For a Little While

by Rick Bass

  Since all the other rooms were filled with newspapers and tin cans, Sloat’s bed had been dragged into the center room. The kitchen was nearly filled with unwashed pots and dishes, in which phalanxes of roaches stirred themselves into scuttling escape as we entered. The rug in that middle room was wet underfoot—the water-stained, sagging ceiling was still dripping from the previous night’s rain, and on the headboard of the bed there was a small fishbowl, filled with cloudy water, in which a goldfish hung suspended, slowly finning in place, with nothing else in the bowl but a single short decaying sprig of seaweed.

  The fish’s water was so cloudy with its own befoulment as to seem almost viscous, and for some reason the fish so caught my attention that I felt hypnotized, suspended in the strange house—as if I had become the fish. I had no desire to move, and neither could I look anywhere else. All of my focus was on that one little scrap of color, once bright but now muted, though still living.

  I glanced over at Moxley and was disturbed to see that he seemed somehow invigorated, even stimulated, by the rampant disorder.

  So severe was my hypnosis, and so disoriented were both of us, that neither of us had noticed there was someone sleeping in the rumpled, unmade bed beside which we stood; and when the person stirred, we stepped back, alarmed.

  The sleeper was a young woman, not much older than we were, sleeping in a nightgown only slightly less dingy than the shirt of the older man—and though it was midafternoon, and bright outside, her face was puffy with sleep, and she stirred with such languor I felt certain she had been sleeping all day.

  She sat up and stared at us as if trying to make sense of us, and brushed her hair from her shoulders. Her hair was orange, very nearly the same color as the fish’s dull scales, and Sloat stared at her in a way that was both dismissive and yet slightly curious—as if wondering why, on this day, she had awakened so early.

  She swung her feet off the bed and stood unsteadily, and watched us with unblinking raptness.

  “Let’s go look at the stock,” Sloat said, and we could tell that it gave him pleasure to say the word stock.

  The three of us went through the cluttered kitchen and out to the backyard—it surprised me there were no dogs or cats in the house—and the girl followed us to the door but no farther, and stood there on the other side of the screen. Her bare feet were dirty, as if she had made the journey out to the stables before, but on this occasion lingered behind, perhaps made shy.

  Sloat was wearing old sharp-toed cowboy boots, his thin shanks shoved into them in such a way that I knew he wasn’t wearing socks, and he walked in a brisk, almost fierce line straight through the puddles and troughs toward the stables, as if he enjoyed splashing through the muck and grime, while Moxley and I pussyfooted from hummock to hummock, sometimes slipping and dipping a foot in one water-filled rut or another. Whitish foam floated on the top of the puddles, as if someone, or something, had been urinating in them.

  Sloat pushed through a rickety one-hinge gate, and goats, chickens, and other fleeting, unidentified animals scattered before his explosive entrance. Sloat began cursing and shouting at them, then picked up a stick and rat-tat-tatted it along the pickets to excite them further, like a small boy, and as if to demonstrate their vigor to their potential buyers.

  A pig, a pony, a rooster. A calf, or something that looked like a calf, except for its huge head, which was so out of proportion for the tiny body that it seemed more like the head of an elephant.

  “I buy them from the Feist brothers,” he said. “The ones that don’t get sold at auction. They give me a special deal,” he said.

  The animals continued to bleat and caterwaul, flowing away, flinging themselves against the fences. Some of them ran in demented circles, and others tried to burrow in the mud, while the goats, the most nimble of them, leapt to the tops of the crude-hammered, straw-lined doghouses and peered down with their wildly disconcerting vertical-slit lantern green eyes as if welcoming Moxley and me into some new and alien fraternity of half man, half animal: and as if, now that Moxley and I were inside the corral, the goats had us exactly where they wanted us.

  Moxley had eyes only for the calves, thin-ribbed though they were, dehydrated and listless, almost sleepwalkerish compared to the frenzy and exodus of the other animals. Six of them were huddled over in one corner of the makeshift corral, quivering collectively, their stringy tails and flanks crusted green.

