The Shell Collector Page 6

  It was hopeless. He would get it up and then it would crash through a few miles later. Hardly anywhere was the sheet of ice atop the snow thick enough to support the truck’s weight. For twenty hours he revved and slid the truck over eight-foot drifts. Three more times it broke through and sank to the windows. Finally he left it. He was ten miles from home, thirty miles from town.

  He made a weak and smoky fire with cut boughs and lay beside it and tried to sleep but couldn’t. The heat from the fire melted snow and trickles ran slowly toward him but froze solid before they reached him. The stars twisting in their constellations above had never seemed farther or colder. In a state that was neither fully sleep nor fully waking, he watched wolves lope around his fire, just outside the reaches of light, slavering and lean. A raven dropped through the smoke and hopped to him. He thought for the first time that he might die if he did not get warmer. He managed to kneel and turn and crawl for home. Around him he could feel the wolves, smell blood on them, hear their nailed feet scrape across the ice.

  He traveled all that night and all the next day, near catatonia, sometimes on his feet, more often on his elbows and knees. At times he thought he was a wolf and at times he thought he was dead. When he finally made it to the cabin, there were no tracks on the porch, no sign that she had gone out. The crawlspace door was still flung open and shreds of the siding and door frame lay scattered about as though some wounded devil had clawed its way out of the cabin’s foundation and galloped into the night.

  She was kneeling on the floor, ice in her hair, lost in some kind of hypothermic torpor. With his last dregs of energy he constructed a fire and poured a mug of hot water down her throat. As he fell into sleep, he watched himself as from a distance, weeping and clutching his near-frozen wife.

  They had only flour, a jar of frozen cranberries, and a few crackers in the cupboards. He went out only to split more wood. When she could speak her voice was quiet and far away. I have dreamt the most amazing things, she murmured. I have seen the places where the coyotes go when they are gone. I know where spiders go, and geese. . . .

  Snow fell incessantly. He wondered if some ice age had befallen the entire world. Night was abiding; daylight passed in a breath. Soon the whole planet would become a white and featureless ball hurtling through space, lost. Whenever he stood up his eyesight fled in slow, nauseating streaks of color.

  Icicles hung from the cabin’s roof and ran all the way to the porch, pillars of ice barring the door. To exit he had to hack his way out with an axe. He went out with lanterns to fish, shoveled down to the river ice, drilled through with a hand auger and shivered over the hole jigging a ball of dough on a hook. Sometimes he brought back a trout, frozen stiff in the short snowshoe from the river to the cabin. Other times they ate a squirrel, a hare, once a famished deer whose bones he cracked and boiled and finally ground into meal, or only a few handfuls of rose hips. In the worst parts of March he dug out cattails to peel and steam the tubers.

  She hardly ate, sleeping eighteen, twenty hours a day. When she woke it was to scribble on notebook paper before plummeting back into sleep, clutching at the blankets as if they gave her sustenance. There was, she was learning, strength hidden at the center of weakness, ground at the bottom of the deepest pit. With her stomach empty and her body quieted, without the daily demands of living, she felt she was making important discoveries. She was only nineteen and had lost twenty pounds since marrying him. Naked she was all rib cage and pelvis.

  He read her scribbled dreams but they read like senseless poems and gave him no clues to her: Snail, she wrote,

  sleds down blades in the rain.

  Owl: fixed his eyes on hare, dropping as if from the moon.

  Horse: rides across the plains with his brothers . . .

  Eventually he hated himself for bringing her there, for quarantining her in a cabin winterlong. This winter was making her crazy—making them both crazy. All that was happening to her was his fault.

  In April the temperature rose above zero and then above twenty. He strapped the extra battery to his pack and went to dig out the truck. Its excavation took all day. He drove it slowly back up the slushy road in the moonlight, went in and asked if she’d like to go to town the next morning. To his surprise, she said yes. They heated water for baths and dressed in clothes they hadn’t worn in six months. She threaded twine through her belt loops to keep her trousers up.

