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    Wolf
    Wolf
    Wolf
    Ebook233 pages5 hours

    Wolf

    By Jim Harrison

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Jim Harrison’s first novel—a walk on the wild side from “a force of nature in American letters” (The Seattle Times).
     
    The New York Times–bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. Praised as “a raunchy, funny, swaggering, angry, cocksure book,” Wolf tells the story of a man who abandons Manhattan after too many nameless women and drunken nights, to roam the wilderness of northern Michigan, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the rare wolves that prowl that territory (The New York Times Book Review).
     
    “When you turn the last page and Swanson’s voice stops, you want to flip back and keep listening.” —The Examiner
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 3, 2016
    ISBN9780802190062
    Wolf
    Author

    Jim Harrison

    Jim Harrison is a poet, novelist and essayist. His trilogy, The Legend of the Falls, has been adapted for film.

    Read more from Jim Harrison

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    Reviews for Wolf

    4/5

    101 ratings16 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Another great read from Mo Hayder. Her novels are consistently tense and gripping and I positively galloped through this book. As with Hayder's other books, there are some disturbingly vivid descriptions of crime, but no one can deny her writing is gutsy and pulls the reader along at a breakneck speed.This was an interesting read as for the majority of the time, Jack Caffrey is peripheral to the main content. The story is based on a home invasion of family stuck deep in rural Somerset and just out of reach of a decent phone signal. Victims of an apparently nasty burglary, the pulse is raised as we come to realise that all is not as it seems. There are horrible reminders of a previous murder and the characters aren't quite as they seem. There is a real sting in the tail of this story as it twists and turns towards the finale. Fans of Hayder will not be disappointed.
    • 5/5
      Many people commented that Mo Hayder's last Jack Caffrey novel, Poppet was not as good as the rest. A fact that I denied continuously. Having just finished Wolf I was wrong. Wolf is a return to everything that is brilliant about Mo Hayder's, Jack Caffrey series and shows some of the others up.The book is unique to others as this is not so much a police investigation as a private case for Jack Caffrey. None of the familiar characters appear except for Jack and the Walking Man are present. Initially I was disappointed that we would not see the continuation of the Jack and Flea relationship but as the book progresses it was so enthralling I forgot there were any characters missing at all. The victims as always play a wonderful part in this book. I love the way Mo Hayder invites us to meet new characters in her villains and victims. Her depth of character development in this book are a credit to her and a defining factor in how good this book is. If you have followed the series from the beginning, like I have, you will love this book. This book answers several questions that have been held over from previous novel and from the beginning of the Jack Caffrey series. I simply brilliant read.
    • 5/5
      I've said it before and I'll say it again - Mo Hayder scares the bejesus out of me. I've been hooked on her Detective Inspector Jack Caffery series from Birdman, the first book. Wolf is the seventh book. I literally could. not. put. it. down. Every available minute for two days was spent on the edge of my seat. Hayder masterfully preys upon our fears. Are we truly safe in our homes? Will our past come back to haunt us in ways we can't imagine? Can we ever really put a rational explanation to everything? "When you're so scared that you'd do anything, anything at all, then we'll tell you what we want..." I always stop to appreciate the covers of Hayder's book before I turn the first page. There's always a detail that hints at the dark story within. This time it's that splash of red on a picture of a bucolic country home. That - and the flies. The Turrets is home to the Anchor-Ferrers family. The nearby grounds were home to a horrific crime fourteen years ago. When two policeman come to the door the family is fearful that the killer has been released from prison without their knowing - and that he's back in the neighbourhood. A homeless man known to Jack as The Walking Man, finds a small dog with a cryptic 'help us' note tucked in his collar. Walking Man promises Jack information if he'll take the note seriously and look for the owners. Jack has been searching for answers to his brother's death for decades. In each book, a clue or a thread is exposed, leading Jack just a little bit closer to the resolution he seeks. In Wolf, Hayder gets us as close as we've ever been. I've loved the Jack Caffery character from the beginning. He's an enigma - flawed, fearless and full of secrets, but a dedicated cop - who plays by his own rules. Hayder slowly and deliciously builds the tension - it is what might happen that has the reader metaphorically covering their eyes with a pillow. And just when we think we can look - she changes course, taking the narrative in frightening directions I didn't see coming. Hayder's plotting is terrifyingly brilliant. And the ending was perfectly disturbing. Hayder plumbs the depths of the human psyche in both her characters and her crimes. (Gentle readers, this one may not be for you.) Wolf could be read as a stand alone. But to really come to appreciate this series, I would start with Birdman. Wolf is an absolutely and highly recommended read. Just make sure you lock the doors and turn on the lights. This is one of the best crime fiction series out there.