For a Little While

by Rick Bass

  All around them the soft pittings, like hail, of tree chips rained into the bushes. One of the chips hit Buster in the nose, and he rubbed it with his paw, and turned and looked up at Dr. Lynly.

  They heard the mule before they saw him: he was groaning, like a person. He was coming up the hill that led out of the swamp and was heading toward them.

  They could see the tops of small trees and saplings shaking as he dragged his load through them. Then they could see the tops of his ears, then his huge head, and after that they saw his chest. Veins raced against the chestnut thickness of it.

  Then the tops of his legs. And then his knee. Karen stared at it and then sat down in the mud, and hugged herself—the men stopped swinging, for just a moment—and Dr. Lynly had to help her up.

  It was the mule’s right knee that was injured, and it had swollen to the size of a basketball. It buckled with every step he took, pulling the sled up the slick and muddy hill, but he kept his footing and did not stop. Flies buzzed around the knee, around the infections, where the loggers had pierced the skin with nails and the ends of their knives, trying to drain the pus. Dried blood ran down in streaks to the mule’s hoof, to the mud.

  The sawlogs on the back of the sled smelled good, fresh. They smelled like they were still alive.

  Dr. Lynly walked over to the mule and touched the knee. The mule closed his eyes and trembled, as Karen had just done, or perhaps as if in ecstasy, at the chance to rest. The three younger men, plus the sledder, gathered around.

  “We can’t stop workin’ him,” the sledder said. “We can’t shoot him either. We’ve got to keep him alive. He’s all we’ve got. If he dies, it’s us that’ll have to pull them logs up here.”

  A cedar moth from the woods passed over the mule’s ears, fluttering. It rested on the mule’s forehead, and then flew off. The mule did not open his eyes. Dr. Lynly frowned and rubbed his chin. Karen felt faint again, and leaned against the mule’s sweaty back to keep from falling.

  “You sure you’ve got to keep working him?” Dr. Lynly asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The pale logger was still swinging: tiny chips flying in batches.

  Dr. Lynly opened his bag. He took out a needle and rag, and a bottle of alcohol. He cleaned the mule’s infections. The mule drooled a little when the needle went in, but he did not open his eyes. The needle was slender, and it bent and flexed, and slowly Dr. Lynly drained the fluid.

  Karen held on to the mule’s wet back and vomited into the mud: both her hands on the mule as if she were being arrested against the hood of a car, and her feet spread wide. The men gripped their axes and looked away.

  Dr. Lynly gave one of them a large plastic jug of pills.

  “These will kill his pain,” he said. “The knee will get big again, though. I’ll be back out, to drain it again.” He handed Karen a clean rag from his satchel, and led her away from the mule, away from the mess.

  One of the ax men carried their satchel all the way back to the truck. Dr. Lynly let Karen get up into the cab first, and then Buster; then the ax man rocked and shoved, pushing on the hood of the truck as the tires spun, and helped them back it out of the mud: their payment for healing the mule. A smell of burning rubber and smoke hung in the trees after they left.

  They didn’t talk much. Dr. Lynly was thinking about the painkillers; how for a moment, he had almost given the death pills instead.

  Karen was thinking how she would not let him pay her for that day’s work. Also she was thinking about Sydney Bean: she would sit on the porch with him again, and maybe drink a beer and watch the fields.

  He was sitting on the back porch when she got home; he was on the wooden bench next to the hammock, and he had a tray set up for her with a pitcher of cold orange juice. There was froth in the pitcher, a light creamy foaminess from where he had been stirring it, and the ice cubes were circling around. Beads of condensation slid down the pitcher, rolling slowly, then quickly, like tears. She could feel her heart giving. The field was rich summer green, and then, past the field, the dark line of trees. A long string of cattle egrets flew past, headed down to their rookery in the swamp.

