Sourland

  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 wooded interior and bounded by hostile signs—NO TREPASSING PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING PRIVATE PROPERTY—which Sophie supposed to be signs posted by Kolk himself. In the backseat the bulldog began to whimper excitedly as if in anticipation of home. Sophie’s teeth rattled in her jaws, the lane was so bumpy. Kolk took them hurtling deeper into the woods—they were descending a steep hill, toward a creek at a perpendicular angle before them—a narrow creek rushing with water—it was the aftermath of the winter thaw, the creek was unusually high—Sophie steeled herself waiting for a bridge to materialize—waiting for the jeep to clatter over a crude plank bridge—but there was no bridge—to Sophie’s astonishment Kolk aimed his vehicle into the rushing water at a speed of twenty miles an hour—water lifted in flaring wings beside the jeep even as the jeep catapulted up the farther bank.

  He’d shifted gears, the four-wheel drive held firm. Sophie gave a little cry of surprise—it had happened too quickly for her to be frightened.

  Sophie asked why wasn’t there a bridge across the creek. Kolk said what was the need of a bridge—most of the summer the creek was dry, in the winter it was frozen over.

  “The trick is to take it fast, when the water’s high. Slow, you get your feet wet.”

  It was clear that Kolk took pride in his wilderness place. Sophie saw how beyond the clearing in which Kolk parked the jeep were mountains, a view of a valley, miles of pine forest she would have found beautiful but for her fatigue from hours of travel.

  There was the log cabin, Sophie recognized from the photographs. A crude plank addition had been built onto it, unpainted, with a single small window. Close by was a storage shed, a chicken coop/rabbit hutch, what appeared to be a kennel, stacks of traps or cages. At the edge of the clearing were old, abandoned vehicles—a car stripped of everything but its chassis, a rusted pickup truck, a tractor missing its tires. A layer of gritty snow lay over everything, the air here was very cold piercing Sophie’s lungs as she opened the jeep door. Her attention was drawn to one of the cages stacked against the storage shed, some twenty feet away. She had a vague vertiginous sense that something—some small creature—had been trapped in this cage and made to starve to death and become mummified.

  A thrill of dismay coursed through her Why have I come here, am I mad!

  Quickly before Kolk could come around to her side of the jeep to help her down, as he’d helped her up into the cab, Sophie climbed down from the jeep. The cab was so high, she nearly turned her ankle.

  The bulldog leapt out, panting and barking. Kolk was telling her something—about the cabin, or the Preserve—Sophie wasn’t able to concentrate—Kolk hauled out Sophie’s suitcase, beneath his arm. She was feeling dazed, light-headed. She was feeling unreal and could not have explained to her companion that she had not felt anything other than unreal since the morning she’d driven her husband to the hospital which had been the final morning of their life together.

  Kolk broke off what he was saying. Sophie was staring at the mummified thing in the trap—she’d imagined that it had moved, quivered—not a creature but a dirt-stiffened rag. That was all.

  The bulldog followed at their heels, quivering with excitement. A small barrel of a creature with brindle markings like splattered paint drops, a single sighted eye, the other milky and glaring. How like a pig the dog was, with its flattened snout, wriggling hairless bottom and piglet tail.

  “S’reebi, get the hell away. Sit.”

  Sophie laughed uneasily, the dog had a way of nipping surreptitiously at her ankles and feet. A trail of slobber shone on her leather shoe-boots. She perceived that the dog was her enemy, he would wait until Kolk was away, or inattentive, to seriously attack her.

  Sophie asked what was the dog’s name?—she couldn’t quite make out what Kolk called him.

  “‘S’reebi’—‘Cerberus.’”

  Cerberus!—the three-headed dog of Hades.

  Sophie remembered, Jeremiah Kolk had once studied classics,

  Kolk took Sophie’s arm, to lead her in the direction of the cabin. Again this sudden intimacy between them, as in the airport when he’d taken her arm without a word and linked it through his own in a husbandly/proprietary manner.

  The touch of his hand—his hands—was like static electricity, cours
ing through Sophie’s body.

  Sophie heard herself stammer how beautiful it was in this place—“But so remote.”

  She couldn’t bear to look at the man—the melted-away jaw, the exposed stubby teeth.

  Flatly Kolk said: “No. A place isn’t ‘remote’ except in relationship to another place, or places. The longer you remain here, you will see it is just here. There is nothing ‘remote’ about it.”

  Kolk led Sophie into the chilly cabin, carrying her suitcase. The thought came to her—a ridiculous thought—utterly unwarranted—that if she’d balked at the threshold of the cabin like a panicked animal resisting confinement, the man would have forced her into the cabin.

