by Jon E. Lewis
“Why?” he said. “ Why did it happen?” He began to cry again.
“His heart,” she said. “He had been having trouble.” The woman moved closer to him and put her arm around his shoulders. “ I’m sorry,” she said. “ God,” she said.
Presently he slept again, exhausted and calmed, slowly moving to huddle against the warmth of the woman. In the middle of the night he woke and felt the woman shuddering and crying beside him.
He woke to warmth and sunlight coming through the open doorway of the room. He was alone in the bed.
In the outer room the woman and Charlie Anderson were sitting quietly at the table. “Sit down,” Charlie said. “I’ll get you some food.”
“Charlie doesn’t trust my cooking,” the woman said. The woman went into the kitchen and returned with a mug of coffee. She seemed self-conscious and almost shy.
Charlie Anderson came from the kitchen with eggs and a thick slice of fried ham. “Eat good,” he said to the boy.
“He will,” the woman said.
The boy wondered where the grief had gone and if his father had been so easily dismissed.
“We seen the end of a fine man,” Charlie Anderson said and began to remove the dishes.
So the boy ate and watched them, these strangers. And then he walked through the house uneasily and went out through the kitchen door and stood beneath the heavily laden tree and shuffled in the snow and fingered the frozen bark while looking again to the far-off rim.
Eva came outside. The boy was conscious of her standing silently behind him. He blinked in the radiance and watched the high-flying birds, geese moving to feed and water. He heard the woman make a sound behind him, and he turned to see her face crumpling. She gasped slightly. She moved to him and pressed herself against him while she shook and wept. He stood with his arms at his sides and felt the softness of her breasts behind the sweater, and then nothing but the cold in her hair which was loose and open against his face.
Then she was quiet.
“Let’s go in,” she said. “I’m cold.”
She moved away and he followed her, oblivious to everything and completely drawn into himself.
“It will make you tough,” his father had said.
“Goddamn you for this,” the boy thought.
He slammed the door behind him and went to stand before the fire. The woman stood at the window with her hands behind her while Charlie Anderson busied himself with the dishes. The house seemed filled with the musk of the dead birds. The boy’s numb fingers throbbed and ached as he held them open to the radiant warmth of the fire. “Goddamn everything,” the boy said.
RICK BASS
Days of Heaven
RICK BASS (1958–) was born in Fort Worth, Texas. A sometime petroleum geologist, Bass won the 1995 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship for Where the Sea Used to Be and was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for his autobiography Why I Came West. Since 1987 he has lived in the remote Yaak Valley in Montana. As well as being one of America’s foremost fiction writers, he is one of America’s leading nature writers and environmentalists.
Bass’s short story and novella collections include The Watch (1989), Platte River (1994), In the Loyal Mountains (1995), The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (1997), and The Hermit’s Story (2002). “Days of Heaven” is from In the Loyal Mountains.
THEIR PLANS WERE to develop the valley, and my plans were to stop them. There were just the two of them. The stockbroker, or stock analyst, had hired me as caretaker on his ranch here. He was from New York, a big man who drank too much. His name was Quentin, and he had a protruding belly and a small mustache and looked like a polar bear. The other one, a realtor from Billings, was named Zim. Zim had close-together eyes, pinpoints in his pasty, puffy face, like raisins set in dough. He wore new jeans and a western shirt with silver buttons and a metal belt buckle with a horse on it. In his new cowboy boots he walked in little steps with his toes pointed in.
The feeling I got from Quentin was that he was out here recovering from some kind of breakdown. And Zim – grinning, loose-necked, giggling, pointy-toe walking all the time, looking like an infant who’d just shit his diapers – Zim the predator, had just the piece of Big Sky Quentin needed. I’ll go ahead and say it right now so nobody gets the wrong idea: I didn’t like Zim.
It was going fast, the Big Sky was, Zim said. All sorts of famous people – celebrities – were vacationing here, moving here. “Brooke Shields,” he said. “Rich people. I mean really rich people.You could sell them things. Say you owned the little store in this valley, the Mercantile. And say Michael Jackson – well, no, not him – say Kirk Douglas lives ten miles down the road. What’s he going to do when he’s having a party and realizes he doesn’t have enough Dom Perignon? Who’s he gonna call? He’ll call your store, if you have such a service. Say the bottle costs seventy-five dollars. You’ll sell it to him for a hundred. You’ll deliver it, you’ll drive that ten miles up the road to take it to him, and he’ll be glad to pay that extra money.
“Bing-bang-bim-bam!” Zim said, snapping his fingers and rubbing his hands together, his raisin eyes glittering. His mouth was small, round, and pale, like an anus. “You’ve made twenty-five dollars,” he said, and the mouth broke into a grin.
What’s twenty-five dollars to a stock analyst? But I saw that Quentin was listening closely.
I’ve lived on this ranch for four years now. The guy who used to own it before Quentin was a predator too. A rough guy from Australia, he had put his life savings into building this mansion, this fortress, deep in the woods overlooking a big meadow. The mansion is three stories tall, rising into the trees like one of Tarzan’s haunts.