  Sydney poured her a small glass of orange juice. He had a metal pail of cold water and a clean washcloth. It was hot on the back porch, even for evening. He helped her get into the hammock; then he wrung the washcloth out and put it across her forehead, her eyes. Sydney smelled as if he had just gotten out of the shower, and he was wearing clean white duckcloth pants and a bright blue shirt.

  She felt dizzy and leaned back in the hammock. The washcloth over her eyes felt so good. She sipped the orange juice, not looking at it, and licked the light foam of it from her lips. Owls were beginning to call, down in the swamp.

  She felt as if she were younger, going back to a place, some place she had not been in a long time but could remember fondly. It felt like she was in love. She knew that she could not be, but that was what it felt like.

  Sydney sat behind her and rubbed her temples.

  It grew dark, and the moon came up.

  “It was a rough day,” she said, around ten o’clock.

  But he just kept rubbing.

  Around eleven o’clock, she dozed off, and he woke her, helped her from the hammock, and led her inside, not turning on any lights, and helped her get in bed.

  Then he went back outside, locking the door behind him. He sat on the porch a little longer, watching the moon, so high above him, and then he drove home cautiously, as ever. Accidents were everywhere; they could happen at any time, from any direction.

  Sydney moved carefully, and tried to look ahead and be ready for the next one.

  He really wanted her. He wanted her in his life. Sydney didn’t know if the guilt was there for that—the wanting—or because he was alive, still seeing things, still feeling. He wanted someone in his life, and it didn’t seem right to feel guilty about it. But he did.

  Sometimes, at night, he would hear the horses running, thundering across the hard summer-baked flatness of his pasture, running wild—and he would imagine they were laughing at him for wasting his time feeling guilty, but it was a feeling he could not shake, could not ride down, and his sleep was often poor and restless.

  Sydney often wondered if horses were even meant to be ridden at all.

  The thing about the broncs, he realized—and he never realized it until they were rolling on top of him in the dust, or rubbing him off against a tree, or against the side of a barn, trying to break his leg—was that if the horses didn’t get broken, tamed, they’d get wilder. There was nothing as wild as a horse that had never been broken. It just got meaner, each day.

  So he held on. He bucked and spun and arched and twisted, shooting up and down with the mad horses’ leaps; and when the horse tried to hurt itself, by running straight into something—a fence, a barn, the lake—he stayed on.

  If there was, once in a blue moon, a horse not only stronger, but more stubborn than he, then he had to destroy it.

  The cattle were easy to work with, would do anything for food, and once one did it, they would all follow; but working with the horses made him think ahead, and sometimes he wondered, in streaks and bits of paranoia, if perhaps all the horses in the world had some battle against him, and were destined, all of them, to pass through his corrals, each one testing him before he was allowed to stop.

  Because like all bronc-busters, that was what Sydney allowed himself to consider and savor, in moments of rest: the day when he could stop. A run of successes. A string of wins so satisfying and continuous that it would seem—even though he would be sore, and tired—that a horse would never beat him again, and he would be convinced of it, and then he could quit.

  Mornings in summers past, Henry used to come over and sit on the railing and watch. He had been an elementary school teacher, and frail, almost anemic: but he had loved to watch Sydney Bean ride the horses. He taught only a few classes in the summers, and he would sip coffee and grade a few papers while Sydney
and the horse fought out in the center.

  Sometimes Henry had set a broken bone for Sydney—Sydney had shown him how—and other times Sydney, if he was alone, would set his own bones, if he even bothered with them. Then he would wrap them up and keep riding. Dr. Lynly had set some of his bones, on the bad breaks.

  Sydney was feeling old, since Henry had drowned. Not so much in the mornings, when everything was new and cool, and had promise; but in the evenings, he could feel the crooked shapes of his bones, within. He would drink beers, and watch his horses, and other people’s horses in his pasture, as they ran. The horses never seemed to feel old, not even in the evenings, and he was jealous of their strength.

  He called Karen one weekend. “Come out and watch me break horses,” he said.

