by Rick Bass
It turned drier than ever in August, and the loggers began cutting again. The days were windy, and the fields and meadows turned to crisp hay. Everyone was terrified of sparks, especially the old people, because they’d seen big fires rush through the valley, moving through like an army: the big fire in 1910, and then again in 1930, which burned up every tree except for the luckiest ones, so that for years afterward the entire valley was barren and scorched.
One afternoon in early August Glenda and I went to the saloon. She lay down on top of a picnic table and looked up at the clouds. She would be going back to Washington in three weeks, she said, and then down to California. Almost all of the men would be off logging in the woods by then, and if she stayed, we would have the whole valley to ourselves. Tom and Nancy had been calling us “the lovebirds” since July, hoping for something to happen—something other than what was, or wasn’t—but they’d stopped in August. Glenda was running harder than ever, really improving, so that I was having trouble keeping up with her.
There was no ice left anywhere, no snow, not even in the darkest, coolest parts of the forest, but the lakes and rivers were still ice cold when we waded into them. Glenda continued to press my hand to her breast until I could feel her heart calming, and then almost stopping, as the waters worked on her.
“Don’t you ever leave this place,” she said as she watched the clouds. “You’ve got it really good here.”
I stroked her knee with my fingers, running them along the inside scar. The wind tossed her hair around. She closed her eyes, and though it was hot, there were goose bumps on her tanned legs and arms.
“No, I wouldn’t do that,” I said.
I thought about her heart, hammering in her chest after those long runs. At the top of the summit, I’d wonder how anything could ever be so alive.
The afternoon she set fire to the field across the road from my cabin was a still day, windless, and I suppose that Glenda thought it would do no harm—and she was right, though I did not know it then. I was at my window when I saw her out in the field lighting matches, bending down and cupping her hands until a small blaze appeared at her feet. Then she came running across the field.
At first I could hardly believe my eyes. The smoke in front of the fire made it look as if I were seeing something from memory, or something that had happened in another time. The fire seemed to be secondary, even inconsequential. What mattered was that she was running, coming across the field toward my cabin.
I loved to watch her run. I did not know why she had set the fire, and I was very afraid that it might cross the road and burn up my hay barn, even my cabin. But I was not as frightened as I might have been. It was the day before Glenda was going to leave, and mostly I was delighted to see her.
She ran up the steps, pounded on my door, and came inside, breathless, having run a dead sprint all the way. The fire was spreading fast, even without a wind, because the grass was so dry, and red-winged blackbirds were flying out of the grass ahead of it. I could see rabbits and mice scurrying across the road, heading for my yard. It was late in the afternoon, not quite dusk. An elk bounded across the meadow. There was a lot of smoke. Glenda pulled me by the hand, taking me back outside and down the steps, back out toward the fire, toward the pond on the far side of the field.
It was a large pond, large enough to protect us, I hoped. We ran hard across the field, and a new wind suddenly picked up, a wind created by the flames. We got to the pond and kicked our shoes off, pulled off our shirts and jeans, and splashed into the water. We waited for the flames to reach us, and then work their way around us.
It was just a grass fire. But the heat was intense as it rushed toward us, blasting our faces with hot wind.
It was terrifying.
We ducked our heads under the water to cool our drying faces and threw water on each other’s shoulders. Birds flew past us, and grasshoppers dived into the pond with us, where hungry trout rose and snapped at them, swallowing them like corn. It was growing dark and there were flames all around us. We could only wait and see whether the grass was going to burn itself up as it swept past.
“Please, love,” Glenda was saying, and I did not understand at first that she was speaking to me. “Please.”
We had moved out into the deepest part of the pond, chest deep, and kept having to duck beneath the surface because of the heat. Our lips and faces were scorched. Pieces of ash were floating down to the water like snow. It was not until nightfall that the flames died, leaving just a few orange ones flickering here and there. But the rest of the small field was black and smoldering.
It turned suddenly cold, and we held on to each other tightly, because we were shivering. I thought about luck and about chance. I thought about fears, all the different ones, and the things that could make a person run.
She left at daylight. She would not let me drive her home—she said she wanted to run instead, and she did. Her feet raised puffs of dust in the road.
Field Events
But the young one, the man, as if he were
the son of a neck and a nun: taut and powerfully filled
with muscles and innocence.
—Rilke, “The Fifth Elegy”
It was summer, and the two brothers had been down on a gravel bar washing their car with river water and sponges when the big man came around the bend, swimming upstream, doing the butterfly stroke. He was pulling a canoe behind him, and it was loaded with darkened cast-iron statues. The brothers, John and Jerry, had hidden behind a rock and watched as the big man leapt free of the water with each sweep of his arms, arching into the air like a fish and then crashing back down into the rapids, lunging his way up the river, with the canoe following him.
The brothers thought they’d hidden before the big man had spotted them—how could he have known they were there?—but he altered his course as he drew closer, until he was swimming straight for the big rock they were hiding behind. When it became apparent he was heading for them, they stepped out from behind the rock, a bit embarrassed at having hidden. It was the Sacandaga River, which ran past the brothers’ town, Glens Falls, in northeastern New York.
