by Rick Bass
“I’ve an idea,” I said. “Let’s pull the tower down, and drag it over to the fire with the car.”
“Yeah!” said Kirby. “Yeah!” Clouds were hurrying past the moon, something was blowing in quickly, but I could see that Kirby had straightened up some, and that he was not going to pass out.
It’s been ten years since we were in high school. Some days, when I am with him, it seems that eternity still lies out in front of us; and other days, it seems that we’ve already died, somehow, and everything is over. Tricia is beautiful. She reminds me of that white sports car.
We kicked most of the sand off of our shoes, and got in the car, and it started right up, the way it always did. It was a nice car, all right, and Kirby drove it to work every day—though work was only one-point-eight miles away—and he kept his briefcase in the back seat; but in the trunk, just thrown in, were all of the things he had always kept in his car in high school, things he thought he might need in an emergency.
There was a bow and arrows, a .22 rifle, a tomahawk, binoculars, a tire inflator, a billy club, some extra fishing poles, a tool box, some barbed wire, a bull riding rope, cowboy boots, a wrinkled, oily tuxedo he had rented and never bothered to return, and there were other things, too—but it was the bull riding rope, which we attached to the tower, and to the back bumper of the little sports car, that came in handy this time.
Sand flew as the tires spun, and like some shy animal, the BMW quickly buried itself, up to the doors.
To the very end, I think Kirby believed that at any moment he was going to pull free, and break out of the sand, and pull the tower over: the engine screaming, the car shuddering and bucking…but it was sunk deep, when he gave up, and he had to crawl out through the window.
The Cuba libres, and the roar of the wind, made it seem funny; we howled, as if it was something the car had done by itself, on its own.
“Let’s take a picture and send it to Tricia,” he said. I laughed, and winced too, a little, because I thought it was a bad sign that he was talking about her again, so much, so often, but he was happy, so we got the camera from the trunk, and because he did not have a flash attachment, we built another fire, stacked wood there by the tower, which is what we should have done in the first place.
We went back to get the couch, and our poles and sleeping bags, and the ice chest. I had worked, for a while, for a moving company, and I knew a trick so that I could carry on my back a couch, a refrigerator, or almost anything, and I showed it to Kirby, and he screamed, laughing, as I ran down the beach with the couch on my back, not able to see where I was going, carrying the couch like an ant with a leaf, coming dangerously close to the water. Kirby ran along behind me, screaming, carrying the other things, and when we had set up a new camp, we ran back and forth, carrying the larger pieces of burning logs, transferring the fire, too. We took a picture of the car by firelight.
Our hands and arms had dried blood on them almost all the way up to the elbows, from the barnacles, and we rinsed them off in the sea, which was not as cold as we had expected.
“I wish Tricia was here to see this,” he said, more than once. The wind was blowing still harder, and the moon was gone now.
We got a new fire started, and were exhausted from all the effort; we fixed more drinks and slumped into the couch and raised our poles to cast out again, but stopped, realizing the shrimp were gone, that something had stolen them.
The other shrimp were in a live well, in the trunk, so we re-baited. It was fun, reaching in the dark into the warm bubbling water of the bait bucket, and feeling the wild shrimp leap about, fishtailing, trying to escape. It didn’t matter which shrimp you got; you didn’t even need to look. You just reached in, and caught whichever one leapt into your hand.
We baited the hooks and cast out again. We were thirsty, so we fixed more drinks. We nodded off on the couch, and were awakened by the fire going down, and by snow, which was landing on our faces. It was just starting. We sat up, and then stood up, but didn’t say anything. We reeled in and checked our hooks, and found that the shrimp were gone again.
Kirby looked out at the darkness, where surely the snowflakes were landing on the water, and he looked up at the sky, and could not stand the beauty.
“I’m going to try to hitchhike back to Houston,” he said. He did not say her name but I know he was thinking of waking up with Tricia, and looking out the window, and seeing the snow, and everything being warm, inside the house, under the roof.
