The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

  The object, in my mind, was to get as close in as I could before she noticed me. If she looked up, I would stop where I was. She would look at me, puzzled, but also abstracted—and I knew no one had ever behaved in such a fashion, that there were no guidelines in the teachers’ handbook on how to deal with this oddity—and, strangely, she never said anything, only fixed me with her beautiful ice blue eyes and a strange, stern, almost steely look, watching me as if about to say something, but never saying it.

  The class was as puzzled by her silence as I was. I pictured what it would be like if all of us played the Penetrations game—ten or twelve of us moving in on Miss Heathcote while her head was down, or her back turned, so that when she turned around there would be a whole herd of us, a dozen perhaps, frozen in midstep, all gathered around behind her—but it was something I was compelled to do, and something only I did, and perhaps that was why she let me do it: because she could see that I simply had to—or perhaps because she liked my doing it.

  I never said anything when she looked up and stopped me in midstep—stopped me from getting any closer. I could never think of anything to say.

  She would just open her mouth as if about to speak—but she never did.

  I would walk up to within five or six feet of her, trying to see how close I could get before the lights of fear flickered in her eyes. Then I would stand there, quietly, trying to show her that it was all right, that there was nothing to be frightened of, but it never worked—she never lost that frightened look, once I had gotten too close—and finally I would go sit back down.

  They were seeing each other more frequently than ever—Sam having lost his job by that time, and having extra time on his hands—and they went on more picnics, watched more movies, but fought more, too. It was all the same as it had been, only there was more of it. One Saturday they had the worst fight yet—Miss Heathcote crying and wrapping herself around Sam’s waist again, sliding down to his legs, but then getting angry and getting up and throwing an ashtray and storming out of the house after that, slamming the door.

  That Sunday, for the first time I could remember, she did not come over, and neither did Sam go over there. We stayed home, sat in his truck, and listened to a baseball game on the radio, and to the police scanner—and I thought it was over.

  Then that Monday, during biology class, Sam showed up at the window outside our room on the third floor. Sam was wearing his fireman’s hat, and he had on his heavy rubber fireman’s coat, and a hank of rope coiled over his shoulder; he was standing at the top of a ladder, tapping on the window, pointing to her. The class howled; they cheered. The windows were locked, but I got up and ran over and unlocked them; I was afraid Sam would fall.

  When I opened the windows for Sam, Miss Heathcote looked at me as if she had always known it would be me who would betray her—that I would be the one—and she had that look, by the late spring, had it so well—I did not blame her—and Sam crawled gratefully through the window. He was wearing his boots, his rubber pants, his whole fireman’s outfit. Miss Heathcote ran from him then, ran out of the classroom sobbing, and my brother followed, running in those high boots, calling her name. Several of the people in the class stood up to watch, and I felt myself swooning with excitement. He was my brother; he had chased our teacher from the room.

  What happened after that, Sam would not tell and never has told me. He has been an alcoholic, and has recovered, lapsed, then recovered again; and he has had treatments for depression, and has gotten better. He’s told me about all of those things and more; but he said the other things about what happened with Miss Heathcote were personal. He’s held that tight to his breast, close to his coat, and told no one. It withers, it dies; the reasons for their fights, their breakup, almost do not even exist anymore.

  These lives slide by, our lives! Sam is forty-three—my brother, forty-three. And Miss Heathcote—God, Miss Heathcote is well past half a century!

  I remember Miss Heathcote smiling as she came up the walk to go canoeing with my brother, and she really loved him, even if only briefly. And I think he made her feel things, for the first time in a while, I think—though, again, perhaps only briefly—and I hate to say this about my own brother, but I think she got off lucky.

  I love Sam, but I think he would have made her really unhappy later in life. I think it—him and her together—would not have been a good idea: though who can say, for sure?

