For a Little While

by Rick Bass

  The force of the current made eerie sounds, murmurings and chatterings against their craft, as if it, that injured river, had been waiting to speak to them for all their life and had only now gained that opportunity—and they lay there, reclining in each other’s arms, safe from the eyes of the world and its demands, its appetites for paradox and choice; and just as the air was getting stuffy and they were beginning to get a little lightheaded, they felt the surge begin: the magnificent power, the brute gears and cogs hauling them back upstream, just when they would have imagined (convinced by those fast murmurings and chatterings) that there could be no force stronger or greater than that of the river.

  Gradually they broke the surface. Through their portal, still lying on their backs and arm-in-arm, but relaxed now, they could see the plumes and spray of water from their birthing back to the surface; they could see the crooked, jarring skyline of the refinery fires and, farther above, the dim stars just beyond the reach of the gold-green puffs of steam that marked the factories.

  There was not much time now. Soon they would be out and free of the river, swinging, and then Kirby would land them on the beach. They were hot now, sweating, and there was barely any air left. Annie leaned over and found Richard’s face with her hands and kissed him slowly, with both hands still on his face. He kissed her back, took her face in his hands and tried to shift in order to cover her with his body, but there was no room, and for a moment they became tangled, cross-elbowed and leg-locked like some human Rubik’s cube. They broke off the kiss quickly, and now there was no air at all—as if they had each sucked the last of it from out of the other—but they could feel the craft settling onto the sand beach and knew that in scant moments Kirby would be climbing down and coming toward them, that there would be the rap of his knuckles on the iron door, and then the creak of the hatch being opened.

  Time for one more kiss, demure and tender now, before the gritty rasp of the hatch; the counterclockwise twist, and then the lid being lifted, and Kirby’s anxious face appearing before them, and beyond him, those dim stars, almost like the echoes or spent husks of stars. The cool October night sliding in over their sweaty faces.

  Richard helped Annie out—her dress was a charred mess—and then climbed out behind her, marveling at how delicious even the foul refinery air tasted in their freedom. Kirby looked at them both curiously and started to speak, but then could think of nothing to say, and he felt a strange and great sorrow.

  They left the bathysphere as it was, sitting with the hatch opened, still attached to the crane with its steel umbilicus. For any number of reasons, none of them would ever go back; they would never see how the crane would eventually tip over on its side, half buried in silt, or how the bathysphere would become buried, too.

  They rode back into the city, still in costume, silent and strangely serious, reflective on the trip home, and with the pumpkin and candles glimmering once more, and with Annie and Richard holding hands again. The candle wax was still on their faces, and it looked molten upon them in the candlelight.

  On the drive home Annie peeled the candle wax from her face and then from Richard’s, and she held the pressings carefully in one hand.

  When Kirby pulled up in front of her house—the living room lights still on, and one of her parents waiting up and glancing at the clock (ten minutes past eleven, but no matter; they trusted her)—Annie leaned over and gave Richard a quick peck, and gave Kirby a look of almost sultry forgiveness, then climbed out of the big old car (they had extinguished their candles upon entering the neighborhood) and hurried up the walkway to her house, holding her long silk skirt bunched up in one hand and the candle wax pressings in the other.

  “Well, fuck,” said Kirby, quietly, unsure of whether he was more upset about what seemed to him like Annie’s sudden choice or about the fracturing that now existed between him and his friend. The imbalance, after so long a run, an all-but-promised run, of security.

  “Shit,” said Richard, “I’m sorry.” He lifted his hands helplessly. “Can we…can it…?” Stay the same, he wanted to say, but didn’t.

  They both sat there, feeling poisoned, even as the other half of Richard’s heart—as if hidden behind a mask—was leaping with electric joy.

  “I’m sorry,” Richard said again.

  “The two of you deserve each other,” Kirby said. “It’s just that, I hate it that…” But the words failed him; there were none, only the bad burning feeling within, and after sitting there a bit longer, they pulled away from her house and drove through the night, as they used to do, back before she had begun riding with them. And for a little while they were foolish enough, and hopeful enough, to believe it would not matter, that they could get back to that old place again, and believing even that the old place would be finer than any new places lying ahead of them.

  The romance lasted only a little longer than did the carcass of the egret. The three of them continued to try to do new things together—they did not return to the bathysphere—though Richard and Annie went places by themselves, too, and explored, tentatively, those new territories. Always between or beneath them, however, there seemed to be a burr. It was not that she had made the wrong choice, but rather that some choice had been required—that she had had to turn away from one thing in the turning-toward another—and that summer, even before the two boys, two young men, prepared to go off to college, while Annie readied herself to return for her senior year of high school, she informed Richard that she thought she would like a couple of weeks apart to think things over and to prepare for the pain of his departure. To prepare both of them.

  “My God,” Richard said, “two weeks?” They had been seeing each other almost every day. Their bodies had changed, their voices had changed, as had their patterns and gestures, and even the shapes of their faces, becoming leaner and more adultlike, so that now when Annie placed the old wax pressings to her face, they no longer fit.

