He often walked at night and was familiar with the woods, streams, and valleys for miles around, including the heavily forested area inside the reserve. He knew which families owned dogs, where coon hunters hunted, the narrow ravine with a corn mash still boiling in late summer, and where the local militia—forty or fifty armed men—held meetings at night.
At the end of the field he followed a narrow path along the chain-link fence surrounding the Heartland Federal Reserve, stopped at the rope bridge he had strung across the river, listened to the moving water, and eventually reached the gravel road.
Morning light grew in the sky.
On either side of the road were the DO NOT SPRAY signs he had put up two years ago. He had won that particular battle, but after he convinced the township to stop spraying herbicides they bought a radial arm shredder. The chewing device ripped through plants with ear-splitting efficiency, leaving saplings and bushes severed between two and four feet above ground, their decimated tops splayed out like beaten stakes. It was a war of factions. The road crew wanted safe, wide roads and managed ditches; Jacob was making more signs.
Some distance later he came to his driveway—two parallel tire-wide tracks trailing off through the grass and weeds and into the trees. He looked in his empty mailbox and straightened the bent flag. Geese flew overhead.
He followed the driveway half a mile to his ramshackle log home. It was the last remaining building in a former logging camp, and he had added onto it one room, porch, door, garage, loft, and solarium at a time. It now stood as a tribute to afterthought. Solar panels were mounted on the south- facing roof, and, beneath them, were storage tanks for rainwater. A composting outhouse sat partially hidden in honeysuckle and snow pine with a satellite receiver on top, providing access to the Internet. A dozen small round windows salvaged from boats were set into the front of the cabin, giving it a hivelike appearance.
Inside, Jacob showered and shaved and dressed in coveralls for work. He moved the carburetor and newspapers to the far side of the table, ate two tomatoes, and drank a glass of orange juice for breakfast.
Before leaving the house, he glanced at the framed picture of his wife taken two years before her death. She looked lovely, though because of too much sunlight the photograph was beginning to fade.
PAINTED BODIES AND ORANGE FIRES
INTIMACY HAD NOT ALWAYS BEEN DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE FOR Grahm Shotwell and his wife, Cora. Not at all—until about a year ago, when finding a way to close the door on the rest ofthe world ago, when finding a way to close the door on the rest of the world became harder. Problems that couldn’t be solved kept stealing into their mutual space, making it impossible to experience each other with the spontaneous delighting freedom that they both desired. It was maddening to them both because it always seemed as though they should have the mental strength, the courage, to close the door and keep all the unwanted concerns outside. And they should be able to have the integrity to not blame each other for what neither of them could control. But they couldn’t. Banished from each other, they endured in their lonely spaces, and the grief was all the more unbearable because of their well-remembered history of comforting sensuality.
In fact, their relationship had been forged, as it were, in the furnace of physical inspiration, when Cora, a young woman working for her father’s insurance company in Milwaukee, attended a concert by the Barbara Jean Band with a couple friends. Dressed in a flaming red dress and heels, her black hair gathered on top of her head with long, waving strands falling along the sides of her face, she stood next to a folding table covered with Styrofoam cups, cold cider, and hot coffee. She surveyed the crowd and wondered what she was doing in a place that resembled a page out of a ten- year-old JCPenney catalog.
Her roaming eyes fell on a young man on the far side of the room, beyond the musicians, wearing a suit too large for him. He seemed almost comical as he attempted to negotiate his medium-sized frame through the room, armed with only rustic formality and a broad smile that flashed like fireworks from inside his neatly trimmed beard. Many people apparently knew him and reached out to shake his hand, whisper, joke, and touch him as he tried to move around them, causing him to blush again and again in shy retreat.
His slow progress appeared as though it had been filmed earlier and was now being replayed at reduced speed, and it took him nearly five minutes to wend his way through the mostly-seated crowd. Unaware that such mannerisms evolved naturally from the habit of walking among large, excitable animals, she could not take her eyes off him, even after it became clear that his destination was the very table she was standing in front of. His slow movements seemed overly practiced. His oversized suit, she became convinced, was neither borrowed nor stolen, but a deliberate choice to cover up more of him—extra folds of material to hide within. It seemed his ambition, frequently obstructed by people who clearly enjoyed his company, might be to remain unnoticed.
He continued moving until he almost reached her and then stood on the edge of her personal space, looking at the floor. They continued standing this way until Cora realized he had come all the way across the room for a cup of coffee or cider and was now too shy to look directly at her, say what he wanted, or come close enough to reach for it. The realization that she was effectively blockading an entire field of refreshments with her own slender presence gave her—as soon as she recognized it—a surprisingly pleasant sense of power.
“Oh,” she said, moving to her left, “excuse me.”
Grahm stepped forward and captured a Styrofoam cup of coffee with his rough-looking left hand. They stood together without speaking for several minutes, sipping from their drinks. Grahm noticed the perfume evaporating from Cora’s neck, and Cora discovered an interesting pattern of swirling thread in his jacket sleeve, next to the button.
Left alone, they could discover no conversation. But out of the crowd, fate provided two young boys chasing a third. The pursued—running pell-mell in the direction of the exit door—was more concerned with his pursuers than with what lay directly in his path and was busily engaged in knocking chairs to either side of him and scrambling around them.
It seemed inevitable that all three would rapidly collide with Cora, who put out her one free hand in a pallid imitation of stopping traffic and grimaced in anticipation of being driven onto the field of drinks in an undignified collision of overwhelmingly social significance. Instinctively, she closed her eyes and held her drink away from her dress, and in that selfsame instant felt herself grasped about the waist, lifted into the air, and set down again. When she opened her eyes, she was on the other side of the bearded young man, while he absorbed the combined force of the rushing boys, gathering them into his arms and ushering them off again in another direction with the reproof, “Don’t run indoors, boys.”
Though her drink had not spilled, something was decidedly overflowing. Her first sensation issued from just above her hips, where she retained the impression of two gripping hands rearranging her place in the world. The next came from the realization that the man had taken time to set his own drink down, and now he drew it back to his mouth, his eyes twinkling in amusement.
“I can’t breathe,” she said, unsure if this was either a legitimate concern or an appropriate topic of conversation.
He smiled, unable to find anything to say.
“I’m Cora,” she said.
“I’m Grahm Shotwell,” he said, and his voice expanded like summer.
“Pleased to know you,” said Cora. She offered her hand. Grahm took it, entangling them in a mutually inquisitive texture of fingers and palms. The most primitive parts of themselves immediately began speaking to
