very thing he just spent three hot months trying to lose.
Not long ago, I met a woman who was very famous. I never found out what, exactly, she was famous for, but it seemed everyone knew who she was except for me. I worked in Glens Creek at the time. I sold hunting equipment in the back of a cavernous sporting goods store: rifles and shotguns, but also oddities such as turkey decoys and shrunken plastic flutes that would turn your voice into the call of a lusty mule deer.
She came into the store at the very start of summer. An enormous man walked in behind her. Even in his shorts and flip-flops he reminded me of one of those heroic, iron statues you see in front of museums or military tombs. When I first saw him I thought that maybe he was the one who’d done that to her face.
She wore a baseball cap pulled down low on her head and huge sunglasses over her eyes. But still, there was no hiding the damage. Her cheeks were puffy and swollen, and her eyes lay in deep black-and-yellow webs of bruising. Trails of stitching crossed the skin beneath her eyelids, and her nose had bulged to a shiny mound with one stringy blue vein running down the spine like a river on a map. Beneath her chin hung a rubbery yellow bag, into which some kind of fluid was draining.
“Excuse me,” she said to me. “Do you sell archery equipment?” She seemed nervous, jittery. Her eyes kept shifting around behind the lenses of her sunglasses, which were blue at the top, fading to a sparkling gold at the bottom. How wonderful to look out and see the world through those lenses, I thought. Like having a glass image of dawn over each eye.
I took her to the store’s archery section, her man following us. As we made our way through the aisles, I became aware that people were looking in our direction, but I assumed this was because of her injuries.
I showed her the different kinds of bows—the longbows, the recurves, the compounds—and I recommended what I thought would be best for a beginner.
“And you find that archery is fun?” she said, looking at me a little intensely. “I mean, it’s something you can really get into?”
“If you take to it, I guess,” I said.
“But you don’t find it fun?” she said, biting her thumbnail.
I shrugged. “Me? Not so much.”
She gave a tired little laugh and clasped her hands behind her head, causing her nipples to press at the fabric of her shirt in a way that sent a warm tremble through my stomach. “Okay, here’s the thing,” she said. “I’m a lady with a lot of time on her hands and I want to find something to do that’s private and fun. What do you do for fun around here? By yourself.”
“Me? I collect things,” I said. “If you’re staying nearby, you should get yourself a metal detector and see what you can find in the ground. The woods up the road from town used to be a kind of dumping area.”
A man carrying a Big Wheels box stared at us as he slowly passed the entrance to our aisle. The woman shot a nervous glance over her shoulder. “Go looking for things in the ground,” she said.
“It’s what I do alone,” I said.
She looked down the aisle again, but it was empty except for the two of us and her man. “All right, you’ve sold me,” she said. “Where are your metal detectors?”
I suddenly realized we didn’t sell them. I told her so, but offered to lend her one of my own. “I have two,” I said. “Just tell me your address and I’ll drop it off.”
“My address?” she said. She looked at me for a moment. Behind her, her man took a canteen from the rack, unscrewed the cap, and peered into the empty calfskin pouch.
“Listen,” she said, “you seem like a nice guy, but let me just emphasize what an evil person it would make you to put me through anything while I was in this kind of condition, okay?”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed. “What I mean is, I wouldn’t even have come to town, but I feel like I’m going stir-crazy sitting in my house all day,” she said. “What I mean is, look at my face.”
She lifted her sunglasses to give me a better view of her injuries, but all I saw were her eyes. They were the lightest blue, almost white. Tiny blue rafts in that storm of a face.
“Your eyes are pretty,” I said, before I could help it. As soon as the words were out, I felt my face go red. I’d never said anything like that to a woman I didn’t know well.
“My eyes are pretty?” she said, staring at me. For an awful moment I thought she was about to call her man over to destroy me. Instead, she laughed, causing the bag beneath her jaw to jump around in an oddly pleasant, girlish kind of way. Then she took a pen from her pocket and wrote down her address. “It’s Saturday tomorrow. If you’re off, come by in the morning, around ten, and you can show me how to use the metal detector.”
I told her ten would be fine.
“I’m Grace, by the way,” she said, and put her hand out.
I shook it. “Wade,” I said.
“This scavenging better be fun, Wade,” she said, smiling and pointing her finger at me in a playful way. “Don’t let me down, now.” Then she turned and left, her man trailing after her.
As soon as she’d gone, Haymont, my supervisor, hurried over from behind a rack of animal urines. “That was her, wasn’t it?” he said, breathing fast. “I’d heard she was staying somewhere nearby, but I never thought she’d come in here. I can’t believe she talked to you of all people!” He laughed. “You’re probably the one person on earth who hasn’t heard of her.”
“Who?” I said.
“Christ, Wade,” he said, already rushing to the window. “If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.”
My cat is blind. There’s nothing wrong with his eyes—his eyes are perfect—but they’ve been disconnected from his brain. I found him through an ad in the paper. The university used him in a lab test, is why he’s blind. As soon as he was born, the people in the lab sewed his eyes shut and kept him like that for three weeks. Finally, after all that time meowing in the dark, they plucked out the stitches and pried open his little eyelids. And what they found was that although there was nothing wrong with his eyes anatomically, they didn’t work anymore. The doctors tried it again and again with other kittens, and every time the same thing happened. What they proved was that if a cat doesn’t learn how to use something during that first, critical period—not just its eyes, but its ears or even its voice—it never will. The critical periods for some kittens are very short. They only last a matter of days, a matter of hours.
My cat’s name is Sonny. He’s gray with orange stripes and I try to take him everywhere with me. The morning I set out for Grace’s house, Sonny lay curled up beside me on the passenger seat of my truck, his face resting on his paws.
The address proved difficult to find. The house was set back from the main road, at the end of a long, rutted dirt path that wound deep into the woods. When I finally arrived, the size of the house surprised me. It looked like an old hunting lodge, with log walls and high chimneys of piled gray stone at either end of its mountainous roof.
Grace emerged from the lodge’s front door wearing a tank top and shorts made of a pink towel-like material. Her whole body was tanned a rich, buttery brown and streamlined in a way I’d never encountered in real life.
“So, this is your weapon of choice, huh?” she said as I pulled the metal detector from the truck. The bag beneath her chin was empty today. It looked like a yellow rubber bib.
I showed Grace how to work the detector, how to hold the neck close to her stomach so as not to hurt her back, how to wave the pan over the ground in slow, wide arcs. I explained that fast clicks meant precious metal, and that lesser kinds like nickel or steel caused more of a low, static sound. I tossed some coins on the ground so she could hear the chatter.
“I don’t know, Wade. I lost something at the beach once when I was a kid and they looked for it with one of these things…to
“If you don’t like it, I’ll bring over the archery equipment tomorrow,” I said, and then started back to my