  Behind the wheel his chest filled up to have her with him, to be moving out into the country, to see the sun above the trees. Spring was coming; the valley was dressing up. Look there, he wanted to say, those geese streaming over the road. The valley lives. Even after a winter like that.

  She asked him to drop her off at the library. He bought food— a dozen frozen pizzas, potatoes, eggs, carrots. He nearly wept at seeing bananas. He sat in the parking lot and drank a half gallon of milk. When he picked her up at the library, she had applied for a library card and borrowed twenty books. They stopped at the Bitterroot for hamburgers and rhubarb pie. She ate three pieces. He watched her eat, the spoon sliding out of her mouth. This was better. This was more like he dreamed it would be.

  Well, Mary, he said. I think we made it.

  I love pie, she said.

  As soon as the lines were repaired the phone began to ring. He took his fishing clients down the river. She sat on the porch, reading, reading.

  Soon her appetite for books could not be met by the Great Falls Public Library. She wanted other books, essays about sorcery, primers on magic-working and conjury that had to be mail-ordered from New Hampshire, New Orleans, even Italy. Once a week the hunter drove to town to collect a parcel of books from the post office: Arcana Mundi, The Seer’s Dictionary, Paragon of Wizardry, Occult Science Among the Ancients. He opened one to a random page and read, bring water, tie a soft fillet around your altar, burn it on fresh twigs and frankincense. . . .

  She regained her health, took on energy, no longer lay under furs dreaming all day. She was out of bed before him, brewing coffee, her nose already between pages. With a steady diet of meat and vegetables her body bloomed, her hair shone; her eyes and cheeks glowed. After supper he’d watch her read in the firelight, blackbird feathers tied all through her hair, a heron’s beak hanging between her breasts.

  In November he took a Sunday off and they cross-country skied. They came across a bull elk frozen to death in a draw, ravens shrieking at them as they skied to it. She knelt by it and put her palm on its leathered skull. Her eyes rolled back in her head. There, she moaned. I feel him.

  What do you feel? he asked, standing behind her. What is it?

  She stood, trembling. I feel his life flowing out, she said. I see where he goes, what he sees.

  But that’s impossible, he said. It’s like saying you know what I dream.

  I do, she said. You dream about wolves.

  But that elk’s been dead at least a day. It doesn’t go anywhere. It goes into the crops of those ravens.

  How could she tell him? How could she ask him to understand such a thing? How could anyone understand? The books she read never told her that.

  More clearly than ever she could see that there was a fine line between dreams and wakefulness, between living and dying, a line so tenuous it sometimes didn’t exist. It was always clearest for her in winter. In winter, in that valley, life and death were not so different. The heart of a hibernating newt was frozen solid but she could warm and wake it in her palm. For the newt there was no line at all, no fence, no River Styx, only an area between living and dying, like a snowfield between two lakes: a place where lake denizens sometimes met each other on their way to the other side, where there was only one state of being, neither living nor dead, where death was only a possibility and visions rose shimmering to the stars like smoke. All that was needed was a hand, the heat of a palm, the touch of fingers.

  That February the sun shone during the days and ice formed at night—slick sheets glazing the wheat fields, the roofs and roads. He d
ropped her off at the library, the chains on the tires rattling as he pulled away, heading back up the Missouri toward Fort Benton.

  Around noon Marlin Spokes, a snowplough driver the hunter knew from grade school, slid off the Sun River Bridge in his plough and dropped forty feet into the river. He was dead before they could get him out of the truck. She was reading in the library a block away and heard the plough crash into the riverbed like a thousand dropped girders. When she got to the bridge, sprinting in her jeans and T-shirt, men were already in the water—a telephone man from Helena, the jeweler, the butcher in his apron, all of them scrambling down the banks, wading in the rapids, prying the door open. She careened down the snow-covered slope beneath the bridge and splashed to them. The men lifted Marlin from the cab, stumbling as they carried him. Steam rose from their shoulders and from the crushed hood of the plow. Her hand on the jeweler’s arm, her leg against the butcher’s leg, she reached for Marlin’s ankle.