  I remember going out with Sam on the fire calls, but even more I remember my own game of Penetrations that I played by myself, in class—rising and standing, and then beginning to move closer to her, slowly, carefully, trying to get close enough to touch her, to put my hand on her hand, perhaps, or even up against her face—and I remember how she would look up from across the room when she saw what I was up to, and how she would just stare at me, saying nothing but just watching me, the way a hunter might watch an animal at dusk, in the snow; or perhaps the way an animal might watch the hunter, who is moving so clumsily toward it, coming through the woods, right at dusk, with the animal wondering, Do I let him come closer? How much closer do I let him come?—while all the time her heart is beating, fluttering, and she knows, without knowing why, that even though it is dusk, and almost safe, that she has to run, must run, or suddenly all will come crashing down around her.

  Titan

  The summer that I witnessed, breathed, lived the jubilee, I was twelve years old. My brother, Otto, who is four years older, was already on what he was the “fast track” to success, which he defined, and still does, as becoming rich. He is an investment banker, and I suppose it is fair to say that he has never known a moment’s hardship. Even he refers to himself as blessed. I myself was never quite as comfortable in the presence of excessive bounty as he was.

  Our parents were born in the heart of the Depression, grew up under its shadow, cowed and spooked I think by the fear and memory of it. Otto reacted by turning away from the cautious austerity of our parents, away from such fiscal and, some would say, emotional timidity, and struck out as soon as possible in the opposite direction, swimming hard and strong and eager for the profligate.

  Our parents had worked hard establishing their own business as geologists—but it must have rankled Otto, as soon as he was old enough to notice such things: the way our parents held on to, and conserved, and reinvested their savings, setting aside safe and prudent amounts of it, as if against the coming storms of the world—storms that never came.

  There was wealth almost everywhere in Texas in those days, and the fact that I have not participated in it since then, or rather, have chosen other kinds of wealth, does not mean that the monied type was unavailable to me. I simply was pulled in another direction. Even then, I had my own hungers, and still do.

  They say that traits in a family, or even in a nation, are prone to sometimes skip generations, rising and falling in crests and troughs like waves far out beyond the Gulf. And although Otto was only four years older, I often felt as if I were an only child, that he was from the generation before me, and that my parents were from the generation before that generation, so that I was able to witness, and live between, the two ways of being in the world. And I do not mean to judge Otto—but whenever my parents would attempt to have a cautionary discussion with him about his hungry, consumptive ways, he would brush them off.

  There was nothing that he did not see as a commodity, able to be bought or sold or traded, and leveraged or even stolen from the future. He was then and still is simply a taker, and it is the only way he is comfortable in the world: and though one day I suppose the world will run out of things to take and to trade—or rather, will run out of worth-while things to take and trade—that is not quite yet the case, and I’d have to say that all in all he’s continuing to live a fairly comfortable and satisfied life, and that he’s more or less content, even in the continued savagery of his hunger. I think that he has found his own balance.

  Though it did not occur to me when I was twelve, I came to rea
lize later that our elderly parents—they would have been in their midfifties then—might have been a little awed by Otto, by the unquestioning force of his desire, the crisp efficiency of his gluttony, and by the power of his steadfast commitment, almost as if to a religious philosophy, to seek out anything rare and valuable, and purchase it, and count it, and market it: to acquire and consume.

  Listening to him talk about such things—stocks and bonds, gold and silver, treasury notes and soybeans, cattle and poultry, coal and oil—was like watching a great predator gaze unblinkingly, its jaws parted, at a herd of unknowing grazing creatures. My parents weren’t frightened of their oldest son, but they were awed. And who were they, besides his elders, to speak to him, to tell him that he was wrong, when they themselves had known a similar hunger but had simply grown up in a time when it seemed there was nothing available to acquire, and no means for the acquisition?

  My own hunger was for a closeness, and a connection—a reduction in the vast and irreducible space I perceived to exist between all people, even within a family. It would have been fine with me if every morning the four of us had taken our breakfast together, and if the four of us had then gone out into the day to labor in the bright fields together, in some wholesome and ancient way, plowing and tilling, or harvesting and gathering, and to eat all our meals together then, and to end the day with a family reading, an hour or more of dramatic monologue, or a chautauqua.