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic. This book literally had me feeling scared and uneasy from the beginning! A great case that is terrifying for anyone with kids, even grown-up ones. Many issues are resolved.The book starts with the closure of the Misty case which has been going on for several books now. Jack is constantly thinking of his feelings for Flea, but she doesn't make an appearance this time. Instead, Jack meets up with the Walking Man again and this sets him off on the case he eventually becomes involved with. While it has been no secret to the reader for a few books now, Jack finally learns what happened to his brother. As you can probably tell, these books are best read in order as info from previous books is often integral or at least pops up in conversation. This one even has a scene where "Birdman" from the first book is discussed. This one is extremely unsettling and I enjoyed it much more than the last one.
    • 4/5
      Wolf. Mo Hayder. 2014. It has been several years since I have read Hayder. Her books so dark, violent, disturbing, and creepy that I space them out. This one is too. A family is held hostage in their own country home by two sick characters who gained entrance by pretending to be policemen. While they terrify the family, Detective Inspector Jack Caffrey broods over the disappearance of his brother years ago. The Walking Man, a homeless guy who always seems to turn up when Jack needs him, comes upon a dog with part of a note attached to his collar. Jack begins to investigate and discovers the hostage situation. Suspenseful and especially frightening since the readers know what the ghouls have planned for the family
    • 5/5
      This is a great read, genuine plot twists, believable characters, nice attention to detail. I chose it because it was a runner-up to King's Mr. Mercedes for the 2015 Edgar, the only author on the shortlist I hadn't read before. I thought Wolf a better read than Mr. Mercedes. Hope I didn't ruin earlier books in the series by reading this one first.
    • 5/5
      I'm a voracious reader and usually select books that have been well reviewed by the New York Times or the Washington Post or ones written by authors I follow no matter how they're reviewed. Years ago I read Mo Hayder's "Birdman"; it made no lasting impression on me. The same cannot be said of Ms. Hayder's "Wolf." The book moves at a fever-pitch pace, with every moment of relief to be snatched away by a gasp of surprise. I enjoy thrillers, but this one is more haunting, even in its sweet moments, than any other I've read, and I've read plenty. I plan to add Ms. Hayder to my list of favorites simply because of the roller-coaster ride that is "Wolf."
    • 4/5
      Absolutely back to form after the little wobble on -Poppet- (though the perpetrator wasn't much of a mystery -- maybe I should give up hoping for that after several years of reading in this genre?). I could keep going with this series indefinitely, but I hope the character of Jack Caffery finds a bit more peace instead.
    • 4/5
      Mo Hayder does it again with this gripping thriller. I am a big fan of thrillers. What I really love about Hayder is that her thrillers are always just a little bit different from your typical thriller. Hayder is skilled at infusing an extra dash of psychologically disturbing elements, such that I alternate between eagerly devouring the book to find out what happens next, and cringing from the almost unbearable psychological pain of reading further. Hayder is supremely talented at making her thrillers not just thrilling but very, very creepy. And "Wolf" was creepy indeed.The book has two plot threads. First, it is a story about the Anchor-Ferrars family's ordeal at being held hostage in their own home. Second, it is a story about Detective Jack Caffrey and his anguished search for answers regarding his missing brother. It is a true "aha!" moment when the reader realizes where these two plot threads intersect. And it is fascinating to see how the two threads come closer and closer together as the book progresses. In typical Hayder fashion, there is a plot twist in the end, but every element of the book is so skillfully handled that, even as you gasp when you reach the twist, you nod knowingly because everything you just read supported the twist. Hayder's twists are never just thrown in for shock factor; she weaves all the supporting facts so well that you wonder how she was able to keep you in the dark while subtlely revealing so much. Such writing talent!The reason I did not give this book 5 stars is that, while I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, it wasn't to the point where I felt it was so good I couldn't put it down. I'm not sure why I wasn't completely sucked in - it may simply be a factor of the British English, for which I the American had to occasionally pause to interpret.
    • 4/5
