For a Little While

by Rick Bass

  She stared at them without speaking, as if these creatures were her beloveds: stared down into them, forgetting we were there, I think, until frost-fog from the deep freeze began to boil up and around us; and then, just as gently, she closed the lid. And saying nothing, we all filed out through the kitchen and on into the Pissyard to go look at, and purchase, more stock.

  Back before Ben had begun falling to pieces, Moxley and I had sometimes gone by my house after school to do homework and hang out. My mother would make cookies, and if Moxley was still there when my father got home from work, Moxley would occasionally have supper with us. But those days had gone by long ago, Ben now requiring almost all of his waking care. I helped as I could, doing little things like cleaning up the house. Whenever Ben discovered that he was trapped he would ransack the house, pulling books down off shelves and hurling his clothes out of his drawer. Once, he rolled up the carpet and tried to set the end of it on fire, as if lighting a cigar; when we arrived at the farmhouse, we could see the gray smoke seeping from the windows, and, rushing inside, we found Ben passed out next to the rug, which had smoldered and burned a hole in the plywood flooring, revealing the gaping maw of dark basement below, with the perimeter of that burned-out crater circular, like a caldera, having burned so close to Ben that his left arm hung down into the pit. All the next day we sawed and hammered new sheets of plywood to patch that abyss. For a few days afterward, Ben seemed contrite and neither misbehaved nor otherwise suffered any departures from sentience, as if such lapses had been, after all, at least partially willful.

  I helped cook dinners, and some nights I stayed over at their farmhouse and made breakfast, and helped Moxley batten down the doors and windows before leaving for school. Knives, scissors, matches, guns, fishhooks, lighter fluid, gasoline, household cleaners—it all had to be put away. Moxley had tied a 150-foot length of rope around Ben’s waist each night so if Ben awoke and went sleepwalking, wandering the dewy hills, he could be tracked and reeled in like a marlin.

  The farmhouse was a pleasant place to awaken in the morning—the coppery sun rising just above the tops of the trees, and the ungrazed fields lush and tall and green, with mourning doves cooing and pecking red grit and gravel from the driveway—and the interior of the house would be spangled with the prisms of light from all the little pieces of glass arrayed on the windowsill, Ben’s shrapnel collection. The spectral casts of rainbow splashed across the walls like the light that passes through stained-glass windows, and there would be no sound but the ticking of the grandfather clock in the front hallway, and the cooing of those doves, and the lowing of distant cows not ours. Moxley and I would fix breakfast, gather our homework, then lock up the house and leave, hurrying toward school.

  I had some money from mowing lawns, and Moxley was pretty flush, or so it seemed to us, from Ben’s pension checks. As much from habit now as from desire, we made further pilgrimages to Sloat’s corrals that winter and spring.

  And following each purchase, upon our return to Ben’s ranch, sometimes our new crop of sickly calves would remain in the pasture for a few days, though never longer than a week, after which, always, they disappeared, carrying with them their daunting and damnable genes, the strange double-crossed combination of recessive alleles that had caused the strangeness to blossom in them in the first place—the abnormality, the weakness, that had led to the unfortunate chain of circumstances that resulted in their passing from a real auction to the Feist brothers, who would sell them for dog meat if they could, and then to Sloat and a short life of squalor, and then to us, and then to whatever freedom or destiny awaited them.

  Ben caught pneumonia after one of his escapes. (He had broken out a window and crawled through, leaving a trail of blood as well as new glass scattered amid his sparkling windowsill shards of glass from fifty years earlier; we trailed him down to the pond, his favorite resting spot, where he stood shivering, waist deep, as if awaiting a baptism.) Moxley had to check him into the hospital, and after Ben was gone the silence in the farmhouse was profound.

  Moxley was edgy, waiting for the day when Old Ben would be coming home, but that day never came; he would die in the hospital. And although it had long been clear that Ben’s days at home were numbered, the abyss of his final absence still came as a surprise, as did Moxley’s new anger.

  We continued with our old rituals, as if Ben was still with us—cooking steaks on the back porch grill, and buying cattle—but the ground beneath our feet seemed less firm.

  With Old Ben’s last pension check Moxley and I went to a real auction and bought a real calf—not one of Sloat’s misfits, but a registered Brahma—a stout little bull calf. And rather than risk losing this one, we kept it tethered, like a dog on a leash, in the barn. It was not as wild as Sloat’s terrified refugees, and soon we were able to feed and water it by hand: and it grew fatter, week by week. We fed it a diet rich in protein, purchasing sweet alfalfa and pellet cubes. We brushed it and curried it and estimated its weight daily as we fatted it for market. And it seemed to me that with some success having finally been achieved, Moxley’s anger and loneliness had stabilized, and I was glad that this calf, at least, had not escaped. It was a strange thought to both of us, to consider that we were raising the animal so someone else could eat him, but that was what cattlemen did.

