Platte River

by Rick Bass

  Willis turns and stares out the window. “He just walks in the woods,” he says again, and turns back to the class. “If Harley doesn’t mind, and if his knees aren’t bothering him, I thought we’d demonstrate what we used to do — how he used to block people out of the way, to protect me while I ran all over the field, skittering around more or less like a chicken with his head cut off.” The class laughs, and they lean forward in their seats and look at Willis, and then at Harley, and then back at Willis, their teacher.

  Willis glances over at Harley, and Harley shrugs and nods.

  “I’ll be the defender,” Willis says, setting aside the pointer in a corner. “I used to run with Harley, but today I’ll pretend like I’m on the other side and am trying to get past him — trying to get past him to get to me. Pretend there’s a running back behind him. That’s what I used to be. That’s where I used to be.

  “Harley’s going to block me and keep me from getting behind him. He’s going to keep me from getting back there and tackling that runner.”

  Willis crouches down. He’s wearing slick-bottomed street shoes, and Harley realizes this wasn’t premeditated. Harley crouches, remembering everything: every practice under the hot fall blue skies, every day with his friend Willis, every day walking back to the dorm after practice. Then he remembers the pros, the traveling, the namelessness of it, the roaring maw of the stadium crowds, and the way it wasn’t so much fun anymore — and what it feels like to Harley is that Nick’s back there, and that Harley’s trying to protect Nick, and even Willis’s sad winter-sick wife, Claudia, and their hopeful little girl, Jamie — everyone who ever mattered a damn is slipping in behind Harley, getting back there behind him and hiding, for protection, everyone but Shaw, who doesn’t need Harley anymore, who’s gone.

  And for the next half hour or so, as the class watches, fascinated, the two men struggle and clash like dinosaurs: feinting, shuffling back and forth, locked in combat, crashing into one another. Harley knocks the Wolverine to the ground repeatedly, and each time, tenaciously, nearly growling, the Wolverine comes back harder and faster, trying to slip past Harley, trying to get behind him, but he can’t, he doesn’t, Harley’s still got it, and it’s why they paid him so much.

  Finally both men can’t go on any longer, and they stand, half bent over, gasping, sweat streaming down their foreheads, down their chests. Their shirts stick to them, damp across the backs, across their tight chests, and they just stare at each other, panting, not yet friends again.

  The class begins to applaud, which snaps Harley and Willis out of the gasping and staring they were locked into. Willis rises from his crouch first and picks up the pointer, and then Harley straightens up.

  “Talk,” Willis says, tapping Harley with the pointer. “Talk your heart out.”

  “I never learned to let anything go past me,” Harley says, gasping as if for his life. “I have to learn to let things go past.” He shrugs. “I have to go against my instinct. I still have to learn that.” He’s breathing like a locomotive and still sweating wildly, as if being tortured. “It takes me years to learn things,” he says.

  The students listen intently to his confession.

  “I learn with my body quickly,” Harley says, “but I learn with my mind slow. It’s almost impossible,” he says, “to let something go. I was the best there was at not letting anything get past. I was too damn fucking good. It turned me into a fucking crustacean.”

  Willis nods proudly, as if Harley has found out something that Willis has known all his life, and yet also as if Harley has reminded Willis of a forgotten secret, a great mysterious one.

  “Show and tell,” Willis says to the class, still breathing hard. “Next we’ll touch this man, to see what it’s like to be as strong as he is.” Willis walks over and begins unbuttoning Harley’s shirt, and helps him out of it. Harley’s breathing hard, too tired to protest, and he’s too lost, as well, in the memories — the hitting, the blocking, the defending.

  The cool air sweeping in through the windows feels wonderful. Willis hands Harley the shirt, and he wads it up and towels off with it, then sits down.

  “Come on,” Willis says, motioning to the class, pointing to a black girl first, and then to the pale boy behind her, and then to the girl behind him, a tall, shy girl with large glasses and lots of red hair, a poet. “Come on,” Willis urges, gesturing them up with the pointer. “Don’t be shy. Come feel him.”

  One by one, starting with the black girl — who’s wearing a white blouse, navy skirt, and navy sweater — the other students fall in line behind her. They walk past Harley and touch the parts of him (as he sits there heaving, panting, shoulders rising and falling, heart racing) that they want to touch.

  The black girl cups her hands over the smooth round melons of Harley’s chest, then strokes his bull neck with her fingers lightly, and passes on, out the door. The pale boy touches one of Harley’s blood-filled arms, carefully at first, but then taps it — again, as if it’s a melon, a ripe fruit — and then squeezes it with both of his hands, grins. “A crustacean, man,” he says, and then moves on.

  The tall girl with the red hair and big glasses dips down and feels Harley’s face, his jaw, and then runs her hand down the flatness of his bare stomach. Now, growing more confident, more familiar, she pats it twice, the way she might pat a puppy’s stomach.

  The whole class moves past him, a procession, and he’s still breathing hard. He closes his eyes and remembers the days in the stadium, all the days leading up to this one — and all the days that lie ahead of him, with or without Shaw — and finally feels that he has earned his money today.

  He sits there with his eyes closed after the last student has left the room. It is just Harley and Willis again, the two of them sitting alone in the classroom, the windows open, and both of them purged, so that it could be twenty years ago again and both of them just hanging out in a classroom in Ohio, after chemistry lecture and before spring practice. A single fly buzzes inside, high against the warm glass of the open window. Spring is coming hard to northern Michigan. Harley glances at his watch; he’s still got an hour or so before his plane leaves, so they sit there a while, heads leaned back like reptiles, resting, just breathing.

  Then Willis asks, “What’s in the bag?”