      Hayder takes your worst nightmares, translates them into words and sets them down on a page. Grisly, gritty and oh so dark, but her character Inspector Caffery is a character that I am drawn to. He is haunted by his brothers death when they were young, convinced he was taken by the pedophile that lived very close to them, and he has never stopped looking for his body or information on what happened to him. The walking man is another great character, with a difficult sorrow of his own.The case in this book will find Caffrey solving a horrible crime on his own, with a side deal made with the Walking man. The case itself, has many twists and turns, revelations that shock, and a resolution ashorrible as the crime itself. In other words, this is Hayder true to form, doing what she does best. Giving human faces to our deepest fears.
    • 5/5
      A family alone in an isolated house will never forget a murder some fourteen years ago. Unknown to them they are going to be reminded of the murders and held captive in their home. Can Jack Caffrey save the family in time.My Thoughts:As always I like to read any book that is part of a series in order. Due to the fact they do follow on and the main characters have lives away from the main story. In Jack's case there is always the ongoing search for his missing brother.As with Mo Hayders other books this one has plenty edge of the seat moments. The book is very gritty and gory and has plenty of tension. The story has plenty of surprises along the way and will keep the reader guessing.This for me was an excellant read and although I like Mo Hayder's books very much the last couple have been ok where this one has been excellant from start to finish.This also for me has been my first book that I have read as an ebook. I thought I would hate the fact that I was'nt holding a solid book but I was quite surprised. I actually enjoyed the whole experince but I was helped along the way by reading a first class story.I would highly recommend this book as it wil make the hairs stand up on your neck but would recommend that the whole series is read in order to get to know Jack.
    • 4/5
      The Walking Man finds a dog wandering alone with a scrap of paper with the words; HELP US; attached to its collar. He calls on Detective Inspector Jack Caffery to investigate. Caffery is reluctant to get involved -- until the Walking Man promises in exchange new information regarding the childhood disappearance of Caffery's brother. Meanwhile, the Anchor-Ferrers, a wealthy local family, are fighting for their lives, held hostage in their remote home ten miles away.Another horrific book from Mo Hayder. Not for the weak or faint of heart! The ending was the best when Caffery got information from The Walking Man about his brother. Very surprising!
    • 4/5
      This book is a home invasion nightmare with several twists and turns. The scenes inside the house ramped up the tension. The scenes with Jack doing police work were slow by comparison. A good addition to the series.
    • 4/5
      Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?When police arrive at the Anchor-Ferras' remote family home, they fear that a convicted killer is on the loose again and started another killing spree. But their nightmare is only just beginning, as they becomes hostages of men determined to take them to the brink of terror...Meanwhile, DI Jack Caffrey is working on a cold case that is very personal to him, which will tie him to the Anchor-Ferras in ways he couldn't possibly imagine...To be completely clear, this is a DARK crime thriller. Hayder has pulled no punches in describing the family's torment, ratcheting up the tension chapter by chapter. She has wisely pared the narrative down, switching almost exclusively between the remote house  and Jack Caffrey's very personal journey. And what a frustrating journey it becomes, for Caffrey is the only one with any clues, but he is completely oblviouous to the crime taking place. This also helps raise the stakes: will he find out what's going on and will he be in time?It is these questions that kept me going when the pace seemed to flag a little. While irrelevancies have been pared down to almost non-existence, the pace is deliberately slow and measured with everything carefully arranged. The end, when it comes, is worth the patience.Those unfamiliar with Jack Caffrey may be wary of entering a range so far along, but I found that while he is sketched a little thinly at first and there are clearly nuances aimed at regular readers, these do not detract from the story and there appears to be nothing requiring any prior knowledge of stories or characters. However, it is clear that this is only part of his ongoing character arc.In the end, I found this to be a measured, tense, thriller, which while unlikely to revisit, well worth the read.
    • 5/5
      A terrible murder that happened years ago has left its mark on the Anchor-Ferrers family. Hugo Frink, seventeen-year- former boyfriend of Lucia Anchor-Ferrers is out in the woods with his new girlfriend when they are attacked and killed in a horrific way. The murderer, Minnet Kable, was captured and locked up. Now fourteen years later, Oliver, Matilda, Lucia, and their dog Bear, arrive at their country house, and discover something strung up in the trees in their garden. Has Minnet been released and has he killed again? Soon afterward, two police officers turn up to ask about the murder of a woman in a nearby cottage, and to ask the family if they’ve seen anything. The family take the opportunity to show the two policemen what they’ve found. However, the policemen are imposters and once they’ve earned the trust of the family, they tie them up, and rob them. But that’s only the beginning of the nightmare.