  When her finger touched Marlin’s body, her eyes rolled immediately back and a single vision leapt to her: Marlin Spokes pedaling a bicycle, a child’s seat mounted over the rear tire with a helmeted boy—Marlin’s own son—strapped into it. Spangles of light drifted over the riders as they rolled down a lane beneath giant sprawling trees. The boy reached for Marlin’s hair with one small fist. Fallen leaves turned over in their wake. In the glass of a storefront window their reflection flashed past. This quiet vision—like a ribbon of rich silk—ran out slowly and fluidly, with great power, and she shook beneath it. It was she who pedaled the bike. The boy’s fingers pulled through her hair.

  The men who were touching her or touching Marlin saw what she saw, felt what she felt. They tried not to talk about it, but after the funeral, after a week, they couldn’t keep it in. At first they spoke of it only in their basements, at night, but Great Falls was not a big town and this was not something one kept locked in a basement. Soon they talked about it everywhere, in the supermarket, at the gasoline pumps. People who didn’t know Marlin Spokes or his son or the hunter’s wife or any of the men in the river that morning soon spoke of the event like experts. All you had to do was touch her, a barber said, and you saw it too. The most beautiful lane you’ve ever dreamed, raved a deli owner. Giant trees bigger’n you’ve ever imagined. You didn’t just pedal his son around, movie ushers whispered, you loved him.

  He could have heard anywhere. In the cabin he built up the fire, flipped idly through a stack of her books. He couldn’t understand them—one of them wasn’t even in English.

  After dinner she took the plates to the sink.

  You read Spanish now? he asked.

  Her hands in the sink stilled. It’s Portuguese, she said. I only understand a little.

  He turned his fork in his hands. Were you there when Marlin Spokes was killed?

  I helped pull him out of the truck. I don’t think I was much good.

  He looked at the back of her head. He felt like driving his fork through the table. What tricks did you play? Did you hypnotize people?

  Her shoulders tightened. Her voice came out furious: Why can’t you—, she began, but her voice fell off. It wasn’t tricks, she muttered. I helped carry him.

  When she started to get phone calls, he hung up on the callers. But they were relentless: a grieving widow, an orphan’s lawyer, a reporter from the Great Falls Tribune. A blubbering father drove all the way to the cabin to beg her to come to the funeral parlor, and finally she went. The hunter insisted on driving her. It wasn’t right, he declared, for her to go alone. He waited in the truck in the parking lot, engine rattling, radio moaning.

  I feel so alive, she said afterward as he helped her into the cab. Her clothes were soaked through with sweat. Like my blood is fizzing through my body. At home she lay awake, far away, all night.

  She got called back and called back, and each time he drove her. Some days he’d take her after a whole day of scouting for elk and he’d pass out from exhaustion while he waited in the truck. When he woke she’d be beside him, holding his hand, her hair damp, her eyes wild.

  You dreamt you were with the wolves and eating salmon, she said. They were washed up and dying on the shoals. It was right outside the cabin.

  It was well after midnight and he’d be up before four the next day. The salmon used to come here, he said. When I was a boy. There’d be so many you could stick your hand in the river and touch one. He drove them home over the dark fields. He tried to soften his voice. What do you do in there? What really?

  I give them solace. I let them say good-bye to their loved ones. I help them know something they’d never otherwise know.

  No, he said. I mean what kind of tricks? How do you do it?

  She turned her hands palm up. As long as they’re touching me they see what I see. Come in with me next time. Go in there and hold hands. Then you’ll know.

  He said nothing. The stars above the windshield seemed fixed in their places.

  Families wanted to pay her; most wouldn’t let her leave until they did. She would come out to the truck with fifty, a hundred—once four hundred—dollars folded into her pocket. She grew her hair out, obtained talismans to dramatize her performances: a bat wing, a raven’s beak, a fistful of hawk’s feathers bound with a sprig of cheroot. A cardboard box full of candle stubs. Then she went off for weekends, disappearing in the truck before he was up, a fearless driver. She stopped for roadkill and knelt by it—a crumpled porcupine, a shattered deer. She pressed her palm to the truck’s grille where a hundred husks of insects smoked. Seasons came and went. She was gone half the winter. Each of them was alone. They never spoke. On longer drives there were times she was tempted to keep the truck pointed away and never return.