  Here, a prevailing odor struck her—grease, scorch—cooking smells—the sweetish-yeasty smell of unlaundered clothes, bedsheets. The interior of the log cabin was a single large room with a low ceiling and few windows, like a cave; there was both a stone fireplace and an antiquated wood-burning stove; scattered on the floor by the fireplace were piles of crudely hewn logs with dried cobwebby bark still attached. A breeding place for spiders Sophie thought, appalled.

  Yet the interior of Kolk’s cabin was attractive, in its way. Cozy, comfortable. A kind of nest. The bare-plank floor was uneven, and haphazardly covered with small woven grime-saturated rugs—one felt hidden here, protected. In a corner was a brass bed with a sunken mattress—Kolk’s bachelor bed?—heaped with blankets and bedclothes; in a narrow alcove, a small kitchen with open shelves to the ceiling, a two-burner stove and a dwarf-refrigerator.

  She would be preparing meals in that kitchen—would she? Sophie smiled to think so.

  Kolk’s furniture was mostly of brown leather—a massive sofa, matching chairs—furniture of the kind one might expect to see in an old-fashioned gentlemen’s club—once of excellent quality but now so badly worn its color had nearly vanished. There was a tarnished brass floor lamp with a parchment-colored lampshade, there were mismatched tables. These were items Kolk had purchased in a used-furniture store, Sophie supposed. Or rescued from a dump. Prominent on the wall beside the fireplace were unframed photographs of Kolk’s—wilderness scenes of the kind he’d sent her. Sophie saw how haphazardly they’d been mounted—tacked in place, or taped, as if the photographer had no wish to take time, to display his work as art.

  She would do that, if things worked out between them.

  Most of the wall-space was taken up with bookshelves. These were makeshift shelves of bricks and planks. So many books!—Kolk saw Sophie peering at one of the shelves—a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica. Other shelves were waterstained Modern Library classics—Plato, Euripides, Homer, Catullus, Augustine’s City of God, Marx’s Das Kapital, Darwin’s Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. There was an entire shelf of Latin titles. Seeing Sophie peer at these books Kolk said he’d bought the discards from the Latin Academy, a private school in St. Paul where he’d taught briefly—“and not very happily”—in the 1980s.

  All these books, Kolk said. And more, in the next room. And journals in boxes, he’d never unpacked. All for ninety dollars.

  In fact there was an addition to the cabin, at the rear—a “guest room” as Kolk called it—which, he said, he tried to keep in better condition than the room in which he and S’reebi lived. It was into this addition that Kolk led Sophie, switching on a light.

  This was a small room, quite narrow, with a single small square window looking out into the woods. Beside the bed—a girl’s bed, less than adult-sized, built low to the floor—there was a space heater, which Kolk switched on. The bed was covered with an attractive blue-striped goose-down comforter—Sophie believed it was goose-down, testing it with her fingers—she wondered if Kolk had made this purchase especially for her, at a secondhand store? The comforter did not appear to be very soiled, nor did it appear to be worn. Even secondhand goose-down comforters were not cheap, Sophie knew. She felt a touch of vertigo, like sickness.

  He will come here. He will make love to me here.

  On the plank floor in this room was a handwoven Indian carpet of red, beige, and black patterns like lightning bolts. Here too the floor was tilted, just slightly, as in a fun house. There was a bureau of old cedar wood, badly scarred but with a subtle, beautiful smell—Kolk pulled one of the drawers open an inch, as if to encourage his reluctant visitor to unpack.

  The crude plank wall was insulated in panels. On one of the panels was a row of pegs for clothes to be hung on. Sophie saw that a woman’s robe, of some dark-green satin material, with a peacock-tail appliqué on the back, was hanging here.

  He wants me to know. There have been others. His life is an entirety, I will never realize.

  “Here. This is new, this summer.”

  It was a tiny bathroom—a lavatory—in an alcove behind the cedar bureau. It was hardly the size of a telephone booth. Sophie wondered how she was to bathe, if there was a shower elsewhere in the cabin. She could not bring herself to ask. Enough that there was a tiny sink in the room, and faucets; a toilet. On a towel rack, towels! Sophie heard herself thanking Kolk—how grateful she was sounding!

  The towels appeared to be clean, she saw. There were only two of them and they were not very thick but for this, she was grateful.

  In the corner of her eye she’d seen—something moving—quivering—the impress of a body on the blue-striped comforter—a female body—slender, girl-sized.

