Word: hermits
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hermit was a large enough man of indecipherable age, with short-cropped, spikey hair that he may well have cut himself. When he passed in his speeding car, he held his hand to the side of his face, the way that mobsters use their hats when coming down the courthouse steps after being indicted. I rarely saw his face...
...strange face, masklike, hard, and waxen - expressionless. I do not remember seeing his eyes. His countenance was armored, like that of a medieval knight. It had no motion in it, no light of life. When the Hermit drove along the dirt road, he went exactly forty miles an hour, the legal speed limit, and never looked to one side or the other; his eyes were locked on the road ahead. I never knew him to look at anyone...
...other day, walking on the road, I noticed that another car had taken up residence in the Hermit's driveway, newer than the Falcon - a Ford sedan, maybe 20 years old, of an indeterminate orange-beige-bronze color that rental car companies used to buy by the thousands long ago. The Hermit has a companion, I decided, jokingly. He has a lover...
...imagined I had looked inside his fortress for an instant. I decided the Hermit was a sly old dog, and I was touched. Then I accused myself of having a small-town busybody's mind that makes up cheap unfounded stories that cause trouble...
...This squalor was unlike the Hermit. Aside from the junked cars, he seemed to be an orderly man. If he was crazy - which I doubt - his insanity did not express itself in disorder but rather in the reverse, in a rigorous private tidiness of habit. He was not a man to allow something as intimate as his trash to be on view to passing strangers. What was the meaning of the mess in the drive...