  Harley leans forward slowly looks inside it, and smiles, shakes his head.

  “A shirt,” he says. “A fancy button-down long-sleeve dress shirt.”

  “Put it on,” Willis says lazily.

  Harley stands up and tries it on. It’s too short in the sleeves, it’s tight under the arms and especially across the chest — the fabric stretched and the buttons straining to pop — but it’s a crisp, clean white shirt, and it will do well for the flight back home, where Shaw may or may not be waiting. Harley looks down at the new shirt, which smells like Nick — which makes him feel, in that secret way that another’s clothing can do, that he is Nick, only without Nick’s sadness — and he smiles. Willis reaches in his pocket and takes out the check — the fifteen hundred dollars — and hands it to Harley.

  ·

  “He’s been trying to give his stuff away for two weeks now,” Willis says when they get to the airport.

  Harley shakes his head, looks down at his feet. “Do you think he’ll do it?” he asks.

  The Wolverine becomes very quiet, very somber. He shrugs, looks up at his friend. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s not something I, or anyone, has any control over. Shit,” Willis says, looking helpless for the first time that Harley can remember, “it’s a force of nature. Either he will or he won’t. I’ve got no control over it.”

  Harley nods distractedly and tugs once more on the sleeves, which are trying to creep up his thick forearms. He leans forward and hugs the Wolverine hard — it may be twenty years before they see each other again, he thinks. It looks for a moment as if they are wrestling. Then Harley turns and goes through the boarding gate.

  ·

  Five years later, H
arley finds himself on one of the San Juan Islands with two women. One of the women is someone whom Harley’s only just begun dating; the other is married, a friend of Harley’s new woman friend. Shaw’s been gone forever. Harley still misses her. His arms, still huge, remind him of what a fucking crustacean he is. Though he has not talked to the Wolverine since he last saw him in Michigan, Harley sometimes watches the mail, waiting to hear how Nick is doing. And hearing nothing, he has to assume that all is well: that they’re still taking care of him, holding him, taking care of each other — and that maybe Nick is better. No news is almost like good news, Harley thinks. Nothing’s gotten past. He doesn’t think it has, anyway.

  It’s May, and windy as hell on top of the hill they’re looking out from. There are humped islands below them, like the backs of animals, out in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. They’re in Friday Harbor. To the west and north, Victoria Island, and Canada.

  It’s cold. They’ve all got on coats. The three of them are sharing one pair of binoculars and are watching for killer whales — orcas — which some biologists think get trapped in the strait, turned around in their migrations, though others believe the whales come in among the islands for protection from Pacific storms.

  Harley and his two friends aren’t seeing any whales, however. Instead, they watch the huge ships that nose slowly through the Inside Passage. The water is bright blue. Just scant miles away is Vancouver Island, where many of the people speak a foreign language, Harley thinks — French.

  It’s all still so exotic to him, he thinks — everything. Whales, and foreign languages, and so much new country — so much new shit. He can’t figure out what the two women want with him — why they are interested in him, when he is so simple. He feels he has no complexity whatsoever, and understands almost nothing.

  He feels how firm and cold the ground is beneath his sturdy legs, his heavy boots.

  “I can’t make out the words on that tanker,” Ginny, the married woman, says, peering through the glasses. She’s in her late forties, only a year or two older than Harley, and attractive.

  Willa, Harley’s friend, is thirty.

  “D-O-C —” Ginny begins.

  The wind picks up, blurs the image in the binoculars, and Ginny hands them to Harley and rubs her eyes. “It looks like Docen-something,” she says.

  Harley squints at the tanker. It looks foreign, somehow, though he can’t tell why, and he can’t tell if it’s coming or going, though he has a feeling — again, somehow — that it’s going. “D-6-C-E-N-C-L-A-V-E?” he says hopefully, only half believing in himself and what he’s seeing.

  “It could be N-A-V-E,” says Willa, who has worked on a fishing boat up in Alaska. “Navy. Could be Liberian registry, or Panamanian.” Willa’s light on her toes, twisting and jumping in the wind, fresh, and doesn’t seem to feel the sadness that Harley and Ginny are feeling — feeling and trying not to show or even acknowledge. Willa turns her face up toward Harley, who’s still squinting through the binoculars, and says, “We could call up the customs office and ask them where it’s from, and where it’s going.”

  Willa turns again, catches her hat in the wind. “I’m always doing stuff like that, wasting money on long-distance calls,” she says. “Here,” she says, reaching for the binoculars, “let me see.” Harley hands them to her. The wind’s cold.

  “D-O-E-N-A-V-E,” Willa spells. She can see better than Harley or Ginny. But she still doesn’t know what it means — none of them do. Willa takes Harley’s hand in hers and squeezes it, twists her fingers around his, then hands the binoculars to Ginny.

  Ginny’s still watching the ship, but not with the binoculars. She gazes at it as if she’s about to go to it, as if she’s got a ticket, or as if she’s employed on it and has missed the port of call. She’s watching it like it’s her ship.

  “Don’t you ever wish you could just get on a ship like that?” she asks, and Harley feels pretty sure she’s talking just to him. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could just jump on a ship like that and ride, and go wherever it’s going?”

  She’s speaking as if in a trance, and turns, with her eyes watering in the wind, to look up at Harley — half happy and half hopeful, imagining it.

  “Yes,” says Harley, understanding, finally.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rick Bass is an author and activist. He has received many awards and honors for his short fiction, including the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, the PEN/Nelson Algren Special Citation, and the Story Prize. He is also the author of novels and nonfiction, most recently The Traveling Feast: On the Road and at the Table with My Heroes. His stories, essays, and articles have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, including The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine. He lives in the Yaak Valley, Montana, where he is a member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council.