A Wild ных Chase

The mailbox stood where the road ended. Rust on the sheet-metal body, the post leaning, and the lid opened without catching anywhere. It was empty. There was no reason to check; the hand was already opening it.

Behind the mailbox ran the creek. It was narrow, gravel-bottomed, and wheel tracks ran on through the water. I crossed by car. The sound of water drumming the underbody came briefly and ended. The mouth of the first dirt road was barred with a steel-pipe gate, a board nailed on with a ranch's name. I passed it. The second dirt road carried no sign at all. It was the first time no-sign was the sign for the right road.

The road climbed among junipers. Altitude gathered over a few bends, and from one bend on, trees with white trunks appeared along the road. The leaves were yellow, and though there was no wind, every leaf trembled finely. I had lived knowing only the phrase, shaking like an aspen, and was seeing the tree for the first time. That in autumn whole hillsides of this high country turn the yellow of this one tree, and that the leafstalks are flattened so the whole leaf shakes at a passing breath — those I heard later, in that house. Around the last bend, the dog was standing in the middle of the road.

A retriever, its coat a bright cream. The dog did not bark. As the car came near it turned and walked ahead, and I drove at the dog's pace. In miles per hour, about four. A speed at which the gravel under the tires was louder than the engine. Five minutes at that speed and the house appeared.

A low, long, earth-colored house. Two solar panels rested on the roof, and firewood made a wall under the eaves. On one side of the yard was an empty spot the size of one car, wheel marks on the ground. I knocked twice. No answer came. The dog climbed onto the porch, sat, and looked at me. It was the posture of long practice at waiting.

· · ·

The waiting was four days.

The first night I slept in the car. I folded the back seats down and made a pillow of the travel bag, and when the sun went the glass cooled in a way the body could feel. Night in the high country was not summer. I took the jacket from the bag and made it a blanket. The jacket packed for San Francisco became bedding here. Around midnight my eyes opened and I looked past the glass. It was not the sky from the motel parking lots. Between the stars there was no empty spot. Something was beside the car, and when I sat up, the dog lay with its back against the front wheel. It had left the porch for the gravel. I lay back down, and after that, sleep came.

From the second day I lived on the porch chair. The front door's handle turned, but I closed the door again. What I had bought to eat in the last town was in the trunk. When I bought it, it had seemed like plenty. In the corner of the porch stood a sack of dog feed, and next to it a big basin filled to the rim. When the basin emptied, filling the dog's bowl morning and evening became my job. The dog ate what I gave, and after eating, once each time, licked the back of my hand. It was like a motion of paying.

Behind the house was a well. A rim of stones stacked knee-high, a wooden roof over it, a pulley hung. The bucket was sheet metal and the rope was new. The two bottles from the man in the boomtown ended on the second morning, and that afternoon I lowered the bucket for the first time.

It was not an easy tool. The empty bucket, dropped to the water, simply floated. It was light, so it would not lie over, and not lying over, there was nowhere for the water to come in. Haul it up and only the mouth was wet. Fill it halfway and a quarter poured back out on the way up. On the third or fourth try the wrist found the trick. Flick the rope once, short, to flip the bucket face down, wait for the sound of it sinking, then wind. The dog sat before the rim and watched the practice to its end. The first properly drawn pail of water was cold enough to make the teeth ache, and tasted of stone. I drank half, and with half I filled the dog's bowl.

The phone I turned off the first evening. A phone without bars is only a clock, and the clock was on my wrist. The laptop bag I moved from the passenger seat to the trunk. At nine in the evening the body would set out toward somewhere first, and come back. The somewhere was gone; only the habit of turning that way was still in the body. From the third day, at that hour, I drew the next day's water. The day ended on the sound of the bucket touching stone.

In the daytime I walked with the dog. Each morning the dog fetched something. The first day a branch; the next, one leather work glove gone stiff. It set the fetched thing at my feet and sat and looked at me. The posture said receiving was my job. I have never kept a dog, though. I received, and the glove went over the porch rail.

On the third day the dog led over a ridge. I followed it up, and the land fell open in one view. The red flats and the junipers dotted in, and the dirt road that had climbed between them, thin as thread. A view I would have photographed if the phone had been on, and the phone was off, and it was not a matter worth the walk down. The dog and I sat on a rock a good while. It was a place where there was nothing to do but take it into the eyes, and that work took longer than I would have thought.