  Instead, we all sort of went our own ways, day after day. The closest we came to conventional or traditional or mythical unity was every summer when we went on vacation to a place in south Alabama, on the coast, called Point Clear. The hotel and resort where we stayed—the Grand Hotel—was elegant, even if the coast itself was hot and windy and muggy. In the evenings we would eat delicious seafood in the formal candlelit dining room, surrounded by other diners possessing far greater wealth than my parents’: men and women who were no less than corporate titans. And each night, while I would sit there quietly, reflectively, dreaming a child’s dreams, Otto would be looking all around, paying far more attention to the titans—to their mannerisms, and overheard conversations—than he did to the meal itself. And, even then, I would sometimes be aware of the manner in which my parents beheld both of us, and of their unspoken thoughts, as they wondered, How can two brothers, or two of anything, turn out so different? And I could see also that they were perturbed by this difference, this distance. As if we were all moving away from one another: as if our desire for space was the greatest gluttony.

  At the hotel, each night was attended by endless opulence. We would all dress up, titans and nontitans, and enter that grand formal dining hall and be waited on, hand and foot, with one delicacy after another being brought to us, treats and treasures to be had merely for the asking, while a band played music at the other end of the hall. And the next day, after a breakfast of bright fruit and fresh juice, Otto and my parents would go off to play tennis or golf, while I would be on my own, free to wander the well-kept grounds, free to inhabit the reckless lands of my imagination. There was so much space.

  I prowled the cattails in the water hazards along the golf courses, catching fish and minnows and snakes and turtles and frogs—particularly the sleek and elegant spotted leopard frogs, which are already now nearly extinct. They were everywhere back then, and no one could ever have imagined they would simply, or not so simply, vanish. What other bright phenomena will vanish in our lifetimes, becoming one day merely memory and story, tale and legacy, and then fragments of story and legacy, and then nothing, only wind?

  I spent the middle of the afternoons sitting in the air-conditioned lobby, playing chess with and against myself, bare-chested in my damp swimsuit, sitting on a leather sofa with sand grains crumbling from between my toes onto the cool tile floor. I ordered root beer and grilled cheese sandwiches from the pool, charging them to our room, and in my concentration on the game I would spill potato chips into the folds of the leather furniture. I failed to notice the icy looks that must have been coming from the desk clerks.

  There are so many different types of gluttony. Even now, just as when I was a child and without responsibility, I can lie on my back in the tall grass in autumn and stare at the clouds, an adult with not a thought in my head; and when I stand up, hours later, I will still be ravenous for the sight of those clouds, and for the whispering of that grass, and when I go to bed that night I will still be hungry for the memory of the warmth of that late-season sun, even as, in the moment, I am enjoying the scent and embrace of the darkness, and the cooling night.

  At Point Clear, we’d meet up again for dinner—Otto and my parents tanned from the extravagances of their own day, and relaxed: appearing not quite sated—never that—but almost. Even then I felt acutely that I was between two lands. I wanted to take but I also wanted to give: though what, I wasn’t sure.

  Were there others like me? I had no idea. It was entirely possible that I was alone in this regard: that even amid bounty, too much space surrounded me.

  The jubilee was a phenomenon that usually happened only once every few summers in south Alabama, following afternoon thunderstorms in the upland part of the state. The storms would drop several inches of rain into all the creeks and streams and rivers in a short period of time. That surge of fresh cold rainwater would then come rushing down toward the Gulf, gaining speed and potency, doubling at every confluence, until finally, a few hours later—almost always in the middle of the night—the wall of fresh water would come rolling into the Gulf.

