by Rick Bass
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.
Penetrations
My older brother, Sam, was a ladies man. When I was seventeen, he was twenty-two, and during my junior year of high school, to my great initial horror, he began dating my biology teacher, Miss Heathcote, and then, worse yet, fell in love with her, and, worst of all, she fell in love with him. I asked Sam to try to keep it a secret from her that I was his brother, because I was worried that it might make trouble for me in class.
My brother was not right—and though he is better today, has been treated and has also straightened up some, I still fear that a rough road lies ahead of him. But back then he was only beginning to go wrong, to unravel—to feel ungoverned by any laws or constraints.
Sam lived at home, with my parents and me. He had been a fireman for a while but had been let go from the force for “general irresponsibility”; the fire department had believed that he had almost a fetish for danger, for daring.
Sam had wanted to be a policeman after that, but he had a couple of shoplifting convictions, and that was out of the question. I think he would very much have enjoyed being a policeman.
I do not mean to make him sound like such a renegade. He was a good brother, and even today we’re still close. He has been married and divorced once. He’s never gotten into any kind of legal trouble, since he was eighteen. Both times, back then, he tried to walk out of a store with a coat—mink, the first time, and lynx, the next—for his girlfriends, on a dare. The same security guard who had caught him the first time was on duty the second time—Sam wearing the coat as if it were a Windbreaker, and as if it were his, walking then sprinting for the doorway in his jeans and tennis shoes.
I remember my parents being distressed that Sam was drifting off on a wrong course—they were not so wild about him living at home either, though as I heard my father say once, “Better here, at least, where we can keep an eye on him”—but back then I did not recognize so well that it was a wrong course, and I simply enjoyed being around the danger of Sam, or, rather, the way Sam was drawn to danger, and to heat.
What Sam did when he was twenty-two, besides courting women (and women loved him), was to chase ambulances and fire trucks, after the fire department let him go. Sam had a police scanner radio in his room, and another mounted beneath the dash in his truck, and fire extinguishers in the back of the truck. I don’t mean three or four fire extinguishers, but a whole truckload. He had purchased them, he said, from the fire department at “a substantial discount,” and he used them at will.
Sam wore a fire chief’s helmet, which he would don whenever any of the calls went out. He had a city map in the glove box, which he studied all the time. He would listen to the scanners and try to get to the scenes of disaster before anyone else—before the authorities—and sometimes he was successful.
Occasionally, I went with him. Sam and I had certain rules, when we went out on fire calls, and we had, on the times that we could not get there in time to be the heroes, invented a game that we called Penetrations. The object was to see how close to the center of the disaster you could get, or “penetrate”—to go from the outside, and the ring of spectators, into the center, so that you were part of whatever was happening—so that you were as close to it as you could be, so that you could reach out and touch it, if you wanted.
If a home was burning, we would try to get inside it—we would pretend it was our house, and that we’d left something valuable inside. When the firemen grabbed us, we’d put on an act, pitch a fit, and struggle to break free; so close to the inferno that we could feel the wind from the fire, so close that the heat blistered our bare faces. Sometimes we got close enough to actually touch the front door. We never made it inside a burning building, but we tried; for whatever crazy reason, Sam tried, and I followed him: I tried, too. We never got in, though; there was always someone to restrain us and keep us from going any farther. I don’t know how far we really would have gone. We never really found out.
Miss Heathcote was thirty-two or thirty-three, and beautiful. She was the only attractive teacher in the school, and as such was always an outcast, away from the other teachers. The women were distant or catty to her—even then we could see that, and knew it for what it was—and the men were worse: they were fawning, slobbering pigs, coming around her all the time like animals checking out a trough. There was the delicious and wild rumor that Miss Heathcote had been a Playmate in her younger days, in that magazine, and there was not a student among us who did not believe it, or who had not researched the rumor, though no such issue was ever produced—but we knew it was out there, in the past, we could picture it as clear as day, until in our minds we believed that maybe we had seen it but had just misplaced it...
Sam and I managed to keep the fact that we were brothers a secret for about three weeks before Miss Heathcote found out. She came over to the house one afternoon and I simply forgot to hide—it suddenly seemed natural to me, to be sitting there out in the open—and though she was a little annoyed with Sam about having kept it a secret, she didn’t take it out on me. In fact, she was gentle and kind with me. Some mornings the three of us would have coffee and doughnuts together, before driving to school—and so that made me feel bad about what I told my classmates.
“On weekends, when my parents are out, she comes over and swings from the chandeliers naked,” I told them. “She pulled one out of the ceiling once.”