      Meanwhile Detective Inspector Jack Caffery is still investigating the disappearance of his older brother Ewan, when they were young boys. He has just heard that someone connected to the case has recently died in Holloway prison. She was his last hope in solving the case and finding Ewan. But, she left a will, and it seems to reveal a final clue. To find out more, he needs to make a deal with the character called the ‘Walking Man’. He says will only help if Jack finds the true owners of a lost dog called Bear, that he's recently found. Those of you who have read the Hayder books before will recognize the Walking Man and what he's looking for as he walks throughout the countryside.

      Not for the faint of heart, this novel is a dark, impeccably-plotted thriller that will hook readers from the first page and won’t let them go. Mo Hayder ratchets up the terror with all of the taut suspense and terrifying twists that have kept her fans on the edge of their seats for years. I don't recommend reading this series out of order. There are too many connecting threads to make it enjoyable unless you've read the others.
    • 5/5
      What's It About?A bone-chilling novel about a family held hostage in their country home. When a vagrant—the Walking Man, a recurring character in Hayder’s fiction—finds a dog wandering alone with a scrap of paper with the words “HELP US” attached to its collar. He’s sure it’s a desperate plea from someone in trouble and calls on Detective Inspector Jack Caffery to investigate. Caffery is reluctant to get involved—until the Walking Man promises in exchange new information regarding the childhood disappearance of Caffery’s brother. Meanwhile, the Anchor-Ferrers, a wealthy local family, are fighting for their lives in their remote home ten miles away. As their ordeal becomes increasingly bizarre and humiliating, the family begins to wonder: is this really a random crime, or have they been chosen for a reason?What Did I Think?I believe if this had been the first book that I had read in Jack Caffery series it more than likely would have received less stars...but because I knew how well it would pick up...I hung in there and wasn't at all disappointed. This author is a master at ratcheting up tension slowly throughout a book to the point that it demands to be finished. Some will find this one a bit depressing and the characters dark...but what characters she has created in the two that held the family hostage. The ending was shocking and so over the top even for Mo Hayder. You will never in a million years see it coming.