“No,” I said. “Wait.” Then I was cruel. “You’ll just get in a fight again,” I told him, though I knew it wasn’t true: they were always wild to see each other after any kind of separation, even a day or two. I had to admit I was somewhat jealous of this.
“Wait a little longer, and we’ll go out into the waves,” I said.
“Yes,” said Kirby. “Okay.” Because we’d been thinking that would be the best part, the most fun: wade-fishing. We’d read about that, too, and Kirby had brought a throw net, with which to catch mullets for bait.
We’d read about wade-fishermen with long stringers of fish—the really successful fishermen—being followed by sharks and attacked, and so we were pretty terrified of the sharks, knowing that they could be down there among our legs, in the darkness and under water, where we could not see, following us: or that we could even walk right into the sharks. That idea of them being hidden, just beneath us—we didn’t like it a bit, not knowing for sure if they were out there or not.
We fixed a new batch of Cuba libres, using a lot of lime. We stood at the shore in our waders, the snow and wind coming hard into our faces, and drank them quickly, and poured some more, raced them down. It wasn’t ocean anymore, but snowdrift prairie, the Missouri breaks, or the Dakotas and beyond, and we waded out, men searching for game, holding the heavy poles high over our heads, dragging the great Bible cast-nets behind us.
The water was not very deep for a long time; for fifteen minutes it was only knee-deep, getting no deeper, and not yet time to think about sharks.
“I wish Tricia was here,” said Kirby. The Cuba libres were warm in our bellies; we’d used a lot of rum in the last ones. “I wish she was riding on my shoulders, piggy-back,” he said.
“Nekkid,” I said.
“Yes,” said Kirby, picturing it, and he was happy, and even though I didn’t really like Tricia, I thought how nice it would have been if she could have seen him then, sort of looking off and dreaming about it. I wished I had a girlfriend or wife on my back, too, then, to go along with all the other equipment I was carrying. I was thinking that she could hold the pole, and cast out, waiting for a bite, waiting for the big fight; and I could work the throw net, trying to catch fresh mullet, which we’d cut up into cubes, right there in the water, and use for fresh bait: because the bait had to be fresh.
It was like a murder or a sin, cutting the live mullet’s head off, slicing the entrails out, filleting out a piece of still-barely-living meat and putting it on the hook, and then throwing the rest of the mullet away; throwing it behind you for the sharks, or whatever—head, fins, entrails, and left-over meat—casting your hook then far out into the waves and dark and snow, with that warm very fresh piece of flesh on the hook. It was like a sin, the worst of the animal kingdom, I thought, but if you caught what you were after, if you got the big redfish, then it was all right, it was possible that you were forgiven.
I wanted to catch the largest redfish in the world. I wanted to catch one so large that I might not even be able to get it in to shore.
Kirby looked tired. He had put on about twenty pounds since high school, and it was hard work, walking with the poles over our heads.
“Wait,” I said. We stopped and caught our breath. It was hard to hear each other, with only the wind and waves around us; and except for the direction of the waves, splashing into our faces from the Gulf, we couldn’t tell where shore was, or in which direction the ocean lay.
“I’ve an idea,” said Kirby, still breathing
heavily, looking back to where we were pretty sure the shore was. If our fire was still burning, we couldn’t see it. “There’s a place back up the beach that rents horses in the daytime. Some stables.”
“They shoot horse thieves,” I said. But I thought it was a wonderful idea. I was tired, too; I wasn’t in as good shape as I’d once been either.
“I’ll go get them,” I said, since I wasn’t breathing quite as hard as he was. It was a tremendous picture: both of us on white horses, riding out into the waves, chest-deep, neck-deep, then the magic lift and float of the horse as it began to swim, the light feeling of nothing, no resistance.
Mares, they would be, noble and strong, capable of carrying foolish, drunken men out to sea on their journey, if they so desired, and capable of bringing them back again, too.
“Yes,” I said. “You stay here. I’ll go find the horses.”
