by Rick Bass
As we drew nearer the village—the forest ripe with the scent of rut—we saw a swarm of antlers, dozens of bucks prowling the woods, mesmerized by sex, by creation, by the needs of the future, and we were almost home when we saw the buck we wanted.
We saw him because he had seen us, and was coming up the hill toward us—or rather, toward Matthew. He was drawn by the sight of the giant antlers strapped to Matthew’s back. We were moving through dense brush and it’s possible that was all he could see. He came forward with a strange aggression. He was wet from the rain. His antlers were black-brown from having lived in a dark forest and rose three feet above his head and extended beyond the tips of his outstretched ears. It did not seem possible that he could carry such a weight on his head.
Matthew dropped to his knees. The deer stopped, then came closer, still entranced by the antlers, and Matthew raised his rifle and shot the deer, now not twenty yards away, through the neck.
The deer’s head snapped back, and we saw a thin pattern of blood spray across the snow behind him, but the deer did not drop. Instead it whirled and ran down the hill, hard and strong.
I wondered if Matthew could ever finish anything gracefully.
We had to track it.
The snow was deep and slushy. There was little if any blood trail to follow, and the buck’s tracks merged with hundreds of others: the carnival of the rut. We stood there in the hissing, steady rain, breathing our own milky vapors.
“Fuck,” Matthew said. He looked down toward the river in the direction the buck had run. He dropped his pack in the snow. The bloody “Y” on his chest was the same as the one on his back; the two together were like the delicate, world-shaped markings on the wings of some obscure tropical butterfly. I dropped my pack as well. A blood trail was beginning to form on my own back and chest.
To not be wearing a pack after having carried one for so long gave us a feeling like flight; as if, suddenly, we could have gone for another seventy-five miles. We rested a moment, then donned our packs again. The rain and slush continued to beat down on us. We kept stopping to rest, ass-whipped. We began lighting trees again—tree after tree, following the wounded buck’s tracks.
A drop of blood here, a loose hair there.
We found the buck down at the river, in a backwater slough, thrashing around in six feet of water, having broken through a skin of ice as he tried to cross. We watched him for a moment as he swam in circles with only his head and the tower of antlers above the water. He was choking on his blood, coughing sprays of it across the water with each exhalation, and swallowing blood with each breath—the bullet had missed an artery, but severed a vessel—and his face was a red mask of blood.
He glared at us as he swam—a red king, defiant. It was a strange sight, those antlers going around and around in the small pond—like some new creature being born into the world. Matthew raised his rifle and waited for the deer to swim back around, closer to the edge of the shore.
The deer continued to watch us as it swam—head held high, drowning in blood. Matthew shot it in the neck again, breaking it this time, and the deer stopped swimming. The antlers sank.
We sat and stared at it for a long time—watching it motionless through the refraction of water—as if expecting it to come back to life.
Another buck, following the trail of the giant’s hock musk, appeared on the other side of the pond, lowered its head, trying to decipher the cone of scent that had drifted its way.
We hiked upriver to where Matthew had left the canoe. It was under a shell of snow. We got it out and went and got the elk and loaded it, part by part, into the canoe, until the canoe was low in the water. Dusk was coming on again and we could see a few lights across the river, the lights of town. We had been gone only two weeks but it felt like a century.
I stayed behind while Matthew made two crossings with the meat, and then he came back for me. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing and Matthew said we had to get the deer out now as the pond would freeze thick if we waited until the next day.
We waded into the pond together. The water was just warmer than the air. In the water, the deer was light, and we were able to muscle him up to the shore. Then we dragged him over to the canoe—gutted him quickly—and loaded him, and set out across one more time, riding lower than ever. Freezing seemed to be a more imminent danger than drowning, but we reached the other shore, sledded the canoe up onto the gravel, and finally we quit; left the mountain of meat for now, hundreds of pounds of it, only a short distance from home, and ran stumbling and falling up the hill toward town.
Lights were on in the bar. We went straight in and lay down next to the big wood stove, shivering and in pain. The bartenders, Artie and Charlie, came over with blankets and hides and began helping us out of our wet clothes and wrapping the hides around us. They started heating water on the stove for baths and making hot tea for us to drink. It was the first fluid we’d had in days that was neither snow nor cold creek water, and the heat of it made us vomit the instant the tea hit our stomachs. Artie looked at the meat we had spit up and said, “They got an elk.”
Pagans
There once were two boys, best friends, who loved the same girl, and, in a less common variation on that ancient story, she chose neither of them but went on to meet and choose a third, and lived happily ever after.
One of the boys, Richard, nearly gambled his life on her—poured everything he had into the pursuit of her, Annie—while the other boy, Kirby, was attracted to her, intrigued by her, but not to the point where he would risk his life, or his heart, or anything else. It could have been said at the time that all three of them were fools, though no one who observed their strange courtship thought so, or said so; and even now, thirty years later, with the three of them as adrift and asunder from one another as any scattering of dust or wind, there are surely no regrets, no notions of failure or success or what-if, though among the three of them it is perhaps Richard alone who sometimes considers the past and imagines how easily things might have been different. How much labor went into the pursuit, and how close they, all three, passed to different worlds, different histories.
