The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  Fred was delighted by the horrible story.

  “The brown ways of the world!” he cried. “They must be avoided!”

  “Right,” I said. I was thinking avoid meant to hole up and make a stand... to live a life, the way Mother and Father had. To maintain; to preserve what you believed in. But something bothered me, far inside, and it occurred to me a little later on that to avoid in some species meant to flee.

  But above the surface, it was all wonderful: it was the most halcyon summer I ever spent. We walked the river in the daytime, talking and watching and listening and holding hands, sitting in the dust, in the cool shade beneath the big oaks, and just listening to the mourning doves. We polished Chubb’s Cadillac (ferns and vines growing down into its open carriage), and I lifted the lid to the urn and looked in at the cool blue ashes. I remembered how great and hot the fire had been the day we burned him.

  We swam at night like otters, silvery in the moonlight. I have never fit a man so well, nor has a man fit a river so well, nor has water rolled more cleanly, more smoothly, off the bodies of animals, off the curved backs, the round breasts, the oval calves, our round mouths... It was all circles, all lunar. I never wanted to come out of the river.

  The moon shining on my hair, in my eyes, as I swam. The moon on his shoulders. He looked like a giant, swimming at night like that. Lifting his big arms against the sky. Scooping a handful of stars down with each stroke. Swimming past my mother’s grave. Feeling her turn in the rock and watch us go past.

  Do I obsess—am I obsessed—with the past of my mother’s life? Fred once said it seemed that way to him. But his mother was still living—a thing he loved deeply was still living—he had had enough of her (and, truth be told, then some), while I had not had enough.

  I did not get enough. She is still here in the present, but in such thin amounts now, and I am so hungry.

  ***

  The fire that was in Fred: even when we were resting, sometimes sore and chafed, from love—even just lying there, I could feel that he was on fire. He never grew tired. Grandfather was growing more tired each day, and even Father was spending less time out on the land, and was talking about retiring—and sometimes I had the perverse, troubling notion that I had brought a cowbird onto the ranch, that Fred was summoning their old energies away from them.

  This was not clear-headed thinking.

  I simply did not want to admit the truth of their aging. I was selfish and greedy and I wanted more. I was twenty-two, but wanted to be seven or eight again. If they were horses, I was riding them to the ground with my demands for their love: all of them, Fred included.

  I sat with Grandfather and Father and Omar and listened to the ball games: another dead-level .500 season for the Astros.

  Larry Dierker. The Red Rooster. Turk Farrell. Jimmy “the Toy Cannon” Wynn. I learned all the names, that late summer, as if they were genus and species, and learned their habits, too: why Lee May couldn’t bunt, and when Joe Morgan was likely to steal home.

  I believe that Grandfather loved me more because of it. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing to say, but I believe it. I knew that I was losing him, and yet we all had the courage to draw closer, to weave tighter, even all the way into the end.

  Fred worked in the study, under the glow of yellow light, like an angel—we could see him in there, through the glass doors—while the rest of us sat or lay on the patio under the sky and the stars. Sometimes Grandfather would reach down, searching for my hand, find it, and squeeze it. The last bloodline of my mother, I would think, holding his hand—my last, strongest blood-connection to her—and perhaps he was thinking the same, at those times.

  Father and Omar intent upon the game. Grandfather and I intent upon eternity.

  ***

  We’d go out, Fred and I, with lights and netting to try to catch Myotis bats, to band them, to study their territorial dynamics and the size of their home ranges in the summer. We’d hang lanterns from the trees every twenty meters along various contours, and count the Catocala moths that swarmed each lantern. Omar and I knew them from childhood as “tobacco sphinx” moths, with large round “eyes” on the backs of their wings, which I’d learned were used to startle pursuing birds. A warbler would swoop down just about to grab the resting moth, and the moth would leap into flight: and in that leap, the hidden “eyes” would flash, huge and menacing, and would give the warbler just a split second’s pause, and it was that fraction of a moment, that time of suspension, of hover, that sometimes allowed the moth to escape, and to continue living its brief life...

