Jensen Beach: Priest Lake, Idaho

Jensen Beach’s “Priest Lake, Idaho” appears in The Los Angeles Review Issue 10.

There is a man who lives at the end of a street on the outskirts of a medium-sized city in the state of Washington. The street is a cul-de-sac. His house is the one with the black shutters that were replaced upside-down when the house was repainted. The man has since never been able to tell just what it is that looks so strange about his house, but he finds—every time he comes home—a deficit in its appearance. For a living he makes fine, artisan furniture. He specializes in rugged outdoor pieces, or maybe it’s Adirondack chairs. Either way, he owns a lot of tools, which he keeps in a shed in the backyard. Picture this shed: the house has been newly painted—yellow with white trim, black shutters (upside-down, as I’ve already mentioned)—but the shed has not. Dirty, white paint is flaking off the walls of the shed in roughly the shapes of familiar geographic bodies—Priest Lake in Idaho, for example, where the man often camped with his family. The roof of the shed is beginning to give—rot—it seems, from the inside out. It dips several inches at its peak, and a whole row of shingles has fallen into a dusty pile atop the long weeds. Or, if we decide this man is tidy and meticulous, replace the weeds with Bergenia. The man’s wife might be dead. Let’s say that she is. She’s dead. The pain is still familiar and, for this reason, confusing to the man. His work has been suffering. There is a stack of unused hemlock boards beside the tool shed. The man speaks of his wife in the present tense, says things like, “my wife enjoys camping.” It is not that the man has forgotten his wife is dead; it’s only that, in the way I am doing now, he uses language to manipulate how he feels. His wife enjoyed camping at Priest Lake in Idaho, and, if the man says it often enough, she does now, too. She enjoys it. She exists in this enjoyment.

One evening in the last week of October, on a rare warm evening, the man is sitting out on his back porch. Depending on what sorts of habits we might choose to believe this man employs, he is drinking a glass of wine, or maybe scotch, or maybe he’s smoking a cigar. Behind the man, the fresh paint of his house has a glowing quality to it in the dusk. The back of the house faces west, and the sun sets behind a thick row of pines that mark the edge of his property. In the shadow of these trees, the tool shed appears filthy and decrepit. The man watches it from the porch. He is sitting in a chair he made with his own hands, and it is comfortable. The longer the man looks at the tool shed, the more he becomes convinced that it must be replaced. The painters offered to paint it with the same pattern as the house, but the man refused. It’s a tool shed, he thought then, it’s supposed to look the way it does. Now, though, he sees it for what it is. It is old, and it will not stand for much longer. The man recognizes himself, or some image of himself, in this shed. Like it, he is old, and will, more than likely, not be around all that much longer. He’s already lost his wife. His son—or it could just as well be a daughter—is married and lives back East. He’s alone, apart from the dog I haven’t yet mentioned he owns. The man reflects on all this for a moment. Inside the shed, he keeps the means of his livelihood. Without his tools he could not do his job. There are dowel jigs and other, more fantastic, pieces of equipment. The man that this man is is wrapped up in this job. He makes fine furniture. It is what he does until one day it will be what he used to do.

He gets up slowly from the chair that he once made, goes to the garage for the gas can he keeps filled for the lawnmower he uses once a week in the summer, and returns to the backyard. By now, it is dark. The pines are tall silhouettes. Or he might instead notice the orange glow of the security light, only just turned on, at the neighbor’s house. He might hear a ringing phone from an open window, or a siren from a few blocks over. Some kind of sensory detail that makes clear to the man that the world is bigger than just his yard seems appropriate here. The man empties the contents of the gas can onto the shed. He splashes it on the peeling walls. More flakes of paint fall to the ground. The man might be happy about what he is doing, whistling or smiling, perhaps; or he might be upset; or he might not feel much of anything at all. Who can say? He takes a lighter from his pocket—the cigar-smoking seems more convenient at this point than drinking—and looks around for something to light. If the man is a careful sort of person, he will go into his house and find a newspaper or maybe one of the old quilting magazines his wife used to get from the library sales and rip the covers off of—the man never understood why she did that—and light this first and use it to set the shed to flames. Or he will find a stick or a pile of dried grass. What is not a question, though, is that he will light the tool shed on fire, and that it will burn to the ground. Smoke, first a thin gray cloud of it, but soon, when the thinners and stains in the shed become fuel, darker and then black, rising into the sky: acrid and dense. The man takes a step back. The heat is still on his face so he takes another step back. Then another. And in this way he goes about the task of building something new.