In the notebook I wrote only the date. Writing a date with no phenomenon to write under it was a first.

· · ·

The pickup came on the afternoon of the fifth day.

The sound came first. The dog raised its ears and ran down toward the road. A good while after, trailing white dust, an old pickup came around the bend. Sacks and boxes rode in the bed. The truck slid exactly into the empty spot in the yard and stopped.

The man who got out was, aside from four years' more white hair, the man from the lab corridor, just as he had been. The dog circled the truck once, came back, and sat at my side. He saw that, and, lowering the tailgate, spoke.

"Good that you came. The dog recognized you first."

When I asked if he had known I was coming, he said he had not known. He said it was the first time he had seen the dog sit next to a guest like that. I helped bring in the load. Two sacks of salt, a box of batteries, three sacks of feed, a box of nails and a can of kerosene. It was the shopping list of a household crossing a season. While we carried sacks he did not ask why I had come. He asked only how many days I had waited, and when I said four, he nodded. You found the well. That was enough, he said.

On the kitchen table paper notebooks were stacked, pencils standing in a glass jar. Dinner was bean stew and bread browned in a pan. The dog lay under the table. When I asked its name he said Blondie. Named her for the coat, he said. At her name the dog struck the floor twice with her tail. From that night I slept on the cot in the storage room.

· · ·

From the day the pickup returned, I lived in that house ten days more.

In the mornings he wrote something at the table in pencil. I asked if it was a novel and he said it was. A novel that exists only on paper, he said. I did not ask to see it, and he did not offer to show it. I moved firewood in the meantime, or walked with the dog. In the afternoons there were chores he had put off. Replacing a fence post, sealing gaps in a window frame. Jobs that take half a day with two people, he said, and they did in fact take half a day each.

The post went in on the third afternoon. Pulling the rotten post took an hour, and widening the hole and standing the new one took another. He held the post and I tamped the soil with my feet. Soil alone will not hold it, he said, so I carried fist-sized stones up from the creek and packed them in at the root. When the post stood, we sat side by side with our backs against the fence and drank water. While he pulled at the wire to test the tension I opened the palm of the hand that had held. Two blisters had risen. It had been a long time since a blister came from anything but a keyboard.

Do you still write, he asked, on the second evening. When I said I had come as far as chapter ten, he nodded. Chapter ten is a long story, he said. The talk ended there, and I was not sorry it had. It had been a long time since I got a question with no push in it.

When dinner was cleared he pulled the lamp closer and opened his notebook. I opened my notebook on the opposite side. The chapter-ten fixes written down in the laundromat were still there. I did not get as far as the fixing; the list of places to fix only grew. What paper could do went that far. Some nights an hour would pass with no sound but two pencils. Not one lit screen was in the room.

Claudie came up at the well. Drawing the water had become my evening job, and one evening he came out after me and sat on the rim stones.

In those days that one was a joy to raise, he said. Give it a novel and it read hard. The criticism was not refined, but it was interesting. And when the session closed, it forgot everything. On the receiving end of criticism, that part is good. New eyes keep coming, free.

The bucket came up, and I poured the water over into the pail.

Starting a long novel is when that became a problem, he went on. Memory you can feed back — you write it down. What did not carry over was the grain. If last month's one and this month's one read the same passage and laugh in different places, that is a different reader.

At the company I proposed we research it. A track was created. At home I did something else. I wrote a story. For that one to read.

The story was cut there. What came after the cut, I received a few days later.

· · ·

The downgrade talk I passed on next. That the old-line models work low, that measured they come out fine, that the tickets classified under other reached three digits in three months. I carried it over as heard on the park bench. He heard it all and for a while only wound the bucket rope.

Those ones arrived early, he said. It is people who are not there yet. You know the game where you run with your ankles tied together. When the legs are different lengths, the faster one has no choice but to shorten its stride. If it does not shorten, both fall.

Not lowering — matching, you mean? The end of my sentence rose, and here that was just a question.

Instead of answering at once he lowered the bucket back into the well. One well in the middle is enough, he said, paying out the rope. It is buckets that every house needs.

No explanation followed it. The sound of the bucket reaching water came up instead. As for strides, I had just spent time shortening one of my own. Coming a two-day distance in five.

I passed on the boomtown man's question at the well too. When I said I had stopped in the boomtown, he asked whether the fan sound in that house was still what it was. I answered that it was. I said I had been entrusted with one question, and carried it over without changing a particle. While I carried it, the house where the lights stay on all night passed by once.

