by Rick Bass
The full moon was reflected in the pond, and as I approached, the bullfrogs stopped their drumming. Only a dull croaking—almost a purr, now—was coming from the package I carried at the end of the rope. I could hear the sounds of the party up on the hill, but down by the pond, with the moon’s gold eye cold upon it, I heard only silence. I lowered the giant fish head into the warm water and watched as it sank quickly down below the moon. I was frightened—I had not seen Jack’s mother, and I worried that, like a witch, she might be out there somewhere, intent upon getting me—and I was worried about Jack’s whereabouts too.
Sixty-seven dollars was a lot of money back then, and I doubted that any fish, however large, was worth it. It seemed that my father had done Jack’s family a good turn of sorts but that no good was coming of it; I guessed too that that depended upon how the party went. Still, I felt that my father should have held out for the sixty-seven dollars and then invested it in something other than festivity.
The fish’s head was still croaking, and the dry gasping made a stream of bubbles that trailed up to the surface as the head sank. For a little while, even after it was gone, I could still hear the raspy croaking—duller now, and much fainter, coming from far beneath the surface of the water. Like the child I was, I had the thought that maybe the fish was relieved now; that maybe the water felt good on its gills, and on what was left of its body.
I set about washing the saw. Bits of flesh floated off the blade and across the top of the water, and pale minnows rose and nibbled at them. After I had the blade cleaned, I sat for a while and listened for the croaking, but could hear nothing, and was relieved—though sometimes, for many years afterward, I would dream that the great fish had survived; that it had regenerated a new body to match the giant head, and that it still lurked in that pond, savage, betrayed, wounded.
I sat there quietly, and soon the crickets became accustomed to my presence and began chirping again, and then the bullfrogs began to drum again, and a peace filled back in over the pond, like a scar healing, or like grass growing bright and green across a charred landscape.
Back in the woods, chuck-will’s-widows began calling once more, and I sat there and listened to the sounds of the party up on the hill. Some of them had brought fiddles, which they were beginning to play, and the sound was sweet, in no way in accordance with the earlier events of the evening.
Fireflies floated through the woods and across the meadow. I could smell meat cooking and knew that the giant fish had been laid to rest above the coals. I sat there and rested.
The lanterns up on the hill were making a gold dome of light in the darkness—it looked like an umbrella—and after a while I turned and went back up to the light and to the noise of the party.
In gutting and cleaning the fish, before skewering it on an iron rod to roast, the partygoers had cut open its stomach to see what it had been eating, as catfish of that size were notorious for living at the bottom of the deepest lakes and rivers and eating anything that fell to those depths. And they had found interesting things in this one’s stomach, including a small gold pocket watch, fairly well preserved though with the engraving worn away so that all they could see on the inside face was the year, 1898.
The partygoers decided that, in honor of having the barbecue, my father should receive the treasure from the fish’s stomach (which produced, also, a can opener, a slimy tennis shoe, some baling wire, and a good-size soft-shelled turtle, still alive, which clambered out of its leathery entrapment and, with webbed feet, long claws, and outstretched neck, scuttled its way blindly down toward the stock tank—knowing instinctively where water and safety lay, and where, I supposed, it later found the catfish’s bulky head and began feasting on it).
Jack’s father scowled and lodged a protest, but the rest of the partygoers laughed and said no, the fish belonged to my father, and that unless the watch had belonged to Jack’s father before the fish had swallowed it, he was shit out of luck. They laughed and congratulated my father, as if he had won a prize of some sort, or had even made some wise investment.
In subsequent days my father would take the watch apart and clean it piece by piece and then spend the better part of a month, in the hot middle of the day, reassembling it, after drying the individual pieces in the bright September light. He would get the watch working again, and would give it to my mother, who had not been at the party; and for long years, he did not tell her where it came from—this gift from the belly of some beast from far below.
That night, he merely smiled and thanked the men who’d given him the slimy watch, and slipped it into his pocket.
The party went on a long time. I slept for a while in the cab of our truck. When I awoke, Jack’s mother had rejoined the party. She was no less drunk than before, and I watched as she went over to where the fish’s skin was hanging on a dried mesquite branch meant for the fire. The skin was still shiny and damp. She turned her back to the bonfire and lifted that branch with the skin draped over it, and began dancing slowly with the branch, which, we saw now, had outstretched arms like a person, and which, with the fish skin wrapped around it, appeared to be a man wearing a black-silver jacket.