  “Which are the fifteen-dollar ones?” he asked, and, sensing weakness, Sloat replied, “Those are all gone now. The only ones I have left are thirty-five.”

  Moxley paused. “What about that little Brahma?” he asked, pointing to the one animal that was clearly superior, perhaps even still healthy.

  “Oh, that’s my little prize bull,” Sloat said. “I couldn’t let you have him for less than seventy-five.”

  Between us, we had only sixty-five, which in the end turned out to be precisely enough. We had no trailer attached to the back of the station wagon, but Sloat showed us how we could pull out the back seat, lash the seat to the roof for the drive home, and line the floor and walls of the station wagon with squares of cardboard, in case the calf soiled it, and drive home with him in that manner. “I’ve done it many a time myself,” Sloat said.

  The girl had come out to watch us, had waded barefoot through the same puddles in which her father, or whatever his relation was to her, had waded. She stood on the other side of the gate, still wearing her nightgown, and watched us as Sloat and Moxley and I, our financial transaction completed, chased the bull calf around the corral, slipping in the muck, Sloat swatting the calf hard with a splintered baseball bat, whacking it whenever he could, and Moxley and me trying to tackle the calf and wrestle it to the ground.

  The calf was three times as strong as any one of us, however, and time and again no sooner had one of us gotten a headlock on it than it would run into the side of the corral, smashing the would-be tackler hard against the wall; and soon both Moxley and I were bleeding from our shins, noses, and foreheads, and I had a split lip—and still Sloat kept circling the corral, following the terrified calf, smacking him hard with the baseball bat.

  Somehow, all the other creatures had disappeared—had vanished into other, adjacent corrals, or perhaps through a maze of secret passageways—and leaning against one of the wobbly slat walls, blood dripping from my nose, I saw now what Sloat had been doing with his antics. Each time the calf rounded a corner, Sloat had pushed open another gap or gate and ushered two or three more nontarget animals into one of the outlying pens, until finally the calf was isolated.

  Sloat was winded, and he stood there gasping and sucking air, the bat held loosely in his hands. The calf stood facing the three of us, panting likewise, and suddenly Sloat rushed him, having waited to gauge when the animal would be midbreath, too startled or tired to bolt, and he struck the calf as hard as he could with the baseball bat, striking it on the bony plate of its forehead.

  The calf neither buckled nor wobbled, but seemed only to sag a little, as if for a long time he had been tense or worried about something but could now finally relax.

  Sloat laid his bat down almost tenderly—as if it were some valuable instrument to be accorded great respect—and then gestured to the Goat Girl, held out an open hand to her.

  From her pocket, she pulled a short length of heavy rope. She climbed over the fence and carried it to him. Quickly, before the calf could rise, Sloat twisted the rope around the calf’s bulging neck, gripping it with one fist, and then almost delicately at the same time pressed a thumb into the stricken animal’s throat, probing a bit, searching for just the right cleft.

  The calf’s eyes fluttered, then closed with what seemed almost serenity. It shuddered once, then loosened, and Sloat stood up straight, pleased with the cleanliness, the precision, of his act. He paused only to catch his breath and then called to us to help him heft the calf before it came back to consciousness, though we could not imagine such a thing, and I was thinking at f
irst that he had just stolen our money: had taken our sixty-five dollars, killed our calf, and was now demanding our assistance in burying it.

  The Goat Girl roused herself finally from her strange reverie, and splashed through the puddles of foam and slime, out toward the car in advance of us, as if intending to lay palm fronds before our approach. She opened our car door and placed the scraps of cardboard in the car’s interior, for when the calf resurrected.

  “How long will he be out?” Moxley asked.

  “Where are you taking him?” Sloat asked, and I told him, West Houston—about an hour and a half away.

  “An hour and a half,” said Sloat, whom I had now begun to think of as the Goat Man. He shook our proffered hands—cattlemen!—and told us, as we were driving off, to come back soon, that he had a lot of volume coming through, and that he would keep an eye out for good stock, for buyers as discerning as we were, and that he would probably be able to give us a better break next time.