  Sophie Quinn was herself a slender woman. Since her husband’s death she’d lost fifteen pounds. She felt her bones thinning like the bones of a sparrow.

  Kolk said why didn’t she sleep, for a while. Kolk said she was looking tired.

  “I’ll make supper. I’ll wake you for supper.”

  Sophie was having a difficult time remembering—for the moment—where she was, and why she was in this place. Kolk? Jeremiah Kolk? Her frantic smiling eyes were fastened to the man’s upper face, she dared not look elsewhere.

  Her companion too was tired from the drive—a six-hour round-trip in the jeep. But he was a stoic, he would not complain. With half his bewhiskered face he smiled at her—that was what it was meant to be, a smile—Sophie believed. Sophie wondered if one of the man’s legs was shorter than the other, a portion of muscle and cartilage blown away in the detonation. She thought He will sleep with me. He knows I can’t refuse him.

  She wondered how it would be—to hold a man so mutilated, disfigured. There would be much more scar tissue than you could see, hidden beneath his clothes. Waves and rivulets of scar tissue, terrible to the touch.

  Kolk left the room limping, without a backward glance.

  Quickly Sophie shut the door. It had no lock! At least, not from the inside.

  How exhausted she was, as Kolk had perceived. The touch of vertigo that had seemed to her sexual was sheer exhaustion, on the cusp of nausea.

  Beyond the door she could hear Kolk talking to the bulldog, in a cheery-chiding manner. Having a guest in this remote place—a female guest—seemed to please and excite Kolk even as it provoked him to feeling, like his guest, edgy and apprehensive. Sophie listened closely but could hear no distinct words through the door. She wondered how soon—if ever—Kolk would speak to her in the intimate way in which he spoke to the barrel-shaped little bulldog.

  As if nothing were yet at stake, all had been decided between them.

  You summoned me. I came to you. It has been decided!

  Hesitantly Sophie pulled back the blue-striped comforter. She saw with a stab of dismay that the comforter was more badly worn than she’d believed, though it had been—hadn’t it?—recently laundered; Kolk had washed it by hand—had he?—and hung it up to dry outdoors, which would have required days.

  Beneath the comforter, bedsheets worn almost transparent from laundering. The sagging mattress beneath, and no mattress cover. Sophie snatched up the single pillow on the bed to fluff it out—tiny bits of down exploded into the air. Out of the bedclothes wafted a musty odor, that pinched her nostrils. She thought She has die
d here. My predecessor. Allowed to starve to death, to die and become mummified.

  Sophie saw that the single window in the room was too small for an adult to push her way out—no more than two square feet.

  So tired! She had no choice but to stretch out warily on the bed. No choice but to sink into the bed. This musty-yeasty-smelling bed. In her clothes and socks—she’d removed only the shoe-boots. It was terrible to be sleeping fully dressed but she could not risk undressing nor had she the strength to remove her clothing. She had not the strength to open her suitcase and hang up her things—she’d forgotten the suitcase entirely. The satin robe on the peg was hers to wear, she supposed. Though she would have to be naked beneath it, she supposed. She’d begun to pant, her eyeballs felt seared as if she’d been staring into the sun. She could never sleep in this terrible place! A grave-smell, wetted ashes, grit. If you breathed in too deeply you breathed in microscopic bits of skin, cell-particles. You breathed in the death of another. Her skin crawled with this knowledge. Hairs at the tender nape of her neck stirred. She felt an almost sexual yearning—the dark pit was opening beneath her, the tar pit, beneath the low-slung bed. In her haste to sleep she’d neglected to switch off the light, from a bedside lamp with a milk-glass base, an attractive little girl’s-room sort of lamp which Kolk had switched on: the bulb couldn’t have been more than sixty watts, not enough to keep Sophie from sinking into the tar pit which was the identical tar-pit that was beneath her bed back home…Gratefully she shut her eyes. Something black washed over her brain. Almost immediately she began to sleep. She was sobbing in her sleep, in relief. Her limbs twitched, she was gripping herself in a tight embrace, arms crossed over her chest and fingers at her rib cage. O hold me! help me! I am so alone and I don’t want to die please help me! She saw the man approach her—the man with the melted-away face, the exposed and grinning teeth—whose name she could not recall, at the moment. It was a name she knew, but she could not speak it. He had removed his tinted glasses, his soot-colored eyes were glassy, dilated. His soot-colored eyes moved over her caressingly. She saw the mouth inside the bristling beard. It was a scarred mouth and a mutilated mouth but it was a mouth she wanted to kiss, to comfort. Yet she could not move, exhaustion so gripped her in all the cells of her being.