  As this calf, finally, grew fatter, Moxley seemed to grow angry at the Goat Man, and barely spoke to him now when we traveled out there; and though we still went out there with the same, if not greater, frequency, we had stopped purchasing stock from the Goat Man and instead merely went out into the Pissyard to look. After we had purchased the calf from the regular auction, Sloat’s offerings were revealed to us in their full haplessness and we could not bring ourselves to take them at any price; still, we went to look, morbidly curious about what misfits might have passed through his gates that week.

  Moxley asked Flozelle out on what I suppose could be called a date, even though I was with them. I wanted to believe the best of him, but it seemed to me that there was a meanness, a bedevilment. Moxley still had the same aspirations—he was intent on going to school and becoming a vet—but the moments of harshness seemed to emerge from him at odd and unpredictable times, like fragments of bone or glass emerging from beneath the thinnest of skin.

  The three of us began to ride places together once or twice a week, and, for a while, she fascinated us. She knew how to fix things—how to rebuild a carburetor, how to peel a tire from its rim and plug it with gum and canvas and seat it back onto its rim again—and sometimes, out in the country, we stopped beside the fields of strangers and got out and climbed over the barbed-wire fence and went out to where other people’s horses were grazing.

  We would slip up onto those horses bareback and ride them around strangers’ fields for hours at a time. Flozelle knew how to gentle even the most unruly or skittish horse by biting its ears with her teeth and hanging on like a pit bull until Moxley or I had climbed up, and then she’d release her bite hold and we’d rocket across the pasture, the barrel ribs of the horse beneath us heaving; the expensive thoroughbreds of oilmen, the sleek and fatted horses farting wildly from their too-rich diets of grain.

  She had never been to a movie before, and when we took her she stared rapt, ate three buckets of popcorn, chewing ceaselessly through Star Wars. She began spending some afternoons with Moxley out at his farm, and helping him with chores—mowing with the tractor the unkempt grass, bush-hogging brush and cutting bales of hay for our young bull. She showed us how to castrate him, to make him put on even more weight even faster, and she set about repairing the shabby, sorry fence we had never gotten around to fixing properly.

  The calf, the steer, was getting immense, or so it seemed to us, and though he still was friendly and manageable, his strength concerned us. We worried that he might strangle himself on his harness, his leash, should he ever attempt to break out of the barn, and so not long after Flozelle had completed her repairs on the fence we turned him out into
the field, unfastening his rope and opening the barn doors, whereupon he emerged slowly, blinking, and then descended to the fresh green fields below and began grazing there confidently, as if he had known all his life that those fields were waiting for him, and that he would reach them in due time.

  I had the strange thought that if only Old Ben could have still been alive to see it, the sight might somehow have helped heal him, even though I knew that to be an impossibility. He had been an old man, war torn and at the end of his line; no amount of care, or even miracles, could have kept him from going downhill.

  To the best of my knowledge, Flozelle did not shower, as if such a practice went against her or her father’s religious beliefs. In my parents’ car I drove up to the farm one warm day in the spring, unannounced, and surprised Moxley and Flozelle, who were out in the backyard. Moxley was dressed but Flozelle was not, and Moxley was spraying her down with the hose—not in fun, as I might have suspected, but in a manner strangely more workmanlike, as one might wash a car, or even a horse; and when they saw me Moxley was embarrassed and shut the hose off, though Flozelle was not discomfited at all, and merely took an old towel, little larger than a washcloth, and began drying off.

  And later, after he had taken her back home—after we had both driven out to Sloat’s and dropped her off, without going inside, and without going back into the Pissyard to look around, I asked him, “Are you sleeping with her?”—and he looked at me with true surprise and then said, “I am,” and when I asked him if she ever spent the night over at the farmhouse, he looked less surprised, less proud, and said yes.

  What did it matter to me? It was nothing but an act, almost lavatory-like in nature, I supposed—almost mechanical and without emotion, if not insensate. I imagined it to be for Moxley like the filling of a hole, the shoveling-in of something, and the tamping-down. It was not anything. He was doing what he had to do, almost as if taking care of her; and she, with all the things the Goat Man had taught her, had fixed his fences, had repaired the old tractor, the barn.

  She had not led him down any errant path, and neither was his life, or mine, going to change or deviate from our destinies as a result of any choices made or not made. She was like fodder, was all. We were just filling the days. We were still fattening up. We were still strong in the world, and moving forward. I had no call to feel lonely or worried. We still had all the time in the world, the world was still ours, there was no rot anywhere, the day was still fresh and new, we could do no wrong. We would grow, just not now.

  Her First Elk

  She had killed an elk once. She had been a young woman, just out of college—her beloved father already three years in the grave—and had set out early on opening morning, hiking uphill through a forest of huge ponderosa pines, with the stars shining like sparks through their boughs, and owls calling all around her, and her breath rising strong in puffs and clouds as she climbed, and a shimmering at the edge of her vision like the electricity in the night sky that sometimes precedes the arrival of the northern lights, or heat lightning.

  The hunt was over astonishingly quickly; years later, she would realize that the best hunts stretch out four or five weeks, and sometimes never result in a taking. But this one had ended in the first hour, on the first day.

  Even before daylight, she had caught the scent of the herd bedded down just ahead of her, a scent sweeter and ranker than that of any number of stabled horses; and creeping closer, she had been able to hear their herd sounds, their little mewings and grunts.

