The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass Read Free Book Online Page B

Dave always gets his work turned in on time; he hasn’t been late with a project yet.
    Dave is pleasant-looking, tall, friendly, with blue eyes. He smiles a lot, laughs easily, hides from everyone the thing that used to be rage and despair, about his wife taking his daughter away from him, the thing that is now neither rage nor despair, but some harder, sadder, more deadened thing. You couldn’t tell that thing was in him unless you cut him open with a knife, or unless he opened up and told you—which he isn’t going to do.
    Artie is dark, heavy, sulky. He doesn’t know how to laugh. He can pretend-laugh, can ridicule things, but he hasn’t opened up and laughed, hasn’t felt the cleansing opening-up trickling of simple, gurgling laughter since he was about ten or twelve. His skin is as dark as a plum, as if he’s bruised. His eyes are hooded from nonspecific worries, from chronic frowning. He’s about twenty pounds overweight. When he drinks beer he gets friendlier, though not happier. Artie listens to conservative radio talk shows and feels strongly an impending sense of disaster, as if he is in a fast car that is racing flat-out and hard for a concrete wall. He and Dave and Wilson have taken off a Monday from work to go fishing down near Galveston. They’ve hired a guide, whom they’re supposed to meet at daylight, down at one of the Texas City piers on the Gulf. The guide has said that he will take them to wherever the fish are biting. Artie is worried that they won’t catch anything, that the money will be wasted, and on the drive down he keeps pressing Dave and Wilson to reassure him that this is a good guide. Dave and Wilson have been fishing with this guide once before and each caught his limit of speckled trout in only a few hours, though it does not always work out that way, and they tell him this.
    Wilson is driving. He’s got a new truck with leather seats. He doesn’t have a car phone, even though he sells them. He’s read that they cause brain cancer, and so instead all he has is a digital pager, which records the number of messages coming into his answering machine back in Houston. Wilson bought a computer program that pointed out to him that, based on last year’s data, each incoming phone call brings him—on the average—another $152.18 of business.
    The pager is hooked to the sun visor of his truck, and each time it goes off—a rapid series of beeps and clicks—all three men whoop and tally the total: Dave counting with true gusto, elated for his little brother, and Artie sick with green envy but happy at the thought that at least somebody, somewhere, is getting gouged.
    It’s a lot of work for Wilson to go out and answer each of those calls—to drive out and fix whatever’s wrong with the system or to install a new one—but he does it. He has no employees. He’s a one-man show. He won’t even be twenty-nine for another ten months. It makes him seem richer than he already is, though in his mind, it’s a little bit like he’s drowning, or gasping for air—like he can’t quite get enough air—and he doesn’t like that feeling, and he’s trying not to worry about the business so much.
    Fishing trips, such as this one, with his brother, help.
    ***
    Even though it is still an hour before daylight, the pager’s going off about every ten minutes. If the pager gets too full—it will hold only a certain number of messages, depending on their length—Wilson can stop and get out and make a few calls from a pay phone, but he hopes that doesn’t happen today.
    As they drive, all Artie talks about—sitting in the back seat and watching the digital glow of the pager, waiting for its red light to blink in the dark, waiting for the beeping to go off again—is his and Dave’s work. Even though they saw each other on Friday, they go over it again, shooting the shit about