  Moxley slithered the station wagon out to the end of the drive—the Goat Man and Goat Girl followed—and Moxley stopped and rolled his window down and thanked them both again and asked the girl what her name was.

  But she had fallen into a reverie and was staring at us in much the same manner as the calf had after receiving his first blow; and as we drove away she did not raise her hand to return our waves, and neither did she give any other sign of having seen or heard us, or that she was aware of our existence in the world.

  Driving away, I was troubled deeply by the ragtag, slovenly, almost calculated half-assedness of the operation; and on the drive home, though Moxley and I for the most part were pleased and excited about having gotten another calf, and so cheaply, I was discomforted, could feel a rumbling confusion, the protest that sometimes precedes revolution though other times leads to nothing, only acquiescence, then senescence. I could see that Moxley did not feel it—and, sensing this, I felt weaker, and slightly alone.

  The calf woke up when we were still an hour from Ben’s ranch. The calf did not awaken gradually, as a human might, stirring and blinking and looking around to ascertain his new surroundings, but awoke instead explosively, denting a crumple in the roof with his bony head. He squealed and then began crashing against the sides of the car’s interior with such a clacking of hoofs we were afraid he would break the glass and escape; and his frenzied thrashings (he was unable to stand to his full height in the back of the car, and instead began crawling) reminded me of how, hours earlier, the calf had been rounding the makeshift corral.

  We attempted to shoo the calf to stay in the back, swatting at him with our hands, but these gestures held no more meaning for the bull than if we had been waving flyswatters at him, and his squeals transformed to full roars, amplified to terrifying proportions within the confines of the car. At one point he was in the front seat with us, having lunged over it, and in his flailings managed to head-butt me. He cut Moxley’s shins with swift kicks of his sharp little hoofs so that they were bruised and bleeding, and Moxley nearly ran off the road, but then the calf decided he preferred the space and freedom of the back seat and vaulted over the seat again and into his cardboard lair, where he continued to hurl himself against the walls.

  As the Goat Man had foreseen, and as a symptom of the ailment that had caused the calf to not be bid upon in the first place at the regular auction—the auction that had preceded the mysterious Feist brothers’ obtaining him—the calf in his fright began emitting fountains of greenish diarrhea, spraying it midwhirl as if from a hose, so that we were yelling and ducking, and soon the interior of the car was nearly coated with dripping green slime. And though panicked, we were fierce in our determination to see this thing through, and we knew if we stopped and turned the calf out into the open, we would never capture him again.

  Somehow we made it home, and in the darkness of the new evening, with fireflies blinking in the fields, we drove straight out into Old Ben’s pasture, gray weeds scraping and scratching against the sides of the wagon with an eerie, clawing keen that further terrified the calf: and when we rolled down the tailgate’s window he leapt out into that clean sweet fresh night air; and this calf, too, we never saw again, though the residue of his passage remained with us for weeks afterward, in cracks and crevices of the old station wagon, despite our best scrubbing.

  Old Ben fell further into the rot. Moxley and I could both see it, in his increasingly erratic behavior; and though I had perceived Moxley to be somehow more mature than I—more confident in the world—I was surprised by how vulnerable Moxley seemed to be made by Ben’s fading.

  Ben was ancient, a papery husk of a man—dusty, tottering history, having already far exceeded the odds by having lived as long as he had—and was going downhill fast. Such descent could not be pleasant for Old Ben, who, after all, had once been a young man much like ourselves. His quality of life was plummeting even as ours, fueled by the strength of our youth, was ascending. Did Moxley really expect, or even want, for the old man to hang on forever, an eternal hostage to his failed and failing body, just so Moxley would have the luxury of having an older surviving family member?

  We couldn’t keep him locked up all the time. Moxley had taken over control of the car completely, took it to school each day, and hid the keys whenever he was home, but Old Ben’s will was every bit as fierce as Moxley’s, and Ben continued to escape. We often found him floating in the stock tank, using an inner tube for a life vest, fishing, with no hook tied to his line.