    Book preview

    Wolf - Jim Harrison

    I

    HURON MOUNTAINS

    You could travel west out of Reed City, a small county seat in an unfertile valley with a small yellow brick courthouse and a plugged cannon on its lawn next to a marble slab with the names of the World War One and Two dead inscribed in gold and the not dead plainly inscribed with the suspicious neatness of cemetery script, those who served, farther west through fifty miles of pine barrens dotted with small farm settlements often of less than thirty people, or merely a grocery store and gas station adjoined by a shabby aluminum trailer or a basement house with the first and perhaps second stories awaiting more prosperous times, the stores themselves with little and aged stock—lunch meat, bologna pickled in a jar, Polish sausage, tinned foods covered with dust, plaquettes of fish lures, mosquito repellent in aerosol cans, live bait and a pop cooler outside the door—but not many of these—a narrow road through mixed conifers, cedar and jack pine, some stunted scrub oak, birch, and the short-lived poplar, a pulp tree usually living less than twenty years and clotting the woods floor with its rotting trunks and branches, and west through the low pelvic mysteries of swamps divided invisibly from the air by interlocking creeks and small rivers, made unbearable in spring and summer by mosquitoes and black flies, swamps dank with brackish water and pools of green slime, small knolls of fern, bog marshes of sphagnum, spongelike and tortuous to the human foot and bordered by impenetrable tamarack thickets: in short a land with no appreciable history and a continuously vile climate, lumbered off for a hundred years with few traces of the grand white pine which once covered it, an occasional charred almost petrified stump four feet in diameter, evidence of trees which rose nearly two hundred feet and covered the northern half of the state and the Upper Peninsula, razed with truly insolent completeness by the lumber barons after the Civil War with all the money going to the cities of the south—Saginaw, Lansing, Detroit—and east to Boston and New York; and the houses, even the large farmhouses on reasonably good land, sloppily built, ramshackle and craftless compared to Massachusetts or Vermont; west to Lake Michigan then to turn north along its coast to the Straits of Mackinac, cross the mammoth bridge, travel west another three hundred miles through the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula and then north again into the comparatively vast, the peopleless Huron Mountains.

    I crawled out of the sleeping bag and dipped a cup of water from a small tin pail but the water had warmed and a breeze during the night had blown some ashes into it and they mixed there in the surface film with dead mosquitoes. I drew on my pants and boots and walked to the creek. Dew had soaked the grass and ferns, made the leaves limp under my feet; earth was pale green a half hour before the sun would come up and over and through the ridge of trees to the east. I knelt and drank from the creek, the water so cold the teeth ached. I closed the tent flaps, gathered my binoculars (which I would quickly lose) and a worthless .30-30 rifle with bad sights my father had owned, and took a compass reading which I knew would be inaccurate and pointless as the ground in the area was full of varying amounts of iron ore. But I fixed on a knoll a mile or so away and then on the supposed direction of the car several miles directly south by southwest and set out for a hike. Two hours later I was unfathomably lost.

    There is a brief time when first lost that you are sure you will be lost forever. Your heart flutters and you become winded with little walking and everything you know or think you know about the woods is forgotten, or you aren't sure you ever knew enough in the beginning. The compass reads an impossible direction. The view from the treetop you reach with effort reveals only the tops of other trees, or if you follow a stream you know you are walking at least three times further than necessary as the stream winds and twists, makes heavy-growthed flats with hairpin bends and builds swampy areas that make walking very wet and the footing unsure, the mosquitoes clouding around your head as you move. It is first of all embarrassment mixed with a little terror; when the frantic pumping ceases and you regain your breath it is easy enough to turn around and retrace the path you've thrashed through the brush. The rare deaths that do occur are simply a matter of the lost waiting too long to turn around.

    I lay along a tree trunk fallen half across the stream, its roots weakened by the undercut bank. I dozed for a while in the sun, then upon waking sighted the rifle from this prone position at a leaf, then at a large cropping of rocks downstream from the tree.

