I sat on the side of the road straddling the wide seat of the snowmobile at the top of the rise for more than an hour. I tried not to make noises. I resisted the urge to sing or whistle. I tried to imagine the excitement of hunting, after all--I had never done it before. However, I found that hunting was extremely dull. Hurry up and wait. After the first hour, I considered going back to the library, but I was able to put that out of my head by remembering why I left the library in the first place. There was nothing there for me save an afternoon in a chair with books and a farting Labrador.
I continued to wait. I lamented the fact that I hadn’t brought a book with me. It wasn’t snowing. It was just cold and gray. I could have read a book and it might have made time go faster, but turning pages would have been a chore, what with taking the gloves off.
With the thick cloud cover, I couldn’t read the sun to tell what time it was. I was never big on wristwatches. Like most people my age, I’d had a cellphone and that had a clock. If I’d had a watch, I’m sure I would have been checking the stupid thing every thirty seconds to see how much time had elapsed. I eventually had to get up, partially out of boredom and partially because my ass was falling asleep.
I shouldered the rifle by its strap and walked down the rise toward a small, almost dry creek bed at the bottom of the hill. My boots crunched loudly in the snow. If there were deer in the area, they would be aware of me now and most likely heading to better shelter. I honestly didn’t know what I was doing. I guess I just wanted to see if there had been tracks there, if maybe the snowmobile had scared something away from the spot.
When I got to the tree line at the edge of the cornfield, I definitely found tracks. I’m no outdoorsman, but growing up in Wisconsin you learn to tell three basic tracks: deer, rabbits, and dogs. All three were well represented in the snow by the trees. There were deer tracks aplenty, mostly in a straight line from a break in the trees where it would have been easy for them to pass through back to the fields beyond the other side. The tracks had spread out and wandered through the corn, where it was plain to see they had been eating the dried ears from the stalks. The dog tracks were a little bit disconcerting, though. There were a multitude of tracks that seemed to have burst from the woods. If they had come after the deer, the deer would have scattered.
I followed the creek bed further. It curled around the edge of town toward the new high school. It was a strange wall for the town. There was city on the left and fields on the right. Walking along the creek was like walking a tunnel, though. The trees on either side rose up and formed a curving arch of branches. The boughs gathered overhead and seemed to twist together. The dog tracks were thick in the creek. I imagined they came here frequently to drink before the season froze what little water ran in the creek. The tracks carried out of the creek bed and into a field. I followed them for another quarter-mile or so. I came to a spot in the middle of the field where the animals had mashed down a bunch of grass. In the middle of that mashed-down grass was the remains of a deer. There was blood in the snow, but it was dried. Had the deer succumbed to natural causes, or had the dogs attacked it? I couldn’t tell for certain, but judging from the condition of the area, I was inclined to lean toward a pack hunt. As if to tell me I was right, I heard a low howl in the distance, and that howl was answered with more howls and some loud barks. I couldn’t see any dogs, but I knew they were there.
If this had been a normal day, if cars had been driving on the roads and my house was waiting with central heat chugging quietly to keep the place at a balmy seventy degrees, I would have been excited or even hopeful upon hearing dogs. I would have been happy to play with a few dogs and roll in the snow with them. But it wasn’t a normal day. It was a frigid, gray day, and night was approaching, and everyone I knew, or had ever known was dead, and I got scared down to the bone. The howls of the dogs in the distance, the corpse of the deer--they made me panic. My stomach plunged, and I got that sick feeling in the base of my groin that your body sends you when it wants you to know that you’re in a situation that you shouldn’t be.