  He was feeling particularly sore and tired. For some reason he wanted her to see that he could always do it; that the horses were always broken. He wanted her to see what it looked like, and how it always turned out.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, after she had considered it. “I’m just so tired.” It was a bad and crooked road, bumpy, from her house to his, and it took nearly an hour to drive it.

  “I’ll come get you…?” he said. He wanted to shake her. But he said nothing. He nodded, and then remembered he was on the phone and said, “I understand.”

  She did let him sit on the porch with her, whenever he drove over to her farm. She had to have someone.

  “Do you want to hit me?” he asked one evening, almost hopefully.

  But she just shook her head.

  He saw that she was getting comfortable with her sorrow, was settling down into it, like an old way of life, and he wanted to shock her out of it, but felt paralyzed and mute, like the dumbest of animals.

  Sydney stared at his crooked hands, with the scars from the cuts made over the years by the horses and the fencing tools. He cursed the many things he did not know. He could lift bales of hay. He could string barbed-wire fences. He could lift things. That was all he knew. He wished he were a chemist, an electrician, a poet, or a preacher. The things he had—what little of them there were—wouldn’t help her.

  She had never thought to ask how drunk Henry had been. Sydney thought that made a difference: whether you jumped off the bridge with one beer in you, or two, or a six-pack; or with a sea of electric blue Psychos rolling around in your stomach—but she never asked.

  He admired her confidence, and doubted his ability to be as strong, as stubborn. She never considered that it might have been her fault, or Henry’s; that some little spat might have prompted it, or general disillusionment.

  It was his fault, Sydney’s, square and simple, and she seemed comfortable, if not happy, with the fact.

  Dr. Lynly treated horses, but he did not seem to love them, thought Karen.

  “Stupid creatures,” he would grumble, when they would not do as he wanted, when he was trying to doctor them. He and Buster and Karen would try to herd a horse into the trailer, or the corral, pulling on the reins and swatting the horse with green branches.

  “Brickheads,” Dr. Lynly would growl, pulling the reins and then walking around and slapping, feebly, the horse’s flank. “Brickheads and fatheads.” He had been loading horses for fifty years, and Karen would laugh, because the horses’ stupidity always seemed to surprise, and then anger, Dr. Lynly, and she thought it was sweet.

  It was as if he had not yet really learned that that was how they always were.

  But Karen had seen it right away. She knew that many girls, and women, were infatuated with horses, in love with them even, for their great size and strength, and for their wildness—but Karen, as she saw more and more of the sick horses, the ailing ones, the ones most people did not see regularly, knew that all horses were simple and trusting, and that even the smartest ones could be made to do as they were told.

  And they could be so dumb, so loyal, and so oblivious to pain. It was as though—even if they could feel it—they could never, ever acknowledge it.

  It was sweet, she thought, and dumb.

  Karen let Sydney rub her temples and brush her hair. She would go into the bathroom and wash her hair while he sat on the porch. He had taken up whittling; one of the stallions had broken Sydney’s leg by throwing him into a fence and then trampling him, and the leg was in a heavy cast. So Sydney had decided to take a break for several days.

  He had bought a whittling kit at the hardware store, and was going to try hard to learn how to do it. There were instructions. The kit had a square piece of balsa wood, almost the weight of nothing, and a small curved whittling knife. There was a dotted outline in the shape of a duck’s head on the balsa wood that showed what the shape of his finished work would be.

  After he learned to whittle, Sydney wanted to learn to play the harmonica. That was next, after whittling.

  He would hear the water running, and hear Karen splashing, as she put her head under the faucet and rinsed.

  She would come out in her robe, drying her hair, and then would let him sit in the hammock with her and brush her hair. It was September, and the cottonwoods were tinging, were making the skies hazy, soft and frozen-looking. Nothing seemed to move.

