The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass (the best ebook reader for android txt) 📕

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.

Jick is so fucking cheap. There’s not any electricity up here. Jick runs a big filthy Army-issue generator that throbs, like a grouse’s summertime chest-drumming, all the time; when I get to within two miles of the place, I can smell the diesel. And he pisses directly into the little river that runs past his store; he stands out on his dock at night and pisses straight into the river. He’s horrid.

Jick shows movies in the summer and fall, runs a projector outside under the stars, sets up a little pissant movie screen and shows films every night at dusk: horrible films like Spiderman and Kung-Fu Man and California Dreaming. Almost any kind of film, celluloid, flickering beneath the valley stars, would be terrible compared to the sweet brief fact of the valley and the river itself.

He’s just a