I turned and started jogging back across the field. My outfit was heavy, though. The boots became lead weights at the end of my legs. I started to pant heavily. Was I out of shape? Was it the cold? I made it back to the creek bed, but instead of any sense of safety from the tunnel, I felt closed-in. I tried to tell myself I was being stupid. They were dogs, after all, dogs that were domesticated as little as six months ago, family pets. They weren’t going to hunt me down and eat me like that deer, and besides--even if they tried, I had a rifle. The noise of a single shot would scatter them. My best attempts at trying to settle my nerves were not helping. I made it to the cornfield. I felt safer there. The closer I got to the snowmobile, the safer I felt. I ran through the corn, knocking stalks out of my way with my elbows, weaving like a boxer. When I hit the road, I ran to the Cat, pull-started the engine like my life depended on it, and heaved a heavy sigh of relief when it chugged to life on the first try. The snowmobile, despite being open to the elements, felt safe. It was fast. I could outrun the dogs.
I drove back to the library and stashed the sled in the garage next door, then ran back to the fortress of solitude that had become my home. Rowdy was grateful to be let outside to do his business and even more grateful to be let back inside so he could eat his dinner and fall asleep by the fire.
I spent most of that night staring out the dark windows. I couldn’t see anything beyond the blackness, and part of me half-expected to see Cujo charge the glass. I put the semi-auto pistol on a chair beside my bed, and I made sure it was within easy reach before I dared drift off to sleep.
CHAPTER NINE
Health, Hygiene, and Holidays
I didn’t try hunting again for quite some time. I continued to subsist on my canned, jarred, and boxed goods. I became quite adept at making porridge and spaghetti in a cast-iron Dutch oven. I was going through canned goods at a decent clip, tuna, chicken, and even canned salmon, along with beans, tomatoes, and whatever else I had scavenged in my Rubbermaid containers. I actually became quite the non-perishable item chef. I made good canned veggie chili. I figured out how to make a Dutch baby and used canned pie filling to give it flavor. I learned to make passable bread. It was a sort of combination of sourdough and Irish soda bread that I could cook in the hearth in the Dutch oven. It was light and tasty, but a tad dry. It went well with peanut butter, though. It was better than the practically endless supply of Ramen noodles that had made up the majority of my diet until then.
I was creating a lot of physical waste. Garbage. You’d be shocked at how much waste I generated through the months of surviving. I had fifty-five gallon garbage sacks that I’d liberated from Home Depot, nice thick ones, and I was filling up one every two weeks. (I wasn’t recycling anything because that would be just pointless.) When the weather had been good, I’d simply tossed the sack into the back of whatever vehicle I was driving, and I’d run it to the county landfill, about ten miles south of Sun Prairie. Now, with winter in full force and the roads nearly impassible by car, I wasn’t going to snowmobile garbage ten miles just to dispose of it. There were dumpsters all over Sun Prairie, so I took advantage of them. I started with the ones at the nearby VFW, and then moved on to other businesses. When one filled, I found a new one. I tried to keep the library free from extraneous food, though. I’d seen mice inside a few times. Rowdy was disinclined to chase them, so I set out traps baited with peanut butter. I caught a few initially, but they seemed to have wised up against those tactics. The traps continue to be empty. Anything I could do to cut down on the reasons for the mice to stay in the library with me, I was going to do.
My hygiene in general began to evolve. I was still obsessive about my brushing and flossing; I wasn’t going to risk my teeth. I brushed three times a day whether I needed to or not, and flossed after meals, but everything else sort of slid. Before the Flu, I was one of those shower-every-day people. I didn’t feel right unless I showered after I
woke up. My skin would feel greasy and gross. My hair would feel worse. I washed my face often, partially as defense against teenage skin conditions and partially due to my McDonald’s job. Now, with no one around, I’d kept clean pretty well in the summer--lots of quick sink baths with Wet-wipes or a base cleaning around my nethers with a washcloth and some room-temperature water, and maybe two or three times a week engaging in a full-on, but quick, camp shower--but the second winter hit, bathing became a whole new challenge.
Firstly, I’d put my camp shower in the women’s restroom in the library because it had a floor drain. The restroom was near the entry doors and on the exact opposite side of the library from the hearth. Even if I’d built a big fire and opened the doors, there was no real way to channel heat from the fireplace to the bathroom. The bathroom was balls cold. It was not a temperature that made one want to strip down to the skinsuit and get wet. The standard practice of showering as I had in the summer was out of the question unless I wanted my sack to shrink to the size of a raisin.