The previous owner’s name was Beauregard. All over the property he had constructed various outbuildings related to the dismemberment of his quarry: smokehouses with wire screening, to keep the other predators out, and butchering houses complete with long wooden tables, sinks, and high-intensity lamps over the tables for night work. There were even huge windmill-type hoists on the property, which were used to lift the animals – moose, bear, and elk, their heads and necks limp in death – up off the ground so their hides could first be stripped, leaving the meat revealed.
It had been Beauregard’s life dream to be a hunting guide. He wanted rich people to pay him for killing a wild creature, one they could drag out of the woods and take home. Beauregard made a go of it for three years, before business went downhill and bad spirits set in and he got divorced. He had to put the place up for sale to make the alimony payments. The divorce settlement would in no way allow either of the parties to live in the mansion – it had to be both parties or none – and that’s where I came in: to caretake the place until it was sold. They’d sunk too much money into the mansion to leave it sitting idle out there in the forest, and Beauregard went back east, to Washington, D.C., where he got a job doing something for the CIA – tracking fugitives was my guess, or maybe even killing them. His wife went to California with the kids.
Beauregard had been a mercenary for a while. He said the battles were usually fought at dawn and dusk, so sometimes in the middle of the day he’d been able to get away and go hunting. In the mansion, the dark, noble heads of long-ago beasts from all over the world – elephants, greater Thomson’s gazelles, giant oryx – lined the walls of the rooms. There was a giant gleaming sailfish leaping over the headboard of my bed upstairs, and there were woodstoves and fireplaces, but no electricity. This place is so far into the middle of nowhere. After I took the caretaking position, the ex-wife sent postcards saying how much she enjoyed twenty-four-hour electricity and how she’d get up during the night and flick on a light switch, just for the hell of it.
I felt that I was taking advantage of Beauregard, moving into his castle while he slaved away in D.C. But I’m a bit of a killer myself, in some ways, if you get right down to it, and if Beauregard’s hard luck was my good luck, well, I tried not to lose any sleep over it.
In midafternoon I’d come home – it would be hot then, in the summer. The fields and meadows in front of the ranch smelled of wild strawberries, and I’d stop and pick some. By that time of day it would be too hot to do anything but take a nap, so that’s what I’d do, upstairs on the big bed with all the windows open, with a fly buzzing faintly in one of the other rooms, one of the many empty rooms.
When it cooled down enough, around seven or eight in the evening, I’d wake up and take my fly rod over to the other side of the meadow. A spring creek wandered along the edge of it, and I’d catch a brook trout for supper. I’d keep just one. There were too many fish in the little creek and they were too easy to catch, so after an hour or two I’d get tired of catching them. I’d take the one fish back to the cabin and fry him for supper.
Then I’d have to decide whether to read some more or go for another walk or just sit on the porch with a drink in hand. Usually I chose that last option, and sometimes while I was out on the porch, a great gray owl came flying in from the woods. It was always a thrill to see it – that huge, wild, silent creature soaring over my front yard.
The great gray owl’s a strange creature. It’s immense, and so shy that it lives only in the oldest of the old-growth forests, among giant trees, as if to match its own great size against them. The owl sits very still for long stretches of time, watching for prey, until – so say the ornithologists – it believes it is invisible. A person or a deer can walk right up to it, and so secure is the bird in its invisibility that it will not move. Even if you’re looking straight at it, it’s convinced you can’t see it.
My job, my only job, was to live in the mansion and keep intruders out. There had been a For Sale sign out front, but I took it down and hid it in the garage the first day.
After a couple of years, Beauregard, the real killer, did sell the property, and was out of the picture. Pointy-toed Zim got his ten percent, I suppose – ten percent of $350,000; a third of a million for a place with no electricity! – but Quentin, the stock analyst, didn’t buy it right away. He said he was going to buy it, within the first five minutes of seeing it. At that time, he took me aside and asked if I could stay on, and like a true predator I said, Hell yes. I didn’t care who owned it as long as I got to stay there, as long as the owner lived far away and wasn’t someone who would keep mucking up my life with a lot of visits.
Quentin didn’t want to live here, or even visit; he just wanted to own it. He wanted to buy the place, but first he wanted to toy with Beauregard for a while, to try and drive the price down. He wanted to flirt with him, I think.
Myself, I would’ve been terrified to jack with Beauregard. The man had bullet holes in his arms and legs, and scars from various knife fights; he’d been in foreign prisons and had killed people. A bear had bitten him in the face, on one of his hunts, a bear he’d thought was dead.
Quentin and his consultant to the West, Zim, occasionally came out on “ scouting trips” during the summer and fall they were buying the place. They’d show up unannounced with bags of groceries – Cheerios, Pop Tarts, hot dogs, cartons of Marlboros – and want to stay for the weekend, to “get a better feel for the place.” I’d have to move my stuff-sleeping bag, frying pan, fishing rod – over to the guest house, which was spacious enough. I didn’t mind that; I just didn’t like the idea of having them around.