    I had wanted to move farther upstream and set up camp on higher ground to get some breeze and to be less vulnerable to the bugs but I only found the tent in the middle of the evening. It was ten o'clock and still not quite dark when I ate my supper of boiled pinto beans and onions. I doused the entire plateful with red pepper sauce and lay back against a tree thinking how much I wanted a drink, a large water glass filled with warm whiskey, or a succession of doubles with beer used as a chaser. I thought back to the Kettle of Fish bar on Macdougal Street where I first began drinking in earnest. Everyone there seemed twice my age (I was eighteen) and I could get dizzy on four glasses of ale. Eighty cents. But habits are of interest only to the habitual-fat men talk about their diets for hours without boredom, shedding imaginary pounds. I took a long drink of water to wash the fire from my throat and looked at my watch in the firelight. Stopped again; I slipped the watch off noticing the strip of white skin beneath it on the wrist somehow not related to the rest of my body. A friend had a pachuco cross carved beneath his watchband. I flipped this seven-dollar special into the fire thinking idly that in the heat the hands might whirl backwards or in reverse of those old movie montages where a calendar's pages are flipped and trains crisscross the nation from corner of screen to corner of screen, from triumph to triumph with a star's name growing ever larger on the billboards and marquees. I rubbed mosquito dope onto my hands and face and neck and crawled into the sleeping bag.

    We drove down a gravel road bordered on both sides with Lombardy poplars which had begun to die with leaves gone on the topmost branches. My father fiddled with the radio then said no ballgame today it's Monday. We turned into a driveway and moved jouncing over ruts to a farmhouse which from the road had been concealed in a grove of elm and maple trees. When we stopped two dogs rushed out from under the porch as if to devour the car to get at us. My father got out and said come along but I stayed in the car, in part not to get my new shoes dirty which since we left town I had been rubbing busily against the back of my pantleg for a shine. He left and the dogs didn't bother him. They looked like they were from the same litter—half collie and half shepherd—I had had a similar dog a few years before, Penny, but she had bitten the mailman and we had to give her to a farmer who I learned later shot her for killing chickens. I heard laughter and turned in the car to see in the far corner of the shaded yard three girls playing with a swing. There was an elm tree and from a lower branch a rope was suspended with a tire attached to it; they were taking turns swinging, and the oldest had to lift the smallest who was about five up into the tire which she straddled, a leg on either side. The little one had lost three fingers on one hand and had some lilacs between the thumb and forefinger, holding the swing with the other hand. The lilacs were growing along a ditch on the far side of the house. It was May and they were blooming white and purple in great clumps and their heavy scent mixed with the smell of wild mint from the ditch. The house was covered with brown imitation brick siding, nearly a trademark for the poor, with a cement porch darkened with tall honeysuckle bushes. The oldest girl who looked about twelve got into the swing and pulled herself higher and higher, the little one holding her ears as if something were going to explode. She straddled the swing and her dress fluttered higher with each pass. I looked down at my shoes again then played with the radio dial. I looked back at her and I could see her legs and hips all the way up to her panties and waist. I felt cloudy and giggly and had an urge to go over and talk to them. But then my father returned from the barn and shook hands with a man and we left.

    I awoke no later than midnight and the fire was out what with only pine to burn, a nearly heatless wood compared to beech or maple. I thought I heard something and I reached for the rifle which lay along the sleeping bag. I got up and started a fire and decided to make coffee and stay up all night rather than be attacked by nameless beasts all of which were in my head and were due, I'm sure, to my brain drying out. There stands the glass that will ease all my pain, sang Webb Pierce. It would begin to get light before four A.M. I'v always been immoderately clock-oriented. But that was part of what seemed wrong with my infrequent periods of actual labor: the deadly predictability of jobs everyone sighs about, a glut of clocks and my thin neck twisting to their perfect circles, around and around and around. I remembered working in an office in Boston and during the second week there I looked up at the clock on the wall and it was two-thirty instead of the expected four-thirty. I began weeping real salt tears (partly the five doubles for lunch no doubt). A clock-torn child of twenty-seven with tears rolling down his plump cheeks onto his shirt collar, the shirt unbuttoned because it was too small, taken from a dead father's dresser drawer.

