by Rick Bass
After dinner we watched old fight films. For a screen we used a bedsheet strung between two pine trees. Don set up the projector on the picnic table and used a crooked branch for a pointer. Some of the films were of past champions, but some were old movies of Don fighting. He could make the film go in slow motion, to show the combinations that led to knockdowns, and Betty always got up and left whenever we watched one of the old splintery films of Don’s fights. It wasn’t any fun for her, even though she knew he was going to win, or was going to get up again after going down.
I had seen all of Don’s fights a hundred times and had watched all the films of the greatest fighters a thousand times, and I was bored with it. Fighting is not films, it’s experience. I knew what to do and when to do it. I’d look past the bedsheet, past the flickering washes of light, while Jason and Don leaned forward, breathless, watching young Don stalk his victim, everything silent except for the clicking of the projector, the crickets, the frogs, and sometimes the owls. In the dark I wondered what New York was going to be like, if it was going to be anything like this.
Some nights, after the movies had ended, we would talk about Pig-Eye Reeves. It had been several years ago, but even Jason remembered him. We were so familiar with the stories that it seemed to all of us—even to me, who had never met him—that we remembered him clearly.
Pig-Eye knocked out one of the fighters Don had trained, in a bar up in the Delta one night, the Green Frog. That was how Don found Pig-Eye—he had beaten Don’s challenger, had just stepped up out of the crowd. Don’s fighter, whose name Don always pretended he couldn’t remember, threw the first punch, a wicked, winging right, not even bothering to set it up with a jab—Don says he covered his face with his hands and groaned, knowing what was going to happen. Pig-Eye, full of beer, was still able to duck it, evidently, because Don heard nothing but the rip of air and then, a little delayed, the sound of another glove hitting a nose, then a grunt, and the sound of a body falling in the sawdust.
Don and Jason and Betty left the semiconscious fighter there in the Green Frog, with a broken nose and blood all over his chest and trunks. They drove home with no money and Pig-Eye.
They changed the number on the truck mirror from whatever it had been before—forty-five or fifty—back to one. Pig-Eye had won one fight.
“You just left your other fighter sitting there?” I asked the first time I heard the story, though I knew better than to ask now.
Don had seemed confused by the question. “He wasn’t my fighter anymore,” he said finally.
Sometimes Jason would ask the question for me, so I didn’t have to, and I could pretend it didn’t matter, as if I weren’t even thinking about it.
“Is Mack a better fighter than Pig-Eye?” he’d ask after watching the movies.
Don answered like a trainer every time. He was wonderful, the best. “Mack is better than Pig-Eye ever dreamed of being,” he’d say, clapping a big hand on my neck and giving it the death squeeze, his hand the size of a license plate.
“Tell him about the balloon,” Jason would cry when Don had reached a fever pitch for Pig-Eye stories.
Don leaned back against a tree and smiled at his son. The lights were off in the house. Betty had gone to bed. Moths fluttered around the porch light, and down below us in the Lake of Peace, bullfrogs drummed. There was no other sound.
“Pig-Eye won his last five fights down here with one hand tied behind his back,” Don said, closing his eyes. I wondered if I could do that, wondered if I’d have to do that, to ride down the legend of Pig-Eye, and pass over it.
“We sent him up to New York, to a promoter I knew”—Don looked at me quickly—“the same one we’ll be sending Mack to if he wins the rest of his fights. This promoter, Big Al Wilson, set him up in a penthouse in Manhattan, had all Pig-Eye’s meals catered to him. He had masseurs, everything. He was the champ. Everyone was excited about him.”
“Tell him about the scars,” Jason said. He moved next to his dad, so that his back was against the same tree, and it was as if they were both telling me the story now, though I knew it already, we all knew it.
“Pig-Eye had all these scars from his bar fights,” Don said. “He’d been in Vietnam too, and had got wounded there. He flew those crazy hot-air balloons for a hobby, once he started winning some fights and making some money, and he was always having rough landings, always crashing the balloons and getting cut up that way.”