Once, while Quentin and Zim were walking in the woods, I looked inside one of their dumb sacks of groceries to see what they’d brought this time and a magazine fell out, a magazine with a picture of naked men on the cover. I mean, drooping penises and all, and the inside of the magazine was worse, with naked little boys and naked men on motorcycles.
None of the men or boys in the pictures were ever doing anything, they were never touching each other, but still the whole magazine – the part of it I looked at, anyway – was nothing but heinies and penises.
In my woods!
I’d see the two old boys sitting on the front porch, the lodge ablaze with light – those sapsuckers running my generator, my propane, far into the night, playing my Jimmy Buffett records, singing at the top of their lungs. Then finally they’d turn the lights off, shut the generator down, and go to bed.
Except Quentin would stay up a little longer. From the porch of the guest house at the other end of the meadow (my pups asleep at my feet), I could see Quentin moving through the lodge, lighting the gas lanterns, walking like a ghost. Then the sonofabitch would start having one of his fits.
He’d break things – plates, saucers, lanterns, windows, my things and Beauregard’s things – though I suppose they were now his things, since the deal was in the works. I’d listen to the crashing of glass and watch Quentin’s big, whirling polar-bear shape passing from room to room. Sometimes he had a pistol in his hand (they both carried nine-millimeter Blackhawks on their hips, like little cowboys), and he’d shoot holes in the ceiling and the walls.
I’d get tense there in the dark. This wasn’t good for my peace of mind. My days of heaven – I’d gotten used to them, and I wanted to defend them and protect them, even if they weren’t mine in the first place, even if I’d never owned them.
Then, in that low lamplight, I’d see Zim enter the room. Like an old queen, he’d put his arm around Quentin’s big shoulders and lead him away to bed.
After one of their scouting trips the house stank of cigarettes, and I wouldn’t sleep in the bed for weeks, for fear of germs; I’d sleep in one of the many guest rooms. Once I found some mouthwash spray under the bed and pictured the two of them lying there, spraying it into each other’s mouths in the morning, before kissing . . .
I’m talking like a homophobe here. I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it was just that realtor. He was just turning a trick, was all.
I felt sorry for Quentin. It was strange how shy he was, how he always tried to cover up his destruction, smearing wood putty into the bullet holes and mopping the food off the ceiling – this fractured stock analyst doing domestic work. He offered me lame excuses the next day about the broken glass – “I was shooting at a bat,” he’d say, “a bat came in the window” – and all the while Zim would be sitting on my porch, looking out at my valley with his boots propped up on the railing and smoking the cigarettes that would not kill him quick enough.
Once, in the middle of the day, as the three of us sat on the porch – Quentin asking me some questions about the valley, about how cold it got in the winter – we saw a coyote and her three pups go trotting across the meadow. Zim jumped up, seized a stick of firewood (my firewood!), and ran, in his dirty-diaper waddle, out into the field after them, waving the club like a madman. The mother coyote got two of the pups by the scruff and ran with them into the trees, but Zim got the third one, and stood over it, pounding, in the hot midday sun.
It’s an old story, but it was a new one for me – how narrow the boundary is between invisibility and collusion. If you don’t stop something yourself, if you don’t singlehandedly step up and change things, then aren’t you just as guilty?
I didn’t say anything, not even when Zim came huffing back up to the porch, walking like a man who had just gone out to get the morning paper. There was blood speckled around the cuffs of his pants,
and even then I said nothing. I did not want to lose my job. My love for this valley had me trapped.
We all three sat there like everything was the same – Zim breathing a bit more heavily, was all – and I thought I would be able to keep my allegiances secret, through my silence. But they knew whose side I was on. It had been revealed to them. It was as if they had infrared vision, as if they could see everywhere, and everything.
“Coyotes eat baby deer and livestock,” said the raisin-eyed sonofabitch. “Remember,” he said, addressing my silence, “it’s not your ranch anymore. All you do is live here and keep the pipes from freezing.” Zim glanced over at his soul mate. I thought how when Quentin had another crackup and lost this place, Zim would get the 10 percent again, and again and again each time.
Quentin’s face was hard to read; I couldn’t tell if he was angry with Zim or not. Everything about Quentin seemed hidden at that moment. How did they do it? How could the bastards be so good at camouflaging themselves when they had to?
I wanted to trick them. I wanted to hide and see them reveal their hearts. I wanted to watch them when they did not know I was watching, and see how they really were – beyond the fear and anger. I wanted to see what was at the bottom of their black fucking hearts.
Now Quentin blinked and turned calmly, still revealing no emotion, and gave his pronouncement. “ If the coyotes eat the little deers, they should go,” he said. “Hunters should be the only thing out here getting the little deers.”
The woods felt the same when I went for my walks each time the two old boys departed. Yellow tanagers still flitted through the trees, flashing blazes of gold. Ravens quorked as they passed through the dark woods, as if to reassure me that they were still on my side, that I was still with nature, rather than without.
I slept late. I read. I hiked, I fished in the evenings. I saw the most spectacular sights. Northern lights kept me up until four in the morning some nights, coiling in red and green spirals across the sky, exploding in iridescent furls and banners. The northern lights never displayed themselves while the killers were there, and for that I was glad.