The brothers were strength men themselves, discus throwers and shot-putters, but even so, they were unprepared for the size of the man as he emerged from the water, dripping and completely naked save for the rope around his waist, to which the canoe was tied.
Jerry, the younger—eighteen that summer—said, “Lose your briefs in the rapids?”
The big man smiled, looked down, and quivered like a dog, shaking the water free one leg at a time, one arm at a time. The brothers had seen big men in the gym before, but they’d never seen anyone like this.
With the canoe still tied around his waist, and the rope still tight as the current tried to sweep the iron-laden canoe downstream, the big man crouched and with a stick drew a map in the sand of where he lived in Vermont, about fifteen miles upstream. The rapids surged against the canoe, crashed water over the bow as it bobbed in place, and the brothers saw the big man tensing against the pull of the river, saw him lean forward to keep from being drawn back in. Scratching in the sand with that stick. Two miles over the state line. An old farmhouse.
Then the man stood, said goodbye, and waded back into the shallows, holding the rope taut in his hands to keep from being dragged in. When he was in up to his knees he dived, angled out toward the center, and once more began butterfly-stroking up the river, turning his head every now and again to look back at the brothers with cold, curious eyes, like those of a raven, or a fish.
The brothers tried to follow, running along the rocky, brushy shore, calling for the big man to stop, but he continued slowly upriver, swimming hard against the crashing, funneled tongue of rapids, lifting up and over them and back down among them, lifting like a giant bat or manta ray. He swam up through a narrow canyon and left them behind.
At home in bed that night, each brother looked up at the ceiling in his room and tried to sleep. Each could feel his h
eart thrashing around in his chest. The brothers knew that the big man was up to something, something massive.
The beating in the brothers’ hearts would not stop. They got up and met, as if by plan, in the kitchen for a beer, a sandwich. They ate almost constantly, always trying to build more muscle. Sometimes they acted like twins, thought the same thing at the same time. It was a warm night, past midnight, and when they had finished their snack, they got the tape measure and checked to see if their arms had gotten larger. And because the measurements were unchanged, they each fixed another sandwich, ate them, measured again. No change.
“It’s funny how it works,” said John. “How it takes such a long time.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” said Jerry. He slapped his flat belly and yawned.
Neither of them had mentioned the big man in the rapids. All day they’d held it like a secret, cautious of what might happen if they discussed it. Feeling that they might chase him away, that they might make it be as if he had never happened.
They went outside and stood in the middle of the street under a streetlamp and looked around like watchdogs, trying to understand why their hearts were racing.
So young, they were so young!
They drove an old blue Volkswagen beetle. When the excitement of the night and of their strength and youth was too much, they would pick up the automobile from either end like porters, or pallbearers, and carry it around the block for exercise, without having to stop and set it down and rest. But that night, the brothers’ hearts were running too fast just to walk the car. They lay down beneath the trees in the cool grass in their backyard and listened to the wind that blew from the mountains on the other side of the river. Sometimes the brothers would go wake their sisters, Lory and Lindsay, and bring them outside into the night. The four of them would sit under the largest tree and tell stories or plan things.
Their father was named Heck, and their mother, Louella. Heck was the principal of the local school. Lory was thirty-four, a teacher, and beautiful: she was tiny, black-haired, with a quick, high laugh not unlike the outburst of a loon. Despite her smallness, her breasts were overly large, to the point that they were the first thing people noticed about her, and continued noticing about her. She tried always to keep moving when around new people, tried with her loon’s laugh and her high-energy, almost manic actress’s gestures, to shift the focus back to her, not her breasts, but it was hard, and tiring. She had long, sweeping eyelashes, but not much of a chin. The reason Lory still lived at home was that she loved her family and simply could not leave. Lindsay was sixteen, but already half a foot taller than Lory. She was red-headed, freckled, had wide shoulders, and played field hockey; the brothers called her Lindsay the Red.
Lory was not allowed to work at the school where her father was principal, so she taught in a little mountain town called Warrensburg, about thirty miles north. She hated the job. The children had no respect for her, no love; they drank and died in fiery crashes, or were abused by their parents, or got cancer—they had no luck. Lory’s last name, her family’s name, was Iron, and one night the boys at her school had scratched with knives onto every desktop the words “I fucked Miss Iron.” Sometimes the boys touched her from behind when she was walking in the crowded halls.
The night the brothers’ hearts beat so wildly, they lay in the grass for a while and then went and got their sisters. Lory was barely able to come out of her sleep but followed the brothers anyway, holding Jerry’s hand as if sleepwalking. She sat down with her back against the largest tree and dozed in and out, still exhausted from the school year. Lindsay, though, was wide awake, and sat cross-legged, leaning forward, listening.
“We went down to the river today,” John said, plucking at stems of grass, putting them in his mouth and chewing on them for their sweetness, like a cow grazing. Jerry was doing hurdler’s stretches, had one leg extended in front of him. There was no moon, only stars through the trees.