“Helium balloons,” Jason said.
“It was a very disturbing thing to Pig-Eye’s opponents when he first stepped in the ring against them. They’d all heard about him, but he really had to be seen to be believed.”
“Like a zipper,” Jason said sleepily, but delighted. “He looked like a zipper. I remember.”
“Pig-Eye won fourteen fights in New York. He was ranked fifth and was fighting well. I went to a few of his fights, but then he changed.”
“He got different,” Jason cautioned.
“He stopped calling, stopped writing, and he started getting a little fat, a little slow. No one else could tell it, but I could.”
“He needed Dad for a trainer,” said Jason. In the distance I heard Killer nicker in his stall.
“He lost,” Don said, shaking his head. “He was fighting a nobody, some kid from Japan, and that night he just didn’t have it. He got knocked down three times. I saw tapes of it later. He was sitting up like one of those bears in a zoo, still trying to get on his feet for a third time, but he couldn’t do it. It was like he didn’t know where his legs were, didn’t know what his feet were for. He couldn’t remember how to do it.”
I thought about the ammonia and the chloroform handkerchiefs Don would sometimes place over my face when we were sparring. I wondered if every time he did that to me, he was remembering how Pig-Eye couldn’t stand up—how he had forgotten how to get back up. I thought that I surely knew how Pig-Eye had felt.
“The balloon,” Jason said. There was a wind in the trees, many nights, and so often those winds reminded me of that strange feeling of being both old and young, someplace in the middle, and for the first time, with no turning back.
“The balloon,” Jason said again, punching his father on the shoulder. “This is the best part.”
“Pig-Eye was crushed,” Don said, sleepy, detached, as if it were no longer Pig-Eye he was talking about. I thought again of how they had walked off and left that other fighter up in the Delta, the nameless one, sitting in the sawdust holding his broken nose. “It was the only time Pig-Eye had ever been knocked out, the only time he’d ever lost, and it devastated him.”
“A hundred and fifteen fights,” Jason said, “and he’d only lost one.”
“But it was my fault,” Don said. “It was how I trained him. It was wrong.”
“The balloon,” Jason said.
“He rented one,” Don said, looking up at the stars, speaking to the night. “He went out over the countryside the next day, his face all bandaged up, with a bottle of wine and his girlfriend, and then he took it up as high as it could go, and then he cut the strings to the gondola.”
“He was good,” Jason said solemnly.
“He was too good,” Don said.
All that summer I trained hard for New York. I knew I would win my hundred fights. I knew I could win them with one arm tied behind my back, either arm, if Don and Jason wanted that. But I wasn’t worried about my one hundred bar fights. I was worried about going up to New York, to a strange place, someplace different. Sometimes I did not want to fight anymore, but I never let anyone see that.
Jason was getting older, filling out, and sometimes Don let him ride Killer. We’d all have breakfast as usual, then Jason would saddle Killer. I’d wake the dogs and we’d start down toward the lake, moving lazily through the trees but knowing that in a minute or two we’d be running.
Don would sit in a chair by the shore and follow us with his binoculars. He had a whistle he’d blow to warn me when I was about to be trampled.
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When the dogs and I heard the horse, the hard, fast hooves coming straight down the hill, we’d start to run. It would be almost six o’clock then. The sun would just be coming up, and we’d see things as we raced through the woods: deer slipping back into the trees, cottontails diving into the brush. The dogs would break off and chase all of these things, and sometimes they’d rejoin me later on the other side of the lake with a rabbit hanging from their jaws. They’d fight over it, really wrestling and growling.
All of this would be going past at what seemed like ninety miles an hour: trees, vines, logs; greens, browns, blacks, and blues—flashes of the lake, flashes of sky, flashes of logs on the trail. I knew the course well, knew when to jump, when to dodge. It’s said that a healthy man can outrun a horse, over enough distance, but that first mile was the hardest, all that dodging.
