The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Real Town

JICK WAS UP ON the mountain gassing dogs when the windy day blew through. It was their last chance. Some chance.

He has a hank of my hair, which he bought from my ex-boyfriend after we broke up and the ex left the valley. Jick keeps the hair in a little display case in his store. He sells it for ten dollars a lock. He puts the glass box of it up by the window, so that it catches the light. It glows red. Jick knows how much it unnerves me, and he thinks I will buy it all back someday. But I don’t have any money. I have to just look at it. He’s sold two locks of it so far, both to tourists. People will buy anything.

He runs the store here, jacks the prices up so high that you’ve got to be really desperate to buy something. It’s fifty miles to town, and Jick gets a not-so-secret thrill every time someone admits that paying his price is better than driving a hundred miles round trip.

Three dollars for a box of envelopes that costs next to nothing in town, in real town; a dollar for an old drying-out lemon that someone needs for a recipe; two dollars and fifty cents for a quart of milk.

It’s dark in the store, and 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.

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