Back on shore, walking up the beach to the stables, I stopped at a pay phone, and dialed Tricia’s number. The cold wind was rocking the little phone booth, and there was a lot of static on the line.
“Tricia,” I said, disguising my voice, mumbling. “This is Kirby. I love you.” Then I hung up, and thought about how I really liked her after all, and I went to look for the horses. It would be perfect.
We could ride around out in the Gulf on the swimming horses until they tired, casting and drinking, searching for what we were after, pausing sometimes to lean forward and whisper kind things, encouragement, into the horses’ ears, as they labored through the waves, blowing hard through their nostrils, legs kicking and churning, swimming around in wide circles out in the Gulf, in the darkness, the snow; no doubt full of their own fears of sharks, of drowning, of going down under too heavy of a load, and of all the things unseen, all the things below.
The Watch
When Hollingsworth’s father, Buzbee, was seventy-seven years old, he was worth a thousand dollars, that summer and fall. His name was up in all the restaurants and convenience stores along the interstate, and the indistinctions on the dark photocopies taped to doors and walls made him look distinguished, like someone else. The Xerox sheets didn’t even say Reward, Lost, or Missing. They just got right to the point: Mr. Buzbee, $1,000.
The country Buzbee had disappeared in was piney woods, in the center of the state, away from the towns, the Mississippi—away from everything. There were swamps and ridges, and it was the hottest part of the state, and hardly anyone lived there. If they did, it was on those ridges, not down in the bottoms, and there were sometimes fields that had been cleared by hand, though the soil was poor and red and could really grow nothing but tall lime-colored grass that bent in the wind like waves in a storm, and was good for horses and nothing else—no crops, no cattle, nothing worth a damn—and Hollingsworth did not doubt that Buzbee, who had just recently taken to pissing in his pants, was alive, perhaps even lying down in the deep grass somewhere, to be spiteful, like a dog.
Hollingsworth knew the reward he was offering wasn’t much. He had a lot more money than that, but he read the papers and knew that people in Jackson, the big town seventy miles north, offered that much every week, when their dogs ran off, or their cats went away somewhere to have kittens. Hollingsworth had offered only $1,000 for his father because $900 or some lesser figure would have seemed cheap; but some greater number would have made people think he was sad and missed the old man. It really cracked Hollingsworth up, reading about those lawyers in Jackson who would offer $1,000 for their tramp cats. He wondered how they came upon those figures—if they knew what a thing was really worth when they liked it.
It was lonely without Buzbee—it was bad, was much too quiet, especially in the evenings—and it was the first time in his life that Hollingsworth had ever heard such a silence. Sometimes cyclists would ride past his dried-out barn and country store, and there was one who would sometimes stop for a Coke; sweaty, breathing hard. He was more like some sort of draft animal than a person, so intent was he upon his speed, and he never had time to chat with Hollingsworth, to spin tales. He said his name was Jesse; he would say hello, gulp his Coke, and then this Jesse would be off, hurrying to catch up with the others.
Hollingsworth tried to guess the names of the other cyclists. He felt he had a secret over them: giving them names they didn’t know they had. He felt as if he owned them, as if he had them on some invisible string and could pull them back in just by muttering their names. He called all the others by French names—François, Pierre, Jacques—as they all rode French bicycles with an unpronounceable name—and he thought they were pansies, delicate, for having been given such soft and fluttering names—but he liked Jesse, and even more, he liked Jesse’s bike, which was a black Schwinn, a heavy old bike that Hollingsworth saw made Jesse struggle hard to stay up with the Frenchmen.
Hollingsworth watched them ride, like a pack of animals, up and down the weedy, abandoned roads in the heat, disappearing into the shimmer that came up out of the road and the fields. The cyclists disappeared into the mirages, tracking a straight line, and then, later in the day—sitting on his porch, waiting—Hollingsworth would see them again when they came riding back out of the mirages.
