The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

  In his own bedraggled state, however, Ben saw none of the failures. “That’s what being a cattleman’s about,” he said—he who had never owned a cow in his life. “Ninety-five percent of it is the grunt work, and five percent is buying low and selling high. I like how you boys work at it,” he said, and he never dreamed or knew that in our own half-assedness we were making much more work for ourselves than if we’d done the job right the first time.

  After we got our driver’s licenses we used Ben’s old station wagon—he was no longer able to drive—and after getting him to bed, and hasping the doors shut as if stabling some wild horse, and latching the windows from the outside, we left the darkened farmhouse and headed for the lights of the city, which cast a golden half-dome high into the fog and scudding clouds.

  It was a vast glowing ball of light, seeming close enough that we could have walked or ridden our bikes to reach it: and driving Ben’s big station wagon, with its power steering and gas-sucking engine, was like piloting a rocket ship. There were no shades of gray, out in the country like that: there was only the quiet stillness of night, with crickets chirping, and fireflies, too, back then, and the instrument panels on the dashboard were the only light of fixed reference as we powered through that darkness, hungry for that nearing dome of city light. The gauges and dials before us were nearly as mysterious to us as the instrument panel of a jet airplane, and neither Moxley nor I paid much attention to them. For the most part, he knew only the basics: how to aim the car, steering it crudely like the iron gunboat it was, and how to use the accelerator and the brakes.

  And after but a few miles of such darkness there would suddenly be light, blazes of it hurled at us from all directions—grids and window squares and spears of light, sundials and radials of influorescence and neon; and we were swallowed by it, were born into it, and suddenly we could see before us the hood of the old Detroit iron horse that had carried us into the city and swallowed us, as the city, and Westheimer Avenue, seemed to be swallowing the car, and we were no longer driving so much as being driven.

  All-night gas stations, all-night grocery stores, movie theaters, restaurants, massage parlors, oil-change garages, floral shops, apartment complexes, dentists’ offices, car dealerships—it was all jammed shoulder to shoulder, there was no zoning, and though we had seen it all before in the daytime, and were accustomed to it, it looked entirely different at night: alluring, even beautiful, rather than squalid and chaotic.

  The neon strip fascinated us, as might a carnival, but what ultimately caught our imagination on these night sojourns was not the glamorous, exotic urban core but the strange seams of disintegrating roughness on the perimeters, pockets toward and around which the expanding city spilled and flowed like lava: little passed-by islands of the past, not unlike our own on the western edge. We passed through the blaze of light and strip malls, the loneliness of illuminated commerce, and came out the other side, on the poorer eastern edge, where all the high-voltage power grids were clustered, and the multinational refineries.

  Here the air was dense with the odor of burning plastic, vaporous benzenes and toluenes adhering to the palate with every breath, and the night-fog sky glowed with blue, pink, orange flickers from the flares of waste gas jetting from a thousand smokestacks. The blaze of commerce faded over our shoulders and behind us, and often we found ourselves driving through neighborhoods that seemed to be sinking into the black soil, the muck of peat, as if pressed down by the immense weight of the industrial demands placed upon that spongy soil—gigantic tanks and water towers and chemical vats, strange intestinal folds and coils of tarnished aluminum towering above us, creeping through the remnant forests like nighttime serpents.

  Snowy egrets and night herons passed through the flames, or so it seemed, and floated amid the puffs of pollution as serenely as if in a dream of grace; and on those back roads, totally lost, splashing through puddles axle deep and deeper, and thudding over potholes big enough to hold a bowling ball, Moxley would sometimes turn the lights off and navigate the darkened streets in that manner, passing through pools of rainbow-colored poisonous light and wisps and tatters of toxic fog, as if gliding with the same grace and purpose as the egrets above us. Many of the rotting old homes had ancient live oaks out in front, their yards bare due to the trees’ complete shading of the soil. In the rainy season, the water stood a foot deep in the streets, so that driving up and down them was more like poling the canals of Venice than driving; and the heat from our car’s undercarriage hissed steam as we plowed slowly up and down.

  We were drawn to these rougher, ranker places at night, and yet we wanted to see them in the full light of day also; and when we traveled to these eastern edges during school, while taking a long lunch break or cutting classes entirely, we discovered little hanging-on businesses run out of those disintegrating houses, places where old men and women still made tortillas by hand, or repaired leather boots and work shoes, or did drywall masonry, or made horseshoes by hand, even though there were increasingly few horses and ever more cars and trucks, especially trucks, as urban Texas began the calcification of its myths in full earnestness.

