It’s here that she’d work hard to make the story boring, saying how water heated to 158 degrees Fahrenheit causes a third-degree burn in one second.

 

 The typical thermal feature along the White River Fault is a vent that opens to a pool crusted around the edge with a layer of that crystallized mineral. The average temperature of thermal features along the White River being 205 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

 One second in water this hot, and pulling your socks off will pull off your feet. The cooked skin of your hands will stick to anything you touch and stay behind, perfect as a pair of leather gloves.

 

 Your body tries to save itself by shifting fluid to the burn, to dissipate the heat. You sweat, dehydrating faster than the worst case of diarrhea. Losing so much fluid your blood pressure drops. You go into shock. Your vital organs shut down in rapid succession.

 

 Burns can be first-degree, second-, third-, or fourth-degree. They can be superficial, partial-thickness, or full-thickness burns. In superficial or first-degree burns, the skin turns red without blistering. Think of a sunburn and the subsequent desquamation of necrotic tissue—the dead, peeling skin. In full-thickness, third-degree burns, you get the dry, white leather look of a knuckle that bumps the top heating element when you take a cake out of the oven. In fourth-degree burns, you’re cooked worse than skin deep.

 

 To determine the extent of a burn, the medical examiner will use the “Rule of Nines.” The head is 9 percent of the body’s total skin. Each arm is 9 percent. Each leg is 18 percent. The torso front and back are each 18 percent. One percent for the neck, and you get the whole 100 percent.

 

 Swallowing even a mouthful of water this hot causes massive edema of the larynx and asphyxial death. Your throat swells shut, and you choke to death.

 

 It’s poetry to hear Miss Leroy spin this out. Skeletonization. Skin slippage. Hypokalemia. Long words that take everybody in the bar to safe abstracts, far, far away. It’s a nice little break in her story, before facing the worst.

 

 You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.

 

 A February just like this, most of her life ago, Miss Leroy and Olson, the cook, were the only people in the Lodge that night. The day before dropped three feet of new snow, and the plows hadn’t come through yet.

 

 The same as every night, Olson Read takes his Bible in one fat hand and goes tramping off into the snow. Back then, they had coyotes to worry about. Cougar and bobcat. Singing “Amazing Grace” for a mile, never repeating a verse, Olson tramps off, white against the white snow.

 

 The two lanes of Highway 17, lost under snow. The neon sign sayingThe Lodgein green neon, free-standing on a steel pole anchored in concrete with a low brick planter around the base of it. The outside world, like every night, is moonlight black and blue, the forest just dark pine-tree shapes stretched up.

 

 Young and thin, Miss Leroy never gave Olson Read a second thought. Never realized how long he was gone until she heard the wolves start to howl. She was looking at her teeth, holding a polished butter knife so she could see how straight and white her teeth looked. She was used to hearing Olson shout each night. His voice shouting her name followed by a sin, real or imagined, it came from the woods. She smoked cigarettes, Olson shouted. She slow-danced. Olson screamed at God on her behalf.

 

 Telling the story now, she’ll make you tweeze the rest out of her. The idea of her trapped here. Her soul in limbo. Nobody comes to the Lodge planning to stay the rest of their life. Hell, Miss Leroy says, there’s things you see happen worse than getting killed.

 

 There’s things that happen, worse than a car accident, that leave you stranded. Worse than breaking an axle. When you’re young. And you’re left tending bar in some little noplace for the rest of your life.

 

 More than half her life ago, Miss Leroy hears the wolves howl. The coyotes yip. She hears Olson screaming, not her name or any sin, but just screaming. She goes to the dining-room side door. She steps outside, leaning out over the snow, and turns her head sideways to listen.

 

 She smells Olson before she can see him. It’s the smell of breakfast, of bacon frying in the cold air. The smell of bacon or Spam, sliced thick and hissing crisp in its own hot fat.

 

 At this point in her story, the electric wall heater always comes on. That moment, the moment the room’s got as cold as it can get. Miss Leroy knows that moment, can feel it make the hair stand up on her top lip. She knows when to stop a second. To leave a little way of quiet, and then—voom—the rush and wail of warm air out of the heater. The fan makes a low moan, far away at first, then up-close loud. Miss Leroy makes sure the barroom’s dark by now. The heater comes on, the low moan of it, and people look up. All they can see in the window is their own reflection. Their own face not recognized. Looking inside at them is a pale mask full of dark holes. The mouth is a hanging-open dark hole. Their own eyes, two close-together staring black holes through to the night behind them.

