smiled, his visitor spoke so naively.

Sophie thought He could not imagine that I would know. His idea of me is that I could not possibly know.

At last in the waning light of early evening Kolk turned off a gravel road onto a narrow lane leading into the