    The creek roared and tumbled past boulders where I dipped the coffeepot, the noise concealing the movements of the gryphon on the verge of leaping and tearing out my throat. The pink-elephant bit for d.t.’s is bullshit. I was thinking of sauterne and California. It took almost a month to hitch home and I had gone there for no reason anyway, or as Tom Joad had said, There's something going on out there in the West. Certainly is. In San Francisco in a deserted building called the Hanging Gardens by those who slept there we had split a hundred peyote buttons four ways, small cacti which after peeling remind one of gelatinous rotten green peppers. I chewed up an overdose of twenty buttons raw, one after another as if they were some sort of miraculous food then vomited out a window repeatedly for hours. When my mind finally refocused my bedroll was gone. And I walked for what seemed like a year down to Hosmer to catch the labor bus for the bean fields outside of San Jose. A strange form of poison. Not to be recommended, at least not in such large doses. The experience isn't verbally transferable—I've never read a record that came close. Years afterward a small part of my brain still felt the effects.

    I drank several cups of coffee looking off into the moonless cloudy dark beyond the fire. As long as you have to die anyway it may as well be between a grizzly's jaws but they're a thousand miles farther west. In the peyote trance the naked chorus girls foolishly summoned up were peeled and beet-red with snatches an inky and oily black, hard as basalt. The old joke of a woman strangling a rat between her legs. In bars all over the country they are beaver pie poontang pussy quiff cunt shag clam and so on. That thirty-eight-year-old woman in Detroit with violently teased hair and a beer-fed roll of fat around her middle, red mouth like a war wound winks at you in the mirror above the bottles and you wink back with your blind eye and buy her a drink, schnapps on the rocks, and you light her cigarette and look at her fingers which have claws that remind you of a leopard. She has an ankle bracelet announcing BOB in silver. She pouts and babytalks about the movies and whatever happened to Randolph Scott and she says she is a cosmotologist. She knows the cosmos. A home permanent. A Toni. Dressing hair & girl talk. You go into the toilet and look at yourself in the mirror and think that if you were a real American, maybe a marine or a paratrooper or a truckdriver, you would screw her. But you're not so you hover over the urinal and by now your cock has almost shrunk back in your body in reverse lust and you think of excuses. She probably has syph! Or she hasn't showered in a week, she's an old lizard skin, or if she had as many pricks sticking out of her as she's had stuck in her she would look like a porcupine, or she's simply too fat. But it doesn't work so you come out of the toilet and she's following your movement in the mirror as you bolt through the door and into the street, feeling somehow not very virile but safe, thinking it would have been like fucking a vacuum cleaner, thinking of cool monasteries in the country with birds singing sweetly outside the windows and the Mother Superior kneeling before you after vespers. No nuns in monasteries. Or at least a cheerleader after a high school football game sincere about love with a cedar hope chest begun, some homemade bleached muslin pillow cases folded in the bottom with his and hers needleworked in mauve. And as she makes love with no interest she talks of the funny experiment in chemistry class that was so stinky. Naked from waist to bobbysocks.

    I checked my trotlines, a simple device to catch fish without fishing. You bait the small hook and tie the line to a tree or low-hanging branch. The first line held nothing but a bare hook but the second had a small brook trout, the stupidest of trout, about nine inches long. I cleaned it and let the guts wash away in the creek not wanting to attract raccoons who seem able to smell fish guts from miles away. I put the trout in foil and let it steam with a slice of onion then ate it with bread and salt. For dessert I stuck my finger in a small jar of honey and licked it off. The sky was barely beginning to lighten and invisible birds sang, rather as we are told now, to warn other birds away.