 

 The cars parked just outside, they look a hundred cold miles away. Even the parking lot looks too far to walk in this kind of dark.

 

 The face of Olson Read, when she found him, his neck and head, this last 10 percent of him was still perfect. Beautiful even, compared to the peeling, boiled-food rest of his body.

 

 Still screaming. As if the stars give a shit. This something left of Olson, dragging itself down this side of the White River, it stumbled, knees wobbly, staggering and coming apart.

 

 There were parts of Olson already gone. His legs, below his knees, cooked and drug off over the broken ice. Bit and pulled off, the skin first and then the bones, the blood so cooked inside there’s nothing going off behind him but a trail of his own grease. His heat melting deep in the snow.

 

 The kid from Pinson City, Wyoming, the kid who jumped in to save his dog. Folks say that when the crowd pulled him out his arms popped apart, joint by joint, but he was still alive. His scalp peeled back off his white skull, but he was still awake.

 

 The surface of the seething water, it spit hot and sparkling rainbow colors from the kid’s rendered fat, the grease of him floating on the surface.

 

 The kid’s dog boiled down to a perfect dog-shaped fur coat, its bones already cooked clean and settling into the deep geothermal center of the world, the kid’s last words were, “I fucked up. I can’t fix this. Can I?”

 

 That’s how Miss Leroy found Olson Read that night. But worse.

 

 The snow behind him, the fresh powder all around him, it was cut with drool.

 

 All around his screams, fanned out around behind him, Miss Leroy could see a swarm of yellow eyes. The snow stamped down to ice in the prints of coyote feet. The four-toe prints of wolf paws. Floating around him were the long skull faces of wild dogs. Panting behind their own white breath, their black lips curled up along the ridge of each snout. Their little-root teeth meshed together, tight, tugging back on the rags of Olson’s white pants, the shredded pant legs still steaming from what’s boiled alive inside.

 

 The next heartbeat, the yellow eyes are gone and what’s left of Olson is what’s left. Snow kicked up by back feet, it still sparkles in the air.

 

 The two of them, in the warm cloud of bacon smell, Olson pulsed with heat, a big baked potato sinking deeper into the snow beside her. His skin was crusted now, puckered and rough as fried chicken, but loose and slippery on top of the muscle underneath, the muscle twisting, cooked, around the core of warm bone.

 

 His hands clamped tight around her, around Miss Leroy’s fingers, when she tried to pull away, his skin tore. His cooked hands stuck, the way your lips freeze to the flagpole on the playground in cold weather. When she tried to pull away, his fingers split to the bone, baked and bloodless inside, and he screamed and gripped Miss Leroy tight.

 

 He was too heavy to move. Sunk there in the snow.

 

 She was anchored there, the side door to the dining room only twenty footprints away in the snow. The door was still open, and the tables inside set for the next meal. Miss Leroy could see the dining room’s big stone mountain of a fireplace, the logs burning inside. She could watch, but it was too far away to feel. She swam with her feet, kicking, trying to drag Olson, but the snow was too deep.

 

 Instead of moving, she stayed, hoping he would die. Praying to God to kill Olson Read before she froze. The wolves watching with their yellow eyes from the dark edge of the forest. The pine-tree shapes going up into the night sky. The stars above them, bleeding together.

 

 That night, Read Olson told her a story. His own private ghost story.

 

 When we die, these are the stories still on our lips. The stories we’ll only tell strangers, someplace private in the padded cell of midnight. These important stories, we rehearse them for years in our head but never tell. These stories are ghosts, bringing people back from the dead. Just for a moment. For a visit. Every story is a ghost. This story is Olson’s.

 

 Melting snow in her mouth, Miss Leroy spit the water into Olson’s fat red lips, his face the only part of him that she could touch without getting stuck. Kneeling there beside him. The devil’s first step to fornication. That kiss, the moment Olson had saved himself for.

 

 For most of her life, she never told anyone what he yelled. Holding this inside was such a burden. Now she tells everyone, and it’s no better.

 

 That boiled, sad thing up the White River, it screamed, “Why did you do this?”