Richard and Kirby were seniors in high school while Annie was yet a junior, and as such they were able to get out of class easier than she was—they were both good students—and because Kirby had a car, an old Mercury with an engine like a locomotive’s, he and Richard would sometimes spend their skip days traveling down to the coast, forty miles southeast of Houston, drawn by some force they neither understood nor questioned, traveling all the way to the water’s lapping edge.
The boys traveled at night, too, always exploring, and on one of their trips they had found a rusting old crane half sunk near the estuary of the Sabine River, salt-bound, a derelict from gravel quarry days. They had climbed up into the crane (feeling like children playing in a sandbox) and found they could manually unspool the loopy wire cable and with great effort crank it back in. (When they did so, the giant rusting gear teeth gave such a clacking roar that the night birds roosting down in the graystick spars of dead and dying trees on the other shore took flight, egrets and kingbirds and herons, the latter rising to fly slow and gangly across the moon; and as the flecks of rust chipped from each gear tooth during that groaning resurrection, the flakes drifted down toward the river in glittering red columns, fine as sand, orange wisps and strands of iron like dust being cast onto the river by the conjurings of some midnight sorcerer.)
With such power at their fingertips, there was no way not to exercise it. Richard climbed down from the crane and muck-waded out into the gray shallows—poisoned frogs yelped and skittered from his approach, and the dancing flames of the nearby refineries wavered and belched, as if noticing his approach and beckoning him closer: as if desiring to stoke their own ceaseless burning with his own bellyfire.
Richard grabbed the massive hook of the cable’s end and hauled it back up to shore and fastened it to the undercarriage of Kirby’s car, then raised his hand over his head and made
a twirling motion.
Kirby began cranking, and the car began to ascend in a levitation, rising slowly into the air. Loose coins, pencils, and Coke cans tumbled from the windows at first, but then all was silent save for the steady ratchet of slow gears cranking one at a time, and the boys howled with pleasure, and more birds lifted from their rookeries and flew off into the night.
It was only when the car was some twenty feet in the air—dangling, bobbing, and spinning—that Richard thought to ask if the down gears worked, imagining what a long walk home it would be if they did not—and imagining, too, what the result might be if one of the old iron teeth failed, plummeting the Detroit beast into the mud below.
The gears held. Slowly, a foot at a time in its release, the crane let the car back down toward the road.
The boom would not pivot—had long ago been petrified into its one position, arching out toward the river like some tired monument facing the direction of a long-ago, all-but-forgotten war—but there were hundreds of feet of cable, so they were able to give each other rides in the rocket car now, one of them lifting it with the crane while the other gripped the steering wheel and held on for dear life, aiming straight for the moon and praying the cable would hold.
They soon discovered that by twisting and jouncing in the passenger seat they could induce the car to sway farther and spin as it was raised—and it took all of an evening (the spinning headlights on high beam, strafing the bilious green cloudbank above, where refinery steam crept through the tops of the trees) to tire of that game, as startled birds flew past the sky-driver’s windows. They began hooking on to other objects, attaching the Great Claw of Hunger, as they called it, to anything substantial they could find: pulling from the sandbank half-submerged railroad ties, the old bumpers of junked cars, twisted steel scrap, rusting slag-heaped refrigerators, washers and dryers.
As if in a game of crude pinball or some remote-controlled claw clutch game at an arcade, they were able to lurch their attachments out into the center of the river; with a little practice they learned how to disengage the hook in midair, dropping junked cars from forty feet up, landing them sometimes back on the road with a grinding clump of sparks, and other times in the river’s center with a great whale plume of splash.
A sculpture soon appeared in the river’s middle, a testament to machines that had been hard-used and burned out early, spring-busted not even halfway through the great century: the steel wheels of trains, cogs and pulleys, transmissions leaking rainbow sheens into the night water, iridescent sentences trailing slowly downstream.
Within a few nights they had created an island in the slow current’s middle, an island of steel and chrome that gathered the bask of reptiles on the hot days, and into the evenings: turtles, little alligators, snakes, and bullfrogs.
Nights were the best. There were still fireflies back then, along the Sabine, and the fireflies would cruise along the river and across the toxic fields, swirling around the ascending car, the joy ride: and the riders, the journeyers, would imagine that they were astronauts, voyaging through the stars, cast out into some distant future.
In September the river was too low for barges to use, though when the rains of winter returned the river would rise quickly, flooding the banks and filling the cab of the crane; and the riverboat captains working at night would have to contend with the new obstacle of the junk slag island, not previously charted on their maps. They might or might not marvel at the genesis of the structure, but would tug at the brims of their caps, note the obstacle in the logbook, and pass on, undreaming, laboring toward the lure of the ragged refineries, ferrying more oil and chemicals, hundreds of barrels of toxins sloshing in the rusty drums stacked atop their barges, and never imagine that they were passing the fields of love.
Richard and Kirby bought an old diving bell in an army-navy surplus store for fifty dollars—they had to cut a new rubber gasket for the hatch’s seal—and after that they were able to give each other crane rides down into the poisoned river.