I continued to wash with Wet-wipes or a washcloth, but the Wet-wipes were always cold, and if I used the washcloth, I had to heat water first and that took a long time over a fire. I began to make a practice of regularly bringing in snow and melting it to boiling in kettles and pots. That gave me wash water to do laundry (keep the socks clean!), and if I needed to, I could wash with it before I put in the detergent.
I only washed the clothes that needed to be washed: socks and underwear, and on rare occasions, t-shirts. It was too much work to hand-wash everything. The jeans, the hiking pants, sweatshirts, and anything else I wore just got hung up to line-dry and then I’d Febreeze the motherlovin’ hell out of them. When my bedsheets got dirty after six or so months of use, I just burned them and looted a new set from Target. Eight-hundred thread count sateen for the win.
I stopped shaving. I used to hate the feel of beards; they were too itchy. Once shaving required me to heat a lot of water and shave near the fire with a hand mirror though, I just gutted out the itchiness and grew a passable, albeit thin, beard. I was only seventeen, remember. My beard was made of thin, wiry hair, and it was patchy. It wasn’t going to win any awards, but it was easier than scraping it off every three or four days.
I was still using deodorant. It felt weird not to, for some reason. I stopped with just about everything else, though. I wasn’t using soap too often. The Wet-wipes had a sweet scent, but when I washed with hot water and a cloth, that’s all it was: water. If I stunk, I was oblivious to it. So was Rowdy. But he smelled pretty suspect most of the time, especially an hour or so after he ate, and he occasionally licked his own rear, so maybe he isn’t the best judge of that sort of thing. I know that people usually don’t know their own body odor, but I didn’t think I could be too ripe. I wasn’t sweating too much. Early in the winter, I was checking my pits often and sniffing my clothes to see if they were getting funky. By the solstice, I was ignorant of it entirely. I didn’t even bother to check anymore. Who was going to smell me?
My hair had gotten long. Really long. Too long, really. It was starting to bother me. I tried pulling it back. I tried ignoring it. Eventually, it bothered me to the point where I knew it had to go. I took the Cat to Walmart and found a hair trimmer operated by batteries. I set the thing to its lowest blade setting and just scalped myself. (I even cut my beard at the time as well, but it grew back quickly.) I didn’t need to worry about looking good for anyone, so I just took it to the skin military-style. I had never done this before in my life, and I was unprepared for how cold my head would get. For days after that, I wore my knit cap all the time, even at night while I slept.
In a way, it was nice. Going back to Laura Ingalls Wilder, I always imagined what they must have smelled like during that long winter. They were confined and wore those heavy layers of clothes. They only bathed once a week on Saturday night. I imagined they got to be pretty ripe. However, after a few weeks of living like that I stopped caring about how I might smell, and I realized they probably didn’t care, either. There had been more important stuff to care about.
I also began to understand how in those olden days grown men might wear a union suit 24/7. I took to wearing long underwear most of the time, in addition to other things. Long underwear became my pajamas. They were my loungewear. I had a really expensive pair from Cabela’s that were meant for arctic camping or mountaineering. They were rated for extreme cold, and they made life in the chilly library much more pleasant. With my gray long johns and thick, double-knit socks, I’m sure looked like some escapee from a Dr. Seuss book, but screw it--I was warm.
This is not to say I was without my problems. I was doing okay, physically. I was able to keep my little annex heated comfortably, although everything in the place smelled like wood smoke. I had plenty of food, and if I needed more, I knew where to get more. I had plenty of water. (I’d ended up moving my mountain of water bottles into the annex, into the corner opposite my bed for fear of freezing.) I was keeping clean, somewhat. I did laundry. I went for semi-regular jaunts into the world. I was reading mountains of books, sometimes two or three in a day. But, I was not prepared for the mental and emotional breakdowns I would face.