  “I want to see what it’s like,” she said. “Maybe everything will be just fine. Maybe we’ll find out we can’t live without each other, and we’ll end up married and having kids and living happily ever after. But I just want to know.”

  “All right,” he said, far more frightened than he’d ever been while dangling from the crane. “All right,” he said, and it seemed to him it was as if she were climbing into the bathysphere alone, and he marveled at her bravery and curiosity, her adventurousness, and even her wisdom.

  There is still a sweetness in all three of their lives now: Kirby, with his wife and four children, in a small town north of Houston; Richard, outside of Dallas with his wife and two children; and Annie, down near Galveston, with her husband and five children, and, already, her first grandchild. A reservoir of sweetness, a vast subterranean vault of it, like the treasure lair of savages—the past, hidden far away in their hearts, and held, and treasured, mythic and powerful, even still.

  It was exactly like the treasure-trove of wild savages, they each realize, and for some reason—grace? simple luck?—they were able to dip down into it back then, were able to scrape out handfuls of it, gobs of it, like sugar or honey.

  As if it—the discovery of that reservoir—remains with them, a power and a strength, so many years later.

  And yet, they had all once been together. How can they ever be apart, particularly if that reservoir remains intact, buried, and ever-replenishing?

  Even now, Richard thinks they missed each other by a hairsbreadth, that some sort of fate was deflected—though how or why or what, he cannot say. He thinks it might have been one of the closest misses in the history of the world. He has no regrets, only marvels. He wonders sometimes if there are not the ghosts or husks of their other lives living still, far back in the past, or far below, or even further out into the future—still together, and still consorting; other lives, birthed from that strange reservoir of joy and sweetness, and utter newness.

  And if there are, how does he access that? Through memory? Through imagination?

  Ev
en now, he marvels at how wise they were then, and at all the paths they did not take.

  The Canoeists

  The two of them would go canoeing on any of the many winding creeks and rivers that braided their way through the woods and gentle hills to the north. They would drive north in Bone’s old truck and put the boat on the Brazos, or the Colorado, or White Oak Creek, or even the faster-running green waters of the Guadalupe, without a care of where they might end up, and would explore those unknown seams of water and bright August light with no maps, knowing only what lay right before them as they rounded each bend.

  They would take wine, and a picnic lunch, and fishing tackle, and a lantern. They drifted beneath high chalky bluffs, beneath old bridges, and past country yards where children playing tag on the hillsides among trees above the river stopped to watch them pass. They paddled on, Bone shirtless in the stern and Sissy straw-hatted in the bow, in her swimsuit. When they reached sun-scrubbed bars of white sand next to deep, dark pools, around the bend from any town or road, shaded by towering oaks, they would beach the canoe and lie on blankets in the sun like basking turtles, sweating nude, glistening, drinking wine and getting up every now and again to run down to the river and dive in, to cleanse the suntan oil and grit of sand and shine of sex from their bodies.

  Hot breezes would dry their bodies quickly again, once they returned to the blankets. Their damp hair would keep them cool for a little while. They would lie perfectly still on their backs, looking up at the sun, hands clasped, and listen to the sawing buzz of the seventeen-year locusts going insane back in the forest, choking on the heat.

  Later, when the day had cooled slightly, they would climb back into the green canoe and drift farther downstream, unconcerned by the notions or constraints of time and the amount of water that had passed by.

  They would paddle on into dusk, and then into the night, falling deeper in love, and speaking even less, as night fell; paddling with the lantern lit and balanced on the bow, with moths following them. Fireflies would line the banks, and they passed occasionally the bright window-square blazons of farmhouses, of families tucked in for the night.

  When they came to a lonely bridge or railroad trestle, they would finally relinquish the day, or that part of it, to the river, and eddy out to the bank, where Sissy would climb out with the lantern and Bone would pass her the equipment, and then he would climb out and shoulder the canoe like some shell-bound brute, and they would pick their way up the slope, clambering through brush and litter tossed from decades of the bridge’s passersby, ascending to the road, while the river below kept running past.

  Owls would be hooting, and heat lightning, like a pulse or an echo from the day’s troubles—or like a price that must be paid for the day’s bliss—would be shuddering in distant sky-flash in all directions, though it seemed like no debt or accounting to Bone and Sissy, only more blessing, as the breezes from the far-off thunderstorms stirred and cooled them as they walked through the quiet slow sounds of crickets, and through a near-total darkness, save for those glimmers of lightning, and the fireflies that dotted the meadows and swarmed around the couple as if accompanying them. They might be five miles from their truck, or they might be twenty; how to get there, they would have no idea, but neither would they be worried: Bone would not be due back at work for another twelve hours.

  They would walk down the center of the dark road, Bone toting the canoe over his head like a crucifix, or some huge umbrella, and Sissy walking beside him as she would any living thing: a dog, a horse, a gentle bull, a cat. And she felt much the same herself—part human, but part other-animal, as well—and it was, again, the calmest she could ever remember being.

