XV

What made you? How did you form? From where did your layers and your curves and your holes come? Your gentle and your savage places? The bright and the deep hallowed dark. The valleys and cliffs of your soul. The loud and the silent. For what does your heart beat?

I think about these things.

Jack would go see Uncle Red even though Red scared him. Red lived seven miles across town, but Jack drove the back roads to avoid being seen. Snow covered the blacktop, and clouds of fog huddled over the ground. He headed toward the river, carving a barren path. Wet gray flakes twisting and falling out of nothing. What will you say? Think. You need to be ready. Where the road forked, he turned into deeper unmarked snow.

Red’s place sat back in the trees, down a narrow draw along the Snake River’s edge. Cloudy vapor coming off the water near the house. A haggard shape in the haze. Weathered planks. Nails rusted and walls patched by black tar paper. The chimney pipe spilled a silky thread of ash and smoke. One of the windows was cracked open, and from it an electric cord snaked across the snow and vanished into the trees. In the side yard, deerskins stretched from saplings, where cuts of fresh meat dangled, venison left to age and bloom bone-deep flavor in the cold.

Dad had hunted with Red back in the day, when the freezers were full and the brothers were bound by secrets and blood. Red knew Dad better than anybody.

Jack shut off the engine and got out. Hush of quiet. The low rushing dash of river water on rocks and ice. Evergreens drooped with snow and beyond them, in the distance, was the jagged crest of the Tetons, monuments of stone rising up through the gloom with juts and angles and bleak shadowed parts untouched by sun. Inside the house a dog or two barked, and then Bev opened the front door.

“Now why’re you out here in this crud?” Bev asked. “Supposed to snow all day.”

“I need to talk to Red. He around?”

“Sure is. Come on in and get warm.”

Bev was Red’s wife number three, and Jack felt shy around her. She was a talked-about woman in town, made of curves and soft pillowy parts, with plump lips and blond hair she curled with hot rollers. Bev was given to astrology and reading palms. About a year ago she’d told Jack matter-of-factly that, in a dream, she saw him naked on a snowcapped mountaintop surrounded by the gods of Odin. She typically wore flowery kimono robes. Each spring she concocted healing elixirs of herbs and oils, and more often than not she told prophecies on weekend evenings while going fast on crank.