Subtle Bodies Read Free Page B

embraces, and Joris, all of them.
    He was hesitating. He wanted to go back down to the general store. It seemed urgent.
    He needed to hurry. There could be more rain. The forest didn’t offer much prospect of shelter. Visible here and there among the trees were boulders, huge and mottled with great scabs of lichen. A little lichen goes a long way, he thought. As shelter, the boulders were irrelevant.
    He was proud of his life but he wasn’t enjoying it as much as he should. The thought surprised him. It was his own formulation, not an echo of a quote. It was probably true a lot of the time. Recently, though, he couldn’t complain.
    He turned back.

 
    5 This was a store Douglas must have frequented for years. The Vale, it was called. It was clearly from the nineteen twenties or so, a shrine to the period, in its way. The signage said they sold Sundries, along with Bait, Lotto, News, Coffee, and Adult.
    The Vale was a collection of disparate buildings populating a flat, boggy strip of land fronting the highway. Going up, Ned had skirted the place. If he’d known he was going to come back down, he could have parked his rucksack at the place. He liked his Swiss Army–issue rucksack. He liked carrying the rucksack of an army that had never fought a war. His enjoyment of that fact was enough to outweigh the pack’s unwieldiness.
    The Vale’s centerpiece was the general store, a barnlike log structure set on an unusually high stone foundation, with verandas along the sides and a deep front porch on which was arrayed a miscellany of seating—barstools, a piano bench, a porch glider, car seats, a church pew. A cinderblock annex housed a propane sales and service operation. Adjoined to that was a decommissioned sky-blue double-wide trailer connected to the annex by an improvised tunnel formed by stretching plastic sheeting over a succession of metal arches. Strings of ancient faded blue-and-yellow Grand Opening pennants encircled the three buildings at the roof line, drawing the elements of the Vale together. Western music and occasional indications of hilarity leaked from the trailer.
    Ned set foot on the broken lattice of planks and duckboard that had been laid out on the mud in front of thestore entrance. Splendid single lodgepole pines stood at the four corners of the general store. Ned had observed, coming down the mountain, that the personal hinterland of the Vale was essentially a dump site for derelict machinery and other ejecta—there were cairns of hubcaps, short columns of discarded tires, piles of scrap lumber, huge bins wreathed in vines.
    Ned mounted the front steps. He stepped into a fluorescent blaze. He felt at first that he was alone in all the light and music of the cavernous establishment. Nina called fluorescent lighting lighting for robots. Music from a ballroom dancing exhibition showing on a TV set fixed high in an angle of the room contended with pop singing from someplace else. A police scanner interjected occasionally. The pop music was, he saw, due to a radio on the checkout counter behind which someone was sitting and watching. Ned had missed him initially because he was half hidden by the monumental antediluvian cash register and he was seated in a wheelchair.
    The place was packed with things. Shelving rose almost to the ceiling. The aisles were narrow. Overhead a web of clothesline had been strung, to which articles like swim fins, butterfly nets, snorkel tubes, packs of sparklers, and saw blades had been clipped. An umbrella stand held a collection of gripsticks to be used for securing items from the web or the top shelves. In urgent printing, the sign on the container warned that these devices should be used only with the help of staff, and that any injury, damage, or product breakage resulting from unsupervised use would be the sole responsibility of the customer. There seemed to be no organizing principle: a display case contained fantasy knives and stuffed animals. A rotatable cylindrical