storytelling skill that held her saucer-eyed. But he brings her up to the cabin and feeds her. Pulls out all the stops: the rabbit fillet he’s been saving for no reason, fried mushrooms and onions, a decent coffee cake made of Grape-Nuts, and a couple of shots of fermented thimbleberry.
She tells him about her adventures walking across the Garnet Range. “We started out four people. No idea where those three went.”
“Kinda dangerous out this way. You shouldn’t be out here by yourself, looking like you do.”
“How I look?” She blows a raspberry and whisks her palm. “Like an ill monkey who needs washing.”
She looks, to Douglas, good enough to be some mail-order bride scam. “Really. A young woman by herself. Not a patentable idea.”
“Young? Who is that? Beside. This is the greatest country. Americans are the friendliest people in the world. Always want to help. Like you. Look! You made this great meal. You didn’t need.”
“You liked it? Really?”
She holds out her glass for more thimbleberry wine.
“Well,” he says, when the silence gets weird, even by his standards, “you’re welcome to the water from the pump. Take your pick of any building down there. I’d keep out of the barbershop. Something must have died in there recently.”
“This house is nice.”
“Oh. Well. Listen. You don’t owe me anything. It was just food.”
“Who’s making a business?” Then she’s straddling his chair, scrutinizing his face, trying it out with her periscope lips. She breaks off. “Hey! You’re crying. Strange man!”
There’s no good reason why any species would ever have evolved so useless a behavior. “I’m an old guy.”
“You’re sure? Let’s see!”
She tries again. The first woman’s flesh to warm his for years. It’s like a lockpick scratching around a bunged-up keyhole in his chest. He pins her wrists. “I don’t love you.”
“Okay, mister. No problem. I don’t love you, either.” She tugs at his chin. “People don’t have to love, to enjoy!”
He gives her back her hands. “Trust me. They do.” His arms go slack, like they’re chained through a pipe to a concrete slab buried in the ground.
“Okay,” she says again, sullen. She pushes against his chest and stands. “You are a sad little mammal.”
“I am that.” He stands and brings the remains of the feast to the basin. “You take the bed. I’ll sleep in the bag, out here. The facilities are in the yard. Careful of the stinging nettle.”
The sight of the bed thrills her. American Christmas. “You are a good old guy.”
“Not especially.”
He shows her how to work the lantern. Lying on the floor in the front room, he sees the light under the door. Someone’s reading late. He doesn’t realize until later just what she’s reading.
In the morning, there’s more Grape-Nut coffee cake, and actual coffee. No further adventures in cross-cultural misunderstanding. She leaves before the first tourists come up the mountain. Soon enough, the visitor isn’t even a story he tells himself at night, to feed his regrets and beat up on himself for nostalgia.
But America, it turns out, really is the greatest country. The people are so kind, the land is rich beyond imagining, and the authorities will cut a deal for useful information, even after booking you for multiple crimes. In two more months, when the men with the initials on their jackets make their way up the mountain, Douglas has all but forgotten his overnight guest. Not until the Freddies pin him in the driveway, tear up the cabin, and remove his handwritten journal in a sealed plastic box does he remember her. He fights to keep from smiling as they hog-tie him and get him into the government Land Cruiser.
You think this is funny?
No. No, of course not. Well, maybe a little. It has all happened before, and as far as Douglas Pavlicek can make out, it will keep happening forever. Prisoner 571, reporting for duty, four decades on.
They don’t ask him much. They don’t have to. He has written it all down, in painstaking detail, in a nightly ritual of memory and explanation. Signed, sealed, delivered. All the crimes the five of them committed: Maidenhair, Watchman, Mulberry, Doug-fir, and Maple. But it’s a funny thing: his captors aren’t all that interested in forest names.
DOROTHY SHOWS UP in the doorway, the eternally recurring breakfast tray in her arms. “Morning, RayRay. Hungry?”
He’s awake, tranquil, looking out through the window onto the acre and a half of Brinkmanland. He has grown so calm these days. There have been stretches, terrible days that she was sure