I know that I told you earlier that I would occasionally break down and cry for no reason. I know I told you about the numbness, the depression, I was experiencing. I know I told you about the attempt at drowning my pain with booze (which I never attempted again). However, all that got much, much worse with winter.
It started when I realized I didn’t know what day Christmas would be. I hadn’t paid attention to calendars in months. I knew it was December, but I couldn’t have told you what day it was or even if it was close to Christmas. I’d lost track. I remember frantically looking at a wall calendar in the library, desperately going back in my head and trying to catalog the days in order to pin it down, but I could only come up with a weak approximation. If it snowed the first time before Thanksgiving (which it often does), then by my best guess, it was near Christmas, but I didn’t know for certain. That made me cry for some stupid reason. I’m not religious, and I never really was. I think my mother believed in God, but in her hippie ways, she was more of an earth-spirit person and never liked churches. My dad was raised Catholic, but really never kept the faith. I grew up with neither a religious or an atheistic bent, I just sort of ignored religion. However, Christmas was always a time for celebration with family. Both of my parents loved the secular aspects of Christmas. We always had a big tree, a decorated house, and a nice turkey dinner. Sometimes friends joined in for the dinner and our house would be warm and full of laughter. Neighbors would stop buy for eggnog or wine. It was just nice, you know? It was just Christmassy.
I wasn’t going to have that this year. Or ever again. Thinking that made me miss my mom and dad, and I thought of them in the ground in my former backyard, buried so shabbily. I couldn’t even give them proper coffins. I just buried them wrapped in sheets. I felt a welling in my chest, like a bubble, and when that bubble broke, I sobbed like a child. I couldn’t even function. It started while I was sitting in a chair, and I ended up on the floor, curled fetal in the too-warm heat of the fire, a concerned Labrador spooning me.
I thought of the last Christmas I’d experienced--the first one where Emily and I had been a couple. We’d started dating in late October. We were both in the same friend circle, and then one night after a football game, but before Halloween, we’d been hanging out at James Chalkha’s house with a bunch of people and I went out onto his deck because the living room was too warm, and she followed me out and we started talking. We’d never really talked before, she and I. We’d been in the same room lots of times, but we’d never really had a conversation. There, on James’s deck, sitting in patio chairs, we had a real conversation that started with stupid, innocuous stuff like school and friends, and somehow evolved into all sorts of deep topics. Looking back, it seems silly. We were concerned with where we were going to college and how we would pay f
or it, and we talked about our current fears and insecurities, typically teenage stupidity really, but it felt more important then, you know? It felt like it was the world on our shoulders, and for that night it was really, really nice to have a pretty girl to talk to who understood what I was going through because she was going through it, too. We talked on the deck for hours, well past midnight.
After that, I stupidly didn’t ask for her phone number. It took me three more days of trying to talk to her at school to do that, but once I got it, we basically blew up each other’s phones with texts. It was crazy. Next thing you know, we’re hanging out on nearly every Friday and Saturday night and listening to each other complain about our jobs, and suddenly that evolved into making out. By Christmas, we were practically inseparable, but not in that weird, gross way some kids do it, like where they have to be touching if they’re within eyesight of each other. Em was much more chill than that. We loved being around each other, but it wasn’t just mindless hormones and needless touching.
Our first Christmas as a couple, the only Christmas we’d ever have a couple, it turned out, Em made a rule: We couldn’t just store-buy something for each other. It had to come from the heart. She made me a mountain of cookies, particularly these chocolate chip cookies that instead of chocolate chips, she put in busted-up Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups because she knew I had a thing for them. I gave her my favorite book in my collection: a well-worn hardcover copy of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic. I even had a British printing, so color was spelled the British way instead of the American way. She had mentioned wanting to get into Pratchett, and I had read everything he wrote, so it was only fitting. I thought about that book. It was probably still sitting on her shelf next to her bed.
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