For a Little While

by Rick Bass

  I told her good night and said that I would see her again sometime, and then I went down the stairs myself and out into the cooling night, and the stench of the burn pile. For some reason—malice against the universe?—Dexter had tossed an old tire at the base of the little flames.

  “Keeps mosquitoes away,” he said. My friend now, after all these many months of courtship. And did he think, since we had become pals, I might bring him more checks?

  I got in my car and rattled down off the mountain.

  In the morning, I was waiting on the steps long before the courthouse opened. Penny’s smile—her radiance—was as bright as ever when she unlocked the giant double doors and let me in. Yankee troops, under Grant’s command, had been turned back from this venerable building, but here I was, sailing in whenever I wanted, with the free pass of trust and the religion of commerce. It threw me every time, why she was still made so happy by the sight of me after I had failed to pursue her.

  I handed Velma’s lease to her, neither with a flourish nor with shame but with an understated gesture that suggested, perhaps, Sometimes you just get lucky. Her eyes watered with pleasure, and I could tell she wanted to give me a hug.

  She examined the document as if it were a religious artifact.

  “I knew you could do it,” she said. “May I record it?” she asked. “May I record them all now?”

  She was so good, so pure! All this time, she had been waiting for me. She believed in what I did: took it as an article of faith that because I wasn’t a bad man, my work was good.

  There was no one back in those hills, and in those times, in fact, who viewed our solitary flares as anything other than good, as proof that we were getting close to the thing we were after—the thing we desired with so blind an instinct that no understanding was necessary.

  What is the worst sin? Brother Janssen said it was the sin of inattentiveness. Of taking God’s glories and gifts for granted. Of assuming they are our due. When we do so, he said, although we are forgiven with each rising of the sun, we are nevertheless thieves in a beautiful garden.

  There was oil under the Carter property, as the geologists had insisted there would be. I worked the Black Warrior for several more years before moving to North Dakota during the deep shale play, and after that coal-bed methane in the Powder River, in Wyoming and Montana. My success with the Antioch prospect, it turned out, had not gone unnoticed, and as word had gotten out, I had become a sought-after lease hound.

  All this started over thirty years ago and more. By the time I left Mississippi, Genevieve and I had grown gradually apart, and Penny’s interest in me had cooled to disappointment, masked by the mild affection of easy friendship. Her garden was as bright as ever but it seemed that something inside her was beginning to dim, and I did not try to light it again.

  I saw Dexter only once more, and barely recognized him. It was a little over a year after we’d obtained the lease. He came out to witness the testing of his grandmother’s well. I had almost forgotten him, having gained from him all I needed. While he would never be mistaken for anything other than a renegade, he had attempted to dress up for the occasion—clean new blue jeans, and a brilliant white starched shirt—as if believing that might somehow influence the yield from the old ocean below.

  It was a raw night in November and we were all standing around the wellhead: Dexter, myself, the geologist, the engineer, the well techs, and a few neighbors.

  The well tech opened the valve—there was a great gust—and then he lit it.

  The contained explosion thrilled us every time, even those of us who had been seeing it all our lives. It singed our eyebrows, scalded our faces, and we scrabbled backward, laughing, as the fire went straight up, harmlessly scorching the star-dark sky. We stood there, happy, hoping the gas would burn away quickly and we might then be the recipients of what we really wanted, the oil: the elixir.

  One of the spectators went to his truck and returned with a large glass jug of what looked like gasoline, but turned out to be moonshine. Everyone proceeded to pass it around, drinking it at first with all the ceremony and formality of communion. Dexter surprised me by acting like a connoisseur; he took but one swallow, then another sip, which he swished before spitting it onto the fire, where it burned as if from a dragon’s breath. For the rest of the night he declined any more, instead only watching the flare, waiting; waiting.

  The rest of the visitors passed the jug with increasing intimacy, until soon they were all rolling around like monkeys—and, later, going off into the bushes to heave and puke. I did not miss any of that fun, no sir. I was proud of my religion that night, and as they continued to behave like fools, I abstained, remained sober and vigilant, and, along with Dexter, watched the well burn, waiting for daylight.

  It was a big flare, higher than most. More people showed up, drawn by the height of the burning. Many of them sipped from the great glass jug. They kept coming, and stood there gawking at the flame, a dim awe glimmering in them as they observed the spectacle, as if nothing more than their attendance and dull hunger were causing the fire to burn, in some self-sustaining fashion—and I understood: that despite it appearing thus, we do not burn the essence of the earth, but instead are ourselves somehow the burning, though ours cannot be seen.

  That night, while so many of the heathens around me howled and vomited into the bushes, with the towering flare illuminating their movements for all to see, I stared at the world turned brilliant.

  Had Brother Janssen known where I was going—into the outside world—and divined, like a prophet, the difficulties I would meet? He had told me all I needed to know, but I find now, so many years later, that I want more from him—though too late, I fear.

  What were my missteps? I still have no idea, but I could have been better. I wish I could have been given another opportunity. Such desire I suppose is the fuel of any religion—the realization that we squander our mortal days, but that maybe, one day, we will indeed be given another chance.