  He disappeared for a week once after rummaging through the drawers and finding the key to the tractor, which he drove away, blowing a hole through the back wall of the barn. We didn’t notice the hole, or that the tractor was missing, and it was not until a sheriff called from Raton County, New Mexico, asking if Moxley knew an elderly gentleman named Ben, that we had any clue of where he was. We skipped school and drove out there to get him, pulling a rented flatbed on which to strap the tractor, and he was as glad to see us as a child would have been; and Moxley, in his relief, was like a child himself, his eyes tearing with joy.

  All through that winter we continued to buy more stock from the Goat Man, knowing better but unable to help ourselves, and lured, also, by the low prices. Even if one in ten of his scour-ridden wastrels survived to market, we would come out ahead, we told ourselves, but none of them did: they all escaped through our failed fence, usually in the first afternoon of their freedom, and we never saw any of them again.

  We imagined their various fates. We envisioned certain of them being carried away by the panthers that were rumored to still slink through the Brazos river bottoms, and the black jaguars that were reported to have come up from Mexico, following those same creeks and rivers as if summoned, to snack on our cheap and ill-begotten calves, or claves, as we called them. We imagined immense gargoyles and winged harpies that swooped down to snatch up our renegade runaway crops. We envisioned modern-day cattle rustlers congregating around the perimeter of our ranch like fishermen. It was easy to imagine that even the Goat Man himself followed us home and scooped up each runaway calf in a net and returned with it then to his lair, where he would sell it a second time to another customer.

  Or perhaps there was some hole in the earth, some cavern into which all the calves disappeared, as if sucked there by a monstrous and irresistible force. Any or all of these paranoias might as well have been true, given the completeness of the calves’ vanishings.

  With each purchase we made I felt more certain that we were traveling down a wrong path, and yet we found ourselves returning to the Goat Man’s hovel again and again, and giving him more and more money.

  We ferried our stock in U-Haul trailers, and across the months, as we purchased more cowflesh from the Goat Man—meat vanishing into the ether again and again, as if into some quarkish void—we became familiar enough with Sloat and his daughter to learn that her name was Flozelle, and to visit with them about matters other than stock.

  We would linger in that center room—bedr
oom, dining room, living room, all—and talk, first about the weather and then about the Houston Oilers, before venturing out into what Moxley and I had taken to calling the Pissyard. We learned that Flozelle’s mother had died when she was born, that Flozelle had no brothers or sisters, and that Sloat loathed schools.

  “I homeschool her,” he said. “Go ahead, ask her anything.”

  We could have been wiseasses. We could have flaunted our ridiculously limited knowledge—the names of signatories to obscure historical documents, the critical dates of various armistices—but in the presence of such abject filth, and before her shell-shocked quietude, we were uncharacteristically humbled. Instead, Moxley asked, almost gently, “How long have you had that fish?” and before Flozelle could answer, Sloat bullshitted us by telling us that the fish had been given to his grandmother on her wedding day, almost a hundred years ago.

  “What’s its name?” I asked, and this time, before Sloat could reply, Flozelle answered.

  “Goldy,” she said proudly, and a shiver ran down my back. If I had known what sadness or loneliness really felt like, I think I might have recognized it as such; but as it was, I felt only a shiver, and then felt it again as she climbed up onto the unmade bed (the bottoms of her bare feet unwashed and bearing little crumb fragments) and unscrewed the lid to a jar of uncooked oatmeal she kept beside the bowl, and sprinkled a few flakes into the viscous water.

  Moxley was watching her with what seemed to me to be a troubled look, and after she had finished feeding the bloated fish, she turned and climbed back down off the lumpen bed.

  With no further preamble, she asked, “Do you want to see my fur collection?” and when Moxley, with no hesitation, nodded, she took each of us by the hand, led us into the mud-splattered utility room—empty Popsicle wrappers and ice cream cartons cluttered the floor—and, releasing our hands (her own was remarkably tender and smooth, sensual), opened the freezer to reveal a menagerie of what was surely every dead animal she had ever found: not just gutted skunks, foxes, raccoons, squirrels, and opossums, but birds stacked like firewood, their feathers hoarfrosted as if made of silver: great horned owls, blue jays, cardinals, titmice, red-headed woodpeckers. Mockingbirds.