  In the first thaws he would go out to the river, try to lose himself in the rhythm of casting, in the sound of pebbles driven downstream, clacking together. But even fishing had gone lonely for him. Everything, it seemed, was out of his hands—his truck, his wife, the course of his own life.

  As hunting season came on his mind wandered. He was botching opportunities—getting upwind of elk or telling a client to call it quits thirty seconds before a pheasant burst from cover and flapped slowly, untroubled, into the sky. When a client missed his mark and pegged an antelope in the neck, the hunter berated him for being careless, knelt over its tracks and clutched at the bloody snow. Do you understand what you’ve done? he shouted. How the arrow shaft will knock against the trees, how the animal will run and run, how the wolves will trot behind it to keep it from resting? The client was red-faced, huffing. Wolves? the client said. There haven’t been wolves here for twenty years.

  She was in Butte or Missoula when he discovered her money in a boot: six thousand dollars and change. He canceled his trips and stewed for two days, pacing the porch, sifting through her things, rehearsing his arguments. When she saw him, the sheaf of bills jutting from his shirt pocket, she stopped halfway to the door, her bag over her shoulder, her hair brought back. The light came across his shoulders and fell onto the yard.

  It’s not right, he said.

  She walked past him into the cabin. I’m helping people. I’m doing what I love. Can’t you see how good I feel afterward?

  You take advantage of them. They’re grieving, and you take their money.

  They want to pay me, she shrieked. I help them see something they desperately want to see.

  It’s a grift. A con.

  She came back out on the porch. No, she said. Her voice was quiet and strong. This is real. As real as anything: the valley, the river, the trees, your trout hanging in the crawlspace. I have a talent. A gift.

  He snorted. A gift for hocus-pocus. For swindling widows out of their savings. He lobbed the money into the yard. The wind caught the bills and scattered them over the snow.

  She hit him, once, hard across the mouth. How dare you? she cried. You, of all people, should understand. You who dream of wolves every night.

  He went out alone the next evening and she tracked him
through the snow. He was up on a deer platform under a blanket. He was wearing white camouflage; he’d tiger-striped his face with black paint. She crouched a hundred yards away, for four hours or more, damp and trembling in the snow behind his tree stand. She thought he must have dozed off when she heard an arrow sing down from the platform and strike a doe she hadn’t even noticed in the chest. The doe looked around, wildly surprised, and charged off, galloping through the trees. She heard the aluminum shaft of the arrow knocking against branches, heard the deer plunge through a thicket. The hunter sat a moment, then climbed down from his perch and began to follow. She waited until he was out of sight, then followed.

  She didn’t have far to go. There was so much blood she thought he must have wounded other deer, which must all have come charging down this same path, spilling out the quantities of their lives. The doe lay panting between two trees, the thin shaft of the arrow jutting from her shoulder. Blood so red it was almost black pulsed down its flank. The hunter stood over the animal and slit its throat.

  Mary leapt forward from where she squatted, her legs all pins and needles, dashed across the snow in her parka and, lunging, grabbed the doe by its still-warm foreleg. With her other hand she seized the hunter’s wrist and held on. His knife was still inside the deer’s throat and as he pulled away blood spread thickly into the snow. Already the doe’s vision was surging through her body— fifty deer wading a sparkling brook, their bellies in the current, craning their necks to pull leaves from overhanging alders, light pouring around their bodies, a buck raising its antlered head like a king. A silver bead of water hung from its muzzle, caught the sun, and fell.

  What?—the hunter gasped. He dropped his knife. He was pulling away, pulling from his knees with all his strength. She held on; one hand on his wrist, the other clamped around the doe’s foreleg. He dragged them across the snow and the doe left her blood as she went. Oh, he whispered. He could feel the world—the grains of snow, the stripped bunches of trees—falling away. The taste of alder leaves was in his mouth. A golden brook rushed under his body; light spilled onto him. The buck was raising its head, meeting his eyes. All the world washed in amber.