  Places where a patch of corn might exist next to a ten-story office building, places where people still hung their clothes on the line to dry, and little five- and ten-acre groves in which there might still exist a ghost-herd of deer. Ponds in which there might still lurk giant, sullen, doomed catfish, even with the city’s advancing hulk blocking now partially the rising and setting of the sun.

  Through such explorations we found the Goat Man as surely and directly as if he had been standing on the roof of his shed, calling to us with some foxhunter’s horn, leading us straight to the hand-painted rotting plywood sign tilted in the mire outside his hovel.

  BABY CLAVES, $15, read the sign, each letter painted a different color, as if by a child. We parked in his muddy driveway, the low-slung station wagon dragging its belly over the corrugated troughs of countless such turnings-around, wallowing and slithering and splashing up to the front porch of a collapsing clapboard shed-house that seemed to be held up by nothing more than the thick braids and ghost vines of dead ivy.

  Attached to the outside of the hovel was a jerry-built assemblage of corrals and stables, ramshackle slats of mixed-dimension scrap lumber, from behind which came an anguished cacophony of bleats and bawls and whinnies and outright bloodcurdling screams, as we got out of the car and sought to make our way dry-footed from one mud hummock to the next, up toward the sagging porch, to inquire about the baby calves, hoping very much that they were indeed calves, and not some odd bivalve oyster we’d never heard of.

  We peered through dusty windows (some of the panes were cracked, held together with fraying duct tape) and saw that many of the rooms were filled with tilted mounds of newspapers so ancient and yellowing that they had begun to turn into mulch.

  An old man answered the door when we knocked, the man blinking not so much as if having been just awakened but as if instead rousing himself from some other communion or reverie, some lost-world voyage. He appeared to be in his sixties, with a long wild silver beard and equally wild silver hair, in the filaments of which fluttered a few moths, as if he were an old bear that had just been roused from his work of snuffling through a rotting log in search of grubs.

  His teeth were no better than the slats that framed the walls of his ragged corrals, and, barefoot, he was dressed in only a pair of hole-sprung, oil-stained forest green work-pants, on which we recognized the dried-brown flecks of manure splatter, and an equally stained sleeveless ribbed underwear T-shirt that had once been white but was now the color of his skin, and appeared to have been on his body so long as to become like a second kind of skin—one that, if it were ever removed, might peel off with it large patches of his original birth skin.

  The odor coming from the house was quite different from the general barnyard stench of feces, and somehow even more offensive.

  Despite the general air of filth and torpor radiati
ng from the house and its host, however, his carriage and bearing were erect, almost military—as if our presence had electrified him with hungry possibility; as if we were the first customers, or potential customers, he might have encountered in so long a time that he had forgotten his old patterns of defeat.

  When he first spoke, however, to announce his name, the crispness of his posture was undercut somewhat by the shining trickle of tobacco drool that escaped through some of the gaps in his lower teeth, like a slow release of gleaming venom.

  “Sloat,” he said, and at first I thought it was some language of his own making: that he was attempting to fix us, tentatively, with a curse. “Heironymous Sloat,” he said, reaching out a gnarly spittle- and mucus-stained hand. We exchanged looks of daring and double-daring, and finally Moxley offered his own pale and unscarred hand.

  “Come in,” Sloat said, making a sweeping gesture that was both grand and familial—as if, horrific-ally, he recognized in us some kindred spirit—and despite our horror, after another pause, we followed him in.

  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 sudden scuttling escape as we entered. The rug in the center 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 that 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 that 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, I had noticed, 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 little hummock to hummock, sometimes slipping and dipping a foot in one water-filled rut or another. Whitish foam floated on the top of many 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 little 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 now 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 wild tirade: that 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, seemingly 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 hit the calf again quickly, and then a third and fourth time, striking it now like a man trying to hammer a wooden stake into the ground, and that was how the calf sank, shutting its eyes and folding, sinking lower; and still Sloat kept striking it as if he intended to punish it or kill it, or both.

  He did not stop until the calf was unconscious, or perhaps dead, and lying on its side. Then he laid his bat down almost tenderly—as if it were some valuable instrument to be accorded great respect.

  The Goat Girl watched as if she had seen it all before. Sloat paused to catch his breath and then called to us to help him heft the calf quickly, before it came back to consciousness, though we could not imagine such a thing, and I was thinking at first 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, and she 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, and 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.