  I had created all this, and was responsible for the world I now beheld. The thought made me dizzy. I retreated from the scrutiny of that scorching, roaring light, and went up a nearby hill, back at the edge of the forest. In the darkness I felt better. I lay with my back against the slope of the hill and watched the fire, the way it washed out the stars, erasing everything but itself. I could feel the earth trembling, and the fire roaring not just above, but below, rushing up to meet us all.

  The River in Winter

  A boy in the valley, Brandon, fifteen years old, stared down into the Whitefish, the river in which his father had drowned a year earlier. Some weeks back, in the dead of winter, a truck had plunged through the ice, which had then sealed back over. Now Brandon, full of rage and heroism, had volunteered to everyone in the bar to retrieve the truck by diving down and fastening a chain to it, whereupon the rest of them could pull it out. It had been a long winter, and if there was anything better to do that night, no one could think of it.

  The truck was old, of little real worth, but as the evening wore on, wagers had been made, and the proposed act’s value rose to exceed that of the truck itself. Brandon had no interest in the bets, only in the doing, and shortly before midnight he found himself standing on the ice, as if on the smoothness of a marble ballroom floor, in front of a hole above the dark moving water, his way made ready.

  Men and women stood with lanterns on the narrow stone beach at river’s edge. A few ventured onto the ice, where their lamps cast blurry, flickering reflections. Beside the lanterns and the small fires they had built along the shore, the villagers were but dim silhouettes, not a one of them recognizable in the wavering light. It reminded Brandon of the funeral service: all candles, all darkness, so far north.

  His mother, unaware, was not present at the river. He knew she worried since his father’s death about what kind of man he might become.

  He closed his eyes, fastened the chain around his waist, and dropped through the hole.

  Brand
on gripped the heavy chain like an umbilical cord as it took him straight to the bottom, even faster than he had expected. As he sank, the river seemed at first to contract at his touch, as if recoiling from his heat, but then came back in and pressed against him. He couldn’t see anything; beneath the ice, it was blacker than night. He could feel his fear echo around him.

  He landed on the roof of the truck, was swept across it almost before he realized what it was. He lunged for something, anything, and caught the brace of the side-view mirror, and was tempted to fasten the chain to the mirror bar and be done with it.

  In the current, he felt as if he were being sucked down the gullet of a writhing animal. It swept his hair back and tried to peel open his lips. He worked his way upstream, toward the rear of the truck, trying to imagine how the driver had made it out. His air was already leaving him, but he knew he would see this through to whatever end. He thought about all the townspeople waiting for him up above, their fires and lanterns along the shore. Eyes open, eyes closed, it did not matter; down below, the darkness was complete.

  The chain tangled around him as he struggled upstream, and he panicked, sucked in a little water but then clamped his mouth shut tighter. He ducked and twisted, untangling himself from the chain—an expensive use of air, something he had always taken for granted.

  Grabbing at the truck, hand over hand, he arrived at the back bumper. He was nearly out of air, but he crawled under the truck and groped for the frame, barely able to make his hands work, the great cold already shutting him down.

  The current wanted to drag him away, but he found the frame and worked the chain through it, looped it twice, then kicked out from under the truck and scissored toward the surface, his lungs burning. As he rose, he felt as if something or someone beyond him was hoisting him up, though in his confusion he had let go of the chain and was swimming free; he had not thought how it could lead him back up to the hole.

  Nor had he considered how hard it would be to find the hole. No one had told him how to do any of this; he had just jumped in. He realized he must be downstream of the opening. He kicked harder, and bumped his head against the ice, solid as concrete. He reached around, but there was no hole. Something greater than terror seized him.

  Some distance away, he saw through the ice the ghostly traces of lanterns moving back and forth, villagers searching for him. Smears of yellow crisscrossed what had to be the vicinity of the hole. He had no air left.

  He followed the lights above him in a clumsy breaststroke against the current, rapping at the underside of the ice. Someone heard him and thumped back, tapping a lantern-lit path toward the opening. The glow grew brighter, nearer. A dozen hands reached down and grabbed him, yanked him up and out. In his first breath, he took in a mountain of air.

  They dragged him onto the ice like a fish and he lay there coughing and gasping, his blue face turned to the villagers along the shore.

  The men helped him to his feet and led him over to one of the fires, where they gave him his own lantern, seated him on a stump, and wrapped and covered him. He sat thawing before the flames and spitting up river water, which steamed as it splashed against the lantern.

  “Did you get it hooked up?” someone asked, and Brandon, still numb with cold and unable to speak, nodded.

  “Good job,” he heard someone else say. “Good damn job.” He turned to see who had spoken, but in the darkness beyond the lantern’s glow he couldn’t tell.

  He could not get warm; the blanket wrapped around him had frozen like a shell. But the townspeople were no longer concerned he might be in danger. He was back up on the surface, and that was all they needed to know.

  They had turned their attention to the truck. Now that it was fastened to the chain, the villagers were ready to grab hold and pull. They had brought horses to harness to the chain as well.