  After a while a vehicle would approach from one direction or another, almost always an old truck in that part of the country, and the driver would give them a ride. They would lash the canoe in the bed of the truck belly-side down, as if it were still in the water, and climb up into the cab with the old farmer and ride back north into the night, though other times when there was no rope they would sit in the canoe itself, in the back, slanted skyward, gripping both the canoe’s gunwales and the side of the truck to keep it from sliding out. They would ride seated in the canoe, wind rushing past them at forty, fifty miles an hour, and would be unafraid, their hair swirling and the rolls of lightning-wash flashing.

  Sometimes their patron, as he crossed a county line, would want to stop at the neon red of a bar, and they would climb out of the canoe and go inside with him, to share a beer, and perhaps a sandwich or ribs. The sides of their green canoe would be smeared with the wind-crushed bodies from the swarms of fireflies they’d driven through, some of them still glowing gold but becoming dimmer, as if cooling, and it made the canoe look special, and pretty, like a float in some parade, and people in the bar would come to the doorway and stare for a moment at it thus decorated, and at Bone and Sissy.

  They would drink a beer, would shoot a game or two of pool, and would visit in the dark bar, listening to the jukebox while the summer storm moved in and thundered across and past, like the nighttime passage of some huge herd of animals above. And afterward, when they went back out and climbed into their canoe to head on back north, with the driver searching for where they had left their truck, the air would be scrubbed clean and cooler, and steam would be rising from the dark roads, and the smears of fireflies would be washed from their canoe, so that all was dark around them again.

  They would find their truck, eventually, and thank the old driver, and shake his hand, and for the rest of his short days he would remember having given them a ride.

  They would drive home toward the city with the windows rolled down, listening to the radio. They would unload the canoe when they got to Bone’s house and climb the stairs without bothering to turn on any of the lights. It might be two or three a.m. They would undress and climb into his bed, into the familiar clean sheets—warmer, upstairs—and open the windows for fresh air, and would make love again, both for the pleasure of it as well as to somehow seal or anchor their return home; and at daylight Bone would awaken and shower and dress in his suit, and head to work, leaving Sissy still asleep in his bed, their bed, swirled in white cotton sheets and asleep in a wash of morning sun.

  Goats

  It would be easy to say that he lured me into the fields of disrepair like Pan, calling out with his flute to come join in on the secret chaos of the world: but I already had my own disrepair within, and my own hungers, and I needed no flute call, no urging. I’ve read that scientists have measured the brains of adolescent boys and have determined there is a period of transformation in which the ridges of the brain swell and then flatten out, becoming smoother, like rolling hills, rather than the deep ravines and canyons of the highly intelligent, and that during this physiological metamorphosis it is for the boys as if they have received some debilitating injury, some blow to the head, so that, neurologically speaking, they glide, or perhaps stumble, through the world as if in a borderline coma, during that time.

  Simple commands, much less reason and rules of consequence, are beyond their ken, and if heard at all sound perhaps like the clinking of oars or paddles against the side of a boat heard underwater, or like hard rain drumming on a tin roof: as if the boys are wearing a helmet of iron against which the world, for a while, cannot, and will not, intrude.

  In this regard, Moxley and I were no different. We heard no flute calls. Indeed, we heard nothing. But we could sense the world’s seams of weaknesses—or believed we could—and we moved toward them.

  Moxley wanted to be a cattle baron. It wasn’t about the money—we both knew we’d go on to college, Moxley to Texas A&M and me to the University of Texas, and that we’d float along in something or other. He wanted to become a veterinarian, too, in addition to a cattle baron—back then, excess did not seem incompatible with the future—and I thought I might like to study geography. But that was all eons away, and in the meantime the simple math of cattle ranching—one mother cow yielding a
baby, which yielded a baby, which yielded a baby—appealed to us. All we had to do was let them eat grass. We had no expenses: we were living at home, and we just needed to find some cheap calves. The money would begin pouring in from the cattle, like coins and bills from their mouths. With each sale we planned to buy still more calves—four more from the sale of the fatted first one, then sixteen from the sale of those four, and so on.

  I lived in the suburbs of Houston with both my parents (my father was a realtor, my mother a schoolteacher), neither of whom had a clue about my secret life with cattle (nor was there any trace of ranching in our family’s history), while Moxley lived with his grandfather, Old Ben, on forty acres of grassland about ten miles north of what were then the Houston city limits.

  Old Ben’s pasture was rolling hill country, gently swelling, punctuated by brush and thorns—land that possessed only a single stock tank, a single aging tractor, and a sagging, rusting barbed-wire fence good for retaining nothing, with rotting fence posts.

  Weeds grew chest high in the abandoned fields. Old Ben had fought in the first World War as a horse soldier and had been injured multiple times, and was often in and out of the V.A. clinic, having various pieces of shrapnel removed, glass and metal both, which he kept in a bloodstained gruesome collection, first on the windowsills of their little house but then, as the collection grew, on the back porch, scattered in clutter, like the collections of interesting rocks that sometimes accrue in people’s yards over the course of a lifetime.

  Old Ben had lost most of his hearing in the war, and some of his nerves as well, so that even on the days when he was home, he was not always fully present, and Moxley was free to navigate the rapids of adolescence unregulated.