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 across 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.
He took up a collection to start the generator, explaining that it had been through a lot of wear and tear lately. Some of us had money and some didn’t. Mary gave Jick a dollar.
If the radio told us to evacuate, I don’t know if we would have or not. Sue and Bill had their two boys with them, as well as the baby; Sue stayed in the truck