  Brandon did not want to remain alone by the fire, which wasn’t warming him anyway. He stood and took a place in line along the chain, and people clapped him on the back as he passed.

  Some of the men had axes, and if the villagers could lift the truck off the river bottom to just beneath the ice, the axmen could chop a lane for it, and in that manner they would reel it in. The small fires, untended as everyone gathered along the chain, burned lower, more coals than flames. The villagers placed their lanterns like streetlamps at ragged intervals along the length of the chain, beginning at the frozen shoreline and traveling into the woods.

  Thirty men and women, sixty hands, four horses: when they began to pull, the truck started to move. The force required was beyond anything they could comprehend. The line, taut now, quivered like a muscle itself, as though given life. They pulled hand over hand and felt the truck leave the bottom, its tremendous weight twisting in the current.

  Behind and in front of Brandon there were murmurings that the task was harder than people had thought it would be.

  From the back of the line, farther into the woods, the order was given to halt. The horses had gone as far as they could—the forest became too dense for them—and needed to be unhitched and reharnessed closer to the shore. The pullers held the line, which trembled again as if the entire river, and all it contained, was alive and pulling back. It was all they could do, without the horses, not to lose ground.

  After the horses had been reharnessed, the order was given to pull again, and progress resumed. The heat of the animals in their effort radiated as if from ovens. The muscles of the horses shone and steamed, and once more the chain began to move. The pullers leaned in with the horses and marched toward the forest again, a quarter step at a time, pigeon-toed.

  The men on the ice shouted and struck at the ice as they worked to widen a channel. Looking back, the pullers watched cold blue sparks from the ax blows skitter and blaze out. Now the chain cut into the ice as if it might saw the whole river in half and swallow them all. The axmen labored to keep pace with the chain. The pullers were sweating as much as the horses now, and steam rose from their backs, too, so that a fog enveloped them. They felt the truck resisting, yet they found it within themselves to pull harder still.

  Once more the order was given to halt, and the horses were unhitched. This time, as each horse was unfastened, the chain slipped back several links and a shout went up from everyone, believing the truck would haul them all into the river.

  They slid backward, a number of them falling and being dragged along the ground near the shoreline. As some rose, others fell, and they lost further ground. Brandon, still clumsy with river-cold, fell twice, tumbling down toward the river. He was certain he was being claimed, summoned.

  They scrabbled and dug in any way they could to stop the slide. Just in time, the horses were rehitched, and they too leaned in, lunging. A white horse slipped to its knees, showering the pullers with divots of snow, a lantern catching the glint of its hooves just before it was kicked over. Instantly, the woods along that section of chain grew dark.

  The pullers managed to slow their backward momentum only when they reached the light of the next lantern, where, with the white horse and the pullers having scrambled to their feet, they were able to stop the truck’s descent.

  All of their prior work seemed for nothing, or almost nothing; it was time to begin again. But their way was a little easier now. They had worn a path in the snow. They understood better what was required. They found their rhythm and pulled as if they had been doing it all their lives, and plowed forward, steady and strong, soon passing where they had been before.

  Just as the horses neared the point where they would have to be unhitched and reharnessed again, the truck, like some great whale amid chunks of jagged ice, breached the river’s surface. Its back end rose above the ice, with the tailgate sprung open and belching water. The pullers leaned so far in the opposite direction to hold their position that they were now lying almost facedown, bent forward like tall grass flattened by a strong wind. The horses were marching in place, and then galloping in place, tossing up more divots of snow, which
pelted the pullers’ faces, but the truck and chain would go no farther. The pullers could do no more than keep the truck where it was, and only with all of their effort could they prevent the river from taking it back.

  The men on the ice threw down their axes and hurried to fasten new chains to the frame. They tied the chains to a giant larch so that, their progress secured, the pullers could at last rest for a moment. Their relief was an ecstasy, but then the order was given to resume pulling; and the truck, now more like a monstrous crustacean climbing onto the ice, cleared first one rear wheel and then the other. Water rushed from every window, and then the front wheels were up and out of the frozen river as well.

  In the darkness, the pullers felt the chain go slack, then heard the axmen bellow, and for a terrible moment they did not know if the truck had been lost—the chain having broken loose somehow—or if they had gained it, clear and clean, up onto the ice; and they went running out onto the ice to see.

  And beholding the truck, which was still gushing water, they took off their shredded gloves and ran their hands over its frigid curves. The water poured from the truck like a long breath exhaled, one that chilled them as they considered the world beneath the ice, and yet they felt victorious, and congratulated themselves with loud whoops for having brought it back from the frozen deep.

  To give the horses a rest, the pullers tied a tow rope to the truck and drew it behind them on the ice along the riverbank, which was like a frictionless highway—a single person might have been able to pull the truck in this fashion—and the procession of villagers accompanied the truck, with the horses limping behind like lame circus animals. Once they were out to the road, they did not leave the truck behind to be collected the next day, but hauled it all the way to the cabin of the man who had driven it into the river, whom Brandon did not know.