  She crouched behind one of the giant trees, shivering from both the cold and her excitement—sharply, she had the thought that she wished her father were there with her, to see this, to participate—and then she was shivering again, and there was nothing in her mind but elk.

  Slowly the day became light, and she sank lower into the tall grass beneath the big pines, the scent of the grass sweet upon her skin; and the lighter the day became, the farther she flattened herself down into that yellow grass.

  The elk rose to their feet just ahead of her, and at first she thought they had somehow scented her, even though the day’s warming currents had not yet begun to ascend the hill; the last of the night’s heavier, cooling currents were still sliding in waves down the mountain, the faint breeze in her face carrying the ripe scent of the herd downhill, straight to her.

  But they were only grazing, still mewing and clucking and barking and coughing, and feeding on the same sweet-scented grass that she was hiding in. She could hear their teeth grinding as they chewed, could hear the clicking of their hoofs as they brushed against rocks.

  These creatures seemed a long way from the dinners that her father had fixed out on the barbecue grill, bringing in the sizzling red meat and carving it quickly before putting it on her child’s plate and saying, “Elk”; but it was the same animal—they were all the same animal, nearly a dozen years later. Now the herd was drifting like water, or slow-flickering flames, out of the pines and into a stand of aspen, the gold leaves underfoot the color of their hides, and the stark white trunks of the aspen grove making it look as if the herd were trapped behind bars; though still they kept drifting, flowing in and out of and between those bars, and when Jyl saw the biggest one, the giant among them, she picked him, not knowing any better—unaware that the meat would be tougher than that of a younger animal.

  Raising up on one knee, she found the shot no more difficult for her than sinking a pool ball in a corner pocket: tracking, with the end of her rifle and the crosshairs of the scope, the cleft formed just behind his right shoulder as he quartered away from her. She did not allow herself to be distracted by the magnificent crown of antlers atop his head, and when he stopped in his last moment and swung his head to face her, having sensed her presence, she squeezed the trigger as she had been taught to do back when she was a girl.

  The elk leapt hump-shouldered like a bull in a rodeo, then took a few running steps before stumbling, as if the bullet had not shredded his heart and half his lungs but had instead merely confused him.

  He crashed to the ground as if attached to an invisible tether; got up, ran once more, and fell again.

  The cows and calves in his herd, as well as the younger bulls, stared at him, trying to discern his meaning, and disoriented, too, by the sudden explosive sound. They stared at the source of the sound—Jyl had risen to her feet and was watching the great bull’s thrashings, wondering whether to shoot again—and still the rest of the herd stared at her with what she could recognize only as disbelief.

  The bull got up and ran again. This time he did not fall, having figured out, in his grounded thrashings, how to accommodate his strange new dysfunction so as to not impede his desire, which was to escape—and with one leg and shoulder tucked high against his chest, like a man carrying a satchel, and his hind legs spread wider for stability, he galloped off, running now like a horse in hobbles, and with his immense mahogany-colored rack tipped back for balance. What was once his pride and power was now a liability.

  The rest of the herd turned and followed him into the timber, disappearing into the forest almost reluctantly, still possessing somehow that air of disbelief; though once they went into the timber, they vanished completely, and for a long while she could hear the crashing of limbs and branches, and then the sounds grew fainter and farther, and there was only silence.

  Not knowing any better, back then, she set out after the herd rather than waiting to let the bull settle down and lie down and bleed to death. She didn’t know that if pushed a bull could run for miles with his heart in tatters, running as if on magic or spirit rather than the conventional pump-house mechanics of ventricles and aortas; that if pushed, a bull could run for months with his lungs exploded or full of blood.

  As if in his dying the bull were able to metamorphose into some entirely other creature, taking its air, its oxygen, straight into its blood, through its gaping, flopping mouth, as a fish does; and as if it were able still to disseminate and retrieve its blood, pres
sing and pulsing it to the farthest reaches of its body and back again without the use of a heart, relying instead on some kind of mysterious currents and desire—the will to cohere—far larger than its own, the blood sloshing back and forth, willing the elk forward, willing the elk to keep being an elk.

  Jyl had had it in her mind to go to the spot where the elk had first fallen—even from where she was, fifty or sixty yards distant, she could see the patch of torn-up earth—and to find the trail of blood from that point, and to follow it.

  She was already thinking ahead, and looking beyond that first spot, when she walked into the barbed-wire fence that separated the national forest from the adjoining private property, posted against hunting, on which the big herd had been sequestered.

  The fence was strung so tight she bounced backwards, falling much as the elk had fallen; and in her inexperience, she had been holding the trigger on her rifle, with a shell chambered in case she should see the bull again, and as she fell she gripped the trigger, discharging the rifle a second time, with a sound even more cavernous, in its unexpectedness, than the first shot.

  A branch high above her intercepted the bullet, and the limb came floating down, drifting like a kite. From her back, she watched it land quietly, and she continued to lie there, bleeding a little, and trembling, before finally rising and climbing over the fence, with its “Posted” signs, and continuing on after the elk.