  But the moths’ false wing-eyes didn’t help them at night, against Myotis. That world—the dark night’s goings-on between Myotis and Catocala—was as close and deep a look into the stars—beyond the stars—as I have ever gotten. It made the predator-prey relationships of mountain lions and deer, or of men chasing women, or of humans chasing some understanding of the afterlife, look simple by comparison.

  Everything that is pursued will develop some response appropriate to the pursuit: some shift away from the thing that is chasing it.

  But what went on between the bats and the moths while we slept, and what had been going on for millions of years, was as beautiful as the stars themselves.

  Like a high-stakes, high-speed game of evolutionary table tennis, the bats have been chasing the moths through the night by echo-locating. The bats emit high-frequency chirps that strike objects and bounce back to the bats’ big radar-screen ears. The radar “paints” a picture in the bat’s brain instantly: tells it what’s out there, what’s not, and what the shapes of things are.

  Of course those moths that could sense or feel or even hear those invisible, almost inaudible messages—they prospered. They were able to escape, and lived another day to breed, and to pass on those same valuable radar-sensitive genes. Catocala and other moths developed over the eons tiny membranous cups along the thorax: receivers tuned specifically to the oncoming bats’ radar.

  The bats, of course, were not through. Those with slightly different frequencies—higher still, perhaps—were rewarded, evolutionarily speaking; they caught more moths, and prospered. They survived to breed, to pass on those kilohertz genes at a rate exceeding that of their kilohertz relatives.

  The moths developed more tympanic membranes, and feather)’, pinnated “feelers”—veritable flying gunboats of radar-detection. Quivering with sensitivity, with knowledge, picking up every sound, every bit of data, in the world. Of course they can only come out at night.

  Some bats, in this game of tag through eternity, cranked it up to over 200 kilohertz; and some of them crapped out, due to the higher caloric demands of maintaining such fire, such intensity.

  Other bats, through the eons, worked it down to the lower end of the scale, dropping their signals to around 10 kilohertz. (The average human is conscious of signals up to about 9.8 kilohertz.)

  Across the millennia, the moths continued to fly.

  Everywhere they went, there were bats waiting for them, looking for them. When the moths first began to flutter their wings, warming up for flight (it’s strange to think of moths as having blood), the bats’ radar would pick it up, and would be on them in an instant, even before the moth could take flight. Every rustle in the leaves was heard and evaluated by moth and bat alike.

  Such were the invisible threads through which Omar and I wandered so blithely as children, our childish laughter echoing amid the bats’ invisible calls.

  Fred said that he believed moths might move to the daytime, in the next world, the next eon, to escape the bats: but that of course, the bats would follow. Fred worried for the moths (and therefore for the bats) because of how noisy the world was, in all but the quietest places, such as the sandy banks of the Nueces. He had all kinds of recorders and monitors that showed what everyone already knew: that the world was already brimming with noise, excess noise—invisible transmissions, a sizzling roar of it, and he marveled at how the moths and the bats c
ould keep going. Even the sound of a far-off truck going down the highway late at night—one small road cut through the wilderness of scrub, and history—could be heard by both bats and moths, and required a moment’s extra energy to pause and evaluate those distant vibrations...

  There were some bats out there that didn’t even need to pick up the moth’s movement, in order to find it; these bats could fly right above the tops of leaves, sending out their steady whisper of radar, and could glean in that manner even the frightened, huddled image of a moth clinging motionless to a leaf, hoping the whispering bat will pass it by.

  No.

  Even up until the final moment of life, bat and moth are linked together forever, through time, and beyond. As a last-gasp evasive maneuver, a fleeing moth will sometimes stop its wingbeats in midflight, thereby ceasing to give off data to the bat’s radar. But sometimes the bat will pause, too, so that the moth can’t pick up any radar signals—the bat seeming to have disappeared—and for just the briefest of moments they will both hang there, suspended in eternity.

