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
