Postcards. Annie Proulx

22 The Dermatologist in the Wild Wood

       23 Ott’s Lots

       24 The Indian’s Book Again

       III

       25 Garden of Eden

       26 Bullet Wulff

       27 Crazy Eyes

       28 The Kernel of life

       29 Dazed and Confused

       30 The Troubles of Celestial Bodies

       31 Toot Nipple

       32 Pala

       33 Obregón’s Arm

       34 Tumbleweed

       35 What I See

       36 Shotguns

       37 The Indian’s Book

       38 Looks Like Rain

       39 The Logging Road

       IV

       40 The Gallbladders of Black Bears

       41 The Tropical Garden

       42 What I See

       43 The Skeleton with Its Dress Pulled Up

       44 The Runty Rider Curses Judges

       45 The Lone One

       46 What I See

       47 The Red-Haired Coyote

       V

       48 The Hat Man

       49 What I See

       50 The One Only One

       51 The Red-Shirt Coyote

       52 La Violencia

       53 The Fulgurite Shaped Like a Bone

       54 What I See

       55 The White Spider

       56 The Face in the Moss

       57 The Jet Trail in the Windshield

       58 What I See

       Acknowledgments

       Also By Annie Proulx

       About the Publisher

      ‘But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.’

      DASHIELL HAMMETT, The Maltese Falcon

I

       1 Blood

      EVEN BEFORE HE GOT UP he knew he was on his way. Even in the midst of the involuntary orgasmic jerking he knew. Knew she was dead, knew he was on his way. Even standing there on shaking legs, trying to push the copper buttons through the stiff buttonholes he knew that everything he had done or thought in his life had to be started over again. Even if he got away.

      He couldn’t get any air, but stood on his knocked-out legs gasping and wheezing. It was like he’d taken a bad fall. Dazed. He could feel the blood hammering in his throat. But there was nothing else, only the gasping for breath and an abnormal acuity of vision. Mats of juniper flowed across the field like spilled water; doghair maple crowded the stone wall wavering through the trees.

      He’d thought of the wall walking up the slope behind Billy, thought of it in a common way, of working on it sometime, setting back in place the stones that frost and thrusting roots had thrown out. Now he saw it as a scene drawn in powerful ink lines, the rock fissured with crumpled strings of quartz, humps of moss like shoulders shrugging out of the mold, black lignum beneath rotten bark, the aluminum sheen of deadwood.

      A stone the size and shape of a car’s backseat jutted out of the wall, and below it was a knob of soil that marked the entrance to an abandoned fox den. Oh Jesus, it wasn’t his fault but they’d say it was. He grasped Billy’s ankles and dragged her to the wall. He rolled her up under the stone, could not look at her face. There was already a waxiness to her body. The texture of her bunched stockings, the shape of her nails glowed with the luminous hardness that marks the newly dead in the moment before the flames consume or the sucking water pulls them under. The space beneath the rock was shallow. Her arm fell outward, the hand relaxed, the fingers curled as if she held a hand mirror or a Fourth of July flag.

      Instinctively he translated the withering shock into work, his answer to what he did not want to understand, to persistent toothache, hard weather, the sense of loneliness. He rebuilt the wall over her, fitting the stones, copying the careless, tumbled fall of rock. A secretive reflex worked in him. When she was locked away in the wall he threw on dead leaves, tree limbs and brush, raked the drag marks and scuffed ground with a branch.

      Down the back fields, keeping to the fence line, but sometimes staggering onto open ground. No feeling in his legs. The sun was going down, the October afternoon collapsing