  ***

  Nights in the river, washing off the sweat from the night’s labors. The molecules of our sweat being tasted by everything in the river. Our sweat-water lodging in the flesh of the freshwater mussel, being cracked open and eaten by the same raccoon that three nights later would watch Fred and 1 out in the shallows, double-backed, thrashing like alligators; Fred above me, holding me under the river for a moment (the moon blurry, and Fred again blocking the stars and part of the mountains), or me above Fred, holding him underwater in the shallows, there at the last of it: and pausing, then, both of us pausing, right at the last, for one second, two seconds, for as long as we could.

  Three seconds, even four. The river rushing past.

  It is a gradual kind of strengthening. It takes a long time to see how the losses build you up, rather than strip you down and wear you away. In early September, Fred did not go back to school with me. He had made plans to go on to Belize, to study bats, and to study insects. Bugs. He asked if I’d go, but I was angry that he’d withheld his plans so long before asking—as if unsure I’d pass some test he was conducting. I was angry, and again, for a moment—for long moments—felt as if my growing strength, my growing self, was rocked, knocked off balance, compromised. Weakened; generalized, rather than made specific.

  I felt tricked by his erratic swerve in flight: all this talk of Belize, a week before we were set to go back to school.

  It made me think he was hoping I’d say no, was why he’d waited so long; as if he thought he could move faster without me.

  It made me think he loved the bugs more than he did me and my family.

  “Thirty million unnamed species,” he said. “Fifty-two species of bats! It’ll be great! Beaches, bananas, mangoes, guavas...”

  Grandfather just sitting there on the porch in his rocking chair, watching. The sound of his heavy breathing. Watching.

  ***

  There was one more, after that—one more man of significance, I mean, after Fred—though in the end that man melted before my river-memories of Fred. I’d gotten my doctorate degree, and was going to take a job teaching. The schooling hadn’t been easy: so much hoop-jumping bullshit in the world of science, and no more sacred awe. That came only on the weekends, when I could get back to the ranch. (A four-hour drive from College Station, each way.)

  Grandfather was ninety-six. Omar was graduating from Brown, and would be coming back to law school at UT. It was a long trip now for Grandfather to walk, even from the back porch to Chubb’s old vined-over stone house, and though Grandfather could still continue past there and on a good day make it all the way down to the river and the gazebo, he couldn’t make it back up the steps. A wheelchair wouldn’t work over all the rocks and sticks, so we hauled him around in the wheelbarrow when there was something we wanted him to see or somewhere he wanted to go. But mostly he just sat on the back porch and watched the hummingbirds come to the feeders, amazed by their energy.

  Father had bought a milk cow and five baby feeder calves, and had taken to raising a few for market each year, mostly for something to do. Cattle on the Prade Ranch! I had to laugh. Grandfather couldn’t stand them, bent down and got pebbles and threw them at the calves, said they would wander through the brush and step on the quail eggs and knock the vireo nestlings from their nests and erode the mountains into the river so that it would all be washed out to the sea, all, and in our lifetime, but Father just chuckled and fed the cows more corn out of his hand and said that they never left the yard...

  In four more years, after Grandfather died, Father would move to Fredericksburg and start a garden: not yet tired of living, but tired, I knew, of wondering what he had missed.

  The only other man I was ever to bring out to Prade Ranch was an ex-professor of mine named Stan. He was such a non-item that Grandfather laughed when he saw him. Stan was studying immature bald eagles, and seemed not to worship or be struck dumb by the flying chips of color, the bright songbirds, that came near Grandfather every time he spoke.

  “A professor, eh?” Grandfather said, his old eyes laughing—laughing at Stan, and at my embarrassment, for he knew somehow that I wouldn’t be with Stan very long. It was during my brief seemingly sophisticated phase: with all the academia in my head, it seemed I should do something with it. Go to cocktail parties. Spend time with boring and overserious people, instead of being in the church of the wild.

  I thought of Fred. He’d married some Brazilian bombshell and was living in the foothills of the Andes. He had three children, all girls.

