Caribou Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

felt cheap, not real. Carpet on the floor, not wood. He’d always hated carpet. Irene wanted the carpet, said it was warmer. He wanted wood or even stone. Slabs of slate. He didn’t know yet what the cabin would have. Maybe just dirt. Dirt or wood.
    They usually played two-handed pinochle together at lunch, so Gary didn’t know what to do. He leaned over to the bookshelf and grabbed his copy of Beowulf , set it on the table but didn’t open it.
    Hwaet. We Gar-Dena , he recited, and he went through the opening lines. A circus trick. He still knew the opening lines to Beowulf and “The Seafarer” in Old English, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and the Aeneid in Latin, but he couldn’t actually read the languages anymore. He could translate a few lines, struggling through with a dictionary and his notes from thirty years ago, but he couldn’t just read. He had lost that, and though he kept trying to get it back, every few years, his attempts never lasted more than a week or two, and then something always happened, something else needed his attention.
    The salmon so good he closed his eyes. White king, the meat richer, a bit more fat, rare but he had caught one last summer, soft-smoked it and still had a couple vacuum-sealed bags left. He’d need to get out fishing again before the season ended, get a smoker going at the cabin.
    Gary looked out the window at the lake through the trees, ate the salmon, knew he should feel lucky, but felt nothing except a mild, background terror of how he’d get through the day, how he’d fill the hours. He’d felt this all his adult life, especially in the evenings, especially when he was single. After the sun went down, the stretch of time until when he could sleep seemed an impossible expanse, something looming, a void that couldn’t be crossed. He’d never told anyone about it, not even Irene. It would sound like he was defective in some way. He doubted anyone would really understand.
    Well, Gary said, and stood up. He needed to get moving. Irene wasn’t going to help him today, but he needed to be doing something. He’d have to get Mark or Rhoda to help him. So he washed his plate and fork, stepped outside, and walked the path to Mark’s house.
    Well traveled by now, a winding route around alder thickets into spruce forest. He should have come in years ago with a machete, cleared a more direct path. But there was something he liked about the character of the twistings and turnings, saplings he’d seen grow into trees, the changing look of seasons, green now, lush, closed in, the trail ahead blocked from sight.
    Hey bear, he called out. Hey bear, hey bear, as he came around a bend. Mosquitoes buzzing at his ears, going for his neck. The forest damp and rotting, smell of wood. Wind in the treetops, a reassuring sound, the rise of it, the way it always seemed far away, even in close.
    New deadfall from the storm. He cleared branches as he went, tossed them aside. Twigs snapping underfoot.
    He was curious to see the creek, and when he came upon it, finally, the water was high on the banks, but not discolored. The boards he’d set in for the footbridge remained above water, moss-covered edges a bright green. He stood there, the water rushing at him. Ferns all through here, devil’s club rising in horizontal planes, wide flat leaves.
    He moved on, up a rise through spruce and cottonwood, onto Mark’s land, and could already see Mark’s house below in the trees, at the edge of the lake. A large garden to the side, and marijuana plants in the weeds farther back, in plastic tubs. Nearly everyone in town knew about them. Mark had bought the house and land two years before for $18,000, all of which came from cash advances on credit cards. That first winter, he struggled to meet the minimum payments and waited for summer, when he, along with the rest of Alaska, made his entire yearly income. And he did get lucky. The price for salmon was unusually high, the run