Such tales were easily believable in the heat of our adolescence, and I made up worse ones than that. I simply couldn’t help it. We would sit there in class and watch her calm beauty—the startling depth of her eyes, and the deep, relaxed peace she cast over us—as she murmered the complexities of biology, telling them to us like a fairy tale rather than a hard science, and these things seemed only to enhance the stories I made up about her.
Her placidness, her great gentleness, seemed certain to suggest a raging, lusty inferno lying just below the surface, a surface as thin as ice. She’d been at the school for ten years, the only school she’d ever taught at (Sam had gone to a private boys’ school, sort of a disciplinarian retreat, when he was my age).
The students, always hungry, believed the stories I made up about Miss Heathcote and Sam as they had never believed anything before.
My parents were not much older than Miss Heathcote—they were in their midforties—and were a little uncomfortable, at first, not knowing whether to treat her as a friend or as a friend of Sam’s; but I’d heard them talking about her and Sam, when Sam and Miss Heathcote were out.
“She’s a calm glass of water,” my mother kept saying, “exactly what he needs,” to which my father always replied, illogically, it seemed to me, “She’s a beauty, all right
”—and by Thanksgiving it felt as if Miss Heathcote were a part of our family. We were all comfortable with her—Sam, too, I think—in a way that we had never been comfortable with his other girlfriends.
Sometimes, after a fire or an accident, Sam and I would drive by Miss Heathcote’s house. We’d circle the block again and again. She lived in the same house she had bought when she first moved to town, ten years ago. So beautiful, and never married! We’d cruise past that small house as if she were a teenager. Whenever any of my brother’s old girlfriends called, he had instructed me, if I answered the phone I would tell them he wasn’t home—tell them he’d moved away, tell them he’d died, tell them anything.
Frequently, he and Miss Heathcote went on picnics. I rarely went on any of them, but on Friday nights I would watch him packing their lunches into the wicker basket, getting everything ready, and I could imagine what the picnics were like. Sam owned a canoe, with only one paddle, and he took her out in the early days of spring. I would picture Miss Heathcote lying back in the canoe, watching Sam paddle. I think I was in love with Miss Heathcote, too, a little, and I was afraid Sam was going to botch it.
Still, I could not help but continue to tell stories about her. Horrible, awful stories that stir me to shame, even now. “She dances in the street, naked, at night,” I said. “The neighbors turn on their lights and look out their windows and watch. She’s a good dancer,” I added.
I knew that some of these stories were getting back to Miss Heathcote—I knew that they had to be—and she would look at me, sometimes, over at our house, a look passing between her and me, a look not in any way for Sam, a look that told me she knew, and that she did not like it at all; but she was so in love with Sam—forever holding his hand, forever running her hand through his hair as if trying to calm him, the way a man or woman might try to gentle a nervous horse in a burning barn, with the smell of smoke just beginning to drift in—that she never said anything to me, not wanting to stir the waters, not wanting to rock the boat. I think she thought that if she was nice enough to me, and gentle enough, that she could calm me, too, and that I would grow weary of creating the rumors, and I think, too, that she simply had too much pride to admit that she knew, or that it bothered her; and gradually, as the year went on, I did slow down on the stories, though I could still be counted on by my classmates, when pressured, to come up with a good one.
Something I had seen, which I did not tell the class, haunted me then, and still does. One time, back before he was fired, when Sam had to go to the fire station, she begged him not to; she wrapped her arms around his leg and wouldn’t let him go. They weren’t fighting—not yet she just didn’t want him to go. Sam didn’t know what to do. He loved his job and he had to get to the fire station. I had never seen such a thing: a woman trying physically to restrain a man from doing something. It seemed to me that Miss Heathcote’s cool blue eyes, that her authority, would have been enough, but it wasn’t. Sam left her and went out the door. I did not tell that story in school.
She was so much like family, that spring. I could not be around her enough; I wanted to spend all of my time in her company. Late nights, when she and Sam were in the den, watching the blue light of the TV, with both of my parents asleep upstairs, I would sometimes crawl on my belly down the hallway to get closer to Sam and Miss Heathcote, and to listen to them.
“This is what I do,” I heard Miss Heathcote saying one time. “It’s all I’ve learned to do, it’s all I know. It’s too late to change.” She was lying in Sam’s arms, and neither of them was watching the television. Their faces were blue, their arms.
“You can change!” Sam said softly. “Come with me to... oh... Africa!”
I was startled, and did not want Sam to leave, to go to Africa, or anywhere.
Miss Heathcote said nothing, but her shoulders began to heave and I could see her shaking her head, and I could see big tears rolling down her cheeks as she continued to shake her head.