    I slept a few hours after the sun came up; strange about night fears and how my courage strengthens by noon. I had hummed my soaked brain to sleep with The Old Rugged Cross, the equivalent for me of a trench confession. A woman sang it at the funeral in a clear tremulous whine, a wet wind coming through barn slats. But the grandmother had insisted on this anachronism and it was her oldest son. I sang many hymns during a summer in New York City in a room on Grove Street that looked out onto a six-by-six air vent the bottom of which was covered with newspapers, bottles and old mopheads. Rats crawled there in daylight. I couldn't handle the city; it seemed consistently malefic and I wanted to be elsewhere but I couldn't go home, having announced I had left forever. Old songs learned as a fifteen-year-old Baptist convert: There's a Fountain Filled with Blood (drawn from Emmanuel's veins), or Safe Am I (in the hollow of His hand), or the best one, Wonderful the Matchless Grace of Jesus. I simply had no business there in Sodom but refused at nineteen to accept the fact. Sally salved me, Grace greased me home. No control over my cheap sense of such words as destiny and time. I wrote lists of things I wanted or missed for want of the ability to complete a sentence; always half drunk in airless heat as if the words were squeezed out through the knuckles:

    sun bug dirt soil lilac leaf leaves hair spirea maple thigh teeth eyes grass tree fish pine bluegill bass wood dock shore sand lilypads sea reeds perch water weeds clouds horses goldenrod road sparrows rock deer chicken-hawk stump ravine blackberry bush cabin pump hill night sleep juice whiskey cards slate rock bird dusk dawn hay boat loon door girl bam straw wheat canary bridge falcon asphalt fern cow bees dragonfly violets beard farm stall window wind rain waves spider snake ant river beer sweat oak birch creek swamp bud rabbit turtle worms beef stars milk sunfish rock-bass ears tent cock mud buckwheat pepper gravel ass crickets grasshopper elm barbed-wire tomatoes bible cucumber melon spinach bacon ham potatoes flesh death fence oriole corn robin apple manure thresher pickles basement brush dog-wood bread cheese wine cove moss porch gulley trout fish-pole spaniel mow rope reins nose leek onion feet

    When finished I had a choking sensation and walked around with it for days. I would start on West Forty-second and walk along the docks under the highways, always as close to the water as possible, around the tip of the island and the Battery then up to East Forty-second, scarcely noticing or remembering anything. I couldn't return home as a failure, having sold my graduation suit and pawned my graduation watch. The salutatorian's speech was Youth, Awake. A busboy, then washing the inside windshields at a carwash, then a bookstore clerk for a dollar twenty an hour. I always was as stealthy as possible on Tenth Avenue, having seen Slaughter on Tenth Avenue years before.

    By noon the air had become warm and still though far above great dark stratocumulus clouds rolled along from the northwest, across Lake Superior from Canada. There would be a bad storm and I wasn't ready for it; I jogged the three or four miles back to the tent, the first raindrops beginning to fall on the leaves and the wind gray and chilling. I gathered as much kindling as possible and threw it in the tent, then began digging a ditch around the tent with a hatchet, scooping the dirt and roots with my hands for want of a shovel. By the time I was finished my clothes and skin were soaked and I crawled into the tent and stripped, shivering while the storm roared along, a cloudburst that bent trees and broke limbs, made creeks through the woods. I slept in exhaustion and awoke about evening and saw through the flaps a puddle where my fire had been. It was still raining, though now softly, and very cold. I wanted suddenly to be in a hotel in New York or Boston, to be warm after sleeping off lunch and to take the cellophane off a glass in a yellow bathroom and pour whiskey in the glass then add a half inch or so of chlorinated water and plan the evening.

    When Marcia went to California I followed a week later but missed her in Sacramento from which she traveled south to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was broke by Sacramento and had in any event lost interest in her; seeing new country or a new city has always wiped the immediate past clean. I didn't have a picture of her and when I tried to envision her, the features would change vaguely and then I would have to start over as if dressing a bald mannequin, but then an eye would drop to the floor or the mouth would enlarge or the ears would disappear. When I tried to imagine her with someone else I felt nothing; she had mentioned several times that she wanted to make love to an Indian someday, not, of course, ever having met one; a Cheyenne brave with full war regalia blasting

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