Joyce Oates: Sourland

Kolk gave Sophie a sidelong glance. The exposed teeth were hidden from her, she could see only the unmutilated side of the man’s face, his mouth barely visible amid the bristling beard. The dark-tinted glasses were all but opaque.

If you will be kind to me. Please promise me!

If you will not hurt me. I am the person who has come to you, whom you have summoned.

“How did you learn about — my husband’s death?”

Sophie spoke hesitantly. In her letters to Kolk she had never asked him this crucial question nor had he volunteered to answer it.

Kolk’s reply was an enigmatic shrug of his shoulders. He was staring straight ahead, at the highway.

Sophie persisted: “Did you keep in contact with Matt, over the years? Or with mutual friends? Was that how you knew?”

“I kept contact, yes. With some part of the past.”

Sophie wondered what this meant. Some part of the past?

“But you never called Matt. When we were all still in Madison, you might have called him. Matt had been your friend, he’d been badly hurt when you…”

Was this true? In some way, Sophie thought it had to be.

Kolk hadn’t called Matt, and Matt hadn’t called Kolk. Matt had said stiffly He’s not my friend. We’re out of each other’s life.

All that Sophie could remember with any degree of clarity was following Kolk out of an apartment — not the one in which she and Matt were living at the time, but someone else’s apartment — and into a drafty stairwell. There’d been a smell of cooking odors — curry? A man’s stripped-down bicycle on a stairway landing, leaning against a wall? The circumstances of that incident had almost entirely faded from her mind. Yet vividly she recalled the need to touch Kolk, and the way he’d thrown off her hand.

She wondered if that memory had lodged deeply in Kolk, as it had in her.

Or is it a false memory. Like so many posthumous memories.

A willed hallucination whetted by loneliness and desperation as parched grass whets the wildfire that ravages and destroys it.

By degrees the despoiled landscape had dropped away. In the drafty rattling jeep they were traveling on a less populated state highway. Passing farmland, or what had been farmland — abandoned and boarded-up houses and outbuildings of a bygone era — amid vast swatches of acreage belonging to corporate farms. But all the land lay fallow in the late-winter chill as if in a suspended animation.

Ever more they were ascending into the foothills of the Sourland Mountains. Ever more, the highway was becoming less traveled and houses were farther apart and set back farther from the road. There was no radio reception here — Kolk had given up his radio music in a blaze of static. In the distance was a dramatic landscape of steep hills, small mountains covered in pine woods, a pearlescent-marbled sky through which shafts of sunshine pierced like flames.

Leaving Koochiching County. Entering Sourland County.

Here were signs for small quaintly named settlements: Mizpah — Shooks — Boy River — Elk Hunt — Grygle — Bowstring — Black Duck — Squaw Lake — Leech Lake. Then came Sourland Junction, and Sourland Falls.

Soon then they were passing the vast tract of the Sourland Mountain State Preserve on their right. Kolk asked Sophie if she could guess how large the Preserve was and Sophie said she had no idea — five thousand acres?

More like four million, Kolk said.

Four million! Sophie’s voice registered astonishment.

Kolk must have smiled, his visitor spoke so naively.

Sophie thought He could not imagine that I would know. His idea of me is that I could not possibly know.

At last in the waning light of early evening Kolk turned off a gravel road onto a narrow lane leading into the wooded interior and bounded by hostile signs — NO TREPASSING PRIVATE PROPERTY — NO TRESPASSING PRIVATE PROPERTY — which Sophie supposed to be signs posted by Kolk himself. In the backseat the bulldog began to whimper excitedly as if in anticipation of home. Sophie’s teeth rattled in her jaws, the lane was so bumpy. Kolk took them hurtling deeper into the woods — they were descending a steep hill, toward a creek at a perpendicular angle before them — a narrow creek rushing with water — it was the aftermath of the winter thaw, the creek was unusually high — Sophie steeled herself waiting for a bridge to materialize — waiting for the jeep to clatter over a crude plank bridge — but there was no bridge — to Sophie’s astonishment Kolk aimed his vehicle into the rushing water at a speed of twenty miles an hour — water lifted in flaring wings beside the jeep even as the jeep catapulted up the farther bank.

He’d shifted gears, the four-wheel drive held firm. Sophie gave a little cry of surprise — it had happened too quickly for her to be frightened.

Sophie asked why wasn’t there a bridge across the creek. Kolk said what was the need of a bridge — most of the summer the creek was dry, in the winter it was frozen over.

“The trick is to take it fast, when the water’s high. Slow, you get your feet wet.”

It was clear that Kolk took pride in his wilderness place . Sophie saw how beyond the clearing in which Kolk parked the jeep were mountains, a view of a valley, miles of pine forest she would have found beautiful but for her fatigue from hours of travel.

There was the log cabin, Sophie recognized from the photographs. A crude plank addition had been built onto it, unpainted, with a single small window. Close by was a storage shed, a chicken coop/rabbit hutch, what appeared to be a kennel, stacks of traps or cages. At the edge of the clearing were old, abandoned vehicles — a car stripped of everything but its chassis, a rusted pickup truck, a tractor missing its tires. A layer of gritty snow lay over everything, the air here was very cold piercing Sophie’s lungs as she opened the jeep door. Her attention was drawn to one of the cages stacked against the storage shed, some twenty feet away. She had a vague vertiginous sense that something — some small creature — had been trapped in this cage and made to starve to death and become mummified.

A thrill of dismay coursed through her Why have I come here, am I mad!

Quickly before Kolk could come around to her side of the jeep to help her down, as he’d helped her up into the cab, Sophie climbed down from the jeep. The cab was so high, she nearly turned her ankle.

The bulldog leapt out, panting and barking. Kolk was telling her something — about the cabin, or the Preserve — Sophie wasn’t able to concentrate — Kolk hauled out Sophie’s suitcase, beneath his arm. She was feeling dazed, light-headed. She was feeling unreal and could not have explained to her companion that she had not felt anything other than unreal since the morning she’d driven her husband to the hospital which had been the final morning of their life together.

Kolk broke off what he was saying. Sophie was staring at the mummified thing in the trap — she’d imagined that it had moved, quivered — not a creature but a dirt-stiffened rag. That was all.

The bulldog followed at their heels, quivering with excitement. A small barrel of a creature with brindle markings like splattered paint drops, a single sighted eye, the other milky and glaring. How like a pig the dog was, with its flattened snout, wriggling hairless bottom and piglet tail.

“S’reebi, get the hell away. Sit. ”

Sophie laughed uneasily, the dog had a way of nipping surreptitiously at her ankles and feet. A trail of slobber shone on her leather shoe-boots. She perceived that the dog was her enemy, he would wait until Kolk was away, or inattentive, to seriously attack her.