“Summer,” mumbled Lory in her half sleep. Often she talked in her sleep and had nightmares.
“Who was your first lover?” Jerry asked her, grinning, speaking in a low voice, trying to trick her.
Lindsay covered her sister’s ears and whispered, “Lory, no! Wake up! Don’t say it!”
The brothers were overprotective of Lory, even though she was the oldest and hadn’t had any boyfriends for a long time.
“Michael,” Lory mumbled uncomfortably. “No, no, Arthur. No, wait, Richard, William? No—Mack, no, Jerome, Atticus, no, that Caster boy—no, wait…”
Slowly Lory opened her eyes, smiling at Jerry. “Got you,” she said.
Jerry shrugged, embarrassed. “I just want to protect you.”
Lory looked at him with sleepy, narrowed eyes. “Right.”
They were silent for a moment, then John said, “We saw this big man today. He was pulling a boat. He was really pulling it.” John wanted to say more, but didn’t dare. He reached down and plucked a blade of night grass. They sat there in the moon shadows, a family, wide awake while the rest of the town slept.
They waited a week, almost as if they had tired or depleted the big man, and as if they were now letting him gather back his whole self. John and Jerry went to the rapids every day to check on the map in the sand, and when it had finally begun to blur, almost to the point of disappearing, they realized they had to go find him soon, or risk never seeing him again.
Lindsay drove, though she did not yet have her license, and John sat in the front with her and told her the directions, navigating from memory. (To have transcribed the map onto paper, even onto a napkin, would also somehow have run the risk of diminishing the big man, if he was still out there.) Jerry sat in the back seat, wearing sunglasses like a movie star and sipping a high-protein milk shake. John’s strength in the discus was his simple brute power, while Jerry’s strength—he was five years younger and sixty pounds lighter—was his speed.
“Right!” Jerry cried every time John gave Lindsay the correct instructions. In his mind, Jerry could see the map as clear as anything, and when John gave Lindsay a bad piece of advice—a left turn, say, instead of a right—Jerry would shout out “Wrong!—Braaapp! Sham-bam-a-LOOM!”
Up and over hills they went, across small green valleys, around a lake and down sun-dappled lanes, as if passing through tunnels—from shade to sun, shade to sun, with wooden bridges clattering beneath them, until Lindsay was sure they were lost. But Jerry, in the back seat, kept smiling, his face content behind the dark glasses, and John was confident, too. The closer they got to the big man, the more they could tell he was out there.
The road crossed over the border into Vermont, and turned to gravel. It followed a small creek for a stretch, and the brothers wondered if this creek flowed into the Sacandaga, if the big man had swum all the way upstream before turning into this side creek to make his way home. It looked like the creek he had drawn on his map in the sand.
Blackbirds flew up out of the marsh reeds along either side of them. They could feel him getting closer. There was very much the sense that they were hunting him, that they had to somehow capture him.
Then they saw him in a pasture. A large two-story stone house stood at the end of the pasture like a castle, with the creek passing by out front, the creek shaded by elm and maple trees, and giant elms that had somehow, in this one small area, avoided or been immune to the century’s blight. The pasture was deep with rich green summer hay, and they saw a few Holsteins grazing there.
Again, the man wasn’t wearing anything, and he had one of the cows on his back. He was running through the tall grass with it, leaping sometimes, doing jetés and awkward but heartfelt pirouettes with the sagging cow draped across his wide shoulders. He had thick legs that jiggled as he ran, and he looked happy, as happy as they had ever seen anyone look. The rest of the cattle stood in front of the old house, grazing and watching without much interest.
“Jiminy,” said Lindsay.
“Let’s get him,” said John, the strongest.
“Let’s wait until he goes to sleep and then tie him up and bring him home.”
“We’ll teach him to throw the discus,” said Jerry.
“If he doesn’t want to throw the discus, we’ll let him go,” said John. “We won’t force him to.”
“Right,” said Jerry.
But force wasn’t necessary. John and Jerry went into the field after him, warily, and he stopped spinning and shook hands with them. Lindsay stayed in the car, wanting to look away but unable to; she watched the man’s face, watched the cow on his back. The cow had a placid but somehow engaged look on its face, as if just beginning to awaken to the realization that it was aloft.
The big man grinned and put the cow back on the ground. He told them that he had never thrown the discus, had never even seen it done, but would like to try, if that was what they wanted him to do. He left them and went into the stone house for a pair of jeans and tennis shoes and a white T-shirt. When he came back out, dressed, he looked even larger.
He was too big to fit into the car—he was as tall as John but thirty pounds heavier, and built of rock-slab muscle—so he rode standing on the back bumper, grinning, with the wind blowing his long, already thinning hair back behind him. The big man’s face was young, his skin smooth and tanned.
“My name’s A.C.!” he shouted to them as they puttered down the road. Lindsay leaned her head out the window and looked back at him, wanting to make sure he was all right. The little car’s engine shuddered and shook beneath him, trying to manage the strain. The back bumper scraped the road.