  The moon was involved with the jubilee, too, though I don’t know exactly how. Perhaps the moon had to be full, and pulling out a big rip tide just when all the extra fresh water came gushing out—or maybe it was the other way around, and the moon had to be bringing a high tide of sea-water upriver—but anyway, the bottom line, or so said the brochure I had read at the front desk, was that when the jubilee hit the flush of fresh water would stun or kill all the saltwater fish in the vicinity, and that the fresh water would also carry out on its plume a swirling mix of freshwater creatures—catfish, gar, crawdads, bullfrogs—that would also be salt-stunned.

  It was a rare thing, almost a once-in-a-lifetime thing, to see it. I made sure our family’s name was on the list for the wake-up call. The first year I signed us up, I was seven years old. I’d lie there in our cottage every night, watching the moon through the window, waiting for the phone to ring. The woman at the front desk told me that whenever you answered the phone and heard the one word—“Jubilee!”—it meant the thing was on.

  I would lie awake wondering if it had rained in the uplands that day. I would strain my ears to see if I could hear the shouts of “Jubilee!” drifting across the golf course, and up and down the beach.

  Summer after summer passed in this manner, with me wandering solitary along the edges of the bright and well-kept lawns and gardens of wealth in the daytime, and lying there in the cottage each night, trying to stay awake for as long as I could, awaiting the call.

  I imagined that the jubilee was an event of such significance that the hotel staff kept someone down at the beach each night on permanent lookout, like a lifeguard perched high in a chair, waiting to report its arrival.

  In the summer when I was eleven, finally, the call did come, but I was asleep, and didn’t find out about it until weeks later, when we were back home. The phone had rung at two A.M., and when my father leaned over and picked up the phone, a woman’s voice cried “Jubilee!” and then hung up. Neither my father nor my mother had a clue what a jubilee was, much less that I had signed us up for one.

  The year that I was twelve—the year I finally saw the jubilee—I slept by the phone. It was very rare to have two jubilees in two years—and this time I got to the phone, and got to hear the woman say it.

  She uttered just that one word—Jubilee!—and then hung up. I hurried outside, and could see other people already moving down toward the beach in the moonlight—some in bathrobes, others in shorts and sandals. Some
had flashlights, though the moon was so bright you didn’t really need one.

  I went back inside and got my family up. At first they didn’t want to go, but I kept haranguing them, and finally they awakened.

  By the time we made it down to the water, people were already wading out into the ocean. The first thing that hit me—beyond the beauty of the moonlight on the water—was the scent of fresh fish.

  It wasn’t quite as I had pictured it would be. I had imagined that there might be a thousand people, or even ten thousand; but instead there were only about forty of us, moving slowly through the waves, our heads down, searching for the stunned fish floating belly-up. I had thought people would hear about it on the radio stations, and through word of mouth, and that there would be cars parked all up and down the beach—that people would have come all the way from Mobile and Pensacola, and even farther: Biloxi, Hattiesburg, and the uplands—Selma, Columbus, and Tallahassee. But instead it was just us: the resort-goers.

  I had thought you would be able to see the jubilee, too—that the plume of fresh water would be darker, like spilled ink, and that you would be able to discern precisely where it entered and mixed with the bay, being diluted and spread laterally by the longshore currents. But it wasn’t that way at all. I couldn’t tell any difference between salt water and fresh. The waters looked just as they always had. Every now and then I could catch the faintest whiff of something really fresh and dark—organic, like black dirt, forest, nutmeat, rotting bark—but always, just as soon as I became aware of that dark little thread of scent, it would disappear, absorbed by the mass of the ocean.

  I had thought there would be more fish, too. I had thought there would be millions. Instead, there were only thousands. Some of the smaller ones appeared dead, but the larger ones were just stunned, swimming sideways or upside down, gasping and confused. They were out there for as far as I could see—white bellies shining in the moonlight—and other fish were careening as if drunk against my legs—fish panicked, fish drowning, is what it looked and felt like—and people carried pillowcases and plastic bags over their shoulders, filling them as if they were gathering squash or potatoes from a garden.