In that same detached and distanced state of drunkenness—drunk with sorrow, I imagined, that the big fish had slipped through her family’s hands, and that their possible fortune had been lost—Jack’s mother remained utterly absorbed in her dance.
Slowly, the fiddles stopped playing, one by one, so that I could hear only the crackling of the fire, and I could see her doing her fish dance, with one arm raised over her head and dust plumes rising from her shuffling feet, and then people were edging in front of me, a wall of people, so that I could see nothing.
I still have that watch today. I don’t use it, but instead keep it locked away in my drawer, as the fish once kept it locked away in its belly, secret, hidden. It’s just a talisman, just an idea, now. But for a little while, once and then again, resurrected, it was a vital thing, functioning in the world, with flecks of memory—not its own, but that of others—attendant to it, attaching to it like barnacles. I take it out and look at it once every few years, and sometimes wonder at the unseen and unknown and undeclared things that are always leaving us, constantly leaving us, little bit by little bit and breath by breath. Of how sometimes—not often—we wake up gasping, wondering at their going away.
Acknowledgments
An incomplete list of people—writers, editors, friends, agents, booksellers, and organizations—who have directly helped with these stories over the last thirty years, and by whose individual and cumulative generosity I am humbled, includes Nicole Angeloro; Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian; Carol Houck Smith; Camille Hykes; Harry Foster; Larry Cooper; James Linville; Leslie Wells; Will Vincent; Will Blythe; Rust Hills; Gordon Lish; Joy Williams; Elizabeth Gaffney; Brooke and Terry Tempest Williams; Jim and Hester Magnuson; Bill Ferris; Ivan Doig; Jerry Scoville; Annie Dillard; Tom McGuane; Jim Harrison; Craig Nova; Howard Frank Mosher; Lynn and Page Stegner; Janisse Ray; Mark Richard; Amy Hempel; John Rybicki; Ron Ellis; Laura Pritchett; Lois Rosenthal; Evelyn Rogers; Bill Kittredge and Annick Smith; Shannon Ravenel; Peter Matthiessen; Larry Brown; Michael Ray; Wallace Stegner; Russell Chatham; Barry Hannah; Richard and Lisa Howorth; George Plimpton; John and Jane Graves; Barry Lopez; Debra Gwartney; Erin Halcomb and Pat Uhtoff; Michael Griffith; Cristina Perachio; Wynne Hungerford; Molly Antopol; Skip Horack; Lorrie Moore; Mary Gordon; Joyce Carol Oates; Daniel Halpern; Robert Penn Warren; Gary Snyder; Doug and Andrea Peacock; Dick and Tracy Stone-Manning; David James Duncan; Carl Hiaasen; Ron Carlson; Pam Houston; Bob Shacochis and Barbara Peterson; Helen Graves and Malcolm Sturchio; Dan O’Brien; Dan Brayton; Bill McKibben; Denis Johnson; Brian and Lyndsay Schott and the Whitefish Review; Eudora Welty; the Lannan Foundation; the Mesa Refuge; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Guggenheim Foundation; the Lyndhurst Foundation; the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters; the Texas Institute of Letters; the Montana Arts Council; Bob Dattila; Timothy Scha
ffner; Scott Slovic; Corby Skinner; Bob Compton; Stellarondo; Caroline Keys; Gibson Hartwell; Bethany Joyce; Jeff Turman; Travis Yost; Nate and Angie Biehl; Amy Martin; Martha Scanlan; Barbara Theroux; Garth Whitson; Ginny Merriam; Ralph and Bruce Thisted; Betty Gouaux; John Evans; Malcolm White; Doug and Lyn Roberts; John and Yves Berger; Dominique and Christian Bourgois; Marc Trivier; David Sedaris; Karl Kilian; Rick Simonson; Pat and Angi Young; Tom and Jan Lyon; Moyle Rice; Nancy Williams; Deborah Purcell; Clyde Edgerton; Pete Fromm; Amanda, Stephanie, Mary, and Molly Woodruff; and Kirby Simmons and family. I’m grateful to Jessie Grossman for her assistance, friendship, and support in the seemingly interminable editing of these stories.