  Her hair came down to the middle of her back. She had stopped cutting it. The robe was old and worn, the color of an old blue dish. Something about the shampoo she used reminded him of apples. She wore moccasins that had a shearling lining in them, and Sydney and Karen would rock in the hammock. Sometimes Karen would get up and bring out two Cokes from the refrigerator, and they would drink those.

  “Be sure to clean up those shavings when you go,” she told him. There were balsa wood curls all over the porch. Her hair, almost dry, would be light and soft. “Be sure not to leave a mess when you go.”

  It would be dark then, Venus out beyond them.

  “Yes,” he would say.

  Once, before he left, she reached out from the hammock, and caught his hand. She squeezed it, and then let go.

  He drove home thinking of Henry, and of how he had once taken Henry fishing for the first time. They had caught a catfish so large it had scared Henry. They drank beers, and sat in the boat, and talked.

  One of Sydney Bean’s headlights faltered on the drive home, then went out, and it took him an hour and a half to get home.

  The days got cold and brittle. It was hard, working with the horses. Sydney’s broken leg hurt all the time. Sometimes the horse would leap, and come down with all four hooves bunched in close together, and the pain and shock of it would travel all the way up Sydney’s leg and into his shoulder, and down into his wrists.

  He was sleeping past sun-up some days, and was being thrown, now, nearly every day; sometimes several times in the same day.

  There was always a strong wind. Rains began to blow in. It was getting cold, crisp as apples, and it was the weather that in the summer everyone said they were looking forward to. One night there was a frost, and a full moon.

  On her back porch, sitting in the hammock by herself with a heavy blanket around her, Karen saw a stray balsa shaving caught between the cracks of her porch floor. It was white, in the moonlight, the whole porch was, and the field was blue—the cattle stood out in the moonlight like blue statues—and she almost called Sydney.

  But then the silence and absence of a thing—she presumed it was Henry, but did not know for sure—closed in around her, and the field beyond her porch, like the inside of her heart, seemed to be deathly still, and she did not call.

  She thought, I can love who I want to love. But she was angry at Sydney Bean for having tried to pull her so far out, into a place she did not want to go.

  She fell asleep in the hammock, and dreamed that Dr. Lynly was trying to wake her up, and was taking her blood pressure, feeling her forehead, and, craziest of all, swatting at her with green branches.

  She awoke from the dream, and decided to call Sydney after all. He answered the phone as if he, too, had been awake.

  “Hello?” he said. She cou
ld tell by the questioning in his voice that he did not get many phone calls.

  “Hi,” said Karen. “I just—wanted to call, and tell you hello.” She paused, almost faltered. “And that I feel better. That I feel good, I mean. That’s all.”

  “Well,” said Sydney Bean. “Well, good. I mean, great.”

  “That’s all,” said Karen. “Bye,” she said.

  “Goodbye,” said Sydney.

  On Thanksgiving Day, Karen and Dr. Lynly headed back out to the swamp, to check up on the loggers’ mule. It was the hardest cold of the year, and there was bright ice on the bridges, and it was not thawing, even in the sun. The inside of Dr. Lynly’s old truck was no warmer than the air outside. Buster, in his wooliness, lay across Karen to keep her warm.

  They turned onto a gravel road and started down into the swamp. Smoke, low and spreading, was flowing through all the woods. The men had little fires going; they were each working on a different tree, and had small warming fires where they stood and shivered when resting.

  Karen found herself looking for the pale muscled logger.

  He was swinging the ax, but he only had one arm. His left arm was gone, and there was a sort of a sleeve over it, like a sock, and he was swinging at the tree with his remaining arm. The man was sweating, and a small boy stepped up and quickly toweled him dry each time the pale man stepped back to take a rest.

  They stopped the truck and got out and walked up to him, and he stepped back—wet, already, again; the boy toweled him off, standing on a low stool and starting with the man’s neck and shoulders, and then going down his great back—and the man told them that the mule was better and that if they wanted to see him, he was lower in the swamp.