Jason shouted, imitating his father, cracking the whip; the sun rose orange over the tops of the trees, the start of another day of perfection. And then the cry, “The Lake of Peace!” And it would be over, and I’d rush out into the shallows, a dog on either side of me, tripping and falling, the lake at my ankles, at my knees, coming up around my waist, and we’d be swimming, with Killer plunging in after us, and Jason still cracking the whip.
Actually, there were two stories about Pig-Eye Reeves. I was the only person Don told about the second one. I did not know which one was true.
In the other story, Pig-Eye recovered, survived. Still distraught over losing, he went south, tried to go back to Don, to start all over again. But Don had already taken on another fighter and would not train Pig-Eye anymore.
Don rubs his temples when he tells me this. He is not sure if this is how it went or not.
So Pig-Eye despaired even more and began drinking bottles of wine, sitting out on the dock and drinking them down the way a thirsty man might drink water. He drank far into the night, singing at the top of his lungs. Don and Betty had to put pillows over their heads to get to sleep, after first locking the doors.
Then Don woke up around midnight—he never could sleep through the night—and he heard splashing. He went outside and saw that Pig-Eye had on his wrist and ankle weights and was swimming out to the middle of the lake.
Don said he could see Pig-Eye’s wake, could see Pig-Eye at the end of it, stretching it out, splitting the lake in two—and then he disappeared. The lake became smooth again.
Don said that he sleepwalked, and thought perhaps what he’d seen wasn’t real. They had the sheriff’s department come out and drag the lake, but the body was never found. Perhaps he was still down there, and would be forever.
Sometimes, as Jason and the horse chased me across the lake, I would think about a game I used to play as a child, in the small town in Oklahoma where I grew up.
When I was in the municipal swimming pool, I would hold my breath, pinch my nose, duck under the water, and shove off from the pale blue side of the pool. Like a frog breast-stroking, eyes wide and reddening from the chlorine, I would try to make it all the way to the other side without having to come up for air.
That was the trick, to get all the way to the other side. Halfway across, as the water deepened, there’d be a pounding in the back of my head, and a sinister whine in my ears, my heart and throat clenching.
I thought about that game, as I swam with Jason and Killer close behind me. I seemed to remember my dogs being with me then, swimming in front of me, as if trying to show me the way, half pulling me across. But it was not that way at all, because this was many years before their time. I knew nothing then about dogs, or boxing, or living, or of trying to hold on to a thing you loved, and letting go of other things to do it.
I only understood what it was like to swim through deeper and deeper water, trying as hard as I could to keep from losing my breath, and trying, still, to make it to the deep end.
The History of Rodney
It rains in Rodney in the winter. But we have history; even for Mississippi, we have that. Out front there’s a sweet olive tree that grows all the way up to the third story, where Elizabeth’s sun porch is. Through the summer, butterflies swarm in the front yard, drunk on the smell of the tree. But in the winter it rains.
The other people in the town of Rodney are the daughters, sons, and granddaughters of slaves. Sixteen thousand people lived in Rodney before and during the Civil War. Now there are a dozen of us.
This old house I rent costs fifty dollars a month. Electricity sizzles and arcs from the fuse box on the back porch and tumbles to the ground in bouncing blue sparks. The house has thirty-five rooms, some of which are rotting—one has a tree growing through the floor—and the ceilings are all high, though not as high as the trees outside.
Here in the ghost town of Rodney there is a pig, a murderer, that lives under my house, and she has killed several dogs. The pig had twenty piglets this winter, and like the bad toughs in a western, they own the town. When we hear or see them coming, we run. We could shoot them down in the middle of the dusty lane that used to be a street, but we don’t: we’re waiting for them to fatten up on their mother’s milk.
We’re also waiting for Preacher to come back. He’s Daisy’s boyfriend, and he’s been gone for forty years.
Back in the trees, loose peafowl scream in the night. It is like the jungle out there. The river that used to run past Rodney—the Mississippi, almost a mile wide—shifted course exactly one hundred years ago.