For each of them it was the same, whether lowering or being lowered. The crane’s operator would swing the globe out over the mercury-colored moonlit water, then lower it, with his friend inside, into that netherworld—the passenger possessing only a flashlight, which dimmed upon submersion and then disappeared—the globe tumbling with the current and its passenger not knowing whether or not the cable was still attached, bumping and tumbling, spotlight probing the black depths, with brief, bright glimpses of fish eyes, gold-rimmed and wild in fright, pale turning-away bellies flashing past, darting left and right to get out of the way of the tumbling iron ball of the bathysphere.
Soon enough, the cable would stretch taut, and shudder against the current: swaying in place but traveling no more.
Then the emergence, back up out of total darkness and into the night, with the gas flares still flickering all around them. Why, again, was the rest of the world asleep? The boys took comfort in the knowledge that they would never sleep: never.
On their afternoon school-skips together, down to the Gulf Coast, Richard, Kirby, and Annie would wander the beaches barefoot, walking beneath the strand line, studying the Gulf as if yearning to travel still farther—as if believing that, were they to catch it just right, the tide might one day pull back so far as to reveal the entire buried slope of the unseen ocean floor, wholly new territory.
Beyond the smokestack flares of the refineries, out on a windy jetty, there was an abandoned lighthouse, its base barnacle-encrusted, that they enjoyed ascending on some such trips, and once up in the glassed-in cupola they would drink hot chocolate from a thermos they had brought, sharing the one cup, and would play the board game Risk, to which they were addicted.
And, slowly, within Annie, a little green fire began to burn as she spent more and more time with the two older boys; and, more quickly, an orange fire began to flicker, then burn within Richard as he began to desire to spend even more time in her company.
Only Kirby seemed immune, his own internal light cool and blue.
They played on.
By mid-September Kirby and Richard were bringing Annie out to play the bathysphere game, and to view their slag island. They would come out on lunch break, and would skip a class before and sometimes after to buy them the time they needed. There was a bohemian French-African oceanography teacher who was retiring that year and who could see what Richard, if not Kirby, was trying to do, chasing the heart of the young girl, the junior. The teacher—Miss Countée, who wore a beret—would write hall passes for all three of them, knowing full well they would be leaving campus. She issued the passes under the stipulation they bring back specimens for her oceanography lab. They drove through the early autumn heat with the windows down and an old green canoe on top of their car. They paddled out to the new slag island and had picnics of French bread and green apples and cheese.
They piled lawn chairs atop the edifice. And even though the water was poisoned, the sound of it, as they lay there in the sun with their sleeves rolled up and their shoes and socks off, eyes closed, was the same as would be the sound of waves in the Bahamas, or a clear cold stream high in the mountains. Just because the water was ugly did not mean it had to sound ugly.
Richard knew that to the rest of the world Annie might have appeared gangly, even awkward, but that had nothing to do with how his heart leapt now each time he saw her—and after they began traveling to the river, he started to notice new things about her. Her feet pale in the sun, her shoulders rounding, her breasts lifting. A softening in her eyes as the beauty in her heart began to rise out of her. And many years later, after their lives separated, he would believe there was something about the sound, the harmonics, of that ravaged river and her ability to love it and take pleasure in it, that released something from within her; transforming in ancient alchemy the beautiful unseen into the beautifully tangible.
The water lapping against the edges of the canoe, tethered to one of the steel spars midpile. Umbrellas for parasols; crack
ers and cheese. Annie’s pale feet browning in the sun. Perspiration at their temples, under their arms, in the smalls of their backs. Richard felt himself descending, sinking, deeper into love, or what he supposed was love. How many years, he wondered, before the two of them were married and they would browse upon each other, in similar sunlight, in another country, another life? He was content to wait forever.
It was, however, as if Annie’s own fire, the quiet green one, would not or could not quite merge with his leaping, dancing orange one. As if the two fires (or three fires) needed to be in each other’s company and were supported, even fed, by each other’s warmth—but that they could not, or would not yet, combine.
Without true heat of conviction, Annie would sometimes try to view the two boys separately, and would even, in her girl’s way, play or pretend at imagining a future. Kirby, she told herself, was more mature, more responsible. As well, there was an instinct that seemed to counsel her to both be drawn toward yet also move away from Richard’s own more exposed fires and energies.
It was too much work to consider; it was all pretend anyway, or almost pretend. They had found a lazy place, a sweet place, to hang out, in the eddy between childhood and whatever came next. She told herself she would be happy to wait there forever, and, for a while, she believed that.
Occasionally the river would ignite spontaneously; other times, they found they could light it themselves by tossing matches or flaming oily rags out onto its oil and chemical slicks. None of the three of them was a church-goer, though Annie, a voracious reader, had been carrying around a Bible that autumn, reading it on their picnics while crunching an apple, the bayou breeze, river breeze, stirring her strawberry hair.
“I want to give the river a blessing,” she said the first time she saw the river ignite. The snaky, wandering river fires, in various bright petrochemical colors, seemed more like a celebration than a harbinger of death or poison, and they told themselves that through such incinerations they were doing the river a favor, helping rid it of excess toxins.