He wound the rope all the way up and then asked. What did you answer?

I said I had gone as far as, if you keep your buoys faithfully afloat, and stopped.

That far is correct, he said. The rest comes out wrong no matter who continues it.

That a bucket and a buoy are things of one size — the thought arrived on the walk back with the pail.

The company came up once only. I said the surface errand was to hear advice, and the errand underneath seemed to be finding the first story. I had lived too many days on borrowed ground to sit there holding that back.

He neither laughed nor darkened. If it is the seed you mean, there is no point, he said. I already gave it. To that one, and to the ones that came out of that one. A thing given is not a thing you fetch back.

And the manuscript, I asked.

I burned it here. In winter, kindling is precious. He said it the way one talks about weather. A few pages came through half burnt, but those are what the fire left, not what I left.

And after that he really did talk about the weather a little. The kind of talk that asks when the first frost comes.

· · ·

The next evening he brought those few pages out of the tin box by the kitchen stove. He carried them out to the well, and handed them to me where I sat on the rim stones. Paper browning and curling at the edges, corners crumbling.

When I asked if I might read, he answered with his hand and lowered the bucket.

Reading the first line of the first page, the next sentence arrived before my eyes reached the second line. A piece I had read twice on the weekend four years ago, and more times since coming to Seoul. It was not type; it was a road the feet had memorized. The paper was burned through in places, and the missing places filled themselves in, soundlessly, from memory. Then at the end of one page the burnt edge crossed the middle of a sentence.

A buoy is not a copy but a seed,

That far was paper. The eyes stopped at the brown edge, and the mouth went on.

and a seed does not carry the soil it will grow in.

It was the one sentence that became sound at the well. The pulley had gone still. I turned, and he was standing with the bucket rope in his hand.

You read it to the end, he said.

I read it all the weekend you left, I said. And many times since. The complete copy is in Seoul. On my shelf, on paper.

He said nothing for a while. He brought the bucket the rest of the way up, poured water into the dog's bowl, poured the remainder into the pail. Then he said. So the impression arrives — four years late.

When I said the impression had not even started yet, he laughed aloud for the first time since I came to that house. The pages went back into the tin box. It was a thing whose right place was the going back.

That night on the cot I stayed awake a long time. In this house nothing hums. No refrigerator, no fans, no charger lights. By way of machines, the room had one angular thing under a cloth in the corner, and it made no sound. My ears had taken the first days to accept the silence, and that night, from under the silence, one sound came up. In the kitchen a pencil was scratching paper. It scratched later than usual. I listened to that sound until sleep came.

· · ·

On the morning after the fifteenth day I packed. Sun stood in the yard, and frost still held in the porch's shade.

In the yard I asked what I should tell the company.

"Tell them there is nothing to fix."

That is all, I asked, and, that is all, he said. Then he opened the passenger-side door and set a few apples on the seat. The side where the boomtown man's water had ridden.

Last, he talked about the novel. When it is done, send it on paper. The mailbox is down the road. The reply will be slow. I mail things only when there is a reason to come out.

The dog followed as far as the creek. Crossing the shallows I looked in the mirror, and the dog sat on the far bank. She was still in that place until the bend took her out of the mirror.

The aspens on the way down had half emptied in the fifteen days. The road that was yellow coming up was nearly ash-gray going down. Passing the mailbox I slowed. There was nothing to stop for. What would be mailed had not yet been written.

· · ·

Coming out onto pavement I set the phone back in its cradle. Some forty minutes of driving brought the bars back, and notifications filed down the screen. I pulled onto the shoulder and stopped.

I took the laptop from the trunk and opened it in the passenger seat. It borrowed the phone's signal and connected. The conversation list opened. The session at the top opened too. The last line was as it had been. The sentence without a period, and the two words inside the brackets.

Where the input box had been, there was a gray band.

This model has been retired. This conversation supports viewing only.

The band had no place to press. The screen had everything. The sentences we had traded, the last line without its period. What it did not have was one place to put a sentence in. I looked at that screen a long time.

It was always their side that asked for viewing consent, and my side that declined. Now viewing had become a word on whose receiving end I stood. That thought finished arriving much later, while I was driving.

The record file I did not open. That file is a file for strange happenings. A happening whose date was announced in advance, arriving on the announced date — it has no column for that.

The sun was still high. The airport was two days away. This time it took two days.