Black Ribbon

to unload, but afterward, would I please leave my car in the lot. There was an orientation meeting in front of the main house at four o’clock. A lot of people were taking dips in the lake to cool off. What an eager group! Cars had begun arriving at eleven o’clock, two hours before camp was supposed to start, and nothing was scheduled until four, when we had our orientation meeting. Had she mentioned that already? I’d find the schedule in my registration packet. I had picked it up, hadn’t I? Of course I had.
    Maxine’s nervous verbal barrage held Rowdy’s attention slightly longer-than it did mine. When she paused for a breath, I moved fast. “It is terribly hot, and I’d love a swim, and Bonnie sends her best, and she says your dogs are gorgeous, and Rowdy is desperate for some water. Which cabin are we in?”
    Ah, the Maine log cabin. The oh-so-charming outdoor plumbing that smells worse than a dog-show Porta Potti on an August afternoon, the ropes of oakum that slip loose to admit snow in the winter and bugs in the summer, the carcinogenic reek of creosote, the nauseating redolence of damp wood stove, the ephemeral stench of moldy mattress in which small rodents have nested, produced their young, perished, and half-decomposed, usually right under the spot on which you lay your weary head. That’s how it used to be. Then tourism triumphed. The indoor flush had no sooner vanquished the outhouse than oakum lost to synthetic caulk, and creosote to odor-free preservative stains. Even as I speak, the mattress-nesting field mouse, Maine’s official state rodent, is Probably becoming an endangered species.
    In the combination bedroom and living room that occupied the front of my own cabin, the creature was already extinct, its ecological niche destroyed by Blueboard, plaster, and paint, its familiar breeding place replaced by a king-size bed that Rowdy sniffed with mild interest. The beige carpeting had been installed by someone other than a local jack-of-all-trades, as had the pleated blinds, one of which I immediately raised to get a look at the lake and thus the reassurance that I was, after all, in northern Maine. The principal source of my disorientation was, I suppose, the powerful-looking air conditioner built into one wall. Rangeley, Maine, is, after all, the precise spot toward which God Herself directs each immaculate exhalation; the air in Rangeley needed artificial conditioning about the way that water in the Vatican baptismal fonts needs chemical filtration. With water on my mind, I checked out the bathroom. Only a year or two ago, I suspected, when the enterprise had still been a serious fishing and hunting lodge, the shower must have been one of those rusted metal stalls with a dirty plastic curtain magnetically attracted to the human body and a slimy floor with a drain that reliably failed to deserve the name and periodically backed up to spew the contents of the septic tank around the end-of-a-long-day feet of the angled-out fishermen and shot-out hunters who’d come North to escape the city and had only to open their noses and wiggle their toes to understand just how completely they’d succeeded. Pale blue tile with white grout now covered the walls and floor of the room. The toilet was a low-slung, water-conserving model, the dead-white fiberglass tub and shower unit didn’t show a trace of stain, and when I experimented by turning on the faucet at the foreign-looking wash basin, the water didn’t smell like fish or beavers. I hoped that the proprietors of the refurbished lodge weren’t counting on the return: of the old customers, who’d take one whiff, turn around, and head back to Boston and New York. The real sportsmen—the sports , as they’re called in Maine—would hate the place now.
    Me? I grew up in Maine. I thought the bathroom was wonderful.
    Having overcome the impulse to fill the tub and have a civilized soak instead of a swim in the lake, I returned to the big front room, where Rowdy had taken advantage of my absence. Dogs aren’t allowed on my bed unless they are explicitly invited. Rowdy understood the rule perfectly: Unless invited, he was to stay off the bed, that is, my bed at home. We weren’t at home. Therefore, this one was up for grabs. And he’d got it first. So his face proclaimed. Have I mentioned Rowdy’s face? White, an “open face,” without the dark markings that make up Kimi’s full mask, but a handsome, commanding face, richly expressive. What