It happened overnight. The earthen bulge of an oxbow, a bend upstream, was torn by the force of the water. Instead of making its taken-for-granted way through the swamp—the slow wind of northern water down from Minnesota—the river pressed, like sex, and broke through.
I’ve been reading about this in the old newspapers. And Daisy, who lives across the street, has been telling me about it. She says that the first day after it happened, the townspeople could do nothing but blink and gape at the wide sea of mud. Rodney then was the second-largest port in the South, second only to New Orleans.
Boats full of cotton were stranded in the flats. Alligators and snakes wriggled in the deep brown as the townspeople waited for a rain to come and fill the big river back up. Giant turtles crept through the mud and moved on, but the great fish could do nothing but die. Anchors and massive logs lay strewn on the river bottom. Birds gathered overhead and circled the dying fish, then landed in the fetid mud. When the fish began to smell bad, the people in Rodney packed what belongings they could and hiked into the bluffs and jungle above the river to escape the rot and disease.
When the mud had dried and grown over with lush tall grass, the townspeople moved back. Some of the men tracked the river, hunting it as if it were a wounded animal, and they found it seven miles away, running big and strong, as wide as it had ever been. It was flowing like a person’s heart. It had only shifted.
Daisy didn’t see the river leave, but her mother did. Daisy says that the pigs in Rodney are descended from Union soldiers. The townspeople marched the soldiers into the Presbyterian church one Sunday, boarded up the doors and windows, and then Daisy’s mother turned them all into pigs.
The mother pig is the size of a small Volkswagen; her babies are the color and shape of footballs. They grunt and snort at night beneath Elizabeth’s and my house.
Daisy has a TV antenna rising a hundred and fifty feet into the air, above the trees. Daisy can cure thrash, tuberculosis, snakebite, ulcers, anything as long as it does not affect someone she loves. She’s powerless then; she told me so. She cooks sometimes for Elizabeth and me. We buy the food and give her some money and she cooks: fried eggs, chicken, okra. Sometimes Elizabeth isn’t hungry—she’ll be lying on the bed up in the sun room, wearing just her underpants and sunglasses, reading a book—so I’ll go over to Daisy’s by myself.
We live so far from civilization. The mail comes only once a week, from Natchez. The mailman is frightened of the pigs. Sometimes they chase his jeep up the steep hill, up the gravel road that leads out of town. Their squeals of rag
e are a high, mad sound, and they run out of breath easily.
Daisy never gets mail. We let her come over and read ours.
“This used to be a big town,” she said when she came over to introduce herself. She gestured out to the cotton field behind her house. “A port town. The river used to lay right out there.”
“Why did it leave?” Elizabeth asked.
Daisy shook her head and wouldn’t answer.
“Will you take us to the river?” I asked. “Will you show it to us?”
Daisy shook her head again. “Nope,” she said, drawing circles in the dust with her toe. “You got to be in love to see the river,” she said, looking at me and then at Elizabeth.
“Oh, but we are,” Elizabeth cried, taking my arm. “That’s why we’re here!”
“Well,” Daisy said. “Maybe.”
Daisy likes to tell us about Preacher; she talks about him all the time. He was twenty, she was nineteen. Once there was a Confederate gunboat in the cotton field. The boat has since rusted away to nothing, but it was still in fair shape when Preacher and Daisy lived on it, out in the middle of the field, still rich and growing green with cotton, the color of which is heat-hazy in the fall. They slept in the captain’s quarters on a striped mattress with no sheets. They rubbed vanilla on their bodies to keep the bugs from biting.
There were skeletons in the boat and in the field, skeletons of sailors who had drowned when the ship burned and sank from cannon fire to the bow. But these were old bones and no more harmful than, say, a cow’s skull, or a horse’s.
She and Preacher made love on the tilted deck, Daisy said, through the blazing afternoons. Small breezes cooled them. They made love at night, too, with coal-oil lamps burning around the gunwales. Their cries were so loud, she said, that birds roosting in the swamp took flight into the darkness and circled overhead.