Later in the spring, they would have fights. I wanted to patch things, to mend them, to tell Miss Heathcote to hold herself together, that Sam was difficult, but worth it, that he was wonderful, that he saved people—but I could say none of these things, because I had been telling lies about her, and she would have no reason to believe me.
Back before he had even become a fireman, Sam and I put out a house fire once, a kitchen blaze—the cabinets above the stove flaming, and the rug on fire, the woman and her two daughters out on the front lawn—and another time we put out a car that was on fire. There wasn’t anyone in it, though at the time we thought there might be, and we worked furiously, spraying the extinguishers, one after the other, all over the car’s melting body. The tires were exploding, one by one, and the paint and rubber were smoking, filling the night with a horrible stench, and the car was long-ago ruined, but we managed to get the fire put out before the gas tank blew.
Other times, however—most times—we would get there late. The ambulance would have arrived, and a sheet would already be drawn over the victim, or the building would already be in high flames, second-story flames, with sirens, and hook-and-ladder trucks, flashing lights, fire hoses, and loud speakers, bullhorns; and what we did then, which was second-rate, and nowhere nearly as good as the other, but the only thing we could manage, was to wander around aimlessly on the lawn of the disaster, clasping our hands over our heads and saying things like, “Oh, God” or “I’m wounded”—staggering around until one of the emergency technicians, not knowing us from the real victims, herded us over to the ambulance and sat us down, checked our pulse, checked our throats, our eyes, with flashlights, checked us for cuts, for burns, for bruises.
The questions were always the same—“Where does it hurt?” (“Aww, ohh, I don’t know: here, I think”)—and we’d lie around like that, getting attention, if no one else was seriously injured, and then, when the atmosphere started to change, when the chaos subsided and the fire was about to be controlled, or when the ambulance was about to pull away, we would leap up and run off into the night, and hide.
Our hearts would beat like rabbits’. The rest of our life was normal, and our parents never knew we did these things. I felt lucky to have such a brother.
“Are you okay, Jackie?” he’d ask me.
“Hell, yes,” I’d say, still breathing hard.
“Good,” he’d say, and I’d know he was proud of me, that we were partners. “Good.”
We’d watch the flames coming out of the windows, watch the roof begin to crash and fall in, then, which is always how it happened: the roof going first. We felt noble; we felt as if we’d tried to save the burning house but had been unable to.
“We tried,” I’d say.
“Fucking A,” he’d agree, as if we’d been serious in our attempt. “We almost got there.”
They were little fights between Sam and Miss Heathcote at first, but they grew. I didn’t know what to do—I felt as if there were some act I could do, some gesture, that would bridge that gap, bridge their troubles; and the fights never grew from anything specific, never “I don’t want to go there this evening” or “You told me that you were going to get a job,” but rather just from vague fears, I think. They acted, both of them, all that spring, like skittish horses, nervous animals, each afraid to get any closer to the other—enjoying the other’s company, devouring it, even, but hypnotized, it seemed, by the other: frightened.
I would answer the door when she came over to our house and knocked, and as I led her into the house I could actually feel her dread and her nervousness about the way things were going. Sam would be in his bedroom, working on electronic things, working on the police scanner, perhaps, or just listening to it, waiting for a disaster—because they were sure to happen; even in the slowest of weeks, it was simply a matter of listening, of lying there on the bed and waiting for one to happen—and the feeling I got when I led Miss Heathcote into the house was the feeling I might have gotten leading one of those same frightened horses into a burning
stall—the smell of smoke—rather than out of it. Sometimes Miss Heathcote seemed near tears.
“I like her,” I told Sam. “I sure do like her. Did she tell you I said mean things about her?”
“No,” said Sam, looking up at the ceiling—looking up at nothing: there was nothing at all on the ceiling.
“She doesn’t want me going out on fire calls,” he said. He spoke to me as if I were an adult. “She doesn’t like any of those things. She says she just wants to hold on to me and know those things are in me, just below the surface, but she doesn’t want to see them.” Sam lay there on his bed and looked up at the ceiling.
Even though they fought he would always try to calm her down, as she had once calmed him, running his hand down the back of her hair, rubbing her neck and shoulders, whispering things to her, reassuring things, as if trying to hypnotize her; but she always seemed to become even angrier than before, and it was an upsetting thing for me to see.
There was a gap between them—a small gap, but a significant one (even I could see that)—and later that spring, in May, with the school year nearing its end, and the possible loss of her to Sam also drawing nearer, I started playing Penetrations in class.
While Miss Heathcote had her back turned to us, writing on the blackboard—or sometimes even when she was facing us, head down, reading something, while we worked on an assignment—I would rise silently from my lab table and would begin walking to the front of the room—walking silently, slowly.