The very first time that Jesse had peeled off from the rest of the pack and stopped by Hollingsworth’s ratty-ass grocery for a Coke—the sound the old bottle made, sliding down the chute, Hollingsworth still had the old formula Cokes, as no one ever came to his old leaning barn of a store, set back on the hill off the deserted road—that first time, Hollingsworth was so excited at having a visitor that he couldn’t speak. He just kept swallowing, filling his stomach fuller and fuller with air—and the sound the old bottle made sliding down the chute made Hollingsworth feel as if he had been struck in the head with it, as if he had been waiting at the bottom of the chute. No one had been out to his place since his father ran away: just the sheriff, once.
The road past Hollingsworth’s store was the road of a ghost town. There had once been a good community, a big one, back at the turn of the century, down in the bottom, below his store—across the road, across the wide fields, with rich growing grasses from the river’s flooding—and down in the tall hardwoods, with trees so thick that three men, holding arms, could not circle them, there had been a colony, a fair-sized town actually, that shipped cotton down the bayou in the fall, when the waters started to rise again.
The town had been called Hollingsworth.
But in 1903 the last residents had died of yellow fever, as had happened in almost every other town in the state—strangely enough, those lying closest to swamps and bayous, where yellow fever had always been a problem, were the last towns to go under, the most resistant—and then in the years that followed, the new towns that re-established themselves in the state did not choose to locate near Hollingsworth again. Buzbee’s father had been one of the few who left before the town died, though he had contracted it, the yellow fever, and both Buzbee’s parents died shortly after Buzbee was born.
Yellow fever came again in the 1930s, as well as malaria, and got Buzbee’s wife—Hollingsworth’s mother—when Hollingsworth was born, but Buzbee and his new son stayed, dug in and refused to leave the store. When Hollingsworth was fifteen, they both caught it again, but fought it down, together, as it was the kind that attacked only every other day—a different strain than before—and their days of fever alternated, so that they were able to take care of each other: cleaning up the spitting and the vomiting of black blood; covering each other with blankets when the chills started, and building fires in the fireplace, even in summer. And they tried all the roots in the area, all the plants, and somehow—for they did not keep track of what they ate, only sampled everything, anything that grew: pine boughs, cattails, wild carrots—they escaped being buried. Cemeteries were scattered throughout the woods and fields; nearly every place that was high and windy had one.
So the fact that no one ever came to their store, that there never had been any business, was nothing for Buzbee and Hollingsworth; everythi
ng would always be a secondary calamity after the two years of fever, and burying everyone, everything. Waking up in the night with a mosquito biting them and wondering if it had the fever. There were cans of milk on the shelves in their store that were forty years old; bags of potato chips that were twenty years old, because neither of them liked potato chips.
Hollingsworth would sit on his heels on the steps and tremble whenever Jesse and the others rode past, and on the times when Jesse turned in and came up to the store, so great was Hollingsworth’s hurry to light his cigarette and then talk, slowly, the way it was supposed to be done in the country, the way he had seen it in his imagination, when he thought about how he would like his life to really be—that he spilled two cigarettes, and had barely gotten the third lit and drawn one puff when Jesse finished his Coke and then stood back up, and put the wet empty bottle back in the wire rack, waved, and rode off, the great backs of his calves and hamstrings working up and down in swallowing shapes, like things trapped in a sack. So Hollingsworth had to wait again for Jesse to come back, and by the next time, he had decided for certain that Buzbee was just being spiteful.
Before Buzbee had run away, sometimes Hollingsworth and Buzbee had cooked their dinners in the evenings, and other times they had driven into a town and ordered something, and looked around at people, and talked to the waitresses—but now, in the evenings, Hollingsworth stayed around, so as not to miss Jesse should he come by, and he ate sparingly from his stocks on the shelves: dusty cans of Vienna sausage, sardines, and rock crackers. Warm beer, brands that had gone out of business a decade earlier, two decades. Holding out against time was difficult, but was also nothing after holding out against death. In cheating death, Hollingsworth and Buzbee had continued to live, had survived, but also, curiously, had lost an edge of some sort: nothing would ever be quite as intense, nothing would ever really matter, after the biggest struggle.