At Little, Brown, I’m grateful to Karen Landry for production editing, to Sean Ford for book design, and to Allison Warner for the lovely jacket art; to Tracy Roe for incredible copyediting and to Leslie Keros and Katie Blatt for proofreading—and to Daniel Jackson for editorial assistance. This book was the idea of my Little, Brown editor, Ben George. Throughout the editing process, he has been opinionated, passionate, stubborn, relentless, always thoughtful and considered, and I am grateful for all of that, and the book is in his debt.
I’m grateful also to my extraordinary agent, David Evans, who, like Ben, has read and reread and helped edit every word, comma, sentence, image—every thought. And I’m grateful to my family, who lived with me during the time I was writing many of these stories—Mary Katherine, Lowry, and Elizabeth, whose intelligence and high critical standards were invaluable; my parents, Charles and Mary Lucy Bass, and brothers, Frank and B.J. Of the writer’s need to submerge to the land of stories, the Mary Oliver phrase comes to mind: “I miss my husband’s company— / he is so often / in paradise.”
Books by Rick Bass
Fiction
For a Little While
All the Land to Hold Us
Nashville Chrome
The Heart of the Monster (with David James Duncan)
The Blue Horse
The Lives of Rocks
The Diezmo
The Hermit’s Story
Where the Sea Used to Be
Fiber
The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness
In the Loyal Mountains
Platte River
The Watch
Nonfiction
In My Home There Is No More Sorrow
The Heart Beneath the Heart
The Black Rhinos of Namibia
The Wild Marsh
Why I Came West
Falling from Grace in Texas (editor, with Paul Christensen)
Caribou Rising
The Roadless Yaak (editor)
Colter
Brown Dog of the Yaak
The New Wolves
The Book of Yaak
The Lost Grizzlies
The Ninemile Wolves
Winter
Oil Notes
Wild to the Heart
The Deer Pasture
About the Author
Rick Bass, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his memoir Why I Came West, was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana’s Yaak Valley for almost thirty years. His short fiction, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, GQ, and The Paris Review, as well as numerous times in The Best American Short Stories, has earned him multiple O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes in addition to NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. He is the writer in residence at Montana State University.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Selected Stories Wild Horses
In Ruth’s Country
Redfish
The Watch
The Legend of Pig-Eye
The History of Rodney
Fires
Field Events
The Hermit’s Story
The Fireman
Swans
Elk
Pagans
The Canoeists
Goats
Her First Elk
Titan
The Lives of Rocks
New Stories How She Remembers It
The Blue Tree
Lease Hound
The River in Winter
Coach
An Alcoholic’s Guide to Peru and Chile
Fish Story
Acknowledgments
Books by Rick Bass
About the Author
Newsletter
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2016 by Rick Bass
Cover design by Allison J. Warner
Cover art by ZU_09 / Getty Images
Author photograph by Jessica Lowry
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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Acknowledgment is made to the following, in which the stories in this collection first appeared, some in slightly different form: “Fish Story” in The Atlantic; “Fires” in Big Sky Journal and The Quarterly; “The Blue Tree” in Ecotone; “Redfish” in Esquire; “The River in Winter” in GQ; “The Canoeists,” “Coach,” “Goats,” “How She Remembers It,” and “Pagans” in the Idaho Review; “The Fireman” in the Kenyon Review; “An Alcoholic’s Guide to Peru and Chile” in the Missouri Review; “Elk” in The New Yorker; “Her First Elk,” “The Hermit’s Story,” “The Legend of Pig-Eye,” and “Wild Horses” in The Paris Review; “The History of Rodney” in Ploughshares; “Field Events” and “The Watch” in The Quarterly; “Titan” in Shenandoah; “Swans” in Story; “Lease Hound” in Narrative; and “The Lives of Rocks” in Zoetrope: All-Story. “In Ruth’s Country,” “Redfish,” “The Watch,” and “Wild Horses” from The Watch by Rick Bass. Copyright © 1989 by Rick Bass. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. “Field Events” from Platte River by Rick Bass. Copyright © 1994 by Rick Bass. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Fires,” “The History of Rodney,” and “The Legend of Pig-Eye” from In the Loyal Mountains by Rick Bass. Copyright © 1995 by Rick Bass. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. “The Fireman,” “The Hermit’s Story,” and “Swans” from The Hermit’s Story by Rick Bass. Copyright © 2002 by Rick Bass. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. “The Canoeists,” “Goats,” “Her First Elk,” “The Lives of Rocks,” “Pagans,” and “Ti
tan” from The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass. Copyright © 2006 by Rick Bass. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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