  “Yes,” Stan said, “a professor.” He nodded his head slightly, believing, I think, that the old man was honored that a real professor was on the property—that’s probably a first, I could see Stan thinking—and Grandfather guffawed until his eyes watered, and I had to nudge him with my foot and give him a fierce look, which made him laugh harder and made him pound the end of his cane against the back porch tiles.

  “The natural history of Texas is being sacrificed upon the altar of generalization!” Grandfather cried, as Stan and I were heading down to the river—black-capped vireos rushed in to the sound of Grandfather’s voice—and Stan turned and looked back at Grandfather oddly for a moment, wondering, I’m sure, where the hell that had come from. I heard Grandfather add, under his breath, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” though Stan did not smoke a pipe, and I do not think he heard him...

  ***

  We took a canoe down the river, to watch the eagles. Stan couldn’t swim. He had a little black box with him that used GPS, the Global Positioning System, to show him, via satellite imagery, exactly where he was on the map at any given time, right down to the last twenty-foot USGS contour. We canoed past Chubb’s viney, sodden Cadillac, with all the old sun-bleached plastic flowers in the seat, and he looked at that oddly too, but had no questions: looked back up at the sky, scanning for eagles, which he kept calling the i.s.’s, for indicator species.

  I’d heard it all before, a million times before in school, but it seemed a little wearisome, and a little sacrilegious, to be hearing it out in the woods, on the river itself. I was in the stern, paddling, playing the game I’d played as a child, trying to follow the old wagon ruts underwater. There was a stiff cross-breeze, and I kept having to alter my strokes to stay on track.

  The ruts drifted beneath us. A large soft-shelled turtle swam below the canoe. The threatened Midland species, genus Trionyx, I thought, though I couldn’t remember the species or subspecies, and didn’t really care. I could look it up in the book later, I thought.

  It was a fine spring day, mild and breezy. The warblers and hummers had been back for three weeks. Wildflowers would be blossoming in the hills any day. Baseball season was starting. I thought of how timeless the river was.

  Up in the bow, Stan was tuning his little black box, and folding and refolding his topo map to see exactly where he was. He was blathering about gap analysis and DEMs, and I started to laugh. />
  We were coming up on Mother’s spot, and suddenly I didn’t want to go any farther. I put the paddle in the water and braced, still laughing, and backstroked. I ferried us over to the shore, just before we would have rounded the bend.

  “What?” Stan asked. “What’s so funny? Where are we going?” he asked; the wind carrying the tinkling of his words down the river.

  ***

  That night at supper we had a big venison ham that Father had been mesquite-smoking and marinating down at the gazebo all day. It was a deer he’d shot last year, a huge buck he’d rattled right into within ten yards: an old deer, well past his prime. Father was more proud of that big old deer than any other he’d ever hunted.

  I’d forgotten to tell them Stan was a vegetarian.

  “You eat this meat,” I whispered to him. “I want you to say a prayer at the table thanking the land and my father for this meat and then I want you to eat it or I am going to shove it down your throat. You eat this meat,” I hissed. “It’s good for you.”

  He ate it, eyes watering. It nearly made him sick, but he ate it, and said it was good. Said the blessing, too.

  That evening, before the baseball game, Grandfather went back in his room. He was gone a good while, and I thought he’d gone back there to take a nap, but when I went in to check on him he was bent over, rustling around in his cedar chest.

  He straightened up when I came in, and handed me a sheaf of old papers.

  “To show your professor,” he said. He handed the old parchment (wrapped in ancient cardboard with a strip of leather fastening it) and shrugged, as if it were just old paper. “And for you to look at, if you want. I was saving them for your mother. Watching that professor gag down that hindquarter reminded me of them.” He shrugged again. “They’re old letters from this fellow Chubb and I used to know,” he sang, almost in a whisper, and I imagined that the birds, if they could hear him, rustled in their sleep, on their roosts: his words entering their dreams, calling to them. “Fella’s name was Homer Young. He saw things we never got to see.”